The Harder They Come

30

BIG RIVER WAS THE next watercourse down from the Noyo, and it drained an area of one hundred eighty-one square miles of timberland and spread wide to empty into the ocean just below the village of Mendocino. A sawmill had been built at the mouth of the river in 1852 and for a long while it had been the busiest mill in the county, but all that went defunct in the 1930s, and the mill was gone now, replaced by nothing, by sand, and though the watershed was still viable for timber, it was divided between four companies that milled their logs elsewhere and the Jackson Demonstration Forest, which was open to the public, as were the beaches. And the views. Gaze on the hills, as Sten was doing now, and all you saw from Fort Bragg to the north to Calpurnia in the south was a continuous forest that looked as pristine and untouched as it might have been when the Indians were in possession. The ferns dripped. Banana slugs longer than your hand oozed through the leaf litter. There were patches of ground up there that hadn’t seen direct sunlight in a thousand years.

Sten was in the backyard sitting on the redwood picnic table, his forearms braced on the meat of his thighs and his feet resting on the bench, and he was gazing out on the hills so he wouldn’t have to look into the faces of Rob Rankin and his deputy, Jason Ringwald, who’d played varsity football in high school and was a real little son of a bitch who’d been in the principal’s office more times than Adam, but that was neither here nor there. What he was trying to avoid wasn’t so much their faces — the looks on their faces, stony and cold and heartless — as what they were telling him. He was having trouble with that. He was denying it. Raising every objection he could think of.

“I want you to take a look at something,” Rob was saying, and he was a little man, colorless as a transparency, and there it was in his hand, the thing — one of the things — Sten didn’t want to see. It was a plastic Ziploc bag and inside it was a length of foil that had been molded into a kind of hollowed-out cigarette or pipe. One end was blackened where the match had touched it and the other featured a rounded aperture to draw in air — smoke — which would have been where the traces of DNA would collect. From lips, tongue, fingertips. “You ever see this before? Or anything like it?”

Sten came back to him now, but he had to drop his eyes because he couldn’t let this man — or any man — look inside him and see what he was or how this whole business was twisting in his veins like rusted wire. Thank god Carolee wasn’t here, that was all he could think. Thank god. “I don’t know,” he said.

A gull sailed overhead so that its shadow fell across the sheriff’s face and then lifted again. “At school?” Rob prompted. “Surely you — or whoever — must have confiscated things like this at school.” He paused. “It’s what they call a blunt, for smoking marijuana?”

Sten nodded. He knew what it was. And he knew what was coming too.

“We found this at the Bachman crime scene. Actually, we found two of them. The other one, the second one, was up there where that bunker was?” The sheriff paused a moment to swell his cheeks and let out a long trailing breath, as if the whole thing was too much for him, traipsing from one crime scene to another, hauling things around in plastic bags to confront people with on a day like this, with the sun showing bright all the way up into the stratosphere and not even the faintest stir of a breeze. “And another thing,” gesturing now to his deputy, who must have been all of twenty-two or — three, and if this kid smirked or even thought about it, Sten didn’t know if he could hold himself back, not the way he was feeling now. This was the cue for the deputy, Jason, to hand him another plastic bag, inside of which were shell casings, dull silver in color, as if they’d been tarnished. “You recognize these?”

What could he say? They were shell casings. They could have come from anywhere, from anybody. He shrugged.

“Come on, Sten, I’m trying to tell you something here.”

“All right, then tell me.”

“These are casings from a Chinese assault rifle, not something you see every day around here. A Norinco — what was it, Jason?”

“SKS Sporter. Takes 7.62 millimeter rounds.”

The sheriff was standing there on a patch of grass the rain had reinvigorated, the shoots gone green to replace the yellow that had prevailed for the past six months, new life springing up under the soles of the Belleville flight boots he preferred to standard issue. He had his hands on his hips. “I just wanted to ask,” he said, and his eyes never left Sten’s face, “—your son has a rifle, doesn’t he? Adam?”

This was a cold question and Sten felt a chill all of a sudden though the sun was shining and the bay at the mouth of the river glittered like a heat lamp. Fatherhood. He’d never really wanted it, never sought it, and it had come on him late when Carolee, at the age of thirty-nine, had found herself miraculously pregnant. We’re blessed, she’d told him, her face composed round the news, truly blessed.

“Yeah,” he said, so softly he could scarcely hear himself.

“Chinese-made, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah.”

“What I’m saying is, Sten, and I know this is hard on you, it wasn’t the Mexicans that shot Carey Bachman and they didn’t shoot Art Tolleson either. You know that, don’t you?”

What came next was a detailed account of what had occurred yesterday afternoon on Georgia Pacific property approximately three miles northeast of the house on the Noyo where Adam formerly lived with his grandmother — the house Adam had vandalized because he wasn’t right in the head, because he was angry and upset and never had gotten over the death of Carolee’s mother and the way the world kept letting him down.

“That’s correct, isn’t it?” the sheriff wanted to know. “He did live there, didn’t he?” He drew a pair of drugstore reading glasses from his shirt pocket, shook them out and carefully fitted them over the bridge of his nose to consult the police report the deputy handed him. “At 3772 Forest Road?”

Sten nodded.

“You recall how long?”

“Something like six or seven years now, I guess,” Sten said, his voice gone dead on him. He didn’t want to hear this, but he was going to hear it whether he liked it or not.

The sheriff dropped his eyes to the report and continued, glancing up from time to time to make sure Sten was getting the full impact of it because this was a trial in progress, a prosecutorial marshaling of the facts and make no mistake about it. “It says that the victim, in the company of a local resident, Charles Moody, came across a growing operation at that location — opium poppies, the seedpods of which showed evidence of sap collection, which is illegal in the state of California and everywhere else in the United States as well. You can grow poppies all you want and let them go to seed and use those seeds to grow more poppies or sprinkle them on your bagel or do anything else you want with them, but when you cross the line and start scoring the pods to extract opium, that’s a felony offense, that makes you a narcotics purveyor with intent to sell. You understand what I’m saying?”

“He’s not in his right mind, Rob. He’s not responsible. We’ve tried to get help for him, like that time at the Chinese consulate—”

But the sheriff wasn’t paying any attention because mental states weren’t the issue here. Murder was. Murder and felony drug violations. He went on, reading now: “‘As the victim and Mr. Moody made their way upslope in a light misting rain, they were unaware that the suspect was armed, concealed and lying in wait. It was their assumption that the operation had been abandoned, as it was late in the season and they saw no signs that anyone was in attendance. At some point, no more than ten minutes after they’d arrived, the suspect sprang from cover in a threatening manner and when the victim recognized him — called out his name, Adam—the suspect opened fire with his Chinese-made assault rifle, fatally wounding the victim, and then firing on Mr. Moody, who took cover and returned fire with a legally registered handgun he routinely carried for protection in the woods.

“‘The suspect subsequently retreated but began a flanking maneuver that caught Mr. Moody by surprise (he was at this juncture in full flight, in a heavily wooded area some two miles north of the river and the California Western Railroad tracks, or Skunk Railroad, as it is popularly known). Suddenly he came under fire again, and initially, using the trees for cover and returning fire to keep the suspect at bay, he couldn’t determine from which direction the fire was coming. When he realized that the shooter was now in front of him, cutting off his retreat, he began evasive maneuvers, heading west in deep forest before again turning south, where he finally reached the railway tracks at mile marker six and was able to flag down the operator of a railway utility vehicle known as a speeder cart, who took him to safety where he subsequently placed a 911 call.’”

The sheriff glanced up, held him with his eyes, then slapped the report down on the table. “Just so you understand, Sten, Adam actively hunted this guy down, and if Moody wasn’t armed and hadn’t used his head, we’d be talking about three deaths here.”

“He didn’t kill Carey. That was the Mexicans. I saw them. We both saw them out there in their pickup — Carey even called 911 to report them.” A glance at the deputy — and he was smirking. Or gloating. One or the other, take your pick. “What are you smirking about, you son of a bitch?”

And now the kid came to attention, all right, one hand instinctively going to his duty belt. “Who you calling a son of a bitch?”

“You. I’m calling you a son of a bitch.”

“Back off, Jason.” Rob straightened up with a sigh, put his hands on his hips. “In fact, why don’t you go out to the car for me and I’ll call you when I need you?”

There was a moment of hesitation, the deputy’s face a field for the interplay of his emotions, and then they both watched as he turned his back on them and picked his way across the lawn to flip the latch on the gate and disappear round the corner of the house.

“Sten. Look. I know this is hard,” Rob said, easing off the glasses and folding them away in his pocket. “But the evidence doesn’t support that.”

It was hard and it just got harder because he was trying to put Adam and Carey in the same equation, trying to picture the way his son would break with reality but always seemed to be able to come back to it, to right himself. Until now.

“I’ve got to ask you,” Rob said, no trace of understanding or even consideration left in his voice, just calculation, “—you know where he is?”

Sten just shook his head.

“When did you last see him?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

More gulls. The mountains. The ocean. Big River. And the sheriff, the sheriff calculating, because he was working on his own equation. “He was angry last time you saw him, isn’t that right? He didn’t want to leave that house. You had a fight, the two of you.”

“That’s right. But you’ve got to realize, Adam’s not normal. He needs help. I’ve been on to social services about it, everybody, and all I get is privacy laws, all I get is it’s none of my business.”

“And when he left that night, he went where?”

He was trying to come up with an answer, trying to mitigate, minimize, deny, but all he could do, even as Carolee came slamming through the back door with her hair in her face and her feet trying to run out from under her, was look toward the mountains. And point.

31

THIS TIME HE DIDN’T wait for the reporters and the fluffed-up anchorwomen or the rest of the hyenas either. The minute the sheriff left he went in and disconnected the phone and then took his cell out of his right-front pocket and buried it in the top drawer of the bureau in the bedroom. And when Carolee’s cell started ringing midway through dinner — a salad of cold chicken and avocado she’d numbly prepared at the kitchen counter with rigid hands and frozen arms, a salad neither of them could eat because food was the last thing they wanted — he got up from the table, dug the phone out of her purse and turned it off without bothering to find out who was calling or why. “What if it’s news?” she said. “What if they—?” But they both knew it wasn’t news and that they — the authorities, the cops, the SWAT teams Rob had already called in — hadn’t found or done anything. He just shook his head. Her phone was like a bomb, like an IED, and it could go off any minute and bring the whole house down. Didn’t she realize that? It was wrong. It was foul. It was dirty. So what he did was take it across the kitchen, down the hall and into the bedroom, where he buried it in the bureau right next to his own.

Neither of them slept that night. Every time he began to doze off he was aware of her there beside him, tense and alert, listening for sounds in the night. And he was listening too. Listening not for gunfire or the crackle of police radios or the rattling pulse of helicopters sweeping overhead, but for the furtive creaking of the back door, the sigh of bedsprings in the guest room, for Adam, come home to them. Because if he didn’t come home, didn’t get out of the way of everybody, didn’t get treatment and meds and whatever else it was going to take — court-appointed shrinks, the lockup — there was only one way this was going to turn out. Adam might have known these hills, might have been a mountain man — or boy, because that was what he was, a boy still and always — but the sheriff had cordoned off the whole area on both sides of Route 20 and banned entry to anyone for any purpose. They were carrying live ammunition out there. They had dogs. They had heat sensors. If he didn’t come in — and here was a prayer, sent up to whoever might be listening — he was dead.

Then it was morning. Mist in the yard. Carolee asleep finally, mercifully, and the whole world asleep with her. He was in the kitchen making coffee and distractedly gazing out the window when he saw something moving on the periphery of the yard and his heart jumped. Adam, he was thinking, beyond all reason — what were the chances, since he wouldn’t even return to the old house, the house he’d trashed, let alone this one? — and in the next moment he was out the door, barefoot and dressed only in the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. The grass was cold and wet but he didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything — not until the image of his son vanished and rematerialized as some clown in oversized shorts and high-tops with a video camera on one shoulder and a microphone in his hand. “Mr. Stensen,” he was saying, and he didn’t ask if he could have a word because he already knew the answer and just plunged right in, “how do you feel about your son being the target of the biggest manhunt this community has ever seen?”

How did he feel? He felt about the way he had when he came out of the jungle in Costa Rica and Warner Ayala had prodded him with the barrel of his weapon. What they wanted was to provoke you, get you when you were staggered and confused and ready to explode for the viewing pleasure of everybody out there whose son wasn’t psychologically impaired and crouching in the woods like some kind of animal waiting for his brains to be scorched out of him. He knew that. And he knew he had to control himself if Adam was to have any chance at all, but it didn’t matter what he knew because there was no knowledge and no thought involved in what came next. It was just a kind of eruption, and he didn’t hurt the guy, the reporter, whoever he was, and he didn’t say a word to him either. All he did, once he’d got the parameters straight, was snatch the camera off his shoulder — a lightweight thing, half the size and heft of the ones they used in his day — and beat it methodically against the side of the house until there wasn’t much more left of it than you could hold in the palm of your hand.

He didn’t say a word about it to Carolee but by the time she got up all she had to do was look out the window to see for herself — a whole cordon of reporters lined the street with their cameras and microphones, cars and sound trucks were parked up and down the block like the grand opening of an auto show, and the helicopter that kept clattering overhead and buzzing back again had nothing to do with the police. That was a public street out there, he understood that, and he had no recourse unless they actually set foot on his property like the one who’d shoved the camera in his face before the sun had even cleared the horizon, but he’d called Rob Rankin nonetheless to tell him he’d better keep the vultures off or they’d be hunting him down too. Rob said he’d send a car by. And added, before he’d even asked, that there’d been no new developments, except for rumors and crank calls and the usual wave of sightings that turned out to be non-sightings. And he promised, as he’d promised yesterday, to do everything in his power to see that Adam came to no harm, but then — and here he’d paused so long Sten thought the connection had gone dead — that depended on Adam.

The day progressed, the first day, in a way that just didn’t make any sense. They were both half-mad to get out and do something, anything — put up posters featuring Adam’s face and a number to call as if he were a child gone missing, haunt the sheriff’s substation in Fort Bragg in the hope of hearing even the least scrap of news, hike out into the woods and shout their son’s name till he heard them and laid down his rifle and came back to them, but all they had to do was appear in the window and the cameras were trained on them as if the house was a cage and they were some rare form of wildlife never before seen in captivity. Step out the door and the shouts and cries came crackling across the lawn like verbal gunfire. It was frustrating, but above all it was humiliating, deeply humiliating — two men they both knew, knew and respected and liked, were dead, and they were complicit in it. Because their son, their crazy son, enacting whatever fantasy had invaded his head, had shot them dead, and who was responsible? Sten asked himself the question, over and over, through the long morning and into the interminable afternoon, but the answer never changed: they were. He was.

A week went by. There was no news. Or no, there was constant news, but none of it verifiable or relevant. Adam had been spotted wearing a hoodie at Kentucky Fried, he’d stolen a car in Gualala, climbed through a window on North Harold Street in Fort Bragg and raided the refrigerator, pried open the newspaper machine and taken all the copies of the Advocate-News with his mug shot on the front cover. People had heard gunfire down by Glass Beach. Somebody found a wadded-up sleeping bag and two shell casings behind the utility shed in his backyard. A goat disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It was ridiculous. Community hysteria. And it devastated Carolee, who wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour or two a night and if she ate anything at all it was dry toast and coffee. He wasn’t much better himself. They had the TV on constantly and the radio too, the electronic voices in contention, one squawking from the living room, the other the kitchen. And while he refused to plug the phone back in, after that first night he and Carolee had their cellphones pinned to their ears, calling anybody they could think of who might be even remotely connected to what was going on out there in the woods. The chatter only seemed to make things worse, but it wasn’t the chatter that was killing them. It was the waiting.

Then one evening, past dark, when the reporters had given up and packed it in for the day, Rob pulled into the driveway in an unmarked car and just sat there a minute, as if gathering himself, then eased out the door and started up the walk. Sten had the door open by the time he reached it. Rob ducked his head, as if he were afraid of hitting it on the doorframe, but there was no danger there — he was a short man, short compared to Sten, anyway. “Mind if I come in for a minute?” he asked, and he wasn’t bringing good news, you could see that from the set of his mouth, and yet it wasn’t the worst either. Which meant that their son was still alive, still whole, still breathing.

Carolee was right there, her hands dropping helplessly to her sides. Her face was heavy, her shoulders slumped. There was no light in her eyes, nothing, just a sheenless dull glaze. What came into his head was that she looked as if she was drowning, but that was a cliché—no, she looked as if she’d already gone down. “Is it Adam?”

“Is there someplace we could sit for a minute?”

There was, of course there was, and in the next moment they were all three of them heading down the hall to the kitchen, to the oak table there, Carolee offering up everything she could think of — Coffee, did he want coffee? A sandwich? Cookies? She had some of those biscotti they made down at the bakery, or a drink, maybe he wanted a drink? — because the very request, Is there someplace we could sit for a minute, came hurtling at them with a force neither of them could bear.

Sten motioned to a chair and Rob pulled it out from under the table and sat heavily, Sten sliding into the chair beside him. “You know, on second thought”—Rob leaned back in the chair to call over his shoulder to Carolee, where she stood poised at the counter—“maybe a cup of coffee. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“So what’s the news?”

“I just wanted to ask — did Adam ever have any military training?”

“Military training? Are you kidding? He was never in the service. I told you, he’s unstable. And he’s been getting worse. Why do you ask?”

“Something happened out there today and I just can’t explain it—”

And now Carolee, who couldn’t hold it in any longer: “What do you mean — he’s all right, isn’t he? He isn’t hurt—?”

Rob just shook his head, then turned to look in her direction. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m starting to have a bad feeling about all this — not to mention these goddamned news conferences and all the rest of the happy horseshit, because everybody, from the governor down, is putting pressure on me like you can’t believe. But today? We had SWAT teams out there from Sacramento and Fresno both — and more coming. Plus my men and the Alameda County Special Response Unit too. With dogs and helicopters and infrared. And these are professionals, believe me, and they’d just got here, the Alameda team, just staging out on this logging road near where the second crime scene is?”

The water Carolee had put on began to boil, a hiss and rattle of the pot on the stove, steam rising, but she ignored it.

“We made contact with him.” He held up a hand to forestall them. “He’s all right, for now. But I make no promises. Because what happened, to my mind, was beyond belief — or in my experience, anyway. He fired on them, Sten, actually opened up from cover. It was lucky nobody was hit. I mean, they were just standing around, getting their gear together, and suddenly they’re taking fire.”

Rob hadn’t been there, hadn’t witnessed it personally, but he’d talked to the men who had and he’d taken the report. Apparently Adam was moving around a lot — there’d been break-ins reported at some of the outlying cabins as well as at the Boy Scout camp and up and down the Skunk Line — and at two-thirty that afternoon he’d been coming up a trail that intersected the road where the staging area was. One of the team, who’d barely had a chance to climb out of his vehicle, spotted him coming toward them and shouted for him to halt and put down his weapon. Adam didn’t halt and he certainly didn’t put down his weapon. Instead, he ducked into the cover of the trees and started firing and that got the whole team down in the dirt and lighting the woods up because whether they were highly trained and disciplined or not, they found themselves taken by surprise and maybe they were spooked. At least initially. But they soon regrouped and established a defensive formation while the K-9 handler set the dog on his scent.

Once the firing stopped, their expectation was that the suspect would have fled at that point and that running him down should have been routine, taking into account the unfamiliar terrain, of course, and the fact that cellphones were useless out there and they had to rely on the more limited range of their radios. That wasn’t what happened. Adam outflanked them. And did it so quickly they were taken by surprise all over again, only now he was firing from their rear. Again, it was a miracle nobody was hurt. And when the firing subsided this time, the suspect did take off and the K-9 unit went after him.

Rob paused at this point. He had a cup of coffee before him now and he was staring down into it, slowly revolving the cup on its saucer. Sten found that he had a cup too, though he didn’t need it and it would just keep him awake. Carolee was standing beside him, leaning into him, all her weight concentrated in one hip, and if he felt that weight as a burden, so be it. This was marriage. This was love. Two bound in one, in the flesh, for better, for worse. Rob looked up. “I don’t know if you realize how good these dogs are,” he said. “They always get their man, I mean, always. I’ve never seen them fail yet, except in the rare case where the suspect shoots the dog—”

Carolee let out a sharp breath. “Not Adam, no—”

He was shaking his head again, whether in wonder or disgust or some combination of the two, Sten couldn’t say. “If he’d fired his weapon, that would have put us onto his location, so he didn’t.” A pause. “He was too smart for that.”

But the dog had contacted him, that was for sure, because the dog came back with his backpack, or a backpack. Which contained Hershey’s Kisses, a whole sixteen-ounce bag of them, a bottle of gin, ammunition for a.22 rifle (strange, because the recovered casings from the initial firefight were from the Norinco), and half a dozen packages of freeze-dried entrées — the imported ones, from Switzerland, that weren’t exactly cheap. They’d sent the backpack to the lab for DNA testing, but really, there wasn’t much point since it was ninety-nine percent certain it was Adam’s. The SWAT team officer had seen him, positive ID, engaged him, and how he’d ever managed to get away from the K-9 unit was just a mystery.

Sten heard himself say, “What if I went out there?”

“You can’t do that. Too risky.”

“What if I, I don’t know, went up the train tracks with a bullhorn or something, and called him to give himself up? Or the train. What if I took the train up there and just kept calling all the way up and back again — it’s better than nothing. I’ll tell you, sitting here is killing me. And Carolee too.”

Carolee had an arm round his shoulder, bracing herself, and he felt her grip tighten now. “I could go too,” she said. “He’d listen to me, I mean, more than—”

“Me? You mean more than me?” He could feel the anger coming up in him, anger at her, anger at Rob, but most of all at Adam, Adam with his thrusts and parries and the way he hid behind his debility, pulled it down like a screen to excuse anything, and so what if he was the principal’s son? Was it really all that much of a burden? They’d tried to send him to another school, any school he wanted, but he wouldn’t go, wouldn’t behave or act normal or even try, wouldn’t do anything anybody wanted except to please himself. “Because I’m shit for a father, right, is that what you mean? Because he hates me?”

“You’d have to wear body armor,” Rob said, giving him a long cool look. “I wouldn’t let you go out there without it.”

Carolee pushed the hair away from her face and leaned in over the table, looking from him to Rob, her eyes fierce. “I’m going too.”

“I can’t allow that,” Rob said.

“Can’t allow it?”

“Too dangerous.”

But she wouldn’t have it. She stood there glaring at the sheriff, the cords of her throat drawn tight. “I can’t believe you,” she said, her voice rising till it broke. “You think my son would ever dream of hurting me? His own mother?”

32

ON THE MORNING THE sheriff finally called to give his permission, Sten was still in bed. A long stripe of bleached-out sunlight painted the wall over the night table, where the clock radio showed half past ten. Carolee was nowhere to be seen, gone, he remembered, down to Calpurnia to work at the game reserve, Just to get out of the house because I swear I’m going to start screaming any minute now. He’d taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night after something had awakened him — a random noise, a scurrying in the dark — and he’d lain there for what seemed like hours till he got up, made his way to the bathroom and swallowed an Ambien, dry, and then staggered back to bed. When his cellphone weaned him into consciousness, he didn’t at first know where he was, his head fogged with the residue of his dreams, dreams that bucked and shifted and left his muscles kinked with anxiety till he felt as if he’d been crawling through a series of decreasingly narrow tubes all night long.

He was going to ignore the phone — he was trying to ignore it, two weeks more having dragged by since Rob had stopped by the house to quiz him on the subject of Adam’s military background, the police presence in the hills inflated till there was a virtual army out there and still no news, no hope, no reason to do anything but lie flat out on your back like one of the living dead — but those two sharp bleats, followed by a pause and another pair of bleats and then another, were too much for him. He pushed the talk button and heard the sheriff’s voice coming at him, a morning voice, caffeinated and urgent.

“Sten?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I just — you know how it is.” And now all his fears came to squat on his chest like a flock of carrion birds with their long naked claws. “What’s the news? Tell me quick.”

“No news. Nothing. Zip. No contact. But what I’m calling about is I think it’s a good idea you going out there and see what you can do. We’ve arranged it with the railroad people.”

The railroad people. Sure. Of course they’d be involved. Why not? They wanted this thing over with as much as anybody because they’d been shut down now since Adam started in — and that meant no income, no tourists being hauled up the hill by the hundreds and paying forty-nine bucks apiece for the privilege, which in turn meant that everybody who owned a motel or a restaurant or even a gas station was hurting too. The irony of it. But it was beyond irony — it was like some black-hearted joke the universe was playing on him. If before he couldn’t step in the door of a restaurant or coffee shop for fear of some total stranger sending over martinis or picking up his tab, now he didn’t dare show his face because of Adam, because of what Adam had done to Carey Bachman and Art Tolleson and what he was doing, single-handedly, to the local economy. The forests were closed, off-limits. And if the forests were closed, what was the attraction for the tourists — or anybody else, for that matter? Take Back Our Forests. Right. Take them back from Adam.

“Can you be ready today? For the afternoon run? That’s at three-thirty?”

He said, “Yeah, I guess,” but it came out as an airless rasp and he had to repeat himself.

“We’re going to hook you up with a bullhorn, just like you wanted, because frankly we’re all getting kind of desperate here. But you’ll wear protection, I insist on that. And we’re going to have a select group of agents on the train, a few females too, so it looks like the tourists are out again because we don’t want to make the suspect — Adam, I mean — suspicious.”

What could he say? The words were wadded in his throat. He needed water, needed breakfast, needed an aspirin. “So if he comes to me, you’ll take him? Is that it? Is that the plan?”

“Listen, I don’t want to risk any lives out there, and yes, that would be the ideal solution.”

“If I can get him to come.”

“Yeah, if.”

“And get him to put his gun down.”

“It’s a big if. But I tell you, at this point I’m willing to try anything.”

There was a silence.

“And if he won’t put it down, assuming he even comes to the sound of my voice?”

A sigh. The squawk of a radio in the background. “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

The railroad was strictly a tourist thing now, though originally it had been used for bringing logs down to the mill at Fort Bragg, now defunct, like everything else, and he hadn’t been on it more than three or four times in his life. The Skunk Train. With its cartoon skunk logo that made everything seem so innocuous and appealing, though the nickname had come about because the train had originally burned crude oil for heat in the passenger car and that left a sour odor hanging over the tracks. Half-day trips took you to Northspur from the coast or down from Willits up above. And you could see and document the redwoods without having to exert any more effort than it took to set down your wine glass and lift a camera off the seat. For his part, when he wanted to see redwoods, he used his legs. And what he smelled out there wasn’t crude oil or diesel or even woodsmoke from the old steam engine they sometimes ran but just what nature offered up. Not that he was critical. Or complaining. Every town needed an industry, and now that the mills were gone, this was the next best thing. Let the tourists go gaga over the big trees, let them grow fat and fatter. It was fine with him.

The first thing he did after he got off the phone with Rob was walk the three blocks into town for a big twenty-ounce caffe latte with a double shot of espresso, the air dense, the sea swallowed up in fog. There were tourists everywhere, though the season was petering out. Or should have been. But then the Boomers were enjoying their retirement and didn’t have a season anymore — they just kept coming. He would have gone to the bakery or the breakfast place to put something on his stomach, if only for ballast, but he didn’t really want to see anybody or have to make explanations or pretend to be grateful for the expressions of sympathy people kept laying on him, whether false or sincere or somewhere in between. Instead he went to the deli and had them fix him a couple of sandwiches, one for now, one for the train, then he went home to make his hundred daily phone calls in the frustrated hope of gleaning some bit of information that would provide the key here, the key he could turn in a lock that would open the door and make all this go away.

Just yesterday he’d heard from a source at the Fort Bragg police station (Freddy Aulin, who’d graduated from the high school in 1982) that a witness had positively identified Adam the night before. The witness — a man in his twenties, one of those free spirits who didn’t worry much about grooming and slept rough and had a drug and/or drinking problem — was making his own camp off the railroad tracks up near the South Fork milepost, and while he wasn’t oblivious to the sheriff’s order he just didn’t think it applied to him. It was unclear whether he knew Adam or not, but he was heading back from town along the tracks with a bottle of fortified wine and saw a figure coming toward him, moving fast, and recognized Adam. The thing was, Adam didn’t seem jumpy or paranoid at all. In fact, he’d stopped and chatted with the man awhile, even going so far as to share a joint with him in a thicket not fifty feet off the tracks where transients were known to gather. Was the man afraid for his life? Well, no, he wasn’t. For one thing, he was drunk, and for another he expressed nothing but admiration for what Adam was doing, sticking it to them, and they were brothers, that was how he saw it. Adam must have seen it that way too.

“You know,” the man told him, “they’re out here looking for you. Like a million cops.”

Adam just shrugged. “Let them look,” he said.

And how had this man come to let the police in on the encounter? Had he strolled in voluntarily to offer up information, maybe in the hope of scoring some reward money? No. He was arrested for urinating in public when he went back into town later that night for a second bottle, and as the arresting officer was handcuffing him, he happened to let it drop, whether out of civic duty or by way of extenuation wasn’t clear. “I don’t know if it means anything to you,” he said, the words thick in his mouth, “but I just saw that dude you’re after, Adam? Like two hours ago?”

So yes, Sten was making phone calls, and whether they led to anything other than frustration, more frustration, at least he was doing something. He spent the next two hours on the phone, learning nothing, then thought to call Carolee before he left for the train, just to let her know what was going on. She picked up on the first ring and right away he could tell something was wrong, just from the way she murmured hello as if it had to be pried from her lips.

“What is it?” he said. “You hear anything?”

It took her a minute. She was gathering herself, her breathing harsh and sodden, as if she were holding a washcloth over the receiver. “They shot the antelope.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Two of the sable. Corinna and Lulu. They’re saying Adam did it.”

“Adam? That’s ridiculous. It’s forty miles to get down there.”

She didn’t say anything to this, just breathed through the line.

“It’s probably nothing. Some kid with a gun.”

A pause. Her voice so reduced it was barely there. “Adam’s a kid with a gun.”

“Some other kid. Some apprentice yahoo. It’s nothing, I’m sure of it.”

“Uh-huh. Tell that to Cindy. And Gentian. They’ve got two dead animals on their hands, animals that might as well have been over in Africa, taking their chances there.”

He didn’t know what to say to this. Adam could easily have humped those forty miles in the last two days, but Sten was sure he hadn’t. And even if he had, why would he shoot antelope? But then — and Sten’s thoughts were racing ahead of him — why would he shoot Carey or Art or open fire on a SWAT team? The answer came rising to the surface like something buoyed on its own gases: because he was suicidal, that was why. Because he wanted to die. He wasn’t going to come to the train, to the sound of his own name, to his father. That was fantasy. That was futility. That was the way to pain and more pain.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am. Really. That’s a terrible thing. But I’m sure it’s not Adam, I’m sure there’s some other explanation. . but look, the reason I called is I heard from Rob and he wants me to go up the train line.”

“When?”

“Today. This afternoon.”

“I’m coming.”

“You heard Rob, didn’t you? Bullets are flying out there. And whether these cops are highly trained or not, you never can tell what’s going to happen, so that’s just not an option.”

“And you really think he’s going to listen to you, he’s going to come to you? Because I’m the one. I’m the one he’ll come to.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know that,” and here was the accusation again, the old thrust, why can’t you be a better father, why can’t you be home nights, why can’t you get strict with him, lay down the law, make him stop this nonsense, why didn’t you show up for the T-ball game, the sing-along, the cake sale, because what meeting is more important than your own son? “And if I didn’t know it I’m sure you’d be there to tell me the next ten thousand times.”

The train moved along at a walking pace, easing across the intersection on Main with its whistle blowing for everybody to hear and take note of, whether they were stalled at the crossing in their cars and campers or hunkered in some ravine halfway up the mountainside ready to take on the world. Sten was dressed like a tourist, in shorts, running shoes and a woolen shirt that concealed the soft body armor Rob had insisted on, though it wasn’t quite clear why since it wouldn’t stop a round from an assault rifle. Slow it down, maybe, depending on how far it had to travel. Or a ricochet, it might stop a ricochet, which, of course, might not necessarily cooperate and strike you where you were protected. It could go anywhere, through your skull, the roof of your mouth, your groin. But he didn’t want to think about that — or the last time he’d laid eyes on Adam, the fight they’d had, how Adam had shoved back with all the sick fury uncoiling inside him, and what had the Norse called their fiercest warriors? Berserkers. They didn’t know fear. They were unhinged. And on the battlefield they went berserk. Adam Stensen. Sten’s son. Son of Sten who was the son of Sten.

There was no one on the deck of the observation car — that would have been suicidal in Rob’s estimation, Rob who’d declined to go on this little expedition because he had a command to oversee — and Sten wondered about that, about the imposture they were trying to pull off here. Various deputies were scattered throughout the two enclosed cars, men and women both, dressed casually, the men in loud shirts and reversed baseball caps, the women in big straw hats and pastels, but if they were really tourists, actual tourists, half of them would have been lounging around the open car, beer bottles pressed to their lips and cameras flashing. Would Adam notice? Would he care? Would he even be anywhere near the rail line in broad daylight? And here, despite himself, he felt a flush of pride: Adam was smart. He was elusive. And he knew his terrain. He would have made a LURP in Vietnam, the ghost in the night who materialized amongst the enemy to cut the throats of the unwary and scare the shit out of the rest.

The train rattled on, picking up speed but still going at half the normal pace because it was a target and make no mistake about it. A lure. A bait. But then why would Adam want to shoot up a train or go anywhere near it? Sten had no answer to that, except that Adam had a rage inside him and that rage had to come up against something, just to rub it, feel it, let the world know what it was to have a thing like that clawing to get out. He’d felt it himself when he was in his teens and after too and he’d seen it channeled through two generations of cynical slouching bullheaded kids at the high school, of which Deputy Jason Ringwald, seated two rows behind him and staring hard out the window, was a prime example. Most of them suppressed it and went out into the world to become cops and corporate raiders, army lifers, mill hands, but some never could get loose of it and they wound up in jail, crippled in motorcycle accidents or scattered across the blacktop in pieces. Or shot. Shot dead.

“Any time now,” a voice was saying and he looked up to see one of the SWAT team honchos, a lieutenant, all eyebrows and a mouth pursed round a set of small even teeth, hovering over the seat.

They were passing along Pudding Creek, which was tidal here, and had been used to float logs during rainy seasons of the past but was now a swampy stretch of nothing you could barely turn a canoe around in. There were houses up on the hills. Roads. The gleam of a parked automobile. “Here?” he said. “We’re barely out of town.”

The man — he was in his late thirties, forties maybe, with flecks of gray stubble along his jawline where he’d shaved hurriedly — just gave him a look. This man didn’t trust him. Didn’t like him. None of them did. He was the father of the shooter and that made him damaged goods, and if he wasn’t a suspect, in their eyes he should have been. “Might as well. You never know where he could be. Didn’t they spot him along here night before last?”

“That’s what I hear.”

The cop held the look. “It’s costing time and money. For the engineer up there, the two of them. And us. All of us.” He gave it a beat. “We got families too, you know.”

Sten shrugged and rose to his feet, the megaphone clutched in one hand. He was planning to go out there on the observation car no matter what anybody said, and if his son wanted to shoot him — Adam, if Adam wanted to shoot his own father — well let him go ahead. Anything would be better than this.

Until he stepped out on the deck, he hadn’t realized how stifling it had been in the car. The air was in motion here, blowing cool on his face and drying the nervous sweat under his arms. He smelled bay, alder, pine, smelled mud and standing water, the dark funk of rot that underlay everything. The train swung round a curve, heading east now, heading uphill, and he caught a glimpse of a hidden glen thick with moss and fern, the light sifting through the trees in a luminous haze that made him forget for a moment just exactly what the purpose of all this was. He braced his hips instinctively against the sway of the platform and let the world open up around him, thinking how ungenerous he’d been to dismiss the tourists — who could blame them for wanting to come up here where it was silent and green and the trees had stood motionless since the time before Christ, at least the ones the loggers hadn’t got to? The air rushed at him. The tracks sang. He found he’d gone outside himself for a minute there and it took the weight of the hard plastic butt of the bullhorn to bring him back, but then he raised the thing to his lips, feeling foolish and afraid and maybe a little fatalistic too because they were just wasting their time here, weren’t they?

He called Adam’s name, but nothing happened because he’d somehow neglected to switch the thing on. Behind him, a small army sat balanced over their weapons, watching him. He found the switch. Flicked it. And called his son’s name, bellowed it, chanted it, threw it up against the changeless trunks of the trees till it came back to him riding on its own echo, and he kept on calling it all the way up the line and back down again, as the shadows deepened and his voice dried up to a hoarse reverberant rattle in the very deepest hollow of his throat.