Deadfall (10 page)

The wind kicked up in the trees, whispering to them. They all heard it and smiled at the same time.

“Better than the cooing of a woman,” Phil said.

Terry made a noise with his mouth. “I wouldn't go that far.”

“I don't know,” Hutch said. “Nature's fairly predictable, if you know it. And it won't leave you for another man.”

They nodded. Hutch knew they were waiting for him to pursue or drop the topic. They weren't embarrassed for him. They had known each other long enough, and to varying degrees had participated in each other's victories and defeats. Hutch hesitated, hearing words in the wind's whispers. He knew what it told him, so he said, “I want you guys to know . . . I'm glad to be here with you, and I'm blessed to call you friends.”

Terry
aww'd.

“Feeling's mutual, man,” David said.

“Of course,” agreed Phil.

Terry said, “Okay then . . .” From his jacket pocket he withdrew four cellophane-wrapped cigars. He stood to hand them out with the deference accorded to Medals of Honor.

Phil said, “Are these—”

“Cubans,” David finished, rolling his cigar between fingers and thumb.

“Bolivar Royal Corona,”Terry said with careful enunciation.

Hutch slipped it out of the wrapper, smelled it. “Wow. But
how
?”

“In La Ronge. Little tobacco shop next to the diner. Canada, man. They're legal here.”

“Never a bad time for a good cigar,” Phil said.

“Cutter?” Hutch asked, anxious to light up.

Terry made a face. “I knew I forgot something.”

David stood, reached into his pocket, and produced a folding knife. “We don't need no stinking cutter,” he said and neatly sliced off the tip of his cigar. He handed the knife to Terry, who did the same and passed it on. Together they leaned their faces to the fire and lit up.

Phil blew smoke into the sky, watching the wind catch it. “Yeah,” he said.

“I detect a hint of chocolate,” Hutch said authoritatively, tasting the smoke, eyeing the cigar in his hand.

“Leather,” Phil added.

“Coffee,” David said, licking his lips. “How in the world does all that add up to something that tastes so . . . can I say
exquisite
without sounding like a total pansy?”

The other men nodded in agreement.

“The magic of a good cigar,”Terry said.

They blew the smoke over the fire, watching the powdery silver plumes swirl through the coarse gray column of smoke from the spruce logs.

Hutch scanned the sky. “Terry,” he said, gesturing.

Terry stood. A ribbon of green and blue rippled overhead. It appeared to stretch for miles. It fluttered and disappeared just as another came into view.This one was orange, turning red, turning green; a rosecolored curtain rippled, faded. The men stepped around the pit to get the blaze out of their eyes. From the top of the slope that led to the river, they gazed in silent wonder.

The Aurora Borealis. Northern Lights. “
Revontulet
,” David said. “It means fox fires.That's what they call them in Finland. My grandfather used to tell me this old folk tale about an arctic fox running through the snow. Whenever his tail touched a mountain, sparks would fly up and illuminate the sky.
Revontulet.

”

He pulled at his cigar. Its tip flared red. He let the smoke drift out as he added, “Boys, does it get any better than this?”

At that moment, Hutch thought that it didn't. Out of the context of their lives, out of time, this was pretty good.

12

Dillon had finally stopped crying.
He had fallen asleep with his head on Laura's lap.

She sat cross-legged on the concrete floor in a storage room. Anything she could have used to escape or attack her captors had been removed. The metal shelves bolted to three walls around her now contained only boxes of envelopes and reams of paper that, judging by the quantity, the town of Fiddler Falls obviously felt were of vital importance. Most were blank sheets preprinted with holiday borders—Christmas, Easter, Halloween, one with trees and deer for the start of hunting season, and another with rolled diplomas and mortarboards for sixth grade and senior graduations. Roughly once a month, the town manager paid kids two cents a pop to deliver to every home in town notices of community events, printed on these festive flyers. Laura had never considered that somewhere thousands of handbills awaited printing and distribution. By her estimation, she was surrounded by a ten-year supply. A paper-jacketed ream of any design was hard enough and heavy enough to cause a severe headache to anyone clobbered with it. But a headache was insignificant compared to what her captives deserved, and it would not help her and Dillon escape that room.

Had there been a window or big air vent, as rooms like this always seemed to have in movies, she would stack the reams to reach it, but this room had neither. Nor did it possess a working light, through no fault of the architect's. When they had brought her and Dillon in, she had put up so much of a fight, kicking her legs and flailing her arms, that in order to throw her down and make his exit, her captor had lifted her high. She had broken the bulb with her head.Their only light came from the crack under the door. At first it had been the yellowwhite radiance of the sun through a window in the office beyond. Now it was the sterile whiteness of fluorescents. By it, she could make out the room's dimensions, roughly eight feet by twelve. She could see the room's absence of anything that would assist an escape.

And she could see the dried tracks of Dillon's tears on his face. She slid her fingers into his hair, over his scalp. She prayed that he was finding peace in sleep.

“Shhhh,” she soothed, believing her voice would reach his dreams. She brushed the hair off his forehead and smoothed an eyebrow with her finger.

His anguish had broken her heart even more than what she suspected had happened to Tom. She knew the feeling was only temporary, a coping mechanism; focusing on someone else's grief helped you avoid your own. She had never before seen Dillon—or for that matter, anyone else—weep as wretchedly or for as long as he had done.

She wondered if it had been an intuition that was more attuned or a logic that was more developed than she had previously given him credit for that had given him the conviction that his father had been murdered.True, the men who had seized them from home that morning had displayed all the characteristics of bad men as Dillon would have learned from television shows and his own parents' stern warnings. True, when Dillon and Laura had seen Tom in the street, the girl had told the man named Declan “not in front of them.” And true, after they had been dragged inside and thrown into this room, a loud explosion had shaken the floor.

But could a nine-year-old boy put all that together to become absolutely convinced of his father's death?

Despite Laura's attempts to console him, he had cried and wailed ceaselessly.

She had been reminded of too many funerals for children she had seen on the news. A parent—either the mother or the father, but for some reason never both—hysterical in grief, lamenting to God, pleading to the child, tearing at his hair and clothes. Without question, she would have acted similarly had she lost Dillon, and probably had she witnessed Tom's death. But not having witnessed it, she held on to a thread of hope as thin and fragile as a spider's silk.

Dillon's instant and certain grief made her believe that a bond between father and son had been violently broken, and that unlike the mere emotional bonds of psychiatric journals or the metaphoric bonds of poets, this one had been somehow as tangible as the umbilical cord that had once connected mother and child. The boy had cried and moaned until she was sure no more tears could possibly come, but they did. He had fallen into fits of ragged, desperate breathing. She had thought he would hyperventilate and pass out.

The room's darkness seemed to have added to his panic, but Laura had thought it was appropriate, a representation of the evil that had invaded the town and the bleakness of losing Tom.

Laura would have liked to check her watch by the light slipping under the door. But with Dillon finally in the slumber of exhaustion, she dared not move. When she last checked, it had been 4:12 p.m., six hours since they had last seen Tom. Six hours in the storage room. She guessed it was now somewhere around seven o'clock, but it could be much earlier or much later.Time flowed differently in moments of terror and grief.Watching her son sleep, the rise and fall of his chest, the barely discernible movements of his eyes under his lids, she tried to imagine his life without Tom. She couldn't. He had always been as much a friend as a father.Teaching Dillon how to fish, camp, work on the car, build a birdhouse,Tom had been as entertained as Dillon had been. She touched her son's chin and ran her finger along his jaw. She brushed the hair back from his temple.

“I'll try to fill his shoes,” she whispered. “I'll try to be what he would have been for you.”

A tear landed on his forehead. His eyes fluttered; then he was back in his dreams.

She pulled in a deep breath and raised her head. She wiped the unfallen tears from her eyes. She had not realized she was so close to giving in to the grief. She looked into the gloom and thought about being strong. Her fingers again pushed into Dillon's hair and lifted. She felt the fine strands brushing her palm.

“I'll still be me . . . and I'll be him too. But right now I have to get you out of here. I have to make you safe.That's what he would have—” Shadows moved under the door. The lock rattled, and blinding light burst in. She blinked against it as hazy silhouettes filled the doorway.

Someone walked around her and stood at the back wall, in the dark. Two others entered. They remained in the light. One was the older teenaged boy. The other was Declan. He looked down at her. Half his face was awash in bright light, the other in shadow. His cool indifference did not so much radiate from him as it clung to him like a cowled robe. He squatted to be level with her, casually draping his arms across his legs.

“Do we have a problem?” he asked.

She glared. A dozen responses, from the shrill to the sarcastic, flashed through her mind.

Dillon stirred, groaning quietly. He adjusted his head on her lap.

Finally she said, “Where's my husband?”

He closed his eyes, appearing exasperated. “So we do have a problem.”

“Only if I can't see my husband. Where is Tom?”

“Sweetheart, I'm afraid you're going to have to join Matchmaker. com. If you have that up here in Hicksville.”

Every muscle in Laura's body tensed; she wanted to scream, to cry, to fight, to do so many things.This man had provided confirmation of Dillon's conviction and her fears. Keeping them all in her head would drive her crazy, so she pushed them all aside, except one: fight. She felt as though she could fly at him—just fly without benefit of using her legs to spring—and crush him by the sheer power of her hatred. But she sat, her sleeping son's head in her lap, unable to do anything.

The right side of Declan's mouth edged up, but his eyes remained black and cold, reflecting, she was certain, the state of his soul.

“Now here's the problem,” he said. “I killed your husband, nice guy that he was.You're the wife of a cop.” He caught himself. “Excuse me, you're the wife of a
dead
cop. Probably pretty tough yourself. Know a thing or two about weapons. And I'm hearing from these good folks”—he pointed a thumb out the door toward the large community room beyond the offices, where he was holding many of her friends and neighbors against their wills—“that you're a feisty one.” His smile grew broader. “Now, don't get me wrong, I like my ladies feisty. But there's a time and a place for everything, and this ain't it for any heroics from you.”

She stared and conjured the image of breaking his arms and legs. She didn't know how she'd do it. She surprised herself even thinking it, but it had come to her, the way an appetite suddenly does when you smell fresh-baked cookies.

“Nothing personal against your hubby. Like I said, he seemed like a nice guy. But I needed to squash any thoughts of resistance in these folks before they thought them. I explained it all to Tom, and he was down with it.” He winked. “We don't need anyone trying to fill his shoes.”

The man behind her laughed at that.The teen snorted, suppressing the laughter inside. Declan glanced over her head and then at the teen.

“Inside joke,” he explained. “I hope you can appreciate the difficult situation I'm in. How much show of force does one need to control a town of two hundred and forty-two people?”

The man behind her corrected him, “Two hundred forty.” He snickered.

“Oh yeah.Two-forty. How much power to break their fighting spirit but not drive them to rebellion? See, there's a fine line between scaring people and making them angry. You're more angry than scared, and that can mean trouble. So what do I do to change the equation? I can kill you next . . . or your son.”

She put her hand over Dillon's chest.

Declan shook his head dismissively. “People tend to get weird when whole families are murdered, and I don't want anyone getting weird . . . yet. Besides, as a lifelong resident of this fine town and wife of the sheriff, you probably know things I might find useful. So I'd rather keep you around.” He paused. “I could take your son, hold him somewhere. Keep you in line. But that could get messy and more work than I want to put into this.We might forget to feed him . . . and we'd be right back at your breaking point between scared and angry.”

He stood and nodded at the man standing in the shadows. She felt hands on her arms, yanking her up. Before Dillon's head hit the ground, the teen stepped forward and grabbed him with both hands by the shirt. He pulled the boy to his feet.