“Any time you want to take a look at God’s country, just come on out to Wahoo,” Dexter was saying. Incredibly, the man and his wife had come to stand behind Deal and Janice in the rental car line at the Omaha terminal. “You just ask anybody where the Kittles live, they’ll tell you. For that matter, just ask them, where’s Dexter and Iris’s place. They’ll tell you.”
“We’ll do it,” Deal said. “Count on it.”
He scooped up the keys from the sales attendant with one hand, urged Janice away with the other. “Enjoy Omaha, now,” Dexter said as they hurried off.
***
“I was right, wasn’t I,” Janice said. She was huddled in the corner of the rental car, her arms wrapped tightly about her, her hands tucked in her armpits, while Deal worked to get the engine started.
“What’s that?” he said. He was distracted, trying to remember his cold-weather driving routines, whether one was to pump the accelerator or leave the starter to its own devices.
“That guy. You couldn’t get away from him fast enough.”
“He was just trying to be friendly,” Deal said. “If you lived in someplace like Yeehaw, Nebraska, you’d probably be starved for company, too. Especially if you lived with somebody like Iris.”
“Wahoo,” Janice said.
“What?” Deal had given up leaving things alone, was pumping the accelerator rapidly now.
“The name of the town,” she said. “It was Wahoo.”
“Same thing,” Deal said, glancing at her.
After they’d retrieved her suitcase from the baggage claim, she’d taken one look outside, dug out a down parka he remembered her wearing on a ski trip a decade ago. She had its fur-fringed hood pulled up over her head, but she was gloveless and shivering in the frigid air. Outside, winter twilight had dimmed the sky and a gritty snow was coming down nearly sideways, driven by a gusting wind strong enough to rock the car periodically.
Deal remembered buying a parka for the same long-ago trip, but his had burned up a few years back, lost in the same accident that had left Janice with the scars that only she could see.
Forget it, Deal
, he thought. Ancient history. Head down, foot forward. They would work their way out of this yet.
For winter gear, he’d found only a pair of ski mittens and a wool scarf in the back of a drawer. He had borrowed a pea coat from Driscoll, who’d also tossed in a watch cap and a Jon-ee hand warmer. “Used that sucker plenty when I worked Shore Patrol in Korea,” Driscoll had said. “Nebraska’s even worse.”
He’d insisted on digging out a can of lighter fluid from under his sink, filling up the gadget, showing Deal how it worked. “It’ll fit right inside those mittens of yours,” he added, then stopped him on the way out of the apartment. “Call me if you get in over your head, now.”
He was
already
in over his head, Deal thought, fighting the urge to hustle Janice out of the freezing car back into the comfort of the tiny airport. If planes were still flying, they could get as far back as Chicago tonight, take a room at the Ambassador or the Palmer House, find a decent restaurant, have some drinks, pretend it was a vacation, a second honeymoon.
“What’s wrong with this car, Deal?” she said, huddling deeper within herself.
“The winter,” he grumbled as the starter ground uselessly on at his touch.
Deal hadn’t bothered to light the hand warmer, but he was beginning to wish he had. He’d removed his mitten to get the key in the unfamiliar ignition and his fingers were turning to ice.
“Shouldn’t they check these cars out, have them ready for people?”
He turned to her, exasperated. “I bet there’s a place on the rental form to write that suggestion down.”
“You don’t have to get snippy,” she said. “I’m cold, that’s all.”
“Have the rest of the coffee,” he said. They’d stopped at a kiosk in the airport, picked up a Styrofoam cupful of weak brew, a dry doughnut, a leaden cookie.
She shook her head. “It’s already ice,” she said.
Deal turned, twisted the key again. This time the starter chugged rapidly for a few seconds, then shifted to a much slower cycle, and finally fell away altogether with a dispiriting groan.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” she said as another gust rocked the car.
Deal sank back behind the wheel. “Look,” he said. “I’m going back inside, make them give us another car. You want to go with me or wait here?”
The wind was howling outside now, the car jiggling steadily as if it were a rail car being towed across the tundra. “Will it take long?”
Deal shook his head. “I’ll jump the line. I’ll drag the guy out myself if I have to.”
“I’ll wait,” she said. “But hurry, okay?”
He gave her a smile, then saw something in her expression that made him lean across the seat, give her a peck on the cheek. “Count on it,” he said.
He turned, was about to throw open his door when she called out, “There’s something else, Deal. About that couple.”
He rolled his eyes, glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“I was just thinking,” she said. “If they live around here, what would they be doing renting a car?”
It stopped him for a moment. “I don’t know, Janice. Maybe somebody brought them to the airport, they can’t come get them in the storm.”
She nodded, but she didn’t seem convinced.
“It’s getting dark,” Deal said, impatient, his hand on the door. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and he swung himself out into the bitter wind before he could change his mind.
***
It
was
an interesting question, he thought as he bent his head against the wind, paused to pull the watch cap over his ears. And even if there were a number of reasonable explanations, it was a reminder to him that Janice often picked up on things he was in too big a hurry to notice. She was probably far more suited to detective work than he was. As he pushed himself away from the car toward the terminal, he made a resolution to himself to remember that.
Outside, the lights of the terminal seemed much farther away than he’d realized. His Topsiders slipped and slid, their low-cut tops inviting in the ice and snow. In seconds his feet were soaked and freezing. He’d also been clumsy using the unfamiliar mittens when he’d pulled his cap on, he realized. He’d left half an ear uncovered, hadn’t taken a dozen steps and it had already passed through the painful stage, was rapidly turning numb.
He cursed, pulled off a mitten in his teeth, reached up to yank the cap down, stopped when the lights of a boxy-looking vehicle in the row ahead of him popped on, blinding him momentarily in the gloom.
“You got trouble?” he heard the familiar voice call, and lowered his arm to see Dexter Kittle coming around the opened door of the truck-like vehicle toward him. If he was still wearing his golf outfit, there was no way to tell. He’d donned a quilted snowmobiler’s outfit, had replaced the white loafers with a pair of lace-up rubberized boots.
“The damned car they gave me wouldn’t start,” Deal muttered. He saw the passenger door of the Kittles’ vehicle swing open, saw Iris Kittle, dressed in a matching camouflage-style getup, moving his way as well.
“That your missus in there?” Dexter said, pointing over Deal’s shoulder. Deal turned toward his disabled rental car, saw Janice’s huddled shape through the hazy rear window glass.
“That’s her…” Deal began, thinking that something good had come out of tolerating Kittle after all. Even Janice wouldn’t turn down a cozy ride back to the terminal, that much he was sure of. He was turning back, ready to prevail upon Kittle, when he felt a stunning blow at his face.
At first, blinded by pain, by the suddenness of it, he had no idea what had happened. But in the few seconds it took for him to realize he was on the ground now, he also understood that Kittle had hit him, and that his mouth was full of blood because he’d bitten his tongue, or the inside of his cheek, hard to tell because his entire head had gone numb with the cold and the force of the blow. He was trying to scramble to his feet when he felt another blow at his side, a kick that lifted him off the ground and drove his breath from him.
“She’s in the car, hon,” he heard Kittle call.
Deal was gasping, rolling over blindly. He felt another kick, but this one was glancing, muffled somewhat by the thick folds of Driscoll’s pea coat. Deal used the force of the second kick, kept himself rolling, digging his elbows into a patch of soft snow, managing to scuttle under the overhang of a van as another kick flashed past, inches from his face.
There was a heavy thud and a curse from Kittle as the toe of his boot smashed against the underside of the van’s fender.
Deal had his breath back, his vision cleared now, saw one of Kittle’s boots doing a little hop step a few inches from his nose while a string of curses whipped away in the wind. Deal spit blood from between his swollen lips, reached out to clutch Kittle’s pantleg. He curled his fingers into a death grip on the soft fabric, jerked as hard as he could.
There was another cry as Kittle’s foot slid toward him, his shin cracking against the bumper above Deal’s head. Deal yanked again, twisting the boot up until Kittle lost his balance altogether. There was a yelp and a satisfying thump as the man went down hard on his back, a groan as his breath left him.
“Deal!” he heard Janice cry somewhere. “Deal!” The sounds seemed pitiful, whipped into quick nothingness by the wind.
He clutched the fabric of Kittle’s pantleg all the harder, used the man’s weight as leverage to pull himself out from under the van.
Kittle was still groaning, trying to clamber up on his elbow, when Deal caught a fistful of quilted fabric on the man’s chest, swung mightily with his other hand.
“Sonofabitch,” Deal said as his fist caught Kittle’s cheekbone squarely. “Bastard. What is this? What are you doing?”
He was drawing back to swing again when Iris struggled out of the passageway between the van and another car. She had Janice’s chin locked under one arm, was using her free hand to pull the two of them along toward the idling truck. When she saw Deal atop her husband, she dropped Janice, moved toward them. Deal saw Janice bounce limply off the side of the van, a life-size doll cast aside.
He opened his mouth to call to her, but the sound never materialized. Iris had spun toward him in a move that seemed a blur. The sole of her boot caught him high on the cheek, numbing him, sending him over hard onto his back, his hands flying above his head as if he were trying to carve an angel in the snow.
Dowdy old Iris
, he thought, bells clanging in his head. Starbursts of light. Strange animal voices. A hyena laugh.
Stick-in-the-mud Iris. She probably had a hundred bikinis and she probably looked like a well-oiled machine in every one of them, he thought dreamily. How would she finish him off, he wondered. Crossword puzzle pen plunged through his heart? Sensible-stocking noose around his throat? Who the hell were these people? What did they want?
“Get her in the car.” He heard Iris’s voice at his ear, managed to get his eyes open as she bent over to grab his coat with one hand, lift his head up off the snow. She had her other hand drawn back, he realized, a mirror image of how he’d looked a moment ago, ready to cold-cock Dexter, knock him six miles beyond Wahoo. Only difference was, Deal thought, there wasn’t much hope he could turn things around.
A fluff of her hair had escaped the hood of her camouflage suit. Little ice balls clung there, bouncing off her forehead like a flapper’s beads, like tiny beads on a frosted veil…and then he remembered. The spray of tiny berries he’d picked up in Arch’s store after the murder. In the next instant he saw the two of them in their shiny Cadillac car, waving him across the street, Ma and Pa Gothic he’d taken them for, typical tourists, harmless geeks. He’d seen them again, in the Grove, at Lightner’s: a tall, gaunt man with his dog, a loony woman in garden attire and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. He and Janice had probably walked right past them at the Biltmore, and they’d been followed by the pair ever since. They’d killed Arch, and Fast Eddie Lightner, and Martin Rosenhaus. And now it was Deal’s turn to die.
Good as she seemed to be, he suspected it would be painless. One sharp blow and good night. And then something occurred to him, swimming up out of his hapless daze. Janice. Was that what had happened to her? Was she already gone? The way she’d fallen, limp, crumpling into the snow so lifelessly…?
He saw a sheen of amber light wash over Iris Kittle’s face then, thought at first it was a trick of his addled mind. But Iris had in fact glanced up herself, frozen momentarily, her hand drawn back, her fingers twisted into some kind of strange, death-dealing configuration.
The amber light whisked across her features again. And again. A caution flasher, Deal realized. Cop? Airport security?
He felt a tingling in his left arm now, a rush of feeling that extended, along with the sharper sensations of pain, all the way to his fingertips. His right arm was still numb, so the left would have to do. And just as well, for the left mitten was the one he’d left on, the one where the unlit Jon-ee hand warmer still jiggled inside, freezing him with its cold metallic self.
It was like carrying around a frozen flask in there, he thought as he lunged forward, putting his last ounce of strength behind the blow. She was just turning back to him when his fist met her face, the Jon-ee leading the way like a giant-size set of brass knuckles.
He heard a splatting sound, felt maximum resistance, heard her cry out as she fell over backwards. Deal rolled to his side, scrambled onto his hands and knees, shaking his head like an old bull trying to refocus himself as the picadors swarmed. Feeling was returning to his right arm now, to his pulpy lips, but he was still groggy.
One aisle over, behind a double row of cars, a snowplow was grinding swiftly along, a yellow warning flasher whirling atop the cap. A wake of ice and powder soared high into the air behind the machine, lowering the already miserable visibility to nothing.
Deal looked about the gloom for Iris, sure the blow had put her out, but stopped, staring in disbelief, when he found her on her feet, coming unsteadily his way, blood dripping from her smashed nose, from her mouth, a little dribble of it already frozen into an icicle at her chin. Dexter was trying to pull himself up by the bumper of the van, but his boots kept slipping in the bloody ice at his feet. Janice’s form still lay crumpled in the snowbank where Iris had dumped her, but Deal thought he saw movement there, her hand and arm fluttering, or maybe it was just a trick of the wind.