The Empty Chair (35 page)

"Amelia's not gonna shoot," said Jesse Corn, Judas' defender.

"But we're not taking any chances," Lucy said. Then to Ned: "Don't flip it over. Just swim out and steer it over this way. Trey, you go over there, by the willow, with the scattergun. Jesse and I'll be over there on the shore. We'll have 'em in a crossfire if anything happens."

Ned, barefoot and shirtless, walked gingerly on the rocky embankment down to the mud beach. He looked around carefully – for snakes, Lucy supposed – and then eased into the water. Ned breast-stroked out toward the boat, swimming very quietly, keeping his head above water. Lucy pulled her Smith & Wesson from the holster. Cocked the hammer. Glanced at Jesse Corn, who looked at her weapon uneasily. Trey was standing beside a tree, holding the shotgun, muzzle-up. He noticed her cocked pistol and he racked a round into the chamber of the Remington. The boat was thirty feet from them, near midstream.

Ned was a strong swimmer and he was closing the distance quickly. He'd be there in –

The gunshot was loud and close. Lucy jumped as a spume of water shot into the air a few feet from Ned.

"Oh, no!" Lucy called, bringing up her weapon, looking for the shooter.

"Where, where?" Trey called, crouching and adjusting his grip on the shotgun.

Ned dove under the surface.

Another shot. Water flew into the air. Trey lowered the scattergun and started firing at the boat. Panic fire. The twelve-gauge didn't have a plugged tube; it was loaded with seven rounds. The deputy emptied it in seconds, hitting the boat squarely with every round, sending splinters of wood and water flying everywhere.

"No!" Jesse cried. "There're people under there!"

"Where're they shooting from?" Lucy called. "Under the boat? The other side of it? I can't tell. Where
are
they?"

"Where's Ned?" Trey asked. "Is he hit? Where's Ned?"

"I don't know," Lucy shouted, voice raw with panic. "I can't see him."

Trey reloaded and aimed at the boat once more.

"No!" Lucy ordered. "Don't fire. Cover me!"

She ran down the embankment and waded into the water. Suddenly, near the shore, she heard a choking gasp as Ned bobbed to the surface. "Help me!" He was terrified, looking behind him, scrabbling out of the water.

Jesse and Trey aimed their weapons at the far shore and stepped slowly down the incline to the river. Jesse's dismayed eyes were fixed on the riddled vessel – the terrible, ragged holes in the hull.

Charging into the water, Lucy holstered her gun and grabbed Ned's arm, dragged him to the shore. He'd stayed under as long as he dared and was pale and weak from lack of oxygen.

"Where are they?" he struggled to ask, choking.

"Don't know," she said, pulling him into a stand of bushes. He collapsed on his side, spitting and coughing. She looked him over carefully. He hadn't been hit.

They were joined by Trey and Jesse, both of them crouching, eyes gazing across the river, looking for their attackers.

Ned was still choking. "Fucking water. Tastes like shit."

The boat was slowly easing toward them, half submerged now.

"They're dead," whispered Jesse Corn, staring at the boat. "They have to be."

The boat floated closer. Jesse slipped his utility belt off and started forward.

"No," Lucy said, eyes on the far shore. "Let it come to us."

29

The capsized boat floated into an uprooted cedar, extending into the river, and stopped.

The deputies waited a few moments. There was no movement other than the rocking of the shattered vessel. The water was ruddy but Lucy couldn't tell if the color was due to blood or was from the fiery sunset.

Pale, troubled Jesse Corn glanced at Lucy, who nodded. All three of the other deputies kept their guns on the boat as Jesse waded out and flipped it over.

The remnants of several torn water jugs bobbed out and floated leisurely downstream. There was no one underneath.

"What happened?" Jesse asked. "I don't get it."

"Hell," Ned muttered bitterly. "They set us up. It was a goddamn ambush."

Lucy hadn't believed that her anger could get any more consuming. But it now seized her like raw electric current.

Ned was right; Amelia had used the boat like one of Nathan Groomer's decoys and ambushed them from the far shore.

"No," Jesse protested. "She wouldn't do that. If she shot it was just to scare us. Amelia knows her way 'round firearms. She could've hit Ned, she'd wanted to."

"Goddamnit, Jesse, open your eyes, will you?" Lucy snapped. "Firing from heavy cover like that? Doesn't matter how good a shot you are; she still could've missed. And on water? There could've been a ricochet. Or Ned might've panicked and swum into a bullet."

Jesse Corn had no response for that. He rubbed his face with his palms and stared out over the far shore.

"Okay, here's what we're doing," Lucy said in a low voice. "It's getting late. We're going as far as we can while there's still some light. Then we'll have Jim bring us some supplies for the night. We'll be camping out. We're going to assume they're gunning for us and we're going to act accordingly. Now, let's get across the bridge and look for their trail. Everybody locked and loaded?"

Ned and Trey said they were. Jesse Corn stared at the shattered boat for a moment then slowly nodded.

"Then let's go."

The four deputies started over the fifty yards of unprotected bridge – but they didn't walk in a cluster. They were in a long line so that if Amelia Sachs were to shoot again she couldn't hit more than one of them before the others got to cover and could return fire. The formation was Trey's idea, one that he got from a World War II movie, and because he'd thought of it he assumed he'd take the point position. But that was the spot Lucy Kerr insisted on taking for herself.

• • •

"You came damn close to hitting him."

Harris Tomel said, "No way."

But Culbeau persisted. "I said,
scare
'em. You'd hit Ned, you know what kinda shit we'd be in?"

"I know what I'm doing, Rich. Give me a little credit, okay?"

Fucking schoolboy
, Culbeau thought.

The three men were on the north shore of the Paquo, trekking along a path that followed the river.

In fact, while Culbeau
was
pissed that Tomel had fired too close to the deputy swimming out to the boat, he was sure the sniping had worked. Lucy and the other deputies'd be skittish as sheep now and would move nice and slow.

The shooting also had another beneficial effect – Sean O'Sarian was spooked and was being quiet for a change.

They walked for twenty minutes then Tomel asked Culbeau, "You know the boy's going in this direction?"

"Yep."

"But you don't have any idea where he's gonna end up."

"'Course not," Culbeau said. "If I did we could just go there direct, right?"

Come on, schoolboy. Use your fucking noggin.

"But –"

"Don't worry. We're gonna find him."

"Can I have some water?" O'Sarian finally asked.

"Water? You want water?"

O'Sarian said complacently, "Yeah, that's what I'd like."

Culbeau glanced at him suspiciously and handed him a bottle. He'd never known the scrawny young man to actually drink something that wasn't beer, whisky or 'shine. He drank it down, wiped a mouth surrounded by freckles and tossed the bottle aside.

Culbeau sighed. He said sarcastically, "Hey now, Sean, you sure you want to leave something with your fingerprints on the trail?"

"Oh, right." The skinny man scurried into the brush and retrieved it. "Sorry."

Sorry?
Sean O'Sarian apologizing? Culbeau stared for a moment in disbelief then nodded them all forward again.

They came to a bend in the river and, being on high ground, they could see for miles downstream.

Tomel said, "Hey, look up there. There's a house. Bet the boy and the redhead've headed that way."

Culbeau sighted through the 'scope of his deer rifle. About two miles down the valley was an A-frame vacation house, just about on the river. It'd be a logical hiding place for the boy and the woman cop to hole up. He nodded. "Bet they are. Let's go."

• • •

Downstream from the Hobeth Bridge, the Paquenoke River makes a sharp bend to the north.

It's shallow here, near the shore, and the muddy shoals are piled high with driftwood and vegetation and trash.

Like skiffs adrift, two human forms floating in the water now missed the turn and were eased by the current into this refuse heap.

Amelia Sachs let go of the plastic water jug – her improvised flotation device – and reached out a wrinkled hand to grip a branch. She then realized that this wasn't a very smart thing to do because her pockets were filled with rocks for ballast and she felt herself being tugged downward into the dusky water. But she straightened her legs and found the river bottom only four feet below the surface. She stood unsteadily and slogged forward. Garrett appeared beside her a moment later and helped her out of the water onto the muddy ground.

They crawled up a slight incline, through a tangle of bushes, and collapsed in a grassy clearing, lay there for a few minutes, caught their breath. She pulled the plastic bag out of her shirt. It had leaked slightly but there wasn't any serious water damage. She handed him his insect book and opened the cylinder of her gun, then rested it on a clump of brittle, yellow grass to dry.

She'd been wrong about what Garrett had planned. They
had
slipped empty water jugs under the overturned boat for buoyancy but then he'd shoved it into midstream without getting underneath it. He'd told her to fill her pockets with rocks. He'd done the same and they hurried downstream past the boat, fifty feet or so, and slipped into the water, each holding a half-full water jug for flotation. Garrett showed her how to lean her head back.

With the rocks for ballast only their faces were above the water. They'd float downstream on the current ahead of the boat.

"The diving bell spider does this," he'd told her. "Like a scuba diver. Carries his air around with him." He'd done this several times in the past to "get away," though – just like earlier – he didn't elaborate on why he'd been escaping and from whom. Garrett had explained that if the police weren't at the bridge they'd swim over to the boat, beach it, drain out the water and continue on their way, rowing with the oars. If the deputies were on the bridge their attention would be on the boat and they wouldn't notice Garrett and Amelia floating ahead of it. Once past the bridge they'd kick to shore and continue their journey on foot.

Well, he'd been right about that part; they'd gotten under the bridge undetected. But Sachs was still shocked at what had happened next – unprovoked, the deputies had fired round after round at the overturned boat.

Garrett too was badly shaken by the gunshots. "They thought we were under there," he whispered. "Fuckers tried to kill us."

Sachs said nothing.

He added, "I've done some bad things . . . but I'm no
phymata
."

"What's that?"

"An ambush bug. Lies in wait and kills. That's what they were going to do with us. Just, like, shoot us. Not give us any chance at all."

Oh, Lincoln
, she thought,
what a mess this is. Why did I do it? I should just surrender now. Wait here for the deputies, give it up. Go back to Tanner's Corner and try to make amends.

But she looked over at Garrett, hugging himself, shivering with fear. And she knew she couldn't turn back now. She'd have to keep going, play this crazy game out.

Knuckle time . . .

"Where do we go now?"

"See that house there?"

A brown A-frame.

"Is Mary Beth there?"

"Naw, but they've got a little trolling boat we can borrow. And we can get dry and get some food."

Well, what did a count of breaking and entering matter after tallying up her criminal charges today?

Garrett suddenly picked up her pistol. She froze, watching the blue-black gun in his hands. Knowingly he looked in the chambers and saw it was loaded with six rounds. He clicked the cylinder into the frame of the gun and balanced it in his hand with a familiarity that unnerved her.

Whatever you think about Garrett, don't trust him . . .

He glanced at her and gave a grin. Then he handed her the gun butt-first. "Let's go this way." Nodding toward a path.

She replaced the weapon in her holster, feeling the flutter of her heart from the scare.

They walked toward the house. "It's empty?" Sachs asked, nodding toward the structure.

"Nobody's there now." Garrett paused and looked back. After a moment he muttered, "They're pissed now, the deputies. And they're after us. With all their guns and things. Shit." He turned and led her along a path to the house. He was silent for a few minutes. "You wanta know something, Amelia?"

"What?"

"I was thinking about this moth – the grand emperor moth?"

"What about it?" she asked absently, hearing in her memory the terrible shotgun blasts, meant for her and this boy. Lucy Kerr, trying to kill her. The echoes of the shots obscured everything else in her mind.

"The coloring on its wings?" Garrett told her. "Like, when they're open, they look just like an animal's eyes. I mean, it's pretty cool – there's even a white dot in the corner like a reflection of light in the pupil. Birds see that and think it's a fox or a cat and it scares them off."

"Can't the birds smell that it's a moth and not an animal?" she asked, not concentrating on the conversation.

He looked at her for a moment to see if she was joking. He said, "Birds can't smell," as if she'd just asked if the world was flat. He looked behind them, up the river again. "We'll have to slow 'em down. How close you think they are?"

"Very close," she said.

With all their guns and things.

• • •

"It's them."

Rich Culbeau was looking at the footprints in the mud of the shore. "The trail's only ten, fifteen minutes old."