Then it all came back in sharp focus.
It was the killer’s voice. The tugging at her arm was the handcuff and now, as she blinked her eyes open and raised herself painfully out of the snow, she could see his legs close beside her as he heaved and struggled with the tipped over snowmobile. And with every heave, the handcuff that still attached her to the rear pillion grip cut deeper and more painfully into the skin of her wrist.
There was a red mist about him. It was her blood, she realized, streaming down her face from the spot above her eyebrow where the skid had hit her. She shook her head to clear it, tried to ask him to stop jerking and heaving at the snowmobile.
The only sound that came was a strangled, choking grunt. She swallowed half-melted snow and saliva, choked slightly, coughed rackingly. Mikkelitz heard her and, thank God, stopped his insane straining at the snowmobile. His chest and shoulders heaved explosively and he staggered back a few paces.
“Fuck!” he shouted viciously. “Fuck, fuck and fuck this fucking whore of a snowmobile!”
She tried to stand, but her free arm went deep into the soft snow, gaining no purchase. And besides, the pillion handle to which she was handcuffed was almost at knee level. The snowmobile was tipped over almost three-quarters of the way on the downhill slope. It hadn’t quite rolled upside down, thank God. Otherwise she would have been well and truly trapped beneath it and, by now, she probably would have suffocated.
Mad with rage and frustration, Mikkelitz had been trying to roll the little vehicle upright-against the slope of the mountain. The slope and the weight combined were simply too much for him.
She could smell the harsh fumes of gas and saw red fuel dripping from the air vent in the gas tank cap, spurting out through the tiny hole with the pressure of a full tank behind it.
Mikkelitz, his breathing a little more regular now, moved forward and grabbed the handlebars, straining to lift the snowmobile back upright. His feet churned in the soft snow and he was thigh deep. He could succeed in doing no more than moving the machine in small jerks—enough to lacerate her wrist again. She cried out with the pain.
“Stop it!” she said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re breaking my wrist!” His face was close to hers as he forced his body lower, trying to gain purchase. The eyes were bulging and the effort was making his face scarlet.
“Heave, you bitch!” he spat at her. “Help me or I’ll cut your fucking arm off?”
And she tried. But even with both of them shoving, it was no use. To all practical purposes, they were trying to lift the machine almost vertically, and turn it over at the same time. And they were trying to do it from a base that gave them no solid footing to work on.
“Stop it!” she gasped again. “It’s useless! Can’t you see it’s useless?”
Whether he stopped because of what she said, or whether he was simply exhausted for the moment, she didn’t know. She was just grateful that the heaving and jerking had stopped. She slumped beside the snowmobile, one arm pinned underneath it. He dropped across it, his breath coming in huge, ragged gasps. For a minute or so, he dropped his head onto his forearms, crossed over the side of the snowmobile’s engine cover. Then he looked up at her, shaking his head in exhausted fury. She met his eyes and let her own slide away from what she saw there. He was insane with rage, almost crazy in his impotence. Her life was hanging by the slenderest of threads, she knew. In a second he would kill her, just to vent his rage and frustration. She gestured weakly at her trapped arm.
“Undo … me,” she said haltingly. “Get … handcuff off … and”—she indicated a rolling circle downhill—“roll it right over and down.”
He was uncomprehending for a second or two. Then he frowned as he saw the reason behind what she’d said. If she were out of the way, it would be a reasonably simple matter to roll the snowmobile completely over—lying on its side on the slope it was already two-thirds of the way there anyway-and let it come back upright after completing a full revolution. Instead of trying to lift it against its own dead weight, he’d have gravity to help with the task.
He fumbled in his shirt pocket and she felt a sudden flush of hope through her heart as he fished out the key to the handcuffs.
Once she was uncuffed and he was concentrating on righting the snowmobile, she’d take off like a startled deer, she decided. She’d roll, slide and tumble but she’d go.
He was coming toward her now, sinking deep with each step. Eagerly, she clawed at the snow with her free hand, clearing a space so he could get at the handcuff around her wrist. Looking at it now, she could see the snow around her hand red with the blood she was shedding.
He dropped to his knees on the snow beside her and bent forward, peering under the fallen snowmobile to the chrome grab handle. Her heart fell as she realized he wasn’t undoing the cuff around her wrist. He was unshackling her from the snowmobile, unlocking the cuff around the chrome bar.
As the hardened steel cuff came loose, he grabbed it firmly and stood back, jerking her upright with him. Again pain flamed in her wrist and she gasped. He glanced around, saw what he was looking for and dragged her across the deep snow to a young aspen.
The main trunk was about six inches in diameter. But about four feet from the surface of the snow, the tree forked. The secondary branch angled out at around twenty degrees from the vertical and was about the thickness of a man’s wrist. Wrenching her in a final spasm of pain, he clamped the empty cuff around the branch. As he let her go, her knees buckled and she hung by one arm, half sitting in the snow at the base of the tree. The branch extended another fifteen feet or so. There was no way she could slip the cuff off it. And it was too thick for her to break. She tried, in a dispirited way, seizing the short chain between the cuffs with her free hand and heaving at it.
It was no use. Her legs gave way under her again and she swung by the chain and slumped to the snow.
He backed away to the snowmobile, watching her feeble effort to break loose with a satisfied smile. He was beginning to feel on top of things again, she thought, and realized that had probably saved her life, at least for the moment.
Rolling the snowmobile downhill was obviously an easier task. He quickly had it upside down, then over on its other side. The next step-getting it upright-was the hardest. But even that was easier than trying to lift it back against the slope of the hill. He strained and heaved at it. His feet still sank into the snow up past his knees. But now he was standing above the snowmobile and the fact actually helped rather than hindered. It brought him down closer to the level of the snowmobile, allowing him to get a more direct thrust at it, and use the strength of his back and legs to do the pushing.
She watched him as he heaved and shoved at it, nearly having it upright, then at the last minute letting it fall back on its side. Then, with a final convulsive heave, he had it over and the snowmobile crashed over onto its runners, showering loose snow in all directions. For a moment, it looked as if it might tip all the way over again and he lunged at it, grabbing the uphill handlebar and throwing his weight back into the slope of the hill to steady it.
He looked around at her with a fierce gleam of triumph in his eyes. Triumph and something else. She realized she was dealing with someone who was totally unstable, poised right on the brink. She shivered uncontrollably and he saw the movement and smiled. Then he jerked on the starter cord.
The exhaust belched blue smoke. The motor tried to fire, then died. He kicked it savagely, splitting the fiberglass cowling of the engine in his fury, jerked the cord again.
Again, blue smoke, a coughing grunt from the motor, then silence.
She watched as he made an enormous effort and got control of himself. He reached into the engine and turned off the fuel tap so that no more would flow to the engine. Then he held the throttle wide open and tugged again.
This time, along with the cloud of blue smoke, the motor ran for half a dozen uncertain beats before dying. He tried to catch it with the throttle, just missed it and cursed again.
She was looking around, trying to find a way to leave a message. Jesse would come looking for her, she knew that. She didn’t know how she knew it. She had no reason to believe that Jesse even knew she was missing.
She just believed it. Because if she didn’t, she had to believe that she was going to die. But she had to tell Jesse where Mikkelitz was taking her so he could go looking there.
She glanced furtively at him. He was head down over the snowmobile, paying no attention to her. She smoothed a section of snow beside the tree and traced the initials “APT” for Abby Parker-Taft, then, with her forefinger, a little smaller, the letters “WS” and an arrow pointing up the mountain in the general direction she thought the weather station lay.
As she was doing so, she realized, with a detached part of her brain, that she could hear another snowmobile somewhere in the distance, the rasping note of its two-stroke cutting through the cold air.
She frowned at the letters in the snow, wondering if she could do more. A quick glance at Murphy showed him with his back still to her and she decided she had time to write the words “weather station” in full. She quickly smoothed over the “WS” and began to print carefully, when a sudden explosive roar from the snowmobile made her start with fright.
The motor was running and he wound the throttle open and closed a few times to clear the plugs, sending clouds of oily blue exhaust drifting in the light breeze. Then he started toward her, reaching into his shirt pocket once more for the key. Frightened, she glanced down at the incomplete message in the snow. She had managed only the letters “WEATH—” but it might just be enough.
Except he saw the direction of her glance and saw what she’d written. The triumph in his eyes died suddenly, replaced by the cold anger she’d seen before, in the garage of the condo on Ski Trail Lane. Even though she knew he was going to hit her, she never saw the backhanded blow coming, just felt it explode off her lip and knock her spinning, hanging against the cruel bite of the handcuffs again.
“You fucking bitch,” he said quietly, obliterating the letters in the snow with a quick arc of his boot. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”
She tried to regain her feet, her free hand up to her mouth where blood was running again. Her lip felt twice its normal size. She didn’t register that he was still talking to her.
“Didn’t I?” he said, then, in a rising tone, “Didn’t I?”
And when she didn’t answer him, he hit her again, the arm swinging back in the opposite direction and knocking her from her feet yet again. She sobbed in pain and fear, managing to gasp out, “Yes! You told me! Sorry! Sorry, please … I’m sorry …”
Then he grabbed her by the hair and she felt her eyes water with the pain as he pulled her face close to his own.
“Listen, bitch,” he said. “You do as you’re told, okay?”
“Okay” she whimpered, cowed and beaten, hating him, despising herself. And he shoved her backward so her head slammed against the aspen and her vision blurred for a second or two.
“Please …” she tried to say, but her voice was barely more than a sobbing whisper. “Please, don’t—” But he hit her again, openhanded this time, across the mouth, and her lips felt like swollen balloons. She forced her eyes open, seeing his hand drawing back for another blow. Then he stopped, as the motor of the snowmobile coughed once and died. He hesitated, cursed violently, then released her to slump semiconscious in the snow as he started to move toward the snowmobile.
Just as another snowmobile skidded to a halt on the access trail above them.
And somehow, she knew, Jesse had found her.
SIXTY-FIVE
L
ee was pacing again, up and back, up and back. She’d tried to sit calmly but somehow she just couldn’t hack it. Felix watched her with a tolerant look on his face. At first she was going to stop for his sake, realizing how annoying her action could be. Then she’d noticed his look and thought to hell with him.
She let go of a pent-up breath and stopped by the window, staring out across the snow-scattered street and the river to where Ray Newton’s Jet Ranger was sitting in the athletics field, its big single rotor slowly turning as he kept the jet turbine at idle.
She leaned her knuckles on the cracked paint of the windowsill, put her forehead against the chill glass of the inner pane. Like most business premises in the town, the windows were double glazed for insulation. Even so, the glass felt cold enough to freeze water.
A bunch of town kids on snowmobiles and mountain bikes had clustered around the chopper, wanting to come closer and get a good look. She could see Ray nervously shooing them away, casting worried glances at the rear of the chopper to make sure none of the kids were sneaking around there, trying to get close without him seeing them. Few people realized that the rear of a helicopter was the most dangerous quarter. It was instinctive for people to duck their head under the main rotor as they walked out to a chopper. Yet the big rotating blade was well clear of them. Even if they jumped way up, they’d likely not make contact. But the tail rotor, spinning so fast it was almost invisible, was the real danger. More people had been killed, Lee knew, walking into the whizzing tail rotor of a helicopter than had ever made contact with the big, high-set main rotor. It just went to show. The world was full of careless people, not Michael Jordan look-alikes.