Mountain Madness (4 page)

The truth was, she’d arranged for Mike to meet them at the mall because she didn’t want him coming to the house.

She didn’t want him to see what she’d done to the place.

That was stupid, of course—it was
her
house now, after all—but part of her felt unreasonably guilty all the same.

Since Mike had left, she hadn’t changed much of anything. She hadn’t rearranged the furniture, had kept the pictures hanging where they’d always hung; there were even some of Mike’s old clothes folded on the top shelf of the closet. She hadn’t been stagnant on purpose, hadn’t left things the same out of some misguided sense of nostalgia. She simply hadn’t had the time or the inclination to reorganize. Or so she told herself.

And did she have any reason to believe otherwise? The divorce had been a mutual thing—which sounded like something you said about a week-long high school romance rather than an eight-year marriage, but it was true—they’d both known they would do better apart. Things had gotten too hard; by the end, they been fighting almost every night. Even their love for Trevor hadn’t been enough to hold them together.

So redecorating the house a little shouldn’t have been a problem, and yet it had taken her all this time to do it, and now that she had, she was afraid of what Mike might think and feeling guilty.

Stupid. She hadn’t really done much. Taken down a few pictures, replaced a rug in the entryway, repositioned the couch and the television, and bought another end table. Little things, mostly. Although Mike would probably notice (the couch at least, the big leather dinosaur of a thing), he wouldn’t care. Surely he wouldn’t be hurt. Would he?

Libby wasn’t sure. They’d shared the house for a long time. Since he left, he’d come to pick up or drop off Trevor at least twice a week. She supposed that on some level it might still seem like home to him. And now she’d changed it without him.

Libby sighed and looked over at the empty cup. She’d been right about needing more to drink—she was thirsty already.

Trevor shuffled forward a few steps and rubbed absently at the tip of his nose. He still had the five-dollar bill clutched between his fingers, and Libby wondered why he hadn’t stuck it in his pocket. Silly guy. She beamed.

The carousel stopped to let off its current passengers. The first thirty or forty waiters climbed onto the platform and mounted their animals, and the line behind them surged forward to fill the void. Libby watched Trevor carefully until the progression stopped and everyone resettled. When they stilled again, Trevor turned around to the girls behind him and said something that made them laugh.

That was Trevor, always quick to make friends, whether they were five years older than him or not.

Libby thought it would probably be okay for her to go grab a refill. She could watch over her shoulder and keep an eye on Trevor the whole time.

She un-slumped and pushed out of the chair. Carrying the empty cup to the taco station, she glanced back toward Trevor (fine, of course) and then at her watch. 4:45. Mike would be here soon—he was usually early. Afterward, Libby would have the rest of the weekend to herself. She’d miss her son, as always, but she would enjoy the quiet time. Stepping to the soda fountain, she thought of long, steamy baths, glasses of wine, and relaxing music.

She hadn’t done any work that morning before leaving the house, had planned on getting in a few hours that night after she returned alone, but now she thought she might put it off until tomorrow. She made most of her money from website design, but she’d actually gotten a little ahead in the last couple of weeks and thought she could afford to take both the day and night off. At least this once. She’d have the rest of the weekend for any catch-up work that needed doing.

She dumped her ice, replaced it with some fresh, and held the cup under the Mountain Dew nozzle until it brimmed. Refitting her plastic lid and moving back toward the table kept her so busy that she didn’t actually look up until she was almost halfway there. While she slipped the straw between her lips and took her first drink, her eyes scanned the crowd for Trevor. He wasn’t where she’d seen him last, just in front of the group of young girls. She detoured to the right, around tables of couples, families and friends, trying to get a better angle.

It wasn’t her angle, and it wasn’t that she couldn’t see him.

Trevor had vanished.

TWO

THE MAN HAD
been watching the boy for a long time now, sometimes rubbing the stubble on his chin slowly and rhythmically, the way another man might pet a cat, sometimes standing still as a tree with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes wide, studying.

The boy was brown haired and slender. Not skinny, not wimpy, but lean, like a mountain lion or a coyote. Once, a long time ago, he’d known another boy who looked almost the same. His name had been Georgie, and he had been the man’s brother.

The man who had been Dave, and not Davy, for just over twenty-three years, had blood under his fingernails, but he’d managed to wash most of the splatter off his face. One splotch lay caked in the crease behind his ear, but for now the uneven locks of his poorly cut hair hid it from view.

It was his birthday. Thirty years old. A special birthday.

Still watching the boy, Dave pulled a toothpick from the breast pocket of his shirt, where he kept a small stash of them. The shirt was not flannel, nor was it checked. It was a plain blue button-up that he’d stolen off a backyard clothesline especially for today. He’d kept it hanging on the back of his door that morning until after the bloodshed and his mostly successful cleanup. He stuck the toothpick in his mouth and chomped. Then he pulled a twig from a nearby branch, put it in his pocket to replace the pick. Much better that way. Balanced.

He wore olive-green cargo pants. In the right cargo pocket, he had a hunting knife with a razor-sharp blade. In the opposite pocket: another. He reached both hands into their respective compartments and ran his fingers down the knives’ rubber grips. They were identical weapons, or nearly so, and although it wasn’t exactly a gun at each hip, Dave couldn’t help but compare himself to an old western cowboy.

The second knife was just a backup, something he had no intention of using or needing, but Dave liked knowing it was there. He’d never been a boy scout, never had that “be prepared” jargon brainwashed into him, but he’d never been a moron either and he never did anything half-assed.

He watched and chewed.

The boy’s mother had gone inside the house almost half an hour earlier, left her son to play. The kid had spent ten of those thirty minutes bouncing a ratty old tennis ball off the side of the house, and then he’d ventured across the back yard to the edge of the property (near Dave’s hiding spot, this was), where a tree house sat high in the branches of a fork-trunked oak. The fort looked so weathered and cracked that it must have been older than the boy himself.

Dave had noticed it before. He’d come here many times.

Weathered or not, the wooden rungs nailed to the tree’s trunk had held for the kid when he scurried up them and onto the main platform, which had itself now withstood almost twenty minutes of jumps, half-hearted karate moves, and the various re-positionings of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who didn’t seem to know whether he wanted to sit, lie, or stand. The old platform hadn’t so much as creaked.

Dave grinned. Over the last six months he’d visited a lot of houses, and he’d watched a lot of boys, but he always came back here. The boy’s real name, he knew, was Zachary, but he never thought of him that way. Usually it was just
the boy
or
the kid
; occasionally, it was Georgie.

Now the boy moved again. Dave left the weapons in his pockets but removed his hands. He needed to focus on the kid.

From his place behind the thick tree trunk deeper in the woods, Dave watched the child back off the platform on his stomach and kick blindly for a rung nailed to the trunk about two feet down.

It wasn’t just the kid’s looks. Even his movements reminded Dave of Georgie. And on several occasions, Dave had noticed the double knots on the laces of the kid’s sneakers. Georgie (the original Georgie) had known how to tie a pair of sneaks so well you could only get them off with a pair of scissors.

The boy descended the irregularly spaced rungs with almost superhuman agility and pushed away from the trunk still five feet shy of the ground. When he landed, his knees bent and his arms flung out to his sides in a way that made him look like an alighting bird. He straightened himself up and headed back to the house.

Dave smiled and walked around his hiding tree. Today wasn’t just another day. It was time to stop watching. He moved, and the knives slapped against his thighs.

THREE

THE PICKUP MOVED
around the mountain roads like a sickly horse out for one last lap around the racetrack. It leaned around the corners, shuddered more than once to an almost complete standstill, jerked, bounced, and wobbled its way forward.

Mike Pullman rode it out of the Rockies the best he could, relying heavily on the brakes, cursing himself for continuing to put his life in the hands (or wheels) of such an untrustworthy hunk of junk. He’d realized only recently that the truck was on its last metaphorical leg, and he’d soon have to trade it in for something a little more surefooted, an SUV or a jeep. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. He’d paid the truck off several years ago but hadn’t yet figured out how to bend his budget around the purchase of a new (or even a reliable used) vehicle. 

Still, he had to get one, one way or another. A good set of snow tires and extremely careful driving had gotten him through one winter in the mountains, but they would never get him through another, assuming the truck somehow survived to see it.

The pickup’s front tires rolled onto a long stretch of flat road, and Mike eyed the interstate ahead. He let out a single short sound, a cross between a sigh of relief and a whoop of joy. The truck groaned as he accelerated, and one short-lived squeal came from a belt somewhere inside the engine compartment, but Mike was soon cruising. The mountains fell away behind him.

He’d driven the back roads in his usual silence, afraid that the distraction of the radio might make him miss a turn and slide into a ditch or, worse, off the unguardrailed edge of a cliff. But now that he’d reached relatively safe ground, he punched the power button on the dash and flipped through the radio’s presets until he found an oldies station playing some classic Rolling Stones.

He merged onto I-25, beating his hand against the steering wheel in rhythm with the tune, and reminded himself of a more important reason to get rid of this old clunker: Trevor. The choice to upgrade to a better vehicle wasn’t just the smart one or the practical one—it was the
fatherly
one. After all, any time he loaded Trevor in the truck, Mike was putting more than just his own life in danger; his son deserved better than to hurtle all around Colorado in a veritable deathtrap.

Before the breakup, Libby had sometimes hinted that they ought to get rid of the truck—leaving classifieds open on the coffee table, mentioning the great deals their friends had gotten on
their
used cars, that sort of thing—but back then the pickup had still been a dependable means of transportation, and she’d never gotten confrontational about it. He’d taken the truck with him when he left, and she’d kept the newer Honda. Since the divorce, she hadn’t said a word about the truck, but he knew she probably dreaded Trevor climbing into its cab the same way she would have dreaded him strapping himself into an electric chair or stepping inside a smoking gas chamber. Mike guessed she stayed quiet about it now only because, as divorcés, they sometimes had to choose their battles; for whatever reason, she’d let the issue of the truck slide.

Part of him, a very petty and illogical part, wanted to drive the pickup until it disintegrated, just to spite her. Fortunately, it was also a small, easy-to-ignore part.

He eased the truck up to sixty miles an hour and punched at the radio’s presets again when the Stones dissolved into a series of mind-numbing commercials.

Cars and trucks, motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers zipped by him on the left, the big rigs sometimes leaving his small truck shaking in their wake, but Mike hardly noticed. Since moving to the mountains, he’d traveled this stretch of road dozens, and possibly going on hundreds of times, and at this point he figured just about everyone in the state had passed him at least once. No big deal; he wasn’t usually in a rush, and he’d never been one to indulge in road rage. Let someone else lose control and wrap his skull around a mile marker—Mike would take his sweet time. Of course, the truck maxed out at about sixty-five, which meant his choice to drive slowly wasn’t really much of a choice at all.

In the back of the truck, an unsecured tool chest slid against the wheel well and made a disturbing clunking sound. Mike peeked back there to make sure the hasp hadn’t come undone and returned his eyes to the road at once after verifying it was okay. Like his ex-wife, Mike worked out of his home, but unlike hers, his work had little to do with any technological mumbo jumbo. He worked with his hands, made high-quality rustic furniture that he sold mostly in town at craft festivals and in furniture stores throughout most of the surrounding counties. He did, however, still sell many items through the website Libby had set up for him early in their marriage, and even a few on auction sites like eBay. Actually, in the last few years his online transactions had become an increasingly larger percentage of his overall annual sales, though he hadn’t admitted this to Libby and didn’t really want to admit it to himself. No matter how much of his furniture sold online, it wasn’t made there, and he was proud of that, as happy about the clunking tools in the bed of his truck as he was about the blisters on his fingers or the sawdust in his hair.

He’d tuned the radio to a station playing a contemporary song he hadn’t yet heard but that seemed to have an acceptable amount of electric guitar. The band transitioned from a distortion-heavy guitar solo to the chorus, and Mike glanced down at the dashboard clock. If he kept driving at this speed, he would just barely make it to the Mountain View on time. He applied a little more pressure to the gas pedal, meaning to bring his speed that much closer to the limit, but the truck bucked and shook, and he let up. Although punctual by nature, Mike recognized that sometimes it was better to be a little late than a lot dead. Especially when the kind of death you were talking about would more likely than not involve being twisted around the axles of a Mack diesel.