“I’m no fool,” Eli Pate said. “I know that they’ll send for help and that they’ll get those transmission lines back up. But with all those unknown faults scattered about the mountains, what will happen when they reenergize the transmission lines, Jay?”
“The system will try to shift loads. Frantically. And by doing that, it will create more problems. Cascading outages. You’ll lose cities. You’ll lose states, maybe.”
He sounded like a man beneath an interrogation lamp, admitting what he didn’t want to admit.
“That,” Eli Pate said, “was always my idea. And I’m going to share a little secret, Jay. This is only the start. But I’ll be true to my word. If you take out those transmission lines, you will live to see your wife again. That doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, I rather look forward to the media broadcasts of your account of your time with me. It will be fun to watch. Except…” He snapped his fingers. “Damn. It will be awfully hard to find a functioning television in this part of the country. Alas, the price of success.”
Jay lifted the binoculars to his eyes again and saw the man who’d climbed free was looking back inside the truck, trying to help the others. Another survivor reached for help from inside the ruins of the truck, reached for the man who’d already escaped.
The bloody arm he extended no longer had a hand.
56
The route Larry took away from the corpse of Scott Shields led them back through and toward the Bighorn Mountains.
“Fastest way would be up and over,” he said, “but the pass is still closed with snow at the top. We gotta head south, go through Greybull. The property is private land that abuts the national forest. It’s basically cut off from everywhere in the winter and not much easier to access in the summer. You could develop it, I suppose, but it’s expensive to build out there. I can’t even imagine a figure on utilities. Just to run electric would be plenty of work, and plenty of dollars. But it was good empty land. You know I’ve always liked good empty land.”
He was too chatty, considering what they’d come from and where they were bound, but Mark understood it, remembered it. Larry had always talked more when he didn’t want to dwell on reality.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said.
“What?” Larry looked genuinely confused.
“I’m sorry that I showed up on your doorstep this morning. Why are you even doing this? You’ve committed enough crimes today to put yourself in lockup for a long while, Uncle. Why?”
Larry frowned, glanced at him. “You said they murdered your wife, Markus.”
“You didn’t even know her.”
“You’re still family.”
“Not the kind who has been any help to you.”
Larry’s eyes were back on the road. “That’s not how I look at it, son. You were brought up wrong. I had a part in that, I know.”
“You had the good part. You tried to balance Mom.”
“Hell, I didn’t provide any balance. We were just different kinds of messes, my sister and me. Our brother too. Ronny and Violet and me, well, we stuck together better than most, I suppose, but I don’t think we would have if it hadn’t been for you. What you needed, none of us knew how to give. But we got something from trying. You’ll never understand that.” He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “You know I look back on when you were nothing but a baby, back before you could so much as stand without help, and I think that’s why I got clean. Because you needed me. Needed us. But my definition of clean would be most men’s filthy. All the same…I think I got closer than I would have been because of you, Markus. Maybe even stayed alive because of you. I was in a bad way when your mother had you, and when Isaac skipped, what I wanted to do was kill the son of a bitch, but that wasn’t an option. Why? Because you needed your ass wiped. And so I stayed and tried to help. And trying to help was good for me.”
Mark said, “Isaac?”
“Shit. It’s been so damn long, I guess I slipped,” Larry said. He was casual, as if giving a name to an unknown father were a small thing. “He might not even have been the boy. I hate to put it that blunt for you, but that’s the way it was. He was the most likely candidate, I guess you’d say. He was leading the polls.”
“You knew him.”
“Mostly what I knew was that he’d skipped out when he knew your mother was…well, in her condition.”
“Pregnant,” Mark said. “That was her condition. He knew it when he left?”
Larry’s face twisted. “Shit, son, I don’t rightly recall how it went or how it didn’t. I’m not saying you didn’t get shortchanged by not having a father around, but you didn’t lose anything by missing out on that guy. He was the type who attracted your mother, full of bullshit tales that she wanted to believe.”
“What kind of tales?”
“He was a psychic,” Larry said with mock seriousness. He looked at Mark for camaraderie in the ridicule, but Mark was thinking of the boy from Cassadaga telling him he belonged in the camp, and the best he could manage was a wry smile.
“For a psychic,” Larry said, “he sure was surprised by that pregnancy test.”
Mark exhaled and turned toward the open window so the wind blew harder into his face, making him squint.
Larry glanced at him and said, “I don’t mean to go on about that. None of it matters. Not him, not even your mother. You got out from under it, from under all of us, and you did damn well for yourself. I’m proud to know it.”
Mark thought of his condo the way it had once looked, bright and shining, thought of Lauren and her new Infiniti and her law-school degree, and he thought of his own job. He had done well for himself. That was not a lie. And yet, by the end of today, he might be handcuffed beside a stolen truck and headed to a remote jail in the Rockies.
“You said it right earlier, Uncle.”
“Pardon?”
“Every man has a different definition of clean,” Mark said. “And I’ve found it’s tough to hold your anchor on that one. Even when you think you’ve got it…there’s something you haven’t counted on blowing toward you in the wind. Always. And when it gets there? Well, you might find your position sliding then. You might find it sliding fast.”
Larry didn’t answer. For several miles neither of them spoke. They passed through Greybull and headed east, chasing those mountains, which grew larger and taller and starker with each passing mile.
“I’m sorry that wind blew you back here,” Larry said finally. “But we’ll find the son of a bitch you need, and we’ll get him to answer for your wife’s murder.”
“Sure we will.”
“She was something special, wasn’t she?” Larry said. “I can feel it. Hell, I just know that. From the way you…I just know it, that’s all.”
“Yes,” Mark said, rubbing the old dive permit between his thumb and index finger. “She was something special.”
The engine’s throaty growl labored, rising to a whine as the road steepened on its climb into the mountains, and Mark found that it was hard for him to hold Lauren’s face in his mind. She seemed very far away.
57
The place Pate led him to was down a dirt lane through rugged prairie land, fifteen miles away from the nearest town and twenty from the Chill River power plant.
It was, unfortunately, the perfect choice. The transmission lines were equipped with motion-activated cameras in the ranges close to the power plant and the substations, but this stretch in the middle distance was a floater-the kind of stretch that was far too common in the country. Critical infrastructure, absolutely, but monitored? Not exactly.