Mulengro, page 27
“Collect it,” Janfri told Jeff.
Numbly, Jeff did what he was told.
“Now lie down,” Janfri ordered the policemen. “Face down. Jeff, find something to tie them up with—use the cord from their radio or their belts if you have to.”
“This is insane,” Jeff told him. He stared at the gun in his hand, but the brief thought running through his mind didn’t make any more sense. There was no way he could use that thing—not even to stop this madness. He put it down on the hood of the cruiser like it was a hot coal. “These are cops,” he said, turning back to Janfri. “They put you in jail for shit like this.”
One of the officers hadn’t lain down yet. He turned, on his hands and knees, and tried again.
“He’s right,” he told Janfri, keeping his voice reasonable. “You’re calling the shots now, but you’re just making things worse in the long run.”
“Tell them what you want with us,” Janfri said. He knew from the way that they’d dealt with Jeff and Jackie earlier that something else had happened. “Go on.”
The officer tried to judge the man behind the shotgun. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to set him off, because he didn’t want to die, but . . .
“Look,” he said, still keeping his voice calm. “We don’t have to talk about it. You know and we know, so—”
“Tell them!” Janfri wasn’t sure what lie they were going to come up with, but he wanted it out in the open so that he’d have a better idea of what they were up against.
“Please,” Jackie said. She started to move forward, but Jeff caught her arm, keeping her out of the Gypsy’s range of fire.
The policeman nodded dully. “All right,” he said. “You want to hear me say it? What’s it going to do—make you feel good, hearing it? Are you planning to blow us away like you did Finlay and the Gypsies?”
“Finlay?” Jeff said. “Craig Finlay? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Constable Finlay being killed earlier this evening—by your friend here and maybe you too. Were you in on it? Did you get your rocks off doing it? Is it giving you a hard-on hearing me tell you? Guess it’s not so easy to get the kind of high your kind are usually looking for, being out here in the bush. It hasn’t had time to make the front pages yet.”
Craig was dead? Killed earlier this evening? Jeff shook his head, unable to understand what he was being told. Craig was dead and they thought that Janfri had done it? That he and Jackie had helped him?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He was going to be sick.
“What do you want now?” the officer asked him. “Do you want me to tell you about the rest of the people your friend butchered? Like maybe—”
“Shut up!” Jeff cried. “Just shut up! There’s no way he could have killed anyone. We were with him all night.” “Oh, sure. And I guess—”
“That’s enough,” Janfri said. “On the ground and keep your mouth shut. Do you see what I mean?” he asked Jeff. “Now will you tie them up? We want to get across the border before it gets light and we’re just wasting time now.”
“Across the border?” Jeff asked. “You mean to the States? We can’t do that.”
“Where else can we go?” Janfri demanded. “Come on, Jeff. Tie them up.”
Jeff started to say something else, but Jackie tugged at his arm. He nodded and went to the cruiser, then thought about their handcuffs.
“Sure,” Janfri said when Jeff mentioned them. “But make sure they haven’t got any keys on them.”
He didn’t lay the shotgun down until both men were tied up— first with their hands cuffed together behind their backs, one man’s left to the other’s right, and then with the cord from the radio in their cruiser. When Jeff and Jackie were finished, the two men were sitting on their knees, backs to each other, trussed like a pair of game birds.
“You won’t get away with this,” the first officer repeated. “I’m going to personally hunt you down, Gypsy—all the way to Mexico if that’s what it’s going to take.”
Janfri shook his head. “Once we’re across the border, you’re never going to even see our tracks, friend.” He shook his head as the man began to speak again. “Open your mouth one more time and I’ll gag you as well.”
The policeman said nothing, though his eyes spoke volumes.
“Okay,” Janfri said, collecting the shotgun and handguns, as well as a high-powered rifle that was in the police cruiser. After shutting down the searchbeam, he led the way to Jackie’s Honda, waited for her to open the door with her key. Her hand shook so badly that he cradled the weapons, took the key from her and helped her get into the back with Jeff. Laying the handguns on the passenger’s seat, with the rifle and shotgun on the floor, he got in behind the wheel and shut the door. A shudder touched him and he laid his head against the steering wheel, waiting for the reaction to leave him. One wrong move back there . . .
“Janfri?” Jeff asked. “Are you all right?”
He took a long breath, exhaled it slowly, sat up. “I think so.”
“You wouldn’t really have shot either of those men—would you have?”
The Gypsy shook his head. “I couldn’t have. I don’t have any real fight with them—not the kind of fight that would make me want to shoot them, at any rate.”
Jeff held Jackie close, relieved at Janfri’s reaction to what had just happened, but somehow more frightened as well. It was good to know that Janfri wasn’t crazy, but now that he was beginning to understand more of what they were up against, he didn’t want to lose the small comfort of having someone in charge who seemed to know what he was doing. Because everything was going wrong. Ola’s disappearance, the Gourlays, the dead thing in the woods. . . . Now the police were after them and Craig Finlay was dead.
“What’re we going to do?” he asked aloud.
“Disappear,” Janfri said. His voice sounded firmer now.
“In the States?” Jackie asked.
The Gypsy shook his head. “I just said that in the hopes that it will throw them off a little. I doubt that it’ll do much good, but at least it will spread them a little thinner.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
Janfri turned to look at them. “We’re going to Mill Pond,” he said. “We’ll hide the car in the bush up there and try to find your friend Ola before anyone else finds us.” He faced front again and started the car. Left unsaid was his fear that Ola wasn’t going to be where they could find her. “Which way do we go?” he asked instead.
“You have to turn the car around first,” Jackie said. She was almost resigned to her new fate. It was funny. She’d been looking for some direction in her life, something to plan for for the future. But now, in just a few short hours, she wasn’t even sure she had a future anymore. If the thing in the woods didn’t get them—she was trying hard not to think of this Mulengro and his ghosts that Janfri had mentioned—they were probably going to get shot down by the police. Their options were so narrowed now that they weren’t even worth thinking about anymore.
“Turn here,” she said as the windmill came up on their left.
Janfri took the turn and slowed the car to a crawl on the rough track of a road that led by a house and a mowed field behind it, then headed off into the forest.
“I wish . . .” she began, then let her voice trail off.
Jeff held her closer and she leaned her head on his shoulder. “What do you wish?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “I was going to say I wish that this had never happened, but I guess we all feel that way. I suppose all there’s left to wish for is that we make it through, you know?”
Jeff nodded. In the front seat, Janfri said nothing. The hopelessness in Jackie’s voice did nothing to bolster his own lack of optimism as to what the next few hours held for them. He tried to concentrate on the track as it wound through the forest.
thirty-four
Ola couldn’t relax. She moved back and forth across Zach’s living room, fidgeting whenever she did sit down. She was standing now, looking out at the dark lake through the window, one finger idly touching the half-finished dulcimer that lay on the low worktable in front of her. Boboko watched her through slitted eyes from a worn throw rug by the cast-iron stove. Zach sat in his favorite reading chair, a book lying open on his lap, his gaze shifting from the page he’d read ten times already to the stiff back of his guest.
The wood grain seemed to breathe under Ola’s fingertip. She could almost feel the tree that the wood had come from if she opened herself enough, but then she would remember... Mulengro...out there in the night...seeking her... coming for her... and she’d close her mind from accepting any external impressions. Or at least she would try to. The night outside was so quiet. Silent with menace. Prikaza. Bad luck rode the wind and called her name.
“There’s, like, nothing much you can do,” Zach said softly. “Sit down, Ola. Ease up. You’re just bad-vibing yourself.”
“Can’t.”
“Won’t,” Boboko muttered.
Ola shot him a look, then sighed. It wasn’t Boboko’s fault. She moved away from the worktable, away from the silent night beyond the window, and curled up on the sofa.
“I can’t see my own future, you know,” she said suddenly. Zach said nothing, using her own Gypsy patience against her until she went on. “I’ve never wanted to see my own future,” she added finally. “But now...tonight ...I know he’s coming, Zach. He’s out there, waiting for me, coming for me, and I can’t even use my dook to see if I’ll survive.”
“Everything’s going to be copacetic,” Zach said. “Unless you keep psyching yourself out.”
“I can’t help it. There’s just too much bad luck in the air.”
Earlier they’d heard dogs howling. Zach had smiled away her nervousness. “It’s just some farm dogs hooting it up,” he told her, but Ola had felt Mulengro’s presence in that eerie sound—just as she felt it in the silence now. It seemed inescapable. She couldn’t shake the fear that her fate lay in Mulengro’s hands ...and that it was inescapable as well.
Zach laid his book on the floor. “There was this old guy that used to live down the road,” he said. “He told me, ‘When you meet the devil, you can’t waste time being scared. You got to just spit in his eye!’ This Mulengro—he’s your devil, Ola, and unless you stop being afraid of him, he’s going to have the battle half won already. Do you know what I mean?”
She nodded. “We call him o Beng,” she said.
“What’s the devil?” Boboko wanted to know. The sound of the word, the way Zach said it, intrigued him.
“Well, if you’re a Christian,” Zach said, “you see him as a fallen angel. According to—” He broke off. “Did you hear that?”
Ola shook her head, but then the sound was repeated—a distant coughing like the backfire from a car.
“Shotgun,” Zach said. “Some redneck’s out in the woods with a
gun.”
Ola shivered and hugged her knees, goose bumps lifting on the skin of her forearms. She was so on edge that everything was making her nervous. For a long moment the three of them sat quietly, waiting for yet another repetition of the sound.
“Some say that the devil’s like a big old ugly black dog,” Zach said finally, looking at Boboko. “There’s a little piece of him in every one of us—a place where it’s dark and our fears grow, where anger comes roaring up and bad vibes hang out. And the thing we’ve got to do in this life is to, like, keep that darkness down and not let it creep up and take us over. That’s how you get an evil man, you know. He doesn’t come from a bad family, or a bad street or a bad part of town. He comes from somebody who wasn’t strong enough to hold back the darkness, or was too lazy to, or just plain didn’t care. I think they freak me out the most—the ones that don’t care.”
Boboko rather doubted that he had even the smallest part of a dog inside him, black or otherwise, but he was trying to stay on his best behavior because Ola was upset enough without adding to her worries. He still wasn’t sure he cared that much for Dr. Rainbow, but his initial impressions had been greatly tempered by the day spent in his company.
“That doesn’t apply to everything in this world,” Ola said. “There are places and things that are evil simply because that’s what they are.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Zach replied. “Take yourself, now. With all you went through as a kid... if the liberals are right, you’d be an embittered evil woman, just looking for ways to get back at everyone who hassled you.”
“I am bitter.”
“But not evil.”
Ola sighed. “I don’t know what I am sometimes, Zach. I can’t fit in with the Gaje world—it simply goes against everything I believe in—but I’m not welcome to live amongst my own people. I don’t want to be alone all my life.”
“I can dig that,” Zach said. “But, look. We haven’t known each other for more than a day or so but, like, I think we’re getting along pretty good. At least the vibes are right from this side of the room. There must be more folks out there in the world that you could be tight with.”
“I suppose.”
Ola didn’t understand what it was about her host that let her open up to him the way she did. It had to have something to do with the fact that he had the sight as well—his own kind of dook. And in a way, though she wasn’t sure that he would admit it, he was as much an outcast as she was. He was a refugee from a lost era, a hippie in a time when caring for yourself was more important than caring for other people or the world around you. Most of his peers had forsaken their beads and their long hair to become executives and businessmen, while he remained an anachronism, living alone on an out-of-the-way lake, with only the voices he heard on the wind for company. Did he have any friends?
“Don’t you get lonely?” she asked.
“Sometimes. I’ve got a few friends that’ll drop by from time to time, but most of the people I used to know just got tired of waiting for me to grow out of all this, you know? Like there was something wrong with being what I am.” His gaze met hers and he smiled sadly. “I know all about not fitting in, Ola.”
Silence fell between them again. They were both misfits, Ola thought. When Zach picked up his book again, she swung her legs to the floor.
“Can I borrow your canoe?” she asked.
“Sure. You want company?”
Ola shook her head. “I just want to float out on the water for a while and think.”
“I know the feeling.” He hesitated, wanting to add, “Be careful,” but he didn’t want her thinking along those lines if she wasn’t already.
Ola fetched her jacket. “Don’t wait up,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“Take your time,” Zach said as he followed her to the door.
“You don’t mind me going off on my own like this?”
“Hey, everybody needs their own space sometimes, you know?”
Ola nodded and lifted her hand in a wave. “Stay out of trouble, Boboko,” she called to the cat.
Zach lifted a hand in return and watched her vanish into the darkness that lay thick below the hill. He stood there for a long moment, just staring. For the first time in all the years that he’d lived here, night fears arose in him. The darkness beyond the lights of the cottage no longer seemed peaceful. Its secret blackness had taken on a malevolent edge that sent chills traveling up his spine. He thought of calling to Ola—afraid for her now—but didn’t want to intrude on her privacy. He was just blowing things out of proportion, he told himself. Except he heard a mutter on the wind, a whisper that brought last night’s dream reeling back into his head. Dory playing his flute and the ghosts spilling out, riding the music.
Zach shivered, feeling as though he’d stepped into the middle of an episode of The Twilight Zone. He started to turn back inside, then paused. He thought he heard something else—something more substantial than the wind. For a moment the sound was so alien that a claw of fear crawled up his spine, then he placed it and laughed at the turn his imagination had taken. It was only a car. But what was it doing out here at this time of night?
The Honda made its way up the steep incline. When it reached the top, Janfri let it coast to a stop. They were still driving with the lights out. On the right he could see darkened cottages.
“Now what?” he asked.
Jackie leaned forward, resting her arms on the front seat. Her face was very close to the Gypsy’s. When she spoke, it was in a whisper, as though she was afraid the night outside the car would hear and do something to stop them.
“There’re a few cottages here—about six, I think. If we keep going straight ahead, we’ll reach a ‘Y’ in the road. The righthand turn takes us to the last cottage where this hippie named Dr. Rainbow lives year-round. The lefthand turn goes on into the Conservation Area and then just sort of fades out. We could drive up there as far as the car can go and hide it in the bush. After that . . .“
“We look for Ola,” Janfri said. He put the car into first and inched it forward again.
Zach put on a fringed buckskin jacket and, picking up a flashlight, started for the door.
“Where are you going?” Boboko asked.
“There’s someone in a car out there and I want to check it out. Someone was shooting out there earlier—I heard two shots, and maybe a third a little later on. If it’s that same damn fool, I want to get his plate numbers and call the OPP.”
Boboko looked around the cottage, frowning. “I’m going with you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Zach held the door open and Boboko slipped out ahead of him, every sense alert. “Why did you bring the light?” the cat asked.
“In case it’s just someone who got lost or something.”
“And how are we going to know which it is?”
“Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Now if we’re done rapping . . .” He could hear the car still, heading into the Conservation Area.
“I don’t know,” Jeff said. Janfri had squeezed the Honda into a stand of cedars and was now trying to erase the marks of its passage by pulling the flattened grass upright once more. “If they come looking for us with a helicopter, they’ll spot it awfully fast.”
