The Wolf in Winter (26 page)

“Yes, I think they will. Now, the rumor.”

“A man and a woman. Married. Children. Perfect Middle Americans. They have only one employer. A handful of hits, but very good.”

“Their motivation?”

“Not money. Ideology.”

“Political?”

“Religious, if what I hear is true.”

“Where?”

“North Carolina, but that may no longer be the case. It’s all I have.”

Behind them, the yellow-clad giant named Edmund appeared. He handed Louis a slip of paper. On it was written a cell phone number. The meeting was over.

“Soon I’ll be gone from here,” said Cambion. “Use that number to confirm that the contract has been rendered null and void.”

Louis memorized the number before handing the paper back to Edmund. It vanished into the folds of the giant’s hand.

“How long you got left?” he asked Cambion.

“Who knows?”

“Seems like it might be a mercy to let the contract run its course,” said Louis, as Edmund stepped aside so that the two visitors could leave, and prepared to escort them out.

“You might think that,” said Cambion, “but I’m not ready to die yet.”

“Yeah,” said Louis, as the drapes fell closed behind him. “That’s a damn shame.”

CHAPTER

XLIV

Ronald Straydeer was not unfamiliar with sleeping outdoors. He’d bedded down in the jungles in Vietnam, the Great North Woods of Maine, and beside pot plantations in upstate New York during a period of misunderstanding with some rival growers, which came to an end when Ronald put one of them headfirst into a narrow hole and proceeded to fill it in.

Thus Ronald understood the necessity of good nutrition and proper clothing, particularly when it came to cold weather. He wore polypropylene, not cotton, next to his skin, because he knew that cotton trapped moisture, and the action of convection meant that cold air and damp drained the body’s heat. A hat with earflaps covered his head, because when the head got cold the body began to shut off circulation to the extremities. He kept himself moving constantly, if only through the gentle shuffling of his feet and minute stretches of his arms, fingers, and toes, generating heat as a by-product. He had brought plenty of water, and an assortment of nuts, seeds, energy bars, jerky, and salami, as well as a couple of MREs—because sometimes a man needed a hot meal, even one that tasted as if it had been made for pets—and containers of self-heating soup and coffee. He didn’t know how long he might be out in the wild, but he had packed enough food for four days, or more if he had to be abstemious. He was armed with
a licensed hunting rifle, a Browning BAR Mark II Lightweight Stalker in .308. If it came down to it, he could claim to be hunting squirrels or hare, even coyotes, although the Browning wouldn’t leave much of a varmint behind apart from bits of fur and memories.

He had been fortunate with this location. The woods around the ruined church were a mixture of deciduous and evergreen, but more of the latter. He bedded down in the thickest copse he could find and covered his sleeping bag with branches. He made a careful recce of his surroundings but did not enter the church grounds—not out of superstition but simply because, if Shaky was right, the church was important, and people tended to protect places that were important. He checked the gate and the fence, and saw nothing to indicate that the grounds were guarded electronically, but he still didn’t want to risk setting off any kind of hidden motion sensor. Neither did he attempt an exploration of the town itself. Ronald was a striking, imposing man, and he attracted attention. Perhaps he would be seeing more of the town soon enough.

To pass the time, he read. He had brought with him a copy of
Bleak House
, by Charles Dickens, because he recalled the detective’s recommending it to him once. He had bought it but never got around to reading it. Now seemed the appropriate time.

Shaky, like Jude before him, was convinced that Prosperous was rotten, and he had halfway managed to convince Ronald of the same thing, even before Ronald had ever come to the town. Shaky had accompanied Ronald around Portland and South Portland as he began quietly questioning the homeless about what they had seen in the days preceding Jude’s death. Shaky had a way of calming folk. He was unthreatening, and generally well liked. It was, thought Ronald, a little like having a good dog with him—an old Labrador, maybe, something friendly and tolerant. He didn’t share this with Shaky, though. He wasn’t sure how it might be taken.

Despite their efforts, they learned nothing of worth until the end
of a long day of searching and questioning. It came from an unlikely source: the woman known as Frannie, with whom Shaky had witnessed Brightboy arguing on the morning that Brightboy attacked him. Shaky usually did his best to avoid Frannie due to her intimidating nature, and the vision of a man having his nose gnawed off that she invariably conjured up, but Ronald Straydeer wasn’t troubled by her in the least. He told Shaky that he knew Frannie from way back, when she still had most of her teeth.

“Is it true that she once bit a man’s nose off and spit it out in front of him?” asked Shaky. After all, it seemed that Ronald Straydeer might be able to confirm the story, once and for all.

“No,” said Ronald solemnly. “That’s not true.”

Shaky was relieved, but Ronald wasn’t done.

“She didn’t spit it out,” he continued. “She swallowed it.”

Shaky felt ill. During the subsequent conversation with Frannie, he found himself using Ronald’s body as a bulwark between him and the woman. If she’d developed a taste for male flesh, she’d have to go through Ronald to get to him.

Frannie was pleased to see Ronald, although she was less pleased when she learned that he was no longer dealing. Using mainly four-letter words, she expressed the view that Ronald was a grave disappointment to her. Ronald accepted the judgment without complaint, and gave her the name of someone who might be able to help her find some pot, along with twenty bucks with which to treat herself.

In return, Frannie told them about the couple she’d seen near Jude’s basement.

Frannie wasn’t a mixer. She avoided the shelters. She was always angry, or briefly coming down from being angry prior to getting angry all over again. She liked no one, not even Jude. She’d never asked him for anything, and he’d never offered, knowing better than to do so. Shaky couldn’t understand why she was opening up to Ronald Straydeer, even allowing for the money and the pot connec
tion. It was only later that it dawned on him: Frannie had been flattered by Ronald’s attention. Ronald spoke to her as he would to any woman. He was courteous. He smiled. He asked about a wound on her arm, and recommended something for it. None of this did he do in a false manner; Frannie would have seen through that in an instant. Instead, Ronald talked to her as the woman that she once was, and perhaps, deep down, still believed herself to be. How long had it been since anyone had done that for her, thought Shaky. Decades, probably. She hadn’t always been this way and, like all of those who ended up on the streets, never wanted it for herself. As she and Ronald spoke, Shaky saw her change. Her eyes softened. She wasn’t beautiful—she would never again be that, if she had ever been—but for the first time Shaky saw her as something other than an individual to be feared. She let her guard down while talking to Ronald, and it struck Shaky that Frannie lived her life in a state of perpetual fear, for, however bad it was to be a homeless man, it was infinitely worse to be a homeless woman. He had always understood that, but as an abstract concept, and generally applied it only to the younger girls, the teenagers, who were more obviously vulnerable. He had made the mistake of imagining that somehow, for Frannie, it might have become easier over the years, not harder. Now he knew himself to be wrong.

So Frannie told Ronald Straydeer of how she had walked past Jude’s place the night before he died, and seen a car parked across the street. And because she was always desperate, and asking was free, she tapped on the glass in the hope that a dollar might be forthcoming.

“They gave me a five,” she told Ronald. “Five bucks. Just like that.”

“And did they ask for anything in return?” said Ronald.

Frannie shook her head.

“Nothing.”

“They didn’t ask after Jude?”

“No.”

Because they already knew, thought Shaky, and they were smarter
than to draw attention to themselves by bribing a homeless woman for information. Instead, they paid her—enough to be generous, but not too generous—and she went away, leaving them to wait for Jude to appear.

Ronald asked what Frannie remembered about them. She recalled a silver car, and Massachusetts plates, but she admitted that she might have been mistaken about the plates. The woman was good-looking, but in that way of women who try too hard to keep themselves in condition as they get older and end up with lines on their tanned faces that might have been avoided if they’d resigned themselves to a little flesh on their bones. The man was balding, and wore glasses. He had barely looked at Frannie. The woman gave her the money, and responded to Frannie’s word of thanks with the briefest of smiles.

Frannie’s information wasn’t much, but it was a small reward for their efforts. Ronald prepared to take his leave of Shaky and return home. He would call on the detective along the way, and share what he had learned with him. Instead, he and Shaky saw the detective’s face appear on the television screen of a bar on Congress as they passed. Ronald bought Shaky a beer while he sipped a soda, and together they watched the news. Shaky told him that it had to be connected to Jude and his daughter. If that was the case, it was also connected to Prosperous, and if Prosperous was involved it had something to do with the old church, which was how Ronald came to be lying in the woods eating MREs and reading Dickens. Even if Shaky was mistaken, at least Ronald was trying to do something, but he had to give it to the little homeless man: Prosperous felt wrong, and the old church felt multiples of wrong.

There had been little activity since he arrived. Twice a police cruiser had driven up the road to the church, but on each occasion the cop had simply checked the lock on the gate and made a cursory circuit of the cemetery. Ronald had used the telescopic sight to pick out the cop’s name on a briefly visible shirt tag: Morland.

The only other visitor was a tall man in his forties with receding hair, dressed in jeans, work boots, and a brown suede jacket. He arrived at the cemetery from the northwest, so that his appearance in the churchyard caught Ronald by surprise. On the first occasion, Ronald watched as he opened the church and checked inside, although he didn’t remain there for long. Ronald figured him for the pastor, Warraner. Shaky had learned about him from the detective, as well as something of the chief cop named Morland. Both Jude and the detective had endured run-ins with each of them, according to Shaky. Ronald didn’t follow Warraner when he left, but later he found the path that led from the churchyard to the pastor’s house. Better to know where he was coming from than not.

The pastor returned shortly before sunset on the first day, this time with a rake and a shovel, and began clearing undergrowth from an area about forty feet from the western wall of the church. Ronald watched him through the scope. When Warraner was done, a hole just a little over two feet in diameter was revealed in the earth. Then, apparently content with his work, the pastor left and hadn’t yet returned.

Now darkness had descended again, and Ronald was preparing to spend another night in the woods when the car arrived. It approached slowly, because it was driving without lights, and it stopped well before it neared the cemetery’s railings. Two men got out. Ronald turned his Armasight night-vision binoculars on them. One was Morland, although this time he was out of uniform. The second was an old scarecrow of a man wearing a long coat and a felt hat. They didn’t speak as Morland unlocked the cemetery gate, and the two men entered.

A second car, a station wagon, came up the road. Morland and the scarecrow stopped to watch it approach. It pulled up alongside the first vehicle, and an elderly woman emerged from the driver’s side. Two more men climbed out of the back, although one of them needed the assistance of his companion and the woman to do so. He wore
a small oxygen tank strapped to his back, and a mask covered his mouth. Supported by the others, he made his way into the churchyard.

Finally, from the northwest, came the pastor, but he wasn’t alone. There was a girl of eighteen or nineteen with him. She wore a padded jacket over what looked like a nightgown, and there were unlaced sneakers on her feet. Her hands were restrained behind her back, and tape covered her mouth. To her right walked another man, a decade or so older than the pastor. He held the girl’s right arm above the elbow, guiding her so that she wouldn’t trip over the old gravestones, whispering and smiling as he did so. The girl didn’t struggle or try to run. Ronald wondered if she was drugged, for her eyes drooped slightly, and she dragged her feet as she came.

She was brought to the place by the western wall of the church from which Warraner had cleared the undergrowth earlier that day. Ronald tried to get closer to them, but he didn’t want to risk making a noise and alerting the group below. He contented himself with shifting ­position slightly so that he might see more clearly what was happening. It was a still, quiet night, and the voices of the group carried to him if he listened carefully. He heard Warraner tell the girl to rest, that they were almost done. The man who held her arm assisted her as she sank to her knees, and the others formed a semicircle around her, almost obscuring her from sight. A blade appeared, and Ronald drew a breath. He put down the binoculars and switched to the night-vision scope on his rifle. It wasn’t as powerful, and didn’t give him such a wide view of proceedings, but if anyone tried to take the knife to the girl, then, cop or no cop, he planned to cut them down before the metal touched her skin. The Browning was self-loading, which gave him four shots before he’d have to pause.

But the knife was used only to cut the bonds holding the girl’s hands. Ronald watched them fall loosely to her sides, and then the man who had been assisting her removed the padded jacket, leaving her with only the nightgown as protection against the cold. Through
Ronald’s scope she looked like a pale ghost in the churchyard. He fixed his sights on the man with the knife and waited, his finger not quite touching the trigger of the rifle, but the blade disappeared, and none of the others was holding a weapon.

They backed away from the girl, partially obscuring Ronald’s view of her. He could still see her nightgown, though, white against the dark. He moved his sights from one back to the next, watching for movement, waiting for someone to produce a gun or knife, to make a move on the girl, but nobody did. Instead, they appeared to be waiting.

Ronald moved back to what he could see of the girl, and a finger of shadow crept across the pallor of her nightgown, as though the moon had suddenly shone on an overhanging branch.

But there was no branch, and there was no moon.

A second shadow came, and a third, like cracks on ice. There was a flurry of movement, a blur of white, and a single dull snap, as of a bone breaking. The watching elders came together, and for an instant the girl’s form was entirely hidden from Ronald.