Harmless (19 page)

“So …”

“Whoever was on those bikes got off here. Look around you.”

“We’re in the middle of the fucking woods.”

“Exactly. So why did they get off their bikes?” Alex was almost frantic for Joseph to reach the same conclusion.

“I don’t know.”

“Because something happened here. They ran into somebody. They must have.”

“You don’t know that.” Joseph felt both his hope and his fear levels rising. He didn’t like it. The resolve to confront Franny’s abductors was slipping through his hands like oiled rope.

“This is what I
know
.” Alex’s tone was moving quickly from eager to angry. “You don’t stop your bike in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere without a reason. Joseph, the girls were on this path. They were heading this way. These tracks aren’t more than a few hours old. The timing lines up.”

“I know, but—”

“Put the fucking pieces together for once in your life!”

“But we’re nowhere near the commune.” Joseph was trying to keep the hysteria from his voice. What those sick men at the commune could do to Franny in a few minutes would take lifetimes to unremember.

“I know that.” Alex was all firm reassurance now. “The commune’s still an hour away. But something might have happened
here
. We have to take a look. It’ll take a few minutes. Then we’ll make our decision.”

Our
decision? Was Joseph ever going to stop taking orders from this cocksucker? What choice did he have?

“Just search that side of the path,” Alex said.

Joseph turned on his flashlight and stomped into the
bush. There was only about ten feet of level ground before a hill began to climb into the dark. He walked through a corridor of ragged trees between the path and the hillside, winning an argument in his head with Alex about the stupidity of this change in plans.

On a patch of bare, dry earth, his flashlight picked out a few sets of faint footprints walking away from the path, toward the hillside. He kneeled down, careful to keep most of his weight on his good ankle. One of the sets of footprints looked small enough to be a teenage girl’s. Maybe.

Joseph remembered the boy—
Dave
—Rebecca and Ruby had talked about earlier. He and a bunch of friends could have ridden their bikes out here to meet the girls—no, he’d been through all those scenarios. The girls would have left a note if they were going out to meet friends.

He needed to focus. There were at least three sets of prints and possibly a few tire tracks leading to the hillside.

“They went into the bush here,” he called out.

After a few seconds Alex stepped into the bush, and crouched down to examine the tracks.

“They got off their bikes,” he said. “That’s why the tire tracks are so faint. I told you! Something happened here.”

Joseph wasn’t going to argue anymore.
Just get this over with
.

Alex reached the hillside in four steps and started climbing, Joseph struggling to keep up. The ground sloped up steadily, the trees and bushes thinning the higher they went. Occasionally, a short run of footprints appeared on the ground.

“Turn off your flashlight,” Alex said, his voice almost manic with anticipation. “There’s something up there.”

Something was blocking the way a little farther up the hill, either a boulder or a fallen tree. Above the blockage, a faint light glowed in the trees, too white and cold to be firelight. Joseph checked the sky. The moon was buried in clouds.

“It’s electric light,” Alex said.

Joseph tried to line up the feeling of dread triggered by the mention of electric light with a plausible scenario, but he came up empty. What did this have to do with Franny and Rebecca?

“Does someone live back here?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?” Joseph tried to get Alex to look at him, but Alex was fixated on the light, his lips silently mouthing words. He even shook his head, as though quieting a contrary thought.

“Someone’s up there,” he said. He pointed to the top of the hill, his hand grasping at air. “And they don’t know we’re coming.” He stepped over a low bush, gently brushing aside branches with the rifle barrel, as close to silent as a man his size could be. “Let’s keep that advantage.”

Joseph tried to match his movements, easing branches back into place as if they were squeaky doors. He checked his pocket to make sure he still had the knife, and remembered Julian’s vague but utterly sincere warning to
be careful
.

Alex stopped and put his hand up. He risked a quick burst from the flashlight. Joseph’s guess was right. A pair of
trees had fallen across the hillside. Alex must have guessed the same because he was nodding.

“Climb over.”

Joseph made it over the trees without hurting himself, then stepped into a hole and nearly turned his other ankle.

“Jesus! Two trees and now a
hole
? Is this place fucking booby-trapped?”

“Keep your voice down.”

Alex helped Joseph out of the hole and they walked up a narrow path that led to the top of the hill, where faint patches of light clung to the trees’ lower branches like a phosphorescent fungus. A shack a little wider than a single-car garage sat in a small clearing, its outline shimmering in a caul of electric light that emanated from every wall but the one that faced them. Alex nodded them forward, and as they walked into the clearing Joseph felt as though he was stepping onto a self-consciously stark theatre set, the audience hidden in the trees, awaiting the spectacle about to begin. There were no obvious signs of danger, but the wall facing them, suspended like a black curtain against the cool light, made his skin crawl. Alex also stared at it, his cheeks slack, his mouth hanging open, as if his wide, unblinking eyes were siphoning the energy from his face.

“Don’t worry, they can’t see us in the dark,” he said. “Just be careful. It could be a meth shack.”

Joseph stopped. “Then we should get the fuck out of here.”

“No. I’m going to get a better look.”

Joseph grabbed Alex’s arm. “This is dangerous.”

“If it’s dangerous for us, what would happen if the girls came here?”

“What? Now you’re saying the girls are being held by meth cookers?” The forest was sprouting life-and-death scenarios like wild mushrooms.

Alex was too agitated by the possibilities, whatever they were, to tolerate objections. “We’ll check it out, then we’ll leave.”

He ran along the edge of the clearing, shadowing the trees on the border, and since there was no point arguing about the plan, Joseph followed him. They stopped at a boulder that gave a view of a small window, mounted above the front door, which spilled a shadowless, fluorescent wash that reminded Joseph of highway gas-station washrooms. Kids might have built this place, nailing together drywall and sheets of panelling and lumber taken from family garages and building sites, the shack a summer’s worth of theft and scrounging—Huckleberry Finn stuff. Then again, the workmanship wasn’t half bad: the window frame formed a proper square and the door appeared to keep out the worst of the elements. Behind it came a rush of muffled talking and laughter, punctuated by a stranded, out-of-time laugh.

“Doesn’t sound like they’re cooking meth,” Joseph said.

Alex continued to stare ahead with a piercing expression, as if he were trying to see behind the door.

“Why don’t we just knock? They’re probably just kids.”

“Kids?” Alex didn’t hide his contempt. “Kids with thousands of hours of hardcore porn and violence under their belt. God only knows what drugs they’re on.”

“What are you saying?”

Alex shushed him. “The chess club doesn’t build a shack five miles into the woods. Just be prepared. If someone
grabs you, bite their hand, gouge their eyes, bring your heel down on their foot until you hear the bones break.” Drops of sweat beaded Alex’s face like a spattering of melted wax. He wasn’t leaving until they’d seen what was going on in that shack.

Joseph closed his eyes, reaching down to the bedrock of will that surely lay beneath his shallow, jittery attention. Alex must have his reasons for checking the shack. If it turned out to be a waste of time, Joseph would veto any future detours. If Alex’s hunch was right, they could be a few minutes away from finding the girls. He reached into his pocket, slid Julian’s knife from its case, and held it up to the light. The blade did not throw off horror-movie flashes—instead, the steel absorbed and dulled the light, except for the sparkling sharp line of the blade. The edge was so thin it seemed to fizz, inviting the skin to press a little harder—
there
, it cut his thumb, opening a little smile that oozed a fat drop of blood.

“That’s the real deal,” Alex said, impressed. “Keep it handy.” He stood up and pumped a shell into the chamber. “I’ll check the window on the big wall facing the trees. Try to see into the window on the far wall, but don’t let them see
you
. Meet me by my window.”

He moved off in a loping crouch into the trees across from the front door, the rifle swinging by his knees like a piston. Joseph imitated his stance as he ran in the opposite direction, staying close to the trees before he remembered that there were no windows on the wall facing him. He stepped into the clearing, every standing hair on his body a sudden receptor, the sheer volume of empty space
pressing down on him as if he were chained to the bottom of an enormous water tank. The black wall, framed by the halo of electric light, looked like a doorway into a deeper darkness, but he was safe for now. Even if someone stepped out for a piss they’d be blind for the first twenty seconds. Plenty of time for Joseph to reach the trees.

He approached the side wall and gently leaned against the ridged plastic siding. Someone had put a lot of work into the shack. That could be a good thing or a bad thing. As he reached the end of the wall, the men in the shack unleashed a round of approving hoots. The voices sounded young, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned the corner and stepped into the narrow space between the shack and the trees, the branches facing the shack frozen in a dull white glow. He eased his way toward the light’s source, a crude window sawn from the drywall, and leaned his back against the wall. Franny and Rebecca might be in there. Maybe they’d escaped the vets and run into the guys who built the shack. He stepped away from the shack and stood in front of the window, which was covered from the inside with thick, translucent plastic. It was like peering into an out-of-focus microscope lens, vague shapes wiggling and merging behind a bright foreground. Inside the shack the guys laughed, one of them capping a cackle with a hearty “Yeah, bitch.” They were using their “boys only” voices, amped up by recirculated testosterone. Franny was not in there.

He wanted to punch the wall, cut a hole in the window, smash something. Instead, he took a deep breath. They were boys, maybe eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, but they might have spotted Franny and Rebecca, or seen
strangers in the woods. He and Alex would knock on the door, play the Concerned Fathers card, appeal to the alpha male. The boys might even join the search.

He made his way further along the wall, pausing to touch the knife through his jacket pocket before rounding the corner. About five paces away, Alex was staring into a bright window, an expression on his face Joseph had never seen before. How to describe it? Like a father who comes home to find his son hosting a raging party—stunned, disappointed, desperate for a trigger to unleash his rage. Joseph stepped closer. Alex’s eyes were bright with moisture. He heard Joseph approaching and waved him over.

“They can’t see you if you stand back from the window.”

About a foot high and twice as wide, the window was positioned closer to the front of the shack, the dirty glass giving a decent side view into the single room. Two battery-operated camping lights sat on a Formica kitchen table crowded with beer bottles, and there were two glossy posters nailed to the far wall, the first of a cartoon pit bull wearing a diamond-studded collar emblazoned with the word
Player
, the other of a curvy blonde pole dancer—real aspirational stuff. A folded futon mattress leaned against the side wall next to a small wood stove and a stack of beer cases. Four teenage boys—kneeling, rapt, silent, all of them about sixteen—occupied the front half of the room, facing a large screen plugged into a laptop beside the door.

The porn they were watching was amateur stuff, the actors’ skin shimmering in patches like fish scales. Onscreen, an orange-faced girl in heavy makeup lifted her head, dislodging from her mouth an average-sized cock that
flicked in the open air like a hatchling forced to fend for itself. One of the boys shouted, “Viagra injection please!”—scoring big laughs. The girl stared into the camera with her glassy, drooping eyes and licked her lips, earning a “Dude!” from a boy with a faux-hawk, who called out, “A fucking star is born!” A boy in a jean jacket and a backward ball cap over his blond afro was high-fived by the skinny kid to his right. Then the biggest boy stood up too quickly and stepped back, claiming distance from the screen without looking away. He was a squat giant—broad and square under his baggy sweatshirt and cargoes—tagged with a tattoo of a Chinese character, a gold hoop forcing open a dime-sized hole in his earlobe. The three other boys sported a selection of tattoos, blurs of zigzags and Maori war markings, and there were goatees and a chunky silver thumb ring—obligatory tokens of pagan non-conformity.

“The future chamber of commerce,” Alex said, any trace of sadness gone from his bearing.

Joseph watched the big kid, who seemed to want to will what he was witnessing out of existence. Onscreen, the girl grabbed the cock before it could wilt out of sight, and a panning shot caught a lip of baby fat pinched between her hip and ribs.

“Fuck, she’s a kid,” Joseph said, his head feeling as though it were being injected with carbonated water. She was Franny’s age, at most.

The camera lingered on the baby fat, skin only the girl’s mother had ever touched, before veering away to settle on the male actor as he pushed the girl’s head deeper home.