The Gift of the Dragon (6 page)

“I just wish I knew more about that way.”
 

“Much of what I’m telling you, you told me. Before you got shot.”
 

“Back then, was I worried about Sara?”
 

“That I can't say. You did tell me she came from Tampa.”
 

“Tampa, in Florida?”
 

“I think there is only one Tampa. The name meant “the place of burning sticks” to the Tocobagas, the natives who lived there before the Spanish came.”
 

“You’re a wealth of knowledge, Jenny.”
 

“Ha! I read too much.”
 

“Maybe the answer is in Tampa.”
 

“Maybe it’s a place to start.” Jenny took a silver rectangle from her bag. “Take this.”
 

“What is it?”

“A smartphone in my name. It has an application on it that may help you. It is called Ami.”
 

“The phone?”
 

“Sort of. It’s easier to show you.” Jenny held up the phone. “Ami, is there a Peter Moore who lives in Tampa, Florida?”
 

A tinny voice responded, “I find more than two hundred thousand results for Peter Moore and Tampa. Do you have any other information I could use to narrow these results?”
 

Alice gasped. “That’s cool!”
 

Jenny laughed. “Yeah. It’s pretty good. I’ve another one, though. Last week I helped a man from a computer company down south with his back pain. He gave me this new Sequence Seven phone. Some patent dispute, and now his company can’t sell them. But I just got myself an iPhone. So you can take this one.”

 
“Thank you, Jenny!”
 

“Please don’t worry about it, Alice. You’ve given me much for what little help I’ve been to you.”
 

“You saved my
life
.”
 

“Maybe.” Jenny held up a set of keys. “I asked Jonathan to bring my motorcycle up to the National Forest Service road beyond the river. You can get to it by heading due north through the woods. When you hit the road, go uphill until you see a large rock with a Pacific yew growing on top of it. You remember how to identify a yew?”
 

“You showed me last week. Small tree with needles that come out in a spiral but then twist to stay flat. Red berries on it now. Usually by itself. Very rare.”
 

“Right. Behind the tree, you’ll find the bike. I would stay off the main streets until you get up to the Collawash.”
 

“We took that ride last month on all those dirt roads!”
 

“That is the back way out of Willamette Springs. You can take those trails most of the way to Portland.”
 

“So just head north. Look for the mossy sides of the trees?”
 

“Also, your smartphone has a GPS.”
 

Alice raised her eyebrows.

“That means you can ask Ami the way if you get lost.”
 

“I think I’ll like this Ami.”
 

With one last hug, Alice headed down the hill below Jenny’s yurt. She had stayed here long enough; she felt almost healed, although she still had occasional lapses where an arm or leg would go numb, or she would blank out and find herself several minutes later with no idea what had happened.
And my memories about myself start with seeing Sara get shot!

Alice crossed the river in the fading light. The way to Jenny’s motorcycle snaked up a narrow ravine between the two hills, following a creek from where it flowed into the Darkertree River. She waded through the shallow water and ducked into the fern-covered gully formed by the junction of Mansfield Creek and the Darkertree. Growing from ground too steep and remote to be easy to log, large Douglas firs dominated the drainage, the old trees seeded or left behind after loggers had come through in the late 1800s. They rose more than two hundred feet into the air and ranged from two feet to ten feet in diameter. Beneath the dark green canopy, trunks of fallen giants crossed the creek and ran up and down the banks, and huge stumps rose from the trees that had been cut and taken out. The dead trees rotted slowly, covered with the purple flowers of wild rhododendrons, bright green huckleberry bushes with small red fruit, the fronds of rough sword ferns in the brighter areas, and delicate lady ferns where the thick canopy kept most of the sun out. Nearer the flowing water, big-leafed maples left dappled shadows, black and emerald in the fading light.

Alice loved to practice being quiet when she walked alone in the woods. When the clicks and cheeps of the frogs, the buzz of the cicadas, and the peeping of crickets sang on as she passed, she knew she was being successful. She felt no rush, as Jenny had told her planes flew to Tampa every few hours from Portland, and the money belt Jenny had given her when she had left held plenty of cash.

Alice had been hiking up the creek for about half an hour when all of a sudden something seemed wrong. The twilight song did not play here. Alice stopped and then slowly backed into the thick huckleberries lining the banks of the creek. She waited for a few minutes. Nothing changed. The woods remained quiet. Whoever or whatever scared the small creatures into silence must have been close by.
 

Alice got down on her belly and inched through the undergrowth. She winced as something in the money belt poked her belly. Probably the set of small tools Jenny had showed her. She said they were Alice’s. “For picking locks. Your fingers will know how to use them.”
 

She crawled up the steep bank of Mansfield Creek, taking a quarter of an hour to move one hundred feet up to the top, and the long summer twilight had nearly ended when she arrived. She looked down on the remains of a tree almost twice as thick as she was tall. Thick huckleberry covered the stump, which rose about twenty feet above the flowing water, providing a perfect vantage point to watch for someone using the creek as an easy trail through the dense forest.
Someone like me!

Some of the huckleberry branches on top of the stump moved from side to side, as if they hid a stalking lizard.
 

When the bushes moved, she heard a slight clicking sound of metal hitting metal.
 

Alice stared at the moving bushes, and after a bit of study she could distinguish the outline of a human form, with a large apparatus on its head and the long shape of a hunting rifle by its side.
Night vision goggles.
 

The camouflaged shape looked to be that of a big man.
You do not want to get into a long fight with that one.
 

Looking close, she saw an earpiece and a throat mike he talked softly into. She couldn’t hear the words he spoke, but along with the metal clicking of his scanning, his voice must be loud enough to spook the small creatures. And he didn’t notice. That suggested training in the city, somewhere the sounds of the night going silent would not warn him. Or he knew they were silent but did not think his prey would notice it.
 

He is a fighter, not a spy.

How the voice in her head knew that, she had no idea. Alice knew she could silently move around him and on up the wash to where Jenny’s motorcycle waited. Jenny and her friends were able to take care of themselves.
 

However, this man waited for her. He must have a reason. She would like to find out what that reason might be. She looked up. Many years ago, an old Douglas fir had fallen here across the creek.
 

The durable old trunk stretched from one bank to the other still, covered in moss, honeysuckle, and small fir trees slowly recycling the carcass. It passed over the man’s hiding spot. Alice got up on one knee—then the other leg. She slowly worked back from the edge of the ravine, shuffling her feet into the needle litter covering the ground so she did not step on any crackling twigs.

Alice made her way up to where the tree once stood tall, where now only the remains of its roots pointed toward the sky, ripped from the ground and left naked, slowly rotting. Rough, rounded moss marked the old tree’s trunk, covering protuberances created by scars from broken branches and parasites that the tree had long ago covered with bark and wood. She took great care to avoid making noise as she wound her way around the opportunistic growth covering the mossy bridge formed by the old log. After a few minutes of choosing every spot her hands or feet touched the bark, she arrived at a spot directly above the watcher.
 

Imagining herself agile as Jenny’s cat, Alice crouched, jumped, and leapt the six feet down onto the man. Her heels struck the man’s solid shoulders, knocking him back and away from his gun. She shot out her hand and grabbed the goggles off his face, leaving him blinking. Alice rolled with the fall, the man’s gun in one hand, her finger unconsciously moving the safety to “off” as she rolled. She came up on one knee with the hunting rifle aimed between the man’s eyes. He recovered quickly with a crab-like move that put him right back on his feet, and he faced her with a long, sharp-looking knife with a jagged top and a shining point that seemed thirsty for her blood.

“I’ll cut you for that!” his voice boomed.

Alice aimed the gun at him.
Winchester 88. Serious big game rifle.
The words came to her as if spoken by someone else; she had no idea how she knew these things.

“You can try,” Alice said. “This is a fine gun. Powerful. I know how to shoot it.”
Do I?
“You won’t be able to use that knife, so let’s drop it, okay?”

The man glowered down at his knife. “Fat lot of good it did.” He dropped the knife and looked up at her. “You’re pretty quick, girl. How the heck did you get up there without me hearing you?”

“Practice.”
 

“Ah, and the enemy is the best teacher. So what are you looking for out here?”

“What am
I
looking for? You are the one out in the woods dressed like a backcountry Stormtrooper. I think you were waiting for me. Why?”
 

The man’s eyes got big and wide. “Well, I was just hoping to bag a bear when you attacked me! Are you one of those granola nazis who hate hunters?”
 

That took Alice aback. What if he were telling the truth? Thank goodness she didn’t seem to have hurt him. She looked more closely at the night-vision goggles.
Four tubes—that kind of NVG costs more than sixty thousand dollars.
 

Wondering how the voice in her head knew a detail like that, Alice said, “That’s expensive gear for bear hunting. And who were you talking to on this?” Her foot nudged the man’s headset where it lay on the ground.

The big man’s craggy face turned petulant. “All right, look, you got me. You have something that my boss wants. Give it to me, and the people I was talkin’ to won’t go mess up your friends in that commune.” Alice raised the gun.

“My friends can take care of themselves. Meanwhile, I’ve got a big rifle pointed at you. Now, you must be asking yourself, does the little woman know how to shoot my rifle? Does she know what the safety is, and did she take it off?” Alice stared at the man. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. So it’s your move. Do you feel lucky?”
I hope the bluff works!
She didn’t know whether she had ever shot someone before. She did know she would not start shooting now unless the man made a threatening move.
Maybe not even then.

The man looked worried. “Look, I’m just out here trying to recover my boss’s property. I don’t know how you came by it or even if you have it. I’m looking for a necklace—a lot like the one you have there.” He pointed at her chest, where the necklace lay against the skin, revealed by the V-neck of her shirt.

“What did he want you to do with it if you got it from me?”
 

“Bring it to him. That’s really all I know about it.”
 

“Where did he want you to bring it?”
 

He looked around as if someone were watching him. “I don’t want to tell you that.”
 

Alice poked the rifle at him. “I will use this! I’ll shoot you here.” She pointed the gun at his knee. “I’ll shoot your knees out and leave you for that bear you were looking for!”
 

“Let’s be careful where you point that!” He moved his right hand toward his shirt.
 

“Keep your hands up!”
 

“I have the address… in my shirt pocket.”
 

“Get it very slowly.” Then Alice looked around. “Drop it there, and back away from it.” Nightfall neared completion. The three-quarter moon shone down, casting long shadows from the trees above them. A wind picked up and set the leaves rustling along the banks of Mansfield Creek. Alice watched closely as the man pulled a piece of paper from his shirt and let it flutter to the ground by his feet.

“Back up.”
 

The man backed up a few feet and then stopped at the edge of the stump. He waved his upraised hands. “I’m sorry, this is as far back as I can go.”
 

Alice bent down and grabbed the paper, keeping one eye out for him to make a move. She also grabbed his goggles. She wanted to put them on to make sure there was something useful written on the paper from the man’s pocket, but she thought that it would take too long to figure them out.
 

“Stay here. Don’t try to follow me. I’ll have these.” She shook the goggles. “If I hear a noise behind me, I’ll shoot first and then see what it is.”
 

“Hey, no worries. I’m totally through for the night. If you let me go, I’ll tell my boss I never saw you. I swear.” She thought the man might be smiling at her, but in the darkness she could not be sure. Alice jumped down off the stump with her gun and her goggles and her paper and jogged up the creek.