65 WHAT THE DEAD CAN PROVIDE

65

WHAT THE DEAD CAN PROVIDE

Monger and Rackman each died in the instant the quarrel found its target. Their hearts stopped and their blood pressure dropped at once to zero over zero, so that their wounds produced little blood. Relieving them of their supplies isn't wet work, but two people are required to shift and roll such large men to wrestle their backpacks from them.

Belden Bead had perished from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot. Nash Deacon succumbed to mushroom poisoning as if Vida's life were an Agatha Christie novel. In the first case, she wasn't to any degree complicit, and the second was an almost genteel homicide. However, the sight of neck and head wounds inflicted by the quarrels attests to an escalation of violence that she regrets but for which she has no remorse—and to which, in the interest of survival, she might have to resort again. At least men like these, by their evil, ensure the absolution of those forced to kill them.

The brothers are carrying a lot of ammunition; Vida and Sam have no use for it. When the ammo is discarded, the backpacks will be bearable. The bottled water, protein bars, and dry dog food are sufficient to support them until they get to Two Moon and Sun Spirit, if the three German shepherds drink spring water where it exists.

"What do we do with the bodies?" Sam asks.

"We don't do anything."

"Seems we should."

"No time for it."

"But this isn't the deep wilderness."

"So?"

"Later today, maybe tomorrow, hikers could come along."

"These four won't be here then."

"What—they've got an appointment?"

"With a hole in the ground."

"Who puts them in it?"

"I figure one of them is carrying a traditional GPS locator. Boschvark will have insisted on that. His people are monitoring the signal. The search party stops moving, and goons come to see why. They'll disappear the bodies."

Sam understands. "Big money at stake. Can't let anyone wonder what they were doing here. Can the crossbow be linked to you?"

"No. Even if they had enough evidence to convict me ten times over, they don't want me in a courtroom with what I know."

"You can take them down?"

"I'm going to try."

"Boschvark?"

"Yes."

"His project."

"I hope."

As Vida and Sam strip unneeded items out of the backpacks, the dogs relax. Trained to be discreet once the subject of the search is found, they shy from the dead and settle on the ground. Sherlock and Whimsey each lies with his chin on a paw, while Marple rests her chin on Sherlock's back.

After a silence, Vida says, "Once you get me where I need to go, take your dogs home."

"Why would I do that?"

"Why wouldn't you?"

"If these people had killed you, then they would've killed me. And my dogs."

"Maybe. I guess that would have been up to you."

"They wouldn't ever trust me to stay silent. And I wouldn't have."

"Just taking me to see Two Moon and Sun Spirit, you've done enough. Maybe already too much, from Boschvark's point of view."

"Then I have nothing to lose by hanging with you."

"There's always something to lose. In the future we're hurtling toward, there will be no bottom, no down-as-far-as-I-can-go. There will always be some place lower, darker, more terrible."

Sam gets to his feet, slips his arms through the pack straps, shrugs the weight onto his back. "Even if I wanted to chicken out—"

"You wouldn't be chickening out."

"Even if I wanted to, I couldn't."

"Principles can cost you everything, and maybe for nothing."

"It's more pride than principles. If I went yellow on you, my dogs would know."

"Your dogs."

"For a long time, no one's opinion has mattered half as much as what my dogs think of me. Maybe that sounds crazy to you."

"Sounds dead-solid sane," she says.

More than her beauty or the courage she displayed when dealing with four armed killers or her grace under pressure, those few words endear her to him. He wants her as a friend. His mirror has assured him that nothing greater than friendship is possible, but friendship is a kind of love and a priceless blessing.

Little Bear River, where steam billows from the water, cannot be reached in the direction they have been headed. With the three dogs, they retrace their steps to where Vida was swarmed by tech ticks. Before heading west, she retrieves her leather jacket, uses her knife to scrape the widgets off, and puts on the coat.

From the small backpack she shed earlier, she extracts the cardboard tube containing the pencil portrait of her uncle and secures it in a side pocket of the larger backpack that she now carries. Whatever she might be called on to endure, she is more likely to get through it if Ogden is with her.

The crossbow is a burden, but one she must bear. She might need it. Even if there is no adversary against whom she'll have to defend herself, the instrument is emblematic of her fate, a symbol of her mission, an attribute of her soul. She carries it uncocked, with no quarrel in the groove.

The leash of each German shepherd is connected to the master leash. Although the dogs lead as if drawn by a scent to which they have been sensitized, that isn't the case. They have no spoor to follow. Sam Crockett chooses the route. Although he instructs the dogs with an occasional word, with a tug of the leash, he seems to influence the pack also by psychic means of which perhaps even he isn't fully aware. They negotiate the wilderness via trails smoothed by all the elements and by the many creatures of the forest and the fields, making way up and down the least precipitous slopes, by flat ridgetops and flatter vales wherever possible, as if Nature herself guides them in a metaphysical alliance.

The trails are often wide enough for Vida to proceed in step with Sam. Whether she is at his side or following, she glances back from time to time with the expectation that they are being pursued. If the forest and the journey are as mystical as they seem, not only bright spirits have come into these woods but also those with dark intentions.