Cramer sat on the bank of the river catching his breath and watching Stooley Peters’s old Plymouth long-bed go down. The river was deep here, and there was a roiling turbulence in this stretch, though not enough to suck the heavy old vehicle downstream. He’d left the windows open. She’d go down quick enough. He would enjoy every minute.
He was aware of the fact that this was the second vehicle he had sunk in less than twenty-four hours. How about the Taurus as well? he thought. Maybe this is my calling, sinking things! But no, it wasn’t like that, really. In Peters’s case, he was just paying the old man back, an eye for an eye. What he’d done to Waylin Pitney’s truck filled with stolen merchandise was something more. It was like saying good-bye.
He hadn’t been able to manhandle the barrier out of the way, so he’d had to back the Plymouth up and crash through it. There was just enough cracked and weed-choked macadam beyond the barrier for him to stop from going over and ending up in the drink. He hadn’t counted on the brakes being so soft, the tires so bald. For one brain-numbing moment, he thought he was done for. But the old dame stopped with one front wheel over the lip of the crumbling hillside and Cramer jumped free. The rest was grunt work.
Peters was swearing enough to turn the air around him blue. Mimi worked hard at not smiling. She kept her distance from him, but, judging from the language, it was as if he didn’t know she was there. He ran out of fuel and stopped cursing eventually. Then he got this strained look on his face as if he was thinking and it was hard work.
“You got that little phone on you?” he said, holding his hand up to his ear, with his pinkie extended for a mouthpiece, in case she didn’t know what a phone was.
“It’s back at the house,” she said.
“Well, go get it,” he said, and started marching back down the driveway. But she ran ahead of him and stopped in his path.
“I’ll go make the call for you. You can wait right here.”
He looked as if he might argue the point, but something, probably the determination on her face, made him change his mind.
“Call the cops,” he said.
“Okay. Hey, and I can even tell them the license plate number.”
“You remember it?”
She shook her head. “Not the number, exactly, but I did notice it was issued in 1976. That ought to make it easy to find.”
She hadn’t noticed much in the way of irony in Peters’s conversation so far, but he picked up on hers quickly enough. And he raised his hand as if he wanted to give her the back of it, except that she was a good healthy ten feet ahead of him.
“Around here, missy, it’s against the law to steal somebody’s vehicle.” Then he swiped the air with his large mitt of a hand, as if he’d said all he wanted to say to her, and stomped back out to the road and on toward Paradise.
But what Mimi was thinking was that the Upper Valentine ended in the direction that Cramer was heading. She had run there often enough to know. It was about three miles, she guessed. She could make it in under twenty minutes.
As she changed into her jogging gear, she wondered if it had been Cramer. They had not caught sight, through the dust the truck kicked up, of who was behind the wheel. But considering Peters had scuppered his canoe, as he put it, she had a feeling the old man was right. And if it was Cramer, there was no use waiting around here for him to show.
It was three o’clock when she hit the road, but it looked more like eight. The sky was low and black and heavy with rain. She was glad she’d put on long pants for the run; there was quite a wind. It was 3:25 when she got to the busted barrier.
She stared down the steep hill to the river. She could just make out the right front end of the truck, tilted upward like some black and rusty boulder just under the surface. Even as she watched, it sank from view. Then she looked east and west, her eyes scouring the hillside. The slope was steeper to the west, the brush more dense. If he was still here, that’s where he’d be, she thought. There was no other way out of here.
“I’m not sure if you are here, Cramer,” she shouted to the hillside. “But I’m going to pretend you are and hope maybe you’ll come out of hiding and talk to me.”
She looked around. Nothing. The wind was loud in the trees; the storm was close.
“Cramer?”
The sweat was drying on her, chilling her face and arms. She pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“I don’t know if you got the letter we left at your place,” she said. “We want to talk to you. I want to talk to you.” Oh, this was ridiculous! For the second time in two days, she was talking to an invisible man. A man in the trees, a man up a hill. He had to be there. She could feel he was there.
“I’m not sure what you’ve been playing at,” she said, “but I want to hear your side of the story. Like maybe it was Stooley Peters who was poking around, and you were keeping an eye on him. Or maybe you were spying, but there was a reason. Cramer?”
She turned in a long slow circle.
“Do you like me, Cramer? Because I feel this connection. Do you feel it, Cramer? And I guess what I want to know is why you would steal Jay’s guitars. Why? That’s what I can’t figure out. I can’t see you doing that.”
She stared at the steep hillside and then looked up because she had felt a drop of rain. And then suddenly she looked back down the road because a car was coming.