“They didn’t see us, though.” Clara gave him a smile, and those neat white teeth irritated him, a reminder of his own upbringing. His family couldn’t afford dental care. Though Ace had just crossed that hallowed ground into his thirties, he’d already lost three adult teeth, only one of them from a fistfight. Some of the others were black, and a cavity in his bottom left molar had hit the roots and tongued him with hellfire.

“I told you, The Lord’s looking after us. It’s holy work.”

“I believe you.”

“Sometimes I feel like I could drive right up to the biggest police station in the South, park right out front in a handicapped spot, wave my pecker around, and they’d never even give me a ticket.” Ace forgot to keep his voice down. A prison chaplain had once explained to him about “religious mania,” but though Ace had a fondness for crazy people, he didn’t cotton much to maniacs. Besides, the two hikers were probably a mile away by now.

“What do we do now?” Clara asked. “If we go back to the trail, we might run into them.”

“We got an hour or so before sundown.” Ace squinted through the sparse foliage of the treetops to the smeared patch of purple sunset in the west. “Let’s just stick to the ridge and then set up camp when we find a flat spot.”

He turned and walked between the towering hardwoods, knowing she would follow without question. The river pulsed with a constant dull roar below them, a white noise that washed over the sounds of birds and small animals. The force of the river made the ridge vibrate. Ace could dig that raw power. Like the bombs in his knapsack. Ace wasn’t much of a nature freak, but he’d learned the best way to evade attention was to go where no one else bothered. If that meant hiding out for a while in the ass end of Possum Paradise, then so be it.

They had been following the Unegama for three days, though the trail sometimes meandered away from the river’s course because of the steepness of the grade.