Gun Lake (4 page)

sweet innocent

a kiss.

After a while, it got so he could transport himself at will back to ninth grade and that first kiss, back when the world would be anything he would make it and a tawny-haired girl named Erin could make him forget everything else. And that was what saved him. As long as he could escape there in his mind, he could finally find sleep, finally expect to wake up with some semblance of hope. They weren’t words on a page or scenes from a movie. They
were memories. A life once lived. A scene once enacted. A memory that was his and his alone.

Memories
. Kurt Wilson held the framed wedding photo in his hand and studied it. The attractive couple embraced as they posed on the altar steps in a church, the altar itself just out of focus. The woman was attractive in a cute, cheerleader sort of way. Her golden locks were longer in the bridal shot than in the other photos lining the top of the bedroom dresser. Her face was also thinner, with a lively expression that seemed absent in the more recent shots. The man’s pictures followed the same pattern, with more hair and fewer pounds in the wedding shot than the other ones.

He put the photo next to him on the king-sized bed and looked around the room. Pictures of the family overflowed the dresser, most featuring the same three boys at various ages, all below ten. A whole wall of framed snapshots gave a good representation of this family’s life. Family trips, birthday parties, Christmas holidays, school pictures. Kurt let his eyes move from one to the other and felt an emptiness he knew he’d never be able to fill.

The door to the bedroom remained open, and he heard the sound of the baseball game coming from the family room below. Other voices mixed in with the announcers’ voices and the sounds of the crowd and the pitches.

Kurt rubbed the week’s worth of beard on his face and stood up, bringing the photo back to its resting place on the cluttered dresser. He saw several watches, perfume and cologne bottles of various shapes and sizes, a jewelry box. The single shot of the blonde from earlier days, maybe college, caught his attention. He stared at the smiling, unlined face and wondered if she had dreamed of someday living in a place like this. Five bedrooms, three bathrooms at his last count, even a three-car garage. Well-decorated, well-furnished, and well-lived in.

This is what normal people did. They created lives. Built houses. Had barbecues and children and mortgages and credit-card debt and dogs named Flippy.

Where’d I go wrong?

But of course he knew. Knew it almost to the minute.

Kurt had left the bedroom and begun to walk downstairs when a noise startled him.

“What’re you looking for in there?” the voice from the darkened hallway asked. Then he saw Lonnie standing in the shadows. Kurt stared at him for a prolonged moment.

“Hey, man, I was just asking.”

Kurt passed him by without an answer. Since Louisiana, he’d barely said a word to Lonnie. There wasn’t any point. Kurt just wanted to get through the next few weeks and finally be rid of the kid once and for all.

Downstairs, in the den, he found Craig watching a Cubs game. The flattened curly mop on his head looked desperate for a pair of shears.

“You want to turn that down?” he asked, looking at the windows again to make sure the blinds were closed.

“Listen to this quality surround sound.” Craig held a large remote in his hand.

“Yeah, sounds nice. Give me that.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I want to check out CNN or something. Have you looked for any news?”

“No,” Craig said again.

Kurt noticed the bottle of Heineken in Craig’s hand.

“Go ahead and make yourself at home,” he said.

“I’m tryin’, man,” Craig declared earnestly. Kurt shook his head. Sarcasm was wasted on some people.

Lonnie had followed Kurt down the stairs. He plopped himself on the couch, long legs splaying out in front of him.

“All the beer in there and he reaches for a Heineken,” Lonnie mocked, then cursed at his friend. “Give me a Bud any day.”

The two sitting men laughed as Kurt changed the channel. “What is this?”

“What?” Craig asked.

“They got a dish or something?”

“Yeah. Satellite. A thousand channels if you want it. I was trying to find something worth watching.”

“Funny how the channels weren’t moving when I came down,” Kurt said as he thumbed through CNN and MSNBC and other channels.

“We’re old news,” Lonnie said.

“For one family it’s never going to be
old
news.”

Lonnie rolled his eyes, his face asking,
When are you going to get over it?

“I haven’t seen anything about us,” Craig said.

“It was only three days ago,” Kurt said, staring at the information on the screen. “Unless there’s been a war or something, we should still top the headlines.”

“Old news,” Lonnie repeated. “Nobody cares.”

Lonnie carried his rebellious indifference in a James Dean sort of a way. A meaner James Dean, the kind that looked like he wouldn’t think twice about putting a firecracker in your lap and laughing as it went off. He was only twenty-four years old and still treated this whole escape as some wild joyride. Kurt was tempted to beat some sense into the kid, just like he had tried to at the sporting-goods store. But he was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good.

“You think they might have a little item on the ticker at the bottom?” Craig asked.

“They did last time I checked.”

“Stagworth Five. Sounds like a movie or something. Pretty cool.”

Kurt looked at Craig’s flushed round face and wondered how many beers he’d consumed. But the guy was right on. Leave it to the media to come up with a catchy name for them. Hold the movie rights and begin production on a made-for-television miniseries.

“Turn it back to the game,” Lonnie said, bored.

Kurt tossed him the remote. “We’ve got another hour or so before we leave,” he told them.

“And then what?” Craig asked.

“I’m not sure. It depends on how tonight goes.”

Lonnie actually seemed interested in the conversation now. “Are we sticking around here?”

“I hate Texas,” Craig said. “We’re going to Mexico or something, right?”

“We do what Sean says. We all agreed to that.”

“Yeah,” Lonnie snipped. “But he ain’t
said
a word.”

“Whoa, hey, leave it here,” Craig said, animated, forgetting about what they were talking about.

“What?” Lonnie asked.

“This is one of his best movies.”

Kurt looked at the television and saw a young Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat and poncho.

Craig cursed as he exclaimed how much he loved
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
.

“Kurt, quick, name your top five Eastwood movies.”

“I don’t know. What kind?”

“Just westerns,” Craig said. He was playing a favorite game that had passed time back at Stagworth.

“Well, this is one.”

“Besides this one.”

“A
Fistful of Dollars
, maybe.”

“Another spaghetti western,” Craig said.

Kurt found it ironic how a somewhat slow and dim-witted good ol’ boy like Craig could be such a fount of knowledge when it came to movies. He was a walking—who was that one movie reviewer, the chubby one? Kurt didn’t remember the guy’s name, but that was Craig. Movie-man Craig, a gentle, laid-back guy who should have been married and had a family he could take to Disney movies. Good ol’ Craig who, by the way, had stabbed an acquaintance to death in a parking lot outside an Atlanta bar. He admitted it had been partly booze, partly self-defense, partly stupidity. But all the parts had added up to a fifty-year sentence in Stagworth.

“What else?”

“I don’t know,” Kurt said, with other things on his mind.

“Gotta have
High Plains Drifter
, of course. That’s a classic. Paints the entire town red and calls it hell.” Craig laughed. “What a classic. Then there’s this one. And
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, that’s another. And
Unforgiven.”

“I never saw that one,” Kurt said as he walked toward the side of the room where the bathroom was located. He looked at his watch.

Where’s Sean?

He could make himself sick worrying. He needed to keep his thoughts clear, keep a cool head. Wes and Craig and Lonnie—especially Lonnie—were not clear-thinking, coolheaded guys. Somebody needed to make this work. Sean might have the plan, but somebody else needed to have the patience.

He wondered how tonight would go. He feared another incident like the awful one in the sporting-goods store. He felt sick every time he thought about that room, that stocky body on the floor. Just one gunshot, and now they were past the point of no return. They weren’t just fugitives anymore. They were murderers too.

For some of them, that made them repeat offenders.

We can’t get caught. Not now
.

As he finished washing his hands and turning off the faucet, he heard a whirr of something mechanical and steady coming from behind the wall to his left. He thought for a few seconds, then rushed out of the bathroom and scanned the walls in the family room for the lights.

“… and there’s a bad sheriff of the town played by Gene Hackman—you know, the guy from
The French Connection—
”

“The garage door’s coming up,” he told Craig and Lonnie.

“What?” Craig looked up, clueless.

“Grab your beer and come on,” Kurt said as the lights in the room went dark.

“Where?”

“The basement. Hurry.”

Craig was the first to head downstairs. Kurt and Lonnie followed, hurrying him along. Kurt paused at the bottom of the stairs and then cursed.
We left the television on
.

In the unfinished basement, obviously used for storage more than anything else, they stood looking at each other.

“Get in the crawl space,” Kurt said.

“I’m not gettin’ in there,” Craig said.

“Shut up and go. It’s cement. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Why?”

But just then they heard a door open upstairs, and Kurt pointed a finger up to the crawl space as he reached to turn off the lights. He only heard heavy breathing and boxes and bags shuffling as they crawled up into the three-foot crawl space that made up half of the basement space. Kurt scooted on hands and knees and plowed into what felt like an empty suitcase. Craig said something, and Kurt told him to keep his mouth shut.

“Get behind something.”

“What?” Craig asked.

“They’re going to come down here,” Kurt said in a whisper.

“Why?”

“’Cause we left the television on.”

Lonnie cursed and Kurt told him to shut up.

They lay crouched in darkness, Kurt hiding behind something that shielded him from view. He hoped. He wondered if the other two were doing the same.

They didn’t say anything as they listened to steps above them and voices. The sounds of the movie could be faintly heard until someone shut it off. More voices having a conversation. More steps. Doors opening. More voices.

don’t let this go bad please don’t let it go bad it can’t go bad

Kurt thought about the time and figured it to be around ten o’clock. They had close to forty-five minutes before they needed to get out of here.

Then the door to the basement opened and the voices floated down to the crawl space.

“Just check it,” a woman’s voice said.

Kurt cursed in his mind. A couple. A husband and a wife. This could be ugly.

What was Rita thinking, bringing us here?

The basement lights came on, and Kurt found himself behind several boxes of what felt like books. He looked to his right and saw Lonnie flat on the concrete floor behind bags of something, perhaps Christmas decorations. He couldn’t see Craig.

“It’s probably just the satellite acting up.” The voice sounded older, nervous, unsure.

“Just go down there,” the woman said.

Don’t do it
.

And then, steps coming down. A creak. Footsteps on the basement floor.

Kurt then thought of two things simultaneously.

The photo of the three children upstairs in the bedroom. And the Smith & Wesson revolver Lonnie had taken a special liking toward, the same revolver that tucked snugly against his jeans.

The same revolver he had used to shoot the woman at the Harman’s sporting-goods store.

THIS WAS NOT THE WAY it was supposed to be.

Do you hear that, God? Can you hear these thoughts right now? I know you can. So help me out a little
.

Michelle Meier guided her Jeep Cherokee down the side street, noting the parked cars she passed. She knew the vicinity and that was about it. But enough was enough, and if she had to check out every single car like a city officer dying to hand out tickets, so be it. This was probably the seventh street she had coasted down. All lined with parked cars on each side, all edging apartment buildings and condos. The street dead-ended, so Michelle turned the Jeep around and drove back to the main street.

The phone rang, and she flipped it open to see her husband’s name pop up.

“Any luck?” Ted Meier asked without even a hello.

“No.”

“You sure you want to do this? Maybe I should—”

“I’m sure,” Michelle said.

“Chicago is a big city.”

“It’s around here somewhere. I had to pick him up from her place once. Remember?”

“It’s ten o’clock,” her husband said.

“Yeah, I can see. But that’s early down here.”

“How do you know Jared’s even there?”

“He’s here. And I’ll find him. I’m bringing him home.”

“Michelle—”

“I’m not mad at you,” she said. “I’m not blaming this on you traveling.”

“I know. But why tonight?”

“He still has to obey our rules. As long as he’s living under our roof.”

Because in a little while—two more months, to be precise—he’s going to be gone
.

“That’s been the problem all along, you know,” Ted said. “He spends as much time as possible away from home. At someone else’s place.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said, turning down another street. “He needs to know the consequences of breaking rules.”