Killer View (37 page)

He forced himself to breathe. He didn’t want to attempt taking the cabin without Brandon, without some backup. But Brandon’s silence necessitated action. With his back to the cabin—possibly only a matter of inches away from Mark Aker—Walt slipped quietly toward the front, wondering what would come next.

ROY COATS ATTEMPTED TO SORT OUT THE EVENTS OF THE past few minutes, his mind racing. He had little to go on beyond a single gunshot and, minutes later, the tripping of the perimeter wire.

Had he checked with Gearbox after hearing that gunshot? He couldn’t remember. His brain had just about lost its wheels, the pain too great. He squinted and tried to recall what had happened.

He remembered speaking with Newbs about the perimeter wire. And just now the snowmobile—
that would be Gearbox
—had returned to camp.

There was a loud, uninterrupted ticking going on in his head. The top of his mouth itched. He had to relieve himself.

Had he talked to Gearbox or not?

He picked up the walkie-talkie and called out for his man. Waited. No answer came.

Why such a long time between the return of the snowmobile and Gearbox knocking on the door?

“Gearbox?” Coats shouted loudly enough for his voice to carry through the walls. “Get your ass in here and explain—”

His command was cut off by the sputter of semiautomatic weapons fire.
Two hundred yards
.

Coats processed the most important part of that information:
semiautomatic
. Their AKs had been customized by Rupert Folkes in Jerome to be single-shot and full automatic; they weren’t rigged as semiautomatics.

At the same moment, the doorknob turned
without knocking
. His guys were trained to show him the respect of announcing themselves.

Coats snatched the .45 off the table and delivered three rounds into the cabin door before the damn pistol jammed. Pissed off at the self-loads, he hurled the gun across the room at the door before instantly regretting his action.

He looked around for another weapon.

The smell of cordite filled his nostrils. Blood trickled from the broken scab, as he stood painfully from the chair.

Another quick burst of semiautomatic fire.

The camp was under attack.

ONE OF BRANDON’S ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIE SCENES WAS in
Indiana Jones,
where Harrison Ford, faced with a sword-wielding Egyptian, simply ignores the flamboyant swordplay, pulls out his sidearm, and shoots him. Stepping out from behind the tree, hands in the air, he waited for the man shouting at him to show himself. Once he did so, Brandon gave it all of about five seconds before lunging to his left with a hip check, the momentum from which carried the M4 around his body and straight into his open hands.

He squeezed off a semiautomatic burst—three rounds—and watched the guy’s kneecaps explode. The guy went down like a folding chair, his weapon flying out of his hands and catching on a branch stump sticking out from the trunk of the tree he’d used as shelter. The gun strap caught under his chin and snapped his head back as he fell, so that he bobbed like a puppet; his obliterated knees folded, so that he looked like both legs had been crudely amputated. The gun then disengaged from the branch stump, and the man fell face-first into the snow, which swallowed him like sea-foam.

Brandon saw all this dimly, in the haze of a partial moon, knowing enough to make for cover as the rifle dropped down into the snow and on top of the man.

Brandon dove.

The fallen man fired at him.

Brandon returned two more quick bursts and got lucky: a piece of the man’s head took off like a frightened bird.

The dead guy, his skull open, sat up on the injured knees, waved his hands frantically like a drowning man searching for a rope, then fell forward again before Brandon could get off another shot.

Brandon came to standing in the lee of a wide fir, lowered the night vision goggles, and confirmed the kill.

Ugly.

His hands were trembling; he felt frightfully cold all of a sudden.

Just then he heard three pops from the direction of the compound. Forty-five Magnum. It wasn’t the sheriff’s gun.

WALT LAY FLAT ON HIS BACK, HIS CHEST HOT WITH SEARING pain. Two of the three shots had scored; the third had narrowly missed, so close to his left ear that he’d heard its whistle. Keeping the gun aimed at the cabin door, he wiggled off his left glove and felt for his chest, his fingers worming into a hole in the Kevlar vest where the bullet was still warm. The other was embedded in his radio. The pain when he breathed was unrelenting due to a cracked rib, and it took him a moment to fully understand—to believe—he wasn’t on his way out.

Then he rolled and pushed himself up to standing, knowing what it felt like to be hit by a bus. Keeping the thicker logs that formed the cabin wall between himself and the shooter, he ducked and twisted the doorknob and threw the door open.

“Sheriff!” he announced.

Now, in the very far distance, came the mosquito buzz of approaching snowmobiles. Both teams were converging on the compound from a mile out.

Walt struggled for breath. Every movement caused blinding pain. He stood, banged off the door, throwing it fully open to make sure no one was hiding behind it, and then pushed himself into the doorway, fell to his knees and rocked forward, his gun gripped in both hands.

Clear
.

The .45 was on the floor to his right. He grabbed it, ejected the magazine, and tossed both halves out the door into the snow.

He used the furniture as screens, flipping the only table and hiding behind it, then working past the woodstove to the only doorway. Trying to draw a deep breath and then regretting it for the agony it caused.

He turned the doorknob. Tested the door. Swung it open.

A bunk room: two bunk beds, meeting in the near corner. No closets. Clothes on hooks on the wall.

Clear
.

Open window, the blind undulating in waves, still in motion.

Walt poked his head out the window, then quickly back inside. Right. Left.

Clear
.

He followed out the window.

A confusion of tracks in the snow.

But one line of tracks called to him above all others, leading directly to a shed fifteen yards behind the cabin. The right leg was wounded and trailing badly, dragging behind, the left leg doing all the work. Walt thought this explained why the shooter—
Coats?
—had not rushed the cabin’s front door to finish the kill.

Walt pulled down the night vision goggles and the landscape before him came alive in monochromatic green and black. But it was as if someone had turned on a searchlight: he could see not only the shed and the corral next to it but well beyond to a stack of chopped wood.

His weapon extended, his arm braced and steadied, he punched his way through the thick snow toward the shed, the beat of his heart painful in his bruised chest.

A sound from behind turned him. He dropped to one knee, swung the gun around, and took aim: the figure stood over six feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a truck. Walt blinked, and he eased his finger off the trigger.

A bear. A
big
bear raised onto its hind legs. Ten, fifteen yards. Even through the goggles, Walt saw the foaming saliva spilling from its mouth. An angry bear. A
mad
bear. And then: the dark spot on its shoulder. A
wounded
bear.

He could try to kill the bear, though it would take most of the contents of his magazine, and the bear would likely maul him before actually succumbing. It took a perfect heart shot to drop a bear. Walt had heard stories of direct hits to the skull that glanced off without effect. He turned and ran for the shed. He didn’t need a rearview mirror to know the bear was following at a gallop.

He blew through the shed door and slammed it shut, turning and once again dropping to one knee. The eerie black and green played out through the goggles, depicting a garage and slaughterhouse in one. It was cluttered with tools and sacks, tires and lumber. An enormous dead cow hung from a block and tackle, its long black tongue swollen and drooping toward a dirt floor where a slimy mass of afterbirth and a fetal calf lay cut open and splayed. The smell was suffocating—not even the cold could freeze out death.

The entire wall shook behind him as the bear collided. Past the hanging cow was an old tractor or truck on blocks, reduced to a steel skeleton and surrounded by parts. He heard the wheeze of his own painful breathing and then another crash as the bear bid for entry. The thing hit the door so hard that a shovel fell from the wall and clanged into some fuel canisters.

Then silence.

The front half of the rectangular shed was clear, meaning if Coats was in here he was hiding back amid the remains of the tractor. Walt stood and moved carefully forward, keeping his back to the wall, staying as close to it as possible, without getting his feet caught in the tangle of clutter. Several seconds had passed without an effort from the bear, but Walt found himself stealing glances in that direction, where the door hardware was now splintered and partially torn from the jamb. He crept a few more paces forward in the churchlike silence.

Glass shattered behind him. Walt turned in the spray and squeezed off two shots, expecting to see Coats, but it was the bear’s giant mitt that swiped at him through the broken window, five grotesque claws tearing through Walt’s shoulder and into his muscle. Walt fell into the dead cow, starting it swinging, slipped in the slime on the floor and scrambled quickly to his feet. By the time he did, there was no sign of the bear, only two splintered holes in the log wall where his wild shots had landed.

The chain holding the swinging dead cow creaked like a clock slowly winding down.

He briefly lifted the goggles, wishing he could do without them, but the difference was astonishing: the shed held only a faint glow of moonlight. Back in the world of green and black, he moved cautiously toward the tractor, stepping toward the center of the room to avoid a pile of clutter.

He stood there, panting from the rush of the bear attack, his shoulder throbbing, working the goggles left to right, searching out the hidden recesses and hiding places while anticipating a surprise attack.

Behind him, the swinging cow slowly twisted and spun as its metronomic ticktocking wound down. Unseen by Walt, the crude knife slice running down the center of the gutted animal twitched open and a human hand slipped out. Then another, this one bearing a bloodied meat hook. The gap widened to reveal the feverish face of Roy Coats.

Walt heard the icy crack of the cow carcass opening and spun.

The meat hook sank into his right hand. His gun dropped. His body followed the sinking weight of the hook as he screamed. The goggles bounced off his head. He crashed onto the dirt floor, his bruised chest sending shock waves of pain racing through his body.

Coats struggled to free the hook, but it had penetrated the meat of Walt’s hand and did not come loose. The two men were briefly connected by the hook, Coats unwilling to let it go, Walt unable to shake it loose. Walt, on his knees, punched out with his left hand and hit something spongy. The man wailed and released the meat hook.

Walt grabbed hold of the hook, gritted his teeth, and pulled it free. With his left hand, he sank the hook into Coats’s chest just as the man raised his head. His left arm was not nearly as strong or coordinated as his right, and, though the hook hit Coats, it did little more than graze him.

Walt punched the man’s leg in the same spot again and then kicked up, as Coats craned forward. He caught the man’s chin and heard the cracking of teeth.

Coats somehow had the hook now. He swung out at Walt, who scrambled back—one swipe, two—narrowly missing him. Walt collided with a pile of junk, and here came the hook again. He blocked it with a length of pipe seized from the pile. The hook came free.

Walt smashed the pipe into the man’s ankle and Coats screamed again.

The shack shook; it sounded like an earthquake.

Walt saw the gun: five feet to his left.

He dove for it.

Coats threw a knee into Walt’s face, stumbled forward and inadvertently kicked the gun away. It disappeared in the darkness into a pile of debris along the wall. Walt scrambled to his knees, swinging the pipe and connecting again. Then he pulled himself to his feet.

Coats backed up, away from the pipe, his right leg dragging awkwardly.

Walt staggered forward, barely conscious, his right arm and hand useless.

Coats snagged a fallen shovel and swung it madly into Walt’s left side. The blow knocked Walt into the hanging cow and he spun to fend off the next attack. The shovel glanced off the frozen cadaver.

The door broke from its hinges and crashed to the floor—first a rectangle of moonlight, which was then blotted out by the massive presence that filled it. The bear charged the first thing it saw: Roy Coats.

The shovel was lifted high but fell to the floor, handle first, the blow never delivered.

Walt heard the tear of clothing, followed quickly by the bubbling slobber of Coats attempting to cry out. But his cheek was no longer part of his face and his left eye was missing.

Walt knew better than to run for the door: he didn’t want the bear substituting him for his present target.

Hands on the cow, he realized where to hide and pulled himself into the frozen womb, the sounds of terror continuing in a relentless stream until Roy Coats was silenced forever and the bear wandered off and out.

AS FIFTEEN OF THE BACKUP DEPUTIES SEARCHED FOR MARK Aker, he stumbled into camp of his own accord.