“Um.” Jimbo popped his fist on the chair arm. “Eric and I kicked around a few ideas.”
I waited.
“Okay, so she goes up there to find the spring, like you said. And I think when she found it — and it turns out to be more than a spring — she’s really hyped and she comes back to report it to Krom. I mean, cops found her car in the Community Center lot. But she runs into Mike inside. And she can’t help it, she puts it to him. Or maybe he puts two and two together and figures where she’s been. And he wonders why she’s so cranked about it. And he says he’s gonna go check it out. And she takes charge, you know, like she does, and says Mike’s not going without her. Gets her gear from her car, and they drive up to Lake Mary, and from there…”
There was a rumbling, a throat clearing, shivering our chairs.
Jimbo said, white, “So what do you think?”
I said, slow, “Why do you think it was Mike she ran into? Instead of Adrian?”
“It was a Sunday.”
“So?”
“She disappeared on a Sunday. Didn’t you look it up?” Jimbo shook his head. “You make a lousy cop.”
“What’s so special about Sunday?”
“Mike mans the office for Krom on Sundays. Krom takes the day off. You didn’t know?”
I stared at my brother. “I didn’t know.”
“Hey, no sweat. And you’re not such a lousy cop. I mean, man, when you started in that night about powder in the evidence… Wish I gave you that cartridge. Wish you’d figured out about Mike and Georgia — then he’d be in jail and we could evac out both roads.”
“Wish you’d told me about Gold Dust.”
“That was Eric’s call. Anyway, I figured you’d figure it out eventually.” Jimbo slumped in his chair until his butt was on the edge and his legs bridged out over the snow.
I glanced at my brother. Let somebody else do the damn dishes. Our world’s about to come undone, but Jimbo’s still Jimbo. It was, oddly, comforting.
It wasn’t until three twenty-five that we heard a sound like garbage trucks waking the neighborhood. Jimbo snaked up from his chair and shouted across the street to the Precourts, who were already piling into their pickup, “Gentlemen start your engines!”
My legs were rubber.
Jimbo hooted. A police Jeep was turning the corner, followed by a Guard truck and then a line of cars I recognized from the next street over. The Jeep slowed and Eric rolled down the window and yelled, “Let’s go, Oldfields.”
Jimbo was already in his Fiat and it peeled out of the garage and backed into the driveway beside my Subaru. Somehow, I was in my car with the engine on. Somehow, I was backing down the drive. My arm was hooked on the windowsill. I saw the minute hand on my watch leap from three twenty-nine to three thirty.
Two hours left of daylight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I was choking. That’s what made it real.
This was no dream, no drill, this was the real thing and I knew it because our fleeing neighborhood — and the neighborhood that fled before us and the neighborhood coming behind us — filled the air with exhaust that seeped in through the vents, in through the nose and mouth and eyes and burned the message into the tissues. It’s real.
Jimbo’s Fiat was in front of me and the Precourts’ pickup was behind me and the high Pika walls flanked me. That was the immediate neighborhood.
We crawled. Twenty-five miles per hour. Safe and sane.
My second hand leaped to four o’clock.
Jimbo’s radio fed me a steady whisper of advice. Stay calm. Keep moving. Leave two car-lengths between your vehicle and the vehicle in front. I wore the phones, like Jimbo, half-on and half-off my ears so I would not miss the onset of an eruption.
Up ahead, someone honked.
Another honk, and then another.
Jimbo slowed and I gained on him and then I slowed too, and I watched the rearview to be sure Rich Precourt was going to slow. We were doing fifteen, and holding our two-car-lengths-pace beautifully, when Jimbo’s brake lights went on and his Fiat squirreled into the right-hand snowbank. I slammed on my brakes and the Subaru’s nose slid left, and up ahead I heard nonstop honking and in the earphones stay calm leave two car-lengths and then all I heard was the screeching of brakes up and down the line and somewhere far behind the Precourts, like distant thunder, a crumpling of metal on metal, time after time.
Jimbo was already out when I got out, both of us choking on the haze of exhaust. And then mercifully people began to shut off their engines.
I killed the Soob.
Now, there were screams. I braced for an explosion. No explosion came — just nonstop screaming. It came from up ahead.
The Precourts were crowding behind me, and behind them the Robinsons and the Wargos and the Ruiz’s, the whole damn block. They swept me up and we engulfed Jimbo and in front of him the Werneckes, and like the accident junkies we’d all become, we surged forward toward the screams.
Some twenty vehicles up the line the crowd stopped and swelled like an aneurysm and I was squeezed against a little sedan. I’d lost Jimbo. I wormed along the sedan and then suddenly I got a clear view and saw why we had stopped our flight.
Between our crowd and another crowd plugging the canyon up ahead was an unpopulated stretch of road. Vehicles were stopped at odd angles, doors open. Roaming this no-man’s-land was a bear. Big as a truck, within a paw’s swipe of someone’s Taurus. It reared as if trying to see over the crowd, and the screamers who had not once let up screamed even harder. The bear froze. Ears went flat. The ground gave a little jolt, and nobody in the crowd noticed or cared about one more shake, but the bear did. It launched itself backward, landing on its belly, then lumbered up with a howl of anguish like the snow’s on fire. It shook itself and snow crystals popped off the cinnamon fur.
Dragged out of its winter sleep, I guessed, by the same rude shakeup that sent us all scrambling for a way out.
Something jammed into my back. I turned. It was Jimbo’s elbow. He held his biathlon rifle, pointed skyward, but I could see the clip was in firing position.
“You can’t stop a bear with a twenty-two,” I hissed.
My brother hissed back, “Got a better idea?”
Of all times to decide not to duck out, Jimbo chooses this.
In my earphones a voice was advising calm and I didn’t know if that was the standard evac spiel or if emergency communications had caught up with the bear.
The bear wasn’t calm. It was trapped and snarling and it lowered its anvil head and began to come our way.
I was deafened by screams. I lost Jimbo again and then I saw him worming his way out front of the crowd, rifle held high. He yelled “back up, back up” and the crowd did its best, heaving backward but there were just too many of us squeezed in at this block party, and the people farther back could not hear, over the screaming, my brother’s cries.
The bear heard. I saw the silhouette of teeth, and then the big cinnamon started forward again, all its anguish homed on Jimbo.
Jimbo shifted into marksman’s stance and like he has done a thousand times before he brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted and squeezed off a round.
There was a bellow from the cinnamon that stopped my heart.
Someone nearby yelled Jimbo you idiot.
But it looked for a moment as though Jimbo had done the right thing, for the bear froze and twisted, focusing its rage on the pinprick in its shoulder.
“Okay,” I said, heart beating again.
At both ends of no-man’s-land the crowds had shut up.