The Confessors' Club

THIRTY

My cell phone was in the glove box, and not worth the risk of a sprint to get it, even if it did work in that particular patch of woods. It wouldn’t do any good anyway; the Porsche would never make the crawl out of the woods on flat tires.

I needed to run – run through the trees, run up the fire lane to the road, to the town. But a small part of my brain knew to beg to be rational. A man of the woods, used to tracking running prey in dark places, would expect that. He’d be waiting.

I scrambled to my feet and ran the other way, down to the lake. Every whisper of the wind came cold like the breath of a mad man with a gun; every creak of a dry limb the snick of a sliding rifle bolt; every snap of a twig the first crack of sudden gunfire. I got to the water and ran along the shoreline until it broke to feed the river. The water was rushing too fast to cross there. Only one direction remained now.

I ran up the bank of the river, to the rocks below the rickety bridge, and crept up to the edge of the road. It seemed deserted in both directions, but that’s what he’d want me to think.

There was no choice. I pounded onto the rotting planks, my footfalls jouncing loud on the loose timbers. If my shooter was within a half a mile, he’d know exactly where I was.

I got across in an instant, ducked into the woods and got snagged by a barky vine lying like a snake beneath the blanket of rotting leaves. I crashed down hard. Then, pushing up, dazed, I started to run only to get tripped again. Up once more, my legs were now too weak. I could only stagger from tree to tree in a kind of palsied shimmy, dodging vines when I could, falling when I couldn’t. Sweat burned my eyes. Horseflies, bigger than I’d ever seen, bit at my cheeks and my neck. Sometimes I swatted at them, my hand coming away bloody. Mostly I just let them bite. I had no strength.

Somehow, I kept moving. An hour and a half later, I got to the used-to-be gas station across from the Dairy Queen.

Both service bay doors were open. A man wearing dark blue coveralls straightened up from the front bumper of a rusting green Chrysler minivan to eyeball the blood, dirt and bits of bark and leaf shreds that clung to my skin and wet clothes.

‘Jesus, mister,’ he said. He was young, in his early twenties.

‘I had an accident,’ I said.

‘I guessed that already,’ he said, grinning.

‘I’ve got a car with flat tires in one of the fire lanes off County M. I need you to go out and fix the tires.’

He cleared his throat. I would have too, if I’d been confronted with someone bloody and slimed head to toe with lake muck and compost. ‘Is the car in the water?’

‘No.’

‘Then how did you get so-?’

I took out my wallet, extracted the bills, damp and stuck together like a thin sheaf of steamed cabbage, and peeled off a fifty. I laid it on the van’s fender. ‘It’s real money, just wet.’

He looked at the limp bill, then back at me. ‘How many tires are punctured?’

‘I don’t know. I’d gone for a walk. When I came back to the car, at least two of the tires were flat.’ I peeled off another fifty, pasted it next to the first one. ‘Do you have a gun?’

‘I hunt,’ he said.

‘The second fifty is for you to bring it along.’

He looked at my clothes and then at the two fifties, and then he shrugged. A hundred was a hundred, no matter that it was offered by a crazy man demanding he bring along a gun. He unpeeled the two fifties, went into the office, and came back with a shotgun. We got into his dented, powder-blue tow truck.

‘You up here on vacation?’ he asked as we rumbled down the road.

‘I came to see Arthur Lamm.’

He laughed. ‘I guess everybody knows him, leastways his car. Drives a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Mercedes Benz.’

‘Seen him lately?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s a story going around that someone in Chicago reported him missing to the sheriff, but Herman Canty says that’s nuts, that Lamm’s just gone camping. On the other hand, that Mercedes has supposedly been sitting idle, collecting bird drops, out at Lamm’s camp for quite some time.’

‘Do you know Herman well?’

‘Nobody knows Herman well, except maybe Wanda at Loons’ Rest.’

‘Herman drives a nice new truck.’

‘Noticed that, huh?’ he asked, a wide grin on his face. ‘Herman ain’t never worked much, yet here he is, driving an expensive machine. Somebody must have died for him to afford a rig like that.’

He came to a full stop at the bridge on County M. Shifting into low, he eased the truck onto the timber planks like he was rolling it onto eggs. ‘One of those fifties is for risking this bridge,’ he said, as the loose old wood shuddered beneath us.

We got to the fire lane a couple of minutes later and bounced up to the Porsche.

‘I’ll be damned.’ The tow driver made a show of looking at me with new respect. ‘I’m sorry, mister; I didn’t figure you for a Porsche.’

I picked a fleck of leaf off my shirt and flicked it out the window. ‘Understandable,’ I said.

I stayed in the truck when he got out. He walked over to the driver’s side rear wheel and squatted down. Pulling out a pocket knife, he picked at something stuck to the side of the tire, then got up, and moved around the car, bending to flick at each tire with his knife.

He came back to my side of the truck, smiling. ‘No need for my gun.’ He opened his palm, showing me four bits of twigs. ‘You been pranked, is all. All four tires. Kids jammed these into your valves to let the air out. I’ll have you on your way in no time at all.’

He started the compressor on the truck bed and uncoiled a long hose. Moving around the Porsche, he inflated each of the tires.

I got out, but had to lean quickly against the door. My legs were still rubber.

He gestured at my filthy wet clothes. ‘Be a shame to sit like that in such a nice car.’

‘I’m going back to the Loons’ Rest to get cleaned up.’

‘I probably owe you some change, mister,’ he said, coiling the hose. ‘This wasn’t a hundred-dollar job.’

‘It was a bargain,’ I said, as much for the company of his gun as it was to fix my tires.

‘Fair enough, then,’ he said, climbing into his truck.

I led us out of the woods and we drove back to town. As he turned into his old station, I gave him a wave and continued down to Loons’. The parking lot was just as empty as when I’d checked out that morning. I grabbed my duffel from the trunk.

Wanda frowned as the bells inside the door danced.

‘I need to get cleaned up. I’ll pay for another night, though I’ll only be a half-hour.’

‘We’re full up.’

I stared at her for a couple of seconds before I pointed a finger at the empty parking lot outside. ‘There’s nobody here.’

‘They’re out sightseeing.’ She looked away from me, and out the window at the parking lot. She wasn’t just being deliberately rude; there was something in her eyes. Fear, maybe.

‘And I suppose it’s your friend Herman leading them around, in that new pickup truck I’ve been seeing absolutely everywhere?’

She kept looking out the window, as though waiting for someone to pull in. ‘Full up,’ she said.

It had been no kid with twigs and a gun back in those woods. It had been Herman. I was being warned.

‘Tell that son of a bitch I’ll see him again,’ I said at the door.

It was true enough.