IT WAS MIDWAY THROUGH the fifth week, Adam was still at large and the police were beyond crazy. They were stopping everybody on Route 20 just to look in their cars because in their feeble minds they imagined Adam squeezed under somebody’s seat or packed into their trunk and they’d stopped her three times now but it was nothing more than a petty annoyance. They didn’t ask for her papers and she didn’t have to state her status. They didn’t care if she was wearing a seatbelt or not and they didn’t run her license plate or turn up the warrant out for her arrest on the grounds that she’d refused to play their idiot games or shuffle one more time through the charade of authority with the old hag of a judge in her courthouse presided over by the flag of the U.S.I.G.A. No. All they were interested in was Adam. It was all-out war now. They’d been made to look like the fools they were, big macho men with their big manly guns and all the resources of ten sheriff’s departments and they still couldn’t catch one twenty-five-year-old mountain man who was driving a stake through the heart of the local economy and scaring the bejesus out of the taxpayers so they couldn’t even sleep at night.
She was at home, in the kitchen, listening to music and pushing two bone-in pork chops around a pan and sprinkling them with rosemary from her garden. She was tired of salad so she’d bought some fresh spinach at the farmers’ market, rinsed it, tossed it with a little garlic salt and pepper, then splashed it with olive oil and balsamic and microwaved it for three minutes, easiest thing in the world. It had fallen dark now, the nights growing shorter—and colder—and Halloween just two days away. How would that play out? she wondered. What would parents tell their children? They’d have private parties, she supposed, because no one—absolutely no one—would be going house to house. Not with Adam out there. Would he consciously hurt a kid? Not the Adam she knew. But then he had driven his car onto the playground, hadn’t he? And maybe he wasn’t really the Adam she knew, not if he could shoot down Art Tolleson and the other one and just leave them there to rot.
Kutya stirred in the corner where he’d been lying asleep, laziest dog she’d ever seen and not getting any younger, and now he came clicking across the floor to her and the smell of the meat searing in the pan. “No,” she told him, bending from the waist to look into his eyes, “you’re just going to have to wait.” Then she turned back to the pan and flipped the chops, everything in its place and everything quiet, but here she was in her warm kitchen with the smell of the meat rising around her and she couldn’t help wondering what Adam was eating. He had a prodigious appetite and no matter how many freeze-dried entrées or cans of beef stew he’d squirreled away out there, how could it have lasted him all this time? He’d been breaking into cabins, they’d reported that, and he’d held that one old lady hostage back there at the beginning, but still. And that was another thing: no hot food. Even when it was raining, even when it was cold, and it had been getting down into the forties at night. Maybe he had a camp stove, the kind of thing you could risk cooking on in a deep secluded place, a cave or something, but even so he must have been pretty miserable. She tried to picture that a minute, him in a cave, with that rank wet smell caves always had and what, bats hanging overhead? He wouldn’t dare travel in the daytime, not if he had any sense and he did, obviously, so he must have been roaming the woods in the dark—and if he was, he couldn’t use a light. And if he couldn’t use a light, how could he find his way? Plus, how could he keep from dying of boredom out there, even if he was putting everything he had into baiting the jerkoff cops and their killer dogs and no doubt enjoying it too? Adam. And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?