CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (43 page)

Forced to it she would answer him out of good manners. He was her elder, her relative, and he had saved her life. Besides, she did love the heck out of him. "I'm listening."

"You think because you went off and got all that fancy learning that you know everything right and good there is to know. That's natural, 'course. Young folks always think they know better than old people. Sometimes they do know better. I'm willing to admit that--just as a point of argument, you understand. And I'm sure you did learn a lot from them smart Jews down there in God's land. Maybe on some points you might know more than me or Sully. But this thing you're wanting to do--take out the alarms, leave the doors unlocked--well, honey, that's just plain cracked-brain thinking. There ain't no other way to say it."

"But Uncle Flap, that's just because you don't understand the strategy."

"Suppose you tell this ignorant old geezer this fancy strategy of yours so I'll understand then?"

"You won't like it even when I tell you."

"Suppose you tell me and see."

Carla took a breath and repeated the passage about appearing to be defenseless to make the enemy feel untroubled about his attack. She was careful to explain herself properly to rail against the modern day idea of aggression and false security. She thought she had a good case. Flap might be able to accept new ways if she was skillful in her presentation.

When she finished speaking, he said, "Ummm..."

"What does that mean?" she asked. "Does it mean you see it my way?"

"Nope."

She halted, standing her ground. She almost stomped her foot, he made her so angry. "Oh, God, you and Sully are cut from the same cloth. You can't take in anything new. Which, by the way, isn't new at all, it's centuries-old wisdom from some of the finest minds the world's ever known."

"Could be," he admitted.

"So why can't you see it?"

"Baby, we're talking about a sick man here. You understand that? Your great Chinese strategist wrote down rules for dealing with a perfectly sane and ordinary kind of man. A soldier under a commander. Seems to me like he was talking about dealing with a common man involved in a perfectly ordinary kind of war--if there is such a thing as an ordinary war--" He laughed a little at the incongruity of his statement. "And your wisdom learned from that little Chinese fellow could trick a regular soldier. It could trick a man used to using certain war tactics. But Carla, Martin Lansing, he ain't your regular run-of-the-mill soldier or your everyday killer or your next-door neighbor. He come up out of the stinking swamp of hell, and he ain't like you and me. He don't think nothing like us."

Rather than automatically disavow anything her uncle said, Carla pondered this unique way of looking at her quarry. What Flap said did make good sense now that she could stand aside and recognize it. "Maybe," she allowed.

"No maybe about it, honey. Lansing might be one that'd figure out right away what you was up to. If he figured it out, you'd be in worse trouble than you'd be with the security, now wouldn't you?"

"Maybe," she repeated, stubbornly relenting to his superior logic.

"See, you gotta think of Lansing as an altogether different breed of snake. He ain't no milk snake sneaking up on a mama cow to suck her tit. He's more like one of them coral snakes, brightly colored and so deadly just one bite'll kill you. Now, you don't walk out barefooted in the woods hoping it's the milk snake might crawl underfoot, do you? You take precaution. You wear your boots, just in case you encounter one of them goddamned, sneaky-ass corals.

"So can we get rid of this silly idea of tearing out the alarms and unlocking the doors? Can we do that now, Carla? You think maybe it might be better to keep yourself as safe as can be, with whatever technology can give you? 'Nother words, can we wear our boots, just in case?"

Carla shifted from foot to foot in the dark forest. She hung her head, thinking. Flap waited patiently, his huge bulky form steady as a block of midnight. "All right. If you think it's okay, I'll leave it alone." She raised her head to stare at him. "But I'm not giving up on everything I've learned just to suit you and Sully. You won't be right every time."

"I suppose not. Nope, not every time, honey. Just when it counts," he added, grinning.

Carla knew he must be smiling with triumph as he hauled her behind him from the forest shelter onto Sully's back lawn. He was such a funny old guy the way he mixed common sense with an earthy logic that she had to smile, too.

He was one of a kind. She trusted him. He might be old, outdated, and hopelessly chauvinistic with his "honeys" and "babys," but she would never rule out the possibility he might also, on occasion, be
right
.

#

Lansing ditched the car on a switchback road that ended where an old shack once stood. Now there were only fallen bricks where the sooty chimney had soared skyward.

From the trunk of the car he took a puke-green bedroll he had bought at a camping supply store, a canteen, tin cooking utensils that stacked one inside the other and were carried by a wire handle, thick storm candles, a flashlight, matches in a small metal box, and a few provisions.

Using his shirttail he wiped the surfaces of the car where he had touched it with his hands. It was stolen out of North Georgia. Might be six months before anyone ventured down the switchback and found it, but Lansing knew well not to take chances.

With a pale, often-washed gray duffel bag slung over his back, he struck off down an incline into the woods. Two miles to the southeast lay Sully's house. Just thinking about it gave Lansing a warm feeling that started in his gut and crept up to his rib cage. He would have liked to rebuild his old lean-to on the sloping bank not far from Sully's backyard, but he couldn't do that because he had told Sully approximately where it was. No. This time he would situate his hideout a little farther away and not directly in line with the house. Tonight, though, he would sleep in the bedroll beneath the tree limbs and the stars.

He paused and looked up. Already the sky was blueing overhead, and he picked out bright Venus. Suddenly he remembered something he had learned at school. He had been a poor student and, as soon as he was told facts, forgot them. But one day in his literature textbook he read about the gods and goddesses worshiped by the Greeks. It fired his imagination. The god he chose to remember and to call his own was Ares, god of war. Ares was brother to Zeus, the mightiest god of all, but unlike the other gods, Ares did not adorn his throne with gold and jewels. His throne was made of ugly brass, the chair arms ending in knobs depicting skulls. The cushion he sat upon in the throne was made of human skin. Ares was tall, handsome, and cruel. His emblems were the wild boar and the bloodied spear. He lived in a house in a mythical patch of menacing woods.

Lansing looked from the sky to his surroundings. He, too, was returning to his home, the woods, the deep and the dark, the menacing, the fearful. He said to himself, "I am Ares. I can make the heavens tremble." He muttered this incantation until he grew too embarrassed to repeat it. He knew he was no god, was in fact all too mortal and subject to dying. He had nothing but the palace window in his mind, his personal retreat no one in the world could ever reach. Unlike Ares, who still rode the open sky, Lansing was earthbound and beset by disease and trouble.

Shaking off the thought, he began walking again. A small animal scurried through ground brush away from him. A bobwhite gave its sharp, musical call from somewhere close by, and in the distance the mate answered,
Bob-bob white
.

Lonesome, Lansing mused. Every one and every thing has a mate. Awful way for the world to be constructed. Females depending on males, males fawning over females. Every last jack one of them putting the misery on the other. Even the gods and goddesses of old Greece mated with earthlings and brought themselves down.

His boots sank into marsh disguised as land. He angled up and around it. The stench reached him and he pinched shut his nostrils with thumb and forefinger. Smells like dead stuff down in that muck, he thought, lots of crappy dead stuff. Smells like rats under a sink cupboard going bad.

Blackberry vines and creepers strangled whatever wildflowers might have grown in this wild brambly section of the forest. Mushrooms with virulent orange caps dotted where Lansing walked. They made squishing sounds when he stepped on them. That made him smile. Ares would have loved to tramp the earth and destroy every poisonous particle of it.

He could no longer see the sky or stars above the treetops. Pines soared over a hundred feet before branching out. Water oak, scrub cedar, poplar, and red ash hunched in to fill the remaining spaces. Lansing walked where other men did not attempt to go. Deer did not forage here. This was a place for snakes lying in buried pits, spiders hugging free bark, grub worms wriggling blind beneath rotting timber.

It was full dark, spooky with night owls and the slithers of four-footed beasts, before Lansing found a spot to lie down for the night. Mosquitoes hummed around his face and worried the lashes of his eyes, the hair in his nose.

Nothing suited Martin Lansing more. The wilder and more wretched the land, the more his spirits rose. He knew he would not be able to sleep because of the adrenalin pumping. During the long hours of wakefulness in the bedroll as the dew fell and coated his face like a caul, he fantasized about Carla and how much she must care to call him back to her. Of all the others he had killed he could barely recall two or three faces of his victims. But Carla's face--and body--was as fresh in his mind as if he had seen her yesterday.

He hoped to see her again, in the flesh, tomorrow.

Alternately shivering and sweating, dreaming and waking to slap away mosquitoes, Lansing rested sporadically until a gold dawn laced the forest floor with a newly minted day.

CHAPTER 5

"When the enemy feels danger, he will attack. The guerrilla must consider the situation and decide at what time and at what place he wishes to fight. If he finds he cannot fight, he must immediately shift."

Mao Tse-tung

Carla woke early and lay listening to birds singing from the woods' edge. She dressed quietly so as not to wake Sully, took a hunk of Colby cheese and a kosher pickle from the refrigerator, and let herself out the back door. She stood filling her lungs with the tangy morning air as she munched on the cheese. There was nothing that smelled quite as fresh as morning before the sun burned off the dew.

Sparrows flitted across the yard and took turns alighting on the birdbath. They ignored Carla's quiet presence. A rustling drew Carla's gaze to Sully's vegetable garden. He had used chicken wire to make a fence around the perimeters to discourage poachers, but something moved among the great emerald stalks of romaine lettuce leaves.

Carla walked closer in to see what was going on. A white-tailed rabbit with tan body fur leapt at her approach and scooted down the neat furrow to the fence line. She saw him duck into the ground as if it magically opened to swallow him. On inspection she found the rabbit had burrowed beneath the fence to get at the lettuce. She found a good-sized rock and placed it in the opening. Sully needed a scarecrow or else some aluminum foil pie pans to put on sticks so they would catch and reflect the sun to frighten away marauders. She'd have to tell him.

She finished the cheese, demolished the pickle, rinsed her hands in the bird bath, and walked toward the woods. She meant to find the area where Lansing's old lean-to used to be. She gloried in this task, feeling at once home again with the earth as she had felt when working on the kibbutz in Israel. No matter how hot the sun or how weary her muscles, how blistered her hands or how parched her throat, she loved the smell and feel of earth coating her skin.

She trampled softly as possible but still woke sleeping birds and had to listen to their passionate scolding. She picked up a walking stick along the way and beat at the brush and weeds before stepping through them to scatter snakes if they happened to be crawling about.
Corals
, especially.

After an hour of wandering, she came upon the creek she supposed Lansing used for drinking and washing while he lived in the forest for a month. There had not been rain in many days and the water level was low, clear, ripples here and there indicating stone tops breaking the surface. She squatted and drank from cupped hands.

She went on, her eyes objectively cataloging the lay of the land--how a rise began here, dropped off there, where a tree had been gutted by lightening, where deadfall lay rotting peacefully, termites swarming just beneath out of sight.

She came to a ravine and stopped to look it over. Lansing might have made his place here, she thought, rubbing one hand along her blue-jeaned thigh. She carefully walked along the sloping bank on either side, poking at leaf and limb debris with the walking stick. A moccasin disturbed by her plundering revealed itself from beneath a cache of old fall leaves. It came toward her as she backed away. She had to beat at the ground with her stick to make it turn and hightail it for safety.

"Damn cottonmouth," she muttered. It was an aggressive snake, mean-spirited and venomous. She would have to watch for them coming out to sun themselves after the long cool night.

She kicked at a mound of dirt and was about to walk past when from the corner of her eye she noticed a speck of bright red. She halted, squatted to examine her find. With the stick end she pawed at the earth until the red thing came free. She reached out, held it up before her eyes. It was a pair of wire snips with red plastic-covered handles.

A mockingbird flew low, lit on a poplar limb, and sang loudly all his multi-varied songs for Carla, as if it were his duty to serenade a mortal being today.

So this is where he went to ground
, Carla thought, walking around the place she had found the snips. She mentally gauged how far it was to the stream, how far to Sully's house.

She tucked the snips into her back pocket and struck off on a horizontal line with where Sully's house should be in her calculations. She walked for another hour until she was thirsty and tired. The forest grew wilder here, the trees crowded together to let little sunlight enter. Thorns snagged at her pants' legs and there was the scent of something dead in the sweltering still air. No mockingbird sang, nor creek gurgled. There was too much silence, too little light, too dense a passage for her to go any further.