Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) (24 page)

We drove north for about four hours, counting a stop at State Liquor Store for a bottle of good Scotch for Bob, and for dinner in Lincoln.

A snowstorm caught us halfway through Franconia Notch, reducing visibility to a few feet, so instead of a breathtaking view of the steep granite cliffs sloping down to the river, we got much too close a look at the dented and rusty guardrail. Since Sarah was driving, I just did what I usually did when my actions couldn’t affect the outcome.

I closed my eyes.

We eventually arrived at the house. Off the beaten track was an understatement. Uncle Bob’s place was down a dirt road, off a slightly less rutted dirt road off a barren stretch of Route 16. Only about twenty miles and a few hundred moose separated us from Canada. The driveway was unpaved and too steep to attempt in winter. It ran maybe fifty yards through the woods down toward the house, a frozen lake beyond that.

The house sat in a clearing in the trees. It had begun life as a simple cabin with a few bunks and a woodstove, a place to stay while hunting, fishing and canoeing, but it was newly sided with cedar shingles, the windows were modern and a mast of solar panels was aimed out over the lake through the gap in the trees.

The temperature was twenty degrees colder than it had been in Philips Mills, the snowbanks on the sides of the road were five feet high. The bite in the air, the chill seeping through my jacket, the snow falling through the evergreen branches all brought back memories. It felt a lot like the Ardennes had back in forty-four. Maybe expecting to get jumped at any moment by guys with central European accents highlighted the similarity.

We parked at the top of the drive and made our way down to the house. Uncle Bob met us at the front door.

He was a big man, probably around sixty, long hair and untrimmed beard gone to grey. He wore an old army jacket, a 3rd Infantry Division patch on the left sleeve. It stretched a bit over his midsection, but other than that, he seemed in fighting trim. He reminded me of a French Canadian fur trader I’d spent some time with on the St Lawrence. Hell, he might have been a direct descendant. God knows Jacques spent enough time producing them.

He had a smile and a hug for Sarah. I got an appraising look. Not unfriendly, but not warm either. One of my old sergeants had given out the advice “be polite, be respectful, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet”. I think Bob had heard the same, and taken it to heart. There was a look in his eyes that I recognized. He’d been in real combat, killed men who were trying to return the favor. He looked even more like Jacques up close. I remembered that face, calm and concentrated in the firelight, sharpening his tomahawk the night before we rescued his Huron wife from the Iroquois. Uncle Bob looked like he’d be right at home sneaking into the enemy’s longhouse.

‘Uncle Bob, this is Sean.’ Sarah nodded at me.

I stuck out a hand. He took it in a grip that would have put me on my knees had it been my injured one. ‘Sarah says you’re a good man but you got some trouble.’

‘She’s half right,’ I replied.

That got a genuine smile.

‘Come on in out of the cold. I have dinner in the oven. Should be about a half hour.’

We walked in to the house, through a mud room filled with coats and boots, skis and snowshoes on the walls, into a large kitchen. A big woodstove sat in the center of the room, along with a good sized table. The sitting room beyond was dominated by a gun rack. And I mean
dominated
. Uncle Bob had a .30-06 bolt action deer rifle, a pump action shotgun, an old side-by-side shotgun, a semi-automatic .22 rifle, a lever action rifle and a Soviet SKS assault rifle, although it was probably made in either Bulgaria or China depending which hemisphere he’d brought it home from. There were a few sidearms as well. A big Ruger revolver, probably a .44, and two semi-automatic handguns.

I’d led squads with less firepower.

‘Something smells delicious,’ Sarah said, shucking her bag. ‘What’s for dinner?’

‘Moose tenderloin,’ he replied. ‘Buddy of mine shot one early in the season, wound up giving me quite a bit of meat. After you called last night I got some out of the freezer. Been marinating it all day.’ He went to the refrigerator and handed us each a beer.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble for us,’ she said.

‘Company gives me an excuse to cook a roast. No point in doing that for one.’

‘Sean’s quite the cook,’ she said. ‘You guys can swap recipes.’

‘You still useless in the kitchen?’ he asked with a smile.

‘I’m fabulous in the kitchen,’ she said.

I covered my reaction to this shocking falsehood with a sip of beer.

‘Still can’t cook,’ she added.

Bob’s massive hand thumped on my back as I choked and coughed on my beer.

‘Thanks,’ I gasped.

‘You OK, Sweetie?’ asked Sarah, all innocence.

‘I think I’ll live,’ I said, trying to ignore the new pain in my ribs.

‘Never a dull moment with this one,’ Bob told me.

We ate a leisurely dinner, accompanied by several beers, followed by coffee and finally the ceremonial opening of the bottle. After a drink, Sarah stood and excused herself.

‘I want to dig around some more on that disk. You boys get to know each other.’

‘I should try to call some people back home,’ I said. ‘Make sure these guys aren’t leaning on my partners.’

‘It’s late,’ said Sarah. ‘Why don’t you just call your voice mail?’

I looked blankly at her.

She sighed. ‘You have no idea how to call your voice mail, do you? After I get my laptop out, I’ll set it up so we can download your messages, see if anybody called.’

‘You’re too good to me.’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘Remember that.’

As she walked out of the kitchen, Bob turned to me. ‘She’s quite a woman.’

‘She is.’

‘She really cares about you. I can see it. Known her a long time.’

I waited.

‘You want to take that seriously.’

‘I take it very seriously,’ I replied.

‘I’ll spare you the speech. She’s a big girl; she can make her own decisions. Just be careful.’

‘I will.’

‘So,’ he refilled our glasses, ‘where’d you serve?’

‘I did a stint in the Marine Reserves,’ I began.

‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘The truth. You may have been a jarhead. Might even have stayed on in the weekend warriors for a while, training the newbies how not to get ambushed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you’ve done some real fighting. And some black stuff. Let’s not lie to one another.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I saw the way your eyes moved when you walked in. You checked the approaches to the house; looked for cover, concealment, areas that are blind spots from the windows. You thought about which way would be the quietest to stalk the place. You gave the gun case a long look. I bet you could name every piece in it. Probably know that the SKS wasn’t bought Stateside.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I wracked my brains for a story that would fit what he thought he knew and make him believe I’d served the government sometime since the Korean War.

Soldiers hadn’t changed much, but equipment and lingo had. A missed detail would stick out to a guy like Bob.

‘Did a hitch in the Seventh Marines. Got transferred to Force Recon. Went a lot of places. I was a decent shot, decent with languages, good with the locals and a ghost in the boonies.’ I shrugged. ‘I may have been temporarily assigned to a few government agencies.’

He nodded. ‘Now, this trouble you’re in,’ he said, ‘does it have anything to do with what you were doing for the government?’

‘You could say that.’

‘So, tell me about it. The broad strokes, no names, no places.’

I thought for a while. I could give him bare bones, let him understand the basic idea. He was offering us a place to hide, maybe he could help.

I was used to keeping secrets, hiding myself behind the things I didn’t say. What I wasn’t used to was the new secrets, the stuff about myself I’d hardly had time to assimilate. I decided to try it out on Bob.

‘I refused to follow what was basically an unlawful order. An immoral order. They wanted me to help torture a prisoner. We were in an unconventional situation. We unconventionally resolved our differences with a little bit of violence. The higher-ups stepped in, I quietly went away and things got smoothed over. Now somebody wants to resume our disagreement.’

He nodded. ‘I know the drill. I started out in 3ID. With Sarah’s dad. He did his four and got out. I went to Ranger School, got into Special Forces.’

He paused, looking out the window over the frozen lake.

‘Too much of what we were training for had too much scary potential for domestic spying, way I see it. That’s why I moved out here, away from the watchful eyes. Off the grid.’

‘You think somebody’s keeping tabs?’

‘I don’t give ’em much reason, but I don’t trust ‘em. I’ve seen the evil that a government can do.’

I remained silent. Tried to keep my expression neutral.

‘You look like you’re not convinced,’ he said. ‘Didn’t figure you for a guy who bought the bullshit about freedom and security. Figured you’d seen what makes a government scary.’

I’d hit a nerve by not agreeing. Probably a mistake, but too late to back off.

‘Did you ever serve in Africa?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Asia. Some time in the Middle East. What’s special about Africa?’

‘Let’s just say I’ve seen what makes a lack of government so scary.’

I’d seen it in lots of places that weren’t Africa, but in Uncle Bob’s lifetime, most of those had been relatively well ordered. It didn’t really make a difference. When the system breaks down, and there’re no roads and no clean water and not enough peace to allow the construction of sewers or hospitals, or enough troops to keep order—well, you really don’t care if it’s Hutus or Vikings or Visigoths burning your hut and violating your women.

He grunted. Took another sip of whisky. ‘I still don’t trust them. Don’t trust anyone who wants that much power.’

‘There’s plenty of happy middle ground between a horde of rebel child soldiers with AKs and machetes invading the village, and jackbooted secret police hauling off the undesirables. Ambitious men will always seek power, and when they get it, they’ll seek more.’ I shrugged. ‘At least here, you can vote the sons of bitches out.’

He gave me a long look. It belatedly occurred to me that it was the kind of look he kept for men who enjoyed his hospitality, ate his food, sought sanctuary at his home, boned the daughter of his army buddy and then pointed out the holes in his deeply held worldview. It was also the kind of look that highlighted just how remote this house was, and how big he was.

That was a lot to get into a look.

After a long moment, the ice broke up and he gave a sour grin. ‘You might have a point. Mostly I think you only think that way because you’re still young and idealistic, but maybe you have a point. Maybe we’re so used to being safe from the Mongol Hordes that we forget.’

I smiled, partly out of the novelty of being called young and idealistic, and partly because we weren’t going to have a knock-down drag-out over the pros and cons of civilization.

He nodded. Finished his drink.

‘Well, you’re both welcome to stay here while you figure out what you want to do. If I think of anything, I’ll let you know. It’s about time I turned in. You two can take the guest room at the top of the stairs. If I’m not here when you get up, make yourselves at home. There’s food in the fridge, Sarah says you know your way around a stove. Just so you know, there’s a Browning 9mm in the drawer of the bedside table up in your room. Just in case trouble follows you.’

He heaved himself out of his chair and headed off to the ground floor bedroom. I looked at the narrow staircase, thought about my ankle and poured another drink before making the trek. At least there was a beautiful woman at the other end.

Chapter 25

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING feeling merely awful, which was a step in the right direction. I dragged myself out of bed and shuffled slowly toward the kitchen. Through the window I noticed that Bob’s truck was gone.

As I passed the living room, I saw Sarah sitting at the computer, chin cupped in her left hand, one leg tucked under her, the other curled beneath the seat, her foot hooked behind the back leg of the chair.

I smiled as I admired the curve of her body, from the attractively disheveled blonde curls, down her neck and back, over her hip and down her leg. It was a pose that Rubens would have spent hours on, and Degas would have suggested with a single brushstroke.

‘So, who’s Monique?’ she asked in a flat, expressionless tone, not turning toward me.

My pleasant reverie shattered as alarm bells clanged behind my eyes. Survival instincts, honed by years of experience, called for a quick escape.

‘My partner on the ambulance,’ I replied, keeping my voice light and carefree. ‘Why? Is something wrong?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Why don’t you listen to the voice mail I downloaded and tell me.’