Primal: London Mob Book Two (19 page)

I
t was
mid-May when Bodhi Lowell finally reached New York. It had taken him almost two months of walking, two months with nothing but the pack on his back and his own thoughts for company, but he’d made it all the way from Montana, and for the first time in his whole life he found himself east of the Mississippi.

He’d picked up the Appalachian Trail yesterday in Harriman and was already looking forward to rejoining civilization in Pawling. He hadn’t eaten since the two protein bars he’d wolfed down as the sun was coming up, and he was ready for a real meal. Maybe a cheeseburger or two.

The sound of his footsteps was meditative on the uneven ground, and he looked up at the patches of sky that appeared between the tops of the trees, grateful for the mild warmth of the day. In another month or two, the land out west would be scorched and hardened by the summer sun, rain a precious commodity. He wondered what the weather would be like here.

He’d been working a ranch over in Winnett, birthing cows in the dead of winter, when he’d seen the online job posting for a summer farm hand in Milford, New York. Up to then, he’d never been east of Colorado, but he’d been unaccountably drawn to the summer position at Darrow Farm, and eventually, to the idea of it as an opportunity for a more dramatic change of scenery. After a few emails, one phone conversation in which he’d been surprised to realize Marty Darrow was a woman, and a quick check of his references, he’d been hired. He’d started out on foot in March and had never looked back.

He raised his head as the sound of chatter came from up ahead on the trail. A few seconds later, a couple rounded the bend. Bodhi smiled in greeting as they each raised a hand. Their voices quickly faded behind him, and he continued on, shifting his pack and settling it more firmly on his shoulders.

The pack had made countless trips with him across Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, plus one sweltering summer in Texas, and he’d gotten used to answering the questions prompted by its presence. Old women wanted to know where he was from and truckers asked where he was headed. Kids asked him why he didn’t have a car while their parents wondered about his parents. But the one thing everyone wanted to know was if he got lonely. The question had surprised him at first. Being alone wasn’t something he feared or even thought about. It was a resting state, had been as natural as breathing since he’d left home at fifteen without a word to anyone. He’d been careful to stay under the radar right up until his eighteenth birthday last year. If his dad had reported Bodhi missing and he’d been caught, he would have been forced back to the crappy little apartment in Billings. Or worse, into foster care when Child Protective Services realized his dad was a drunk. He was better off on his own, something he’d proven by quickly picking up seasonal labor with the migrants who came north in the summer. He was a good worker, a hard worker, and he soon had a list of farms and ranches who were happy to have him back for the next season.

The winters were the toughest for finding work. Then the farms were all but shut down, jobs hard to come by. Still, he’d always managed to keep a roof over his head, traded for milking cows or feeding cattle, both of which had to be done year round. The barns where he slept offered a kind of continuity; the soft shuffle of animals and the smell of hay and manure were the same everywhere. It was the closest thing he had to home, and he slept deep and sound there whether he was on an apple farm in Wyoming or a cattle ranch in Montana.

He knew what people thought about the fact that he hadn’t been to school since he left home. He could see it in their eyes. That he was stupid, a loser. Deep down, he even wondered if they were right. His dad sure had thought so. But the truth is, he never did stop learning, and he had over a dozen library cards from all over the West. The long, cold nights of Winter were his favorite. Then he was sometimes the only farm hand on the payroll, and he’d finish chores for the night, sprawl across his bunk, and read until his eyes burned. When the library was too far from the ranches and farms where he was employed, he’d dig around the bunkhouse for whatever he could find, just as likely to come upon a back issue of Field and Stream as an old copy of The Sun Also Rises. Didn’t matter. He read what he could find, and while he knew it didn’t make him educated, exactly, he also knew he wasn’t dumb.

He’d taken the GED when he was sixteen and changed his name when he turned eighteen. The choice of Bodhi was a little ironic, since he was about as far from enlightened as anyone, but it had a kind of anonymity to it, and he liked the idea of being a faceless wanderer, searching for truth, rather than a former runaway without a single soul to care whether he lived or died. His new last name, Lowell, had been his mother’s, and the forgettable nature of it suited his purposes perfectly. He was tall, but not noticeably so, and while his years of ranch work had made him strong, his brown hair and eyes were nothing if not average. It was how he liked it. He was just passing through, had no desire to leave any trace of himself or form any attachments. The truth is, he hadn’t had much luck with people. His best interactions with them had come from a distance, and he planned to keep it that way.