Praying for Sleep (18 page)

The same land that as of a week from Saturday was going to be somebody else's.

Heck folded the papers and stuffed them behind a statement from the veterinarian. He walked to the plate-glass picture window, which faced west, the direction the storm would be coming from in just a few hours. In the truck, on the drive back home, he'd heard several announcements about the storm. One of them reported that a twister had cut a swath through a trailer park in a town seventy miles west of here. There'd been no deaths but several injuries and a great deal of damage.

Hearing this newscast, just as he happened to click on the old radio, seemed to Heck a bad omen. Would his trailer survive intact? he wondered, then whispered, "And what the hell does it matter?" He picked up a roll of masking tape and peeled off a long strip. He lay down one long diagonal of an X. He started to do the cross strip, then paused and flung the tape across the room.

Walking into the bedroom he sat on the spongy double bed. He imagined himself explaining this whole matter to Jill — the foreclosure, the lawsuit — although he often grew distracted because when he pictured this conversation he pictured it very explicitly and couldn't help but notice that his ex was wearing a hot-pink peekaboo nightgown.

Heck continued to speak to her for a few minutes then became embarrassed at the unilateral dialogue. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the roiling clouds, and began another silent conversation — this time not with Jill but with Heck's own father, who at this moment was many miles away, presumably asleep, in a big colonial house that he'd owned for twenty years, no mortgage, free and clear. Trenton Heck was saying to him, It's just for a little while, Dad. Maybe a month or so. It'll help me get my life together. My old room'll be fine. Just fine.

Oh, those words sounded flat. They sounded like the excuses offered by the red-handed burglars and joyriders Heck used to nab. And in response his father glanced down the long nose that Heck was grateful he hadn't inherited and said, "For as long as you like, son, sure," though he was really saying: "I knew all along you couldn't handle it. I knew it when you married that blonde, not a woman like your mother, I knew..." The old man didn't tell his son the story about the time he was laid off from the ironworks in '59 then got himself together and started his own dealership and made himself a comfortable living though it was tough... He didn't have to, because the story'd been told — a dozen times, a hundred — and was sitting right there, perched in front of their similar but very different faces.

Times aren't what they were, Heck thought as he nodded his flushed thanks. Though he was also thinking, I'm just not like you, Dad, and that's the long and the short of it.

He took a swig of beer he didn't really want and wished that Jill were back. He imagined the two of them packing boxes together, looking forward to a joint move.

A truck horn sounded in the distance, an eerie carrying wail, and he thought of the lonely whippoorwill in the old Hank Williams song.

Oh, come on, he thought, rain like a son of a bitch. Heck loved the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the trailer. Nothing sent him off to sleep better. If I ain't going to get my reward money, at least give me a good night's sleep.

Trenton Heck closed his eyes, and, as he began to doze, he heard the truck's plaintive horn wail once more in the distance.

12

Owen Atcheson knew the harrowing logic of cornered animals and he understood the cold strategy of instinct that flowed like blood through the body of both hunter and prey.

He would stand motionless for hours, in icy marshes, so still that a drake or goose would pulse carelessly thirty feet above his head and die instantly in the shattering explosion from Owen's long ten-gauge. He'd move silently — almost invisibly — inches at a time, along rock faces to ease downwind of a deer and without using a telescopic sight place a .30 slug through the relaxed shoulder and strong heart of the buck.

When he was a boy he'd doggedly follow fox paths and set dull metal traps exactly where the lithe blond animals would pass. He'd smell their musk, he'd see the hint of their passage in the grass and weeds. He'd collect their broken bodies and if one chewed through the stake line he'd track it for miles — not just to recover the trap but to kill the suffering animal, which he did almost ceremoniously; pain, in Owen Atcheson's philosophy, was weakness, but death was strength.

He'd killed men too. Picked them off calmly, efficiently, with his black M-16, the empty bullet casings cartwheeling through the air and ringing as they landed. (For him, the jangle of spent shells had been the most distinctive sound of the war, much more evocative than the oddly quiet cracks of the gunfire itself.) They charged at him like children playing soldier, these men and women, working the long bolts of their ancient guns and he'd picked them off, ring, ring, ring.

But Michael Hrubek wasn't an animal driven by instinct. He wasn't a soldier propelled by battle frenzy and love- or fear-of country.

Yet what was he?

Owen Atcheson simply didn't know.

Driving slowly along Route 236 near Stinson, he looked about for a roadside store or gas station that might have a phone. He wanted to call Lis. But this was a deserted of the county. He could see no lights except those from distant houses clinging to a hilltop miles away. He continued down the road several hundred yards to a place where the shoulder widened. Here he parked the Cherokee and reached into the back. He slipped the bolt out of his rifle, pocketing the well-oiled piece of metal. From the glove compartment he took a long black flashlight, a halogen with six D cells in the tube, the lens masked by piece of shirt cardboard to limit the refraction of the light. Locking the doors he once again checked to see that his pistol was loaded then walked in a zigzag pattern along the shoulder until he found four hyphens of skid marks — where a car had stopped abruptly then sped off just as fast.

Playing the light over the ground he found where Hrubek had jumped from the hearse: the bent grass, the overturned stones, the muddy bare footprints. Owen continued in a slow circle. Why, he wondered, had Hrubek rolled in grass? Why had he ripped up several handsfull of it? To staunch a wound? Was he trying to force himself to vomit? Was it part of a disguise? Camouflage?

What was in his mind?

Six feet from the shoulder was a muddle of prints, many of them Hrubek's, most of them the trackers' bootprints and the dogs' pawprints. Three animals, he noticed. Here Hrubek had paced for a time then started running east through the grass and brush just beyond the shoulder. Owen followed the trail for a hundred yards then noted that Hubrek had turned off the road, plowing south, aiming for a ridge of hill paralleling the highway fifty feet away. Owen continued along this track until it simply vanished together. Dropping to his knees he scanned the area, wondering if the man was smart enough to deer-walk, an evasion technique used by professional poachers: stepping right down on the ground, avoiding the most telltale sign of passage (not prints but overturned pebbles, leaves and twigs). But he could find no bent blades of grass — the only evidence most deer-walkers leave behind. He concluded Hrubek had simply backtracked, aborting his southward journey and returning to the path beside the road.

Fifty yards east he found where Hrubek had once again the same — turned south, walked a short way then backtracked. So, yes, he was moving east but at the same was drawn to something south of the road. Owen followed this second detour some distance from the highway. He stood in the midst of a field of tall grass and once more saw that the trackers had paused here.

Shutting off the flashlight, he took his pistol from his pocket and waded into the pool of cold darkness that rolled off the rocky hills in front of him and gathered at his feet like snow. He paused here and, against all reason, closed his eyes.

Owen Atcheson tried to rid himself of the hardened, savvy, forty-eight-year-old WASP lawyer inside him. He struggled to become Michael Hrubek, a man consumed by madness. He stood this way, swaying in the darkness, for several minutes.

Nothing.

He could get no sense whatsoever of Hrubek's mind. He opened his eyes, fingering his pistol. He was about to return to the Cherokee and drive on to the truck stop in Watertown when a thought came to him. What if he was allowing Hrubek too much madness? Was it possible that, even if his world was demented, the rules that governed that world were as logical as everyone else's? Adler was fast to talk about mix-ups and doped-up patients ambling off. But step back, Owen told himself. Why, look at what Michael Hrubek's done — he's devised a plan escape from a hospital for the criminally insane, he's executed it and he's managed to evade professional pursuers, Owen decided it was time to give Hrubek a little more credit.

Returning to the spot where Hrubek's trail ended he placed his feet squarely in the huge muddy indentations left by the madman's feet. With eyes open this time, he found himself looking directly at the crest of the rocky hill. He gazed at it for a moment then walked to the base of the rock. He dabbed his fingers in mud and smeared it on his cheekbones and forehead. From his back pocket he took a navy-blue stocking cap and pulled it over his head. He started to climb.

In five minutes he found what he sought. The nest on the top of the rocks contained broken twigs and grass and the marks of boots. Their indentations were deep — made by someone who'd weigh close to three hundred pounds. And they were fresh. He also found button marks from where the man had lain prone and looked at the highway below, maybe waiting for the trackers and their dogs to leave. Pressed into the mud was a huge handprint above the word
rEVEnge
. Hrubek had been here no more than an hour before. He'd gone east, yes, but only for clothes, perhaps, or to lead his pursuers astray. Then he'd backtracked west along a different route to this outcropping, which he'd spotted on his way east.

The son of a bitch! Owen descended slowly, forcing himself to be careful, despite his exhilaration. He couldn't afford a broken bone now. At the bottom of the rocks he played his flashlight over the ground. He found a small patch of mud nearby and observed bootprints walking away from the rocks — the same prints he'd seen on the top of the cliff. Although they weren't widely spaced, they were toe-heavy, an indication that Hrubek was jogging or walking fast. They led to the road then back south into the fields, where they turned due west.

Following these clear imprints Owen walked for a short way through the grass. He decided that he would make... that Hrubek was indeed going west then would return to his truck and cruise slowly along the highway, looking for his quarry from the road. Just another ten yards, he decided, and climbed through a notch in a low stone fence, leading to a large field beyond.

It was there that he tripped over the hidden wire and fell, face forward, toward the steel trap.

The big Ottawa Manufacturing coyote trap had been laid brilliantly — in a section of the path with no handholds for arresting falls, just beyond the stone wall so that a searcher couldn't get his other foot to the ground in time to stop his tumble. In an instant Owen dropped the flashlight and covered his face with his left arm, lifting his pistol and firing four .357 magnum rounds at the round trigger plate in a desperate effort to snap it closed before he struck it. The blue-steel device danced under the impact of the powerful slugs. Stones, twigs and hot bits of shattered bullets flew into the air as Owen twisted sideways to let his broad shoulder take the impact of the fall.

When he landed, his head bounced off the closed jaws of the trap and he lay, stunned, feeling the blood on his forehead and fighting down the horrific image of the blue metal straps snapping shut on his face. An instant later he rolled away, assuming that Hrubek had used the trap as Owen himself would have — as a diversion — meant to hold him immobile and in agony while Hrubek attacked from behind. Owen glanced about, huddling beside the fence. When there was no immediate assault he ejected the spent and unfired cartridges then reloaded. He pocketed the two good rounds and scanned the area once more.

Nothing. No sound but a faint wind in the lofty treetops. Owen stood slowly. So the trap had been meant merely to injure a scenting dog. In fury Owen picked up the bullet-dented trap and flung it deep into the field. He found the spent shells and buried them then, by touch, surveyed the damage to his face and shoulder. It was minor.

His anger vanished quickly and Owen Atcheson began to laugh. Not from relief at escaping serious injury. No, it was a laugh of pure pleasure. The trap said to him that Michael Hrubek was a worthy adversary after all — ruthless as well as clever. Owen was never as alive as when he had a strong enemy that he was about to engage — an enemy that might test him.

Hurrying to the Cherokee he started the engine and drove slowly west, staring at the fields to his left. He was so intent on catching sight of his prey that he grazed a road sign with the truck's windshield. Startled by the loud noise he braked quickly and glanced at the sign.

It told him that he was exactly forty-seven miles from home.

Michael Hrubek, crouched down in a stand of grass, caressed his John Worker overalls and wondered about the car at which he stared.

Surely it was a trap. Snipers were probably sighting on it with long-barreled muskets. Snipers in those trees just ahead, waiting for him to sneak up to the sports car. He breathed shallowly and reminded himself not to give away his position.

After he'd passed the GET TO sign he'd hurried west through the fields of grass and pumpkin vines, paralleling the dim strip of Route 236. He'd made good time and had stopped only once — to place one of the animal traps beside a stone fence. He'd set a few leaves on top of the metal and hurried on.

Now, Hrubek raised himself up and looked again at the car. He saw no one around it. But still he remained hidden, in the foxhole of grass, waiting, aiming the blade sight of his gun at the trees ahead and looking for any sign of motion. As he smelled the grass a dark memory loomed. He tried his best to ignore it but the image refused to disappear.