Cold Heart (8 page)

He calmly flipped open the side port of the single-action pistol and ejected two spent shells, replacing them with cartridges in his bulging pants pocket.

Dawn crouched farther down the slope, trembling like a leaf. She couldn't get the horrible images—Terry's frail body quivering on the floor as El stabbed her, the empty darkness of the big pistol barrel pointing in her own face—out of her brain.

But El had slipped in her mother's blood and his shots had gone wild. Even in death, her mother was looking out for her. In the end she had saved her daughter from one of the very creatures that inhabited her worst nightmares.

“You all have to die,” said El. “You can't stay here anymore.”

The most terrifying thing to Dawn was the casual way in which he said it. Like he was saying “We have to get ready in case it rains.”

What's wrong with him?

And what does he mean by
all
?

Was he talking about her and her mother?

He took a step closer to the slope and she could no longer see his face. But now she could see the pistol again, hanging beside his bloody pants leg. That and one boot.

She held her breath and tried to stop shaking.

He was whispering now, as though he knew exactly where she was. How close he stood to her.

“You can't live. You have to understand that, Dawn. Your mother knew. She turned her back for me so it wouldn't hurt. I don't want to hurt you either. But you can't stay here.”

She wanted to scream at him to go away and leave them alone. But the instant he heard her he'd shoot her dead. Her only hope was that he didn't really know where she was.

The trouble was that she couldn't hold her breath any longer. It all wanted to come out in a gigantic burst. There was sweat on her hands, on her face, trickling down into her eyes and the back of her neck. She exhaled so slowly that it was just a silent hiss of air across her lips and a fierce stinging in her lungs.

She breathed back in the same way. But it wasn't fast enough or powerful enough to fulfill her body's need for oxygen. She did it over and over, the ache intensifying, praying that El would give up and go away.

When he leaped forward and crashed through the branches, she nearly screamed. He stumbled around, grunting and
stamping like a wounded grizzly. The alders jerked and slapped her face. She was tangled in them like a fly in a web.

“Come out of there!” shouted El.

She could see both his boots now, inches away from her, and a razor of fear sliced up her spine.

He was standing on the handkerchief.

She'd still had it in her hand as she scrambled over the side of the bank, down to the Fork, and she must have dropped it as she dived into the alders. Until El stepped on it, the scrap of cloth had been forgotten. Now it seemed to point to her hiding place like a neon sign.

Had El noticed it yet?

Dawn glanced slowly around to see if there was any escape. But she knew there was none. El would never miss at this range.

She was screwed.

But his big black boot covered all but the corner of the handkerchief. If he didn't look directly down at it, he might not notice…

“Come on out, you little bitch,” said El. He kicked at the brush. But there was no anger in his movements. His voice never rose, although he had been shouting before. He sounded almost as though he was bored. As though he was talking to himself.

Curling up tightly, she held her breath until she knew her lungs would burst.

M
ICKY WAS A THIRD
of the way to Cabels’ Store, her mind on the letter she had just completed to Jim, explaining once more that yes, she was fine but no, she had no intention of leaving McRay. And no, there was nothing between her and Damon. They were just friends. Jim had hoped for more out of their relationship, but he'd have to live with that. She and Damon had never been destined to be anything but friends. Damon didn't need a woman the way some men did. Damon needed a direction. A focus. Something he could lock on to the way he had once locked on to his practice.

A pair of squirrels chittered overhead, playing hide-andseek with her along the trail and she thought of Aaron McRay. The old man was feisty and bright-eyed as one of those small animals. Micky never knew when Aaron was kidding or how he could say some of the wild things that he did.

His dark eyes would flicker as he spit out some crude remark. Testing or teasing.

Micky had been in town only three weeks—two longer than she'd intended—when Aaron had pounded on her door.

“Buy the place or get out,” he'd said.

“Excuse me?” She didn't know whether to invite the old man in out of the cold or slam the door in his face.

“My cabin,” he said, nodding at the wall, not her.

“You're Aaron McRay.”

“No shit.”

“I was invited here,” she told him. “I thought you knew. I'm sorry.”

“Did know. You want it or what?”

“Want what? The cabin? I'm only visiting.”

“Don't give me that crap.” He spit tobacco juice onto the snow beside the stoop. A brown trickle ran through the whiskers on his chin. “You aren't going anywhere.”

“Who told you that?”

“They never do.”

“They?”

“The assholes that move into McRay.”

She couldn't help herself. She laughed in his face.

His scowl cracked a little. “Think that's funny?”

“I have an odd sense of humor.”

“Good. You want the fucking place, or what?”

“I said I'm just visiting.” Had Damon mentioned the old man was a little insane? She didn't remember.

“You crazy?”

Was he reading her mind? “Excuse me?”

“Heard you might be crazy.”

Micky burst out laughing. “Just mildly psychotic.”

“Cy what?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm crazy.”

“Good. Women don't belong in the bush, though.” But his scowl definitely cracked.

“Really.”

“It's a fact.”

“Says you.”

“Says me.”

He turned to leave.

“Like some coffee?” she asked impulsively.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Any good?”

“No.”

“Sure.” He pushed past her and took a seat at the table.

She couldn't help laughing at the absurd conversation.

After that she had decided that laughter was the key to Aaron.

He'd say something outlandish.

She'd laugh.

She'd laugh again.

He'd glare and say something more crude or politically incorrect.

He smiled. No teeth. Just a thin-lipped sneer.

But she'd also discovered that Aaron could be incredibly thoughtful.

That same winter, when Damon was off somewhere with Marty and Stan, Micky glanced out of her bedroom window one morning and saw snow halfway up the side of her outhouse. Her woodpile—purchased from Clive, who sold wood as one of his seemingly inexhaustible line of services—was covered in deep powder and a waist-high drift nearly blocked her front door.

The firewood was twenty feet away. She hadn't stacked it against the building yet and, with a sinking heart, she realized it would take her all day just to dig it out.

She was bundling up to do so when she heard the scrunch of a shovel out front. She glanced out of the loft window to see the back of Aaron's bright blue parka. He was digging out her woodpile. She zipped up her jacket and bulled her way through the drift, grabbed a shovel, and joined him.

She said hello.

He nodded.

Two hours of silent work later, they both leaned huffing over their shovels.

“You didn't have to do that.” she said. It was early afternoon but already the sun was long gone and green-and-yellow tendrils of Aurora Borealis ribboned over the peaks.

“Gonna have fun getting your wood free, now,” said the old man, nodding toward the pile that was frozen together with thick ice.
“Cheechako
thing to do.”
Cheechako
was what all the old-timers called greenhorns.

“I should have stacked it under the eave,” she agreed.

“Too fucking late now.”

“Never too late,” she laughed, watching him stomp off back up the trail to his cabin. “Thank you!”

Aaron lifted one gauntleted hand over his shoulder but didn't look back.

“I'll take it!” she shouted without thinking.

“Take what?” He kept walking.

“The cabin.”

He turned.

“You never asked my price.”

“I don't care,” she said, thinking of the money from both her parents’ and Wade's insurance policies, gathering dust in some dark bank vault.

“Take it,” said Aaron, with a thin-lipped smile. “I give it to you.”

Micky stood in the snow, shaking her head.

A month later the deed had arrived in her mail.

In a slash of blue, one of the jays whipped down through the trees and chattered at her and she thought how like a jay Aaron was. All chatter and no bite.

Another gunshot rang through the still air.

Just across the creek. Maybe it wasn't Marty or Stan. Maybe El had spotted a bear. They did come out this time of year and rummage around the cabins sometimes. Clive had told her to bang a spoon on a pot to frighten them away— noise bothered the big animals—but most people trusted gunfire better.

But the grizzlies weren't usually aggressive. Not unless you got between a sow and her cub.

Micky wondered idly if she should go back and get the Glock just for its noise value. But she was already halfway to the store. She began to whistle and snap her fingers as she walked, anything to let a wandering bear know that she was coming. Next to running from one of the giant beasts, the worst thing you could do was startle one.

The trail was narrow and twisting, strewn with boulders and still dotted here and there with tufts of crusty snow. Hares usually shot out of the woods as she traversed the path, but today they were strangely shy. She spotted only one, peeping around a grandfather spruce, off to her left, but he swiftly vanished.

“Nervous, old bunny?” she said. “You know I wouldn't hurt a fly.”

Maybe the gunshots had the rabbits on edge. Howard MacArthur and most of the other men in the community hunted the big snowshoes for meat but no one hunted this close to her cabin. Still, the animals were savvy enough to know what the sound of gunfire meant to their species.

“Sorry,” she whispered, speaking to the empty forest. A sudden burst of anxiety thickened the very air around her. She stared at the spot where the hare was hiding.

She knew exactly what it felt.

She could sense it quivering, feel its fear.

To the rabbit, the gunshot would be echoing like cannon fire, the ground beneath its soft pads vibrating with the terror of the explosion. Its tiny nose would be sniffing the air for the intruder, its ears twitching, eyes shifting desperately left and right, every shadow in the forest a portent of impending pain and death.

And suddenly she felt an intense hatred for the hunters.

It was an irrational and emotional response that she should be able to reason away with a good walk on this beautiful day. But the shots touched a bad place in her heart, and just as irrationally she felt the fear not dissipating but growing. She had the crazy thought that it wasn't the hare that was in danger.

It was her.

Her heart pounded and her breath quickened. Her palms were damp and her mouth was dry.

She glanced back down the trail behind her, then hurried on.

E
L
SPUN AND FIRED
while he was still in mid-sentence, still coaxing Dawn to come out of hiding and give herself up. Now he had his back to her, searching the brush.

When he fired, she'd ducked instinctively. His sudden movement had disturbed the snarl of branches and now all he had to do was turn around and they would be face-toface.

She felt like a rabbit.

The shot still rumbled in her ears and tears leaked from her cheeks into the rock-hard ground beneath her palms.

What set him off again?

A noise in the alders?

A puff of breeze?

The North Fork was only a few feet through the branches to her right, and once again she considered making a break for it.

He had missed with his first two shots when she ran from the cabin. But she didn't see how he could miss at this range if he spotted her. And the brush would slow her flight so much that he could unload the pistol at her before she even reached the creek. He'd probably reload before she made it to the safety of the far shore.

If he didn't just chase her down and stab her to death.

The handkerchief was still stuck to his right boot, glued on with blood and mud. She lowered her head and tried to make herself as tiny as possible. El flailed at the brush, peering this way and that.

“Come on out, now,” he said, the calm in his voice even more terrifying than before.

How could anyone do what he had done, be doing what he was doing, and act so calm?

Suddenly she knew what it was about El that had always set her teeth on edge.

There was never any emotion in his voice. As though there were no life going on inside him, just the automatic actions of a machine, just chemicals boiling inside his body and his brain.

“Come on, Dawn. If you're hit, you're going to bleed to death in there and the little animals will pick your bones. You don't want to die like that. Come on out and you can be with your mother. I'll close up the cabin after you. That will be better. You'll be with your mom.”

The mention of her mother made the tears sting again. Snot ran down her face, dripping like tears onto the ground, and it grossed her out but she was scared to wipe it away. She wanted desperately to blow her nose. She was afraid some weird instinct of El's would point her out to him and he would spin and fire a shot in her direction. She tried even harder to press herself into the ground.

It seemed only an instant before that she had witnessed the horrible scene in the cabin. But it also seemed as though she had been crouching in the alders for hours, for days. She felt certain the horror would continue forever. That she would be hiding here for eternity, holding her breath, stifling the shivers, terror paralyzing her, waiting for the death blow to fall.