‘What about us?’ said Angel. ‘If we kill him, will there be blowback?’
‘The difference is that we don’t care,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Angel. ‘I must have missed that memo.’
‘Basically it said “Fuck ‘em if they ain’t on our side”,’ Louis explained.
‘Yeah, I would have remembered seeing that one,’ said Angel. ‘So we keep hunting him until we corner him, or until he just rolls over and dies?’
‘We hunt him until he tires, or we tire,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see how it plays out. You got anything better to do?’
‘Not lately. Not ever, to be honest. So what now?’
I looked again into the darkness beyond the house.
‘If he’s out there, let’s give him something to watch.’
* * *
While Angel went to retrieve our car, Louis and I broke into the Chevy and pushed it against the door of the house. I could already smell the gas from the stove in the kitchen as Louis doused the interior of the Chevy with the Collector’s cognac, saving about one third of it. He stuck a kitchen rag in the neck of the bottle, and shook it to soak the material. When he was sure that the road was clear, Angel signaled Louis with his headlights, and Louis lit the rag, tossed the bottle into the car and ran.
The Chevy was already burning as we drove away, but the two explosions – the first from the car, the second from the house itself – came sooner than anticipated and occurred almost simultaneously, catching us by surprise. We didn’t stop to watch the fireball rise above the trees. We just kept driving, taking Telegraph Road into Maryland as far as the intersection with Route 213, then headed north into Pennsylvania. We handed the car over to a woman in Landenberg, took possession of our own vehicles and separated without another word, Louis and Angel heading for Philly while I drove north to the Turnpike.
On the outskirts of Newark, a man in a dark coat watched fire trucks pass. The sleeve of his coat was torn, and he limped slightly as he walked, favoring his right leg. The lights of the trucks briefly illuminated his thin face, his dark, slickedback hair and the thin trickle of blood that ran from his scalp. They had come close to catching him this time, so very close …
The Collector lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as his house burned.
2
The wolf was a young male, alone and in pain. His ribs stood out beneath his rust brown fur, and he limped as he drew closer to the town. The wolf’s pack had been annihilated by the shores of the St Lawrence River, but by then the urge to roam had already taken him, and he had just begun moving south when the hunters came. His had not been a large pack: a dozen animals in all, led by the alpha female that was his mother. They were all gone now. He had escaped the slaughter by crossing the river on winter ice, flinching at the sounds of gunfire. He came across a second, smaller group of men as he neared the Maine border, and sustained an injury to his left forepaw from a hunter’s bullet. He had kept the wound clean, and no infection had set in, but there was damage to some of the nerves, and he would never be as strong or as fast as he once had been. The injury would bring death upon him, sooner or later. It was already slowing him down, and slow animals always became prey in the end. It was a wonder that he had come so far, but something – a kind of madness – had driven him ever onward, south, south.
Now spring was approaching, and soon the slow melting of snow would commence. If he could just survive the remainder of winter, food would become more plentiful. For now, he was reduced to the status of a scavenger. He was weak from starvation, but that afternoon he had picked up the scent of a young deer, and its spoor had led him to the outskirts of the town. He smelled its fear and confusion. It was vulnerable. If he could get close enough to it, he might have enough strength and speed left to take it down.
The wolf sniffed the air, and picked up movement among the trees to its right. The deer stood motionless in a thicket, its tail raised in warning and distress, but the wolf sensed that he was not the cause of it. He tested the air again. His tail moved between his legs, and he drew back, his ears pinned against his head. His pupils dilated, and he exposed his teeth.
The two animals, predator and prey, stood united in fear for a moment, and then retreated, the wolf heading east, the deer, west. All thoughts of hunger and feeding had left the wolf. There was only the urge to run.
But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
A single light burned in Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery. It illuminated a table around which sat four old men, each of them concentrating on his cards.
‘Jesus,’ said Ben Pearson, ‘this is the worst hand I’ve ever seen. I swear, if I hadn’t watched it dealt myself, I’d never have believed it. I didn’t even know cards went this low.’
Everybody ignored him. Ben Pearson could have been holding four aces dealt by Christ Himself and he’d still have been bitching. It was his version of a poker face. He’d developed it as a way of distracting attention from his regular features, which were so expressive as to give away his every passing thought. Depending upon the story that one was telling, Ben could be the best or worst audience a man might wish for. He was almost childlike in his transparency, or so it seemed. Although now in his seventies, he still had a full head of white hair, and his face was comparatively unlined. It added to his air of youthfulness.
Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery had been in Ben’s family for four generations in one form or another, and yet it wasn’t even the oldest business in the town of Prosperous, Maine. An alehouse had stood on the site of what was now the Prosperous Tap since the eighteenth century, and Jenna Marley’s Lady & Lace had been a clothing store since 1790. The names of the town’s first settlers still resounded around Prosperous in a way that few other such settlements could boast. Most had roots back in Durham and Northumberland, in the northeast of England, for that was where Prosperous’s first settlers had originally come from. There were Scotts and Nelsons and Liddells, Harpers and Emersons and Golightlys, along with other more singular names: Brantingham, Claxton, Stobbert, Pryerman, Joblin, Hudspeth …
A genealogist might have spent many a profitable day scouring the town’s register of births and deaths, and some had indeed journeyed this far north to investigate the history of the settlement. They were received courteously, and some cooperation was offered, but they invariably left feeling slightly dissatisfied. Gaps in the town’s annals prevented full and thorough research, and making connections between the settlers of Prosperous and their ancestors back in England proved more difficult than might first have been expected, for it seemed those families that departed for the shores of the New World had done so in their entirety, leaving few, if any, stray branches behind.
Of course, such obstacles were hardly unfamiliar to historians either amateur or professional, but they were frustrating nonetheless, and eventually the town of Prosperous came to be regarded as a dead end, genealogically speaking, which perfectly suited the inhabitants. In that part of the world they were not unusual in preferring to be left untroubled by strangers. It was one of the reasons why their forefathers had traveled so far into the interior to begin with, negotiating treaties with the natives that tended to hold more often than not, giving Prosperous a reputation as a town blessed by the Lord, even if its inhabitants declined to allow others to share in their perceived good fortune, divinely ordained or otherwise. Prosperous did not invite, nor welcome, new settlers without specific connections to the northeast of England, and marriages outside the primary bloodlines were frowned upon until the late nineteenth century. Something of that original pioneering, self-sufficient spirit had transmitted itself down the generations to the present population of the town.