Cold Heart (15 page)

She had to get out and away before El discovered she was inside.

“Where's Clive?” said El, in that dead singsong.

Dawn froze in the middle of the storage room, knowing that there was no possible place here for her to hide. Terror crackled along her skin like electrical bolts.

“Where's Clive?”

Dawn suddenly realized that El wasn't talking to her.

He's talking to Rita.

Does he really think Rita's going to answer?

But the bullet that blew the huge hole in the back of Rita's body had to have killed her.

She tiptoed ever so slowly, ever so silently over to the big sliding door that was the only exit from the workshop.

A large hook-and-eye latch secured the door.

The latch looked well oiled and shiny with use. But opening the door would be noisy. El was certain to hear and come around the counter before she could escape. It was thirty yards to the nearest brush, on the airstrip side of the store.

She'd never make it.

She left her hand on the latch, praying that El would go away.

Outside, Clive's four-wheeler sounded and Dawn jerked, clenching her teeth.

Clive was coming back.

And El was waiting.

She considered yanking the door open and racing out into the clearing to warn Clive.

As the engine noise increased, Dawn eased the latch upward, catching her finger painfully between it and the door, but biting down her gasp of pain. She wedged her hand inside the frame, surprised at how silently the heavy door slid on the runners overhead.

Even the scattered sunlight outside blinded her and she hurried into its welcome warmth. She was shielded from the front of the store by ten feet of log wall with no window. Around the corner, the four-wheeler crossed the clearing.

She stepped away from the building.

Clive was climbing off of the Honda. Surprise filled his friendly face as he spotted her. He raised his hand in her direction just as she opened her mouth to scream at him to run.

She wondered in that instant if Clive felt the shotgun, centered on his chest.

Dawn could almost see the thick lead pellets as they flew through the air like metal wasps. The bullets struck Clive so hard in the breast that his feet lifted off the ground and he fell back across the seat of the Honda in a heap.

M
ARTY REACHED UP OVER
his head and gave the nail another whack. The sharp echo rapped down the ravine, reminding him of the gunshots he'd heard earlier. He wondered if that was what his construction sounded like to people down below.

But anyone with half a brain could tell the difference between a gunshot and the sound of a hammer.

He gave the support posts for the sluice another good shake to see if his makeshift bracing was going to work. Seemed sturdy enough, but the force of the water bouncing off the sides and down over the rough bottom vibrated the sluices so that they constantly required new braces. Along its thirty-foot length Marty had installed ropes and wires and trimmed saplings to shore the contraption up.

But his mind remained on the shots.

Someone potting a rabbit.

Then the third rattled up the valley and he'd stopped, cocking his head to give a listen.

A man might miss a rabbit twice. But it was unlikely that the creature would hang around for a third shot.

Maybe he'd wounded it and was finishing it off.

Pretty damned lousy shooting.

Marty had gone back to work. And he wouldn't even have heard the next shot if he hadn't stopped to give the sluice another shake.

That was a shotgun. More of a booming sound. And farther away.

What the hell were they shooting at?

Had to be a bear.

People shooting grizzlies made Marty nervous. The only reason for shooting the big bastards out of season was to protect yourself and that was always a dicey affair. By the time you decided you were in trouble it took a cannon to kill a damned Griz. Marty had plenty of experience with bears. They were always hanging around the valley, looking for garbage or foraging for berries. But in twenty years in the bush he'd never had to shoot one.

He tried to remember exactly where he'd heard the first shots coming from. But sound was funny in the valley. The ravines and canyons created weird echoes and dead spots. The thick forest muffled some areas and the rock walls amplified sound in others.

The shots sounded like they came from Howard's. Or maybe Terry Glorianus or even Micky's cabin. But it might have been over at El Hoskins's place.

Marty frowned.

Some of them had sounded like pistol shots. Like the roar a big.44 might make.

The thought of El shooting at a bear with his pistol left Marty with mixed emotions.

He felt sorry for anyone who had to face a grizzly with a pistol. But the picture of El doing it was humorous.

El, his mirror glasses glinting, his legs splayed, shoulders back like Gary Cooper, facing off on Main Street with Yogi the Bear.

“Dumb-ass,” muttered Marty, spitting into the creek.

He tossed the hammer back into his plastic bucket and wrapped a piece of tarp over the top, tying it with a bungee cord. He climbed back up to the top of the sluice and picked up his shovel. A couple of snowflakes fluttered against his face.

Another shotgun sounded and he stopped.

What the hell was going on?

O
NCE AGAIN DAWN CROUCHED
in the alders. The airstrip was a couple of hundred yards behind her. But there was no help there.

Clive lay across his four-wheeler, ten feet from the front stoop.

And, although she couldn't see Rita, Dawn knew by the way El was sidling in and out of the door that he was stepping over her body.

At first Dawn thought that El was intent on stealing everything in the store. He'd made trip after trip, his arms full of boxes and bags, piling them a few yards away from Clive and the four-wheeler. Then he started putting rifles on top, stacking them in a neat pyramid.

She couldn't figure out how he intended to get away with all of the goods he was taking, but it occurred to her that he couldn't haul them all off at once. He'd have to leave some of them where they were and she might get a chance to grab a gun. Even if he didn't leave any guns, she could sneak back into the store and use the phone to call Anchorage for help. That thought brought her her first real ray of hope.

This time, when El came back out, he carried a red Jerry can and he began to soak down the heap of weapons with the contents of the can. He reached into his pocket and
pulled out a butane lighter. Then he grabbed one of the gleaming wet rifles and touched the flame to it. The gunstock burst into flame and he tossed it into the pile.

The heap erupted with a fierce
whoomp.
The heat surged and shells popped like firecrackers. El backed toward Dawn's hiding place and she crouched tensely, prepared to dash for deeper cover at the slightest sign that he had spotted her.

He was so close that she could hear him muttering to himself.

“You can't stay here,” he kept saying. “None of you can stay here.”

He seemed to be having an inner quarrel with someone. Dawn had no idea who was winning or whether or not it was that kind of argument. After a minute, El ambled back down to the store and disappeared through the door into the storage shed.

M
ICKY DIDN'T RUN
.

She
threw
her legs out in front of her, down the slope, and then followed them. It was a lurching gait. A controlled fall. But it used less energy.

Let the mountain do the work.

It's still a long way down.

Don't want to wear out before I get there.

She was almost to the turnoff to Damon's place.

She had to stop and at least see if Damon was home, to warn him. Damon would walk right up to El and say hi. Never knowing. Damon insisted on being friendly to El. Damon was friendly to everyone.

More than anything she wanted to reach her cabin and hold the Glock in her hands. Suddenly the gun didn't seem so evil to her. She could feel its comforting heft. She wanted its power.

Because right now, if she raced around a corner and El was standing in the trail with that big Ruger, she wouldn't have as much chance as one of the timid bunnies.

It's El.

Each crunch of her boot in the gravel pounded his name into her brain.

He's finally snapped.

She could picture him at the moment he slid into that dark abyss in his mind. His face deadly calm, just a slight tremor in his hands. His body tight as a drum. Graceful as a dancer, yet tense. Like the shooter in the padded suit. Like the killer in her parents’ shop.

That had been the last chance to stop him before someone got killed. Right then, when his brain was boiling but before he exploded like a stick of dynamite.

But how could I have foreseen that moment?

How could I have stopped him before this happened?

Shoot him?

For what? Because maybe he'd killed Clive's dog? Because he
looked
crazy? Because both she and Rita were scared of him and Aaron hated his guts? Because he reminded her every time she saw him of the murders in her past?

She reached the fork in the trail and trotted through the alders toward Damon's place. The cabin was buried in the deep woods, the clearing barely extant, trees almost touching above his roof. She couldn't understand why he liked it that way. He hated being cooped up even worse than she. He'd torn all the interior walls out of the house so that the downstairs was just one large open area. Even his outhouse had no door.

But he'd refused to cut down one tree on his property.

She knocked on the door but the hollow echo told her all she needed to know.

It looked like Damon was gone as usual.

Out in the woods somewhere. Looking for that damned mythical mine.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

“Damon?”

Sunlight through the windows turned the interior to gold. Every surface inside was polished and pampered. The dish towel was folded neatly on the sink. The two chairs stood at attention beside the table. Books on the shelf beside Damon's recliner were arranged in alphabetical order. Wherever El was, it looked like he hadn't been here.

She stepped back onto the porch and started to close the door.

A firecracker rattle coming from the direction of Cabels’ Store startled her.

S
TAN HELD THE SHOVEL
at shoulder height. The blade rested upside down on the edge of the two-by-twelve side of the sluice chute. He barely heard the gravel sloshing down the washboard bottom or the sound of South Fork above his head. He was trying to place the popping noise coming from far off down the valley.

He wondered if it had anything to do with the earlier gunshots.

Gunfire wasn't unusual in the valley. People were always potting rabbits. Calibrating their gunsights. And, of course, this time of year, there was the possibility of someone trying to scare off a bear. Gunfire didn't trouble Stan. Hell, if no one in the valley complained about his dynamiting, who was he to bitch about a little target shooting? But the popping Stan kept hearing wasn't someone hunting rabbits.

It sounded like a celebration. Stan was always up for a party.

He shoveled another spadeful of gravel into the sluice, then picked up what remained in the bucket and dumped it in. Hooking the bucket onto the end of the shovel and the shovel over his shoulder, he climbed to the creek bank, balancing on the narrow path. The wind whipped down the narrow defile and low clouds ran like an upside-down river, flowing through the ravine.

Scattered flakes danced in the wind.

Marty would give him a hard time for quitting early. But he headed down the trail anyway.

Stan worked the easier pickings in the gravel of the high South Fork, where the stream disappeared into the mountain. Marty eked out a living on the lower run of the creek, just above Damon's claim. Rolling boulders with a sevenfoot steel pry bar, to find his nuggets. But both shared the wealth, having pooled their claims from the first week they met, years before. Marty bitched about Stan's laziness. But he knew that Stan found the gold easier and faster than he did. It was a fair partnership.

Stan tugged his sweatshirt hood down tight and his gloves out of his back pocket, tossing the shovel and bucket onto the trailside, where he could pick them up later. If it snowed a few inches, the tools would be buried. And since he'd conveniently broken all his other shovels in the past three weeks, he wouldn't be able to work again until the snow melted.

Too bad.

He crossed the narrow stream and picked up the trail again on the other side, heading downhill. The creek cut a deep jagged swath through the mountainside, and retreating glaciers had, over the eons, left rugged boulders and gravel strewn along the walls and floor of the tiny canyon.

The farther downstream he went, the more popping he heard. Where the canyon widened into a tree-lined clearing, Stan found Marty leaning on his shovel, facing downstream. Marty never wore a cap, his sunburned bald head shone like a welcome beacon.

“Get to work!” shouted Stan, startling Marty. When Marty swung around there was a curious look on his face. He nodded back downstream.

“What's that, you think?” he asked, with just the slightest trace of a Scandinavian accent.

Stan shook his head, frowning in the direction of the noise.

“Can't figure it.” He moved up alongside Marty. “Sounds like Clive is celebrating something.”

“Celebrating?”

Stan shrugged. “You know. Fireworks?”

Marty gave him that look that said
what are you, a dunce?

Stan hated that look.

“That isn't firecrackers,” insisted Marty. “Listen.”

For the first time Stan really considered what he was hearing. Marty was right. It didn't sound like firecrackers. It sounded like gunfire. Only there was something different about it.