Текст книги "The Call of the Mountain"

Автор книги: Sam Neumann

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

24

There was a frontage road to the north of I-70. Connected to this was a county road that split south. This county road traveled for just over two miles, into the woods and up a slight pitch, until a narrow, poorly maintained dirt road connected to it. It was on this dirt road that I finally stopped and put the car in park.

I turned off the engine and the lights. I sat in the driver seat, making sure the coast was clear, and watched two minutes tick by on the dash clock, then quietly opened the car door and stepped out. The outside was silent, except for the faint hum of highway noise. I gently pressed the car door closed and waited another minute. Finally satisfied, I opened the trunk.

The trunk lights flooded out and illuminated the space around it. My eyes adjusted and saw the trunk was mostly empty; clean, tidy, and simple. In the center was a small mound, three feet wide, covered by a blanket.

I paused. This was the cargo? This was what I was being paid to haul? Whatever it was, there wasn’t very much of it. It could’ve fit in a wheelbarrow.

I reached for the blanket slowly, but stopped my hand inches from it. Perhaps it was better, simpler, if I stayed oblivious.

Perhaps there was a consequence to knowing.

I looked around me, through the pine trees, down the bumpy dirt road. I was alone. I was very alone.

I pulled the blanket off.

Underneath, there were computers. Still neatly boxed and sealed in clean white packaging. Apple laptops, a dozen of them, worth well over twenty grand together.

So he’s an electronics dealer?

I reached over and touched one of the boxes. They were stacked on their sides in a wooden crate, all arranged in an orderly fashion. One box had a small defect—the corner was pushed in, as if it had been dropped. Everything else was pristine.

I put the blanket back over the stack of computers and slammed the trunk. Once in the car, I sped down the dirt road and tried to make up for lost time.

25

The run finished as usual, a few minutes later than it should have, but no one seemed to notice. My driver back to my apartment was mute and boring as always. We listened to Fleetwood Mac.

In the morning I received the envelope. In it, as always, was five hundred cash, and also a handwritten note.

See me today. 3:30.

– Vince

Immediately I began sweating. It was in the middle of the woods, and I was confident I hadn’t been followed. I was alone. There was no way for him to know.

More baffling was why it would matter, even if he did know. There were laptop computers in that trunk. Odd cargo to haul in a Chrysler sedan, yes, but not scandalous. Certainly not illegal, or even close. So the questions. Why the secrecy around the cargo? Why the clandestine operation?

Why was I now being summoned by the boss?

I left my place at just after three, my palms already sweaty. I reminded myself I had no reason to worry—I hadn’t done anything wrong—and it did little to comfort me.

I drove my car up the mountain road, winding through the trees and hills until I again reached the driveway of Vince’s chateau. This time, the driveway was empty, and there were no other cars. The sky was overcast and the air was still.

I parked and knocked on the front door. When there was no answer, I knocked again, louder, and waited longer. Still nothing. A third knock and I waited. Nothing. Finally I pushed the front door open.

The house was as I’d remembered it, arranged in the cozy, down-home fashion of that first evening in the mountains. But the lights were off, and even in midday, the living room was dim. Shutters were drawn, windows were closed. There was the distinct smell of someone else’s home. I looked around and saw no one.

“Hello?” I said, startled by how timid my voice sounded.

I tried to sound bolder, louder.

“Hello? Vince?”

I waited and heard silence. Slowly, tentatively, reminding myself again I had no reason to be frightened, I made my way into the house. I checked the kitchen and the rest of the large living room, knowing I’d find nothing. I called his name one more time, then started down the long hallway, where the bedrooms were. The doors were closed, and I passed them one by one until I’d reached the door Suzanne and I slept behind. I walked past it and noticed one last door, the final one on the right, was cracked open.

I pushed it open slowly, and there he sat.

“Julian,” he said through a smile. “Please, come in.”

He sat behind a large, weathered oak desk, across the room from where I stood. It was bigger than I expected, at least twice as big as any of the bedrooms. There were floor lamps and ornate rugs and a small couch and chairs. There was a small dry bar with whiskey and glassware. It was his office.

His voice startled me initially, and I must’ve jumped.

He chuckled. “Did I scare you?”

“No,” I said, lying. I looked at him from across the room, still sitting behind the desk. He welcomed me in, but did not stand. Even from twenty-five feet away, he looked big behind that desk. He was a big man, but there, in that room, alone with him, he seemed enormous.

“Please,” he said, and welcomed me with his hands. He smiled even broader.

I walked toward him in spite of basic human instinct. The shutters were closed in the office, and the room was dim except for the soft glow of a desk lamp.

“Have a seat,” he said, and I sat down in the large plush chair facing his desk. There was a black bear skin pinned to the wall behind him. I tried to slow my breathing. There was something about this man. There was something about this house, about this day, about this meeting. There was something.

“Thanks for coming by,” he said, and leaned back in his chair. He was putting on a guise of effusive happiness; his smile would not go away. It made me uneasy. Since the run, everything had made me uneasy.

“No problem,” I said in a mostly normal voice. “What’s up?”

He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Up?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s…up? Why did you invite me here?”

“Oh,” he said, shaking his head, “no reason. I just wanted to check in. See how things are going. You’ve been with us for a few jobs, and you’ve done well. I like to check with the employees every now and then. How’s it going for you?”

He stared and waited for my answer.

I shrugged. “Good. It’s been good.”

“It has.”

“Yes. It has. Thank you again for bringing me on. I appreciate what you’ve done for me.” My pulse slowed, and I was able to get the words out without wavering.

“Of course,” he said, waving a hand. He pushed back his chair and stood up, and walked around the desk. “Do you…have any questions?” he asked, walking past me and stopping beside the small bar.

“Well, no,” I said, now looking at the wall and listening to him pour liquid behind me. “Not really. Everything’s been pretty self-explanatory.”

There was a pause as he finished pouring the drink. I didn’t turn around.

He appeared next to me again and sat down at the desk. There were two glasses of whiskey, no ice, both half full. He slid one my way.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Nothing at all?”

I shook my head. Of course I had questions. All kinds of them; numerous things I’d pondered on those long drives. I’d planned to ask him about all of it. But here, in his office, alone with him, something screamed at me not to. That it wasn’t the right time. That asking questions was a bad idea, even though it was specifically what he was offering.

“Nothing that sticks out,” I said.

He nodded. “Very well.” He then raised his glass and invited me to do the same. “To new friends and positive ventures,” he said.

I nodded and we each took a drink. I swallowed and set my glass down, still full of whiskey. Vince downed the whole thing like water.

“Because, you know,” he said, setting the empty glass down, “if there was something you needed to know—if there was a question you had, that you felt was necessary to get answered in order to do your job effectively—then the proper thing to do would be to ask it. Dealing with your questions in any other way wouldn’t really fit with what we’re trying to do.”

He stared at me. The smile was gone.

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “So, being that you’ve indicated you’re happy with the job thus far…”

He raised a palm and waited for my acknowledgement.

“Definitely,” I said.

“…and you see yourself continuing with us for the foreseeable future…”

Another pause.

“Yes,” I said.

“…then the pertinent thing to do would be to ask any lingering questions that you may have. Because these things can affect job performance, and we need to get them taken care of and move on with the work. So, I will ask you one last time: is there anything you need to ask me?”

My palms sweated again. He looked straight in to my face. The glass of whiskey sat in front of me. The room was silent.

“Well,” I said, measuring my words carefully, “I guess I was never really told what it is we’re hauling, exactly.”

He sat back and bridged his hands. “Is this information required for you to perform your job duties?”

“I…well, no, I guess not.”

“Julian, I’d like to give you a small piece of advice: don’t concern yourself with things that don’t require your concern. Here we have a prime example: you’ve been making runs for me in an efficient manner already, without having knowledge of what, exactly—as you said—you were hauling. Clearly, you don’t require this information to do the work, and I can’t imagine another purpose for it.”

I nodded.

“Concerning yourself with these trivial things—that, quite frankly, are not your business—is not a good practice in commerce or in life. I did not get to where I am professionally by stressing over things that don’t further my cause. Am I making sense?”

“Yes.”

It was odd to think back to just over a month ago, sitting in the offices of one of the most powerful financial firms in the world and rubbing shoulders with old and esteemed gentlemen who were all filthy rich. Through it all, I couldn’t remember any of them speaking to me this way. Yelling, chastising, putting down, perhaps; these things were common. But they were direct. There was no room for interpretation. With Vince, right then, it was an encoded message disguised as a clear message.

“This information was not given to you, because you have no need for it,” he continued. “My advice would be to not stress about the things you don’t know. If you needed to know it, I would have told you.”

“I understand,” I said, and wiped my hands on my pant legs.

“As I thought you would,” he said, and the smile returned. “I believe we’re done here.”

I rose to my feet and tried to think of something to say, but he spoke again before I could.

“You’re not planning on leaving without finishing your drink, are you?”

I looked down at the glass. “I don’t usually drink liquor in the middle of the day.”

He gave a polite chuckle. “It’s eighteen year-old single-malt. I’m afraid it cannot be wasted.”

He stared at me and waited. I picked up the glass and examined it, then tipped it back and swallowed the rest of the liquid. It must’ve been three shots of alcohol, and unfortunately I was still unable to tell the difference between good scotch and bad scotch. My eyes watered and I forced a straight face.

“Atta boy,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder from across the desk. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Of course,” I said, and walked to the door. As I was leaving, he spoke one last time.

“Electronics,” he said.

I stopped and turned around. “Excuse me?”

“Electronics” he repeated, looking at his desk, then back at me. His voice was flat and dry. “Consumer electronics are what you’re hauling. I buy direct and act as something of a wholesaler.”

I paused and again tried to find words. “Okay then,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

He nodded and turned his back.

26

After our conversation, I did not expect to be retained as Vince’s employee. It seemed I’d irked him in some way, whether he knew about me snooping around the trunk of that Chrysler or not. It was possible, I suppose, that our meeting was not out of the ordinary—that he was just “checking in,” as he said—but that was not how it felt. Leaving his house that day, I wondered if I had done my last run, and if that had been the case, it would have served as a relief.

But the runs continued—three in the next week—and the cash was piling up, easy and tax-free. No matter the denomination, there was something refreshing about not immediately handing a third—or, in my later years, half—of the money to the government. I kept what I made stacked in my sock drawer. I hardly had any expenses. When I was raking in the big bucks on Wall Street, it never felt like getting ahead, because more money was always quickly followed by more spending. New furniture, redecorations, extravagant dinners. Car payments, Manhattan rent, and mounds of student loan debt from both of us. But now, finally free of so many of those things, I made a point to limit my debt and financial obligations as much as possible. I’d paid off my credit cards shortly after arriving in Colorado, and after the most recent run, I found a buyer for my Mercedes in Denver and he paid me in cash. The sale was at a discount, but I didn’t care; I was free from car payments, and I didn’t need a luxury machine in the mountains anyway. I used a fraction of that money to buy an old Ford Explorer that smelled like mothballs but ran well and had four-wheel-drive. I was proud of myself.

Due to the odd meeting with Vince and the numerous runs I’d been on, my mind was mostly occupied with the job. In my downtime, my mind reflexively wandered into trying to solve the puzzle of everything I did not know. It became exhausting, to think about it constantly, and I asked myself whether I would actually be able to separate the things that concerned me from those that did not, as Vince suggested. Between the actual work and the ruminations about work, I did little else. The hikes stopped, the exploration stalled. I saw Suzanne occasionally, but hers was another puzzle I did not have the energy to try and solve. I thought of little else but the job and what to do about it.

One morning, that changed.

I strolled down to the local coffee shop after rolling out of bed around nine. The air was hot already; the weather report said we could be seeing highs of ninety in the mountains. Denver was bracing for record temperatures. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and black coffee. After I paid, I heard a voice to my left.

“Julian, right?”

I might not have recognized her dressed down, out of her slick dress and into jeans and a green fleece. I might not have recognized her with her long, tangly hair hidden underneath a brown beanie, an odd choice for this weather. I might not have, if it was anyone else, but it was her, so I did. I recognized her immediately, before I saw her face. I felt her presence, just as I had the first night, and her gravelly voice was unmistakable. Her eyes were unmistakable.

“I’m Adeline,” she said, when I didn’t respond right away. She reached out and shook my hand as if I needed a refresher on who she was. Her smile was effortless.

“Of course,” I said. “I remember you.” She stood eye-to-eye with me, or just a little shorter. She smelled of faint perfume. She owned the room, again. I got the self-conscious feeling of being watched, as if the other scattered patrons had all turned to stare at us, to see how I handled the interaction. I looked to my right. They hadn’t.

“You’re Suzanne’s guy,” she said.

“Something like that,” I said. “You’re Vince’s girl.”

“Something like that,” she said, and laughed.

Later, I would replay that line in my head a thousand times, analyzing the tone, dissecting the laugh, deciding the words meant nothing then reopening the case again five minutes later. Something like that. It would haunt me, because it suggested a glimmer of hope. And the human spirit will strive heedlessly towards the smallest glimmer when it is looking for hope. I found myself spending hours and days exploring the vast possibilities that lived inside that one innocuous statement.

And I wanted her. I didn’t know why, exactly, and it didn’t seem to matter. I just knew I wanted her; hard, fast, and terribly. We’d exchanged only a handful of sentences, but I knew it from the beginning. I had never believed in love at first sight, and I still didn’t. It wasn’t love. I didn’t know what it was. It was just a firm, hard, iron-gripped wanting, the way a child wants a popular new toy. I desired her. The hair, the flawless skin, the legs, the eyes. My god, the eyes. Outwardly, she was as close to perfection as I had seen.

She asked me to sit down and I almost said no, because I didn’t want to disappoint her. My mind thought of excuses—had to be somewhere, was late for some thing—immediately, without my consent. I was afraid of her, and of what she represented. But I did sit down.

We made small talk and drank coffee, normal conversation between normal people. She kept asking about Suzanne, and I kept remembering she existed.

27

The weather began to cool. It was only August, but already I could feel the season change; summer was holding on, but its days were numbered. I needed long sleeves in the evenings. One by one, slowly, leaves began to change colors.

The runs continued. I once considered quitting. Just telling Vince thanks, but I was done. Wasn’t for me. I could bartend again or get another hourly job as I figured things out. I mapped out the whole conversation mentally. He would understand. But the money was good and I struggled to find a tangible reason to quit. I only had the feeling of unrest in the pit of my stomach, and that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t justify throwing away a good paying job on a premonition.

On the way to Grand Junction, Damon asked me about my meeting.

“Didn’t know you knew about that,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, steering us along I-70, “small community we got.”

I sighed. “So what do you want to know?”

He shrugged. “You don’t gotta tell me anything. I’m just curious, I guess. How it went down, and all.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Is that a normal thing? Him calling us guys up to his place, back to his office, just for chats?”

He thought about it. “Certainly happens from time to time. Wouldn’t say it’s standard operating procedure.”

I sat silent for a few moments and digested the information. Vince had said it was normal. Just a chat with an employee, to check in. Something he did all the time.

“It was weird,” I finally said. “It was like he was on edge or something. I sure as hell was. But there wasn’t even a point to the meeting, really. It was like he just called me up there to ask me if there was anything I wanted to ask him.”

“He asked you if there was anything you wanted to ask him?”

“Yeah.”

“And that was it?”

“Sort of, but not really,” I said. “Not sure I know the guy well enough to read him or anything, but there was something else going on. It was like there was something he was waiting for me to ask. Like he expected a certain question.”

The car was silent, except for the steady drone of a radio turned down low.

“Did you ask him anything?” Damon asked.

“Yeah. Well, not right away. It seemed like he was tricking me or something, so I didn’t want to. But he kept pushing. So I just asked about the cargo. What it is we’re actually hauling.”

“And?”

“At first he didn’t answer. He just gave me this lecture about staying focused on the things you need to know. But then, right before I left, he told me.”

“And?”

“Electronics,” I said. “That’s what he told me. All different kinds. But I’m sure you knew that.”

He shook his head. “Nope. Woulda guessed something else, to be honest.”

“No way,” I said. “You didn’t know? And you’ve been doing this for how long?”

“No man. That thing you said about minding your business—that’s how it works.”

I looked at him and lowered my voice. “You’ve never…looked?”

“Looked?”

“Yeah. Taken a peek in the trunk.”

“God no,” he said. “No, sure wouldn’t think ‘a doin’ that. That’s askin’ for trouble right there.”

I shook my head. “I think you’re a little dramatic. It’s not like we’re involved in some cult.”

“Course not. That just isn’t our business though. This is a good job I’d like to keep. Followin’ directions has worked for me so far.”

“And you don’t care why he’s so secretive.”

“Not really,” he said. “But man, he just told you. You asked and he told you what you were haulin’. So it’s not even a secret.”

“Right,” I said.

“So there. Case closed. We can get on with it.”

We could see the lights of Grand Junction now. The highway pitched down and turned right.

“Just doesn’t feel right,” I said. “Something about it.”

“Well, if it helps, I can tell ya’ I’ve been doin this for a long time, and never had one problem. Not one. You keep your head down and do the work, you’ll be fine. It’s a good gig, ain’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

We sat in silence while he drove down the long hill and approached the edge of town. The night sky was cloudy. There were no stars or moon.

“How’s the girl of yours?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said, “’fraid that didn’t work out.”

“Already? Bummer.”

He shrugged. “Way it goes.”

He drove us through town and to the drop spot. I had the route memorized at that point, and could have driven us there with my eyes closed. Always the same exit, always the same turns, always the same industrial lot. We parked and before getting out, he turned to face me.

“Listen, man,” he said. “All these questions and stuff. Just be careful with all that.”

“This is what I’m talking about. What’s with the paranoia?”

“Not paranoia. Nothin’ like that. It’s just, I like you. I like drivin’ to the runs with you, talkin’ in the car, all that. You’re a good dude. I wouldn’t want to see ya get booted just because you got a wild imagination, ya know?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I get it.”

We both exited the car and went opposite directions. Him to a GMC Yukon, me to a Ford F-150 truck with a bed cover. I stopped behind the truck and looked at the sealed cargo area. Glancing across the parking lot, I saw Damon standing outside his vehicle, looking at me. I gave him a thumbs-up and got in the driver’s seat.