Death Benefits_ A Novel Part 34

He could see that Stillman and Mary were under attack too, because they were moving faster, occasionally fanning their hands near their faces. They kept going, and then they abruptly stopped. Beyond the trees just ahead there was the silvery glow of moonlight on water.

Walker cautiously came up to them, and they all crouched beside the path to watch and listen. The night was still and hot, the air barely moving the upper leaves of the trees along the other side. The river here was wider than it had been in town, maybe fifty feet across, and it looked slower. The bed of the river was wider too, with weed-tufted banks about three feet high and then about ten feet of muddy flats that must have been covered after a rain.

There was no need for speech. If there was such a thing as safety tonight, a chance to see the sun again, it lay on the other side of that wide, sluggish stream of water.

Stillman moved forward two paces, sat on the gra.s.sy spot above the mudflat, turned his head to look up and down the river, and remained still for thirty seconds. Then he slipped off the edge and walked across the mudflat, his feet sinking in and making soft sucking noises when he pulled them out, leaving deep tracks. He walked until the water was at his thighs, then lowered himself into it, giving a little shiver. He pushed forward, half-swimming, half-walking, until he was in the middle of the channel. Walker could tell when the bottom fell off below his feet and he began to swim, because the current had been deceptive. Stillman was still moving toward the far bank, but the water was pushing him along with it to the right, in the direction of the covered bridge.

It was Mary's turn. Walker turned to look for her, but she was invisible. He was leaning forward to be sure she had not somehow gone already when he heard a swishing, rustling sound behind him and to his right. The sound made him cringe-she was making so much noise. But he saw that it was a shape bursting through the thick brush, and somewhere in the sight he caught a glint of dark metal. He dodged to the side.

The man seemed not to emerge from the bushes but to form out of shapes that Walker had already looked at and failed to put together. The man had stepped into the path, but Walker saw that the att.i.tude of his silhouette was wrong: he was facing away, looking at the river, where Stillman was swimming.

The man made a hasty, jerky move to raise the shotgun to his shoulder. Mary came out of the bushes behind the man already running, and threw herself into the small of the man's back, bending his body like a bow. The shotgun pointed straight into the air, and for an instant, the man was looking at the sky.

He pivoted, trying to bring the b.u.t.t of the shotgun down on Mary, but Walker pushed off on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet with his head down. He caught the man in the stomach, felt the air huff out of him as they left the edge of the bank and, for an instant, flew.

They came down together, then slapped into the mud at the edge of the river, so that the man's head and shoulders made a splash but his back and legs were in the mud. Walker was aware that the shotgun had not come with them, but he could not free himself to find it. The man swung at him, and Walker's vision was jolted as the half-clenched fist knocked the side of his head. Walker endured a jab in the stomach, then brought his elbow and forearm down into the man's face, throwing the weight of his upper body into it.

The man's legs were working as he struggled to flip over, then straining to bend enough to bring a knee up to Walker's groin as he flailed at Walker's head with his arms. As both men grappled and sought to plant their feet, they moved deeper into the water, where Walker's weight was not enough to hold the man down.

The man rolled in the water; Walker brought his arm around the man's neck from behind, and sensed with revulsion what he could do, and realized that it was what he must do. He tightened his arm muscles, climbed higher up the man's back to get his knee onto the man's spine, and pushed him under.

The man fought, bucked, tried to roll again, but his efforts took him down into deeper water. The muddy bottom gave him no solid place to plant his feet, and Walker kept the pressure on him so the head never came to the surface. There were bubbles, great wrenching movements. Walker felt horror and shame as he clung to the man, sensing by touch the desperation and fear in every movement.

The man stopped. His body went limp. Walker clung to him. There was one final fit of kicking, twisting, bucking, and then the man's body did what Walker had known it would do, and gasped in an irresistible reflex to get air. The lungs filled with water, and the man lost consciousness. Walker waited, counting the seconds, until thirty had gone by and it was impossible that the man was alive. Then he let go and raised himself in the water.

Mary was at his shoulder. She hugged him, and he could see that her eyes were clenched shut and tears were coming, but they were not tears of relief. She was filled with regret, mourning with him for the horror and shame of what he had just done. Then she pulled away and walked with difficulty through the mud to the bank, bent over, lifted the shotgun out of the gra.s.s, and held it out to him with both hands.

Walker took it, and they moved together into the river. They kept going, leaning to the left against the steady weight of the current, and then they were waterborne. Mary swam with an awkward b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke, the clothes and shoes making her movements slow. Walker imitated her, holding the shotgun above the water with his right hand and stroking with the left. He was tired, and his arms were heavy, but he kept himself moving by telling himself lies about resting as soon as he made it to the other side.

His toe hit mud and he kicked again, and this time it held. He reached out for Mary, grasped her wrist, and pulled her toward the bank until he could tell that her feet were on the bottom too. Together they began to walk toward the bank. There was an eye-searing flash of light from his left as a flashlight beam pa.s.sed over them, then a glare as it came back and held on them.

Mary ducked under the water, and a gun went off across the river. The splash of the bullet rose in a thin vertical column four feet up, and before it came down, Walker felt Stillman s.n.a.t.c.h the shotgun out of his hand. Stillman aimed quickly and fired, a report that slapped Walker's eardrums and made his diaphragm vibrate in his rib cage. The flashlight fell to the ground, bounced, and lay in the gra.s.s, its beam on the twitching hand and wrist of the man who had been holding it.

The silence returned, a much deeper quiet than there had been before. The frogs' chirping had been replaced by the silence of many beings stopping in place and listening. It lasted for five seconds, and then the woods seemed to erupt with sound. There were shouts, branches breaking, heavy footsteps. Beams from flashlights appeared and swept back and forth, then danced crazily on bushes and trees as men ran with them.

Stillman and Walker both turned at once. Mary was already sixty feet downriver from them. She waved to beckon them toward her. It was not a strategy, just the simple need to go in the direction the sounds weren't coming from, and to move away from lights into darkness. Both men went after her, trying to reach the bend in the river, the next spot where there might be something to hide them.

Mary disappeared beyond the turn, then Stillman. When Walker was about to slip past the end of the curve, he took a last look. The lights were converging. He could see a few of them playing about the mudflats, then finding something and staying on it. They had found the body of the man he had drowned. In a moment their eyes would pa.s.s across the deep footprints in the mud, and follow them into the river.

43.

When Walker swam around the curve, Stillman and Mary were still ahead of him, floating downstream. Looming above them was the dark rectangle of the covered bridge. Mary was the first to be swept under it. She grasped one of the bridge's new concrete supports and held on. Walker took a couple of strokes to bring himself into line with it and stopped himself beside her. He looked around for Stillman and saw him clinging to the one beside theirs. Stillman pushed off, holding the shotgun above the water, caught their support, clung to it with one hand, carefully set the shotgun on top of the block of concrete, and lowered himself deeper into the water.

The tumult was growing. There was the sharp, hollow sound of men running across the bridge above their heads, shouts and footsteps from around the bend where the bodies had been found. From somewhere above them, they could hear a police radio. The female dispatcher's voice was unperturbed and unchanging. "Unit Ten, please proceed to Main and Washington to a.s.sist in clearing the bridge. Unit Three and Unit Six, please return to the station ..." The answers were gruff and so m.u.f.fled as to be incomprehensible from here.

Stillman moved closer to the others and whispered, "They're all going upstream to the bodies."

Mary said, "We left tracks in the mud. They'll know we're here."

"By the time they see tracks we can't be here," said Stillman. "Give the rest of them a couple of minutes to reach the bodies, and then we'll go up by the bridge."

Walker looked in the direction Stillman was indicating, and saw that the spot where the bridge rested on solid ground formed a wedge-shaped s.p.a.ce that was protected a bit on each side by the steel girders that lay under the original structure. "All right," said Walker. "This time I'll go first. I'll try to get a car. Then you come behind me with the shotgun in case-"

"I know," Stillman interrupted.

Mary said, "We'll all go at once. It's harder to shoot three people before one of them gets to you."

Walker hesitated, but she said, "You know I'm right."

"Move into the shallows now and up onto dry land," said Stillman. "We've got to get some of the water out of our clothes, because the dripping makes noise."

The three drifted quietly to the sh.o.r.e under the bridge, then crawled higher into the low s.p.a.ce at the end. The water ran off them, and Walker noticed that Stillman had been right about the noise. While they were lying on the ground the water streamed off them in small rivulets and soaked in without a sound. The night air felt cool on their wet bodies.

Walker waited for a shiver to pa.s.s, then pointed upward, and the others nodded. Walker turned and slowly, quietly made his way out along the bank until he could stand, then climbed the bank to the gra.s.sy, level s.p.a.ce beside the outer wall of the covered bridge, and stopped to listen. The shouts of the searchers were rarer and farther off now, and the flashlights threw a dim glow in the trees beyond the bend in the river.

Walker stepped around the wall and looked into the bridge. There was a police car parked in the middle of the bridge facing the town. There was a man behind the wheel with the door beside him open.

Walker went down on his hands and knees and began to crawl toward the rear of the car, trying to stay in the blind spot to the right along the wall. The dispatcher's cool voice said, "The Main Street bridge is now clear. Units Five, Four, Twelve, Nine, and One, please proceed to New Mill Systems. All other units please stand by at your present locations and wait for instructions. We are now in a Code One Hundred situation. I repeat. Code One Hundred is now in effect."

The driver of the car seemed to be affected by the news. He straightened in his seat and flicked a switch on the dashboard as Walker reached the rear b.u.mper of the car. The siren made a loud, shrill scream, then went lower and up again.

Walker rose to a crouch, dashed around the car to the door, and reached inside. He hooked his arm around the man's neck and dragged him from the seat onto the rough wooden planks of the bridge. The man groped at his side for his pistol, but Stillman came from behind, grabbed it out of its holster, and held it to the man's forehead, where he could see it.

Stillman held the shotgun out to Walker, and Walker released the man and took it. He peered into the interior of the car, then stood. "The key's in it."

Mary slipped by him, sat in the driver's seat, and started the engine, but there were other sounds now. Men were calling to one another in the woods. "Come on," she said. "That siren was to call them in."

Stillman dragged the man to the opening at the side of the bridge, the gun still at his head. He growled, "One chance. Jump or I kill you."

The man rolled over the sill of the opening and disappeared into the darkness, and a second later there was a splash. Walker got inside with Mary and rolled down the window. Stillman got into the back seat and said, "Go!"

Mary had backed up almost to the end of the covered bridge when Walker said, "Wait." She stopped.

They looked out through the opening at the far end of the bridge. Across the field, there were lights. The whole stretch of highway from the woods to the Main Street bridge and beyond looked like a river of white headlights, coming their way.

Mary said, "Maybe we can outrun them," but there was no conviction in her voice.

"We've got to do something to the bridge," said Stillman. "Give me the keys."

She handed them to him. He ran to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and stared inside. There were three kinds of fire extinguishers, a first-aid kit, a road-emergency kit. He opened them all as Walker came up beside him.

Stillman took a pair of scissors from the first-aid kit, then cut the hose from one of the fire extinguishers and stepped to the side of the car and handed the hose to Walker. "Siphon some gasoline onto the bridge."

Walker stuck the end of the hose down into the gas tank, sucked hard on it until he tasted the gasoline coming into his mouth, then lowered the hose as far as he could and tried to spit the poisonous taste out. There was a clear, steady stream of gasoline dribbling out and soaking into the boards of the bridge.

Stillman appeared at his side holding a highway flare. "That's enough gas. Get in."

As Walker got inside, Stillman yanked out the hose, capped the tank, and said to Mary, "Back out of here at least fifty feet, turn the car around, and wait."

Mary backed out across the clear approach to the bridge, turned and backed into the brush, then swung forward to aim the car at the highway. Walker spun in his seat, looked out the rear window, and watched Stillman.

Stillman stepped out of the covered bridge, bent double, and sc.r.a.ped the flare on the pavement to light the match on the end of it. There was a sputter of sparks, then a brilliant red glow like a slow-motion explosion. Stillman backed away a few steps, tossed the flare in a high arc, whirled, and ran.

The flare spun crazily in the air. Walker could see Stillman's broad body like a black void in the middle of the rosy glow, sprinting toward the police car. The flare reached apogee and started its descent, but before it could hit the boards of the bridge, it ceased to exist. There was the flash of the gasoline fumes trapped in the enclosed s.p.a.ce igniting, and there were bright orange flames billowing out the entrance over Stillman's head like a hand reaching out to s.n.a.t.c.h him, then receding into the interior.

The dry, seasoned boards of the bridge's sides caught instantly, and the faint breeze that Walker had barely been able to detect a short time ago was now funneled into the tubular bridge as though the fire was sucking it inward. The superheated air had no place to escape, so it spread, rippling along the ridge beam to the other end in seconds. The boards of the roof began to issue whitish smoke, and in a moment it suddenly ignited, like the smoke above a candle.

Across the bridge, Walker watched the first of the cars pull up a short way off and stop. A figure got out on the driver's side, and Walker leveled the shotgun on it, then held his fire. Other doors opened, pa.s.sengers scrambled out to stand on the road and watch. As they gathered together to gape at the tall, snapping flames that were engulfing the bridge, Walker gaped at them. The first figure that had exited was the young woman Walker had seen hours ago in her kitchen. He recognized the shining blond hair pulled tight on her head, and the dark green sweater. She held her arms out from her sides, and the two children came close to her, letting her hold them.

Stillman threw himself into the back seat and the car began to move. Walker could not take his eyes from the rear window. He stared past the woman at the road that was now lit up by the burning bridge. Other cars had been blocked, and drivers and pa.s.sengers were getting out and walking ahead to stare at the fire. Walker said, "They weren't coming after us. They were trying to get out."

Mary was steering the car with the intense attentiveness of a person driving through a blizzard. "What do you mean?"

"It's families. Women, kids. They're evacuating the town."

Stillman had been peering out the back window too, the policeman's pistol in his hand. "He's right. It can't be anything else. When they found the guy in the water, they must have thought we'd already gotten out."

As the road came out of the woods and curved to head into the cleft between the two hills, Walker felt the car jerk to a stop. As he whirled to face the front, he saw the dark shapes of vehicles blocking the road, and then he was blinded by bright lights. The shapes of armed men seemed to emerge from the darkness on all sides at once. A man's voice came out of a speaker. It was loud and disembodied, but was not strained or tense. "Drop your weapons, and step away from the car with your hands in the air," it said calmly.

Stillman snapped, "Do it," and got out. Walker and Mary each took one step forward, and then Walker lost his bearings. What felt like a dozen hands threw him to the pavement on his belly, patted him down, took his wallet, wrenched his arms behind him, and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. He was aware of several pairs of men's feet striding back and forth near his head, and low voices conferring. A female voice said sharply, "Max Stillman."

Stillman's voice came from nearby, but Walker could not see him from here, because the three had been placed in a triangle with their feet toward one another. "I'm Stillman."

Walker could hear shuffling as men raised Stillman to his feet.

The woman said, "Special Agent Nancy Atkins, FBI. We've got two agents in that town, and all I want to hear from you right now is exactly where they are."

"I think they're in jail," said Stillman. "Before they started hunting us tonight, the cops rounded all the strangers up and took them to the police station."

Walker heard a murmur of m.u.f.fled instructions, the sounds of running feet, men talking into radios, car engines. A minute later, he heard the deepening growl of helicopters as they swooped in overhead.

It was already afternoon when Stillman, Walker, and Mary walked down the road along the line of empty cars. The cars had been pushed to the side of the road, searched, and left with doors and trunks open. Federal officers were slowly, methodically taking fingerprints and making lists of the items they were finding, removing, and putting into large plastic bags with labels. Far down the line behind them, a second team was coming along more slowly. This group had toolboxes and a variety of electronic devices. They would come to a car and begin dismantling it: taking door panels off, probing the padding of seats, opening hoods, and peering up under the dashboards with gooseneck flashlights.

A convoy of four big panel trucks came up the road, slowly wobbled over the prefabricated surface that had been laid over the skeleton of the bridge, then accelerated toward them. They stepped off the road onto the shoulder to let the trucks pa.s.s, and Walker felt the hot, dusty wind from their pa.s.sing. He stared after them.

Stillman said, "d.a.m.ned convenient of the people of Coulter to load all their valuables into cars for us."

They walked toward the town. "All I want right now is to claim my rental car," Mary said. "Then I'm going to drive it to my hotel and take a bath."

Stillman said, "If they give you yours first, don't leave before you talk to me."

"Why not?"

"I want to see the notes you left in the car-the ones you took when you were in the public records office in Concord."

Walker turned to look at him. "You're staying here? What are you doing?"

"I want to hang around the FBI people and see if I can get a copy of their list of all the people in the town."

"But we made one when we were looking for Scully's cousin."

"Of course we did," said Stillman. "But I'm waiting for the official, revised edition. Between the car registrations and house deeds and fingerprints, they'll probably come up with a good list by the end of the day."

"Why are you doing all this?" asked Mary. "They're all in jail already."

"I don't work for the FBI. What I'm getting paid for is finding out what made these people pick McClaren Life and Casualty."

"I'm not sure how my notes are going to tell you that," said Mary.

Stillman shrugged. "We'll see."

When the three reached the police station, the FBI agents who had set up a temporary headquarters there released the cars to them. Mary Casey's rental car and Stillman's vehicle were both in the police lot with their doors open. Mary took her keys out of her pocket, opened the trunk of her car, looked inside, and muttered something under her breath.

"Something wrong?" asked Stillman.

"My notes were in my laptop. It looks like the Coulter police noticed it after they towed the car. Want to see it?"

Stillman and Walker looked in the open trunk. The computer looked as though it had been broken up with a sledgehammer, then run over by a car.

"I don't see the hard drive," said Walker.

"We never will," said Mary. "That's just the mess they made getting to it." Then she slammed the trunk, got into the driver's seat, and started the engine.

Stillman nudged him. "Go ahead," he muttered. "She'll look once, and if you're not on your way, she's gone."

Walker watched Mary turn and glance over the seat at him, then begin to back up. She swung the car around, then pulled forward so it was headed out toward Main Street, stopped, and slid over to sit in the pa.s.senger seat, looking straight ahead through the windshield.

Stillman stared at her thoughtfully, shrugged, and said, "See you later." He watched while Walker got in behind the wheel, made the corner, and headed down the quiet street toward the temporary bridge out of town.

It was nine hours before Stillman turned up at Mary's hotel room. He knocked loudly, and when Walker came to the door in a hotel bathrobe, he handed him several sheets of paper stapled at the corner. Walker stared at each page, looking at the long column of family names and addresses. When he had finished, he looked at Stillman. "Does this do anything for you?"

Stillman shook his head. "I faxed the list to McClaren's. It doesn't do anything for the personnel office, either. None of the surnames from Coulter match an employee. If there is an inside person, we can't get him the easy way."

Walker frowned. "But if there is, it's got to be possible to find out who it is. They registered everything with the state: births, deaths, marriages, divorces." He glanced over at Mary. "If there is an inside person, he's got to be a relative."

Mary propped herself up on an elbow on the bed and said, "Families do have two sides. The person wouldn't necessarily have the same surname. It wouldn't take much to trace the genealogies back one more generation and see if there are any cousins Walker knows." She gave a half-smile. "You have to buy me a new laptop anyway, Max. I'm willing to get it in Concord and spend a few days on this."

An hour later they were on the road to Concord. By late afternoon, Walker, Stillman, and Casey were sitting at a long wooden table in the Health and Welfare Building on Hazen Drive, staring at the first set of names that their search of the New Hampshire archives had produced. They worked for two days after that, looking at birth records, digging up marriage certificates, and constructing family trees. At the end of the third day, Walker raised his eyes from the latest list of names and said quietly, "I know who it is."

Walker was at his desk in the cubicle when he heard the elevator's doors hum and slide open. He listened to the pock-pock-pock pock-pock-pock of high heels coming down the open aisle of the bay, then saw Maureen Cardarelli in a gray business suit with a short skirt move past the entrance to his cubicle. Her eyes slid in his direction, then forward, then did an exaggerated double take. She stopped and walked to the doorway warily. "Walker?" of high heels coming down the open aisle of the bay, then saw Maureen Cardarelli in a gray business suit with a short skirt move past the entrance to his cubicle. Her eyes slid in his direction, then forward, then did an exaggerated double take. She stopped and walked to the doorway warily. "Walker?"

"Accept no subst.i.tutes," he said.