A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror Page 20

  “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you choose to go to New Jersey on this road, Mrs. Christopher?”

  “Actually, I got turned around. I thought I was heading to the Palisades Parkway. It’s so dark.”

  “You’re not in any way involved in that attack on the bridge are you, Mrs. Christopher?” He directed his light at her face and watched her eyes.

  “Me? Good God.”

  “Glen Rock, New Jersey. I’m logging you in, ma’am. You may be hearing from the local police later. This is not the smartest thing in the world to be fooling with.”

  “I didn’t intend to cause any trouble. I’m sorry.”

  “We’re trying to deny these people any chance to get away, ma’am. Coming around here in your car is working against us.”

  “You’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you?” Mag asked, lines of worry forming on her forehead.

  “What is your telephone number in Glen Rock, ma’am?”

  “201-555-8954. I just want to go home.”

  “Right. I want you to turn your vehicle around now and head back to Glen Rock by way of the Palisades Parkway.”

  “Thank you, officer. I will.”

  “If, by chance, you do see anyone on the side of the road, or whatever, do not stop. Just keep going. Understand?”

  “I understand perfectly,” Mag said.

  She turned the ignition key, felt the warm blast of air on her face. For an instant, she saw the MPs in the rear view mirror; and then they disappeared as if they never existed.

  * * *

  It was two-thirty, but Mag was wide awake as she steered off the highway onto Ridgewood Avenue and drove slowly along the dimly lit street. She envisioned herself walking into the dark house, straight to the telephone, and straight to a blinking answering machine and a comforting message from Lou. But a tingling along her jaw line, tapped out a message that wouldn’t go away: Lou was out there somewhere in the night, freezing and wet.

  As she turned the corner onto Pleasant, she saw a plain white van parked at the curb and a man perched high up on the telephone pole. Another man stepped out from behind the van and waved her past. In the rear view mirror, she saw the man snap open a small telephone and speak into it as he watched her car move down the street.

  She didn’t know why, but she drove past their driveway. The house was dark. She continued down to Cedar and then turned the corner. A black sedan was parked at the curb. She saw a match flare inside, then die. She drove on, around the corner at Birch, and then slid to a stop and killed the engine. She sat there in the dim light and looked all around. She saw no movement. She exited, closed the door of the Subaru quietly, glanced up and down the street, and then strode rapidly across their neighbors’—the Comptons—yard. She made her way through the bushes at the back of their house and across the grass in her own back yard. Trude heard the key in the lock at the back door and yapped crazily until Mag sank to her knees to quiet the dog.

  Upstairs, she went immediately to the window and moved the curtains slightly to see up the street. The white van was still there. The man on the telephone pole jumped down the last two feet, opened the rear door of the van, and ducked inside. The other man moved around the van, disappeared inside, and slammed the door shut behind him. For five minutes, Mag stood at the window. Nothing moved outside.

  She shed her coat and moved quickly to the telephone, listened, and heard a faint crackling an octave above the dial tone. Was she imagining everything? Had she created an elaborate fantasy to push the truth off into the corner? Was it an affair? With Patty Buck? She sank into a chair in the darkened room. Her eyes roved over the dark Indian painting on the far wall, the long case clock in the corner, the floor lamp on the near wall. She brought her hand up to her mouth and blew lightly on her knuckles. She placed two fingers on her temple and pressed her ring finger against her lips.

  No. It was real trouble this time: a deadly kind of trouble. A familiar calm locked in. An involuntary hum rose from her throat and ricocheted off her palette. It wasn’t even daybreak, yet everyone knew about this bridge thing. Everybody. Bliss and his helicopter. The election...

  But suddenly, weariness intruded on her thoughts and pushed them away. Exhausted, she slumped in the chair and slept.

  It was bright in the room when she awoke; nearly noon. The doorbell was ringing and Trude was at it again, barking at the door. She stared at the clock, bewildered, and then her brain began to clear. She looked out the window and saw Anne outside with the boys carrying a big, blue duffle bag.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The rain stopped again before they reached the top of Turkey Mountain. Weariness from the strain of constant vigilance claimed the strength in his legs and allowed mountain laurel tangles and jagged rocks to trip him as he lurched up the incline, peering through heavy eyelids, pulling Sydney along by the hand. The night wind leaned into his face, chilling the sweat on his forehead. It sneaked up the small of his back, snatched his thin wisps of breath, and scaled them along his cheeks and into the night. They fumbled through the darkness at the top of the ridge and found a small, covered draw on the eastern slope. They dropped to the ground and huddled—shivering, silent—until finally they slid into sleep.

  * * *

  The sun rose above the horizon and freed them of the chill as they slept. Lou woke to the sound of chopper blades whupping somewhere in the mountains. He didn’t move. But even if the craft were hovering directly overhead, he knew that the people inside it wouldn’t be able to see them through the branches and leaves.

  He looked over at the girl. She was curled up next to a rock, still asleep; her white coat torn and dirty in a sodden heap next to her. Her cheek was smeared with mud, her black hair damp and straggly against her forehead. She lay in the fetal position; her head resting against her two hands. Her face wore an expression of peace. One leg was flexed as if she were running in her sleep.

  She jerked and sat upright, looking all around with a blank look on her face. For a full minute she sat like that, looking at him and all around until it came back to her.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She reached her arms out in a large yawning motion. “I’m cold,” she said.

  “Get your jacket on.”

  “It’s soaked. You got a couple of ham and cheese. Your sack, where is it?”

  He tossed the rucksack to her. “They’re all we’ve got. The candy bars turned to mush.”

  “I need a comb.”

  “No combs,” he said.

  “My feet are falling off,” she said, rolling up her pants legs. She peeled her socks off, threw them to the side, pulled a foot up into her lap, and massaged the arch. “Nobody said anything about backpacking.”

  “You want to see where we are?” he asked. “Come here. See this long ridgeline? That’s Turkey Mountain. We’re right here in this draw.”

  “Excellent. How long until we have a pack of dogs on us?”

  “Dogs? With all the rain and water we went through? Nah.”

  “I was dreaming about dogs. Never mind no scent; they found us.”

  “Not yet they didn’t,” he said.

  “Then they came at us with a helicopter with a blinding searchlight on it.”

  “You can’t see anything from a helicopter in this stuff. Too many leaves and underbrush down here.”

  “Then I saw this long line of men with shotguns combing the woods with, like, little rabbits and foxes and raccoons scrambling over the rocks in front of them, and Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier splashing through the swamp.”

  “It takes time to organize a search like that. That’s something they might have operating tomorrow, but not this soon.”

  “You’ve got all the answers.”

  “I have no answers.”

  “Show me where we’re headed,” she said, leaning over the map.

  “Come midnight tonight, we walk a mile and a half out to the end of this ridge, across Mine Tor
ne Road, to the little pick and shovel there on the map. That’s Borrow Pit. That’s where we’re supposed to link up.”

  “With who? Stanfield?”

  “Stanfield.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Unfortunately he’s all we’ve got at this point. Should’ve thought of that along with a lot of other things, but I didn’t,” he said.

  “What if you had? What difference would that have made? We’re screwed. You didn’t think. I didn’t think, least of all about people getting killed. Whatever happened to the thing about nobody using their gun?”

  “People get scared.”

  “I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

  “Yeah, and maybe Elmer Fudd will get us out of here.”

  “Okay, what are we going to do, commander?”

  “Think.”

  “Oh, great. Think.”

  “You’ve got a big mouth.”

  “More Ranger stuff.”

  “Shut up. You got yourself into this. Don’t lay it on me.”

  “You’re the one who came up with this brilliant plan with the trucks and the guns and the napalm. Look at these blisters.”

  “I know a couple of guys back on the bridge who’d settle for blisters right now.”

  A sudden wave of sadness swept along her brow and lodged in her throat as a muffled sob. “I’m sorry. Yeah. Oh, God.” She took in a deep breath and allowed a long steadying exhale. “All right. Are you ever going to reveal your name to me?”

  “Cook.”

  “Hey!”

  “You don’t need to know my name. Okay. Christopher. Lou Christopher.”

  “Sydney Winkler. I already told you.”

  “Yeah, well, Sydney Winkler, we got ourselves into some deep tapioca here.”

  “I wish it were still dark,” she said.

  “The dark helps. It’s hard to move through this stuff at night; for them, too. If they’re out looking for us on foot already, they couldn’t have started before daybreak. There’s a lot of ground out there to be covered. Now that we’re out of that gorge, we could’ve gone in any direction. Even if they did have a line of men a mile long combing these mountains, they could never guarantee they’d find us with all of these little draws and swales. So they probably wouldn’t even do it. They have to be depending on active patrolling of the roads. They’re probably setting up checkpoints. Searching cars. Things like that.”

  “Which means we have to walk out of here.”

  “The plan calls for a linkup.”

  “The plan sucks. How does our contact get into the area with roadblocks set up all around? And how do we get past the cops after they pick us up; if they do?

  “The police can’t stop people from driving around the area. Besides, who exactly would they be looking for?”

  “Us.”

  “Not just us. How many of the others could they have found? How much could they know already? It’s only been a couple of hours.”

  “They have all of them. They know everything. They have the hostage.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He saw me. He saw you.”

  “He never saw our faces. We’ll just stick with the plan. It’s not much, but it’s all we have right now. We can’t speculate about all the possibilities without going crazy.”

  “I feel like I was hit by a truck.”

  “You look it.”

  “Don’t talk.”

  “Who cares? We’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Yeah, and everything’s going to be all right. Shit.”

  “We have to stick to the plan.”

  “The plan. The plan.”

  “Once we make the linkup, we’re going to have to rely on somebody else to get us out. I don’t see any other way right now.”

  “You’re gullible. You’re dangerous.”

  “Copeland and Stanfield don’t want us to be identified or caught any more than we do. If the cops pick us up and start interrogating, they and everybody else get implicated. That wouldn’t sit too well with the ‘lady’ as they say.”

  “What lady?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how you got into this to begin with. But it would be foolish for me to tell you who and what I know, just in case this doesn’t work out the way we want it to.”

  “What is that supposed to mean, for chrissake?”

  “I know for a fact that the people who got me into this thing will be very upset if they think there’s a chance that I’ll be naming people for the cops. The same goes for you. The less you know, the better off you are.”

  “Oh, God. I don’t like it. I don’t like this at all.”

  “It’s possibly not all that bad. If we make this linkup, then Copeland will know that we’re out of the hands of the police. He knows that we don’t want to go to jail. He has pretty good assurance that we’ll never choose to go to the police on our own later. And at this point there’s nothing to lead investigators from Bear Mountain Bridge to us.”

  “I know it sounds weird at a time like this but, like, I have to pee.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Watch out for poison ivy,” he said.

  Her feet were bare. She got up stiffly and picked her way through the rocks and underbrush up the draw.

  The sun, now fully up off the horizon, chased the drifting fog that still lay at the base of the hills. The leaves were fully turned. The mountains were painted in all the somber yellows and browns of fall. In their little draw, the cover was almost complete. The trees on the mountain still had most of their leaves and the rhododendron that grew thickly all around their hideout was dark green. The ground was rough. It was hard to find a place to sit without clearing the spot of rocks. Sydney was working her way back down the draw.

  “Hey, I think I heard some trucks or something down the mountain,” she said.

  “There are a lot of dirt roads that run all through here. They’re patrolling them on the chance they might catch us wandering along. That’s one thing I learned early: stay away from the roads.”

  “You really were a Ranger?”

  “Yes, I really was.”

  “Eat any snakes?”

  “Yeah, a rattler—not much meat on him. Let’s break out the rations. We’ve got sandwiches.”

  “God, I wish I’d sprung for a pizza way back there at the truck park.”

  “We’ll split one and save the other for later. My stomach isn’t going to let me rest until I give it something to work on.”

  They savored the sandwich.

  “So, you’ve done some hiking,” he said, recalling the Ames parking lot conversation.

  “All over. Camping too. We had these summer biking excursions. At Peddie School.”

  “Not exactly hiking,” he said.

  “Oh yes it was. For a week and a half, we’d ride and then stop and set up camp. Cooking out, sleeping on the mats, going on hikes through the woods. All over the place in Pennsylvania and Maryland.”

  “Peddie. I’ve heard of it. Your folks are pretty well off then.”

  “You could say that. From ninth grade on they boarded me there. Summers too.”

  “So, you’re a Jerseyite.”

  “By way of Chicago. Dad worked his way up through the telephone company, at Ameritech, then we moved on to ATT in Bernardsville.

  “Pretty area,” Lou said.

  “Yeah. But, not real happy times. They split and left.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “Sort of. I went from Peddie to Williams. Then back to Jersey for Ramapo College.”

  “Why Ramapo of all places?”

  “Williams booted me.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Sydney shifted to a spot where she could lean against a rock. Lou watched her move in efficient, purposeful spurts punctuated by long pauses where she just stared straight ahead at nothing at all.

  “I chose Williams,” she said. ”I’m really into biology and they have a great program.

  “It’s a good school.�
��

  “I worked with the professor who was mapping the brains of zebra finches.”

  “Wow. How’d he do that?”

  “She. Physically how? You don’t want to know,” Sydney said.

  With the sun up in the sky, it was warm enough for both of them to shed some more of their outer clothing to allow it to dry. Sydney hung her coat on a rhododendron bush and laid her socks out on the ground.