Winter Prey (43 page)

CHAPTER
31

He was on snowshoes, working along the ridges across the access road to his cabin. After the first mile, he was damp with sweat. He took his watch cap off, stuffed it in his pocket, unzipped his parka to cool down, and moved on.

The alders caught at his legs, tangled him. They were small, bushy trees with thumb-sized trunks marked with speckles, like wild cherries. In some places they’d been buried by the frequent snowfalls. When he stepped over a buried bush, his snowshoe would collapse beneath him as though he’d stepped in a hole, which, in fact, he had—a snow dome, held up by the flexible branches of a buried alder. Then he’d be up to his knee or even his crotch, struggling to get back on the level.

As he fought across the swamp, a rime of ice formed on his sunglasses, and his heart thumped like a drum in the silence of the North Woods. He climbed the side of a narrow finger ridge; when he reached its spine, he turned downhill and followed it back to the swamp. At the point where the ridge subsided into the swamp, a tangle of red cedars hugged the snow. Deer had bedded all through the cedars, shedding hair, discoloring the snow. There were
pinkish urine holes everywhere, piles of scat like liver-colored .45 shells; but no deer. He would have been as obvious to them as a locomotive, and they’d be long gone. He felt a spasm of guilt. He shouldn’t be running deer, not this winter. They’d be weak enough.

His legs twitched, twitched against the pristine white sheets, white like the snow. The winter faded.

“Wake up, you . . .”

Lucas opened his eyes, groaned. His back was stiff, his neck stretched and immobile in the plastic brace. “Goddamn, I was out of it,” he said hoarsely. “What time is it?”

“Four o’clock,” Weather said, smiling down at him. She was wearing her surgeon’s scrub suit. “It’ll be dark in an hour. How’re you feeling?”

Lucas tested his throat, flexing. “Still hurts, but not so bad. Feels more like tight.”

“It’ll do that as it heals. If it gets worse, we’ll go back in and release some of the scar tissue.”

“I can live with the tight feeling,” he said.

“What? You don’t trust me?” The .22 slug had entered below his jawbone, penetrating upwards, parallel to his tongue, finally burying itself in the soft tissue at the back of his throat. When he’d tried to inhale, he’d sucked down a flap of loose tissue not much bigger than a nickel and had almost choked to death. Weather had fixed the damage with an hour of work on the table at Lincoln Memorial.

“Trust a woman, the next thing you know, they’re cutting your throat,” Lucas said.

“All right, so now I’m not going to tell you about the Schoeneckers.”

“What?” He started to sit up, but she pushed him down. “They found them?”

“Camping in Baja. This morning. They used a gas credit card last night, and they found them about ten o’clock our time. Henry Lacey called and said the folks don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, but one of the girls is giving them quite an earful. Henry may fly out there with a couple of other deputies to bring them back.”

“Far out. They can squeeze them on the other people in the sex thing.”

“They? You’re not going to help?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not my territory anymore. I gotta figure out something to do. Maybe go back to Minneapolis.”

“Hmph,” she said.

“Well, Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, picking up her change of mood, “I was hoping you’d help me figure it out. One way or another, you’ll be around, right?”

“We gotta talk,” she said. “When you get out of here.”

“What does that mean? You don’t want to be around?”

“I want to be around,” she said. “But we gotta talk.”

“All right.”

Shelly Carr knocked on the door. “Visiting hours?” He had a wool-plaid hunting cap in his hands, with earflaps.

“Come on in,” Lucas croaked. Carr asked, and Lucas said he felt fine. “What’s the word on Harper? Weather says you found his truck.”

“Yeah—out on a lake. There’s a big collection of fishing shacks. Lot of people around there. We think he might have met somebody, got a ride so we couldn’t put out a bulletin on his license. God knows where he is now, but we’re looking.”

“You look pretty good,” Lucas said.

“Got some rest,” Carr said.

“Have you talked to Gene again?”

“Yeah. He’s still up at your cabin,” Carr said. “He just sits up there and watches television and reads. I’m kind of worried.”

“He needs professional help, but there’s no chance he’d talk to a psychiatrist,” Weather said. “Big macho guy like that, no chance.”

“Yeah, well . . . I know where he’s at,” Lucas said. “It’s like the Church. If you don’t believe, it won’t do you any good to go. He’s gonna have to work it out himself.”

“The whole thing was odd,” Carr said. “He was okay until he went to her funeral. He shouldn’t have gone, I told him that.”

“He might of had to,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, I know,” Carr said reluctantly. “But as soon as he saw her face, that was that. I mean, she looked like an angel. You know about his daughter.”

“Yeah.”

They sat for a moment, not talking, then Carr said, “I gotta go.” He whacked Lucas twice on the leg. “Get better.”

When he was gone, Weather said, “Shelly’s doing all right politically. Lacey’s made sure that everybody knows about him walking up the driveway to deal with Helper.”

“Took some balls,” Lucas said.

“And somehow all the dead people are just . . . dead. Seems like nobody really talks about it that much. It’s been less than a week.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Lucas said.

“Did you see the paper?” she asked.

“A nurse brought it in this morning, just after you left,” he said.

“Great picture, Shelly with the FBI guys, taking credit,” she said. “Kind of made me mad.”

“Shelly’s just taking care of business,” Lucas said mildly. He was amused.

“I know. I had a little talk with him about his wife, by the way. I suggested that they both might be better off divorced.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said, ‘Divorce is a sin.’ ”

After a few minutes he said, “Push the door shut.”

She looked at the door, then stepped over, pushed it shut, sat on the bed next to him, kissed him. He couldn’t turn his head much, but he could move his arm, and he held her to him as long and hard as he could.

She finally pulled away, laughing, straightened her hair.

“Jeez, it’s hard not to take advantage of you, a man in your condition,” she said.

“Hey. I don’t hurt all that bad. So come back here.” He tried to reach for her, but she danced away.

“I wasn’t referring to your getting shot. I was referring to the fact that you’re falling in love with me.”

“I am?”

“Take my word for it,” she said. She stepped closer, bent over, kissed him lightly on the forehead. He tried to reach for her again, but she danced away. “Try to get some rest. You’re probably gonna need it when you get out.”

“You’ve got a sense of humor like a cop,” Lucas said. “Nasty. And you hide behind it. Like a cop.”

She’d been smiling, but now the smile narrowed, turned uncertain. “I guess I do.”

“Because you’re right. I am falling in love with you. You don’t have to be funny about it.”

This time she touched him on the tip of the nose and said, “Get well.” She was smiling, but seemed to have tears in her eyes, and she left in a hurry.

Lucas drifted for a while, punched up the TV, turned it off, used the bed-lift control to raise his head. He could see out the window, across the lawn toward the town, with the small houses and the smoke curling out of the chimneys. Not much to see: white snow, blue sky, small houses.

And it was bitterly cold, everybody said, the worst cold of the winter.

From inside it didn’t look so bad. From inside, it looked pretty good. He smiled and closed his eyes.