That biting, sarcastic tone. It was really starting to get on his nerves. “Don’t you have other shit to do, Purinam? Or do I get another full day of your attitude.”
“I cleared my calendar just for you, Peej.”
The nickname again. It made him remember her naked, remember the cool smoothness of her freckled skin.
Over three years ago, Jian had said. That’s a long time, Mister Colding.
No. This wasn’t going to happen. Sara clearly despised him, and with good reason. Sometimes Colding wondered if he’d cornered the market on finding things to feel guilty about, but this was right up there with the best of them.
“Look, Sara. I… I’m not normally… well, I don’t normally act like that. With women. The way I did with you, I mean.”
“You don’t normally hump-and-dump?”
“Uh… no.”
“Oh, I see. Just with me, then. How nice it must be for all the other women you treat with respect and dignity.”
Colding started to say there aren’t any other women, but he stopped. He was just sounding more and more like an idiot.
The gurgle of a diesel engine saved him from further embarrassment. Sounded like a big truck. The trees past the curving driveway hid it from view for a few seconds. The sound grew a bit louder as the source cleared the trees and turned down the snow-covered drive.
Sara laughed and clapped.
Colding looked at the strange vehicle, then at Sara. “What the fuck is that?”
“That has be the Nuge. How awesome.”
Colding stared at the thing rolling toward them. A lumbering, two-part vehicle painted white—white, with black zebra stripes. The front half looked like a four-door metal box set on top of short tank treads, with room inside for front and back bench seats. A stubby down-slanting hood ended flat with heavy headlights and a metal-grate bumper. The roof had a hatch above the front passenger side, and a second above the entire rear seat.
The rear section looked like a modified flatbed riding on its own set of squat tank treads. In that flatbed was a small aerial lift with a man-sized white plastic bucket (also painted with zebra stripes), like the kind on telephone repair or utility trucks. When extended, the arm might lift the bucket as high as twenty feet. An articulated joint connected the front and back halves of the vehicle.
Clayton drove down the curved driveway and stopped in front of the wide stone steps. He leaned out the open driver’s-side window and smiled at Sara. “Hiya, doll.” He looked at Colding and the smile faded. “Let’s go, eh? I ain’t got all day.”
“Clayton,” Colding said, “what the hell is this thing?”
“It’s a Bv206. Magnus bought it surplus off da Swede military. I use it to mow da landing strip, groom da snowmobile trails and fix da phone lines when storms knock ’em down. Lot of ground to cover, eh? And most of that ground is either swampy, muddy or covered in six feet of snow.”
“And you call it Ted Nugent, why?”
Sara raised her hand like a kid in school. She jumped up and down and waved her arm. “Oh! Oh! Teacher, pick on me, pick on me!”
“Miss Purinam,” Clayton said. “Please answer for da class.”
“It’s called Ted Nugent because it can go down in the swamp. Just like Fred Bear.”
Colding looked back and forth between them. “Who is Fred Bear? What the hell are you people talking about?”
“It’s a song,” Sara said. “It’s a Michigan thing, you wouldn’t understand. Just get in.”
Sara hopped into the back. Colding walked to the passenger-side seat and opened the door, pausing for a moment to run his hand over the black-striped surface. The armor looked thick enough to stop small-caliber fire. So Magnus had a Stinger, a platoon’s worth of weapons and a troop transport. Wonderful.
Colding hopped in and shut the door. “You’re late, Clayton.”
“I slept in. Da benefits of youth.” He put the vehicle in gear and pulled away from the mansion.
“You know, Clayton,” Colding said. “You can call me doll, too. I might blush, though.”
“Aw, fuck ya. Listen, I’ll take you up da northwest coast, show you da snowmobile trails. They’re mostly mud and swamp until everything freezes solid. Then I’ll swing you around to North Pointe and, if ya don’t mind, Sven would like a word.”
Colding shrugged. Why not? He had to see the whole island anyway, even if it was freezing out. Colding started to roll up his window.
“Oh, yah,” Clayton said. “Mind leaving that down? I ran over a squirrel a couple of days ago. Didn’t quite get all da guts out. It’ll stink in here something fierce if you close it.”
How about that? Clayton actually asked nicely for something. No pissy tone this time. Maybe the old man was loosening up. Colding shrugged and rolled the window back down.
They headed northwest. Much of the trail looked like an ancient road, now overgrown and pitted, some spots thick with two feet of black, stagnant water. The Bv rolled through all of it. One swamp looked a good twenty feet deep in the middle, but the Nuge proved to be fully amphibious—it rolled into the water and floated, moving across the surface until the tank treads dug into the mud on the far side. One hell of a machine, really.
Through the thick trees, Colding saw the occasional collapsed house. Snow clumped on moss-covered roofs, and a few even had saplings growing up through the angled remnants.
Sara leaned forward, preferring to look out the front window rather than the sides. “Looks like a lot of people used to live here.”
“Yah,” Clayton said. “Some forty years back we had about three hundred year-round residents. Mostly copper mining, but also summer people, tourists.”
“So what happened?”
“We had… an incident. At da copper mine. Twenty-two people died. This trail goes right by it, I’ll show ya.”
He cranked the Nuge forward at a punishing twenty miles an hour. Branches scraped the vehicle’s sides and roof, but Clayton effortlessly avoided the tree trunks.
They popped out at a clearing near the island’s high rocky spine. Colding saw a small shed made of bone-dry wood, bleached almost white from decades of sun. Like a set from an old silent movie, a barely discernible sign had the word DANGER written on it in faded, paintbrush-scrawled letters.
“That’s da old mine,” Clayton said. “Used to be tons of copper across da whole U.P. Boomtowns rivaled anything from da gold rush days out West.”
“Spooky,” Sara said. “Is that where the people died?”
“Most of ’em,” Clayton said. “Those men are still in there, at least their bones. At night, when it’s quiet, you can hear them calling for help.”
Colding would have mocked a woo-woo superstition like that, but Clayton’s memories clearly ran deep to a place of pain, maybe also of fear.
“The cave-in kind of broke da town’s heart,” Clayton said. “People moved away over da years. There was only about fifty of us left when Danté came in and bought everyone out. He kept me and Sven. James and Stephanie are new, brought in to manage a backup herd. Enough of this shit. I don’t like this spot much.”
Clayton put the Bv206 in gear and they drove back into the woods, the rough road jostling everyone inside. His mood seemed to lighten the farther they got from the mine. “I think I smell squirrel guts,” he said. “Your window down all da way, Colding?”
“Yeah, you can see it is.”
Clayton looked and nodded. “Okay, eh? Well, keep it down. I’m a little cold so I’m rolling mine up. You know us old guys can get chilly.” He cranked the handle to raise his window just as they broke out of the trees at the edge of a small farm. Colding recognized the barn with the roof shingles that spelled out Ballantine. This was where the island’s only working road started. Or ended, depending on how you looked at it.