Presidio by Randy Kennedy

Author:Randy Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

FIVE

Harlan stood with his forehead pressed against the lower half of the glass on the station wagon’s driver’s-side window. He yelled out again, to no one visible. His voice rolled over the morning, unanswered.

“Nobody in her, Troy! She’s empty. Ain’t a soul down here!”

The sun had crested, but the raking light hid more than it revealed, throwing deep shadows behind the car and up the ridge.

At the first sound that had jolted them from sleep—the unmistakable sound of a car almost on top of them—Troy’s first instinct had been to run and leave everything behind, Harlan included, and in the near-darkness he had tried to pick out a path along the ridge that would conceal him without running him into the silt. But when he had looked to find Harlan he saw that his brother was already in full motion heading the other direction—the wrong direction—clamping his hat to the top of his head as he ran. Before Troy could yell to stop him, he was more than halfway to the bottom of the slope, loping down in a graceless crouch like someone trying to avoid being shot after realizing too late that he was fully exposed.

Based on what had sounded like a lone vehicle, a heavy one, Troy had calculated that it wasn’t the law but a wetback hand, maybe a farmer himself, out before daybreak to check irrigation pivots. But even if that were true, even if he could talk them out of the encounter, it wouldn’t matter because they’d be seen and word would spread faster than they could outrun.

Troy had drifted into a light sleep just before daybreak and he felt heavy and disoriented as he tried to put his body into motion. He patted his coat jacket for his papers and wallet and stumbled into his boots, hopping toward a stand of arrowhead that hemmed the lake for a hundred feet curving south. He didn’t know how to move on foot in the daylight; he’d never been on the run without a car. He thought about Harlan: Harlan running out into the open like that because he had clearly decided in the light of a new day that he was finished with what was happening to him. Whatever lay at the bottom of the hill, sheriff, farmer, hunter, hand—the devil himself—was preferable to present company. And Troy couldn’t blame him. But he knew that Harlan wouldn’t be able to do otherwise than tell everything.

Troy plunged into the grass through a gale of bugs pelting his face and hands. He could still hear the sound of the vehicle below and in the time it had taken him to find cover the engine had grown so loud and pitched he thought it might actually be headed up the ridge toward him. But as suddenly as the sound mounted, it fell off and died out completely after a series of staccato horn bursts that confused him and made him wonder if something more dangerous wasn’t down there after all, parties exchanging signals.

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