Skillful Death (33 page)

I take a deep breath when I turn onto the road that goes up over the pass. I shouldn’t be nervous. My little car has made it through these mountains plenty of times, but there’s something different up here. There’s no safety net. About three-quarters of the way to the top, the pavement ends on a dirt road. I never see anyone else up there, and it’s just dirt road, trees, and sky. That’s when my cell phone starts to beep at me. It’s complaining that it has no signal.

You’d think that way up there on a mountain, it could see plenty of towers. I go ahead and turn the phone off. It will just burn through the battery, looking for signal.

As soon as I crest the hill, I drop my car down into a lower gear. Here’s where the good transmission is necessary. If the transmission has a mechanical problem, using it to slow the car’s descent will heat up the transmission fluid and make it start to boil away. I’m not terribly mechanical, but that’s how I understand it. Worse than dropping into a lower gear would be to try to ride the brakes all the way down. Those will fail. There’s no doubt.

As I get down the other side of the mountain, the pavement picks back up, but the signs don’t. People on this side of the mountain don’t appreciate being told when to stop and when to yield. They move by their own rules. Either that, or these roads aren’t maintained by the state; I’m not sure which.
 

By the way, if you’re trying to use a GPS to navigate to your destination, I hope you checked it before you crossed that pass. I don’t know why—perhaps the mountains block the view of the sky—but a GPS will not be able to acquire satellites when on these roads. I had to learn these directions the same way a Mississippi riverboat pilot learns his route: I apprenticed under my boss until I could find my way. I turn often, and often on to roads that don’t look like much until a way down them.
 

Pavement comes and goes. Civilization is over, and then there’s a mile or two of nice, two-lane road with bright yellow stripes down the center, marking where it’s not safe to pass. Then it’s back to dirt and gravel. Weird.

I make my final turn and chug uphill on a dirt track that’s peppered with big rocks. Some have shiny spots where tires have spun and polished them. About halfway up, I find a tree across the road and a big red Jeep parked off to the side. I guess I’ll have to hike the remaining miles.

My bag is packed for this. It won’t be my first time hiking up to this cabin. In the spring, it’s pretty common to find the road washed out. My boss has a winch on the front of his jeep, so if he gets hung up on a rock, he can just hook up to a tree and pull himself out. Makes me wonder why he didn’t try to drag that tree out of the way. I’m also curious as to why his Jeep is on the downhill side of the tree. Except to pick up groceries or make his monthly phone call, the boss rarely leaves his cabin in the summer. What are the odds that this tree would come down when the Jeep happened to be away from the house?

The downed tree has leaves on the branches. It definitely came down during the summer. I step up on the trunk. It’s a big tree, probably a foot and a half in diameter. Now that I’m up on it, I see what brought it down: a chainsaw. I guess it wasn’t just luck that brought it down when the boss was out.
 

I’m no tracker, but I look for footprints going up the dirt road. The road is pretty dry, but I think I see scuff marks evenly paced. The boss owns a chainsaw. Would he park down the road and then block himself in? It would keep away casual visitors. But, how many of those could he possibly get all the way up here?

I’m in good shape for the city, but my legs are burning on this hill. When I was comfortable in the car, I thought I was about halfway up the drive. Now that I’m on foot, I’m starting to think that it must be a lot longer than I remembered. I’ve climbed about a mile when I finally see the cabin up there between the trees. The boss keeps his property orderly, but there is always something that looks a little ramshackle about Vermont houses. They’re never completely tidy.
 

The sun is moving down the other side of the sky, so his place is backlit, but I see a shape up on the balcony. Someone’s sitting in a chair, pulled right up to the railing, and that someone is flanked with fishing rods.

“Stop,” the person on the balcony calls.

I keep walking. I’m not yet certain if that is my boss up there, but even if it is, I’m not good at following instructions bellowed at me without explanation.

“Stop! You’re going to hit a tripwire!” the person yells.

My perception of the situation changes pretty quick. First, those aren’t fishing poles, they’re rifles. Second, that is my boss, but I’ve never heard him sound like this before. He sounds absolutely frightened.

“Boss?” I call.

“Who’s that?”

I’m still pretty far away, but I’m close enough to see him raise a rifle up to his shoulder. My eyes move from that to the forest floor. I’m looking to my left, to see if I can duck behind that tree without hitting any tripwires. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, and I don’t know if I would recognize it even if I could see it.

“It’s Malcolm,” I yell. I have my hands in the air now and I’m ready to scramble to my left.
 

“Mac?”

I have a red dot on my chest. It’s a laser from his rifle’s sight. It’s time to see if I can dash for cover.

It’s like he’s reading my mind. “Don’t move, Malcolm. You’ve got anti-personnel wired all around you.”

“I’m just going to back away slowly,” I yell. “You give me a call when you get a chance.”

I take a half-step back before he yells his next order.

“Stop, Mac. I’m not joking. What are the odds of a nine eight suited?” he asks.

This is an interesting question. If someone wanted to impersonate me, they might learn my birthday, my mother’s maiden name, where I met Bud, and all the details they could drum up about our relationship. What they would find hard to memorize would be the winning odds of poker hands. I’ve been working on memorizing poker odds for years. In fact, I started about the time I was working on the dream emailer case. There are so many combinations of hands, and it’s crucial to know what the odds are to decide if you should play or fold.

To quiz me, my boss only had to learn the odds of one combination. The question is this: do I trust my memory enough to pit it against the rifle pointed at my chest.

“How many players?” I ask. The odds of winning a hand of Texas Hold’em when holding a suited nine and eight go from about fifty percent down to ten percent, depending on how many players are still at the table.

“Six.”

“Twenty percent,” I say.

“Stay there,” he says. “I’ll be right down.”

He disappears into his house for a second and then reappears crossing the lawn. My boss isn’t a tall man, but he’s broad and strong. Even out here in the woods with a rifle strapped to his back, he’s wearing his typical attire. He wears simple khaki pants, a brown belt, and a fancy blue button-down shirt. He has an elaborate device strapped to his bald head.

When he reaches me, he’s holding a handgun, but not pointing it at me. I can’t see his eyes. They’re looking through whatever is lashed to his head.

“Don’t move,” he says. “There’s a device about a foot to your right.”

A device? I move automatically to my left. As soon as I picture a bomb or whatever about a foot to my right, my feet move automatically to the left.
 

“My right!
My
right!” he shouts. “I said don’t move. You’re getting closer to it.”

Now I freeze.

“I can see all the devices with this headset. It’s really amazing,” he says. “I’ve got another one up at the house. I should have brought it for you.”

His head is tilted down as he passes me carefully on my right. He lines himself up right behind me. I realize my hands are still in the air and I bring them down to my sides.

“What’s in the backpack?”

“I don’t know, stuff? I have some clothes, another pair of shoes, some toiletries. Normal stuff.”

“What’s the big round thing on top?” he asks.

I keep my feet planted, but I can’t help but look over at my shoulder. What is he talking about?

“What are you talking about?”

“In your bag. On top of what looks like a bottle of soda.”

“Oh,” I say. How the hell can he see my soda? I guess there’s some kind of X-ray built into his headset. Is that a thing? “Are you talking about the cookie? It’s a cookie.”

“Is it one of those vegan peanut butter cookies from the Mobile station?”

“Yes. You can tell that?”

“No,” he says, laughing. “I can’t tell what kind of cookie it is. It was just an educated guess, or maybe wishful thinking. I love those things. Take five steps forward.”

I move slow. I don’t know how big these steps should be, and I’m not willing to simply guess. He tells me when to stop. He tells me to turn right. He tells me to go forward, move left, take a big step over what looks like a spider web. My boss has serious money, so I’ve definitely been flabbergasted by his toys before. But if he’s telling the truth about all the traps in his yard, then these things must be close to magic. I never would have guessed there was anything hidden amongst the grass and leaves.

I’m sweating by the time we get to his sliding doors. Every muscle feels tense.

He takes the thing off his head. I sigh as I take off my backpack.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask.

“I’ll tell you upstairs,” he says.

The cabin is pretty modest. It has a couple of bedrooms and a bath downstairs. The lower floor is half-underground, so it’s a little damp and has a dehumidifier running all the time, but it’s nice and cool in the summer. My boss closes and locks the sliding door behind me.
 

Up on the first floor, he has another bedroom and a sitting room. The back windows look at nothing but ferns and trees. It’s a great place to sit and vegetate, or watch TV. Same thing, I guess. Upstairs, he has the real living room and kitchen and everything. He spends most of his time up here, and right now it looks like he’s been camped out for a while. The couch is littered with pillows and blankets, and the kitchen table is covered with keyboards, monitors, and wires, going in every direction.
 

I sit my backpack down on a chair, and take a seat in another.

“Something to drink?” he asks.

“I’ve got my soda,” I say. I unzip the pack and pull it out. I take the cookie out, too. “You want some? How did you know it was in there?”

He points to the headset that he just plugged into a charger. “My display has a millimeter wave scanner. It’s like what they use at the airport. It’s not perfect, but I can see solid objects, and vegan cookies are solid.”

He’s starting to sound like himself again. When he was on the porch, and even when he was talking me through the minefield in his yard, he sounded scared and tense. He smiles at me when he unwraps the cookie and I wonder if he has always been crazy, or if it’s a new development.

“Have you always been crazy and I just never noticed before?” I ask.

“Honestly? The yard has been wired up for years and years, but I never turn it on. I was always afraid that it would blow up a deer in the middle of the night. There are ultrasonic emitters that are supposed to scare away wildlife, but I didn’t know if I should trust them or not.”

“What happened? Why are you so paranoid now?”

“That’s a long, long story,” he says.

I raise my eyebrows and wait. Usually, when a person tells me something is a “long story,” it’s a story they’re dying to tell. It’s like they’re waiting for permission to waste your time. If you don’t grant permission, you usually get the quick version. Given all the firepower he has at the ready, I want the quick version.

One of his computers starts to beep and he jumps up to go look at a monitor. He comes back and sits back down a few seconds later.

“Just a glider passing overhead,” he says. Like everyone has glider warning systems set up on their kitchen table.

“Short version?” I suggest.

“Why don’t you tell me what prompted you to come up here, and then I will fill in the rest,” he says.

“Fair enough,” I say. It’s not unusual for me to invite myself up to the cabin. We have that sort of relationship. He knows he can come stay with me, and I’ll take the occasional vacation up here to the land of hippy libertarians. I guess it’s like a father/son thing. We always talk first, though. This might be the first time I’ve dropped in unexpected. “I brought in a street magician the other day,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Yeah. He was running a really good routine on businessmen at lunch. I brought him in just to find out what exactly he was running.”

“He was that good?” He breaks off another chunk of my cookie.
 

“He really is,” I say. Here, I decide to extend the truth and see if my boss is paying attention. “He said you’d already brought him in.”

“I did? Me? Brought him in where?”

“He didn’t know,” I say. “He just said that a bunch of guys pulled him, talked to him, and then you set him loose with five grand for his trouble.”

“Doesn’t sound like me,” he says.

“That’s why I’m here. You wanted an alert if I ever found anyone else looking for the same sort of unexplained phenomena. ‘Anyone else,’ you said. ‘Even me,’ you said.”

“I did say that. What makes you think that it was me looking into this kid?”

I tell him the abbreviated version of the story, focusing on the part where an older bald man in a blue shirt with fancy cuffs gave the street magician five thousand dollars and set him loose.

“That does sound like me,” he says. “I think I recall the young man. I didn’t bring him in to talk about magic tricks though. If he’s the one I’m thinking about, I brought him in to find out if he had ever been bitten by a really big snake.”

Did you ever notice that people on TV shows and in movies are always saying, “Wait, what?” I think it’s the author’s way of pausing to make sure that you, the simple viewer, get a full chance to appreciate exactly how bizarre or clever they’ve been. It’s a verbal space filler, letting you pause before getting back to the action, and it highlights the previous statement.