Part 21 (1/2)

He hoped it was Carolyn, hoped she could get into the boat and get away. But he knew she wouldn't.

Randy jabbed him again, painfully. Chip kept putting one foot in front of the other, sure each time that this step would be his last.

Because Randy was just waiting for a good place to kill him. Chip didn't know what kind of spot it would be. Soft earth, to dig a grave in, or by a fallen tree trunk that Randy could roll on top of him.

But whatever it was, when it came, that would be it. The end.

All done. And no one to save him. Randy poked him once more as Chip stumbled, caught himself, and resumed walking.

Nothing more to be done about it. In this way they proceeded together into the woods.

CHAPTER 9.

CHIP KEPT ON WALKING UNTIL RANDY TOLD HIM TO STOP at the edge of an old pit that looked as if it had once been mined for gravel. A rickety-looking old superstructure hung over it, built of timbers with a metal wheel bolted to it.

A fraying rope still hung down from the wheel. For hauling the gravel out, Chip imagined, as he peered down into the pit. Its steep sides were sandy, with a few dead, dry weeds poking up at intervals from the tan soil.

Pockets of stones interrupted the sand, extending downward in a flow pattern as if the stones had come out as a liquid, then frozen. Last summer's gra.s.s bristled yellow and brown in a narrow long-ago-cleared area all around the top of the pit.

A rough trail had led here, barely visible now, twin narrow tracks recalling the pa.s.sage of wheels. Chip noticed each separate thing in a sort of hyper-vision, the colors brighter and the edges of everything sharper than normal.

It was freezing out here, even more than on the boat. He was getting tired under the weight of the life jacket, heavy with its straps held tight by thick metal buckles. And it was damp; it had rained here sometime in the recent past, and he could smell the cold water at the bottom of the pit.

He supposed he should feel afraid, but he was long past that. He felt angry; he felt as if he had nothing to lose. So he said it as soon as he thought of it.

”The money's fake.”

The words hung in the cold, clear air as if printed there. Chip felt Randy stop short right behind him. They'd reached the huge old white pine-a sentinel tree, that kind of big, solitary evergreen was called, he remembered irrelevantly-that he'd been able to see from sh.o.r.e.

Around it, the breeze made a rattling sound in the few brown leaves still remaining on the smaller maples and birches. About twenty feet up, a thick dead branch stuck straight out from the pine like the lowered arm of a railway crossing: Stop.

”How'd you know that?” asked Randy with what Chip knew was deceptive mildness. But he answered anyway.

”I looked. On the big boat, in your book.” The memory of it sickened him: clippings and photographs.

”Between the pages where you'd hid it. Though I guess there must be more of it somewhere. Because ...”

”Shut up.” Randy poked him in the back with the gun barrel. There was a long silence while, Chip supposed, Randy thought it over. Then: ”I don't believe you.” But it was clear from his voice that he did. Chip could practically hear Randy thinking now, trying to come to grips with it.

With how he'd been fooled. Chip was still trying to figure it out himself, how it had happened and what Randy might do when he knew: That his brother, Roger, had screwed him.

That, somehow, that was what the map had been all about. Not for Randy, but for someone else, and who would it be but Roger? And besides, something had always been wrong with the story.

No matter what Roger Dodd or anyone else said, there was no million dollars. Chip's belief in it and his attempt to get it had, like Randy's, been doomed from the start.

”How do you know?” Randy's voice, asking it, was as calm as if he'd been asking the time of day.

Keep him talking, Chip thought. ”I looked at the bills. And they look real.” Felt that way, too. Someone had gone to a whole lot of trouble printing them up. ”But they've got identical serial numbers.” And that meant counterfeit; there was no getting around it.

In as few words as possible, Chip explained this to Randy, felt him taking it in and believing it, finally: That it had all been for nothing. That the money had never been real.

That he'd been had. ”You were supposed to bury it out here.” Chip was trying it all out in his own mind by saying it aloud. ”If things went wrong, you'd need someplace to stash it, where Roger could find it. And this was it.” He looked down at the sandy soil at the foot of the sentinel tree. ”Roger was supposed to come here later and check. That's what the map was for, to let him know where you'd put it. He'd go out to the buoy where he'd left the money; you'd have hung a map on the buoy for him.”

Which now that he'd said it actually sounded straightforward enough so that Chip thought it was probably true: There'd been a bail out option. ”But you lost the map and I found it,” he said.

Randy kept listening. ”If the money was here, Roger would know you'd had to leave it. He would take it back and you could try again to make the transfer later.”

When, for instance, alerted border officials weren't looking for a guy with bad surgery, bad ID papers, and a satchel full of cash. The whole bailout option was a smart move on Randy's part, since lots of other things could have gone wrong besides the pair of them that had: first Carolyn, then Sam.

Carolyn had given Randy another ch.o.r.e to accomplish in Eastport: shutting her up, vanis.h.i.+ng her off the face of the earth. Then, just when Randy must've thought he had her taken care of, Sam had showed up at the wrong moment.

And finally Chip himself had arrived, yet another glitch in the plan. Still, Randy had handled it all well; was handling it now, even, by deciding whether to kill Chip or do something else.

Chip hoped the unexpected worthlessness of the money would nudge Randy toward the ”something else” option, since whatever it turned out to be, it was probably not as terminally disastrous as a bullet in the head.

Meanwhile the moments dragged on as Randy stood there thinking about it: Which?

The gun was at his side. His face, in the thin morning light a map of scars and st.i.tch marks, wore no expression at all. But his eyes ...

His eyes, empty of emotion, inspected Chip clinically. Chip thought that under the circ.u.mstances this represented progress, until a grim smile curved Randy's misshapen lips. They resembled the fake wax lips Chip had gotten as a kid around Halloween, too big and red, as if they were already melting a little on the inside.

As if Randy's whole mouth were collapsing and his face might follow. Around them the forest brightened, daylight filtering in through the trees.

”How'd he do it?” Randy asked unexpectedly.

Roger, Chip guessed he meant. ”Fake the money?”

Randy nodded.

”Easy,” Chip replied. ”All you'd need is a few real bills, plus a good scanner and a really good printer. But, I mean, most of them are really good now. Or good enough, anyway.”

He was trying to fill the silence. ”You'd scan in real ones. Then copy them, get a few on each sheet.”

It wasn't quite that simple. Getting the right paper would be more difficult than it sounded, and getting the page set up to make the fronts and backs of the bills line up correctly would take some skill as well.

But it could be done. In fact, he'd researched a case where someone had, before Carolyn decided that counterfeiting wasn't a sensational enough crime to be worth a whole book.

”And there's another thing,” Chip said.

Because as long as Randy was listening, he wasn't shooting. Also, maybe the way to keep Randy from feeling murderous about Chip was to get him feeling that way about someone else.

Roger, for instance. ”See, floating the fake money out there was bad enough. But-”

Chip described in detail how at the very first opportunity, Roger had blamed everything on Randy, how he'd drawn himself as a victim in the whole scheme.

”So what I think is,” Chip concluded-persuasively, he hoped-”I think if Roger hadn't gotten dragged in to talk to the cops, he'd have gone on his own.”