The Confessors' Club

SIXTY-ONE

The rain came down in sheets of gray glass beads, dissolving my headlight beams into mist and blurring the trees alongside the road into seamless dark curtains. Every few seconds, great jagged spears of lightning gave me enough of a snapshot of the narrow gravel road ahead to speed forward another hundred yards before everything went dark again, and I had to drop back to my snail’s safe crawl.

So it went, for an hour, until a fresh flash of lighting lit the tall, narrow Tinker Toy shape coming out of the gray. The rickety bridge was twenty feet ahead. I downshifted to first gear, unzipped the driver’s curtain so I could see to orient myself with the left side rail, and eased onto the old wood. Lightning flashed again, bringing a huge stutter clap of thunder that shook the ancient span like loose sticks. The rail next to me swayed in the sudden light. It was barely a dozen feet above white caps frothing in roiling water. The river was rising.

Ice needles blew in through the open curtain, stinging my face as I watched the rail to my left. It was the only way I knew to drive straight. But drift too close and I could catch a front tire, knock the left side loose and plunge over the side. Drift too far the other away, I might hit the right rail, and drop off that side.

Lightning flashed; I was halfway over. I squeezed the steering wheel tight and, holding my breath, punched the car forward. After what seemed like an hour, my tires crunched gravel. I’d made it across.

Still, I dared speed up only when lightning cracked to give me a view. Finally, at what seemed like the twentieth flash of lightning, or perhaps the hundredth, the fire lane appeared for an instant. I stopped, downshifted into the ultra-low gear that off-road Jeep crazies use to assault steep hills, and waited. At the next flash of lightning I gunned the Jeep down into the slush of a gulley and up through the gap in the trees, and cut the engine as the woods darkened again into invisibility. I could only hope I’d pulled far enough in to conceal the Jeep from the road.

I found my black knit hat under the passenger’s seat, but left behind the yellow poncho. Yellow would light me up like neon every time lightning flared. Telling myself that courage can only be strengthened by adversity, I stepped out into the rain.

There was a thick tree fifteen paces directly perpendicular to the Jeep’s right front wheel. The soft loamy compost at its base went deep enough to easily bury the aluminum case. I pulled back the loam, dropped the case, and covered it with wet leaves. By now my khakis and shirt were soaked clear through with freshly strengthened courage.

Though the rain was beating harder, louder, the woods felt suspended beneath the din, as if every living thing within it – every bird, every squirrel, every insect – was holding its breath in fear of what was about to happen.

I ran to Lamm’s camp. My footfalls barely sounded above the rain invading the trees, but to my ears now every twig snapped like a gunshot, every breath called out as loud as a shout.

The Mercedes rested in its same place, still filthy with its fuzzy carpet of sap, pine needles and a thousand pats of green-white bird guano. But here and there the hard rain was loosening the crusted blanket into spots of bubbling paste that had begun to run down the sides of the car in dirty little rivulets, like the car had become something evil, molting, shedding its skin.

There were no other cars there, no tan Buick. The clearing and the back of the cottage appeared deserted, yet something flashed bright in the gloom, down by the water. Staying inside the trees, I moved to the shore. An orange rowboat with an outboard motor attached to its stern bobbed high, despite the rain, at the end of Lamm’s dock. I edged closer to see into the water. The barely floating boat I’d bent to look at last time, the instant before I’d been shot at, had gone. Canty had said it had been a second boat. I hadn’t believed it then; I didn’t believe it now. There’d been no other boat. Someone had bailed out the one I’d seen earlier, attached an outboard motor, and used it to go off somewhere.

‘We’re gonna be rich!’ a man screamed in a strange, singsong voice from inside the cabin.

I crouched, and moved back deeper into the woods. I knew the voice. It was Delray Delmar, no doubt yelling at Wendell.

I pulled out my cell phone to dial 911. There were no bars. No service.

I backed farther into the woods. Still no bars.

I did the minutes in my head. Fifteen to run back to the Jeep, maybe forty-five minutes to make it through the storm either to the sheriff’s department or to the pay phone in Bent Lake. No matter which way I chose, the sheriff might not get there for two hours.

Still, the cops would arrive well before noon, when Delray told me I had to be up in Bent Lake.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Delray screamed.

I turned to run back into the woods, to the Jeep.

A bolt of lightning lit the dark sky, and a second later, thunder shook the ground.

A gunshot fired.

I turned around, charged the back door, twisted the knob and shouldered it open.

And got clubbed on the back of the neck with a million-pound bat.