FrostLine (26 page)

Chapter 25

Every blood cell in my body wanted to dive for cover. Every brain cell screamed that if I moved I'd get shot by the spy sniper scope that Mr. Butler had supposedly hallucinated. I did the sensible thing out of sheer paralysis, and lay stock still. But my spine was tingling and my skin crawling and I craved cover like a sinner craved forgiveness.

Cover beckoned beside the stream—midway between Dicky's swimming hole dam and Henry King's deer fence—a man-high boulder dropped by a friendly glacier seven thousand years ago. Behind that boulder, I could slide down the bank and crawl away in the stream bed.

Slowly, I stretched my arms and rolled over, slowly, hoping to put a couple of trees between him and me. I wished I carried a gun. Preferring not to live that way, I could end up dying this way.

I spotted the glint again. He was moving, clearing his field of fire.

I stood up and opened my fly.

As I did, I edged nearer the boulder. I stopped. I inspected the ground like a poodle picking hydrants. I moved behind the boulder, dropped into wet moss, zipped up, and plotted a quiet escape upstream into Butler's woods, until I was out of range with hundreds of tree trunks between me and the stalker.

How long would he sit staring at the boulder?

Not as long as I would like him to.

I slid down the bank, crawled into the stream on all fours. The gully was deep. If it stayed deep and I stayed quiet and he stayed where he was in the trees, I just might be able to get away.

I started crawling upstream. Adrenalin flooded my heart, sucking strength from my limbs. I dragged leaden arms and legs through the shallow water, scraping rocks and gravel and broken branches.

Suddenly, I stopped.

In my weak-limbed, numbed-skull panic, I had forgotten Dicky's dam. Five feet high, it blocked the stream bed entirely. Either around or over would expose me to a clear shot.

I turned around, and crawled back the other way, under Henry King's deer fence and his No Trespassing signs. I considered standing up and sticking my hands in the air. But that trusting an act might be taken as an invitation to target practice. Best to keep crawling down into the open and run like hell to Henry King's house.

A hundred feet downstream, I raised a cautious head to get my bearings and saw a glove.

It was lying on the right hand bank—inches from my face. A shrunken, dead skunk cabbage leaf partly covered it, and it looked like it had been there awhile.I pushed the leaf off. Then, with a stick, I raised it slightly and peered underneath. The leather had stiffened. Pale white weeds were curled under it, starved of the sun. A couple of them had escaped and were sending out green shoots.

It was deerskin. One of Dicky's deerskin gloves, the glove that hadn't been on the hand Ollie had found. The glove Dicky had lowered his guard to put on.

A bright red dot suddenly hovered on it like a shiny red bug. I stared stupidly. It looked transparent. I jerked my hand back just in time. An eight-inch bolt
thwacked
through the glove, pinning it to the ground.

It was a crossbow bolt, guided by the red dot of laser light. Twenty-first century technology married to medieval. Dead silent. Deadly accurate. It woke me up in a way I had not been awake in a long time.

I yanked it out of the ground, stuffed Dicky's glove in my pocket, ran down the stream bed and stopped, suddenly. Crashing sticks and leaves sounded behind me. My cue to vault the bank and into the woods. As I did I glimpsed a flicker back in the stream. A swift black figure, black from head to toe.

I slowed, moved more quietly, and stopped again on the far side of a fat red oak. Again I heard him, out of the stream, too, into the trees about fifty yards behind me. I debated attacking, reasonably sure that he didn't have a shotgun, the one weapon I feared in the trees. His crossbow was near useless in the dense growth until he got right next to me.

Ten yards to my left stood an enormous lightning-blasted silver birch, an ancient tree nearly as big around as my oak. I knelt down to pry loose a rock that the oak roots had heaved from the ground. As I worked at it, I steadied my breathing and calmed down a little. I was, after all, in my element.

Despite their propensity for mayhem, Chevalley men matured into wonderful uncles when they got older. My father had been very busy earning a living and serving the public, so my mother had steered me toward her long-gun- and chainsaw-toting brothers and cousins, men who thought it their natural responsibility to teach little boys how to shelter, hunt, and hide in the trees. I'd dressed my first deer when I was old enough to hold a knife—several weeks before the season, if memory serves. By the time I was ten I could start a fire in the rain, sleep in the snow, and eat almost anything that wandered my way. I had lost the cold eye for hunting years ago, but I'd been taught by masters.

I bowled the rock hard and low. It crashed through the brush like a Main Street real estate agent tromping leaves, while I Chevalleyed left on my belly, toward the silver birch. As I had expected, half the tree stood hollow and, rejuvenating itself, had reinforced the break with a shield of new bark.

The cavity was like a chimney. I squeezed inside and wedged my way in and up, climbing nearly ten feet on toeholds of crumbling heartwood.

Had I time I'd have checked for snakes, weasels, rabid raccoons and bees, all of whom might regard my hidey hole as home. But a rustle nearby told me I'd cut it close as I could. A convenient knothole would have been nice to watch his progress. But there were none and I waited, blind in the dark.

He entered the tree so quietly that he was inside, blocking the light and peering up through weird goggle eyes, before I realized he was there. I let go all holds and dropped like a stone.

He leaped back.

I kicked, and connected, hard.

For a second I thought his head had fallen off. But it was some kind of helmet and as it fell away I glimpsed a military crew cut and a very thick neck. Then I got my legs all tangled under me, and before I'd squeezed out of the tree trunk, he was gone, a distant crashing in the trees.

I started after him.

I wanted to ask why he was stalking me. Had he tried to shoot me? Or Dicky's glove? Who gave him his marching orders? And, while we were at it, where was he the afternoon Dicky got blown up with King's dam?

A crossbow bolt smacked into a nearby hickory. I took a serious look at the carbon-fiber shaft quivering a foot from my face and reconsidered my options.

I already had quite a haul for a walk in the woods: Dicky Butler's glove, a real treasure, albeit holed palm and back; two high-tech crossbow bolts; and the helmet. Which turned out to be a black skull cap of cotton-lined neoprene fitted with night vision binoculars and sound-enhancing Big Ears—as they were called by low-life, high-tech deer hunters—so sensitive they could hear an animal's frightened breath.

It hadn't been bought in a sporting goods store. There was no brand name. It looked like a piece of highly restricted military hardware, and very expensive. I headed back upstream, ducking under King's deer fence, to return it to its rightful owner. Via his front gate.

I telephoned Fox Trot from Mr. Butler's kitchen. King and Julia were in another meeting. I said, “I'll be by in a half hour.”

The receptionist bridled. “You need an appointment.”

“Tell Mr. King that one of his employees lost valuables in the woods. I'm returning them.”

I hung up before she could argue.

Magneted to Mr. Butler's rust-pitted refrigerator door was a business card for A & D Piggery, Route 7, Gallatinville, New York. I took it and charged down to Fox Trot.

Albert and Dennis were back on the gate.

“Name!”

“Sun Tzu.” I held up the helmet. Jaws dropped. “I'm expected.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“Open the gate.”

They opened the gate.

The driveway spikes were up, gleaming like serpent teeth in the shady light. “Ben Abbott.”

The spikes sank.

The helicopter parked on the lawn down from the house was whining, and as I parked, its spinning blades speeded up. I ran up the steps and pounded the front door. Jenkins opened up. “Is that King leaving?” I yelled.

“No, Mr. Abbott. They're down at the office. You're expected.”

I walked the garden path to the old Zarega house, carrying the helmet like a gorgon's head. Julia came for me, greeted me with a handshake. I thought at first it was for the receptionist's benefit. But there was no private smile for me.

She looked beautiful in a skirt and blouse of pale and paler green. Her hair was up, her neck exquisite. Her hand trembled a little. So did mine. It went with the dry mouth and the accelerated heartbeat.

She glanced at the ceiling, a clear warning that the joint was bugged.

“Where'd you get that?” she asked aloud.

“I'll explain to the boss.”

King's office was a blandly, expensively furnished room, the old main parlor, if I recalled, re-paneled and decorated by the sort of interior designer who spends money on touches like a marble surround for a fieldstone fireplace.

King was on the telephone. He flashed me a fairly friendly nod and motioned me to sit, while raising an inquiring eyebrow at the war prize dangling from my hand. I sat on the couch Julia indicated, and placed it on my knee. Julia took a chair opposite and we waited quietly for him to finish his call. No one, not even the butler, had commented on my wet and muddy clothes.

King's voice was imparting high-priced wisdom in a low register, something general-sounding about the new climate in London, the words less important than the tone. When he hung up, he made a note on a pad beside, read it, then looked up expectantly.

“What is that?”

“Night-vision and sound enhancer. It fell off one of your employees.”

“Thank you,” he said, reaching across his desk.

I held onto it. “Not good enough.”

“What's wrong?”

“The son of a bitch shot at me.”

“I didn't hear any shots.”

I took the crossbow bolts from my back pocket. “Neither did I.”

“But I'm sure no harm was intended if you walked into his target practice.”

“I was the target.”

“Were you on my property?”

“Trespassing is not a capital offense. Your people have no right to try to kill me if I stray over a property line.”

“Well, I can understand how you might be upset, Mr. Abbott.”

I had not come in upset. If anything I was exhilarated to have some leverage in the house. But his arrogance was getting to me—his bland assumption of might makes right.

“Not as upset as you're going to be when I report this to the police.”

“Now, now, now. I see no need to go off half-cocked.”

“I came near getting killed. I'm already half-cocked.”

“I'll have a word with the person in question.”

“So will I.”

King shrugged. “All right, if that will make you happy.” He pressed an intercom button. “Josh. Front and center.”

To me, he explained, “Josh is our security chief.”

“I know. He testified at the inquest.”

We waited in silence. Josh Wiggens hurried in, elegant in a gray suit. “Yes, Henry.”

King nodded at the helmet. “Ben, here, is upset. He claims that an employee wearing that, shot those—” he indicated the bolts in my hand— “at him.”

“Had you breached the perimeter?” Wiggens asked.

“Josh,” I said, “I owe you one for Derby. But cut the crap.”

“Julia mentioned your gratitude. No problem. Lucky I was nearby.”

“Lucky? Or were you following me? “

Josh regarded me with a expression of pity. “A former colleague has become an antiquarian book dealer down in Derby. Dumb luck you happened by.”

“Then I'm grateful to both of you,” I said, wishing I knew whether it had been his idea to follow me there, or Henry King's. “But that was Derby. This is Newbury. Your guy shot at me. I want to talk to him.”

“Not possible.”

“The boss says it's possible. Don't you, Henry?”

King waved a benevolent hand. “Put his mind at ease.”

“I'm afraid that the employee in question just left.”

“When's he due back?” I asked.

“Early next week.”

I said, again, loudly, “Not good enough. He shot at me twice.” I tossed a crossbow dart on King's desk, the mud-crusted one that had pierced Dicky's glove. King grimaced, as if the dirt it scattered on the immaculate rosewood upset him a lot more than the weaponry. “Get him,” I demanded. “He hasn't gone anywhere.”

“I'm afraid he has.” Wiggens nodded to the window as the helicopter took off, rattling the glass. I headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” cried King.

“Cops.”

Josh Wiggens started to protest. King gestured him to be silent. “You're not going to the cops, Abbott. If you intended to go to the cops, you'd have gone directly. You came here, instead. You obviously want something. Tell me what you want and we'll see if we can give it to you. Sit. Down. Sit down. Julia, dear, ring for Jenkins and let's have a cool drink. What would you like, Ben? Iced tea? Lemonade? Something harder?”

“Iced coffee,” I said, just to be perverse.

“Iced coffee it is. Me too, Julia. Josh? Your usual?”

Julia picked up a phone. King mused over the bolt in a deep, professorial voice. “The crossbow changed warfare by making the foot soldier the equal of heavy horse. The first long-range hand missile. It could be fired accurately by an illiterate peasant and pierce the armor of the noblest knight. Comparable to today's terrorist with his Kalashnikov or vest bomb. A weapon so atrocious that popes banned it.”

“Except,” I reminded him, “against infidels.”

King nodded. “Comforting to learn that they still teach history at Annapolis. So you are also thinking, What of the English yeoman's longbow?”