The fourth truck came up the road at ten to four. It didn’t slow for the turn into the campground.
Vlad assumed it was with the other three. They had all stopped within a quarter mile of each other at a wide spot where a two-track dropped off toward the creek. He watched the taillights go red and then go out.
He was cold. He had been sitting against the same tree since one and his feet had gone numb a while ago.
Marcus was asleep sitting up with his leg out straight and his heel up on the pack. Samantha had told him to do that and then carefully tucked him in among their gear so he’d have the least chance of rolling over. Marcus hadn’t objected. Vlad wanted to feel amused, but he wasn’t.
Samantha was awake. She had been lying on her side with her eyes open for a while.
“There are four trucks above us,” Vlad said.
“Hunters.”
“Yes.”
She sat up and put her hands inside her sleeves.
“Then it’s now.”
Marcus opened his eyes. “I’ll go.”
“No.”
“We said I get the car.”
“You said it.”
“I’m good at people.”
“Yes,” Vlad said. “That is the problem.”
Marcus started to get his leg under him, groaned sharply, and stopped.
“How many of us are there,” Vlad said.
“What?”
“On the news. How many people are they looking for.”
“Two,” said Samantha.
“Nobody is looking for a third person,” Vlad said.
“He’s right,” Samantha said.
She said it fast.
“So I sit here,” said Marcus.
“With your foot up.”
Samantha unzipped the pocket on her chest and held out some twenties. Vlad took them and put them in the sock with his and put the sock inside his jacket. She did not ask what he wanted them for. He was not sure any more whether that was trust or whether she was just tired.
“Vlad, what are you going to tell him?” she said.
“Nothing that is true.”
“Not even your name.”
“Especially not my name.”
He stood up and stomped his feet to get the blood circulating. He took the bag with the Mini in it off his shoulder and held it out to Samantha, but didn’t let go of the strap as she grabbed it.
“I will want that back,” he said.
“I know.”
“Second bend below the campground turn,” he said. “Above the road, in the trees, not on it. Five o’clock. If I am not there at six, start walking up.”
“Up where?”
“Up.”
“Vlad,” said Marcus. “Whatever you want off him, make him say it first. Don’t ask him for anything. Tell him the problem and then shut up.”
Vlad had watched Marcus do that to people for four years. It worked every time. It always annoyed him that it worked.
“Okay,” he said, and headed down through the trees.
It took Vlad twenty minutes to get to the road and another ten to come up it, staying in the trees on the uphill side, stepping quietly in the duff instead of gravel. The creek covered most of the noise he made. He came around the bend above the campground and got down in the willows forty feet short of the wide spot.
Five vehicles. Crap. He’d only seen four come up.
There was a brand new white Ford, a Chevy with a dog bowl upside down behind the back tire, a flatbed with a quad strapped onto it, and a Subaru with a box on the roof, parked badly. None of the four had frost on the windshield.
At the far end there was an old GMC, three-quarter ton, the red gone pink across the hood, with a cab-high shell on the back that had been white on some other truck. It was caked in mud. The whole windshield was white with frost, so it had been up here since before Vlad started counting.
Four men were standing at their trucks with their headlamps on red, pulling out gear and putting it on. One of them peed off the side of the road while he was still buckling his pack. They went off up the two-track one at a time, ten minutes apart, and the sound of each of them was gone in under a minute.
The man from the GMC was sitting on its open tailgate with his boots in the gravel, not doing anything at all.
Vlad waited. The man kept sitting. Vlad moved four feet to his left to see whether there was a bow against the bumper, and a willow stem came across his shoulder and let go.
“You can come out,” the man said. He did not turn around. “I heard you a while ago.”
Vlad lay there. He was scared.
“I’m not going to come find you,” the man said. “I’m too old to bother.”
Vlad got up. His left leg had fallen asleep again so he stumbled and grabbed the willow in front of him. He got stable and walked over. The man swung the red light onto him for a second and took it off.
“You’re not hunting.”
“No.”
“You’re not camping either.” The man put his hands on his knees. “You smell like you’ve been out about a week.”
“Our truck is at the campground,” Vlad said. “It will not start.”
“Which site.”
Vlad did not know the numbers of the sites.
“There is no truck,” he said.
“Okay.”
The man reached back into the bed, came out with a thermos, poured an inch into the cup and drank it.
“What do you want.”
He had come up with a bullshit answer earlier. A brother in Lakewood, a doctor the family had used for years.
“My friend’s foot is infected,” Vlad said. “There is a raw place on his heel the size of a quarter. The skin is red and shiny for several inches around it and the swelling has come up over the ankle bone. It is hot when you put a finger on it. He has had it inside a boot for two days.”
The man put the cup down on the tailgate.
“Is it going up the leg.”
“Not yet.”
“When it goes up the leg you’re past the part where anybody helps you. My old man sat on one of those for ten days because he didn’t want to bother anybody. They took the leg off at the knee.”
Vlad did not say anything. The man poured another inch into the cup and did not drink it.
“How’d you get in here.”
“We walked.”
“From where.”
“A long way.”
The man looked at him for a while. Then he filled the cup the rest of the way up and held it out.
Vlad took the cup and drank what was in it. He had not had anything hot in a few days. For about two seconds he was going to say yes to anything the man offered him.
“I can run you into Gunnison,” the man said. “There’s a clinic on the highway. They open at eight and he’ll have antibiotics in him by nine.”
“We are going to Denver.”
“Denver is four hours and a pass in the wrong direction.”
“Yes.”
“Why Denver.”
“Because a clinic in Gunnison is going to ask him his name.”
The man did not move.
Headlights came around the bend below and swept the willows and kept coming. Vlad turned his face into the bed of the truck and stood still. Another truck went by at fifteen miles an hour with two men in the cab. One plate and two faces. It did not slow down. It parked at the top of the wide spot, and when the doors opened one of the men said it was colder than yesterday and the other one agreed with him.
The man on the tailgate watched it go by and then looked at his boots.
“I don’t want to know,” he said.
“No.”
“I come out at dark. Not before.”
“Yes.”
“That truck runs and it’s the only one I’ve got. It’s worth about eleven hundred dollars and most of that is the tires.”
Vlad put the cup down and took the sock out of his jacket, unrolled it on the tailgate, and counted fifty twenties onto it.
The man picked them up and counted them again himself.
“That’s a thousand.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not selling you my truck.”
“I am not buying it,” Vlad said. “It is rent.”
“Rent.” The man folded the bills once and put them in his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket. “What’s your name.”
Vlad did not answer.
“If that truck is not sitting here when I come out, I’m going to be standing in front of a sheriff at nine o’clock tonight telling him someone took it,” he said. “I’d like to have a name.”
“Vladimir.”
“Vladimir what.”
“Just Vladimir.”
“Vladimir,” the man said, putting the stress in the wrong place.
Vlad did not correct him.
“Okay,” the man said.
He got off the tailgate and leaned on it until it shut. He opened the driver’s door, took a pair of glasses off the dash, and put them in his shirt pocket with the money.
“Keys are in it.” He pulled a paper sack out of a cooler in the bed and put it on the seat. “That’s for the foot guy.”
“Thank you.”
“The muffler’s bad. Drive it like an old man.” He got his pack up onto one knee and then onto his shoulders, and picked the bow up off the front tire. “Second gear won’t go in unless you let it come all the way back first.”
“Yes.”
“Dark,” the man said.
“Yes,” Vlad said.
The man walked off up the two-track. Vlad stood in the open door and listened and could not hear him at all after the first few steps. He was better in the woods than Vlad was.
The cab smelled like cigarettes somebody had quit smoking a long time ago. There was a coffee can of bolts wedged under the seat and hay on the floor mat on the passenger side. The keys were hanging in the ignition on a ring with a bottle opener on it.
Vlad moved the seat forward and started it. It turned over twice and caught, and it was loud enough that he looked up the two-track. Then he pulled the registration out from behind the visor and read it with his headlamp on the lowest setting and his hand cupped over the lens.
KINNEY, WESLEY A. An address on a county road outside Gunnison.
He put it back behind the visor.
He drove down past the campground turn at fifteen miles an hour like everybody else. The green tent at the far end had a light on inside it, low and moving. He went by.
He turned the lights off at the second bend and stopped. They came down out of the trees fast, Samantha first with both packs, then Marcus, who got in clumsily and hauled his leg up after him with both hands.
“It smells like a barn in here,” Marcus said.
“Yes.”
“Whose truck is this?” Samantha said.
“Wesley Kinney’s.”
“Did he give it to you?”
“He rented it to me.”
“Until when?”
“Dark.”
Vlad handed Marcus the paper sack.
“Dark’s fourteen hours,” said Marcus.
“Yes.”
“How long do we need it?”
“Longer than that,” Vlad said.
Marcus opened the sack, looked at the sandwich inside, and tore into it.
Vlad drove down the hill slowly with his lights off. When the road dropped into the trees he turned the lights on and went north toward the reservoir.