Page 58 of God’s Country

“Yeah,” Ollie said as if savoring the thought.

“But you have to get back to civilization to enjoy your haul,” I pointed out and smiled.

“When are we getting out of here?” Ollie said.

“A couple more days.”

“Two more days?” He gave me a killing look. “You playing us for suckers?”

“It wouldn’t take that long if you gave any help with the paddling.”

“That girl nearly broke my back.”

“As for your brother there, I’ve been in canoes with Girl Scouts who could paddle rings around him. In this wilderness, you two are worthless.”

Ollie stood up as if to start for me, but Stan intervened.

“Sit down, you dumb ox. Can’t you see he’s just trying to get your goat? We go due north and the cops’ll get us before we cross the border. We need this guy.”

Which told me that Stan, at least, had bought my story.

Ollie breathed fiercely for another moment, then gave a nod and drilled me with a threatening look. “But you try anything funny along the way, I’ll make you pay for it, believe me.”

“I want to get out of here alive just as much as you do,” I assured him.

Though I was pretty certain that was not what Ollie had in mind for me at all.

We finished the meal and I told Ollie to take the fish guts and skin and bones into the woods a good fifty yards away and bury them.

“What for?”

“It’s etiquette. And it keeps from attracting more bears.”

He wasn’t happy, but he did it. In the meantime, Stan watched me with his Glock at the ready while I broke camp and packed up for the day’s paddle. I left the torn-up tent, but I didn’t feel quite so bad about that. I figured that Stephen and Daniel and Mal and the boys, and maybe even Cordell and Tucker and Leticia, would make it out of the wilderness that morning, and inform the authorities of what was amiss in the Boundary Waters. I hoped that as they tracked us, maybe using the mess we left behind to help guide them, they would clean up in our wake.

We shoved off into the pond, with Ollie again in the middle of the canoe with our gear, Stan in the bow, and me in the stern. It was a glorious morning. Clear blue sky, golden sunlight, a thousand shades of green in the trees and foliage around us, the birds numerous and joyful, the clean, biting scent of evergreen so redolent in the air. For some reason, we were free from the blackflies, though whenever we paused for long the mosquitoes descended. If I hadn’t been with the Kennedy brothers and now on a dark mission of my own, I would have reveled in that morning.

Around midday, we completed a brief portage and were about to put our canoe back into the water when I spotted another canoe coming our way. My first thought was to hightail it back the way we’d come. I didn’t want the Kennedy brothers to have any opportunity to do violence to anyone.

A hungry smile came to Ollie’s lips. “Food,” he said quietly.

The canoe was still a couple of hundred yards out and approaching. I could see there were two canoeists. In the bow was a young woman, in the stern a young man. From the distance, I judged them to be somewhere in their twenties and in good shape. To be in this deep part of the Boundary Waters, I figured they were experienced in the wilderness.

Stan was focused on them too, now, maybe thinking like Ollie about the prospect of a resupplied food stock. Both brothers were tired as well as hungry, and they’d grown careless. Stan was standing beside me. He had the Glock stuck under his belt so that his hands would be free to carry some of our gear. I’d made no moves at all to escape in the time I’d been with them. This was the chance I’d been waiting for. Quick as lightning, I reached out and snatched the gun from Stan’s belt. He looked appropriately stunned and uttered, “Oh, shit!”

Ollie looked away from the canoeists, saw the pistol in my hand, then glared at his brother and hissed, “What the fuck?”

“This is how it’s going down,” I said. “We let them pass without incident. If either of you do anything I don’t like, I’ll use the Glock. Believe me. Just stand aside and let them land. Pleasant conversation is all that’s going to happen between us, understood?”

If he’d been the one holding the gun, I’m sure that Ollie would have used it on me. Killing someone—maybe even his brother, who should have been more careful—was clearly his burning desire. But he managed to rein himself in, nodded his understanding, and took a couple of steps away from the path of the portage. I moved enough away from the brothers that I could shoot either one if it came to that. As the canoe approached, I held the gun down at my side and just enough behind me to hide it from sight.

“Hullo!” the young woman in the bow called out and waved to us as they neared the landing.

“Say hello back,” I said to the brothers.

They did, and Stan added a wave.

As the couple nosed up toward shore, the young woman disembarked and held the bow while her companion got out from the stern. They waded ashore and were clearly eager to talk.