Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [91]
They know exactly how to play it. First you make up some “syndrome” or “disorder” that covers the crime. Then you give it some fancy-sounding name, and count on the whores and fools to spread the word. You don’t have to prove anything, just repeat it often enough, preferably through a good media machine. Doesn’t matter if the entire scientific community sneers at it. What counts is that it gives defense attorneys an argument for a “nonincarcerative alternative.” And black-robed collaborators all the excuse they need.
I could see why they wouldn’t have a sign out front. But I didn’t know if the Indian was offering to educate me, or trying another test to see if I was who I claimed to be. So I just said: “Oh yeah. The recycling center.”
He grunted an acknowledgment. Or maybe it was an agreement.
We kept climbing. The altimeter read six thousand, and jumped up another fifteen hundred in the next few miles along a paved two-laner. A faint smell of something like very rotten eggs wafted up as we came alongside a fast-moving river. The side of the road was pocked with little hot springs. When we slowed way down, you could hear the earth gurgling not far below the surface.
The Land Rover negotiated the curves slowly until we passed a huge rock formation that looked like the bow of an old battleship, cut into a V, the prow vertical. We kept on climbing until we reached a fork in the road. The Indian went left, and we started climbing again.
The higher we climbed, the higher the pines grew—some of them were redwood-size giants. The road made one big looping turn, and then we were moving due west. I spotted a few occupied-looking houses, way back among the trees. And the shell of one that looked like it had been abandoned during the Civil War.
As we kept climbing, we left the pavement behind again. After we passed eight thousand, we came to a good-sized lake, maybe a half-mile across, the water very blue. Here the shoulder of the road was about the same height as the Land Rover. The Indian kept it moving, but very slowly.
We passed the lake, and then the road got worse. The skyscraper pines spiked up between enormous rock formations—sheer walls of stone that went up higher than I could crane my neck to see.
The air felt almost supernaturally clean, but it felt thin in my chest, too. I knew only the sun was keeping the temperature from getting dangerous … and we were going in and out of shade as we drove.
For the next few miles, we saw houses again, spaced real far apart. The terrain was nothing but dirt with occasional low grass. We rolled past a place called Seven Springs. And a sign that read this road is not maintained in the winter months, followed immediately by a drop from a bumpy, potholed dirt road to just plain dirt, with ruts wherever the water cared to run. We were at eighty-five hundred feet. And still climbing.
“We’re in the national forest now,” the Indian said. If that meant we were trespassing, it didn’t seem to concern him much.
There were no more houses. Sometimes on the right, but mostly on the left, there was either dirt or rock going very nearly straight up where the road had been cut into the side of a hill. Whenever the rise was on the left, we were plunged into deep shadow. Huge trees met overhead, almost like the jungle canopies I remembered from Biafra. Except now the only chill in the air was from the altitude.
The road was so deeply rutted that, sometimes, the Indian had to work up speed and just bounce over them. Other times, when the ruts were running in the same direction we were traveling, he slowed to a crawl and drove the narrow little spaces between them, carefully placing all four tires. I wouldn’t have tried with anything less than the Land Rover’s ground clearance. Huge pines stood sentinel on either side of the road, which had clearly been cut right out of mountain rock, twisty and steep. It was all as familiar to me as Mars.
Finally, we came to what looked liked