Lake Country (27 page)

Lungs burning, legs like rubber, Toby climbed into the truck and cranked the motor. It started right up. He backed it up, ran it off to one side of the lane, and cut the engine again.

Just as he was about to climb out, Toby looked over and saw a gym bag sitting on the passenger seat. He paused. Thought:
No way
.

He reached over, unzipped the bag. Sure enough, inside he found a great big pile of loose, crumpled bills: His restaurant guy’s money.

He almost couldn’t believe it. Luck had turned his way at last. And Toby Lunden felt he damn well deserved it. He snatched the bag and took it with him.

Toby ran to the Navigator, throwing the pickup keys into the woods on the way. He climbed in behind the wheel, fired it up, and pulled forward until he had room to turn around. He took one backward glance at the peaceful-looking cabin across the misty, peaceful-looking lake, then did what he should have done hours and hours ago:

He mashed on the gas and got the hell out of there.

They tailed Morningside and his crew down a road through the woods until finally they saw brake lights, and the Suburban slowed down in front of them. After cruising along for a hundred feet or so, the SUV took an abrupt right-hand turn through the overgrowth, onto a narrow rock lane. As they approached the same spot, Maya saw the broad side of an old, beat-up sign at the mouth of the lane, and she could just make out the faded lettering:
Rockhaven
.

“Oh, you’re kidding,” she said. She looked out the windshield, down the empty road ahead, then twisted and looked up the empty road behind them. “Where the hell is everybody?”

Justin leaned forward over the wheel, joining her in looking out the windows. “Maybe they already went in?”

Maya didn’t think so. According to Detective Barnhill, both the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Department and the state patrol district office in Brainerd had been notified of Harold Macklin’s lake house, and units had been dispatched to the site. This road should have been lined with cops, not deserted in both directions.

She grabbed her mobile and dialed Barnhill’s number. No signal.

“Go go go,” she told Justin, urging him on with hand gestures as the Suburban suddenly disappeared behind a curtain of trees.

“Should we wait?” he said.

“Are you kidding?” Maya undid her seat belt and lunged into the backseat, hauling Justin’s gear bag up front with her. “Ain’t nobody else here but us Mizzou alums.”

“What are you doing?”

“Shooting while you drive.” Maya pulled his station-issue camera, an expensive Sony DV camcorder, out of the bag. “We’re going to get every last move these assholes make on tape. And I swear to God, if Juliet Benson really is here? And if something bad happens to her because Cowboy Bob up there decided to get cute? You and me, we’re going to barbecue the son of a bitch.” Maya pulled the lens cap and flipped open the camera’s side-view screen. “Gerry Slater can teach
your
stuff next semester. How about that, Indiana? You in?”

“Oh, I’m in,” Justin said, stepping on the gas. The Yaris fishtailed on loose rock as he hauled the wheel to the right and careened into the lane. He goosed the car past the entrance sign and around the next curve, following the lane into the woods. They fell in behind the Suburban just as the SUV’s brake lights pulsed and disappeared around the next bend.

Maya fired up the camera and centered the Suburban in her frame, bracing her elbows against her own midsection for as much stability as she could maintain.

“Maya Lamb and Justin Murdock,” she said for the audio pickup, her view of the world in front of them now reduced to the four-inch color LCD panel of the cameras’s display screen. “April eighth, seven-nineteen a.m., following Buck Morningside and members of Twin Cities Public Television production staff.” She zoomed in on the Suburban’s rear license plate and quoted the tag number just in case it didn’t read on tape. “Minnesota five one dash five zero three.”

They followed along, winding this way and that through the timber. At one point the lane dipped low through a tunnel of trees, then rose up along a shallow embankment, taking a gradual left-hand course around yet another blind turn. Maya started to say,
Keep us in tighter
, but Justin was already ahead of her. He punched the gas, hit the curve, and reeled the Suburban back within sight.

They’d almost made up the distance when all at once, without warning, the Suburban swerved left, then bore hard right, disappearing completely off the edge of Maya’s screen.

She jumped and looked out her side window, panning with the camera. She saw the Suburban jouncing violently down the embankment, into the timber, and thought,
What in the world?

She had just enough time to reframe the scene in her viewfinder before the Suburban came to a dead stop, crunching head-on into the trunk of a stout burr oak tree. The Suburban’s hood popped up like a tent. Bursts of glass shimmered in the rays of sunlight slicing in through bare branches. A blast of steam gey-sered up from the engine compartment.

At the same moment she witnessed all this, Maya heard Justin shout out in alarm. The Yaris pitched suddenly, throwing her against her door. Maya knocked her head against the window with enough force that she saw spangles in her vision.

But she held on to the camera.

As Maya dragged her foggy gaze back to center, she had the sensation of watching everything that happened in the next dreamlike half second on two different planes of vision at once: one through the windshield, and one through the camera’s display screen, each view representing half of the whole picture in front of her.

As if in slow motion, she saw a second gleaming black SUV barreling toward them, speeding out the same way they were going in. She saw the wide, spectacled eyes of the other driver. She saw him swerve to his right as they swerved to their left, each vehicle remaining directly in the other’s path. She saw a Minnesota license plate growing larger. An oncoming grille filled up the camera’s LCD panel with chrome. Then time sped up again, and a thundering quake shook apart the world.

The way they were positioned, Bryce couldn’t watch Mike on the couch and Darryl in the doorway at the same time. Darryl took advantage by sliding to his left, toward the fireplace, into Bryce’s blind spot. This maneuver left Bryce with a choice.

He chose to regard Darryl as the greater threat.

The moment Bryce turned his attention, raising his weapon smoothly, Mike made his move. He dove forward
off the couch, aiming for Bryce’s exposed rib cage, just underneath his gun arm.

It was an awkward, lumbering effort, and he certainly wasn’t at his best, but none of that mattered. He had only a few feet of ground to cover, and his goal was simple: disrupt the asshole’s aim.

But the guy had eyes all the way around his head, apparently. And he had Mike’s number all the way. And he was fast.

As soon as Mike came off the couch, Bryce took a step backward, at the same time snapping off two quick shots that sent Darryl diving for cover. The first round struck the fireplace façade in a burst of stone chips; the second went higher, shattering the gills of the mounted walleye, knocking the trophy off its peg.

In the same fluid motion, before Mike could correct his balance, Bryce took a gliding step to one side and came around hard, delivering a downward stomp to the side of Mike’s bad knee.

The pain was like a detonation. Mike heard a crunch and felt the knee give way, hinging in the wrong direction, and his mind went blank. He went down like a bag of sand. When he opened his eyes, he was looking straight up the pipe of the gun. Somewhere above that, Bryce was smiling.

Then Darryl was all over him. He came airborne over the couch, body extended, hitting Bryce high and hard. Bryce stumbled back, overpowered. The gun flew out of his hand and skidded across the floor. Darryl wrapped his arms and rode him down like a rodeo steer.

Even as he was driven backward, Bryce somehow shifted his balance, twisted his body, and used Darryl’s
momentum to his own advantage. They landed together in the center of the coffee table. The table splintered and flattened under their weight.

Bryce was already moving again. Rolling onto his back, bringing his arm down in a hammering backhand, going for Darryl’s windpipe. Darryl saw it coming and rolled the other way just in time to avoid the strike. Bryce’s fist pounded the spill of newspapers where Darryl had been with enough force to rattle the floor.

Then they were on their feet again, moving, sizing each other up, while Mike sat on his ass, blinking away rage and frustration.

His knee felt like a broken rattle. Getting blown up the first time hadn’t hurt like this. He heard a sound to his right and looked over, glimpsed the back of a familiar windbreaker disappearing down the bedroom hall.
Toby
, he thought.
I’m going to find you, you bug-eyed little coward
.

But he had other things to find first.

While Bryce and Darryl charged each other, Mike dragged himself around on the floor, sweeping through beer cans and newspapers with one hand, looking for Bryce’s gun.

Nothing. He kept searching, all along the base of the overturned couch, underneath Bryce’s overturned chair, dragging himself on his elbows like a useless invalid.

At one point, he glanced up. What he saw made him freeze in wonder.

Mike had seen Darryl Potter fight more times than he cared to remember. For a while—at least up until that assault charge cooled his heels last year—one of
Darryl’s favorite pastimes had been to find some sports bar on a night when they’d be running the MMA cage fights on pay-per-view. Darryl liked to wait for the testosterone junkies to get worked up into a lather watching the event, then put himself within orbit of the baddest-looking wannabe in the joint. And then start mouthing off.

Mike had seen Darryl fight fair, and he’d seen him fight dirty. He’d seen him fight sober and drunk. He’d seen him fight hurt. He’d even seen him fight in the throes of a ripe case of food poisoning.

The only thing he’d never seen Darryl do was lose.

Bryce the Fugitive Recovery Specialist was handing Darryl’s ass to him, and he appeared to be having a fine time doing it. In the twenty seconds Mike sat there watching, Darryl went down and got back up three different times. Each time a little slower. Each time a little bloodier. Each time looking less like an opponent and more like a practice bag.

Bryce used his fists, knees, elbows, and shins; he was so fast and so accurate that it was spooky to watch. Everything Darryl tried was met with a block and a return strike—usually a combination of them—all delivered with speed, force, and precision.

They’d been at each other less than two minutes. Bryce didn’t have a mark on him. Meanwhile, Darryl looked like he’d fallen down a flight of concrete stairs. He couldn’t last much longer.

And he seemed to know it. While Mike watched from the floor, Darryl let out a roar, lowered his center of gravity, and drove his shoulder into Bryce’s ribs.

Bryce rolled with the impact, dipped, twisted. He
pulled Darryl over the top of his shoulders and slammed him down.

Before Darryl could move, Bryce scrabbled atop him like a spider. He locked up Darryl’s legs with his own. He delivered three vicious jabs to the middle of Darryl’s face, then a right cross, followed by a left. Then he reared back and spread his arms wide, like brutal wings, and chopped down from either side at the same time.

By that last blow, Darryl had already gone limp as a rag. Mike felt his heart in his throat. He needed to get over there. He needed to get over there now.

But he was ten feet away. Practically helpless. Even as he tried to crawl on one knee, dragging his ruined leg behind him, he watched Bryce lift Darryl’s lolling head off the floor with his hands. He watched him twist with his whole body. He heard a sound like a bundle of sticks cracking. And he knew that Darryl was gone.

Just like that.

Two minutes, tops.

Bryce stood up. Rolled his shoulders.

Mike dropped his head and let it hang. He felt as though he were floating. He felt numb all the way through. He didn’t know where he was for a minute. He didn’t know what had happened or how he’d gotten here.

Then, somewhere in the haze, he noticed something.

Two feet from his hand. Hiding under a torn, tented back issue of
The Lake Country Herald
.

Juliet Benson’s fishing knife.

Mike reached out for it as if moving through a
dream. He felt the knife’s wooden handle under his palm. He drew his hand back, folding the long blade against the inside of his forearm even as he heard footfalls on the floorboards, saw black boots approaching from the corner of his eye.

A fire started in his scalp as Bryce reached down and pulled him up by the hair. Mike struggled to get his good leg under him, suns of pain imploding in his knee. He grabbed on to Bryce’s shoulder for balance with his free hand, feeling the Kevlar under Bryce’s T-shirt. His mind had gone clear and calm. His only thought:
He’s wearing a vest
.

“I hope you realize,” Bryce said, lightly winded, “that it didn’t have to go like this.”

Mike finally made it upright. He hopped on one leg until he’d steadied his balance. They were about the same height, which made it almost too easy to look Bryce in the eyes.

“It didn’t,” Mike said. “You’re right.”

“Too bad,” Bryce said. He pulled Mike’s head back, laying his throat bare. “Nice knowing you. Sort of.”

As Bryce drew back his free arm, flattening his fist into a wedge, Mike brought his other hand up fast. He shoved the knife into the side of the bounty hunter’s neck.

Mike watched the guy’s eyes go wide. He watched confusion bloom on his screwed-up wreck of a face. He thought,
I’m so sorry, Hal. You were right. I should have listened
. He didn’t stop pushing until the knife reached its hilt. When it did, he wrenched the handle.

Bryce the Fugitive Recovery Specialist looked as if he’d forgotten what it felt like to be surprised. He
gagged and grabbed at Mike’s hand. Mike let go of the knife handle and shoved Bryce away, two hands in his chest, as hard as he could manage on one leg without falling down.