Kitabı oku: «Wild Ways», sayfa 4

“You want to take this outside, pal?” Blackhorse loomed toward Carlson, his eyes hot with anger.

“Enough!” Meg’s shout cracked through the room like a pistol shot and everyone stared at her, startled into momentary silence. She ran both hands through her tangled hair, tempted to start pulling it out by the roots. “You guys sound just like my brothers! I’ve spent most of my life listening to them argue over who has the right to tell me what to do, and I stopped taking it from them and I’m sure not going to stand here and take it from you!” The last word was all but a shout and she caught herself and took a deep breath to calm down. “All of you back off, understand? Just…back off!”

“Hey, Meg,” Carlson said, clearly hurt. “I never meant anything by it. I was just—”

“Trying to take care of me, I know,” she said with forced patience. “Matt, what are you doing here? How did you know where I was?”

“We were in the air fifteen minutes after your call came in this afternoon,” Engler said, eyeing Blackhorse suspiciously. “We choppered in and met with Sheriff Haney—who is not a happy man, by the way. I strongly recommend you don’t go back there anytime soon.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Meg muttered. “Although it wasn’t me who shot up the bar.” This with a hostile look at Blackhorse.

“Anyway, we tracked you here.”

Meg’s heart sank. She’d been quite proud of the way she’d covered her tracks, but apparently she’d left a trail a mile wide. “How?” she asked wearily. “Where did I go wrong?”

Engler just looked at her. “The phone call, of course.”

“What phone call?” Meg wheeled around and looked at Reggie, who was trying to make himself invisible. “Reggie, what phone call?”

He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “Well, um…when you went out to the car, I…um…found your cell phone, and…um…”

“He called your brother in Chicago, wanting to talk to Honey. Grady called the Agency, saying something didn’t sound right and wanting to know what we were doing about it.”

Meg winced.

Engler looked across at her. “Meg, what did you think you were doing, coming after Dawes yourself? O’Dell’s fit to be tied.”

She winced again. “He, uh…knows by now. I guess.”

Carlson laughed. “Oh, yeah, he knows. He doesn’t believe it, but he knows.” He laughed again. “I’ve seen O’Dell mad before, but I’ve never seen him like this. You have gone down in the annals of Agency history, Meg. I wouldn’t give two cents for your future, but they’ll be talking about you for decades. You’ve elevated the lowly computer gnome to new heights. Trouble is, now every gnome in the place will want to play field agent and the rest of us will be out of work.”

Meg flushed slightly. “Look, I…uh…”

“Gnome?” Blackhorse had been listening to all this intently, and he looked at her now, eyes narrowed. “You’re a gnome?”

“I am a Computer Information Retrieval Specialist,” she said a trifle defensively.

Blackhorse just stared at her, seemingly unable to comprehend what he was hearing.

“She’s one of the best,” Carlson said blithely. “Although after O’Dell’s finished with you, Meg, you’ll be lucky to have a job counting paper clips. Everyone thought you were on vacation, then we get this phone call from some hicksville sheriff in South Dakota—”

“North,” Engler put in. “North Dakota.”

“Whatever. This sheriff says he has someone in custody who claims to be one of our agents. That said agent was involved in a shootout in a bar involving a Nevada cop—” this with a distasteful glance at Blackhorse “—a thug called Pags Pagliano and a pipsqueak calling himself Reggie Dawes.” This elicited a huff of indignation from Reggie, but Carlson ignored it. “I happened to be closest to O’Dell’s office when the call was routed through to him.” He winced at the memory. “As I said, Engler and I were on a chopper fifteen minutes later and another team was dispatched to your brother’s place to pick up Honey.”

“Is she okay?” Reggie hovered in the background worriedly.

“She’s fine,” Meg snapped. “I told you, my brother’s a cop.”

“She’s fine,” Carlson echoed. He looked at Meg with a shake of his head. “O’Dell’s mighty peeved about that, too, Meg. You know how he hates it when we get civilians involved. You should have sent Honey to an Agency safe house instead of involving your own family.”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Not to mention the fact you didn’t have the authority,” Engler said calmly. “Seeing as you’re out here playing field agent games you haven’t been trained for, on an assignment that doesn’t exist.”

Meg flushed again. “The only way Reggie would come with me was if I could guarantee Honey’s safety. I knew sending her to stay with Grady was as good as putting her in any safe house. Maybe better.”

“Wait a minute.” Blackhorse held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Run that by me again? She’s out here on an assignment that doesn’t exist?”

Carlson gave him a dark look. “What police force did you say you were with? Nevada? Kind of out of your jurisdiction, wouldn’t you say?”

Blackhorse ignored him. “You’re saying you clowns let a gnome with no field training come out here and—”

“I took the training!”

“—handle this non-assignment all on her own, without adequate backup or—”

“She didn’t tell anybody what she was doing,” Carlson protested. “She was on vacation! It wasn’t until—” He caught himself abruptly. “Hey, don’t I know you? I know you from somewhere.”

Meg had her mouth open to tell Carlson exactly who Blackhorse was, then subsided, recalling the expression on Rafe’s face when he’d spoken about the Agency. Rafe gave her a quick look, seemingly surprised by her silence.

“Special Agent Rafe Blackhorse,” Engler said suddenly. He stared at Rafe in blank disbelief. “You’re dead!”

“You’re kidding!” Carlson took another look at Rafe, staring hard at him. “Well, I’ll be…it is you! But Engler’s right. You’re dead.”

“Do I look dead?” Rafe asked sourly.

Carlson flushed. “I was in the West Coast office when all that went down. I just heard that you—” He bit it off.

“Ate your gun,” Engler put in helpfully. “Guess the story wasn’t true, then, huh?”

“Guess not, Einstein.”

It gave Meg such a jolt that she simply stared at Rafe, trying to remember everything she’d heard about him. Suicide? Surely she would have remembered that. “I heard…” She frowned, struggling to haul the memory up from the depths of her mind. “I heard it was in the line of duty.”

“They always say that,” Carlson said. “O’Dell doesn’t like it when his agents off themselves. Figures it reflects badly on him. So unless you commit hari kari in front of the Lincoln Memorial at high noon with press and television, it’s kept pretty quiet.”

“You’ve been alive all this time,” Engler said quietly, as though not quite believing it. “Why all the secrecy?”

“It was a cover story of some sort, wasn’t it?” Carlson put in with sudden understanding. “And you’ve been working for O’Dell all this time. So that’s why you turned up here, helping Meg.” He grinned with relief.

Engler was still staring at Rafe. “That true? You still on the payroll?”

“Wish I’d known that beforehand, because I don’t mind telling you, I was a little scared of what we were going to find.” Carlson scrubbed his fingers through his short, brown hair. “Ruffio and Stepino have both got their soldiers out looking for Dawes. I was sure you were dead.”

“You’re hell bent on seeing someone dead, aren’t you?” Rafe muttered. “And I’m not working undercover. Agent Kavanagh and I just sort of ran into each other, is all. I quit the Agency cold two years ago.”

“But you were taking care of her.” Engler just stared at him.

Rafe glanced at Meg. His gaze held hers for a long moment. “She was taking care of herself just fine. I was ready to pull out when you guys showed up.”

“But…” Carlson looked from one to the other of them, clearly puzzled.

“Mr. Blackhorse is a…private investigator,” Meg put in smoothly, ignoring Rafe’s raised eyebrow. “He…um…became embroiled in the situation when Pagliano tried to kill Reggie this afternoon, and he kindly offered to…assist me.”

Reggie was looking shell-shocked. “I don’t understand any of this,” he whispered. “You mean she isn’t an agent at all?”

“She’s an Agency employee, just not a field agent,” Engler said with a disapproving look at Meg. “She had no authority to bring you in, and no business being out here without proper training.”

“I had the training,” Meg repeated heatedly. “Okay, so I didn’t complete it, exactly, but I didn’t need the underwater demolition stuff or the advanced military armament stuff or all that pilot or parachute training stuff, either. And, okay, I didn’t spend two years as an intern, playing second banana to the agent in charge. But I found Reggie when no one else could. And I convinced him to come in. And I was bringing him in just fine.”

“But…why?” Carlson shook his head. “That’s what I don’t understand, Meg. You’ve never said anything to me about wanting to be a field agent. And you know how O’Dell feels about women in the field.”

“I wanted to prove he’s wrong,” she said flatly. “The man’s twenty years behind the times! If I can prove I can do the job, he can’t keep me out. I’d been following Reggie’s case from the beginning, and when he disappeared with O’Dell’s money and no one was able to find him, I decided it was the perfect opportunity. It only took me a couple of days to track him down with our computers, and I…” She shrugged and looked at Reggie. “Reg, I’m sorry. I’ve been lying to you, but it really was for your own good.”

“So does this mean I’m not really in custody?”

“No!” Carlson and Engler exclaimed in unison, and Reggie sat down, looking gloomy.

“It was crazy,” Carlson muttered. “You could have been killed, Meg. Why not just put your application in and see if—” Abruptly, he stopped. Frowning, he blew his cheeks out, looking at her sadly. “Oh. Bobby.”

“My brother died in the field,” Meg said with quiet intensity, “and I want to know why.”

“Meg…” Engler lifted his hand, then let it fall to his side again. “Damn it, Meg, we’ve been over this a hundred times.”

She lifted her chin slightly. “And like I’ve said a hundred times, Adam, I don’t believe that Bobby got sloppy. That he lost his edge and it got him killed. Something happened out there that night.”

“I was on Bobby’s team,” Engler reminded her gently. “Nothing happened that night that wasn’t in my report. And I’ve been over it and over it with you.”

“Except you weren’t with him the night it happened.” Meg looked at him evenly. “He was set up, Adam. I know that as certainly as I know you don’t want to believe it. Bobby was a good field agent. He told me that he suspected someone on the team was dirty and you’ve admitted he talked to you about it!”

“And I told him he was wrong,” Engler said gently. “Meg, your brother had been working deep under cover for almost six months. Things…happen to a man who’s been out of touch with the real world for that long. He’s so used to suspecting everyone he’s working with that he starts to see conspiracies and threats around every corner.”

“Bobby was the most grounded, real person I’ve ever known. He was not imagining things!”

“Meg, I don’t know what happened to Bobby that night, but it was no double cross. No one blew his cover. I’m sorry he’s dead—he was a good agent and a friend of mine. But O’Dell’s closed the case down because there’s no evidence to keep it open. Good men die stupid deaths, Meg. I’m sorry, but it happens.”

“Not to my brother, it didn’t,” she said with quiet intensity.

Engler started to say something, then thought better of it and subsided, frowning.

“He was double-crossed,” Meg said savagely. “By one of our agents. Then he was murdered to keep him quiet. O’Dell won’t investigate because he doesn’t believe me, but I darn well intend to find out who killed Bobby if it’s the last thing I ever do. And if O’Dell won’t make me a full field agent, then I’ll quit and do it on my own!”

Engler exchanged a quick look with Carlson, and Meg bit back an angry oath, knowing they were thinking the same thing everyone else at the Agency thought. Word had it that Bobby had slipped up and gotten himself and another agent killed, and that she couldn’t accept the truth. That she’d come up with this preposterous idea that it had been another agent who had double-crossed and ambushed Bobby and his partner. Conspiracy plot, they called it behind her back, smiling knowingly amongst themselves. Even O’Dell was tired of listening to her.

She shook her head angrily and stalked across to the bed, starting to shove her things willy-nilly into her small suitcase. “Reg, saddle up! We’re leaving.” She shot Engler a cool look. “I presume you two are here to escort Reg and me back to Washington.”

“Well, actually, Matt’s going to take Reg to Washington.” Engler managed to look mildly embarrassed. “My orders are to escort you back to Virginia ASAP. From this room to O’Dell’s office, no stops between.”

“I’m not going back to Virginia until I know Reg is safe. I gave my word.”

“No problem. There’s an Agency jet sitting on the tarmac out at the airport with its engines hot and two more agents aboard for backup. I’ll let you walk on and buckle him in, if you like.”

“How are you and I getting back?”

“Military chopper.” Engler smiled slightly. “O’Dell’s private stock. You’re getting the royal treatment.”

“O’Dell’s little joke, giving me the royal treatment to my own firing squad.” Meg mustered up a rough smile. She looked at Rafe for a moment, then walked across and held out her hand. “Well, Mr. Blackhorse, it’s been…instructional. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure, exactly, but I appreciate your help. And I’m sorry about your…arrangement with the other party. Give him my regrets, will you?”

To her surprise, Rafe actually smiled. His hand folded around hers, warm and incredibly gentle. “It has been a pleasure, Special Agent Mary Margaret Kavanagh. Like I said, you’re one of a kind.”

“CIR Specialist Mary Margaret Kavanagh,” Meg said with a sigh. “And I meant what I said about appreciating your help, even if it wasn’t exactly what you intended. I’ll keep all your advice in mind. In case I ever need it again. You ought to think about billing O’Dell for your in-field training services.”

His fingers tightened slightly, encasing hers in gentle warmth. “You take care of yourself, Agent Kavanagh.”

Then he drew his hand from hers slowly, letting his fingers linger on hers for a moment before releasing them completely.

She nodded again, then just smiled and gathered up her suitcase, glancing around the room to make sure she had everything. Carlson was helping Reggie get his things together in the other room, and she could hear them squabbling already.

She walked outside with Engler, taking a deep breath of night air.

“Hey. You. Engler.”

Rafe’s voice caught Engler just as he was opening the door of his rental car for Meg. He stiffened and Meg saw his hand move fractionally toward his weapon.

She looked around sharply. Rafe was just standing there, tall and calm-eyed in the moonlight, hands loose at his sides.

Engler turned slowly. “What?”

“Tell O’Dell she did just fine out here. Handled herself better than most men I’ve seen with twice the training.”

Engler looked as surprised as Meg felt. She stared at Rafe in amazement.

“She stayed one step ahead of me for almost a week, and when I did catch up to her, she drew down on me like an old-timer, cool as water. Tell him that.”

“Yeah, okay.” Engler looked at Meg with renewed respect. “I’ll tell him that.”

Rafe nodded, then touched his forehead in a lazy salute, his eyes holding Meg’s. “S’long, Irish.”

“I…yeah…” she stammered, feeling suddenly flustered for no reason. His gaze was as warmly intimate as a caress, as though they’d been sharing a lot more than barbed threats half the night, and she sensed more than saw Engler look at her curiously. “I, um…so…long.”

“Well, if that doesn’t beat everything.” Carlson had joined them in time to hear the whole exchange and was standing there with his mouth open, watching Rafe stride away. “Meg, you just got a five-star recommendation from a legend! Man, wait’ll O’Dell hears about this!”

Chapter 4

Mary Margaret Kavanagh was still on his mind three weeks later.

And Rafe was not happy about it.

It was irritating as hell to be thinking about her at all, for a start. But to have her on his mind here, up on Bear Mountain, really ticked him off.

Until now, he’d managed to keep the outside world from intruding up here. His fortress from reality, his sister had called it. She’d used a lot of phrases like that once, shouting them at him as though trying to pierce armorplate with words. But it wasn’t a fortress, just a quiet retreat from the clamor and clang of a world that seemed increasingly irrelevant.

Up here there was nothing but him and the sky and the wind and the mountain itself, its granite roots planted deep in the planet’s heart. It was silent, save for the moan of the wind and the occasional scream of an eagle, and as clean as bone, scoured by that ever-present wind.

Everything was reduced to its simplest form, all softness and artifice and weakness gone until only the core remained. Even the stunted trees had been stripped of nonessentials until they were more like polished stone than living things, gray and hard and elemental, all but unkillable. Tree-thing at its most fundamental level, like the rock and the sky.

Like him.

It had saved him, this mountain. Like the rocks and the twisted trees, he’d been scoured down to his most elemental self until all that was left was hard and pure. He’d come up here almost two years ago intending to kill himself. Eight months before, he’d drunk himself into a stupor and had stayed that way, trying to blot out the memories. But it had never worked. And finally, too exhausted by guilt and pain to go on, he’d decided to stop even trying.

He’d had some plan, he supposed, although he’d never been able to remember it. Later, he’d found the unloaded pistol where it had dropped from his bourbon-numbed fingers, so maybe that had been it. Whatever he’d planned, he’d managed to screw it up, too drunk to put thought into action. Instead, he’d fallen into a pile of boulders near the summit and had lain there for days, drifting in and out of consciousness, soaked by rain and heavy dew at night, burned dry by an unforgiving sun during the day.

He still had no idea how long he’d lain there. Long enough to kill most men, he suspected. Long enough to kill him had he not been so pickled in bourbon. He remembered licking dew from stone, the taste bitter in his mouth. Remembered waking once and seeing clumps of blueberries hanging just above him, growing where no blueberries grew. Knowing they were nothing more than a hallucination, he reached up with fingers that seemed unattached to his body and picked them and ate them, the juice as sweet as wine. Remembered finding apples. Like the blueberries, they were out of place and out of time—it was spring, not fall, and there wasn’t an apple tree for a hundred miles in any direction. But, hallucination or not, he ate them and they were sweet.

He remembered watching the slow spiral of an eagle as it hung in an updraft a hundred feet above him, giant wings unmoving. He talked to it; he remembered that, too. Babbling things he’d never spoken aloud before, shouting his rage to the sky. He remembered screaming threats to God and man alike. Remembered retching dryly for hour after hour, stomach cramping so painfully he could hardly breathe as the wind and sun worked eight months of cheap booze from his system. Remembered weeping finally, exhausted and empty and at the end.

He’d simply let go then, he remembered. Content to lie there and drift into a final sleep, relinquishing control to whatever forces had kept him alive that far. Something had been there, with him, at the end. Real but not real, just a presence half-seen, a Spirit Warrior keeping silent, still watch. And thus watched, he’d slept finally, slipping down into that kind of deep, dreamless renewing sleep that had eluded him for the better part of a year.

He’d awakened just before dawn, chilled to the bone, and had sat up slowly, sober for the first time in months. Everything was still, the crystalline air so pure and cold it hurt to breathe. The sky was the color of skim milk, still dotted by stars and streaked with peach in the east, and he had sat there, shivering uncontrollably, and had realized with surprise that he was alive. Purified inside and out by wind and rain and sun, as smoothed and polished and hard as an obsidian blade.

The sun had risen, warming him a little, and he’d gotten unsteadily to his feet, feeling as delicate and untethered as a cloud, and had stumbled light-headed and shivering down to the trailer. He had no idea where the key was—he’d locked it up after Stephanie had been killed and had never been back—so he just pried the door open and rummaged around until he found some clean, dry clothes. Then he’d gone up to the spring, stripped naked and dived into the icy water, coming up sputtering and breathless and shocked fully awake.

He’d gathered his old clothes up into a pile and burned them, then had cut his hair and burned that, too. He’d made it a ceremony of sorts, tossing a little tobacco into the flames to thank whatever spirits had held him back from dying, smiling at his own whimsy.

His pickup truck was still in a ditch about a mile down the trail where he’d run it into a tree. He’d winched it out, driven it up to the small meadow where the trailer was and cleaned it up, tossing out the empty bottles and then scrubbing out the stink of vomit and stale sweat and despair.

He’d started running the next day. It had nearly killed him at first. He would run twenty feet and stagger the next twenty, pouring with sweat and cursing with the pain as every muscle in his body knotted. But after a week or two the twenty feet stretched to fifty, then a hundred, and then he suddenly broke through and was running like a deer. He ran without thought or purpose those first few months, just pounding down the miles like someone trying to outrun his own demons, and maybe that was what he had been doing.

The healing started sometime during those months. His mind became as lean and healthy as his body, and soon he’d found himself thinking of the future again. Not long-range. Just a day or two at first. But, as with his physical endurance, that got stronger with time and practice, as well. Soon he was planning a whole week ahead, then the week stretched to a month, and somewhere along the line, without even realizing when it had happened, he was thinking in terms of years.

But until now, those thoughts had been solitary ones. Simple things, mostly, like what kind of water pump to buy when he realized the old one was finally beyond repair, and the best direction to angle the woodshed to keep the snow from blowing straight in, things like that. Now and again he would take on a retrieval job, adding his fee to the pile of fifty-dollar bills hidden behind the paneling in his bedroom closet, but mostly he stayed to himself up here.

There was always something to do. Repairing leaks in the trailer’s sunbaked hide alone was almost a full-time job, the generator needed regular tune-ups, and there were books to read and wood to chop. It was a simple life, physical and free of the complexities and confusions and complications of the outside world, and he liked it just fine that way.

Until Mary Margaret Kavanagh had starting turning up in his thoughts for no reason he could figure, and suddenly things weren’t the same at all.

Swearing under his breath, Rafe turned the key in the truck’s ignition. The engine caught instantly and he gunned it a few times, listening carefully. He’d spent the better part of the morning tuning it up and was finally pleased with the way it sounded, although there had been nothing much wrong with it in the first place. He’d blown out the fuel line, replaced a couple of hoses and put in new spark plugs, and short of stripping the thing down to basics and starting all over again, there wasn’t much more he could do.

Filling time. Trying not to think of her.

He refused to let his mind wrap itself around the syllables of her name. He’d been doing that a little too often, too. Her name was like a line of poetry or a bit of music he couldn’t get out of his head, and now and again he would realize he’d been running it over and over in his thoughts like some tribal chant, the rhythm of the words almost hypnotic.

Mary Margaret Kavanagh.

Hell of a mouthful. Maybe her parents had hoped she would grow into it.

He grinned in spite of himself, letting himself savor the memory of her in those spandex pants and that white sweater that kept slip-sliding off one smooth shoulder, then the other, and those wide blue eyes. And maybe even better was the memory of her in the motel later that day, round little backside upholstered in soft denim, small breasts no more than a tantalizing hint under her sweatshirt, sex appeal less blatant but no less potent.

His grin widened before he could stop it and he gave his head a weary shake. Sex wasn’t something he thought of a whole lot. Mainly because if he thought about it too much he was tempted to do something about it. And although there were women aplenty down in the world who would have been more than glad to help take the edge off—some for free, others not—there was something too clinical in that kind of release for his taste. So except for a lapse of judgment or two, he stuck to cold showers and hard work.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

Lately, it didn’t seem to be having the desired effect at all. He’d taken up running again, but even that didn’t always work, and sometimes he just took care of it himself with the wry thought that, as far as sex went, anyway, things had been a lot simpler when he’d been drunk twenty-four hours a day.

He would be minding his own business, thinking about something else altogether, and suddenly he’d find himself remembering the way she’d felt against him when he’d held her captive against the side of her car that night, cat-supple and erotically curved and contoured. About the heat and satin of her skin against his fingers and the taste of her breath, the scent of her hair. At night the remembering would translate itself into dreams so hot and graphically sexual that he would wake up in physical pain, on fire with a want so fierce it felt like being flayed alive.

And sometimes on those nights the physical want would get all tangled up in an aching want of a different kind, and then the memories would surge over him no matter how hard he tried to keep them at bay. Those were the nights when he would get up and run for hours, because it was either run or stay there in the dark, with the thought inching ever nearer that all it would take was one bullet and a steady hand to stop all those memories for good.

And thinking things like that was less productive than thinking about Mary Margaret Kavanagh. Rafe swore at himself again—out loud and with considerable feeling this time—and gave the ignition key an angry twist to shut the engine off. He swung out of the truck and walked around to slam the hood down, then started putting his tools away.

Three, the old three-legged dog he’d found in a ditch last year and had never gotten around to getting rid of, was barking at something down the road and Rafe shouted at him to shut the hell up, in a foul mood suddenly. The barking paused, then resumed again, and Rafe swore at the old dog under his breath. And then he heard the car.

It startled him, getting caught flat-footed like that. Swearing, he grabbed his tool kit and headed for the trailer at a fast run. He’d gotten sloppy. And that damned woman had something to do with it! She’d knocked his timing and instincts all to hell and gone, and here he was halfway to being ambushed on his own mountain and his head was still full of her.

The old silver Airstream was comfortably cool and it took a moment for Rafe’s eyes to adapt from full sunlight to dimness, but he didn’t need to be able to see to find what he was looking for. The rifle was in the cabinet where it was supposed to be and he grabbed it—no need to see if it was loaded—and walked back to the open door, staying just inside.

There was only one way to approach the trailer and that was straight across the hot, bright clearing. Anyone coming that way would be in full sunlight, half blinded by the glare of the sun off the trailer, and wouldn’t see Rafe until he was ready to be seen.

The car growled up the last slope and eased itself into the open, wallowing across the ruts like a scow in heavy water. It was coated with dust, and flares of drying mud covered its flanks and grill, and there was a nasty dent on the left front where the paint had been scraped off. It settled to a stop about sixty feet from the trailer and after a moment the driver turned off the engine. Rafe stayed motionless, waiting to see what was going to happen.

Odds were it was nothing. Some lost tourist—he got one or two a year—or climbers or hikers who either hadn’t seen or had ignored the No Trespassing signs at the bottom of the road. Or some New Age guru looking for magic rocks or the secret to enlightenment or some blasted thing. He never quite knew what it was they expected to find up here, but he usually humored them long enough to give them some enlightenment of his own—specifically, the meaning of those big Private Property signs nailed to trees along the road—and then sent them on their merry way.