Authors: Giles Blunt
“Better check the score before you get home.”
“I’ll check it on my phone. Not that Laura cares.”
They got dressed and Randall folded up the blue blanket. In the vestibule they put on coats and boots. Randall switched off the light. His hushed voice in the dark as if people might be listening right outside the door. “Give it two minutes, right?”
“Okay.”
“And make sure the door is shut properly. Lock seems to be screwed up—everything sticks in this house.”
He gave her a quick kiss, said he couldn’t wait until next time, and then he was gone. A cloud of cold air, smells of snow and pine. His car starting in the drive. It shouldn’t hurt this much, she told herself. You’re a big girl. Supposedly. No cat-hearted Loreena, though, that was obvious.
She watched through the door window as his tail lights winked through the trees. It was a long drive back to town and then up the highway to the reserve; she decided she’d better visit the bathroom before hitting the road. She wiped her boots on the mat until she was sure they wouldn’t leave water on the hardwood.
As she was coming out of the bathroom, she heard a key in the front door. A man’s voice. Not Randall. Stomping of boots and voices answering.
Sam stepped into the bedroom. If these are the owners, she said, or even another agent showing the place, I am in shit city, and so is Randall. But the owners weren’t supposed to be back yet, and why would an agent be showing a house at this hour of the night? It didn’t make sense. The toilet was still running, and she prayed it would stop.
Voices and movement deeper into the house. Hall light going on.
Sam got down on the floor and slid under the bed. There is no kind of serious person, she said, that would be in this situation.
Several minutes of quiet, then the man’s voice louder and footsteps coming her way. Dulled sound of stocking feet. Did that mean they would be staying?
The man’s voice from the hall. “Got a nice bathroom. Nothing luxurious, but it’s the location you’re paying for. The tranquility.”
The bedroom light came on and Sam held her breath. She couldn’t see anything, the bedspread hanging almost to the floor.
“Good-sized master bedroom. Room for a queen-size bed, obviously. Decent closet space. You might want to pick yourself out a different colour.”
Sound of closet doors sliding open.
A woman’s voice, some kind of accent. “It was built when, you said?”
“Early sixties.”
“So new. Looks older, the style.”
Closet doors sliding shut.
“Character,” the man said, closer now. “They didn’t just reach for the cookie cutter.” He crossed the room and there was the sound of curtains being pulled back. “You got the lake out back, snowmobiling in winter, canoeing, water skiing or whatever’s your fancy in summer. It’s the view makes the place. I gotta get you-all out here in the daytime. Smack dab on the water, out on a point—it’s a postcard, there’s no other word for it. Pretty unique. Got two more bedrooms.”
“Is only one bathroom?” Another man’s voice. Again a foreign accent.
“Yessir. You mightn’t consider it for your primary residence, but for a northern getaway? I think you’d be hard put to beat it.”
Their footsteps thudding toward the hall and the light going out.
“You-all check out the other bedrooms,” the man said, “and then I got a little something to warm us up.”
Sam shifted her position under the bed. She could hear the man and woman in the hall, some foreign language. How long could it possibly take you to check out a little bungalow?
Leave
, she told them.
Just leave
.
Footsteps moving back toward the kitchen or living room, no longer in the hall anyway. The people didn’t leave, but she couldn’t hear them anymore.
She tried to regulate her breathing, to calm down. They would go soon. Another few minutes maybe.
From the living room, the clink of glasses. Laughter. Sam prayed they were not planning on an all-night booze-up.
She waited, thinking about the window. The house was such an open style there was no chance of getting to the front door without being seen. She had never seen the back door, but it would have to be somewhere near the kitchen. That meant the window.
Is there one single solitary thing I have to be grateful for in this situation? she wondered. One single solitary thing to justify that famous “attitude of gratitude” her father was always encouraging her to cultivate? Maybe one. Got to the bathroom before all this. Otherwise there’d be a whole other layer of anguish.
Gunshot.
Sam’s head hit the box spring. Her father had taught her to shoot when she was nine. There was no doubt in her mind, not for one instant, that someone had just fired a gun.
Another shot.
A man shouted. The kind of yell a man lets fly when his team has just scored a goal.
When you get lost in the woods, her father told her—and everyone gets lost in the woods, even Indians—the first thing you do is what you don’t do. You don’t panic. Panic will kill you faster than any wolf, faster than any bear. Panic is the quickest cause of death known to man. What you do is you notice it, you name it for what it is, and you lock it away in a little safe where no one can get at it, not even you, understand?
Don’t panic, she told herself. Maybe no one has been shot. They were looking at a house—why would anyone shoot anyone? Maybe someone’s shooting blanks for some reason. Maybe they snorted some coke or something and they’re going a little wacky. Don’t panic.
She tried to get control of her breathing, her heart rate. No one knows I’m here. Whatever’s going on, it’ll be over soon. They’ll leave, I’ll leave. Life will be normal and no one will be dead. Not me, at least.
None of this slowed her heart rate. Blood thundered in her ears.
She eased herself out from under the bed. There were two windows side by side, one with an air conditioner fixed into it. Outside, moonlight on snow. She turned the lock on the other one and lifted. It didn’t move. Her heart jacked itself up even more. It was all she could do not to scream.
This is panic. Heaving up on the window grips, pushing on the sash, nothing moving. Thinking, this is panic, get back under that bed.
Grabbing the chair. To this moment still having made no sound.
I do this and there’s no going back. It’s one chance and no more. I should get back under that bed.
She swung the chair with all her strength, spinning her weight into it. The noise was terrifying.
One knee over the sill and onto the slight ledge outside. Hands on the sill and glass slicing into her in many places at once. She pushed herself off, coat ripping, and hit the ground hard, knees and hands. Then up and running, and bullets spitting snow in front of her before she even heard the first shot.
She made straight for the darkness of the trees, thinking, my tracks in fresh snow saying shoot me. She dropped down behind an outcropping of granite and looked back. Someone had turned on the bedroom light, but there was no shadow in the window. Think, she said. To her left, the platinum lake, the ice still too thin for anyone heavier than a cat. There’s only two ways back to the car, one on either side of the drive and then the road. He saw me come this way. He’s going to bust out that front door and head for this side and he’s going to hear me even if he can’t see me and then I’m dead and I really do not want to die.
The open ground between her and the house looked like the worst place in the world. She left the rocks and ran right back through it, keeping close to the rear of the house, and then into the woods on the other side. Every instinct told her to run all out. I’m fast, she said, but I’m not Loreena Moon and I’m not about to outrun bullets. The trick is not to run fast but to run silent.
She tried to remember all of the tracking lessons her father had given her. How to move in on your prey without being detected. Keep your steps to the rocks, right on them or close by. Ease your weight by grabbing low branches close to the trunk. Don’t step on twigs. Great bit of Indian lore there, Dad. I’d never have thought of that. Being a good tracker was not the same as being good, meaning living, prey.
When she was well past the front of the house, she crouched amid a stand of pine and listened. She could see the drive, could hear the man crashing through the woods on the far side. How dumb was this person likely to be, was the question. How long would it take him to see that there were no tracks over there, no footprints in the night’s thin layer of snow. Then he would either wait or head down to the back of the house and see her trail doubling back.
He came out of the woods and turned slowly, conning the snow, the woods. Sam reached into her pocket for her cellphone. Not there. She felt her other pockets. The man moved back toward the house, the gun long in his hand. Sam took off again. A few moments later the road was in sight through the trees. Her car was down the road a little toward town. To avoid crossing the open driveway, she would have to get to the far side of the road and into the woods, which climbed a steep hill, or risk the open road.
The man was crashing through the brush behind her. Sam broke for the road and ran for it. If he saw her, he would have trouble getting a shot, and by the time he reached the road, she would be at her car. A bee whizzed by her face and then the following
crack
told her everything she needed to know. She got to the hydro utility road and her car parked maybe fifty feet in from the road.
If he’s made it to the road, the noise of me starting this thing up is going to tell him where I am.
She kept the lights off. The Honda started first try. She took it slow on the service road; the slight rise would have been enough to render those bald tires useless. As she rolled up to Island Road, she saw him coming and gunned it, back tires spinning but drifting up onto the road. It was agony to ease off on the pedal, but it was the only way the tires were going to grip. A bullet slammed into the back end, and the man was yelling, running toward her in the rear-view.
The tires caught and she eased her foot down, keeping low in the seat. Another bullet slammed into the trunk. She rounded a curve and breathed a little easier. He couldn’t get a shot and he wasn’t going to catch her on foot. His best move now would be getting into the car she’d seen shadowed in the driveway and coming after her all
Terminator
. She had the advantage of knowing Island Road, which had some serious twists and turns, and he couldn’t be sure if she was headed to town or farther north.
A car coming the other way blasted its horn and flashed its lights. She put her headlights on and kept it fast, the Honda fishtailing on the hills and curves. Nothing in the rear-view, but then you could only see back to the last curve. Up ahead, the Chinook Tavern on the right and beyond that the highway.
The Chinook parking lot was busy for a Thursday night. People outside, huddled over their cigarettes. A guy was poised to pull out on his Harley, but there was no way she was going to let him. She blasted by and totally ignored the stop sign at the intersection. He yelled something—hurling his outrage into the night.
Then the smooth road and the lights of town in the distance. She patted her pockets again for her cell. Definitely gone. She must have lost it when she jumped. Moonlight on the flat white surface of Trout Lake, the road itself in the deep shadows of trees and hills. The speed limit was
80 kilometres, but she pegged it at 120. You couldn’t go faster on these curves. It was a perfect speed trap, of course. The cops often staked it out, hoping to lasso the drunks weaving back to town from the Chinook.
The steering wheel was sticky with blood. Her knee was hurting, and not in a way that was going to fade any time soon. The blood had soaked down nearly to the cuff of her jeans. That was probably going to need stitches. You are in trouble ten different ways, she said, and if you’ve got some plan for getting out of it, I’d really like to hear it right now—preferably before Mr. Murder decides to come after me.
W
HEN SHE GOT HOME, SAM PARKED
the car in the garage and inspected the damage to the rear end. The left signal light was shattered and there was a bullet hole in the trunk. Three inches higher and her brain would have been all over the windshield.
She went into the house and removed her coat and boots in the dark. Her mother always slept with her bedroom door open. Sam had to be silent moving down the hall and into the bathroom. The right leg of her jeans was stiff with blood below the tear in the knee. She opened the cabinet above the sink and found a bottle of Tylenol with codeine left over from a tooth extraction. She shook two into her palm and swallowed them, scooping water from the faucet to wash them down.
Her left hand was cut, a two-inch gash at the base of her palm. It wasn’t bleeding too badly now. She got some gauze and tape and an old face cloth from the closet by the toilet, then had to go back for the rubbing alcohol. Tremors shook her thighs as she got into the tub. She peeled her jeans down halfway and sat on the edge of the tub to extract her left leg.
She took a few deep breaths and held the last one and rolled her jeans off the cut in her knee. Tears sprang to her eyes and she started to sob
but managed to keep it quiet. She pulled her jeans off the rest of the way and rolled them up. Blood welled from her knee. She ran water over it and watched the red and pink swirl into the drain. She washed her cuts with soap and water and dried them with the old face cloth. The alcohol was cold and it stung, but it felt clean.
The cut in her knee needed stitches, but there was nothing she could do about that. A trip to the emergency room would require an explanation, and she might run into someone who had been shot or had done the shooting. She dried her feet and went back to the linen closet and dug around and found an ancient box of Kotex that her mother had got a couple of years ago for some medical reason she hadn’t cared to discuss with her children. Sam taped one tight to her knee.
It took some effort to clean up the mess and she kept expecting her mother to tap on the door the whole time, but she didn’t. Sam turned off the bathroom light and limped past her brother’s bedroom door into her own room and shut the door. She hid her rolled-up jeans and the box of Kotex under the bed. She switched on her bedside lamp and sat on the edge of the bed with her left leg stretched out straight. Pootkin was curled up on the end of the bed. She raised her black head and blinked and went back to sleep.