“Nope.”
“Where exactly are you going?” she asked.
Chapter 44
“YOU’RE LATE,” said my father.
That’s what I arrived to—his very first words to me. Never mind that I’d been driving in a rented Jeep Cherokee since the crack of dawn and that I hadn’t seen him for almost a year, since the last time we went hunting.
No hello, no handshake, no hug.
No surprise.
I dropped my gear, glancing at my watch. Noon on the dot. “The hell I’m late,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Diamond?”
My father’s vizsla, unequivocally the coolest dog in the world, came jumping over to me, landing his front paws on my waist, as he always did. As I always did in return, I gave Diamond’s golden-rust coat a vigorous working over, watching his tail whip back and forth to the point of being a blur.
Leave it to a breeding stock that first arrived the United States from behind the Iron Curtain to be my father’s emotional surrogate.
“So you found it all right, huh?” asked my father.
“The last couple of turns were a little tricky,” I said. “GPS only gets you so far in these parts.”
So did the roads themselves. Rendezvous was an off-the-grid cabin half a mile beyond the end of a dirt road. The last stretch of pavement was at least five miles before that. I wasn’t sure I had the right spot until I saw my father’s old—very old—Jeep Commando parked in a small clearing.
Usually we’d be meeting at a hunting preserve in New Hampshire near where my father retired, in Concord, but my calling him out of the blue required ad hoc measures. The start of grouse season was still a few weeks away in the Granite State, so my father called in a favor from a friend who owned four hundred acres an hour north of Bangor, Maine. The private land was exempt from the state’s hunting regulations, thanks to a grandfather clause. We were good to go, just the two of us, all four hundred acres to ourselves.
Still, safety first. Hunting gospel: be seen or be dead.
“Here,” said my father after lugging my duffel into the cabin. He tossed me a bright orange pinny. “Wear it.”
There was a joke to be made, something about not having an excuse to shoot one another now. But I held my tongue. This trip had a larger purpose, after all.
“Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.
The second I put my arms through the pinny, my father reached for the small sling bag that I’ve used since I was a teenager to carry my ammo and shooting glasses. It was almost like he planned it that way, waiting until my hands were occupied so I couldn’t stop him.
“Just making sure,” he said, poking around inside the bag. “Remember when that Milky Way mysteriously found its way in here?”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “I also remember that I was fifteen at the time.”
“Rules are rules.” He handed me back the bag. “All clear.”
“Are you sure? You could frisk me, too,” I said.
The prohibition against food was the crazier of his two rules, for sure. Although for the purist—and, if anything, Josiah Maxwell Reinhart was a purist—it made sense. Kill only what you intend to eat.
And if you don’t kill anything, you don’t eat.
No exceptions. Including contraband candy bars, I learned as a kid. “Hunger makes a man focus,” he told me then.
I stared at him now. His short-cropped hair was graying at the tips. Other than that, he was winning the fight against aging. Kicking its ass, actually. No sag beneath the chin or anywhere else. Still sturdy as hell.
Just as stubborn, too.
“How’s your friend?” he asked.
“His name is Tracy, Dad, and he’s a little more than a friend,” I said. “I know you got the wedding invitation.”
He mumbled something in return. I couldn’t hear it, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.
Instead I wet my finger, checking the breeze. Hunting for grouse meant heading into the wind so the scent would blow toward Diamond.
“So,” I said, propping the same 20-gauge Remington against my shoulder that I’ve been using since my Milky Way days. “Are we going to stand around talking like girls or are we going hunting?”
My father smiled. It was genuine, no trace of his trademark smirk.
“We’re going hunting,” he said.
Chapter 45
MY FATHER and hunting have a lot of things in common. First and foremost, they both require a lot of patience.
For nearly two hours, we walked in silence amid the dense poplars—mostly bigtooth aspens and quaking aspens—with Diamond leading the way. It was good exercise, but it wasn’t dinner. From time to time, Diamond even turned back to us and cocked his head as if to say, “Not a single whiff—what gives?”
The only good news was that I didn’t have to wait out my father’s state of denial as long as I’d thought. He knew there was more to this outing than my suddenly having a hankering for ruffed grouse. Plenty of restaurants serve the bird in Manhattan, although “those lefty idiots down there,” as my father calls them, mistakenly refer to it as partridge.
No, my father definitely knew I had something to discuss with him. In person.
Finally he gave me his version of putting his arm around me and asking kindly what was on my mind.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, son, spit it out already,” he said.
I gave him the background, quickly and in bullet-point style, as he was used to. It was everything from the initial package Grimes got with my book and the bloodstained card to my meeting in the mayor’s office.
But this wasn’t about the Dealer. This was about me. Maybe my father, too.
“She knows,” I said.
“Who? The detective?”
“Yeah—Elizabeth. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to.”
I expected any number of reactions. Anger was one. Doubt was another. I could almost hear him calling out my arrogance, reminding me that having a doctorate in psychology didn’t mean that I could read people’s minds.
Instead I got the reaction I least expected. Ambivalence. “Okay, so maybe she knows,” he said. “So what?”
“So everything,” I said. “That would mean—”
“Yeah, that Deacon told her.” My father shrugged. “He’s not exactly the mayor of Podunk, and he’s a billionaire to boot. Besides, you were surely the first suspect, right? A guy like Deacon would take his vetting of you very seriously.”
“By vetting, do you mean hacking?”
“It’s possible. It’s not like a State Department official would ever have a private e-mail server in her closet or anything,” he said. “Point is, classified just ain’t what it used to be.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“What you do with any leak,” he said. “Seal it.”
My father suddenly stopped, motioning at Diamond, who had gone birdy. The dog was rigid as a rock, having picked up a scent.