Chaingang

“My cabin is being watched. I think your house will be, if it isn't already. The phone may be bugged. You don't know who we're dealing with. There's no point in going to some motel. If somebody wanted to find either one of us, it would make their job too easy."

“But why would they want to? I don't—"

“Just trust me for now. Keep trusting me—okay?"

“Okay."

“Don't give up on me yet."

“I'm not giving up on you for a second, you nut case. I'd like to know what suddenly made you like this, though."

“I'll tell you. But first things first. We need a place to kind of hang out for a while. Think."

“We've got a little place at Whitetail. It's just a shack. No running water. We couldn't stay there—"

“Sure we could. It would be perfect. I didn't know you guys had a place out there."

“Sam bought it the second year we were married. As a little place to get away on the weekends. We ended up taking a couple of vacations there, we enjoyed it so much."

Mary felt absurdly vulnerable and uncharacteristically malleable. She realized that for years now she'd let Sam make so many decisions for their mutual welfare, trusting him to shield her, to make her world safe. Suddenly she was plunged into something that had torn that world apart, and her knight in shining armor had been replaced by a man she didn't really know. “A cocaine dealer,” Marty Kerns had called him.

“I hope you know what you're getting us into,” she said to Royce, smiling to take the barbs out of it. Her teeth were small, well formed, and the front teeth were as prettily white as an actor's cap job. Royce wanted to put his arm around and lean over and stick his tongue in her mouth, and he knew the second he touched her, she'd be out of the ride and walking back home, and any chance they'd ever have would be over from that second.

“I hope so, too,” he said, thinking that it was pretty damn late to start worrying about little details like that now.

“Phew! Gross!” Mary screamed, fanning the air and opening wooden shutters.

“Home away from home."

“I told you it was just a shack."

“You think this is a shack...” he laughed, “...you should see my place.” Maybe we will sometime.

“We need to talk about something.” She pointed to the bed, and he read her mind, or thought he did.

“No sweat. We can hang a sheet or something. I'll put my sleeping bag over there. We'll build a fire. It'll work out fine."

“Okay,” she said, very unsure and more so all the time. Here they were cut off from the world. No running water. No stove. Worse yet—no telephone anywhere around for miles.

“As soon as you get your stuff unpacked, we need to get to work on our overall plan,” he told her. He'd decided she was about to fall apart on him, and he wanted to keep her game as tight as he could. “We're going to need each other now, Mary. I won't kid you. This may get hairy."

“All right,” she sighed. But she finished getting her things put away, and after lugging some firewood in, he made a mark on the crude wooden trestle table in the center of the room.

“Here we are. There's the rock quarry. Okay? Here—” he swept his arm in a half circle “—is the back edge of what's supposed to be Ecoworld. Right? That's where we're going tonight."

“Why?"

“Recon. Take a nice quiet look-see. Something's wrong with that deal. The first thing we're going to do is find out what the hell's going on. Are you game?"

“I'm game, aw'right,” she said. “I just don't understand."

“Right.” So far he was doing one great job keeping her out of any danger. The first thing they were going to do was break into a construction site.

“I want you to look at my notes. I'm not sure they prove a damn thing,” he said. “But I don't have any better starting places, and no matter how many times I run World Ecosphere, Inc., through my head, I set off some kind of buzzer. It stinks. The whole deal."

“I'll admit it never made a lot of sense. Even when Sam was so excited about the fortune we were making on it."

“Who are the people involved with the land deal? What are their links, if any, to the other missing or murdered persons in this area?” He pointed to a hand-lettered list of names, the names connected with curving arrows.

“Who is investigating each of these cases of missing men and women, and who is investigating the violent deaths? Look at the jurisdictional breakdowns. The amount of known follow-up within our community. We're a town of six hundred and change—okay? We know when the heat is shining us on.

“What are the suspicious elements that keep pointing back to a possible involvement by the Ecoworld guys?” He pointed to a two-page summary he'd put together. “Read it."

She started reading it, and he said, “Read it out loud,” wanting to hear his thoughts played back to him. Maybe he'd think of something they'd overlooked. She began reading slowly:

“* Adult men and women—disappearing. Links? Geography. Land deal.

* Adult men and women—murdered. Links? None known.

* Adult men and women—violent deaths. Murders? Links? None known. No proof of crime.