Free Trap Door by Sarah Graves

“But maybe he did. And he could’ve even followed us to the cottage turnoff.”
    After that if he was in a car we’d have known he was there; you could hear a vehicle’s tires on the dirt road from miles away in the lakeside silence. Still…
    “Never mind that Jemmy’s in the deep forest,” I added. “You feel so safe out there, you know? Like all of civilization is on another planet far away and you don’t have to worry about it. But a guy like Walt Henderson doesn’t care. He’ll crawl through the teeming jungle with a knife in his teeth to finish off the fellow he’s after.”
    “So what would you do? If you did get the chance to talk to Henderson, what would you say?” Ellie asked, steering sharply to avoid a deer that had suddenly appeared in the roadway in front of us.
    Because it wasn’t enough in Maine to watch out for the other drivers, many of whom apparently had trained at the same place where they teach people how to get shot out of cannons. You also had to negotiate through the animal kingdom.
    “I’m not sure,” I replied as the deer faded into the trees and Ellie returned the truck to the proper lane with casual ease; my heartbeat only stuttered a couple of times. “But if it came right down to it I’d think of something.”
    After all, I used to talk men in Henderson’s line of work into a lot of things. Health insurance, for instance; even in those days a major surgical procedure could wipe out a fortune, ill-gotten or not. I’d persuaded a couple of them into legitimate business careers, too; why work in an industry where a gunshot wound is a common cause of occupational injury when you can have a snazzy suite of offices on the fortieth floor of a major downtown landmark building?
    While, of course, remaining just as crooked as ever; where do you think all those lost pension funds in the early nineties went?
    “We’re assuming Jemmy’s assessment of Henderson is correct?” Ellie asked. We were approaching the causeway to Moose Island. A cop in mirrored sunglasses appeared to ignore us from behind the wheel of his parked squad car, the words
Pleasant Point Police
lettered in black on the side of it.
    I felt his eyes on my neck like a couple of insects as we went by. “It is correct,” I said, then added, “Jemmy may be a tad flaky but he’s always been reliable on the topic of who wants to kill him.”
    “Okay, then.” We passed the Quoddy Airfield with its freshly paved runway and bright orange airsock, then the Bay City Mobil Station, the firehouse, and the IGA.
    In the parking lot the high school kids were holding a car wash, some holding up hand-lettered signs while the rest squirted each other with hoses. “In that case… ,” Ellie began.
    She swung the steering wheel unexpectedly, taking us down County Road toward the south end of the island. “No time like the present,” she declared.
    Five minutes later we were at the end of a road that terminated suddenly in a gravel turnaround. Beyond that a massive rock wall loomed like the perimeter of a fortress, sharp-tipped black iron spikes jutting from the wall’s capstones every couple of feet.
    “Henderson’s place,” Ellie told me. “You’ll talk to him while I wander around keeping an eye out for Cory.”
    She frowned at the rock wall. “Not that I really think he’s here. If he’s got any sense it’s absolutely the last place he’d go. But that way we can tell Bella we at least tried to find her friend’s fugitive son.”
    Because you couldn’t lie to Bella. She sniffed fibs with the same unerring skill she used to ferret out household dirt; Victor used to say her first cranial nerve was overdeveloped.
    “Kill two birds with one stone, huh? Good idea,” I said.
    Assuming the dead birds didn’t turn out to be us. Bearding the lion in his den seemed a more apt description for what we were doing; privately I wasn’t so sure about Ellie’s notion.
    Still, letting Henderson know I was aware of his plans