Mammoth

25

WHILE Matt waited and fretted in Susan's office, a confederate he had never met was seated in a room, waiting and fretting, only a hundred yards away, beneath the circus grandstand seats. His name was Jack Elk, which had almost been a problem when he was hired, six months earlier. He had been born Jack Elkins but had changed his name legally ten years before, at the age of eighteen.

Anyone with the name of an animal was automatically flagged by the personnel computers at Fuzzyland as a potential security risk, as it was fashionable among the more radical animal rights groups to adopt names like that. But Jack had always told people he was half Apache, reclaiming his racial heritage, and he could pass for it, with his dark skin and black hair. In fact he was no Indian at all, but his claim was passed on during the clearance process by a subprogram from the legal department, which went to great lengths to avoid any accusation of racial discrimination.

How had it happened? How did he come to be sitting here, minutes away from setting in motion a series of events that could end up in one of the most spectacular kidnappings of all time? But... could you kidnap an animal? Maybe if you held it for ransom. Call it simple theft, then. It still carried a prison term.

And he'd only met Susan once. He had insisted on it, even though they both knew it was a security risk. He had to look in her eyes and know that she had Fuzzy's best interests at heart, that she wasn't doing this as part of some personal vendetta against one of the richest men in the world.

Howard Christian. Jesus! He was going up against Howard Christian. And he knew for a fact that Christian never forgot, and never forgave. Jack Elk chewed on his tenth cherry-flavored Tums of the night and watched the clock.

MATT was watching the screen that showed the hallway outside Susan's office door when he saw her open it from the outside, then from the inside. It was a little disorienting. He glanced at the screen showing Fuzzy's quarters. All the guests had gone; there was nothing to see but the star himself, placidly stuffing trunkfuls of his specially blended fodder into his mouth.

"It's time," she said simply, and he stood up. They faced each other for a silent moment, Matt waiting for her to say something else, and he realized she was giving him one last chance to back out. Maybe giving it to herself, too. Her eyes seemed to be pleading with him. It almost looked as if she wanted him to talk her out of it. As for himself, all she had to do was say the word and he was out of there. With her, of course. He didn't give much of a damn about Fuzzy, and she knew that, and didn't care, but he knew that her life had revolved around him for five years, and she had undergone a change at least as radical as the one that had overtaken him during his long quest alone. And he knew that he loved her, and would do anything for her. And there was another reason they had to do this, one he hadn't told her about yet.

So he said, "Let's do it." And surrendered himself to Fate.

JACK Elk saw Susan enter her office. The inside was one of the few places in Fuzzyland that he couldn't look into, others being the rest rooms and the offices of some of the top management and, of course, Howard Christian's offices. Earlier he had seen a man enter, keeping his back mostly to the camera, but there was another camera that gave him a better angle and he had called it up, ran it backward a few seconds, froze a frame that gave him a good three-quarter profile, zoomed in digitally, and enhanced it, just for something to do while he waited. This was what he was good at, skills he had honed in some of the bigger casinos in Las Vegas, where he could spot a pickpocket or a bottom-dealer in a crowd of people as easily as an ornithologist could peg a pelican in a flock of sparrows. He called up the face-recognition program. His own face program, the one he carried around in his brain, was excellent, sharpened by years of BOLOs issued by the casinos concerning card counters and dips and high rollers. This guy's face was familiar, one of those faces you felt was somebody who had been famous briefly, but maybe quite a while ago. Like that, but older.

Whoa! Of course. He was the guy who went back into the past with Susan. Did this change anything? Jack wondered. He glanced at the box on his screen labeled THREAT level. This was an innovation of Christian's, who had designed parts of the security programs, and a fairly dumb one, Jack thought. Christian was a hands-on sort of boss, especially when it came to computers, which to Jack translated as "interfering horse's ass." He was liable to show up at any time with some lame suggestion to "improve" systems that had been fine-tuned by generations of Nevada's most devious minds. Howard's threat levels ran from green to red. Green people were "Perfectly okay" and red people were "Do not admit under any circumstances." Trouble was, nobody but Christian seemed to be entirely sure what threat levels blue, yellow, and orange meant. You might get a blue rating if you had ever served time in jail. Orange seemed to mean "Keep an eye on him."

Matt was listed as threat level yellow. Near as Jack could figure out, that meant Howard just didn't like the son of a bitch. Of course, since he was working with Susan, Jack would have let him slide even if he was red... unless the reason for the red rating was that he might be a danger to Fuzzy.

Would he be? Of course not, not if he was with Susan. Right?

He was drawn away from his thoughts by the sight of Susan and Matt coming out of her office. She stared right into Jack's camera and gave a slow nod. The operation was ready to start.

Jack wiped his palms on his jeans and got to work.

"SO what's the deal with this guy you're working with?" Matt asked, simply for something to say to take his mind off the weak feeling in his knees. "Jack..."

"Elk. When I first decided to do this, six months ago, I reached out—very cautiously, through a couple hidden Internet accounts—to people I thought might be willing to help. There's an underground network out there and it's not easy to get into. Animal rights fanatics, antifur people, eco-extremists, some of them involved in some very nasty stuff, so naturally they're cautious. But I had somebody I felt pretty sure would talk to me, at least give me a hearing... I'll tell you about him later. We're here."

They had been walking down wide, tall, brightly lit corridors, more than big enough to accommodate a herd of elephants, which was exactly what they were for. A few zigs and a couple of zags that Matt had paid little attention to, a few doors that had opened to a key card Susan carried on a chain attached to a belt loop, and now they were in a very large open room with almost no light at all. Large shapes loomed around them. Susan took a flashlight from a hip pocket and clicked it on, then swept it around the room. The first thing the flashlight beam encountered was a full-grown giant ground sloth, rearing twenty feet above them, standing absolutely still. The thing was missing its left arm at the elbow, and from there to the shoulder the bare metal of gears and tubing of hydraulics stuck out.

"Howard has the biggest toys of anybody on the block, that's for sure," Matt whispered back. She giggled, and it delighted him inordinately that he had made her laugh. How many times in the last few years had he had to simply put out of his mind all the little things he loved about her? That, or go crazy. Now, if they could pull off this thing, maybe they could be together forever.

Or serve separate prison terms.

No use thinking like that. He followed her down winding paths between mechanical prehistoric beasts and was amazed, first, at how many of them there were, and second, how many were in for repairs or maintenance. Getting a colossus like a mechanical mammoth to walk realistically, something a baby mammoth could do within an hour of birth, was still a challenging problem in cybernetics and robotics. Howard's tech people were the best in the world, except maybe for the loyal old guard he hadn't been able to hire away from Disney, but there was a lot to go wrong.

Susan led him through the creatures. Matt was taken back to a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York when he was very young. Many of the rooms had held massive skeletons, but newer ones had lifelike mock-ups made of rubber and plastic and fake fur, many of which moved their heads or opened their mouths. Very primitive stuff, compared to this, but an unforgettable experience for a child. They reached a second set of doors and Susan's flashlight revealed a prominent sign on it:

NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT "E" CLEARANCE

"Research and development," Susan said. She carded the door and turned the handle, which opened easily with no alarm.

"You're an E clearance, obviously," Matt said.

"Wouldn't have done me any good if Jack wasn't working with me. Somebody else would have noticed this door was being opened, but Jack should be covering that. Did you know that when Disneyland opened, you bought ticket books, and the E tickets were for the best rides?"

"Really?"

"Howard enjoys touches like that. Come on."

They entered the R&D facility, which was as dark and deserted as the repair shop. All they needed to have the thing blow up in their faces was some nerd working late, but Susan said it wasn't a problem, and he supposed the mysterious Jack knew the whereabouts of anyone with access to this room. The first thing he saw in the flashlight beam was Fuzzy. The second thing he saw was another Fuzzy. They could be identical twins. Just beyond them was a third mechanical mammoth, the same size and shape but naked, like an elephant, and with a service hatch in its side open. And just beyond that was another automaton with no skin, just metal bones and wires and a maze of tubes.

THERE was no turning back now, Jack knew. He had taken steps that he could conceal for some hours, but not forever. A record of his actions would be stored somewhere in computer memory, and he had no idea where, or how to get at it, or how to alter it, if it could be altered at all. He supposed a computer genius could do it, given enough time, but maybe not. Because, of course, one of the biggest weaknesses of any security system was the watchers themselves. They had to be watched, and at Fuzzyland that was done, as in Las Vegas, by the computers. And Jack Elk, though one of the best in the business at operating top-of-the-line security systems, was no computer genius at all.

When the call had gone out over the underground network for a sympathizer with experience and, most importantly, spotless credentials in his particular field, it would have been too much to hope for that the person they turned up would have any hacking skills. Susan had felt incredibly lucky to find any such man at all, and twice blessed to see by his resume that he was one of the tops in his field. Such men were much in demand, and when he quit his job as shift manager of the Eyes-in-the-Sky team (known to the dealers as the Fink Squad) at the Mirage and moved to Oregon, the Fuzzyland chief of security was happy to get him, and started him off, as per union seniority rules, on the night shift, which was just where he needed to be. He quickly learned the system and settled in peacefully.

Meanwhile, the network was searched for a man who didn't have to be anywhere near as clean as Jack Elk, and who was a first-rate computer genius. That man was located (and turned out to be a woman, though Jack would never know that), and given the problem of getting into the Fuzzyland security computers.

Jack spent the next months carrying a credit card-sized digicam in his pocket, snapping pictures of the layout as well as the inputs and outputs and, wherever possible, the internal wiring of the security system. He wrote down the manufacturer and model number of every piece of equipment he could get close to. He took his time, never took chances. He sent the results through the U.S. Mail and a few weeks later got back a two-inch square clear plastic chip and detailed instructions about what to do with it. A week later, in the wee-est of the wee hours of the morning, he plugged the chip into the machine where he had been told to plug it in. A red light flashed briefly on his panel, then quickly went out. He waited one minute, then removed the crystal memory chip, pocketed it, and on the way home put it in an envelope and dropped it in the first mailbox he passed on his way home as eagerly as he would have rid himself of a pound of plutonium.

Then he sat back and waited, doing his job.

Several things could have happened next.

The presence of the tiny spy could have been detected, though it was supposed to protect itself against that. In that case there would have been an investigation which may or may not have led back to Jack Elk. If it did, he would have been quietly dismissed. Nobody noises it around that there has been an attempted breach of their security.

The third possibility was what had actually happened. He received in the mail a small parcel with nine two-inch plastic cards exactly like the one he had plugged in before, which had explored the system and diagnosed the proper course of action. Each card was clearly numbered with a grease pencil, one through nine. With it was a short list of instructions, telling him where to remove the appropriate recording cards and plug in the new ones. When the operation has been accomplished, said the last part of the printed instructions, replace these cards with the originals, and there will be no evidence left in the system of just what was done, or how.

At the bottom someone had written in cursive, with a pen, Piece of cake!

And now it was time.

He looked around the room, which had fifteen stations similar to his, which was raised and behind the others, as befitted a shift manager. All the stations faced a long wall with every inch covered in surveillance screens, able to display almost every camera in Fuzzyland at one time. The pictures were constantly changing. There was no earthly reason for such a thing, Jack knew, since each operator looked only at his own twenty-four screens, but display screens were cheap and it made impressive wallpaper to show off to big shots getting a behind-the-scenes tour. It looked like a Hollywood version of a high-security installation. People expected it.

In Vegas, all the stations would be manned 24/7, covering every square inch of public area. At Fuzzyland, after the park closed, there was no need for anything like that level of paranoia. Most of the park had coverage, and every inch of Fuzzy's compound, but there was no need to monitor every camera all the time. Most of them showed nothing but cleaning crews, and after about one A.M. even those guys would go home. Motion detectors would key in a particular camera if something larger than a cat moved anywhere in the park, and Jack or one of his two assistants would take a look and deal with the situation. It was very boring work on the night shift, and boredom is the bane of any security system.

He glanced at his two companions for the night, seated at consoles directly in front of him and just below. To work this shift they didn't exactly have to be the two sharpest pencils in the cup, and they weren't. Security work tended to attract two types: retired cops, and guys who liked to wear police-style uniforms and hoped to one day get a job that would let them carry a gun.

Ed Crane was a perfect example of the first type, a veteran patrolman from the Beaverton force, sixtyish, thick around the middle, more than happy to find a job that let him sit in a soft chair all night and exercise his remarkable ability to sleep soundly with his eyes wide open. Darryl Mosely was the wanna-be: a gangly redhead with bad skin who never failed to show up in the crisply pressed khakis his position entitled him to wear, even though the guys in the pit, including Jack, usually wore street clothes. Darryl was a new hire, had worked there for only a week, and clearly had his eye on bigger things, working his way up in the organization. He was earnest and hard-working, and Jack sort of hated to do this to him. If Susan pulled this off, Darryl was forever going to be one of the guys who let a mammoth be stolen right out from under his nose.

"Got a camera glitch here, chief!"

Jack looked up slowly—It's no big deal, it's just a little problem; we get one every night, don't act strange!—and saw that one of Darryl's twenty-four screens was black.

"Ah... try keying it in again." What the hell was going on?

Darryl did as instructed, and for good measure, flicked the screen a few times with his fingernail on the well-established principle that giving a balky machine a whack or two was apt to fix it. But it didn't.

"Camera's in Fuzzy's compound," Darryl said. "Other two in there look okay, though. Critter's eatin' his way through another bale of hay."

Jack could see that on his own screens.

"How about I go down there and take a look?"

"No!" Jack said, a little too loudly. "Uh... you know we aren't supposed to disturb the big boy unless it's an emergency. He's got his night keeper watching him." He realized he was explaining too much. "Let me see if I can do anything from here."

Do something, do something.

Following a corollary of the same principle Darryl had used earlier, Jack pressed his thumb against each of the nine cards he had replaced... and felt a click on number 9.

"Oops! There we are, back on line," Darryl said.

Jack let his breath out very slowly. He hadn't realized he had been holding it.

"TELL me about this Jack guy," Matt said. "Why's he doing this?"

"Isn't the better question why am I doing this?"

"I've got a feeling that's a much longer story. I just asked because when my mouth is moving my

teeth can't chatter." "I know what you mean." Susan was at a desk, opening and shutting drawers. She found what she needed—one of the ubiquitous plastic cards that a few years ago would have been a CD and a few years before that a floppy disk, and a cobbled-together thing that looked as if it had started out as a remote control for a model airplane—and they went back to the first Fuzzy. Excuse me, Fuxxy. Fuxxy Mark Two, according to Susan.

"Never entered my mind." It hadn't. Matt had wondered, from time to time, if Susan had had any male companionship during his long absence. It would only have been reasonable and natural, and he really didn't care and didn't want to know unless she wanted to tell him. He had only cared if she would take him back, and she had. No, he knew she hadn't gone to bed with Jack because she had said she had only met him once, and it wasn't in her nature to use people that way, to get something from a guy with sex. If she had screwed Jack, it would have been because she liked him, not to enlist him.

"Jack Elk is a lurker around the edges of the animal rights movement. He's a member of the Audubon Society and several other middle-of-the-road animal and conservation groups... pretty much like me. When he was young he went to a few protest marches and such, he was offered the chance to help 'liberate' some minks from a fur farm and declined—which was a good decision, because most of them got arrested and one had a finger bitten off. He's not a joiner and not an activist, at heart."

She lifted the amazingly realistic flap of one of Fuxxy Mark Two's ears and found a slot there to insert the card. When it was in you couldn't even see the slot.

"He is anticircus and antifur and antizoo and a vegetarian, but he's never done much about it, and we were very lucky to find him, because if he'd joined any of the more radical groups he'd never have got past the security checks here. Now hang on a minute here, I only saw this demonstrated once, and I don't want us to get trampled by a mechanical mammoth."

She concentrated on the controller. A green light came on. She punched a few buttons... and Fuxxy Mark Two began to breathe.

I swear it, if it wasn't too late already I'd run to my car and not stop driving until I got to the Nevada state line.

But it was far too late. On screen 1 he could see Susan and Matt and that goddamn contraption coming down the hall. He had to stick it out. Half an hour, just half an hour, that's how long she said it would take.

He got up from his chair, idly walked along the back gallery, stretched his arms and cracked his neck as he did a dozen times every shift... and casually glanced down at Ed Crane's console where, if things were not working, two people and a mechanical mammoth would come around a corner in about five seconds. Not that Ed was likely to notice it, staring glassy-eyed into space. But Darryl certainly would, and soon. Nothing happened on the screen, and he went and sat back down. On his own screen he could see Susan and Matt and Fuxxy. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the Unknown Hacker. Piece of cake, my ass.

All his life—or since the age of eighteen, anyway, when he had been horrified by the pictures and stories he had seen at a booth at a career fair at his high school—he had hated the exploitation of animals. It had been like a born-again moment for a Baptist; from that day his outlook on life had changed.

His outlook... but not his actions. He was basically lazy, didn't interact well with people, and had found the perfect niche for himself in a job that allowed him to sit down all day and spy on people he didn't have to talk to. He figured in another ten years his ass would be a yard wide and he'd have a hard time walking from the car to the front door, but he didn't particularly care. It was the life that suited him.

But he spent his spare time—where else?—sitting at his home computer connecting with some pretty radical groups, following their exploits, cheering them on from his comfortable safe seat in the grandstands of life.

Then one day the word had gone out that an operational group—what the straight media would call "terrorists"—was looking for someone with skills that could have been culled perfectly from a reading of his resume. From some dark well of guilt in his soul, carefully kept covered for the last decade since that almost-debacle with the minks, he felt the sudden urge to stand up and be counted, to put his ass on the line, to do something about the terrible evils he read about every day. Cautiously, he sent out a feeler, and, cautiously, an approach was made. One thing led to another...

And here he was, participating in what would probably become known as the heist of the century.

"HE'S on what they call 'come-along' mode," Susan said. "He'll follow the controller wherever it goes, never get closer than five feet."

Five feet felt entirely too close for Matt, who kept looking back over his shoulder to see if the damn thing was still back there, and was never quite sure if he was happy or not to see that it was, at a steady, dependable five feet, lumbering along as naturally as any actual living beast he had ever seen.

"So it's for use in the... what do they call that part of the park? With all the mechanical critters?"

"No, he's for the center ring... maybe."

"You can't be serious. Howard plans to palm off a mechanical substitute for the real thing?" "I said maybe. There's still a lot of bugs to be worked out. Can't have 'Fuzzy' falling over during the show and just lying there, trying to walk. So they figure they're about a year away from being able to chance it, not with this one, but with Mark Three or Four, which you saw back there being put together."

"It's partly my fault. Howard and I have been head-to-head over this thing practically from day one. He wanted three shows a day, I wanted one; we settled on two. I wanted two days off per week, we settled on one. Howard had power over me, because he's sure it would take a lot to make me quit here. Fuzzy is... like a child to me. It would be very hard to leave him. But I've got some power over him, too."

"What's that?"

Susan grinned.

"Fuzzy won't work for anybody but me."

Matt laughed out loud, then looked nervously at the camera they were just passing. (Not far away, Jack wondered what the hell the idiot found so funny.)

"You're kidding."

"He imprinted on me that night, or he loves me, or he's just ornery, look at it any way you want to. He lost his mother, and never attached to any of the wet nurses we provided for him. In fact, he didn't seem to like elephant milk much. He preferred to suck the stuff that I mixed up from a bottle. He has other handlers who groom him and can lead him around from place to place if they don't get in the way of what he really wants to do, but he only fully cooperates with me. Howard didn't find that out until the first time he fired me, three years ago, and he was apoplectic."

"Fired you 'the first time'?"

"Oh, he's fired me several times since then, but it lasts about an hour or two. Actually, a while after Andrea came along, he stopped firing me. She's been a good influence on him."

"He could use one."

"Sometimes he seems almost human. Anyway, this robot was supposed to take some of the burden off the real Fuzzy. Do the early show, sub three or four times a week, something like that. But it's one thing to make a titanothere that can walk around a predetermined track with a human operator inside, and something else to make a robot that can do tricks and really fool the eye under bright lights. The project is way behind schedule. I'm sure they'll get it right one day soon... and by then I really, really hope they'll need it badly... because here we are, and this is the last chance to turn back."

JACK watched them on his screen as they opened the gate to Fuzzy's enclosure and Susan entered, alone. Fuzzy had heard her or smelled her, and he turned from his manger and greeted her with his trunk. She patted his big flanks, gentling him, offering him a treat which he snarfed up. Fuxxy had come to a halt when Susan turned off the follow-me button on her controller. Now she turned it on again, and the imposter lumbered through the open gate and into the enclosure, stopping faithfully just behind her.

He explored the newcomer with his trunk. Jack wondered what the beast was thinking. Surely Fuxxy didn't smell like a mammoth, but he sure looked like one. But when Susan touched his side gently with the ankus, Fuzzy turned and went with her outside the stall, and when she touched him again and spoke to him he stood beside Matt, apparently incurious about this new guy. And why not? Fuzzy met a hundred new people every day, and was friendly to them all. Fuzzy was everybody's friend, but only took orders from Susan.

Susan got the mechanical monstrosity positioned just where Fuzzy usually spent the night. Later, Fuzzy might normally lie down for an hour or two, seldom longer than that. If he didn't lie down—which Fuxxy couldn't do—neither Darryl nor Ed would think anything of it. Jack watched as Susan did something with the controller. Fuxxy began the slow, back-and-forth swaying that was a normal behavior for Fuzzy when he was content, or asleep on his feet. The mechanical trunk curled from time to time. It looked pretty lifelike to Jack. He looked over his board and down at Darryl's. The kid was still getting the tape loop of the real Fuzzy on his screen. It was very, very close to the realtime picture now on Jack's. He wiped sweat off his brow.

Then Susan jammed the controller deep under a pile of hay, closed the gate behind her, and moved out of camera range with Matt and Fuzzy.

He followed them down several hallways to a point where a right turn would lead them into the arena, and a left turn to a big door to the outside. They turned left. He checked the external camera. No one out there. He got out his cell phone and punched 1, which dialed Susan's phone. He saw her answer. She said nothing, and he punched the number 2, which sent the text message all clear. He watched her switch off, and punched the electric door opener. He gritted his teeth, imagining the racket the thing was making. If somebody were to drive into the wrong parking lot right now...

They left the building, the door rumbled back down (silently, to Jack), and the unlikely trio headed out across the parking lot to where Susan had parked her big pickup and monster fifth-wheel trailer. Before they even reached it the tailgate was coming down. From his angle Jack couldn't see inside, but he knew there was a dune buggy parked in the garage in back. Susan had been parking the rig there every Sunday night for months now so she could get an early start for the Oregon Dunes near Florence, or some other off-roading destination to spend Monday, her only day off.

The next part was tricky. Jack couldn't see most of it because of the angle, but it seemed to go smoothly. In fifteen minutes Susan climbed into the driver's seat of the pickup, started the engine, and pulled away.

As soon as she was out of camera range Jack punched nine buttons, ejected nine cards into his hands, and replaced them with the proper ones. There wasn't even a flicker on the screens as the recorded views were replaced by the real ones. The Unknown Hacker's magic was still working. SUSAN pulled the truck up beside the security booth and braked gently to a stop. Harry, the night guard, left his booth smiling. He liked Susan. He wouldn't after tonight, but there was nothing she could do about that.

"Getting a late start," Susan said. "Probably head east a bit, there's a good place around Bend."

"Don't break your fool neck, okay?" Harry noticed Matt sitting on the other side.

"He's my guest," Susan said.

"Sir, could you give me your visitor card?"

Matt handed it over, and Harry swiped it through a device that agreed that Matt had been legitimately allowed entrance. Susan opened the door and Harry stepped back to let her out. He followed her around back, and Susan keyed the ramp to come down.

"Damn stupid, having to search this damn thing, Miss Morgan, but you know how it is. Rules are rules."

"I don't mind a bit."

Harry stepped onto the ramp and walked up to the dune buggy parked in the back. There was room to walk around it and into the kitchen and living area. He shone his flashlight around, all the way to a narrow hallway where the bathroom was, and three steps leading up to the bedroom. If Susan was stealing office supplies or circus costumes or even computers she could have concealed a lot of them in this place, but why on earth would she? It would be insulting to Miss Morgan to do a thorough search of this rolling Hilton every Sunday night, and nobody had ever asked him to. He was supposed to make sure nobody in a large vehicle absconded with one of the bigger robotic creatures, and there sure as shit wasn't enough room to hide any of them in here.

And Fuzzy, of course. Harry chuckled at that idea. He closed the door, edged around the buggy, and jumped down to the ground beside Susan.

"Wagons ho!" he said. "Head 'er out!"

"Good-bye, Harry," Susan said. She got back in the cab and drove away.

NOT far down the road Susan pulled onto the shoulder, leaped from the cab, bent over, and threw up. Matt came around the front of the cab but she waved him away until she was through. After a moment, she stood up and gestured to the cab.

"You drive. I've only ever driven it from Portland once and to and from work. I hate driving this thing."

Matt thought about telling her that he didn't have all that much experience towing, himself, but knew she didn't need to hear that. And he had pulled a trailer, on the very day that his life had changed forever on his great Trout-Fishing Adventure, when Warburton came down in a helicopter and tempted him into the clutches of Howard Christian. It hadn't been that tough.