Page 68 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
I stand and turn to Dalton. “I’m done here. If I keep talking to this piece of shit, someone’s going to be cleaning up a mess.”
“You aren’t allowed to hurt me,” Louie bleats.
“I meant that I’d throw up,” I say. “But now that you mention it, that might work even better. I’ll let Eric look after that, though. I can’t stomach you for another second.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dalton doesn’t do anything more than lock Louie up. But if Louie spends his time in that cell expecting someone to beat the shit out of him, I don’t have a problem with that.
I can’t abandon the possibility that Louie—or even Lynn and Grant—kidnapped Max, but I don’t see a motive. It’s not as if they can demand ransom from Dana when she doesn’t have access to a bank. Lynn was just sticking her nose into my investigation because clearly I was too inept to see the obvious—that Dana wasn’t an innocent victim. As for Louie, he’d done something far worse. He looked at a boy’s disappearance and saw an opportunity for profit.
Once again, I am reminded of an ugly and uncomfortable fact. That the people who caused trouble in Rockton weren’t always the criminals the council snuck in. They were often ordinary people like Louie, who’d come here for a legitimate reason.
I could say that Louie must have lied and wasn’t a real victim, but that’s like him seeing Dana’s case and deciding she’s not a real victim. Horrible things can happen to innocent people like Dana. And innocent people like Louie can do horrible things.
Now we need to deal with Louie, and I absolutely do not have the time or the inclination for that while Max is still missing. So I bring Isabel and Phil up to speed, and we leave his fate in their hands while we go back to searching.
So much progress, and none of it got us an inch closer to finding Max.
Now that we’re back in the forest, I’m laser focused, no longer feeling the tug of doubt wondering whether someone in town kidnapped him. Having set aside the “resident as kidnapper” theory, I’m confident roaming farther from town. Either someone is holding Max captive out there or they’ve taken him south, and if it’s the latter, we should find a spot where the plane landed, because that’s the only reasonable way to get him out of these woods.
* * *
We focus our search on the section we’ve been avoiding—the land that marks the territorial border between our town and the mining camp. We’re supposed to warn them first, and there’d been plenty of land to cover before we got to that.
We don’t know exactly where their settlement is, but we have a good idea from the distant noise. So we’re staying far enough from their camp that we won’t get shot as trespassers, while searching what is indubitably their self-claimed territory.
Louie mocked us earlier for not following a grid pattern, as if we were randomly tramping over the land. He’s right that we aren’t utilizing the standard grid, but that only works when you have either very little land to cover or a whole lot of people to do it.
What we do instead is a loose version, where we have divided the land into sections. We comb through those sections as best we can. We’re following every possible trail, whether left by human or animal, because wherever Max is being held, they had to use or cut a trail to get there. We’re on a very old one, overgrown but demarcating a clear passageway, and we’re trekking along it when Storm goes still. Her nose lifts, and she lets out a whine and looks from me to the bag at my waist, the one carrying Max’s scent.
“She smells him,” Dalton says, and his voice is almost rigidly neutral. The last time Storm smelled Max, she’d taken off in the joy of finding her target, only to discover his empty jacket. Now she’s wary, and so is Dalton, because that last experience might not be the only reason for Storm to be uncertain. She’d act the same way if she smelled him … and his scent said we might not find him alive.
I pat her broad head and lower myself to her level. “Thank you. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay. Now show us.”
I give the command again, and she’s off at a trot. She goes about twenty meters before veering off on a path I would have missed, being even more overgrown.
“Someone’s been this way,” Dalton says. “They cut through.”
I don’t see what he does, but I take his word for it. Storm continues down that path until she slows up ahead and Dalton grunts, and it takes me a moment to see why.
A cabin. There’s a cabin ahead.
I crouch and quietly call Storm back so we don’t alert anyone inside. Then I take her off the path and ask her to wait while Dalton and I get a closer look. She lies down with a grunt, her head resting on her paws, resigned.
I let Dalton pick a path forward through the trees as I follow right behind. He circles wide until we have a better view of our target.
I said it was a cabin, but “shack” would be a better descriptor. An old and abandoned shack, with part of the roof missing, the rest sagging. It’d be just barely big enough for two people to stretch out sleeping bags.
We have come across the ruins of other shacks out here, and those were among the first places we checked. But with this one being on the wrong side of our boundary, we’ve never seen it.
We approach now with guns out. After a few steps, I tap Dalton’s arm to get his attention and point at a spot where boards have rotted and one has half fallen, leaving a place where we can look inside.
There aren’t any windows in the shack, which is to our advantage. As long as we don’t make noise, our approach won’t be noticed. We continue until we’re pressed against that back wall. Then I bend to look through the opening left by the falling board.
I peek through and inwardly curse. It’s early evening, not yet dark, but the lack of windows means it’s black inside. I can make out a bit of light from the broken roof, and when I inch forward, more light comes from an open doorway on the far side.
I blink hard to let my eyes adjust. Then I look again.
