DAY 5
Six cans of soup at one seventy-nine. Rice, two bags, three ninety-nine each. Tortillas at two ninety-nine.
Marcus had been playing this out in his head since the creek. He did it going up, on the long switchbacks where the trail gave up on shade, and he was still doing it when Samantha stopped abruptly in front of him.
They were fifty feet below the top. He could hear a car.
“Down,” she said quietly.
He sat where he was. Vlad came up beside him and lay flat and took his hat off. After a second Marcus took his off too and felt the sun land on his scalp.
Samantha crawled the last bit on her stomach.
She was gone a long time. Marcus thought about the road down the other side and started counting groceries in his head.
“Eleven cars,” she said when she came back. “Nine of them are tourists. It’s a scenic drive and there’s a bathroom.”
“And the other two?” Vlad asked.
“Both are white Suburbans, backed in, side by side at the far end where the trail comes out. Everybody else nosed in.” She was looking back down the trail while she said it. “Four men standing around the SUVs, not looking at the view.”
“Are they looking at the trail?” Marcus asked.
“One of them is.”
Vlad said nothing. He sat up and put his hat back on. He wrapped his arms around a rock, squeezing tight.
“How long have they been there.”
“I don’t know. There’s a Forest Service sign by the toilets that has something taped to it.”
“A photograph,” Vlad said.
“I can’t tell if it’s a photograph from two hundred yards. It’s a piece of paper.”
Marcus looked at Vlad and then looked back at Samantha.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s the other way down.”
“There isn’t one. The road is the only thing that crosses it for at least twenty miles either direction and the trail comes out on top of it.” She looked at him. “We can turn around and go back north and be nowhere, with two days of food.”
“Or we walk out of the trees into a parking lot with four federal agents in it.”
“Yes.”
“Those are two shitty options.”
Vlad rolled onto his side. “There is a third. You go back down and I go across.”
“You’re not getting a ride,” Samantha said. “You have no money on you and you won’t talk to anyone.”
“I have twenty-two hundred dollars in my pack.”
“You have twenty-two hundred dollars and you won’t talk to anyone.”
Marcus laughed, Samantha snapped her head around at him and glared, and he put his hand over his mouth.
Nobody said anything for a while after that.
“Nine of eleven are tourists,” Marcus said. “That’s the whole thing, right? That’s not four men watching an empty parking lot. That’s four men in a place where forty people an hour walk past them.”
“What’s your point?”
“They can’t stop forty people an hour. They’re going to stand near the sign and look at faces and hope they get lucky.” He was getting animated. “So the worst thing we can do is come out of the trees. Anyone who comes out of the trees is a hiker, and they are looking for hikers.”
Samantha was quiet.
“Where do we come from instead,” she said.
“The bathroom.”
Vlad snorted.
They went east under the top, off the trail, side stepping slowly through rock for forty minutes. They came up onto the pavement two hundred yards down the far side, where a switchback put a bank of dirt between them and the parking lot.
They hid their packs in the rocks below the road, under an overhang. Samantha went up by herself to check things out and came back a few minutes later.
“Nothing has changed. The Feds are in the same place.”
Together, they walked up the road into the parking lot, hands empty, looking like three tourists who had driven up to take a look at the top of the pass.
It was the loudest place Marcus had been in five days. A car door beeped and he flinched.
“Don’t go to the toilets,” Samantha said, not moving her mouth much. “Everyone stands at the rail. Go stand at the rail.”
The rail was a length of peeled log on posts at the west edge of the parking lot. A dozen people were hanging around, talking and taking pictures. Marcus put both hands on the log and looked out at the view.
Rice, two bags. Six cans at one seventy-nine.
Vlad had drifted off along the rail and was standing at the end of it with his back to everybody. Samantha had gone the other way.
A woman near Marcus said, “Would you mind?” and held out her phone.
He took it. She got her husband and stood him against the rail. Marcus took a half dozen pictures quickly in both portrait and landscape mode and handed the camera back to the woman.
“Oh, these are great. Thank you.”
“Sure,” Marcus said.
She waited half a second for the rest of it, and then she looked at her phone and went away.
The agent came along the rail.
He was young, wearing a polo shirt and hiking pants that looked like they had never been hiked in. He had the piece of paper in his hand, folded in half with a photo showing, working his way down the line. He got to the couple with the phone and said something. They shook their heads and he said something else and they laughed.
Marcus watched the mountains.
The trick, Vlad had said, is that she asks the same question hundreds of times a day and does not care what the answer is. The correct answer is yes.
This man was going to say a sentence he had said hundreds of times today.
He stopped on Marcus’s left, close enough that Marcus could see the paper had two photographs on it. The agent held it up at chest height without much conviction.
“Afternoon. Have you seen either of these two up here today?”
Marcus turned his head and looked at his own face.
The beard wasn’t in it.
“No,” he said.
Six cans, rice, tortillas. He reached into the cart in his mind for the next item, but there wasn’t one.
Then he heard himself say, “You guys been up here all day? That’s a hell of a—”