Vic sat a while with Paul in the camper, handling the mental trauma from Hardman's attack. Meanwhile, Diacono zigzagged generally westward. Westward wasn't the way to Minnesota, but it removed them from the immediate war zone, the area where they might expect to encounter an enemy. After a while he crossed I-135 and drove into a town, where a sign announced "Lindsborg, pop. 3,155." There Diacono pulled into a small garage marked "Knutson's Automotive Repairs and Body Shop," and the three of them got out.
A large blocky man walked over, wiping his hands on a rag and eyeing the ravaged windshield. Probably Knutson, Diacono decided.
"Lemme see if I can figure out what you want," Knutson said.
Frank nodded. "Right—new windshield. Also a new back window, new outside mirror, and patch some bullet holes."
Knutson circled the truck, then whistled softly. "What the hell happened? Looks like you drove through the opening day of deer season."
"We don't actually know. We were at a motel in Oklahoma last night—at some Interstate exit out in the country—and when we went out to the truck this morning..." He shrugged. "Some drunk with a gun in his pickup decided to take target practice, I guess; people do strange things anymore. But we decided we'd better just keep going and get it fixed in Lincoln, so we wouldn't be late. We're supposed to meet with the Nebraska coaching staff tomorrow noon."
Frank looked at his watch. "There's an extra fifty dollars in it if you can get it done inside of four hours."
While Frank talked, it occurred to Knutson that the story might be less than true, and a frown of suspicion touched his grease-smudged brow. Opening the driver's door, he leaned inside. Then his eyes picked up the bullet hole low in the back of the driver's seat, and the absence of any blood, there or elsewhere. His suspicion evaporated, and he turned back to Diacono.
"You're lucky nobody was inside; he'd have been hit sure as hell. If you can give me five hours, I'll fix her up for you. The filler's got to have time to dry. But there's no way the paint job can be ready today, even if you just want a touchup. That'll have to wait till Lincoln."
"Fine. I'll worry about the paint job later. Just put primer on the patches."
When Frank had signed the job order, they went outside. There was a bank down the street, and he turned in that direction; he needed to cash a check. This trip, he told himself, was getting expensive.
"Well," he said, "what next? Can we drive the Interstates, now that we've lost our monitor? Or do you think he'll pick us up again?"
"I'm pretty sure he's dead," said Vic. The others looked sharply at him. "I think he blew a fuse back in that wheat field. He threw a whammy on Paul back there; that's when Paul lost control for a minute. Then I attacked him, but I wasn't the only one. There was Tory and several others. We've got friends in this.
"And about what we do next—what we'd better do is get hold of some license plates somehow or other that don't say Arizona on them. There seems to be a lot of people looking for a big black pickup with Arizona plates."
"Gracco!"
Vincent Gracco had been sleeping heavily after too many hours awake; it had taken Shark a full minute of psychic prodding to waken him.
"Yeah? What is it, Shark?" he mumbled thickly. "Unh! You're on the grid already!" Gracco, in pajamas, sluggishly swung his legs off the bed and put his feet on the carpet. "What's happening?"
"Who knows? We seem to have two carloads of psychics running around somewhere in the middle of the country headed for Lake Superior, and I don't know where they are. If they've got any brains at all, they've changed vehicles by now so they'll be impossible to spot. We're in trouble, Gracco; we need to talk about this."
Gracco considered saying something to the effect that if he didn't get more sleep, they'd be in worse trouble, but somehow he didn't. "Okay, I'm listening."
"We can't depend on cancelling them along the road somewhere now, the way we thought we could. We could get lucky—we're about due—but we can't depend on it. And I just took a look at Lake Superior from way up. There are practically no clouds, and there's ice with snow on it around almost the entire shore. In some places it extends out for miles. The whole west end is frozen over for maybe twenty or thirty miles out from Duluth.
"Given those conditions, if you were Merlin, how would you try to reach the island if you were somewhere up around Lake Superior?"
"They've almost got to fly," Gracco said. "They could hire a tractor to haul a boat out near the edge of the ice—a small boat they could push the rest of the way by hand—but they'd have to be nuts to do something like that. The tractor could break through when they got close to the edge, or they could swamp trying to cross open water..." But we're not monitoring them now, Gracco reminded himself. They'd be hard to spot on all that water. "What kind of beaches are there on the island, if they tried a boat and got that far?"
"There's an ice shelf along the whole south side of the island, but the north side is partly open, probably from wave action. All the bays and inlets are frozen over, and mostly where it's open, it's cliffy."
Gracco shook his head. "It's fifty to one they'd fly and come down on one of the little lakes on the island. Olson tells me there are a lot of little lakes out there."
"Dozens of them," Shark agreed, "all frozen over and covered with snow. There's one they could use that's only two or three miles from the gate."
"Okay," said Gracco, "here's what I'll do." He squinted at the clock by his bed. "It's four-thirty in the morning here. I'll get on the horn to Olson and let him know we've lost track of Merlin. We've already talked about what we'd do if that happened.
"We can't cover all the airports in this part of the country, but we'll contact every charter company as far south as the Twin Cities to let us know if they come around, because they could hire any plane with skis to fly out there.
"There's something else we need to look at, though," Gracco continued relentlessly. "They could stay lucky and make it to the island. To the gate. We need somebody out there to waylay them. I know it's dangerous, because we don't know how far out the neutral zone goes. But we could decide on a hundred feet or a hundred yards or a mile, and take our chances—blow them away if they show up out there. If we cut them down earlier, no harm done. But if they get that far, we got nothing more to lose."
Shark didn't reply, and the absence of disagreement encouraged Gracco. "I told Olson that Merlin thinks some escaped Nazis stashed a big cache of gold and jewels out there after World War Two in an old prospector's hole. When he asked me why we don't just ambush him on the island, I told him Merlin might decide to cool it before he got that far, and we needed to hit him along the way if we could. I told him Merlin might be crazy, but he's also a genius, and a slippery sonofobitch.
"It wasn't the greatest story in the world, and Olson didn't totally buy it, but with the money I'm waving around, he settled for it.
"Now, the island is a national park and wilderness area. I was talking to a guy that flies dope for Olson, and he says there's a law against landing a plane out there, or even flying over the island below 9,000 feet, without special authorization. It's even against the law to be on the island at all in the winter; they think it bothers the wolves or some dumb shit like that. So I suppose if the Park thinks someone's out there, or hears a plane, they get on the horn and call the Coast Guard or the Michigan State Police or somebody—I don't know who.
"Anyway, we need to play it cool and not get noticed. So what I'll do is get some guys together that know their way around the woods in the winter, and dress them in camouflage whites. Then I'll fly out there with them at night—come around out of the northwest, where there's no ranger station to hear the plane. We can land on some lake near the gate and go there on snowshoes.
"But I'll need you to show me where the gate is. You're riding the grid, and I doubt if I can find the gate just by flying around feeling for it."
Shark nodded mentally; setting an ambush was the necessary final safeguard. "Get a big map of the island and call me back," he said. "I'll show you the gate on it."
A big map of Isle Royale—where could he get one on short notice? The U. of M. library would have one, Gracco decided; a place like that had everything. Shark could guide his pen psychically, right there in the library. Then he'd fold up the map, put it in his shirt, and it was his.
"Will do," Gracco said. "I'll whistle you up on that later today."
They disconnected. So fucking much to do, Gracco thought, I need three of me. When this is all over, I'm going to have me a nice long sleep and then take a vacation in Monte Carlo.