Nimec looked out at the somewhat indistinct contours of the mountain a while longer, turning things over in his mind. There were decisions and there were decisions. Some were tougher than others, and with good reason. When you had one that couldn’t be reversed and worried endlessly about the consequences of getting it wrong, Nimec guessed that ought to be reason enough to rank it high on the difficulty scale. And maybe knocking a week or two off the calendar was exactly what he needed to get the decision ahead of him right.
Another full minute of silence passed before he brought his eyes back to Megan’s face.
“Hope you’re okay holding down the fort while I visit Shangri-la,” he said with a relenting sigh.
“Fret not,” she said. “I’ll keep our stockades guarded round the clock.”
“You and Gramma Caulfield?”
Megan smiled, reached across the desk, and gave his wrist a fond little pat.
“Leave it to us womenfolk, pardnuh,” she said.
Jarvis wanted to believe the chopper wasn’t out searching for him. Even as he opened the motorboat’s throttle to push it faster downriver than any boat piloted by a sane man should be moving in the pitch darkness, he was wishing he could convince himself they would not do so drastic a thing, send a helicopter into the air after him, a small and unimportant person in their big, important world. Someone who’d not taken so much as an unearned cent from them, and did not let his eyes stray far from the grounds he kept in nice, trim shape for his weekly paycheck. And why not think he’d be found deserving of a fair turn? An honest, hardworkin’ gardener is Jarvis Lenard, we’ll make an exception an’ let him be, they might have said. Save some trouble, ya know. Leavin’ aside that bad seed family relation of his, what have we to fear from the man?
Jarvis had to smile grimly at the thought. And right so. The bird might be whipping over that southern shore for some purpose other than to track him down. Just as the Sunglasses might’ve come poking around the employee commons for a reason besides his connection to poor Udonis. If he were to give his imagination a stretch, Jarvis supposed he could come up with an explanation that didn’t involve his cousin for the Sunglasses having asked about him in that menacing way of theirs, wanting to know this and that and the other thing from anyone they could seek out that knew him. Surely he could, and no doubt his words would find an accepting ear… but the truth would remain the truth all the same. His mother hadn’t raised any fools under her roof, and it was too late in the day to eat a plate full of lies and nonsense, especially those served up raw by his own brain. Not after hiding for almost a week in the bush with only the few supplies he’d taken from his cabin. Not since spending every dollar he’d saved over these past years, every dollar and more, to grease the hands of a bald hair parasite for use of his flimsy little seventeen-footer. And most especially not at this moment, while he was shooting along the channel at — what was his speed just now? — Lord Almighty, sixty miles an hour, sixty on a moonless night, heading out to the open sea.
The truth was the truth. Right so, right so. It was there in the sky above that Jarvis Lenard had his evidence.
The copter was out prowling the night for him. The Sunglasses never gave up. Sinister, menacin’ bastards, yeh. Weren’t going to quit until they found him, caught him trying to reach the mainland. And Jarvis knew that if they did, he would come to the same bloody end as his cousin Udonis and those men out of Point Hope he’d hired to bring him away safe.
Jarvis glanced over at the left side of the channel, where a forest of mangrove trees had crept toward the water’s marshy bank, their air roots groping out over the mud and rushes like slender, covetous feelers. Though the helicopter was not yet in sight, he could tell it was close upon him from the loud knocking of its blades, and didn’t need to check the GPS box on the motorboat’s control console to know there was a long way to travel before he reached the inlet. Probably his bow lights would be enough to guide him — bright new kryptons, they were, he’d received that much good treatment from the bloodsucking waterfront leach in exchange for emptying his wallet — and Jarvis supposed he could have found his course through the river’s many twistings and turnings by second nature after having lived his whole thirty-five years on earth near its shores. But say he reached the Serpent’s Mouth before daybreak? What lay ahead of him then? A journey of many miles around the cape, with a chance he would be coming into Cedros Bay against the tidal current, all depending how fast he could navigate.
Could be it would have been none the worse if sweet Nan hadn’t given him a heads-up and he’d stayed put, just waited for the Sunglasses to come for him. Could be. But why bother his mind with second guesses, eh? There were times when you had to make your choice and to stick to it whatever the outcome.
Jarvis darted along the curving waterway, his bow high, heavy sheets of spray lashing against the outboard’s windscreen as he breasted the surface. Still he was unable to leave the noise of the chopper behind… indeed the sound of its blades seemed closer than before. Holding steady as he could, he once again flicked a glance over his shoulder toward the south bank.
That was when he got his first fearful look at it, a sleek black shadow which might have blended seamlessly into the night except for the tiny red and blue pricks of the running lights on its sides and tail. The helicopter whirred in over the mangroves he’d just left behind, a spotlight in its nose washing the treetops in sudden brilliance. Jarvis saw them churn from its rapid descent, their interwoven branches beaten into wild contortions by the downdraft of its rotors.
The long shaft of the beam sliced ahead of the oncoming bird, roved over the trees and across the reeds to the water. It made a quick sweep over and past Jarvis, and then reversed direction and locked on his speeding craft.
Jarvis kept his eyes raised for only a moment before he brought them back to his windscreen, blinking as much from fear and agitation as the somehow otherworldly glare. His hands clenched around the butterfly wheel, he shot into high gear and poured on speed, pushing the outboard to its max, holding onto that wheel, feeling its jerky resistance and holding on tight, certain the wheel would tear free of his grip if he loosened it the slightest bit, spin right out of his fingers and send the boat careening onto its side.
The helicopter attached its trajectory to him even as he struggled to retain control. Cutting across the shoreline to the river, it veered sharply west and then swooped down low at Jarvis’s back, came down in pursuit like an enormous predatory nighthawk, the fixed, fierce eye of its spotlight shafting him with brightness. And the noise, Jarvis had never heard anything like it. The knock-knock-knock of the copter’s rotors beating the air had transformed into a deafening roar as it drew closer and closer, and the sound that assaulted him now seemed to outwardly echo and amplify the accelerated pounding of his heart.