The Confessors' Club

TWENTY-NINE

I hit muck in an instant. I was too close to shore, too easy a target for a man with a gun.

I clawed blindly at the spongy decay, grabbing madly to pull myself down and away. The water was ink, thick with the sediment I’d stirred up, slimy in my nose, gritty in my eyes. The saw-edged weeds scratched at my face and ripped at my hands as I tugged at them, one handful after another, to get deeper, farther from shore.

My lungs begged for air, but death was a gunshot waiting at the surface. The water was deeper now, clearer. I let go of the cutting weeds and began breast-stroking through the frigid water to stay down, fighting my lungs, counting, ten more strokes, then nine and five and then no more. I lunged up for air, my eyes shut for the crack of gunfire, the burn of a bullet.

No explosion came. No burn, no pain. I gulped air, dropped back under.

Ten new strokes, and ten more, then up again, gasping, pawing at my face to clear my eyes. Lamm’s cottage was two hundred yards away.

My jeans and shoes were lead, tugging me down. I let them pull me under, and breast-stroked below the surface toward the center of the lake until I could do no more, and came up to look. The brown log cottage was lost in the blur of the trees at the shoreline. I made wide circles with my arms, staying up, watching for movement. Nothing moved at the shore.

A thousand iced daggers pricked deep into my legs. My strength had gone; my shoes were dragging weights. I needed to untie them and let them fall away but, barefoot, I wouldn’t have a chance of outrunning anyone in the woods.

A thought struck, so perfect that I hugged it like I was hugging life: A killer would have killed. I’d been a plump target at the shore and then swimming the first yards away. Anyone close could have easily put bullets into me. But there had been no more gunshots after the first two.

It had been some fool hunter, sure. I was way up north in the land of the gun-toting free, where everybody got armed at birth and shooting wild was a part of life. Hell, by now my hunter was probably a mile away, resting on a termite-infested log for a mid-morning bite of bratwurst and cheddar, perhaps even lifting an ear flap on his plaid cap to scratch his pointed head and wonder why he never hit anything.

Damned fool hunter. Damned fool me.

I’d panicked over nothing.

Cramps hit, great contorting pulsations that dug into my legs with iron fingers. I dropped under the water, doubled over to knead my knuckles into my right leg, then my left. The cramps dug back deeper, relentless in the frigid water.

Damned fool me. I was going to drown if I didn’t get out of the water.

I kicked for the trees, flailing my arms at the water as the great electric curls of pain wrapped tighter and tighter around my calves. My hands as well began to cramp, too weak to do anything but slap at the water. Swallowing water, I went down.

Incredibly, a foot grazed the bottom. I pushed up, saw sky, disbelieving. I was still yards from shore, but I’d touched bottom. I wanted to laugh, for the mercy of it. I screamed instead. From the cramps twisting deep into my legs.

I half dog-paddled, half-stumbled to the narrow ribbon of slick moss at the shore and crawled out on my belly. I collapsed face down on to the mud, shivering, sucking in the cool musk of the shore with ragged breaths.

And cursing. I swore at everyone I could think of. I cursed wedge-headed, cheese-worshipping, damned-fool inbred hunters. And their mothers. And the women who ran places like Loons’ Rest. And their broom-beating, bat-stomping offspring.

I cursed Arthur Lamm, who might simply have been off camping. I cursed the lead-headed Herman Canty, stoic Northwoodsman, for not telling me anything definitive.

But mostly, I cursed myself. I’d almost died, not from gunshot, but from drowning in stupid panic.

A branch hung low above my head. I reached up and pulled myself up to stand. My legs wobbled and then calmed under my weight. Breathing came easier. After a moment I dared to let go of the branch, and bent to retie my shoe laces, loosened and slimed by ten thousand years of decayed plants and fish.

I started into the trees. The damp rotting carpet of last year’s leaves muffled my footfalls as I pushed my legs to move quicker. My hunter might still be in the woods, about to spray a last few thousand rounds into the trees before heading home.

Even stumbling fast, whole swarms of stinging insects found me, chilled wet meat, pulsing with blood – a smorgasbord of lake muck and sweat served up in a thick residue of fear. I didn’t slow to learn if they were mosquitoes, flies or gnats. They all stung like they were on steroids. Everything liked to hunt up in those piney woods.

Sooner than I hoped, I caught a shimmer of bright yellow through a thinning in the trees. Leo’s Porsche, designed for the autobahn, hunkered low on the scraped clay of the fire lane, as out of place in those woods as I was. I dipped my hand into the pocket of my jeans, came out with the keys. Water dribbled from the little electronic remote. I ran up to the edge of the fire lane.

And stopped.

The sloped nose of the sleek German car was too close to the ground. The right front tire was flat. As was the rear tire. I backed deeper into the dark shelter of the woods and dropped behind a massive oak, to think, to understand.

Two tires, flat, immobilizing the Porsche.

Someone wanted me trapped, defenseless, in the woods.