Dead Run (5 page)

"My fault." Sharon gave her a sheepish shrug. "Mea culpa."

"Oh, honey, don't apologize. That barn was the most amazing thing I've seen since the day Roadrunner took his shirt off. I just didn't realize it was the gateway to hell."

Annie looked out at the tunnel of towering white pines that crowded the strip of tar like silent spectators at a parade. The thick trunks seemed to swallow the light, offering occasional strobe-light glimpses of what lay within. She had no idea what might be lurking out there in the shifting shadows, but she was quite certain it was unpleasant. "This is absolutely the spookiest place I have ever been in my life. I never heard of anyone famous from Wisconsin, and now I know why. Nobody lives here."

Sharon turned around in the front passenger seat and lowered her sunglasses so Annie didn't look orange. "Ed Gein was famous. He lived here."

"Never heard of him."

"He used to kill people, grind them up, and eat them."

"Hmph. Well, apparently he ate them all."

Sharon smiled at her, and the pull of muscles puckered the small, circular scar on her neck. Every time Annie noticed it, she remembered a pool of blood on the floor of the Monkeewrench warehouse, a smeared trail leading away where Sharon had crawled on her belly to get upstairs and save Grace.

"There aren't many people up here," Sharon said. "Mostly state forests. This far north, they just seem to go on forever."

"Speaking of which, I've been keeping an eye on that little ol' compass up there on the dashboard. It's been pointing north an awful long time, and I just don't think Wisconsin is all that tall. Maybe we should see if we can't find a right turn before we hit the North Pole."

"Looks like we're about to get a chance to do just that," Grace said, tipping her head toward a small sign coming up on the right that read, "Four Corners ->2 mi."

"Praise Jesus." Annie sighed. "Civilization." She patted the dark bob that had become her signature hairstyle over the past year, then fished a compact and a tube of lip gloss from her purse. From what she'd seen at the Holy Cow Diner, more than a few of the Wisconsin country women rivaled her in girth, but they didn't know beans about presentation. It was Annie's job as a fashion missionary to show them the way.

She had the lip gloss at a critical point in the application when the Range Rover suddenly backfired, then lurched, sending a streak of magenta across her upper lip. "Damnit, Grace. What'd you do? Run over a reindeer?"

But Grace didn't answer her. Sharon was looking curiously at the gauges on the dash, and Annie suddenly noticed the kind of silence that didn't belong in a moving car. She looked out at the trees passing ever more slowly. "Oh, for God's sake. Did this thing just up and quit?" This was flabbergasting. Grace's car would never break down. It wouldn't dare.

"Looks that way," Grace said calmly, adjusting her left hand on the wheel to compensate for the sudden loss of power steering, trying to restart the car with her right. There was no response when she turned the key, and the only sound in the car was the muted hiss of the tires on the road.

Grace never actually frowned, at least not like other people. But something showed in her eyes, even as her face remained expressionless, almost as if they were turning inward to examine the emotions that others rarely saw. It wasn't a conscious thing-just a lesson learned long, long ago, that if you kept your feelings to yourself, people couldn't use them against you. At the moment, her dominant feeling was rage, directed toward her mechanic in particular and internal combustion engines in general.

You can't control everything.A smug, condescending psychiatrist had said that to her ten years ago, demonstrating his mastery of stating the obvious. Of course you couldn't control everything. Grace had learned that when she was five. But you could anticipate and prepare for any eventuality your imagination could come up with, and she was very good at that. The worst-case scenario was her specialty.

Not once did she consider that the Range Rover would start again, or that some Good Samaritan would come along to lend a hand and give them a ride. These were things that happened in some perfect, predictable world, but Grace had never been there. In her world, they were going to end up walking, and that's what she prepared for.

Her eyes scanned the side of the road for anything resembling a turnoff as the Range Rover slowed. They'd almost exhausted the last of their momentum when she spotted a dirt track making a doorway into the woods on the right. "Is that a driveway?"

"Maybe . . ." was all Sharon had time to say before Grace turned the wheel and the Range Rover shot forward on the track's initial downward slope. Pine boughs slapped against the windows as the car lumbered around one sharp turn, then another. They were well into the woods by the time the car coasted to a stop. The shiny Range Rover sat in the middle of the shaded greenery like a black mistake, and for a moment, the only sound was the engine ticking as it cooled.

"That was exciting," Sharon finally said. "I liked the part where we zoomed down that little hill and almost ran into that tree. You know, I'm not sure how it works in the city, but over here if you're having car trouble, you just pull onto the shoulder."

Grace unbuckled her seat belt and popped the hood. "If we have to leave the car, I want it out of sight. We've got a fortune in hardware back there, most of it one of a kind."

Annie was peering out her window, her breath fogging the glass. "This is not a driveway."

"It could be an old logging road," Sharon suggested. "And it looks like it might cut through the woods over to Four Corners. I bet we could walk it easy."

Annie was horrified. "You meanoutside? It's a million degrees out there, and you want me to go hiking through the woods? Have you seen my shoes?"

But by then Grace and Sharon had both opened their doors, and a wave of heat had rolled into the car, obliterating what was left of the air-conditioning. "Oh, for God's sake," Annie grumbled, following them out, catching her breath when the full force of the afternoon heat hit her. She fluffed out her dress and minced her way to the front of the Rover, careful not to let the spiky heels of her pumps touch the forest floor. "Well, open this thing's mouth so we can fix it and get out of here."

"Annie, you don't know a thing about cars," Grace reminded her. "I know you look under the hood when they break. Besides, I'm an intelligent woman, and it's just an engine-how hard could it be to figure out? Maybe one of the gerbils died."

Grace raised the hood and stood back a little, amused by Annie's look of concentration as she peered inside.

"This is so disorganized. Is it supposed to look like this?" "Sort of." Sharon leaned forward, then tipped her head to look at Grace. "What are you thinking?" "That we need a tow truck."

Annie looked at the obviously useless engine as if it were a puppy that had just wet on the rug, then flounced back to the car and snatched her cell phone from the backseat.

"Not a lot of towers around here," Sharon said, but that didn't stop Annie from waving the phone around like a magic wand as she spun in a slow circle, trying to snatch a signal out of the hot, heavy air. She tried Grace's phone, too, just in case hers was in some way inferior, then let her hands drop to her sides, thoroughly indignant. "This is outrageous. It's the twenty-first century, we're in the most technologically advanced country in the world, and I cannot make a phone call. How do people live like this?"

For a moment, the three of them stood quietly, looking around. There was a deep, unnatural silence to the shadowy forest, as if it weren't a real forest at all, just a movie set. It was Grace who finally uttered the words Annie dreaded most.

"I guess we walk."

Annie looked down helplessly at her beautiful, fluttery silk dress and her beautiful four-inch heels.

"I've got some extra tennies in my bag," Sharon offered.

"Thank you," Annie said, then thought about it for a minute, considering what was really important. "What color are they?"

As it turned out, they were lavender high-tops, and as Annie looked down at the rounded toes, damned if she didn't like what she saw.

"You look ridiculous," Grace said.

"I refuse to entertain fashion criticism from a woman with a hundred black T-shirts. Besides, you put some heels on these things and they just might work."

The logging road, if that's what it was, quickly deteriorated to a narrow dirt path pocked with the sliced prints of deer. Eventually, even the tracks of animals disappeared under a thick carpet of crackling, rust-colored needles. On either side, the forest thickened and darkened, with the lacy fronds of giant ferns quivering at their passage.

Annie eyed the foliage suspiciously, thinking it looked entirely too prehistoric for her taste. And it wasn't just the tropical heat or the mutant ferns that reminded her ofLand of the host-everything about this little excursion had set them back ten thousand years. "This is absurd," she mumbled, shifting the strap of her voluminous shoulder bag. Grace had tried to talk her out of taking it, but the day Annie went anywhere without her makeup would be the day they put her in the ground. "An hour ago, we were three intelligent, successful women in a seventy-thousand-dollar car with cell phones and some of the most advanced computer equipment on the face of the earth, and now we're slogging through a primordial forest like the Barbarella triplets."

Sharon laughed. "Nature's the great equalizer."

"Nature sucks. It's hot and sticky, and it smells like dirt out here. And by the way, would you two waifs slow down? You're with a size-large woman who's wearing flat shoes for the first time in her life, and this path is a death trap. There are tree roots poking out everywhere. Somebody should pave this thing."

The ninety-degree heat made short work of Annie's laundry list of grievances about the great outdoors, and silence closed around their little parade. The farther into the woods they went, the more the forest seemed to press down on them as giant pines linked boughs overhead, creating a dark, aromatic canopy. The silence was as dense as the tightly packed carpet of dried needles underfoot, and as oppressive as the weight of air so still it almost seemed to have substance.

Eventually, the trees seemed to thin a bit, and then abruptly, the woods opened before them, like a door onto a lighted room. They took a step out of the trees onto a circle of old, broken asphalt that formed a crude cul-de-sac. It narrowed into a strip of potholcd tar that intersected a road a hundred feet ahead.

"Thank God," Annie muttered, fanning her perspiring face with a plump hand. "Damn woods is like a sauna." Then she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the bright afternoon sun and looked around. "Good heavens. Is this supposed to be a town?"

There was an old frame house nearly backed into the woods on their right, a pair of concrete-block buildings up on each corner, and not much else.

"At least there's a gas station," Sharon said, nodding at the rusting hulks of old cars jammed together behind the building on the left.

"Well," Annie said, plucking at her bodice. "Good luck to us all if that's the Range Rover service center."

Sharon smiled. "You might be surprised. Some of these smalltown mechanics can fix just about anything."

Grace stood very still for a moment, watching, listening, trying to shake the feeling that she'd just crept uninvited through someone's back door. "All we need is a phone," she finally said, and started toward the gas station.

Up at the intersection, they all hesitated and squinted up and down the empty two-lane road. The woods on the other side looked almost solid, like a living green glacier moving inexorably to swallow whatever puny structures man had erected here. To the left, just past the gas station, the road curved quickly out of sight into the thick woods. It disappeared just as quickly to the right over the crest of a small hill. There was no movement and no sound. Grace could almost hear herself breathe.

Annie looked around, irritated. "Four Corners my foot. There are only two corners in this town. Talk about delusions of grandeur." The silence seemed to swallow the echo of her voice, and she frowned abruptly. "Damn, it's quiet here."

Sharon chuckled. "You've never spent much time in the country, have you?"

Annie snorted. "Of course I have. The country's what you drive through on the way from city to city."

"Well, this is what it's like when you get out of the car. It's a hot, lazy, summer Saturday in a little nowhere burg, and quiet is one thing you get in abundance in a place like this."

Grace thought about that. Sharon was the native, the country deputy from Wisconsin, and as alien as this kind of quiet was to Annie and Grace, Sharon accepted it as perfectly normal, and Sharon would know. Still, she felt uneasy.

It wasn't just that there were no people in sight-that wouldn't have been so odd in a little town where the census takers probably counted on their fingers-but there was no evidence that there were people anywhere. No radios, no dogs barking, no muted laughter of children in the distance-no sound at all.

She looked at the building to their right, at the sign hanging from a wrought-iron bracket with letters spelling out "Hazel's Cafe." To the left was the gas station, obviously showing its best side to the highway. The two old-fashioned pumps squatted on a concrete island between the building and the road, their metal cases polished and oddly clean. A faded blue sign hung on a tall metal post, advertising "Dale's Gas" in white block letters. At least the door was wide open, suggesting that someone might be inside, out of the heat.

Her boots clicked on the concrete as she crossed the apron toward the door. It seemed strange not to hear the syncopated accompaniment of Annie's omnipresent high heels next to her, just the soft slap of the borrowed high-tops and the leather squeak of Sharon's laceups. It bothered her that she could hear these sounds so clearly.

The gas station was as empty and still as the town itself. Grace stepped inside, listened for a moment, then moved toward an interior doorway that opened onto a darkened, deserted garage. Her nose wrinkled at the ripe smells of old oil, gasoline, and solvents, advertising that this was a working garage, even though the picture didn't match the smells. From what she could see in the shadowy garage, the entire place was coated with layers of grime that could probably count the years like rings on a tree. But the inside of the station proper seemed almost spit-shined. Hands that touched an oil can apparently never made it to the register. There wasn't a single greasy fingerprint smeared across its keys or the white Formica countertop it sat on. Even the inside of the window bore the streaked circles of a recent washing, which seemed strange since the outside of the glass was still spotted from the last rain.