Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [77]
“Hey,” he said, “I look like Jeremiah Johnson to you? Last time I was in the woods, I was drunk, I was having sex, and I could see the highway from where I was.”
“You were having sex?” Angie said. “My God.”
“You have something against sex?”
“I have something against bugs,” Angie said. “Ick.”
“Is it true that if you have sex in the woods, the smell attracts bears?” Poole said. He supported himself on a tree trunk for a moment, sucked in the night air.
“There aren’t any bears left around here.”
“You never know,” Poole said, and looked off into the dark trees. He placed the gym bag of money by his feet for a moment, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at the sweat on his neck, wiped his reddening face. He blew air out of his cheeks and swallowed a few times.
“You okay, Poole?”
He nodded. “Fine. Just out of shape. And, oh, yeah, old.”
“Want one of us to carry the bag?” Angie asked.
Poole grimaced at her and picked up the bag. He pointed up the slope. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”
“That’s not a breach,” Broussard said. “That’s a hill.”
“I was quoting Shakespeare, you vulgarian.” Poole came off the tree and began trudging up the hill.
“Then you should have said, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” Broussard said. “Would have been more appropriate.”
Angie took a few deep breaths, caught Broussard’s eyes as he did the same. “We’re old.”
“We’re old,” he agreed.
“Think it’s time we hung ’em up?”
“Love to.” He smiled, leaned over, and took another breath. “My wife? Got in a car accident just before we were married, fractured some bones. No health insurance. You know what a fracture cost to fix? Man, I’ll be able to retire about the same time I’m chasing perps with a walker.”
“Somebody say a walker?” Poole said. He looked up at the steep slope. “That’d be sweet.”
As a kid I’d taken this path several times to reach the watering holes of Granite Rail or Swingle’s Quarry. It was supposedly off-limits, of course, surrounded by fences and patrolled by rangers for the MDC, but there were always jagged doors cut through the chain link if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t, you brought the equipment to make your own. The rangers were in short supply, and even with a small army they’d have been hard-pressed to patrol the dozens of quarries and the hundreds of kids who made their way up to them on a blistering summer day.
So I’d climbed this ridge before. Fifteen years ago. In the daylight.
It was a little different now. For one, I wasn’t in the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager. Too many bruises and too many bars and far too many on-the-job collisions with people and pool tables—and, once, both a windshield and the road waiting on the other side—had given my body the creaks and aches and constant dull throbs of either a man twice my age or a professional football player.
Second, like Broussard, I wasn’t exactly Grizzly Adams. My exposure to a world without asphalt and a good deli was limited. Once a year, I took a hiking trip with my sister and her family up Washington’s Mount Rainier; four years ago I’d been coerced into a camping trip in Maine by a woman who’d fancied herself a naturalist because she shopped at army-navy stores. The trip had been scheduled for three days, but we’d lasted one night and a can of insect repellent before we drove to Camden for white sheets and room service.
I considered my companions as we climbed the slope toward Granite Rail Quarry. My guess was none of them would have made it through the first night of that camping trip. Maybe with sunlight, proper hiking boots, a sturdy staff, and a first-rate ski lift, we’d have made respectable progress, but it was only after twenty minutes of thumping and banging up the hill, our flashlights trained on the imprints and the occasional embedded railroad tie of a railway that had stopped running almost a century ago, that we finally got a whiff of the water.
Nothing smells so clean and cold and promising as quarry