Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (21 page)

“No sign of anybody,” I said. “But if they're around I must be getting close. Easier to handle by daylight, so I'm making camp. I'll report when I move again in the morning. What's doing there? Over.”

Ted replied tersely. “William hasn't come back. Didn't catch the noon Canadian. Over and Out.” No more than that. So he'd been in Fort Norman hoping to talk to William.

I was still holding the radio, wondering if I should switch it off and have a good sleep, or leave it on in case they wanted to call me.

I still hadn't decided when the radio seemed to explode.

First the radio seemed to explode, then I heard the shot. Naturally. A bullet travels faster than sound. The important thing was that the sound of the shot came from my left and was that of a Colt .45, which meant it had come from probably no more than 50 yards away, from a small hump of scrub and rock.

A lot of what I do has always been by instinct. I dove sideways and to my right to take shelter behind the snowmobile while reaching for the shotgun.

I lay still in the snow with the shotgun now in my hands and parts of the radio scattered around me. My mitts were off. The gun barrel's icy metal against my left hand felt like I was grabbing something red hot. My finger sliding from the safety to the trigger was not any more comfortable but I'd had bare hands on freezing metal before and never found it fatal.

I lay motionless, thinking hard. It might well have been that the way I fell made Billy Bob Hicks figure he'd got me. He'd been shooting at me and the radio just happened to bear the brunt. He probably still had only the handgun. If he'd had a rifle, he would have used it instead of shooting at what was practically maximum accurate range for the Colt. With a rifle he could have shot a lot sooner and could have circled wide now, safer with distance, and be ready to shoot again and again. But I could hear footsteps approaching in a silence of such profundity that each crunch of a foot into the snow sounded louder even than the beating of my heart.

He was coming from the other side of the snowmobile. The thunderous crunching of his boots on the snowy crust sounded closer and closer. I considered what I'd do the instant I saw him. Should I shoot immediately, hoping to beat his shot, or roll once and make him try to hit a moving target?

I've seen gunslingers in the movies do that. But was I good enough to be accurate in mid-roll?

When he rounded the end of the snowmobile about twenty feet away with the same black Colt held ready in his hand, the big edge I had was that I knew he was alive. He wasn't sure about me—and besides, I was in the snowmobile's shadow. I squeezed the trigger, pumped, shot again, pumped and fired one more even after the first shot into his chest jolted him convulsively backwards so that the second and third shots got him on the way down.

The Colt has a device which stops the trigger cold as soon as the handgrip relaxes. This must have happened a split second after my first shot, because his only shot was high and wild, a danger only to low-flying aircraft.

I stayed crouching, listening for other sounds. There were none. Then I walked over for a look at Billy Bob Hicks, or what was left of him after three shotgun hits from a range of about twenty feet. He should have stuck to bartending. That shotgun really did make a mess.

That night I mainly lay awake imagining a lot of things. I didn't want to sleep because I felt I was still in danger, with a lot to figure out. Yet, drowsing once, I thought I heard a wolf howling far away then snapped awake and couldn't hear it and decided it must have been a dream because wolves generally sang in chorus.

I had left Billy Bob Hicks precisely where he had fallen. He wasn't going anywhere. Ground-drift snow soon covered some of the stains of death. Splashes of blood were frozen to the cowl of my snowmobile, which I had not moved. If anyone or anything came upon him and thought of doing something rash, they'd have me to deal with. I thought of those movies where nobody can move the body until the police doctor, usually an old grump, arrives and makes notes about the cause of death and possible time of death, and says things like, “I can't answer that, inspector, until we examine the stomach contents on Monday.” Meanwhile the lower classes in the police force are taking photographs and admiring the dear departed's taste in period furniture, kinky sex or whatever. Another guy shows up looking glum. “The murder weapon has no prints on it except Mrs. Thatcher's,” he states, and the inspector snaps, “Try the loo.”

No doubt about it, I really know my business, but I was preposterously short-staffed. The only regret I had was that dead murderers tell no tales. If I'd got him alive he might have been persuaded to clear up matters still pending, then in jail write his memoirs about an underprivileged life as a hit man. But that was a very mild regret. Leaving him alive would almost certainly have left me dead, an option I always tried to avoid.

Right after Billy Bob died and I lived, I had a few moments of indecision. I could run for the hills to guard against having Billy Bob's clients show up and win the next round. Or I could do nothing and wait for Pengelly sometime tomorrow morning to assume that my radio silence meant I was in trouble, and send help. Or I could keep on doing what I had been doing: trying alone to get the answers in what so far stood at a score of two dead, and counting.

I found myself nodding, even smiling. That last option was it.

For some reason then I thought of No Legs and his account of how to trap a wolf—the basic principle being that you bait the trap with something the wolf finds irresistible, like meat rubbed with beaver castor. What I had for bait was the body of Billy Bob Hicks and if any wolves showed up I'd have to shoo them away, but what I had in mind as possible arrivals was any or all of Albert Christian, Benny Batten or Harold Johns.

So I moved my outfit nearly a hundred yards back on the trail and into a few wispy trees where I could see without, I hoped, being seen. At this distance I'd need the rifle, so I unlimbered it. Then I rigged my tent in such a way that the snowmobile was the anchor wall to windward. The other side stretched sideways to where, parallel to the snowmobile and four feet or so away, the canvas crossed, and was anchored by, the loaded sled, which I'd unhitched and moved for that purpose. Although inside and snug, ground sheet and sled cover and anything else usable between me and the snow, I was somehow without appetite for boil-in-the-bag pemmican. I boiled snow, made tea, and kept warm in my sleeping bag while occasionally peering through a tiny but drafty slit in the flap of the tent. I'd lined everything up so that my sightline commanded any approach from the west.

But I didn't expect any visitors. If anyone was close enough to have heard the shots and had a mind to investigate (which was by no means certain: shots affect different people different ways), they'd had lots of time.

Thinking over what I'd do the next day was fairly easy. I hadn't ventured from my position to try to find where Billy Bob had left his snowmobile. I didn't really care. I had to assume that he hadn't reached his colleagues, or clients, or whatever Christian, Batten and Johns turned out to be, or there would have been more of them dealing with me. Somewhere between here and the river I still might find the Cessna and its occupants, alive or dead or some of each. The matter of William's trip out here seemed more and more to be the key to a lot of things.

At the first grey light of morning I did one useful thing. When this was over, I certainly didn't want to be playing body, body, who's got the body. With the axe I cut a spindly sapling and to it tied a blue towel. I stuck the sapling as far into the snow as I could by Billy Bob's now rigidly frozen body and braced it further with blocks of snow, some of them on top of Billy Bob. Then I made morning tea, ate some biscuits, stuck some chocolate in my parka pocket and embarked on Plan B—or was it Plan C? This was to go south slowly. As Billy Bob presumably had got no farther than right here, I was hoping to find again William's snowmobile tracks which I had abandoned the day before.

As I traveled, watching for any human sign, I wondered again how long it would be before someone in Fort Norman—Pengelly or Ted Huff if he was still there—would begin to feel that their continued inability to raise me by radio might mean I was in trouble. Somebody then might make a command decision to send out an aircraft. The thought depressed me. It would be an interruption. The body of Billy Bob was one thing, but not all. I was on to something that I wanted to do by myself.

Like always, Matteesie, I thought.

When I was in my late teens out alone in the Barrens on a trapline, isolation was happiness even when I came back famished, tired, with little or nothing to show.

Or I'd be out alone hoping for a caribou so that I could drive my dogs back into camp with the skinned carcass on the sled and see everybody run out into the open to welcome me, smiling men and women and children dressed in caribou skins yelling, “Eeee, eeee, Matteesie,” while I, the great hunter, shared out the meat.

I had gone less than a half-mile south looking for the extension of William's tracks when there they were.

Ground drift had covered many of the signs but they were still easier to find than they'd been when I'd followed them along the caribou trail, which must have turned elsewhere. The greater visibility was because from time to time there were two distinct trails, one going west and the other east. Some overlapped but not all. William had come out here, reached some objective farther west, and later had gone back. I stayed with his older westbound track.

I'd been going slowly for an hour or so when William's track turned at right angles and uphill. The highest hills in the Franklins were behind me now, the land gradually dropping and flattening out the nearer I got to the river. Today I had crossed a half-dozen frozen ponds, some with stumps and skeletons of stunted trees sticking up through the ice. When I came to the crest of this hill, something made me stop.

It was a sound, the clamor a dog makes when it is part wolf, as huskies are.

I couldn't see it but I could hear it. It was nearly impossible that this was the sound I'd heard the night before and thought I'd been dreaming. A trick of the wind might carry it that far, but I didn't think so. I had an eerie feeling that I'd occasionally had before, when premonition had told me something that actuality couldn't. I had been thinking about William's dog not long before I had dozed, falling off into brief sleep and then been convinced I'd been dreaming.

I was still convinced I'd been dreaming then, but I wasn't dreaming now.

Below me was a pond that differed importantly from others I'd crossed in the last little while. This one was maybe two hundred yards long, more like a stretch of river except that its surrounding unbroken hills were not only along both sides, but closed off the ends. It was shaped more like a stadium than some stadiums. All it needed was a football team and a considerable rise in temperature.

Nothing showed on it but what I took to be the usual animal tracks. When my binoculars showed more detail, I could see no break at all in the snow covering. Most lakes or rivers will have a few windswept spots but not this one: it was totally protected by the hills.

I swept every foot of it for signs, however old and snow-covered, of an aircraft's skis. Nothing. Then I moved the glasses carefully around the shores, which had here and there a sparse growth of trees. Again, I saw nothing. The dog howled again. The sound echoed around the hills so that pinpointing its source was impossible. But it was down there and if it was William's Smokey it must be chained or William never would have gotten away without it. Why leave it behind? Even if William was planning to come back, there must be another reason. From what No Legs said, the dog had made trips out and back many times, alternately running or riding William's sled.

I considered going down by snowmobile to investigate, but instead unloaded my snowshoes from the sled, looped the tapes swiftly around my feet and ankles and calves, put the clip in the rifle, more shells in my pockets, slipped the safety catch off, and started slowly downhill.

Going down a steep hill in deep loose dry snow on trail shoes is no cinch. Wider shoes get a better grip, but trail shoes were what I had. Once, putting my right foot into what looked like safe snow the foot started to slide out of control from a hard crust a few inches below the surface. I got my other foot up fast to a parallel position so that when I slid for six or seven feet I was more skier than snowshoer, but kept my balance.

I could almost hear Pengelly yelling, “For Chrissake, Matteesie! You'll give me heart failure!” I went on more carefully.

The dog still was singing its wild song, the howling somewhere between an excited welcome and a threat.

By the time I reached the flat surface of the pond, I was nearly sure where the sound was coming from. Then I saw the Cessna. My eyes went by it and then did a double-take. My first glimpse was only of the shape of a window, barely discernible through the aircraft's cover of branches and whole trees. I could see that great care had been taken to keep it unseen from the air. Even someone flying low might not have seen it, tucked in against the bank and covered from above and from all sides.

I stopped the instant I spotted that window shape. In a few seconds I saw the dog. He fitted No Legs' description of William's onetime lead dog, the dark ruff along his shoulders fading to lighter brown on his flanks, a Greenland husky snout. He was chained to a tree a short distance from the aircraft, as if he'd been left on guard. He was plunging again and again toward me to the full extent of the chain.

Apart from him there was no sign of life.

I yelled, “Hey!”

My voice echoed from the hills around “. . . hey, hey, hey . . .”

“Is anybody there?”

“. . . dy there, there, there . . .”

I would have liked a coffee and a camp stool right then, to think this over. I held the rifle ready, my mitted left hand holding it by the stock, flexing my bare right hand constantly to keep it limber if I had to pull a trigger. I yelled again and then started toward the aircraft. I don't mind admitting that I was in a high state of nervous readiness. If anyone had opened up on me right then I would have been shooting yet.