Winter Prey (38 page)

We got gunfire! We got gunfire from Janes’ woodlot! Holy shit, somebody’s shooting—somebody’s shooting.

CHAPTER
26

Weather was the key, the Iceman had decided after Davenport and Climpt left, but he couldn’t go running off yet. Had to wait for the cops to clear.

He opened the green Army footlocker, took out the top tray, full of cleaning equipment, ammunition, and spare magazines, and looked into the bottom.

Four pistols lay there, two revolvers, two automatics. After a moment’s thought he selected the Browning Hi Power 9mm automatic and a double-action Colt Python in .357 Magnum.

The shells were cool but silky, like good machinery can be. He loaded both pistols with hollow points, stuffed thirteen more 9mm rounds into a spare magazine for the automatic, and added a speedloader with six more rounds for the .357.

Then he watched television, the guns in his lap, like steel puppies. He sat in his chair and stared at the game shows, letting the pressure build, working it out. He couldn’t chase her down, he couldn’t get at her in the house. Wasn’t even sure she was still at the house. He’d have to go back to the hospital again.

Weather usually left the hospital at the end of the first shift. She’d stay to brief the new shift on her patients. The fire volunteers would be arriving a few minutes after five. If he were going to pull this off, he’d have to be back by then.

A two-hour window.

He looked down into his lap at the guns. If he put one in his mouth, he’d never feel a thing. All the complications would be history, the pressure.

And all the pleasure. He pushed the thought away. Let himself feel the anger: they’d ganged up on him. Bullied him. They were twenty-to-one, thirty-to-one.

The adrenaline started. He could feel the tension rise in his chest. He’d thought it was over. Now there was this thing. The anger made him squirm, pushed him into a fantasy:
Standing in the snow, gun in each hand, shooting at enemy shadows, the muzzle flashes like rays coming from his palms.

His watch brought him back. The minute hand ticked, a tiny movement in the real world, catching his eye with the time.

Two-fourteen. He’d have to get moving. He heaved himself out of his chair, let the television ramble on in the empty room.

Weather would walk out to the parking lot. Through the swirling snow. With a bodyguard. On any other day, a rifle would be the thing. With the snow, a scope would be useless: it’d be like looking into a bedsheet.

He’d just have to get close, to make sure, this time. Nothing fancy. Just a quick hit and gone.

The ride to the hospital was wild. He could feel himself moving like a blue light, a blue force, through the vortex of the storm, the snow pounding the Lexan faceplate, the sled throbbing beneath him, bucking over bumps, twisting, alive. At times he could barely see; other times, in protected areas or where he was forced to slow down, the field of vision opened out. He passed a four-by-four, looked up at
the driver. A stranger. Didn’t look at him, on his sled, ten feet away. Blind?

He pushed on, following the rats’ maze of trails that paralleled the highway, along the edge of town. Past another four-by-four. Another stranger who didn’t look at him.

A hell of a storm for so many strangers to be out on the road, not looking at snowmobiles . . .

Not looking at snowmobiles.

Why didn’t they look at him? He stopped at the entrance to the hospital parking lot, thought about it. He could see Weather’s Jeep. Several other cars close by; he could put the sled around the corner of the building, slip out into the parking lot.

Why didn’t they look at him? It wasn’t like he was invisible. If you’re riding in a truck and a sled goes tearing past, you look at it.

The Iceman turned off the approach to the hospital, cruised on past. Something to think about. Kept going, two hundred, three hundred yards. Janes’ woodlot. He’d seen Dick Janes in here all fall, cutting oak. Not for this year, but for next.

The Iceman pulled off the trail, ran the sled up a short slope, sinking deep in the snow. He clambered off, moved fifteen feet, huddled next to a pile of cut branches.

Coyotes did this. He knew that from hunting them. He’d once seen a coyote moving slow, apparently unwary, some three or four hundred yards out. He’d followed its fresh tracks through the tangle of an alder swamp, then up a slope, then back around . . . and found himself looking down at his own tracks across the swamp and a cavity in the snow where the mutt had laid down, resting, while he fought the alders. Checking the back trail.

Behind the pile of cuttings, he was comfortable enough, hunkering down in the snow. He was out of the wind, and the temperature had begun climbing with the approach of the storm.

He waited two minutes and wondered why. Then another minute. He was about to stand up, go back to the sled, when
he heard motors on the trail. He squatted again, watched. Two sleds went by, slowly. Much too slowly. They weren’t getting anywhere if they were travelers, weren’t having any fun if they were joyriders. And there was nothing down this trail but fifteen or twenty miles of trees until they hit the next town, a crossroads.

Not right.

The Iceman waited, watching.

Saw them come back. Heard them first, took the .357 from his pocket.

He could see them clearly enough, peering through the branches of the trim pile, but he probably was invisible, down in the snow, above them. They stopped.

They stopped. They knew. They knew who he was, what he was doing.

The lifelong anger surged. The Iceman didn’t think. The Iceman acted, and nothing could stand against him.

The Iceman half-stood, caught the first man’s chest over the blade of the .357.

Didn’t hear the shot. Heard the music of a fine machine, felt the gun bump.

The first man toppled off his sled, the second man, black-Lexan-masked, turning. All of this in slow motion, the second man turning, the gun barrel popping up with the first shot, dropping back into the slot, the second man’s body jumped, but he wavered, not falling, a hand coming up, fingers spread, to ward off the .357 JHPs; a third shot went through his hand, knocked him backwards off the sled. And the gun kept on, shots filing out, still no noise, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth . . .

And in the soft snow, the bumping stopped and the Iceman heard the hammer falling on empty shells, three times, four, the cylinder turning.

Click, click, click, click.

CHAPTER
27

He’s moving, he’s moving, he’s moving fast, what happened what happened?

The radio call bounced around the tile corridor, Carr echoing it, shouting,
What happened, what happened
—and knowing what had happened. Weather sprinted toward the emergency room, Lucas two steps behind, calling into the radio,
Stay with him stay with him, we might have some people down.

The ambulance driver was talking to a nurse. Weather ran through the emergency room, screamed at him: “Go, go, go, I’ll be there, get started.”

“Where . . . ?” The driver stood up, mouth hanging.

Lucas, not knowing where the ambulance was, shouted, “Go,” and the driver went, across the room, through double hardwood doors into a garage. The ambulance faced out, and the driver hit a palm-sized button and the outside door started up. He went left and Lucas right, climbed inside. The back doors opened, and a white-suited attendant scrambled aboard, carrying his parka, then Weather with her bag and Climpt with his shotgun.

“Where?” the driver shouted over his shoulder, already on the gas.

“Right down the frontage road, Janes’ woodlot, right down the road.”

“What happened?”

“Guys might be shot—deputies.” And she chanted, staring at Lucas: “Oh, Jesus, Oh, Jesus God . . .”

The ambulance fishtailed out of the parking garage, headed across the parking lot to the hospital road. A deputy was running down the road ahead of them, hatless, gloveless, hair flying, a chrome revolver held almost in front of his face. Henry Lacey, running as hard as he could. They passed him, looking to the right, in the ditch and up the far bank, snow pelting the windshield, the wipers struggling against it.

“There,” Lucas said. The snowmobiles sat together, side-by-side, what looked like logs beside them.

“Stay here,” Lucas shouted back at Weather.

“What?”

“He might still be up there.”

The ambulance slid to a full stop and Lucas bolted through the door, pistol in front of him, scanning the edge of the treeline for movement. The body armor pressed against him and he waited for the impact, waited, looking, Climpt out to his right, the muzzle of the shotgun probing the brush.

Nothing. Lucas wallowed across the ditch, Climpt covering. The deputies looked like the victims of some obscure third-world execution, rendered black-and-white by the snow and their snowmobile suits, like a grainy newsphoto. Their bodies were upside down, uncomfortable, untidy, torn, unmoving. Rusty’s face mask was starred with a bullet hole. Lucas lifted the mask, carefully; the slug had gone through the deputy’s left eye. He was dead. Dusty was crumbled beside him, facedown, helmet gone, the back of his head looking as though he’d been hit by an ax. Then Lucas saw the pucker in the back of his snowmobile suit, another hit, and then a third, lower, on the spine. He looked at Rusty: more hits in the chest, hard to see in the black nylon. Dusty’s rifle was muzzledown in the snow. He’d cleared the scabbard, no more.

Climpt came up, weapon still on the timber. “Gone,” he said. He meant the deputies.

“Yeah.” Lucas lumbered into the woods, saw the ragged trail of a third machine, fading into the falling snow. He couldn’t hear anything but the people behind him. No snowmobile sound. Nothing.

He turned back, and Weather was there. She dropped her bag. “Dead,” she said. She spread her arms, looking at him. “They were children.”

The ambulance driver and the attendant struggled through the snow with an aluminum basket-stretcher, saw the bodies, dropped the basket in the snow, stood with their hands in their pockets. Henry Lacey ran up, still holding the gun in front of his face.

“No, no, no,” he said. And he kept saying it, holding his head with one hand, as though he’d been wounded himself: “No, no . . .”

Carr pulled up in his Suburban, jumped out. Carr looked at them, his chief deputy wandering in circles chanting, “No, no,” both hands to his head now, as though to keep it from exploding.

“Where is he?” Carr shouted.

“He’s gone. The feds better have him, because it’d be hell trying to follow him,” Lucas shouted back.

The feds called:
We still got him, he’s way off-road and moving fast, what’s going on?

“We got two down and dead,” Lucas called back. “We’re heading back to the hospital, gearing up. You track him, we’ll be with you in ten minutes.”

Lucas and Climpt took Carr’s Suburban, churned back to the hospital. Lucas stripped off the body armor, got into his parka and insulated pants.

“Rusty’s truck is around back, right? With the trailer?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll take the sleds,” Lucas said. “Right now we need a decent map.”

They found one in the ambulance dispatch room, a large-scale township map of Ojibway County. The feds were
using tract maps from the assessor’s office, even better. Lucas got on the radio:

“Still got him?” he asked.

Yeah. We got him. You better get out here, though, we can’t see him and we got nothing but sidearms.

Helper was already eight miles away, heading south.

“He could pick a farmhouse, go in shooting, take a truck,” Climpt said. “Nobody would know until somebody checked the house.”

Lucas shook his head. “He’s gone too far. He knows where he’s going. I think he’ll stay with the sled until he gets there.”

“The firehouse is off in that direction.”

“Better get somebody down there,” Lucas said. “But I can’t believe he’d go there.” He touched the map with his finger, reading the web of roads. “In fact, if he was going there, he should have turned already. On the sled, if he knows the trails, he probably figures he’s safe, at least for the time being.”

“So let’s go.”

They stripped the map from the wall, hurried around back to Rusty’s truck. The keys were gone, probably with the body. Lucas ran back through the hospital, past the gathering groups of nurses, ran outside and got the Suburban. Climpt pulled the trailer off Rusty’s truck, and when Lucas got back, hitched the trailer to the Suburban.

Ten deputies were at the shooting site now. The bodies still exposed, only one person looking at them; cars stopped on the highway, drivers’ white faces peering through the side windows. Carr was angry, shouting into the radio, and Weather stood like a scarecrow looking down at the bodies.

Lucas and Climpt crossed the well-trampled ditch, climbed on the sleds, started them.

“Kill him,” Carr said.

Weather caught Lucas by the arm as they loaded the snowmobiles onto the trailer. “Can I go?”

“No.”

“I want to ride.”

“No. You go back to the hospital.”

“I want to go,” she insisted.

“No, and that’s it,” Lucas said, pushing her away.

Climpt had traded his shotgun for an M-16, said, “I’ll drive,” and hustled around to the cab. Lucas climbed in the passenger side; when they pulled away, he saw Weather recrossing the ditch to the sheriff.

“Buckle up and hold on,” Climpt said. “I’m gonna hurry.”

They took County Road AA south from the highway, a road of tight right-angle turns and a slippery, three-segment, two-lane bridge over the Menomin Flowage. Lucas would have taken the truck into a ditch a half-dozen times, but Climpt apparently knew the road foot-by-foot, knew when to slow down, when the turns were coming. But the snow was beating into the windshield, and the deputy had to wrestle the tailwagging truck through the tighter spots, one foot on the brake, the other on the gas, all four wheels grinding into the shoulders.

Lucas stayed on the handset with the feds.

He’s either on the Menomin Branch East or the Morristown trail, still going south.

“We’re coming up on you, we’re on AA about to cross H,” Lucas said.

Okay, we’re about four miles further on. Jesus, we can’t see shit.

Carr:
We’re loading up, heading your way. If you get him, pin him down and we’ll come in and finish it.

Then the feds:
Hey, he’s stopped. He’s definitely stopped, he’s up ahead, must be along County Y, two miles east of AA. We’re about four or five minutes out.

Lucas:
Find a good place to stop and wait. We’re all coming in. We don’t know what kind of weapons he’s carrying.

“There’s not much down that road,” Climpt said, thinking about it. His hands were tight, white on the steering
wheel, holding on, his head pressed forward, searing the snowscape. “Not around there. I’m trying to think. Mostly timber.”

Carr came up:
Weather thinks he’s at the Harris place. Duane was supposedly seeing Rosie Harris. That’s a mile or so off AA on Y. Should be on the tract maps.

“Goddammit,” said Lucas. “Weather’s riding with Carr.”

Climpt grunted. “Could of told you she wouldn’t stay put.”

“Gonna get her ass shot,” Lucas said.

“Eight dead that we know of,” Climpt said, his voice oddly soft. A red stop sign and a building loomed out of the snow, and Climpt jumped on the brake, slowing, then went on through. “Can’t find Russ Harper or the Schoeneckers, and I wouldn’t make any bets on them being alive, either. Goddamn, I thought it only happened in New York and Los Angeles and places like that.”

“Happens all over,” Lucas said as they went through the stop sign.

“But you don’t believe that, living up here,” Climpt said. He glanced out the window. A roadhouse showed a Coors sign in the window. Three people, unisex in their parkas, laughing, cross-country skis on their shoulders, walked toward the door. “You just don’t believe it can happen.”

The feds had stopped at a farmhouse a half-mile from where their ranging equipment said the radio beacon was. Visibility was twenty feet and was falling. In little more than an hour it would be dark. Lucas and Climpt pulled in behind the federal truck, climbed down, and went to the house. Tolsen met them at the door. “I’m gonna go down and watch the end of the drive, make sure he doesn’t tear out of there in a car.”

“Okay. Don’t go in.”

Tolsen nodded. “I’ll wait for the troops,” he said grimly. “Those two boys are gone?”

Lucas nodded, grimacing. “Yes.”

“Shit.”

A farm couple sat in the kitchen with a grown son, three pale people in flannel while Lansley talked on the telephone. He hung up as Lucas and Climpt came in, said, “We’ve got a hostage negotiator standing by on the phone from Washington. He can call in if we need him. If there’s a hostage deal going down.” He looked worn.