Smugglers Notch Read online

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, and began to sniffle.

  St. Germain pushed himself to his feet. With a hand on her shoulder he moved away from the outhouse, then walked into the snow on his own. “Come with me.” He opened the ambulance, climbed in after her, tilted a light over a stainless steel tray crammed with small bottles and racks of ampules.

  “It was horrible,” she said without being asked. “He robbed the store and shot one of the other men, the one who wasn’t mean to me, and then this nice old couple drove up and he shot them, too, and took their station wagon. The deputies got his friends and his brother, so he killed them … I’m glad about his friends.” She was blushing, the redness surging to her drained cheeks. “They were going to … to hurt me.”

  St. Germain tore the wrapper from a gauze pad and bandaged her arm. He removed a handful of shells from the gun belt and placed them in the .38.

  “He did that, too,” Brenda said.

  “What?”

  “When we went in the police car. He found a bunch of red cardboard things, and he put two in the shotgun and the rest in his pockets.”

  St. Germain loosened his gun belt and tugged his pants below his hips. The cords in his neck bulged as he spilled a dark vial into the wound. The girl helped tape his thigh, blushing each time her fingers came in contact with his skin. When she was done, he stamped his foot as if the heel had come loose from his shoe. “It’ll do,” he said, and went into the front of the ambulance.

  The radio crackled with faint bursts of chatter, the signal from Stowe blocked by the high peaks. He made out a few words of French, then a blast of static, then a clear call for volunteers to fight a barn fire in Au Sable Forks in the Adirondacks. But he would be glad for whatever help he could raise. He turned up the volume and began scanning the band, and when the girl slid between the seats to watch him, he gave her the microphone.

  “We have to keep trying till we reach somebody,” he told her. “Just call hello, hello. If anyone answers, tell them where we are and what we’re up against. Have them send troopers to Smugglers Notch.”

  The girl depressed a black button on the mouthpiece. “Like this?”

  “Uh-huh.” St. Germain hurried into the back and unlocked the door with Brenda right behind.

  “What are you doing?” In alarm her voice was small and querulous, fitting the childish face.

  “I’m going to see if I can drive the ambulance off the Notch. But before we get started, I have to check around, chase him away if he’s still out there with the shotgun. Besides, I want …”

  “Yes?”

  “I … it has to be done,” he said. “I have to.”

  “Can’t we wait till they come get us? I’m scared.”

  “Till you talk to them, no one knows we’re here, Brenda.” The girl brushed her sleeve under her nose, and then he took her hands and tugged them around his hips so she was looking straight at him. “This is important,” he said. “I want you to lock yourself in. If anything happens, if there’s gunfire or you don’t hear my voice, don’t open the door. Got it?”

  “Yes. But what if he shoots you? What do I do then?”

  He dropped her hands. Ask my wife, he wanted to say; she has plans for that kind of thing.

  Standing on the bumper, he looked around the Notch. Faded snowshoe tracks on the eastern face showed the way to the Long Trail. He put a foot in the snow, expecting to hear the shotgun before he could bring down the other, then began inching alongside the ambulance. When he came even with the window he watched the girl stare helplessly at the radio, then reach over to lock the door. Seeing him, she grabbed for the handle instead. As the dome light came on, a yellow flash lit up the scrub across the brook and lead pellets hailed against the driver’s side. St. Germain fell back and crawled between the wheels, the girl’s agitated footsteps reverberating overhead. “Get down, Brenda,” he shouted at her. “And shut the damn—” Another shot, closer, kicked snow in his face; the air began to hiss out of the tire closest to him. The undercarriage brushed his spine, and he scurried out and crouched behind the body of the Ford as the light finally went off inside. Footprints he hadn’t noticed before angled back into the cliffs. In the darkness there appeared to be blood in them.

  He backed away, keeping the ambulance between himself and the boy. Where a solitary oak offered cover, he ran to the edge of the stream. The banks were at least five feet apart, too far to jump on his injured thigh. He put his foot down tentatively, planted it on the ice, and then came around with the bad leg, sprawling as it buckled under his full weight. He clambered off on his hands and knees and continued into a jumble of boulders the size of Volkswagens. An unexpended shotgun shell in a blob of red restored his confidence, and he allowed himself a moment to knead the throbbing in his leg.

  The wind nudged bits of cloud over Old Smugglers Face, trapping them between stunted pines. St. Germain tugged his collar around his throat, buttoned it. He tried to picture what Conklin was wearing, but he had been too busy shooting to have noticed. Still rubbing his wound, he limped out of the boulders. A carpet of loose rock opened beneath him, and icy water deadened his leg to the knee. As he scrambled to the cliff, every shadow was a cave where the boy might be hiding. His injured leg was burning again, the other numb, with a brick for a foot. How, he wanted to know, was Conklin maintaining the pace, leaking blood all over the Notch? He skirted a pine stand too dense to see into. On the far side the boy’s trail continued unbending, the sinuous track of a fisher weaving it into a crude figure four.

  Away from the trees he was a bull’s-eye in brown. He moved quickly, but with caution, not getting ahead of himself. A fallen maple blocked his way, and he had to use both hands to bring his leg over the trunk. The moon highlighted mountain ash growing straight up out of the cliffs. He sent a probing shot skyward, and as he waited for return fire he thought of the chase on Lake Champlain, the situation the same now except the roles were reversed. Or were they? He calculated the likelihood that Conklin was playing him on slack line, measured the odds in cold sweat that stuck his shirt to his back. Clutching his thigh, he dashed toward sharp boulders heaped like steppingstones against the dripping cliff, sixteen in all that ended in a fall of broken rock, the trail evaporating as though the boy had burrowed into the talus and pulled the hole in after him. But then he saw the blood again, more—much more—than before, and any doubt that he’d been suckered was dispelled as the long gun went off from above. Two guessing bullets answered for him as a second blast chiseled quartz chips into his cheek, and he turned to kiss the face of the cliff.

  But Conklin was perched where no bullet would find him till hell froze over, or till they both did. St. Germain looked too long at a flash of white on a stone shelf, and a boulder the shape of a football nearly smashed into his teeth. Another large rock rumbled down, taunting laughter after it. “Still with me?” the boy called out.

  The overhang provided cover while he reloaded. He brought up the .38, aimed it with his ear. The bullet soared along the cliff wall, rousting the ravens in the crags.

  “That’s what I thought,” Conklin said.

  As St. Germain poked his head from under the shelf, the shotgun discharged and the pain in his leg reasserted itself in his shoulder, so crisp and hard-edged in the frigid air that he would have sworn he counted three pellets against the bone. Spasms of nausea swept over his body, and to keep from losing the revolver he had to squeeze it with both hands, wrap it in his chest.

  “Careless of you, Larr.” The voice was husky, distant, as if it had traveled far just to reach the boy’s lips. “Like last time.”

  Worse than last time, St. Germain was thinking, stupider and without the excuse of having been taken by surprise. He put his hand to his shoulder and then plunged it in snow, washed away the blood before he could look at it. Ten million times he had replayed the night at Malletts Bay, rearranging events, casting them till they came out right—his reward never the absolution he craved, but a triumph in his mind
that repetition had made more real than his disgrace on the ice. And now, improbably given a second crack at the boy, he’d blown it, Conklin’s toy again. He wanted to cut down the shelf, rattle the cliff till Conklin dropped into his lap, and crush him. Forced to consider his actual prospects, he concluded that they were nil unless Brenda had the good sense to try for help.

  But he knew it was pointless to expect anything of her, that she would remain in the ambulance, still Conklin’s prisoner—as he still was—until one of them came for her. The wind hurtled through the Notch again, pushing cold air over the cliff, and he stamped his feet on his tiny platform and then swept the walls for a handhold, anything better than staying here to freeze.

  His dead toes found a V-shaped cranny in the cliff, the pain dispersing through his system as he inched above the platform. He scraped the other foot against the wall, but the rock was smooth and impregnable, and he would have fallen if his fingers hadn’t caught in a tangle of broken roots. Using only his arms, he raised himself the length of his body. He was moving straight up in a way he didn’t believe was possible, so that he would have said a fly on a windowpane had nothing on him.

  An overhang with a mossy underside blocked most of the moonlight, the darkness on his shoulders like a comforting blanket. He guessed he had twenty feet still to go, but most of it was easy, with toeholds he could spot even now. Then a jolt of pain paralyzed his legs, suspending him in mid-stride, and his breath came in wheezing bursts. When he reached for the trunk of a hemlock sapling, his fingers curled around something slippery, and he pulled back to see them colored with the boy’s blood. He grabbed the tree again. In his hurry to get moving he pried loose several stones, an avalanche sounding in his head as they rattled down the cliff.

  He craned above the overhang. He was clinging to a rim of wet rock that extended two feet out from a ridge of wind-whipped snow behind which he couldn’t see. As he brought his gun hand up, a foot swung over the snowy wall and stamped on the barrel of the .38. The twin muzzles of a shotgun came briefly into focus, then slammed between his eyes. He felt wetness running down his thigh, a moment of self-loathing until he realized his wound had opened again.

  “Don’t go anywhere, Larr. Be right with you.”

  The voice seemed strained, its jauntiness artificial. And when the boy stepped over the barricade, looking more bleached than a year in prison would explain, St. Germain saw that he was wearing only a thin T-shirt splotched with blood.

  Conklin followed his gaze, tugged the sticky cloth from his side. “Lucky shot,” he said. “Move your hand away. Leave the gun where it is.”

  But St. Germain had taken that advice before, and he tightened his grip. Conklin stood heavily on his knuckles and began to grind them into the rock. “I can keep this up all night if you want. Your choice.”

  Except he had no choice. His hand opened on its own and Conklin kicked away the gun, then stepped back to give him room to climb up. The shelf was larger than he had expected, fifteen feet wide and almost as deep, much of it under a sheet of meltwater that stirred with the wind.

  Conklin went behind the wall as proudly as a child entering a snow fort. Away from the water he squatted on a boulder where the snow appeared to have been piled higher and motioned St. Germain to sit facing him. St. Germain was trying to understand why the boy had wasted energy on the flimsy rampart when the wind blew harder and his teeth began to chatter and he huddled down, trying to stop his shivering.

  “Think you’re smart, don’t you?” Conklin sat back with the long gun across his chest, looking satisfied. “Always did, too. It’s your problem, Larr. One of them. Look behind if you don’t believe me. Just look.”

  St. Germain glanced where the boy was pointing and caught an unimpeded view of the rocky ground all the way to the trees.

  “I could’ve taken you out any time I wanted,” Conklin boasted. “Know why I didn’t?”

  But that was ridiculous, St. Germain began to say; he’d been out of range of the shotgun till he was almost at the cliff.

  “I wanted the company. It’s lonely up here and, you know, I’ve always thought you were a very entertaining guy and …” His eyes shut suddenly and his head tilted back, and as St. Germain started to push himself up, he sneezed. “Excuse me,” he said, and tightened his hold on the shotgun. “You look colder than me. Smart guy like yourself, what are you doing up in the Notch dressed for the Fourth of July?”

  St. Germain scrunched closer to the wall, watched the blood spread across his thigh.

  “Am I scaring you?” Conklin asked abruptly. He pulled the gun away as if aware for the first time that it was pointed at St. Germain. “It’s nothing to be proud of, giving an old scairdy cat like you another fright.” The wind tousled the spiky hair, and he slunk down with his feet straight out. “Tell me something, Larr, you a religious man?”

  “I believe there’s a time when everyone is called to account for what they’ve done on earth …” The words slipped out. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s not real profound, Larr. I hope you’re not some kind of agnostic.”

  St. Germain felt vaguely foolish, as if by opening his mouth he had eliminated himself from a game of Simon Says.

  “This is one subject that really interests me. You’re saying you believe in heaven and hell and all that?”

  St. Germain resumed the expressionless gaze he found harder to maintain than any display of emotion.

  “… I was hoping you would,” Conklin said happily, “’cause I need someone, someone who feels like you, to do me a favor.” He bent forward, cradling the long gun. “Mel got killed tonight, and I didn’t get a chance to let him know how much I’m going to miss him and how sorry I am I was always dumping on him in front of people. I want you to tell him for me, when you see him. Will you do that?”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re out of your mind, Paul?”

  “All the time. But you got to remember I have a paper from the State Hospital saying I’m not. You have one of those? You have a nice Remington shotgun like mine? No? Then you tell me which one of us is the nut case.” He laughed. “And that’s Mr. Conklin, Larr, if you recall.”

  He sat back. “There’s another favor you can do right now. I want your shirt, and I don’t want to have to put another hole in it first. So how about handing it over, and we’ll both avoid a lot of pain and suffering.”

  The wind relented, and St. Germain raised his head over the top of the wall and glanced down at the boulders at the base of the cliff.

  “Looking into flying lessons, Larr? Just to keep your lousy shirt?”

  St. Germain was waiting for panic to sweep over him but felt nothing worse than a mild case of butterflies. He stood up slowly and began to undo the buttons, thinking how easy it would be to rush the boy and let his momentum carry them over the shelf before the pump gun stopped him, his only other choice to surrender the shirt and get his head blown off, two paths converging on the same sorry end. Okay, then, he would take Conklin with him, have the satisfaction of that. But even his one small victory was marred by the realization that after dominating his life Conklin now was setting the ground rules for his suicide. Only how could it be suicide when the best part of him already was dead, destroyed that night on the ice?

  There was nothing left to think about. He stripped off the shirt and held it at arm’s length, and when Conklin said, “Give,” he tossed it and then lunged for the boy. His leg collapsed and he rolled under the gun as the muzzle flamed, came up on his toes and wrenched the weapon away, the barrel warm in his hands as he swung it in a low arc with all his weight behind it, like a batter golfing at a ball down and inside and connected with the boy’s knees, and followed through. The cherry stock shattered, and Conklin dropped as though his legs had been sawed off and splashed down in the puddle.

  St. Germain’s ears were hissing. He sat on Conklin’s boulder and rubbed his shoulder and thigh while the boy thrashed around as if the cold water were consum
ing him.

  “God, it’s freezing,” Conklin said. “My knees …”

  St. Germain picked up the shotgun and extended the barrel. As Conklin reached for it, he slid his hand to the trigger and the boy let go and fell back in the puddle.

  “Problem?” St. Germain asked.

  “I slipped.”

  “Let’s try again.”

  St. Germain kicked the weapon off the ledge, then took the boy’s wrist and dragged him into the snow. As Conklin lay on his back beside the wall, St. Germain cupped a hand over one knee and then the other, felt them through the sodden cloth.

  “Bad news, Paul. They’re busted.”

  A fit of terror contorted the boy’s mouth. “I’ll be able to play basketball again, won’t I?”

  St. Germain poked his finger through a scorched hole under the collar, then pulled the shirt on and fastened the buttons, rolled a wet sleeve above the elbow.

  “I didn’t think you could,” Conklin said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I never figured you’d take my gun away and … and do this to me.”

  “Neither did I.” St. Germain sat on the edge of the shelf, dangling his legs.

  “Where you going?” Conklin asked. “You going for help now?”

  St. Germain found footing in the rock and stepped off. “I don’t need help now.”

  “Hey,” Conklin said, “you can’t leave me here. I’m soaked, I wouldn’t last an hour.” His body was shaking uncontrollably as he tried to raise himself. “You’re a cop, you’ll get in trouble.”

  “Haven’t been a cop for a year.”

  “An ambulance driver, right? Yeah, you had to take the oath, the Hippocrites oath, so you can’t—”

  The Caducean patch tore easily off his chest and he tossed it to the boy. “I’m a management trainee,” he said, “a paper pusher. Makes my wife happy to know I’m keeping out of harm’s way.”

  “… Can’t just let me freeze to death.”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “Huh? Then who’s it—?”