A Fountain Filled With Blood (42 page)

Once more, he shouldered the backpack and took Waxman’s head while she took his feet. As they walked, he kept an eye out for a branch they could sling through the webbing to carry it on their shoulders, but there were no sturdy eight-foot-long pieces of wood conveniently left about. Instead, there was a thick bank of ferns, and the occasional root or stone to avoid. The constant whack—although it was never regular enough to anticipate—of the aluminum spars hitting him in the calves slowed him down.

The heat squeezed him like a hand wringing a sponge. His shirt didn’t dry out, but warmed, until it seemed a solidified part of the humid air. Except for the gurgle of the stream and the
swish, swish
as they strode through the ferns, the woods were quiet. Even the usual insect droning was muted. He could feel the tension tightening inside him, the creeping fear that he was exposed, open to fire. He knew it was dumb, that there were no snipers lurking in the Adirondacks, that what he and Clare had to fear was a turned ankle or heat stroke, not a sudden shattering report through the leaves. That green and heat and wet didn’t automatically add up to death.

Then as they rounded a bend in the stream that twisted behind a bluff of earth and pines, he saw three armed men in fatigues.

He dropped Waxman to the ground and drew his gun in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Clare dived over Waxman as he crouched deep into a firing stance. “Drop your weapons,” he roared.

The three men paused from where they had been toiling uphill and stared at him. They didn’t toss down their weapons, just stood in a ragged line, curious, relaxed. One of them had his arms akimbo and another one wiped his forehead.

“Hey,” the man with his hands on his hips said. “We’re not—”

“Police!” Russ yelled. “Put your weapons down
now
!” He tightened his finger slightly and a round fell into the firing chamber with an audible snick.

“Holy crap,” one of the men said. “That’s a real gun.” All three threw their weapons into the ferns. They glanced at one another and raised their hands. The man who had spoken before said, “If we’re trespassing, we’re sorry.”

“We had the landowner’s permission to be on the property,” a man behind him said.

Russ lowered his gun and relaxed his stance. “Who the hell are you?”

They glanced at one another. “Um. We’re from BancNorth,” their apparent leader said. “We’re part of a paint ball team.”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Clare clamber off Waxman’s half-hidden form.

“Our base camp called us maybe twenty minutes ago. Someone had reported a small aircraft going down, near our position. We decided to check it out.”

“They know where we are,” the man behind him said. “They’re sending in search and rescue teams and rangers right now.” The rest remained unspoken: So if you kill us, you won’t get away with it.

Russ was suddenly aware that he must look like an extra in
Deliverance.
He holstered his gun and stepped forward. “Please, put your hands down. Sorry I scared you. I’m Chief Van Alstyne, of the Millers Kill Police Department.” He thumbed back toward Clare. “This is, um, the pilot of the aircraft you’re looking for. We were transporting a badly injured man when our helicopter went down. We could use some help.”

The three bankers looked at one another. He could see the excitement crackle between them as they realized they were on the scene of a real live emergency. “Sure,” their leader said.

As they drew near, Russ could see their fatigues were streaked with dried paint. One of them had on an outfit so new, there were fold lines faintly visible on his shirt. They had the thickening waists and excellent teeth of successful forty-year-old businessmen. That he had mistaken them for soldiers was clear evidence that his in-country reflexes were running amok.

“Do you guys have a topo map I can use to figure out where we are?” he said.

“Yeah, but you may as well do it the easy way,” said one, a pale man whose cheeks were blotchy red from the heat. He fished out something the size of a glasses case and handed it to Russ. “GPS. Hooks us up to the satellite system and tells us the exact coordinates of where we are. You can zoom in and out on the map here.” He pointed to buttons along the edge of the device.

“You know,” said their leader as Russ switched it on, “that’s cheating.”

“I’m not using it during the exercise,” the pale man said. “It’s just in case we get lost.”

Russ looked at the blinking spot on the map and handed the thing to Clare. She glanced up at him. “This is the Five Mile Road,” she said. “We’re no more than a couple of miles away from the Stuyvesant Inn.” She started to laugh. The paint ball team looked at her.

“Can we use those walkie-talkies to get your base camp to relay a message for us?” Russ asked.

“You could, I guess,” the leader said. “But it’d be a lot quicker using a phone.” All three fished into their commodious pants pockets and held out cell phones.

Clare laughed even harder.

Russ made a few phone calls while she calmed down enough to cobble together a better way of carrying Waxman. He watched the guys from the paint ball team search for sturdy branches long enough to serve as crossbars as he confirmed the Millers Kill Emergency Department would send an ambulance to the Stuyvesant Inn. As the men worked the poles through the webbing, Russ briefed Noble Entwhistle, who was holding down the fort at the station house, on the situation. By the time he had called the volunteer fire department and warned them about the fuel explosion, the three bankers and Clare had shouldered the crossbars like native bearers in an old movie, with Waxman swinging in the middle like a bagged tiger.

“Okay, let’s go,” Russ said, closing the cell phone and returning it to its owner. “If we follow this stream, it’ll empty into a pasture just above the Stuyvesant Inn’s land. We’ll just need to follow the cow fence at that point. I’m thinking it’ll be maybe a half-hour walk. The hospital’s sending an ambulance to meet us there. Clare, let me take that for you.”

She shook her head. “The best way to do this, since we’ve got an extra man, is to rotate.”

“Okay, five minute’s rotation.” He glanced at the bankers, who quivered with suppressed excitement. “Fall in,” he said. “March!” Clare cast him a sidelong look, but the other three sprang to it like retrievers on the scent.

By the time Russ had taken his turn lugging the unconscious geologist and then rotated out again, they were clearing the woods and entering the upper pasture. They lifted Waxman bodily over the barbed wire fence and struck off down the fence line, their path impeded by nothing more than the occasional large rock or cow patty. Within ten minutes, Russ spotted the inn’s mauve-and-turquoise exterior, and he realized he hadn’t properly appreciated that beautiful paint job before.

The group crossed over the fence a second time and headed across the rolling meadow toward the inn. He heard a chorus of high-pitched, frantic barks as they approached, and he thought he might get down and kiss every one of those mop head–size dogs. And when Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler appeared at the back door, waving and hallooing, it felt as good as seeing his own men greeting him from the squad room at the station house.

They lugged Waxman around to the front of the inn, where Karl and Annie, two of the regular Millers Kill EMS team, were waiting to drive him to the Glens Falls Hospital.

“What’n the blue blazes happened to him?” Karl asked while Annie checked his vitals.

“He fell off a cliff,” Clare said.

“Then he crashed in a helicopter,” Russ added.

“Sounds like a bad comedy sketch,” the ambulance driver said. “You sure a marching band and a steamroller didn’t go over him, too?”

Standing beneath the shade of the big maple, watching them pull away with Waxman, Russ was still shaking his head. “I can’t believe that guy has survived to this point,” he said to Clare. “Maybe there is something to this God thing of yours after all.”

Up on the porch, the paint ball–playing bankers were regaling Obrowski and Handler with the exciting tale of their adventures. The younger man was ushering them in through the double doors. “Chief, come on in,” Obrowski said. “It’s too hot to stay outside. We’ve got fresh lemonade.”

Russ shook his head. “I’ve got a squad car coming for me,” he said. “I’d better wait for it here.”

“Reverend Fergusson?”

“I think I’ll stay out here with the chief. You’d just have to burn any furniture I sit on anyway.” She plucked at her clothes. “I would surely appreciate some of that lemonade, though.”

“Coming right up.”

She plodded up the porch steps and collapsed into one of the wicker chairs. Russ followed her, dropping the backpack to the floor before sitting down. Beyond the shady maples and the thin gray road, the valley rolled away in pastures and cornfields and distant farms, a crazy-quilt landscape stitched by rocky outcroppings, steep rises, and stony brooks. The valley shimmered in the heat, oddly one-dimensional under the colorless sky, and for a moment Russ felt that he was in a dream, that the wicker furniture and the wooden floor and the far-off farms would disappear with a shake of his shoulder and he would be back in the green leaves, looking for death over every nameless, numbered hill.

Obrowski brought out lemonade, a whole pitcher of it, and two blue glasses stacked with ice. He arranged them with a flourish on a round teak table midway between their chairs. “Unbelievable,” he said, pouring their drinks. “Were you really flying the plane that went down, Reverend Fergusson?”

Clare accepted one of the glasses. “Helicopter,” she said. She had a look in her eyes that made Russ think maybe she, too, was uncertain how much of this was real.

“Those bankers of yours are quite something. I’ve never thought much of the paint ball crowd that shows up on the weekends around here. I remember once when Bill Ingraham went with his business partner. He told me it was the most pointless exercise he had ever undertaken in his life, and that included his draft-induction physical.” He laughed. Russ took his glass from Obrowski and drained it so fast, all he was aware of was the slide of the cold and tart-tasting liquid over his tongue.

Obrowski looked at Russ, then at Clare, then back at Russ. “I’ll leave you two to catch your breath, then, shall I?”

The screen door banged behind him and they were alone. He poured himself another glass of lemonade and drank it more slowly. Thinking about the whole incident with the helicopter made his stomach ache, and thinking about the whole thing with Clare made the rest of him ache. So he propped his feet on the backpack, looked at the slightly unreal scenery, and thought about Waxman. Waxman taking Peggy to the gorge and hitting her up for money. Threatening her, fighting with her, a lucky push or punch—lucky, because she wasn’t a big woman and Waxman must outweigh her by quite a few pounds—and he goes over the edge.

With his backpack.

Christ.

“Clare,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Waxman’s backpack was down in the ravine with him.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.

“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”

There was a pause. Her ice cubes clinked in her glass, another offkilter piece of normality. “No,” she said finally.

“It wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even near him.” He unbuckled the flap and flipped it open. Inside, atop dirty T-shirts, plastic jars filled with algae-speckled water, and a dog-eared copy of
Topographical Maps of New York State,
was a plastic bag the size of a woman’s clutch. It was full of white powder. He heard Clare breath in sharply.

The backpack, thrown into the ravine. Evidence to be found with the body. Except he and Clare had stumbled on the scene too soon.

“What was it you overheard Malcolm saying to his mystery visitor about Peggy?”

“He told him to stay away from his aunt.”

One good hard shove into the gorge. Just enough evidence to link Waxman to Dessaint. He was tempted to give the powder a taste and verify that it was horse or coke, but he’d bet good money it was already cut with the same stuff that had killed the other man.

Stay away from his aunt. No kidding.

And they had met her coming down the trail. And offered to help her. And she had helped them. He remembered seeing her backing out of the cockpit door while he was pulling his headset on. He fished into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was still there, the broken piece of plastic that had rendered the radio useless. All she would have needed was a screwdriver to jam into it. Easy to swipe one from the office and stick into that big bag of hers. Right there under the bottles of cold water. Evidently, Peggy Landry could think on her feet.

And she had been alone and unwatched with the chopper for what—ten minutes? While he and Clare were breaking into the shed.

“What do you think caused the crash?”

She kept staring at the white powder in the bag, then at the black plastic in his palm. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something with the fuel lines?” She looked at him for the first time. “I thought I must have rushed my preflight check. I thought I’d missed something.”

He shook his head. “No. You did just right.” He reached for her hand and pressed the splintered radio control into it. “Peggy Landry,” he said.

“It can’t be.” She looked at the knob. “Helos are complicated creatures. And that ship flew. For what—twenty minutes after we had left her? That sort of delayed…”

“Sabotage,” he said, supplying the word.

“That would take a great deal of knowledge about the helo’s systems. You’d need to be a mechanic. And you’d have to open the ship up, get into the engine or something. She couldn’t have—” She stopped, frowning. She slid her fingers absently up and down her sweating glass. “Unless…All those water bottles.” She turned to him. “She could have squirted water into one of the tanks. We were low on fuel, and I switched from the first tank to the second after we made our ascent to spot the Hudson.” Her face, dirty and sweat-streaked, shone with revelation. “It would have been pretty much dumb luck, getting the second tank. If she’d put it in the first, we wouldn’t have made it to the ravine.”