Authors: Chuck Dixon
Lee adjusted the focus to draw the figure closer. She lifted her eyes over the top of the camera then lowered them, seeking the moving object with her naked eye. She found the tiny shape and turned the dial on the lens to focus in on it.
The image of a girl leapt into view. A young girl, face pinched and white with hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was struggling over a drift half her height, stabbing with her poles, lifting her legs high. She glided down the lee of the slope back to the flat surface of the ice. There she established her stride again and broke out across the frozen lake at a steady pace.
Unusual to see someone out in weather as wretched as this.
Still more unusual that the girl was dressed in a tartan plaid flannel robe over what appeared to be pajamas.
23
Levon Cade lay wedged on his back and blind in the cabinetry beneath the kitchen sink. He shut his eyes. He counted off to thirty before reopening them. Enough light came in off the French doors out to the deck to allow him to see his way around. He walked to the doors and looked out. Everything was dark around the lake. The pole lamps at the end of docks that were always on at night were out. The houses were invisible along the shoreline.
The sky beyond the trees was always dark because the nearest town of any size was away over the horizon hundreds of miles away. No light pollution in this part of Maine. Vacationland, the license plates proclaimed it. “Back of beyond” to the folks down in Bangor. No way to know how far this outage reached. Local or county wide.
He picked up the Hofferts’ kitchen phone. Dead.
Nate Fenton was working on that water heater at the bungalow. It was electrical. The treacherous mix of voltage and water. Nate could be in trouble. At the very least he’d need help getting the juice back on line.
The new LED flashlight in his toolbox threw a beam of cold light that lanced through the gloom. Levon pulled on his coat and went out to the Ram. It started but took some goosing to break out of the frozen slush gripping the treads beneath the new snow. The truck leapt back from the ruts with a jerk. Levon pressed the pedal down steady and rose up to ride atop the snow, tires hissing.
An Alabama boy, he didn’t have that much experience driving in deep snow. Sand was another matter. He had plenty of practice steering over sand. Same principle. Steady pace. Steer into skids. He pulled around the loop before the Hoffert house and down onto Mohawk.
Nate’s snow machine wasn’t in the driveway of the bungalow when Levon pulled up. He sat in the warm cab of the Ram, wipers snicking back and forth. The nose of his truck was aimed at the driveway. Light from the big rack of lamps lit the drive and house front like a movie set. The snow at the foot of the drive was undisturbed. The tracks of Nate’s arrival had been filled in by the snowfall of the past hour. Leaving the truck running but cutting the lights, Levon climbed out and walked toward the garage.
There were fresh tracks from where he’d last seen the snow machine and sled parked to the now closed garage door. The impressions were new, the pattern left by the treads and skis of the machine clearly defined. The house was dark. No light from inside. The garage doors had no windows to allow him to look inside. Levon tried the door handle at the foot of the fold-up. It was locked down from inside. Someone had pulled Nate’s machine into the garage.
He crossed the driveway for the front door of the bungalow.
A droning hum rose from the roadway. A snow machine left the road to climb past the Ram, the skis leapt above the snow as the back treads dug in hard. Against the glow of blue exhaust a figure clad in black hunched over the handlebars. The machine crashed down level; headlamps speared Levon, throwing his shadow high up the face of the bungalow. He moved out of the beam in a rolling leap. The snow rose in a neat row of geysers behind him. A string of sharp explosions rebounded off the surrounding trees. The muzzle flash of the gun in the machine rider’s fist bloomed with crazed light that turned the world into a flickering monochrome.
Levon tumbled down the slope from the house, letting himself fall over a retaining wall away from the gunfire. He was in the dark now, back to the set-stone wall. A beam of light flashed though dark branches above him. The machine growled and rumbled as the beam swept past. He pushed himself off the wall and into the shadows between the pines before the light could return. The machine returned down to the roadway, purring along slow. The rider had a hand-held search lamp out now, playing it over the trees of the slope as he ground along at a crawl.
Levon stayed low, keeping tree boles between himself and the man on the machine. A big man in a black snow suit with gray trim. He watched the man pull back the hood of his suit, exposing a head of severely cropped blond hair. The man stopped the machine and sat straddling it, playing the searchlight over the forested slope around the bungalow. A gleaming back shape lay across his knees; the stubby silhouette of a cut-down rifle of some kind.
It had been automatic fire that chased Levon out of the lamp’s beam. Controlled three-round bursts. Someone who knew how to use the weapon. No hesitation. Someone who had killed before. Someone who expected to kill tonight. The man pulled a radio from the pocket of his suit and raised it to his ear and spoke. Levon couldn’t hear the words over the rumble of the snow machine even though the man was shouting to be heard.
The radio was a little larger than a cellphone with a stunted antenna. Limited range. Whoever was on the other end was within a five mile range. The other speaker was on the lake somewhere. Levon could hear the metallic squawk of the person on the other end. A male voice.
The snow machine rider was gesturing with the hand that held the lamp, agitated. The spear of light rose and fell up into the high branches. An argument.
Levon had a handgun locked in the glove compartment of the Ram now thirty yards down the road to his left at the foot of the drive up on the high side of that retaining wall. A Colt revolver with six shots.
To his right, a good fifty feet away, the man stood astride the snow machine on the mantle of loose powder atop the ice slick surface. He spoke into the radio as he trained the light back and forth through the trees.
Merry was across the lake. A mile plus diagonal run to where the lake narrowed at the base of the neck of the gourd.
Levon rushed out of the trees and down to the road surface behind the snow machine, staying to the rider’s blindside. He launched himself away, sliding between tree boles, slipping under branches bent low beneath burdens of wet snow. The rider’s back was to him, involved in heated conversation with someone on the other end. As he hit the level of the road Levon broke into an open run, crossing the span in three long strides, knees high to clear the loose layer of freshly fallen snow.
Trees lined the drive that led down to the Christopher place. Big spruces formed a three-story double hedge at their base. He stayed among these, hugging the shadows and listening to the purr of the machine on the road above growing fainter. The house lay ahead to his right, built into the slope of the hill. It appeared from the road to be a modest Cape Cod, roof dotted with sleepy dormers now covered with brows of white. The house opened up lakeside to become a three-story structure with a deck a half acre in size leading down to a pool bookended by a four-bedroom guest house on one side and a boathouse with a sharply peaked rooftop. Within was the forty-foot pleasure boat that was Tad Christopher’s pride and joy. It was covered in thick plastic now, heat shrunk down on the superstructure like a second skin.
The lake lay open, flat and leaden gray beyond a flight of wooden steps that led down to a hundred-foot wooden dock that ended at a gazebo. Levon loped down the gully of shadows between the structures for the top of the steps. Up on the roadway the snow machine let out a high growl as the engine revved. The headlamp played over the peak of the boathouse roof for an instant. The rider was turning back the way he’d come.
Levon reached the head of the steps while the engine above and behind him howled. The rider saw the fresh trail he’d left across the road. The steps below him were buried under snowfall making the wooden staircase look more like a slide. Without breaking stride Levon threw himself feet first down the flight, sliding toward the bottom, keeping his knees bent and feet up and clear of the stout wooden side rails going swiftly past his peripherals. His hands were palms down at his sides on the snow to control his speed and attitude. His gloves were back on the seat of the Ram. The cold stabbed at his hands as they skidded over the surface of the icy ramp.
The grind and whine of the snow machine grew louder above him. He tumbled clear of the foot the steps, letting his momentum carry him across a boardwalk. He slid across the slick surface to drop off the edge of the deck. He dropped six feet onto the hard surface of the lake itself. Snow drifted up against the pilings cushioned his fall. He paused in the lee of the walk and listened.
The snow machine was behind the house, clattering noisily over the big deck. He looked over the edge of the walk. Snow streamed down between the boards of the decking under the heavy passage of the machine and rider. The light of its headlamp illuminated the railings and hazed the falling snow before turning away. The steps showed no sign of his slide down them except for a shallow furrow. His back trail was undetectable. The rider would think he was still up on the upper level, perhaps hiding in one of the outbuildings.
Levon could wait until the rider got tired and left. Or until the rider radioed for more help. No idea how many there were. Or who they were. No point in thinking about that.
The light above turned away. The sound of the engine diminished as the rider trundled off the decking toward the back of the house.
Levon moved at a trot out onto the open expanse of ice and into the horizonless dark.
24
She moved to the children, scattering plates and cups and the articles of the board game in her rush to reach Giselle and Carl who stared at the invaders in mute confusion. A cry rose up from within her as she did so. A scream of fear or roar of rage. It came from someplace primal. In an instant, without preamble or prescience, she knew these men meant them all harm.
Hands were on her, jerking her arms from where they reached to gather her children to her. Strong hands lifted her from her feet. A hand clamped over her mouth, filling her nose with a plastic smell. She kicked. She writhed. An arm pressed hard against her throat, cutting off sound.
Giselle and Carl were hauled to their feet by a man in a slick black snow suit. A fist wound tight in Giselle’s hair, pulling her head back. A hand clutched Carl’s upper arm, the boy wincing with the pain the grip brought. The camp lantern was sent swinging by the brief struggle. The glowing pendulum illuminated the face of the man holding the Fenton children. The light etched the shadows deep on his face before swinging away to return to darkness.
Even in the dark the glow of one milky eye remained.
The man spoke to the other men. A foreign language spoken in a growling murmur. The tone of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Danni was released. She fell to the floor, sucking air into her bruised throat. Through the roar of blood in her ears she heard the other men moving through the house. Banging doors. Boots on hard wood. Hard voices.
Moira.
Where was Mitch’s little girl?
She raised her head. The man holding her children was watching her. One half of his face was a mask; the dead eye and waxy skin were frozen in some kind of drooping parody of the opposite plane of his visage. She tried to speak. Her mind sought words, any words that might make this man release her boy and girl. The children breathed in gasps, shoulders rising and falling, eyes wide. Danni lowered her head, dropped her eyes from his gaze.
The other two men returned. A brief exchange. Questions from the man with the dead eye. Answers from the other men.
The man with the dead eye spoke into a radio. A voice came back atop an ambient hiss. A woman’s voice speaking the same language as the men. The man spoke a final command and gestured to the other two with the radio.
Danni was lifted to her feet. She and the children were led out through the front door of the cabin, along the porch and out onto the pathway to the drive. The swift bite of cold was a shock to her face. Something prodded her in the back. She stumbled forward, turning. One of the men held a shotgun. She hadn’t noticed the guns before. She realized now that they were all armed. They were all dressed in identical black snow suits. All wore latex gloves.
None of them were masked.
The man with the dead eye brushed past her, lighting the way with a flashlight. He walked off the drive down the slope to the roadway, following the narrow beam.
Her slippered feet were soon soaked, wool socks sodden with ice cold snow melt. Hot tears came to her eyes. She raised her head and swept her eyes across the dark line of trees the other side of the driveway.
“No. No. No.”
The man who prodded her with the shotgun pursed his lips and shook his head from side to side. A young man with a dark olive complexion and black eyes. He was almost pretty, with feminine features, but for a puckered scar drawn down from the corner of his mouth and across his chin.
Danni forced herself to study his eyes. She gestured to her children who came into her arms. Giselle and Carl leaned against her, hands gripping the cloth of her robe. She turned them and, arms about both, walked before the gunmen toward the roadway after the man with the dead eye, his flashlight casting a tunnel of light before them.