Free Dead Level by Sarah Graves Page A

but mostly now it was only a singleton that survived, like this one here.
    He climbed the tree, snatched one fruit plus another for his pocket, and jumped down. The apple in his hand was wormy but what the hell; biting into it, he imagined turning a flamethrower full blast on the prison social workers, crisping them where they sat.
    When he first got there, he’d have done it if only he’d had the flames. But soon he’d had something better: a plan, which he’d begun working on constantly, in part to try keeping thoughts of Marianne out of his head. Meanwhile, he’d been careful to keep his good luck polished up, too, always choosing the chair that was facing a door, for example, stealing a bit of parsley for his pocket when the cooks weren’t looking—by then, he had a kitchen job—knocking wood every chance he got.
    And now his planning and polishing had finally paid off: he was back in his own familiar territory of downeast Maine, hundreds of miles from where the cops were looking for him.
    He was, he congratulated himself, so smart and lucky that he could hardly stand it. Free , he thought with a burst of delighted exhilaration. No one telling me what to do anymore, or how and when to do it . When you were behind bars, you could barely blow your nose without somebody trying to give you static about it.
    He could hardly believe the pleasure of just being out of there, as if he’d been inside a pressure cooker and someone had taken the lid off. No more orders, no more work duty, no more pretending to be a good little boy. Free …
    But he was also hungry, thirsty, and in need of a warm, dry place,free of insects, field mice, and any other pesky wildlife that might prevent him from getting a decent night’s sleep.
    Fortunately, though, he knew how to take care of all these needs. He’d grown up hunting and fishing here, and he knew every path, trail, and road in Washington County, not to mention every house, garage, and backyard clothesline in the area.
    These new jeans he wore, for instance: he’d had to roll the cuffs up and cinch the waist with a length of wild grapevine, but otherwise they weren’t bad. His boots, too, were stolen off a back step; no doubt they’d been left there by some poor guy whose shrewish wife nagged him about mud in the house.
    Women , Dewey thought, tossing the apple core away. Somehow they always managed to mess up a man’s life. But then the memory of how clever he’d been returned: his jacket and sweatshirt, too, were pinched from different places. That way no one would twig to the notion that someone had stolen a whole outfit.
    So now a bunch of pudgy, limp-spined husbands were going to come home from their stupid office jobs, Dewey imagined, and want to know where their stuff was, and when their wives didn’t have an answer for them maybe they’d grow a pair, find the nerve to smack the women upside the head a few times. It was the only way to handle them, Dewey knew, and the sooner a guy manned up to it, the better.
    And if he went too far, it was the woman’s own fault, Dewey thought as he stepped over a log, up onto a rock, and sideways off the path to avoid a muddy patch. Tracks on the dirt road were one thing; people walked or drove there a lot.
    Back here, though, he didn’t want anyone getting any ideas, like maybe that the famous prison escapee, Dewey Hooper, wasn’t really headed south out of Portland, hundreds of miles and a whole world away from the backwoods of downeast Maine.
    That instead, he’d deliberately stolen three cars and then crashed or abandoned them one after the other on purpose, like dropping a trail of breadcrumbs. A trail for the cops, who had fallen for it, at leastfrom what Dewey had read in the newspaper he’d fished out of a trash barrel that morning.
    The grassy path narrowed between a pair of massive boulders that stuck up like the two sides of a doorway. Beyond them, the thicket of mostly brush and saplings he had been walking