A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (28 page)

“The plan sucks. How does our contact get into the area with roadblocks set up all around? And how do we get past the cops after they pick us up;
if
they do?

“The police can’t stop people from driving around the area. Besides, who exactly would they be looking for?”

“Us.”

“Not just us. How many of the others could they have found? How much could they know already? It’s only been a couple of hours.”

“They have all of them. They know everything. They have the hostage.”

“Maybe.”

“He saw me. He saw you.”

“He never saw our faces. We’ll just stick with the plan. It’s not much, but it’s all we have right now. We can’t speculate about all the possibilities without going crazy.”

“I feel like I was hit by a truck.”

“You look it.”

“Don’t talk.”

“Who cares? We’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, and everything’s going to be all right. Shit.”

“We have to stick to the plan.”

“The plan. The plan.”

“Once we make the linkup, we’re going to have to rely on somebody else to get us out. I don’t see any other way right now.”

“You’re gullible. You’re dangerous.”

“Copeland and Stanfield don’t want us to be identified or caught any more than we do. If the cops pick us up and start interrogating, they and everybody else get implicated. That wouldn’t sit too well with the ‘lady’ as they say.”

“What lady?” she asked.

“I don’t know how you got into this to begin with. But it would be foolish for me to tell you who and what I know, just in case this doesn’t work out the way we want it to.”

“What is that supposed to mean, for chrissake?”

“I know for a fact that the people who got me into this thing will be very upset if they think there’s a chance that I’ll be naming people for the cops. The same goes for you. The less you know, the better off you are.”

“Oh, God. I don’t like it. I don’t like this at all.”

“It’s possibly not all that bad. If we make this linkup, then Copeland will know that we’re out of the hands of the police. He knows that we don’t want to go to jail. He has pretty good assurance that we’ll never choose to go to the police on our own later. And at this point there’s nothing to lead investigators from Bear Mountain Bridge to us.”

“I know it sounds weird at a time like this but, like, I have to pee.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Watch out for poison ivy,” he said.

Her feet were bare. She got up stiffly and picked her way through the rocks and underbrush up the draw.

The sun, now fully up off the horizon, chased the drifting fog that still lay at the base of the hills. The leaves were fully turned. The mountains were painted in all the somber yellows and browns of fall. In their little draw, the cover was almost complete. The trees on the mountain still had most of their leaves and the rhododendron that grew thickly all around their hideout was dark green. The ground was rough. It was hard to find a place to sit without clearing the spot of rocks. Sydney was working her way back down the draw.

“Hey, I think I heard some trucks or something down the mountain,” she said.

“There are a lot of dirt roads that run all through here. They’re patrolling them on the chance they might catch us wandering along. That’s one thing I learned early: stay away from the roads.”

“You really were a Ranger?”

“Yes, I really was.”

“Eat any snakes?”

“Yeah, a rattler—not much meat on him. Let’s break out the rations. We’ve got sandwiches.”

“God, I wish I’d sprung for a pizza way back there at the truck park.”

“We’ll split one and save the other for later. My stomach isn’t going to let me rest until I give it something to work on.”

They savored the sandwich.

“So, you’ve done some hiking,” he said, recalling the Ames parking lot conversation.

“All over. Camping too. We had these summer biking excursions. At Peddie School.”

“Not exactly hiking,” he said.

“Oh yes it was. For a week and a half, we’d ride and then stop and set up camp. Cooking out, sleeping on the mats, going on hikes through the woods. All over the place in Pennsylvania and Maryland.”

“Peddie. I’ve heard of it. Your folks are pretty well off then.”

“You could say that. From ninth grade on they boarded me there. Summers too.”

“So, you’re a Jerseyite.”

“By way of Chicago. Dad worked his way up through the telephone company, at Ameritech, then we moved on to ATT in Bernardsville.

“Pretty area,” Lou said.

“Yeah. But, not real happy times. They split and left.”

“But you stayed.”

“Sort of. I went from Peddie to Williams. Then back to Jersey for Ramapo College.”

“Why Ramapo of all places?”

“Williams booted me.”

“Oh,” he said.

Sydney shifted to a spot where she could lean against a rock. Lou watched her move in efficient, purposeful spurts punctuated by long pauses where she just stared straight ahead at nothing at all.

“I chose Williams,” she said. ”I’m really into biology and they have a great program.

“It’s a good school.”

“I worked with the professor who was mapping the brains of zebra finches.”

“Wow. How’d he do that?”

“She. Physically how? You don’t want to know,” Sydney said.

With the sun up in the sky, it was warm enough for both of them to shed some more of their outer clothing to allow it to dry. Sydney hung her coat on a rhododendron bush and laid her socks out on the ground.

It was safe here, but he knew how close disaster lurked. One little mistake would be all it would take. He had to think of everything.

The girl scraped the ground of rocks and lay down with her head propped on her boots. Gradually, her eyelids drooped. She drifted off to sleep again.

Weariness seeped from Lou’s bones, but every time he felt his eyes starting to close, he fought hard against it. There were only another twelve hours or so to go before they made the linkup.

He could stay awake at least for that much longer. If it meant that he could think the process all the way through and maybe prevent one little error, it was worth it.

Lou got up from the ground and stretched his legs. Leaving the pack, he started up the draw carrying his carbine. Was anyone watching him, prowling with his gun, like the movies? Fuck it. Even if he did look like John Wayne in
The Sands of Iwo Jima
, it was better than getting caught short. He trudged up to the head of the draw and climbed to a small rock outcrop.

Straight across from them rose the high, long ridge called Long Mountain, three hundred feet higher than Turkey. To the east and south rose the massive Bear Mountain, with the Palisades Parkway curving around its base.

Traffic on the road was heavy, but that was normal. He sat on the ground with the carbine across his knees. Far off to the north, a single helicopter glided over the mountains, crumpling to the horizon. It was possible they were conducting an air search; it could also be something completely different. For the moment, it looked as if they were safe, as long as they didn’t try to move out of the area on any of the roads.

Closer in, the Torne rose up higher than their mountain and dominated the area. How had that distinctive crag managed to poke up out of the mediocrity of the rest of the humps that dotted the forest? Had the glacier heaved up here like a fluttering hen dropping an egg, or had it just pushed rocks higher in this particular spot? Was it by design, or did it just happen?

Sydney was still sleeping. She had turned over on her side to face him. Her clothes were wrinkled and creased. In her sleep, her sweater had crept up, baring her midriff and navel. The outline of her low-cut panties showed against her hip. Her sweater was pulled tight across her chest.
Goddam lech.
She rolled onto her back again and opened her eyes.

“I fell asleep,” she said.

“Amazing.”

“Think the sun might have something to do with it?”

“We lucked out. It could’ve kept raining,” he pointed out.

“We’ve been lucky all along, haven’t we?”

“You call that luck?”

“Us getting away.”

“That was luck.”

“I never thought I’d get off that bridge,” she said.

“For a while there I thought you had run right into their hands. The light was in my eyes and you disappeared.”

“I did exactly as you said. I don’t think any of them saw me.”

“Lucky, both of us.”

“When you came sliding down the slope, I thought for sure you were one of them. I decided to take a chance and say something.”

“Tell me about Red,” he prompted.

“I was keeping my eye on the toll guard, scared to death the whole time. I thought for sure the guy was going to, like, rush me or something; I don’t think I could’ve pulled the trigger. Then I heard someone come running up to the truck, cussing a blue streak at everyone he saw. All of a sudden, he let go with his gun, shooting every which way, just spraying around. I don’t know if he was shooting at the cops, at the guy under the truck, or me. He pointed it right at me. I could feel bullets hitting the door of the truck in back of me. A couple of them went through my hair. I felt this burning on my arm. I just rolled up in a ball and, like, prayed. The guy under the truck turned around and shot. I guess the hostage just ran for it. I didn’t see him go.”

“I couldn’t figure that idiot, Red, from the first.”

“If it was up to him, I would’ve been banished back at the truck park. Now I wish I had.”

“I can see that they needed a maniac like him to supply the manpower for this thing. For a while, I thought I could deal with him. Then he went berserk; clocked me. If he’d been alive the next time I saw him, I would’ve rearranged his face.”

“He was a pretty big guy. I’d have picked him in the fight.”

“Thanks. I needed that. Maybe he
would
have finished the job on me. Moot point. How’s the arm?”

“It’s just a little tender. It’s all right. Do you think they’re serious about this being a nationwide thing? I mean, like, pulling off this stuff in a lot of different cities at the same time?”

“Who knows? Who cares?”

“If it’s true, it means that some pretty heavy people had to be mixed up in it, right? And like, if there are heavy people involved, they’re going to want to make sure no shit comes back on them now that it collapsed.”

“They have to be wishing we’re dead.”

“You said you didn’t want to know too much about how I got mixed up in this?” Sydney said, crossing her legs underneath her.

“I just didn’t want to tell you my connection.”

“I already know too much. It all seemed to happen, like, right out of the blue. I got this visit from Stanfield, and then I was in.”

“You just got a visit from Stanfield?”

“I owe this money. Lots of it. I was waiting for someone like him to come after me.”

“You owe money for what?”

“Come on.”

“What? Gambling?”

“Hey, I had a habit, big time, okay?
Ecstasy
cooked my goose at Williams. Then my roommate at Ramapo found out how bad off I was and apparently tipped Stanfield. He showed up with a pile of cash. At the time, it seemed like something from heaven. I was going to pay him back.”