Winter at the Door (15 page)

This could be it
, she thought.
In a little while, I might be talking to someone who’s seen Nicki and
—

Then they heard the gunshots coming from the island.

Pop. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
. Too fast for a standard rifle—

“Shit,” snapped Dylan, recognizing the sound at once just as she had. It was automatic-weapon fire coming from just beyond the line of trees marching along the island’s rocky shore, thirty or so yards distant.

Paddling hard toward the skimpy cover offered by the rocks—more like boulders, really, they were at least half her size, but Gibraltar wouldn’t be enough right now—she was acutely aware that her chest was protected only by the layer of foam in the life jacket.

In other words they were sitting ducks out here. “Maybe just somebody target shooting?” she called hopefully.

But then a round whizzed by her ear with an ugly
zzzt!
and Dylan’s arm came up abruptly, shreds of his jacket sleeve flying.

Bloody shreds. Fright pierced her, and she couldn’t shoot while she paddled. “Dylan?”

No answer. He kept paddling, too, but when they hit the beach between the boulders, he hauled himself from the kayak and fell.

Jesus …
 Jumping from her own boat, she crab-walked clumsily, keeping her head low and scanning the tree line until she reached him. There was blood in the water and on the sand. She pulled the Glock from her bag, fired twice over the rocks, then twice more.

“Dylan?” He already had his phone out; if she hadn’t been so pumped with fright and fury, she’d have wept at the sight.
No signal …

But then she saw that it wasn’t a phone at all. It was Chevrier’s locator beacon; Dylan must’ve grabbed it from the Blazer.

“Gotta get someone out here,” he managed as he activated it, “gotta let ’em know we’re …”

Good old Dylan …
 Of course he’d grabbed it. On the Boston PD, they used to say the only way he’d ever stop thinking was if you cut off his head.

“Fine.”
If it works …
 She eyed his bleeding arm, then poked her head up to scan the trees again. The gunfire had stopped.

For now. Hauling him up, she helped him stagger toward the tree line. Her face pressed his rough cheek.

“A little farther,” she urged him. The shooter might still be back there, but on the beach, they were ridiculously easy pickings.

They reached a massive blowdown, some ancient tree that had lost its rooted hold long ago and fallen outward toward the lake. Gasping, she let him down as gently as she could, then pulled his jacket off, followed by his shirt, and ripped the shirt swiftly into strips.

The wound in his upper arm was a small round mouth spitting gouts of dark blood. She wrapped a torn strip of cloth around it, then several more, twisting them all together tightly by winding a length of fallen branch through them and turning it like a crank.

“Hold that,” she ordered. “Can you?”

Because if he couldn’t, she couldn’t leave him; the wound was arterial, she knew from its regular pulsing. He’d bleed to death.

“Go on. I’m fine.” His feeble smile said otherwise, as did his color, now nearly as pale as the remains of his white shirt. He angled his head at the woods. “See if …”

Right, if there were bad guys in there that she could find, seize, and smack the living shit out of, if possible.

Better yet:
Sorry, Judge. But the perpetrator was resisting arrest and his head accidentally hit my bullet
.

Or Nicki might be there …

She knelt by Dylan. The tourniquet was holding. His grip on the stick that held it tight seemed firm … for now.

“Do
not
lose consciousness, do you hear me?” Her voice broke and she let it. “Dylan?”

His eyelids fluttered open; his lips pursed in a kiss, then formed a word:
Go
.

Rising, she ran, scrambling up a short, grassy path into the woods, weapon at the ready and her heart full of a clear, urgent purpose:

To kill the next son of a bitch she met. But moments later, when she burst through into a shaded clearing surrounded by huge pines, it was obvious.

Someone had taken care of that already.

The
whap-whap
of an approaching helicopter broke the silence in the bloodstained clearing. Through the trees, Lizzie could see two med techs hustle beneath the turning rotors toward Dylan. The next man out of the craft was Chevrier. “Here!” she yelled.

He stopped when he reached her, his eyes widening just as hers had. The smell of gunfire still lingered in the clearing, ringed by a half-dozen small pine-log cabins, where two men lay dead, their blood staining the pine needles under the old trees.

One victim, clad in a fancy, multi-pocketed suede hunting coat and expensive-looking tan boots, had a single hole in his forehead. With his arms flung out and his legs together, boot toes aimed at the sky, he resembled a child making a snow angel.

Only there was no snow, and if angels existed, it seemed he was right now meeting them. “Aw, hell,” said Chevrier quietly.

The second man lay in a mess of the bloody feathers that had exploded out of his down jacket when the barrage of gunfire hit him. His body lay twisted and crumpled, one leg underneath him and one arm bent at the wrong angle, the way it would be if a lot of bullets slammed different parts of it in different directions.

Lizzie had seen it, once, that herky-jerky dance. Once had been enough; she swallowed hard, then spoke.

“He heard the first shot and came running out, maybe, to see what’s what,” she told Chevrier, who nodded.

“Yeah, he would. That’s Harold Nussbaum, he’s been guiding up around here for forty years.” He eyed the body sorrowfully but didn’t approach it.

There’d be a scene team; this was state police investigation material, not the county cops’. His job and Lizzie’s, too, was just to preserve the evidence as best they could.

“You know the other dead guy?” Chevrier asked.

On the beach, the med techs were hoisting the stretcher with Dylan strapped to it up toward the chopper. Her heart caught as his good arm fell limply off to one side.

But then, turning his head, he waved it in a weak salute, knowing she’d be watching if she could.
Dylan …

Tears blurred her eyes; she blinked them away grimly.

“No,” she pronounced firmly, turning back to Chevrier. “We had … that is, Lieutenant Hudson had heard that a little girl had been sighted by a lost hunter back here in the woods somewhere. I accompanied him to check it out.”

“Yeah, huh?” Chevrier rubbed his chin thoughtfully, gazing around the clearing.

The helicopter took off with a roar and a rush of wind that sent the pines swaying, foamy whitecaps scudding across the lake. Lizzie had a moment to wonder how she and Chevrier would get off the island.

Not that she cared much. Hell, if worse came to worst, there were those kayaks, although even at only a little before three in the afternoon the late-autumn sun already nearly touched the tops of the purplish-black line of pointed firs to the west.

Chevrier’s lips pursed consideringly. “So, you hear a rumor about some little kid and the first thing you do is, you get a wild hair and come flying up here, don’t check in with dispatch, just think you’ll charge right in and find out what’s going on.”

She steadied herself, then spoke. “Sheriff Chevrier, my understanding was that the hunter was from out of the area. He might leave at any time, go home and be out of our jurisdiction, maybe even not be locatable, and we might not be able to—”

But Chevrier wasn’t listening, instead staring again at the body of Harold Nussbaum, whom he’d probably known. “Yeah. Yeah, what the hell, that’s what I’d have done, too,” Chevrier said.

Whew
, she thought. So maybe she wasn’t going to get chewed out for—

But then he aimed a stern index finger at her. “If I had a good reason for wondering about it all in the first place, that is,” he added. “Difference is, I’m the boss and you’re not.”

He took a breath. “So I’ll tell you what’s what. I need you for my own reasons, so I’ve been cutting you some slack on your private motivations, okay? But when we get back to town, you’re gonna tell me what the hell you’re up to, haulin’ your city-girl butt all way up here to the boonies in the first place.”

The chopper’s sound faded. Chevrier’s anger didn’t. “And
if
I like your explanation, I won’t
bust
your butt right the hell off this job.
And
maybe I won’t put the kind of recommendation in your file, anybody reads it you’ll be lucky if your next one’s working as a grade-school crossing guard.”

By now he was toe-to-toe with her. “Agreed, Deputy?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir. Absolutely,” she said.

Thinking,
Somebody saw Nicki. That dead hunter there, maybe, and he was already talking about it
.

So to stop him, whoever has her came here and killed him
.

“Hey.” The van, an older but unrusted gray Econoline, pulled up alongside Spud as he pedaled through the early evening.

He’d hung around all day in the office waiting for Lizzie Snow to get back. He needed to know absolutely and for sure that she wouldn’t notice the devices he’d placed, or he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight for worrying about it.

But the morning and then the afternoon wore on and she hadn’t arrived, and the waiting had worn him down. At last, when it got to be past five o’clock, he’d decided to go—

“You do it?” the guy demanded from the van’s driver’s-side window.

The snooping gadgets, he meant. He looked twitchier than usual, his gaze dancing from Spud’s face to the van’s rearview mirror and back again.

Like something frightening had happened to him recently. Or something bad. Then Spud noticed the long, groove-like wound on the guy’s jaw: like a deep, blunt claw mark.

Or … a gunshot wound?
Spud found his voice. “Yeah, I—”

It was the first time Spud had seen the guy clearly: tan, clean-shaven, good-looking in a strange, faintly forbidding way. His eyes looked old, but the rest of his face was smooth and oddly unlined, uncreased by emotion. Like nothing could make him smile.

Or weep. The guy had long dark hair that he wore in a thick braid. He had on a fringed suede jacket with beadwork on the fringes, but the beadwork was fake; Spud had seen the jacket at Walmart.

“Get in.” His hands on the steering wheel were slim and strong looking, oddly long-fingered. Without wanting to, Spud imagined them gripping a knife.

“I said, get in.” His voice was low and calmly compelling.

Spud glanced up and down the rural road: no one coming in either direction. The guy in the van waited, expressionless.

Then: “You want your money or not?”

Still no one. There would be, though. Spud didn’t want to be seen with this guy, but he also didn’t want to get in the van.

Not at all. “That’s okay,” he said, “you can just—”

Hand it to me
, Spud was about to finish. But instead the guy’s hand shot out the open window, seized a fistful of Spud’s laboriously twisted dreadlocks, and pulled.

The guy spoke. “Dude. Don’t make me come out there. Just put the bike in the back, hop in, and chill. You read me?”

“I … I read you,” Spud managed, seeing stars and tasting the blood leaking from his split lip where the ring in it had hit the van door. The next thing he knew, he was inside the vehicle, his bike stashed in the cargo compartment along with what looked to Spud like guns: a half-dozen long ones and a shorter, bulkier one, all wrapped up individually in blankets.

Soon he was riding beside the guy, with no idea where he would
end up or if he would be alive when he got there. The guy had a bone-handled knife in a scabbard on his belt; once he’d seen it, Spud couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Amusement curved the guy’s lips. “It’s just what you think it is. And I use it for just what you think I use it for.”

The guy wore jeans and a pair of moccasins. Leather, like the jacket, Spud thought. But not factory made; too rough.

“Look in the glove compartment.” The guy turned down the old White Oak Station Road, roughly rutted and little used now that a shorter way into town was paved.

Fenced fields lined the road, dark and lumpy with plowed-up earth and the remnants of withered cornstalks. In the chill air, Spud could smell the sweet-sour perfume of the corn heaped up and fermenting in nearby silos, food for local cows over the coming winter.

Spud opened the glove box, wishing he were inside one of those silos, alone in the corn-mash-perfumed dark.

Emphasis on the
alone
part. Inside the glove compartment lay a rubber-banded sheaf of cash. “Take it out. Count it.”

The inside of the van was very clean and quiet except for the crunching of the tires on the rough dirt road.

Trying to keep his hands from shaking, Spud counted out the money: a thousand in tens and twenties. “This is too much. You said—”

The guy’s head turned slowly, reminding Spud of wild animals in nature movies, tracking their prey. He smiled finally.

It was not an improvement. “I mean, you already gave me five hundred, so—”

His voice died. The guy kept looking at him. Spud calculated rapidly. He was out all night often enough so that no one would get worried about him until morning. So he was on his own here. His gaze went from the guy’s knife to the van’s door handle and back again.

“Chill, punk. How come you’re so nervous, anyway? You some kind of a nervous Nellie?”

The guy looked back at the road again. But he wasn’t smiling anymore, and the question didn’t sound friendly.

The knife’s handle was carved in intricate patterns. Spud thought
it resembled human bone. Although how he’d know that, he couldn’t have said. It reminded him was all.

The guy spoke again. “I’ve got another job for you and I’m paying you in advance again, okay? Half now, half when it’s done, just like before.”

He shoved a paper bag at Spud as they reached the old tumbledown garage that the Station Road was named after. Flanked by a huge, flat tree stump as wide as his mother’s dining room table with all its extra sections put in, forty years ago the garage had been a gas station.