The Wrath of Angels (50 page)

He watched them finish their drinks and leave the restaurant. They walked to their rooms in two pairs, Parker and Garner in front, the others behind. The Collector’s right hand slipped beneath his coat and found the hilt of a knife. He rested his fingers on it but did not draw it from its sheath. Beside it was his gun, fully loaded.

Three rooms, four men. It was risky, but not beyond his capabilities.

Kill them all.

But the list, the list . . .

T
he first sign that luck might not be going our way came when I woke up and went out to get coffee. In the parking lot was a shiny white SUV, obviously a rental, and leaning against it, already drinking a coffee of her own, was Liat. She was wearing a parka over beige canvas combat pants and a green sweater. The ends of her pants were tucked into rubber-soled boots.

‘I guess you missed me,’ I said.

One corner of her mouth curled up in very slight amusement.

‘You didn’t want to come in?’

She shook her head.

‘Did Epstein send you?’

Nod.

‘Doesn’t he trust us to bring him the list?’

Shrug.

The door to Angel and Louis’s room opened, and Louis appeared. He was already dressed for the woods, but he still managed to make cargo pants look good.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked. ‘She looks familiar.’

‘This is Liat.’

‘Liat,’ said Louis. ‘
That
Liat.’

‘The same.’

‘Well, I only saw her from a distance, and not from the same angles that you did. She miss you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why is she here?’

‘To bring the list back to Epstein.’

‘She’s coming with us?’

‘You could try to stop her, but you’d probably have to shoot her.’

Louis considered the possibility, then seemed to discount it.

‘You planning on inviting any more ex-girlfriends along? Just asking.’

‘No.’

‘Well, long as it’s just her . . .’

Angel joined Louis. He was also dressed for the woods, and still managed to make cargo pants look bad.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

Spare me, I thought.

‘Liat,’ said Louis.

‘
That
Liat?’

‘Yep, that Liat.’

‘At least we know she exists,’ said Angel. ‘All I saw was a shape in the distance.’

‘You think he made her up?’ asked Louis.

‘It seemed more likely than him actually being with a woman.’

Liat, who had been following the conversation with her eyes, blushed.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Angel. He smiled at Liat. ‘But, you know, it’s true.’

Another door opened, and Jackie Garner emerged. He squinted at Liat.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Liat,’ said Angel.

Jackie looked confused, as well he might have done.

‘Who’s Liat?’

It was just after eight. Ray Wray was drinking coffee, eating a protein bar, and, after the events of the night before, wishing he was back in jail.

He and Joe had bedded down in bags on the floor of the cabin, on the other side of the sheet from the boy and his mother, but only Joe had managed to get any real rest. Ray had drifted in and out of sleep, and at some point in the night he had woken to see the boy standing at one of the windows, touching his fingers to the glass, his lips moving soundlessly. His reflection hung like a moon against the night sky, the true moon suspended above it like a second face. Ray had been afraid to move, and kept his breathing regular so that the boy would not suspect he was being watched. After perhaps fifteen minutes, the boy prepared to return to his bed, but he paused at the sheet that divided the room and looked back at Ray. Ray closed his eyes. He heard the padding of the boy’s feet as he crossed the room, and then felt his breath on his skin. He smelled it too. It smelled bad. The boy’s face was so close to his own that Ray could feel the warmth of it. He forced himself not to pull away, and not to open his eyes, even as he told himself that this was only a kid, and Ray should just tell him to get his ass back to bed where it belonged. But he did not, because the boy frightened him. He frightened him more than his mother, if that’s what she was, with her ruined face and that dead eye embedded in it like a bubble of fat on barely cooked meat. Ray willed him to go away. He’d been so careful, but somehow the boy knew that he was awake.

Just a kid, thought Ray, just a kid. So what if I was awake? What’s he going to do to me: pull my hair, tell his mom?

The answer came to him without hesitation.

Something bad, that’s what he’ll do. The feel of the boy’s breath shifted. It was on his lips now, as though he were leaning in for a kiss. Ray could taste him in his mouth. He wanted to turn over so badly, except he didn’t want his back to the kid. That would be worse than facing him.

The boy moved away. Ray heard the sound of his footsteps as he made his way back to his bed. Ray risked opening his eyes.

The boy was walking backwards, his back to the sheet, so that he could keep watching Ray. The boy grinned when he saw that Ray’s eyes were open. He had won, and Ray had lost. He raised his left hand and wagged a finger at Ray.

Ray was tempted to get up and run from the cabin. If there was a forfeit to this game, he didn’t want to find out what it was. But the boy just pushed aside the sheet, and Ray heard him climb into the bed behind, and then all was still.

Ray looked at the window. The moon was no longer visible.

That was when Ray realized that there was no moon that night, and he had not closed his eyes again until morning.

Angel, Louis and I rode in Jackie’s truck. Liat followed behind in her rental. It was a private road, but one routinely used by locals and hunters. Still, Jackie had secured all the necessary permits, just in case, so we were right with the paper company, the warden service, and probably God Himself.

‘You didn’t want to ride with your girlfriend?’ asked Angel from the back.

‘I think she was just using me.’

‘Right,’ said Angel. He allowed a perfectly timed pause, then said, ‘For what?’

‘Funny,’ I replied, although there was an uncomfortable truth behind Angel’s joke.

We passed a couple of trucks and old cars parked by the side of the road: hunters, the ones who had set out before dawn and would return to town by early afternoon if they’d shot anything. Most hunters liked to stay close to a road, and within five miles of Falls End there were a lot of edges where deer came to feed. There was no reason to go very far into the woods, and so we were unlikely to encounter hunting parties where we were going; at least, not the kind that hunt buck. The road was narrow, and at one point we had to pull over to allow a company truck loaded with logs to pass us. It was the only such vehicle we met along the way.

We reached the point where the road made a definite dog-leg east, and there we pulled over. There was still frost on the ground, and the air was noticeably colder than it had been down in Falls End. Liat arrived a minute or two behind us, just as Jackie began unloading our supplies and Louis was checking the rifles. We had a 30.06 each, as well as handguns. Liat had no rifle, but I didn’t doubt that she had a gun. She kept her distance from us, watching the woods.

Jackie Garner seemed bemused by her presence.

‘She’s deaf, right?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s why you don’t have to whisper.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He thought about it, but kept whispering. ‘How’s a deaf woman going to get by in the woods?’

‘She’s deaf, Jackie, not blind.’

‘I know, but we gotta be quiet, don’t we?’

‘She’s also a mute. I’m no expert, but people who can’t speak tend to be quieter than the rest of us.’

‘Suppose she steps on a twig, and makes a noise. How will she know?’

Angel joined us. ‘What are you, some kind of Buddhist? If a tree falls in the forest, I can tell you now that she won’t hear it.’

Jackie shook his head in frustration. We were clearly missing the point.

‘She’s coming with us, Jackie,’ I told him. ‘Live with it.’

We didn’t plan to be in the woods after dark, but Jackie had still insisted that we bring a groundsheet each. We also had plenty of water, coffee, chocolate, energy bars, nuts, and, courtesy of Jackie, a bag of pasta. Even with the addition of Liat, we had enough to keep us going for a day or more. There were also waterproof matches, cups, one lightweight saucepan, a pair of compasses, and a GPS unit, although Jackie said that we might have trouble getting a signal where we were going. We divided the equipment and supplies between us, and set out. There was no further discussion. We all knew what we were looking for, and what might be out there. I hadn’t shared what we suspected of Malphas’s possible nature with Jackie, and so Jackie had been skeptical that anyone who had survived the crash might still be out there. I shared something of his point of view, but I wasn’t about to bet my life, or anyone else’s, on it.

Jackie led, Louis behind him, then Liat, Angel, and I. Jackie’s concerns about Liat were unfounded: of all of us, it was she who stepped the softest. While Angel and Louis, unused to the woods, wore leather boots with thick treads, Liat, Jackie and I wore lighter boots with only slight ribbing, the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.

The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.

After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.

‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.

‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’

‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’

‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.

‘By what we’re doing?’

‘And where we’re going.’

‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’

‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’

‘What about it?’

‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’

I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.

‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’

‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’

‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’

Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’

We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure:
What is it?

‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’

She extended her hand. Another question:
What do we do?

‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’

Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.

But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.

M
y first thought was that Fort Mordant was less the thing itself than the memory of it made manifest. The forest had done its best to blur and disguise its lines as though to discourage closer examination: its walls were covered in poison ivy, like waterfalls of green tumbling over precipices, and hemlock and common juniper had taken advantage of storm damage to mature trees by using them as nurseries. Cairns of stones, perhaps remnants of the original clearance of the land for the fort’s construction, had become shadowed by moss, lending them the aspect of funeral markers. Somewhere nearby must have been the actual graves of the fort’s original occupants, but I suspected they were long lost to the woods.

In that, I was soon to be proved wrong.

Mordant itself bore some resemblance to the only other such fortification I’d seen in the state: the old Fort Western in Augusta, although on a smaller scale. There were guard towers at each corner, about two stories high, with horizontal slit windows looking over the forest. Inside, although their roofs had long since collapsed, it was possible to see the remains of buildings on three of the four inside walls, with only the wall containing the main gate left free. One had clearly been a stable, because the stalls were still visible, but there was also plenty of room for the storage of supplies. The building opposite seemed to consist of one long single room, and had probably served as a barracks for the men. On the wall facing the gate was a smaller building, but here the division of rooms was obvious: quarters for the commanding officer and his ill-fated family.