Seamus inferred that hunting culture in China was not well developed. “Is this where the soldiers go to buy their uniforms?” Yuxia inquired, gazing at rack after rack, acre after acre of floor space devoted to all manner of clothing in several distinct state-of-the-art camo patterns. Her confusion was understandable; she’d just entered the country through a huge military base, and Seamus had not been very diligent about explaining where the boundary lay between it and the civilian world. He had to spend a few minutes explaining to her and Marlon that lots of people hunted here, and even more liked to cop a certain stance or attitude about it, using camouflage as a cultural signifier, and this was where those people came to buy clothes. Marlon, Csongor, and Yuxia could, in other words, buy anything they wanted in this store without laying themselves open to the accusation that they were improperly wearing the uniforms and insignia of the armed forces of the United States. Once she had pushed through an initial barrier of culture shock, Yuxia found this amusing.
The Fantastic Foreigners were also dumbfounded by the size and variety of the gun section, and in this way they lost another forty-five minutes to culture shock, pure and simple. Seamus could tell that Csongor was lusting after a 1911, but fortunately the paperwork would have made purchasing such a thing impossible, and so the relationship had to remain platonic for now. Because of the unusual way in which they had entered the country, Seamus had been able to carry his own sidearm — a Sig Sauer — the whole way, but he had ended up with only one clip, and so while the others were distracted with running in and out of dressing rooms, he purchased two additional empty clips and four boxes of rounds, as well as a holster that he could use to carry all of that crap around under his jacket. He did not really expect that he would have to use, or even draw, his weapon while driving these people across the country and showing them Mount Rushmore. But the fact was that he had the gun, and he needed a way to carry it around safely and securely and not too obviously. It wouldn’t do to have it rattling around loose in his backpack.
Having settled all of that, he rounded up Yuxia, who was mugging in front of a mirror in a ghillie suit that made her look like the Littlest Ent. She had gotten a little giddy, which he put down to a combination of jet lag, culture shock, and emotional trauma over having been ripped from the bosom of her family and homeland. On this side of the Pacific there were, of course, many persons of Chinese ancestry whose ancestors had come over to this country in the most fucked-up circumstances imaginable, and he supposed that if this adventure were better organized, maybe with some psychologists on its advisory board, he’d be getting Yuxia in touch with the relevant support groups. But as it was they were just going to have to get in the SUV and start driving, and she was going to have to suck it up for a while, and he was going to have to keep an eye on her.
So that was what happened. Csongor rode shotgun. Yuxia crept into the way back, burrowed into a deep warm nest of newly acquired camo gear, and crashed. Marlon sat in the center of the middle seat, blocking Seamus’s line of sight out the rearview and watched America go by with all due curiosity. Seamus felt vaguely like one of those ex-military guys who gets a job as a celebrity bodyguard and finds himself driving rock stars around.
He was feeling some unaccountable need to get clear of the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, so he headed east over the mountains and then down into the desert. At which point it seemed as though nothing stood between him and the Atlantic Ocean, and so he went into serious road-trip, put-the-hammer-down mode, and bombed down I-90 as if there was no tomorrow. White line fever got him most of the way across the state. But then certain real-world issues — the limited size of his bladder and of his fuel tank — began to interfere with the dream. He was seeing a lot of signs for some place called Spokane. He’d heard of it. It turned out to be a decent-sized city with the usual complement of strip malls and chain hotels. None of them looked absolutely perfect, and so he kept driving anyway, and found that he had passed into Idaho without really leaving Spokane; the city had thrown a pseudopod of exurban development across the border, groping out in the direction of a place called Coeur d’Alene. It was there that Seamus finally spotted the inexpensive chain hotel of his dreams, embedded roughly in the center of an eight-hundred-mile-long development that included, within a few hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a twelve-pump gas station/convenience store complex and a restaurant that looked as if it might have microbrews on draft. Presenting his credit card — which, unbelievably, had not been canceled yet — he rented three rooms: one for Yuxia, because she was a girl. One for Marlon, because he was, ultimately, paying for everything and so it seemed that he ought to have his own room. And one that he would share with Csongor, since he and the Hungarian seemed to have developed an understanding that verged on friendship.
They agreed to meet in the lobby an hour later and walk over to the restaurant-that-might-have-good-draft-beer.
Seamus happened to come down to the lobby first and found himself with nothing to do except scan the rack of travel brochures by the registration desk: promotional literature for ski areas, amusement parks, gold mine tours, fishing and jet-skiing on the nearby lake. He grew bored and sat back down. But his mind was troubled in a way that it hadn’t been when he had entered the lobby. He got back up and went over to the rack and scanned it again, trying to make out what he’d seen there that had subliminally irritated him.
He found it, finally, on the third slow pass through the rack: the word “Elphinstone.”
It was on a cartoonish, schematic map of something called the International Selkirk Loop: a circuit of American and Canadian highways, straddling the border, that, to judge from the numerous pictures, passed by lots of pretty lakes and through some nice mountain scenery. This brochure badly wanted Seamus to understand that a person could drive this loop on a motorcycle or an RV over the course of a leisurely day or two, see a lot of natural beauty, eat tasty food, buy cool stuff. It was, in other words, a tourist brochure, and fundamentally of no interest whatever to Seamus.
Except for that one word “Elphinstone.”
That was the name of the town where Richard Forthrast had his cat skiing resort. The place where he had gone missing a couple of days ago.
Correction: Seamus had no proof that he had gone missing per se. He had abruptly stopped playing T’Rain. Pretty thin evidence, that. But it had been something like twenty-four hours — difficult to tell exactly, what with the time zones and all — anyway, a hell of a long time — since Seamus had checked in on Egdod. And to judge from what the boss had said, Olivia had been dealing with troubles of her own, related to someone, something, or somewhere called Tukwila. Jones, or more likely his minions, were blowing shit up on the border, drawing every cop in the world to the epicenter. So it seemed a good bet that no one had been attending to the somewhat Mysterious Case of the possibly Missing Online Gaming Entrepreneur in a while. Seamus hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not at a conscious level, since getting these people illegally into the country had been foremost in his thoughts, and he had just been going on instinct and impulse for at least a day. When stuck in the American embassy in Manila with three illegals liable to be arrested and deported at any minute, it’s hard to focus on hypothetical events that might be taking place near the Idaho/B.C. border.
But now he was here. Literally, he was on the map. For when he pulled the Selkirk Loop brochure out of the rack, Coeur d’Alene became visible on the map, down toward the bottom. His eyes began jumping back and forth, top to bottom: Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene. Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene.