I toed at the Ruger on the floor. “I needed a gun.”
“Clearly.” He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Oh, I see what this is. I snitch on your Pop and a decade later you’re here to collect your pound of flesh.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said evenly. “As far as I’m concerned, Buck can rot away in his orange jumpsuit, and you can keep living out your Duck Dynasty fantasies here in West Purgatory. I have a sister who needs me, and far worse people to worry about than two townie pricks who should have known they were too old to play cops and robbers.” I bent down and picked up the revolver. “So with all due respect, roll back into your hobbit hole and stay out of my way.”
To my surprise, Dec looked concerned. I would have preferred him angry. “Last time you visited me here,” he said, “you were half as tall, splashing in the stream, and pretending to be a goose. I don’t want to see that girl’s face in an obituary, so for your own good, I won’t hesitate to call the sheriff, if that’s what it takes to keep you from heading down a dark road. But if you explain what brought you here to the last resort, maybe I’ll change my mind.” He pointed to the gun in my hand. “And even show you how to take the safety off.”
There was nothing like being pitied by a paraplegic, reclusive ex-con to be reminded of what dire straits I’d come to. As much as I didn’t want to spend another second with Dec on what would probably be my last day on earth, fifteen minutes was a small price to stay out of a holding cell. I tucked the revolver in the waistband of my jeans. “Got any coffee?”
We sat on the patio that overlooked the brook, which Dec called “his redneck Jacuzzi.” He lit a joint and winked. “For my glaucoma—doctor’s orders.”
Between sips of coffee, I recounted an abridged version of the last two weeks. His hand tightened around the spokes of his wheelchair when I informed him of Jack’s death. After I’d caught up to Atlas’s capture, I finished with, “So that’s why you’re going to let me walk out of here without making a fuss. And if you try to stop me, I have no qualms about locking you in that shipping container.”
Dec stared off into the forest, across the river, where a lone black bear was slowly ambling through the trees. Finally, he flicked the stub of his joint into the brook. “There’s something you should see. Wait here.” He popped a wheelie, spun 180 degrees, and glided down the rotting plank he used as a ramp.
After a minute of tinkering around inside of the shipping container, Dec returned to his spot beside me on the patio. He held a small object, metallic silver and about the size of an acorn. For some reason, it had been shrink-wrapped in plastic.
“What is that, a gumball?” I asked.
Dec slipped gardening gloves onto his hands. After gingerly unwrapping the weird marble, he cocked his arm back and threw it into the brook.
Then it exploded.
A geyser of water and pulverized stone jetted into the air. The severed head of an unlucky trout landed on the patio next to me, its body mutilated and cauterized below the gills. Its mouth opened and closed several times before its nervous system acknowledged that it was dead.
I rocketed out of my chair. “What the hell was that, Dec?”
“That,” my godfather explained, “was what Horace Nox used to do this.” He cast aside the afghan that covered the lower half of his body.
Both of his legs had been amputated above the knees.
If you’d asked me five minutes earlier if I thought it was possible to feel any sympathy for Dec, I would have called you crazy. “How?” I realized I was asking the wrong question. “Why?”
Dec drew the afghan back over the stubs of his legs. “Gangsters don’t take kindly to people who take their things—especially their drugs.”
So the story at my father’s trial about his three-man crew trying to steal precious metals had been bullshit. “You’re telling me,” I said, “that you guys were trying to steal Blyss?”
“An early version of it, back when it first hit the scene in Boston.” With some struggle, Dec bent over and picked up the singed fish head. “A rival dealer paid us to steal some cases, find out what this new high was all about. Nox was two steps ahead of us. The warehouse was stripped clean by the time we got there, and the cops weren’t far behind.” He launched the trout’s corpse across the stream.
I was still trying to digest this, so Dec went on. “Fun fact about the Blyss production process: They have to manufacture it in a perfectly dry environment, then mix it with water later. You see, when they extract the drug from the plant, they’re left with this unstable byproduct, a chemical they call ‘Hydrobane’ that reacts violently with water. I’m no chemistry major, but from what I’ve read, the reaction produces hydrogen gas and heat, which when you mix them together—” He mimed an expanding mushroom cloud with his hands and mouthed boom. “Instant Hindenburg. Nox apparently doesn’t like it to go to waste, so he uses it on his enemies. For instance, say a man gets arrested for breaking into his warehouse. Say he beats his rap by ratting on a friend, but Nox doesn’t like that he walked away scot-free. Say he decides to take his Harley out for a Saturday morning ride in the rain, with no clue that, during the night, Nox’s men strapped a nugget of Hydrobane to the bottom of his bike. Say he hits a puddle at the end of his driveway.” Dec left me to imagine the carnage. “I wasted years of my life plotting my revenge against the man. I even acquired several bricks of that stuff so I could watch him crawl on the ground after I took his own legs from him. But eventually I realized I’d rather live in the shadows than die in the cavalry charge.”
Across the stream, the bear was pawing at the trout carcass. “Is this your way of trying to scare me into backing down?” I asked him.
“Damn right it is,” Dec snapped. “You’re off your nut if you think I’m going to give you my blessing to waltz onto his compound.” There were tears in his eyes now. “I betrayed your daddy once. I’m not going to send his little girl to her death.”
My phone chimed, a new disposable in case Nox was tracking the other. The email was from Rufus. He had come through with an elaborate dossier of information about Nox’s greenhouse, the compound in Vermont where he grew and processed Blyss. Delivery routes, timetables, a crudely sketched map. I had no idea what channels Rufus had pursued to track down this information, but I owed my P.I. friend more than a positive Yelp review if I got out of this alive.
I turned back to Dec. While he would never be my favorite person in the world—or even break the top thousand—now more than ever, I could use someone who thought like a criminal. “This isn’t about vengeance, anymore, Dec. It’s about Echo’s life. You can’t change my mind.” I held up the digital map of Nox’s compound for him to see. “But you can help make sure I have the tools I need to come out alive. To send me in unprepared would be the real betrayal.”
Dec folded his hands in his lap. He watched as the black bear rejected the dynamited trout and loped off into the forest. “What do you need?”
“Let’s start with a way in,” I replied, “and we’ll see how hypothetically alive I still am after that.”
Deep in a hardwood forest on the banks of Lake Willoughby, I waited in ambush by the roadside. To conquer Nox’s stronghold, the insane plot I’d concocted with Dec’s assistance would start with an old trick and end with a few new ones. According to my intel, it would all begin in sixty seconds, with the arrival of a maple syrup delivery truck.
Inside his trailer, Dec returned from the refrigerator with a bottle of syrup.
“It’s a little late for pancakes, don’t you think?” I asked.
He ripped the green label off the bottle and flattened it on the table. It depicted the silhouette of two mountains, overlaid with the gold-lettered brand name “Glacier Notch Farms” in the valley between them.
“This boutique maple farm,” Dec explained, “is the front for the largest drug manufacturing operation in all of New England.”
I squinted incredulously at him. “Are you trying to tell me tha
t Horace Nox is Aunt Jemimah?” Now that I looked closer, I could see a dark bird flying away in the logo’s corner.
“A savvy opportunist is what he is,” Dec said. “When Nox and his brother first brought the Blyss lichen back from the Amazon, they had trouble getting it to survive outside of its rainforest habitat. They discovered that the lichen took a shine to the bark of sugar maple trees. A syrup company provided a convenient front for their operation.”
I wandered over to the crude map of Nox’s compound I’d copied onto the wall of the trailer. “So: How do I break into IHOP?”
Dec wheeled over and traced a finger around the perimeter. “There are two mountains to either side, a twelve-foot wall topped with razor-wire, and armed patrols circling the border. Unless you’re an Olympic pole vaulter, you might be shit outta luck.” He sounded hopeful, like a wall and a few guards would scare me into quitting.
Beside the map, I looked through the delivery schedule that Rufus had sent me. True to his military background, Nox ran all of his operations on a strict timetable. “What if I drive right through the main gates?”
Through my binoculars, I saw the green truck with the Glacier Notch Farms emblem round the bend. As soon as it neared my position, I rolled my makeshift spike strip across the road.
The nails shredded the truck’s tires. Under the weight of its heavy cargo, it dropped onto four rims and rolled a ways before the driver pulled over. Good—I needed this truck intact.
With a gun in hand, I ran down the shoulder of the road. On the other side of the truck, the driver-side door opened and a woman swore as she examined the damage to her wheels.
She didn’t hear me over the idling engine until I’d pressed the barrel of the revolver into the base of her skull. “On your knees, hands behind your head,” I ordered. “I have no intention of pulling this trigger, but my finger gets real twitchy when fools try to surprise me.”
The woman followed my instructions. She wore a green Glacier Notch uniform and quaked uncontrollably, but when I glimpsed her face in profile, I could see that something important was missing: surprise. When you drove around a truckload of drugs for a living, the possibility of being hijacked must always be in the back of your mind. “I have no cash,” she said. “And even a few hundred cases of syrup won’t buy you much crack. You can still walk away from this—I haven’t seen your face.”
I walked in front of her to let her see that I had no intention of going anywhere. “I’m not a junkie and I don’t want your cargo. All I want is a ride back to the Notch.”
“What are you, sixteen, seventeen?” She shook her head. “You’re barely older than my daughter. Do your own mother a favor and leave now.”
I sized up the driver. Presumably not everyone who worked for Nox was a bloodthirsty, merciless troll like Aries had been. Some were driven by greed, like Grimshaw and Drumm. Others, like Smitty, were prisoners to fear, but could be persuaded to help you if you pushed the right buttons. My gut was telling me that this driver fell into the latter category.
I’d have to appeal to her maternal instincts. “Your boss is one hour away from causing my eight-year-old sister to die. While that might sound crazy to you, you’re clearly a smart woman. You know you’re not working for the humanitarian-of-the-year. And if you’re a mother, I’m sure you’re probably just doing this to support your family. So ask yourself: If we were talking about your daughter, how far would you go to keep her safe from a tumor like Horace Nox?” I glanced down the road to make sure there were no cars coming. “I’m going to give you a simple choice. We climb in the truck, you drive us back through the compound gates, and all you have to do from that point on is say nothing and go back to living your life. But if you disobey me, then you are consciously putting an end to my sister’s life, and your daughter will grow up motherless.”
The woman nodded frantically. “There’s a tarp in the passenger seat. You’ll have to hide in the back of the cab until we’re through the security checkpoint.”
She climbed behind the wheel and I slipped beneath the tarp in the back. I tapped the gun against her seat to remind her not to mess with me. She made a sharp U-turn and headed north.
Fifteen minutes later, the truck came to a stop. We’d arrived at the gates to Nox’s compound.
Through the open door, I heard the click of boot heels on the asphalt. A guard addressed the driver sounding less than pleased. “What are you doing back here?” he snapped. “You should be halfway to Conway by now.”
I held my breath, expecting the driver to scream that there was an armed stowaway in the backseat. Bless her heart, she kept her voice calm. “There was broken glass from a car accident all over Lake Road. It shredded my tires to shit.”
The guard grunted. “I can see that, Almeida.”
“What did you expect me to do, call Triple A? Give me thirty in the garage and I’ll slap on a new set.”
I heard the loud groan of the compound’s reinforced gates swinging open. “Better make it fifteen,” the guard said. “Rumor has it the boss made a surprise visit today …”
The truck rolled forward through the open gates. I was in.
I peeled the tarp off me. “Thank you,” I said.
She kept her eyes forward on the dirt path. “You can thank me by tucking and rolling out of the truck exactly when I tell you. There’s a camera blindspot on the passenger side up ahead. If you miss your window and they catch you on film, you might as well shoot us both.”
I readied my hand on the door handle, and when she gave a brusque “Now!” I jumped out of the vehicle. I sprinted down the steep embankment beside the path, tripping on the gravel partway down and tumbling the remaining distance.
I landed in what I can only describe as an alien landscape.
A vast field of sugar maple trees arranged in tidy rows stretched as far as the eye could see. To observers during the day, the compound might appear to be an ordinary maple farm, but as the sun plunged beneath the horizon, the tree trunks had started to glow in the dark. According to Dec, the Blyss lichen absorbed sunlight, then phosphoresced throughout the night.
I heard the crunch of footsteps over dried leaves—a guard with a submachine gun doing rounds. I took shelter behind a maple, pressing my back into the spongy lichen-covered trunk and praying that its soft opalescence wouldn’t cast my shadow.
The footsteps came and went, but I wasn’t in the clear yet. The maple fields were teeming with armed mercenaries in black commando getups. They patrolled for unwelcome guests like me, while keeping a vigilant eye on the field workers who toiled late into the night, harvesting the lichen.
The glow-in-the-dark maples were hardly the weirdest feature of Glacier Notch Farms. That distinction went to the monstrous sequoia in the center of the compound, a tree thirty feet in diameter and four times as tall. Horace’s crazy botanist brother, Wilbur, had genetically engineered the behemoth himself. A staircase wrapped around the trunk, spiraling upward like the threads on a screw, until it arrived at a glass globe at the top. Nox used the lookout as a bird’s-eye view of the property that had made him a multimillionaire.
“I’d bet my life that you’ll find Atlas there,” Dec said. “If the information in your boy’s head is as important as you say it is, then Nox will want to keep him close to the chest—and in a place where he can see you coming. Which still leaves one difficult question.”
I touched the circular perimeter of the maple fields. “How do I get from here”—I traced my finger to the center of the circle, where we’d marked the greenhouse—“to here, without taking a bullet?”
“Or forty,” Dec added unhelpfully.
I frowned at the map. Given the ambient light from the tree trunks, I might as well throw on a reflective vest with a neon target if my plan was to play hide-and-seek with the guards.
I recalled something from Rufus’s dossier that hadn’t seemed important on first read. Over the last year, the maple field had strained to meet the growing demand of Blyss. To i
ncrease production, Nox had invested in a new chemical to accelerate the growth of his product.
“Fertilizer …” I whispered.
I used a marker to draw a big red X through Nox’s circular compound, with the two lines intersecting at the massive treehouse in the center. “Four quadrants,” I said, tapping each wedge of the pie, “north, east, south, and west. Each needs to be fertilized and watered once an hour. Since the fertilizer is toxic, the harvesters and sentinels are constantly moving clockwise around the compound to keep away from the sprinkler system—which means that for a few minutes every hour, one quadrant will be completely empty.”
Dec looked unimpressed. “Uh, yeah, because it’s being saturated in poison. What, are you going to wear a raincoat?”
I did a rough calculation of the circle’s radius—it was close to a quarter mile from the perimeter to the treehouse. “A warning system supposedly gives a minute’s notice for anyone who hasn’t already cleared out. That will offer me a brief window to get from point A to point B.”
Dec whistled. “How fast is your four-hundred-meter dash?”
As I lurked at the edge of the field, I heard the cog-like clank-clank-clank of machinery in the ground around me. Down the columns of maples, black sprinkler heads rose out of the dirt in synchrony. Red lights pulsed in warning, and the robotic voice of a woman made an announcement through speakers hidden among the trees:
“Sixty seconds until fertilization commences in West Quadrant.”
I took off down the line of glowing trees. My legs pumped vigorously, toes digging into the soil, heels never touching the ground. For this to work, I was going to need to give it all the horsepower I had. If I was a second too slow, then I would die, and so in turn would Atlas and Echo, like precariously placed dominoes.
Partway through my mad dash across the field, I snatched one of the items from my bag and dropped it in my wake. “Thirty seconds until fertilization commences,” the disconcertingly calm voice announced again. The greenhouse still seemed so far away.