The Lost Coast

the lost coast
a larison short story
    T he sun was setting on the redwoods and Larison thought it was time to find a place to stop. He’d been driving north from Los Angeles for ten days, sometimes moving continuously during the daylight hours, other times going not very far at all, never more than one night in the same place. He knew the people looking for him had no way to track him, but even if they did, there would inevitably be some lag between the moment they could find and fix him and the deployment of actual forces. The more he kept moving, the more any information his pursuers managed to develop would be useless by the time they could do anything to act on it.
    He’d been traveling the coastal highway, but north of Westport it had turned inland, the terrain apparently too rugged for the road to continue along the Pacific, and not long after it had died without fanfare, collapsing into Route 101. He knew from the map on the passenger seat that 101, also called the Redwood Highway, would meander northwest along the King mountain range before reuniting with the Pacific somewhere north of Ferndale. The area in between, cut off from coastal access, was known colloquially as the Lost Coast, a name Larison had found strangely alluring when he’d first heard it years before. He imagined black sand beaches, prehistoric redwood forests, towns as remote and strange as creatures from the Galapagos. Maybe he would spend a few days in the area, passing through disconnected burgs like Petrolia and Honeydew and Shelter Cove, dots on the map next to him. He felt secretly pleased at the notion of a man like himself disappearing in a place that by its name declared it couldn’t be found.
    A road sign told him he was thirty miles from Arcata. He’d never been there, but he knew of it. An old mining and then timber nexus on Arcata Bay, now mostly a college town. He’d find a hotel that would take cash and not demand ID. If that didn’t pan out, he’d keep going and find something else. There was always another town.
    It was nearly dark as he left the highway, the sliver of a crescent moon hanging low in the sky. He didn’t have a car navigation system or even a cell phone, either of which could be tracked, but he didn’t really need the technology, either. There was usually a logic in the layout of small towns, with independent restaurants and retail establishments in the center, gas stations, supermarkets, and other chains farther out, and the more sprawling single family dwellings on the periphery. Some were easier to navigate than others, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. He was rarely in a hurry.
    He found his way by the usual signs to the center of Arcata, which, as it happened, was impossible to miss: a large square plaza surrounded by bars, restaurants, and small shops. At one corner was a three-story brick building he judged to be about a hundred years old. A faded sign jutting from halfway up its side proclaimed that this was the Hotel Arcata.
    He might have driven back to the periphery and found a more anonymous chain establishment, but there was something about the hotel that he liked, something that struck him as simultaneously stalwart and seedy. Certainly it didn’t look like the kind of place where anyone would ask a lot of questions.
    He drove slowly around the plaza, logging his surroundings. Four bars alongside the hotel, the buildings mostly one or at most three stories, the clapboard facades against surrounding hills all straight out of the gold rush. Clusters of hobos, some standing, some sprawled on benches, looking in their languorous ease at least semi-permanent. College kids, from the signs Larison had seen probably from Humboldt State University, aping the hobos’ style, tooling around on skateboards and mountain bikes, probably stoned from good, locally-grown Humboldt County weed. He thought about scoring some himself and momentarily longed for a relaxing, solitary high, but knew he couldn’t. He needed to stay sharp. Just in case.
    No sense in allowing anyone to connect him to the vehicle, so he found an unregulated stretch of street a half mile from the hotel and parked there. He got out and started walking away from the hotel. No one was watching him, but if they were, they’d describe him heading in the wrong direction. In a few blocks, he’d turn and start to move obliquely toward his intended destination. He didn’t mind the walk. It had been a long drive and the early