Page 71 of God’s Country
Women? That threw me. I hesitated. In that moment of pause, the opportunity was gone. Ollie turned back to me, a predatory smile on his brute face.
“Let’s go,” he said, using the gun to gesture toward the campsite. “I want to see what these women are about.”
We left what wood I’d gathered, the big limb with it, and quickly returned to camp. Stan was on the shore. He held the binoculars they’d taken from me to his eyes and was looking out at the lake.
“Where are they?” Ollie asked.
“There.” Stan pointed toward a big island almost a quarter of a mile away. He handed the binoculars to his brother.
Ollie looked, adjusted the lenses, looked again. “You’re sure they’re women?”
“They are,” Stan insisted. “They’ve turned so you can’t see them well now.”
“Did they see you?”
“Me or the canoe. They were coming this way, then must’ve understood that this campsite was already taken and headed toward that island.”
Ollie looked at me. “Has it got a campsite on it?”
“It’s a possibility. I don’t have a map, and I’m not all that familiar with this lake.”
“Should we go after them?” Stan asked. “They might alert the cops.”
Before Ollie could answer, I said, “Fool’s errand. Unless they have a satphone, they can’t communicate with anyone. But they probably have a map. Could be there’s no campsite on the island and they’ll just keep paddling until they reach the next site. Like I said, I don’t know this lake well, but I do know that there are lots of islands and inlets. You might never find them.”
Ollie stood a long time, gazing in the direction of the distant canoe and the women in it. As he watched, they rounded the island and were gone from sight.
Ollie handed the binoculars back to Stan. “Get in the canoe. We’re going to find them.”
“What? No,” Stan said.
“I want to find those women.”
“To what end? We’ve got everything we need to get us to Canada.”
“I could use a little entertainment.”
“Oh, Jesus, you fat pervert. We’re not going after those women so you can do whatever you’ve got in mind. You go out there paddling, maybe you find them, probably you don’t. And, hell, I could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t women.”
“You seemed pretty damn sure.”
“We’re not going, and that’s that.”
The two brothers squared off in a way I hadn’t seen before. I wasn’t sure if Stan was arguing from the reasonable standpoint considering the difficulty of what Ollie was proposing, or if his motive involved not wanting his brother to do the kind of thing he probably had in mind if he found the two women. Me, I had no intention of helping the big brute track them down. What that might mean in terms of my own situation didn’t matter. As Ollie had already made clear to me, I was a dead man anyway.
Ollie, who’d puffed himself up like an animal ready to battle, finally relaxed. “All right, have it your way. At least tonight. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
CHAPTER 39
That night, I could see the women’s fire, a quivering point of light on the other side of the channel that lay between us and the island. Ollie saw it, too. After he’d feasted on pasta that Stan had rehydrated—I refused to help in any way—smoked a White Owl, and had a good amount from the bottle of Canadian Club that was still in his own gear, Ollie said, “The fun begins tomorrow.”
I was tied again to a jack pine. My hands were bound, but Stan had been willing to let me keep them on my lap rather than behind my back. I’d told him how uncomfortable that was, and he’d acknowledged it. Maybe it was simple guilt because of the dead man, the broken promise, and the prospect of what he couldn’t stop his brother from doing if, in fact, they were able to catch up to the women.
Before he crawled into his tent, Ollie closed the food canister and set it next to me. “Another bear shows up, I want him to tear into you, not me.” He gave a little snarl of a laugh, then grabbed the life vest I’d thrown on the ground. “This’ll make a good pillow.” He disappeared into the tent and was soon snoring up a storm.
Stan sat by the fire, feeding it from the wood I’d gathered.
“Not tired?” I asked.
