Note: I'm sorry about the very short chapters, guys. I should have waited until this one was ready before posting the other.
Chapter 17:
Joe wished he knew what was going on. Had they found Noah? He thought the station would have put the word out if they had. There hadn't been any more news since the call for all available officers to turn out to an address on Ocean Front Drive. All he could do now was run, so he kept running.
Not many people came along here. It wasn't the usual road folks from the village took up into the woods, which was why Joe liked it. Today was the first time he'd been able to get up here all week. He'd been too busy: the department had had warnings from the Secret Service about threats to the President this holiday, and they'd doubled-up on the patrols in the village in response, even though the Service had cancelled the Lymans' usual Christmas Eve trip to see Santa in the park.
As he came down the hill, Joe could see the line of his own boot tracks coming towards him. Then another set of tracks appeared, smaller ones-a woman's, probably-coming up the other way, from the highway. They turned east at the same place Joe was going. They were new since he'd come by this way earlier.
A small part of his thought noted the tracks, but he didn't give them much attention at first.
Then he saw the truck. It hadn't been there, either, when he'd come up the trail from Hill Street earlier that afternoon. It was an odd place for someone to park, almost hidden in the brush like that.
He looked at the plates. Out-of-state, Georgia. That was a long way for someone to come just to drive into the woods above Crabapple Cove at Christmastime. And where was the driver? The trail Joe had just come down was the obvious place to hike or hunt, but no one had gone up it that day except himself.
Desperate though he was to get down to the station, all Joe's newly-trained police instincts-and a lot of natural, local-boy ones, too-were starting to prickle.
He walked around the truck. Some of those smaller tracks were there, too. And there were tracks on the other side: a man's big boots heading up the trail towards Lookout Rock, and the smaller ones beside them.
Local boys sometimes took their girls up to the Lookout after school or in the summer. Occasionally an artist would find the spot and work there; it had a great view of the harbor. But nobody went there in the winter. It was too cold for painting then, and the woods fell away below the rock too sharply to get a bead on anything more than a crow or a squirrel.
If you were looking for that kind of small game you'd do better up the way Joe had just been. The Lookout certainly wasn't a place to find the bigger stuff-deer, moose, bear, which were out of season now, anyway. But there had been that shot a few moments ago.
Joe looked back at the truck. This time he saw the stickers. "Lick Lyin' Lyman." "Stop the War on Christmas."
He pulled the shotgun off his shoulder and started running up the trail towards the Lookout.