Lake Country (15 page)

He brought the full bucket inside, said, “Rise and shine,” and dumped the whole thing in Darryl’s lap.

For a split second nothing happened.

Then, in curious slow motion, Darryl erupted into consciousness as though rising up from a great depth. He issued a strangled bellow, seemed almost to levitate from the cushions momentarily, and fell back, hands shooting out to either side like buttresses.

It was like watching a science experiment. Darryl
didn’t even know who he was for a few seconds. He was soaked to the skin. For just those few seconds, the guy looked so confused and pathetic—shaking his head, blinking his eyes, croaking like a frog—that if circumstances had been different, the whole display might have been comical.

Then, all at once, Darryl’s eyes sprang wide. His right hand began to scrabble around the sofa cushion beside him as if suddenly possessed of its own frenzied agenda.

Mike stepped forward into Darryl’s field of vision. He pulled the .45 out of his waistband, held it upside down by the trigger guard between two fingers, and said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

At last Darryl found him with his eyes. His face registered nothing at first. Then came recognition, then renewed confusion, all in a span of two or three blinks. He coughed and said, “Mike?”

“No, Saint Peter,” Mike said. He dropped the empty bucket to the floor with a hollow clang. “You died and went to heaven. I guess some paperwork got screwed up.”

Darryl rubbed his eyes, sat up a little straighter on the couch. He coughed again, fully present now. Or at least fully awake. He spread his hands, looked himself over and said, “I believe it, you crazy fucker.” He pinched his sodden T-shirt away from his chest. “I think you stopped my heart for a couple seconds.”

“Yeah, sure,” Mike said. “I’m the crazy fucker.”

Casually, Darryl glanced at the gun in Mike’s hand. Clearly no threat, but definitely his gun. And definitely not in the spot where he’d left it.

He looked at Mike. After a minute, he said, “And I was having the best dream too.”

He was still drunk, Mike realized. A person might not have known it if they didn’t know Darryl, but Mike knew Darryl. Hell, the guy had put away enough cheap whiskey in the last twenty-four hours to kill a teetotaler, and that wasn’t even counting all the beer. Who knew what else? Of course he was still drunk.

“If I have to be awake for this horseshit,” Mike told him, “then so do you.”

Darryl blinked. Yawned. Said, “How’d you get all the way up here without a car, anyway?”

“I adapted and overcame.”

“Oh,” Darryl said.

“I’m not the only one either.”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and check on your new friend?” Mike glanced toward the loft. “I think she left a message for you.”

Darryl craned his neck, following Mike’s eyes up to the landing.

The moment he saw the padlocked door standing open, his spined stiffened. Almost before Mike realized he’d moved, Darryl was off the couch, across the room, taking the pine stairs up two a time.

Maybe he wasn’t so drunk after all.

Mike tucked the gun back into his waistband, left Darryl up there with his discoveries, and went outside.

Eventually, Darryl came down to the lakeshore and joined him at the end of the narrow, weathered dock.
“Okay, I admit it,” he said, his approaching footfalls vibrating through the planks ahead of his voice. “I did not see that coming.”

Mike didn’t say anything. He just kept sweeping the far shoreline with the three-million-candlepower spotlight he’d grabbed from the shed. From the dock, the beam was powerful enough to brighten the reeds and standing grass along the tree line like a roving circle of daylight.

“Girl’s tougher than she looks,” Darryl mused. He sounded more fascinated than upset. “Seemed like a real princess too. Guess you can’t make assumptions.”

I guess not
, Mike thought. Using the spotlight, he’d been able to follow her trail from the broken glass under the bedroom window, like tracking a wounded deer. Based on the quality of the blood sign, she hadn’t come through the glass unscathed.

He’d already formulated a pretty good idea of how Juliet Benson had completed the next phase of her escape. Now the spotlight beam confirmed his theory. Across the lake, he caught a flash of metal tucked away in the trees. Mike brought the spotlight back and identified the sudden shine for what it was: the hull of a canoe stashed in a stand of sumac.

The girl was tough, all right. And still being smart. Mike felt like he understood her strategy instinctively.

The lake was roughly peanut-shaped, narrow in the middle, rounded on either end. The blood trail told him that after climbing out the window and making it to solid ground, she hadn’t dared reenter the cabin to look for her car keys.

But to take the lane out of here on foot, she would
have had to walk around the far end of the peanut, still barefoot, on rough cold driveway rock most of the way. And there were stretches along the south embankment—lake on one side, steep downhill drop on the other—where she’d have had nowhere to bail out if her captor happened to wake up and come after her.

Paddling straight across the water, on the other hand, cut her distance by more than half, saved at least a bit of wear and tear on her injured feet, and took her directly into the cover of the timber.

It would be slow going in the trees. Plenty of hidden rocks, holes, pinecones, broken branches, and thorny brambles waiting for her. But if she was careful and stayed patient, stuck to soft ground and pine straw as much as she could, and kept the rock lane in sight on her left, then she could make it all the way to the lake road—possibly even the state highway—without ever setting foot out in the open.

Mike was starting to admire the girl. Besides leaving a bottle of perfectly good drinking water behind, he found little fault in her thinking.

Still, a fifteen-foot aluminum canoe was a heavy, awkward thing. Hard to handle out of the water all alone. She could have dragged it across the rocks, but if she’d wanted to avoid making an unholy racket, she would have had to carry it over the ground for at least a hundred feet. Out of the shed, across the lane. At least to where she could push or drag it on the dewy grass the rest of the way. All the way to the sandy launch beside the dock.

All the time scared. Bleeding. And not quite the princess Darryl had taken her for. She might have
been born with some money, but she hadn’t been born soft, this girl.

Definitely tough enough in Mike’s book.

He let up on the spotlight’s trigger. The beam faded and then extinguished, draping the opposite bank in darkness again. Water lapped at the pilings under their feet. Mike stood at the edge of the dock, looking out over the inky, moon-dappled surface of the lake, and tried to think.

How long had she been gone?

Had he passed her on his way in without even knowing it?

“Okay,” Darryl finally said. “I give up. What are we doing out here?”

Mike looked at him.

“We?” On impulse, he turned, raised the spotlight, and shone it full blast in Darryl’s face. “What are
we
doing?”

Darryl raised a hand, standing pale as an overexposed photograph in the ultrabright light. “Damn,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“You tell me,” Mike said, holding the light steady. “What are we doing, man? I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.”

Darryl squinted his eyes, leaning his face away. He said, “Come on, turn it off.”

Something overcame Mike then. An incredibly powerful urge. He surrendered to it with an ease that surprised him.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

He cut the light. While Darryl stood there, temporarily blinded, Mike punched the shit out of him. Just planted his back foot, pivoted with his hips, unwound
his shoulders, and caught Darryl with a hard right hand across the jaw.

It was a gutter move, cheap and dirty, and Darryl didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of it coming his way. The shot landed so pure that Mike felt the impact all the way to his elbow yet hardly felt it at all.

Darryl hit the dock with a heavy grunt, flat on his back, and laid there like he’d been tossed out of a helicopter. Mike put the light back in his face, leaned down, and shouted, “What are we doing, Darryl? Huh? You tell
me
what the hell we’re doing out here.”

He felt sick with nerves and adrenaline. In the five years he’d been home from the service, Mike honestly couldn’t remember losing his temper over anything. The truth was, after six months in a combat zone, nothing ever seemed to matter enough to get bent out of shape about.

Now it was as if a floodgate had opened inside him. Standing over Darryl, Mike felt swept up in a hazy red tide.

“Stand up,” he said, cutting the light again. “Stand up and tell me what we’re doing out here.”

Darryl didn’t stand up. He only propped himself on an elbow. After a minute he leaned over the edge of the dock, spat blood into the water. In the light of the nearly full moon, with his five-day beard and disheveled hair, he looked like some kind of premature, half-changed wolfman with bloodstained chops.

“I said stand up,” Mike repeated, knowing that if Darryl obliged him, even drunk, he’d have more than he could handle.

But he didn’t care. He didn’t care so much that, when Darryl didn’t move, Mike reached down,
grabbed him by his soaked shirt, and hauled him to his feet.

Darryl didn’t resist. He only put out his palms. “Go easy,” he said.

Mike hit him again before he could stop and think about it. This time it hurt like hell. He felt the big knuckle at the base of his ring finger give way. Fiery vines of pain climbed his hand and circled his wrist.

Darryl tripped on his own feet and went down again. He landed hard on his hip this time. The hollow thud of bone on wood echoed under the dock below them, and for a moment—just a moment—there it was.

That look. The look that told Mike things were about to get dangerous. As many times as he’d seen it, Mike had never been on the receiving end before now; as many times as he’d seen it directed toward others, he’d never seen it result in anything but blood loss.

Hot as he was, he had no trouble admitting it: That look scared him. He didn’t want to lock horns with Darryl Potter. But enough was enough.

What happened next was the last thing Mike expected.

The impending mayhem in Darryl’s eyes went away. It went away almost as quickly as it had appeared, fading out like the beam of Hal’s big spotlight as the bulb cooled.

Darryl sat up. He touched his left cheekbone, looked at his fingers. No blood this time. He worked his jaw. “Ow,” he said.

Mike sighed. All the fight ran out of him. He made an experimental fist, then shook out his jacked-up,
aching hand. He could feel his fourth knuckle shoved off to one side, a loose, displaced knob under the skin.

“Goddammit,” he said.

Darryl dabbed his mouth gingerly with the back of his hand. He spat more blood over the edge of the dock. Slowly, he opened his jaw wider and wider until it popped way back in the joint. He winced bitterly, glanced up, and said, “We finished with this part?”

It occurred to Mike that he could take out the .45 and shoot the son of a bitch.

He exhaled, extended a hand, helped him to his feet instead.

Darryl brushed off his ass with his palms. Mike turned toward the lake, settled his gaze on the water. He listened for sounds in the timber. All he could hear was the lap of the water against pilings beneath them, the seashell rush of his own blood in his ears.

Darryl appeared in his peripheral vision. They stood without speaking.

Eventually, Darryl said, “Guess Hal sold me out, huh?”

Mike turned and studied Darryl’s profile. An oily patina of sour, boozy sweat made his skin look like room-temperature cheese. He said, “Did you think he wouldn’t?”

Darryl shrugged. “I was kinda moving from A to B to C at that point.”

“No kidding,” Mike said. “Which part was A?”

Darryl didn’t answer.

Mike turned and left him standing there. He walked back up the dock alone. He could think of about a hundred things he wanted to ask or say, but none of
them really mattered. He knew what he had to do, or at least what he had to do next. Why waste time?

There was a good chance, he thought, that Juliet Benson had found her way to help by now.

On the other hand, it was just as possible that she was exhausted and bleeding in the woods somewhere. He hoped for the former, but he couldn’t risk the latter. Wouldn’t.

He’d reached the shoreline when, behind him, Darryl said, “Hey, Mike?”

He almost kept walking. But he stopped.

“You know I wasn’t going to hurt her,” Darryl said. “Right?”

Mike found himself lost for a reply.

He turned and faced Darryl from a distance. “I wasn’t going to hurt her,” Darryl said. “That was never the deal.”

Mike thought about that. The next question was obvious. The answer didn’t matter, but he wanted to know anyway. “Then what the hell
was
it?” he said. “What the hell was all this about?”

Darryl exhaled like a man putting down a burdensome load. Perhaps the point no longer seemed as clear to him as it had at the time. Or maybe he was only disappointed that Mike had to ask.

“Maybe it’s just me,” he said, “but it seems like the son of a bitch at least ought to know what it feels like before he gets to be done.”

“Jesus,” Mike said. His exasperation was complete and undivided. “Who should know what
what
feels like?”

“What it feels like,” Darryl said, not bothering to address the
who
in the question, “to spend two days
wondering if he’ll ever get to speak to his little girl again.”

He turned away and faced the water again.

“Lily Morse knows what the hell it feels like,” he said. “Why shouldn’t he?”

As Mike stood there watching him, a lone silhouette at the end of the dock, he thought of everything he knew to be true about Darryl Potter. His friend. Hell, these past couple of years probably the closest thing to family Mike had. He supposed it didn’t add up to all that much, but he didn’t know anyone better. They’d been through flames together.