Winter Prey (6 page)

The Iceman sliced across the lake. A half-dozen sleds were gathered on the ice near the LaCourt house, watching the cops work. Two more were cruising down the lakeshore, heading for the house. If the temperature had been warmer, a few degrees either side of zero, there’d have been a hundred snowmobiles on the lake, and more coming in.

Halfway across, he left the trail, carved a new cut in the soft snow and stopped. The LaCourt house was a half mile away, but everything around it was bathed in brilliant light. Through a pair of pocket binoculars he could see Weather’s Jeep, still parked in the drive.

He grunted, put the glasses in a side pocket where they’d stay cold, gingerly climbed off the sled and tested the snow. He sank in a foot before the harder crust supported his weight. Good. He trampled out a hole and settled into it, in the lee of the sled. Even a five-mile-an-hour wind was a killer on a night like this.

From his hole he could hear the beating of a generator and the occasional shouts of men working, spreading what appeared to be a canvas tent over the house. Their distant voices were like pieces of audible confetti, sharp isolated calls and shouts in the night. Then his focus shifted, and for the first time, he heard the other voices. They’d been there, all along, like a Greek chorus. He turned, slowly, until he
was facing the darkness back along the creek. The sound was unearthly, the sound of starvation. Not a scream, like a cat, but almost like the girl, when he’d cut her, a high, quavering, wailing note.

Coyotes.

Singing together, blood songs after the storm. He shivered, not from the cold.

But the cold had nearly gotten to him twenty minutes later when he saw the small figure walking alone toward the red Jeep. Yes. Weather.

When she climbed inside her truck, he brushed the snow off his suit, threw a leg over the sled and cranked it up. He watched as she turned on the headlights, backed out of her parking space. She had further to go than he did, so he sat and watched until he was sure she was turning left, heading out. She might still stop at the fire station, but there wasn’t much going on there except equipment maintenance.

He turned back toward the trail, followed it for a quarter mile, then moved to his right again, into new snow. Stackpole’s Resort was over there, closed for the season, but marked with a yard-light. He could get off the lake on the resort’s beach, follow the driveway up to the highway, and wait for her there.

He’d had an image of the ambush in his mind. She’d be driving slowly on the snowpacked highway, and he’d come alongside the Jeep with the sled. From six or ten feet away, he could hardly miss: the .44 Magnum would punch through the window like it was toilet paper. She’d go straight off the road, and he’d pull up beside her, empty the pistol into her. Even if somebody saw him, the sled was the perfect escape vehicle, out here in the deep snow. Nothing could follow him, not unless it had skis on the front end. Out here, the sled was virtually anonymous.

The snow-covered beach came up fast, and he braked, felt the machine buck up, took it slowly across the resort’s
lakeside lawn and through the drifts between two log cabins. The driveway had been plowed after the last storm, but not yet after this one, and he eased over the throw-piles down into it. He stopped just off the highway, where a blue fir windbreak would hide the sled. He felt like a motorcycle cop waiting behind a billboard.

Waiting. Where was she?

There was a movement to his left, at the corner of his eye, sudden but furtive, and his head snapped around. Nothing.
But there had been something
 . . . There. A dog, a small German shepherd, caught in the thin illumination of the yard-light. No. Not a shepherd, but a coyote. Looking at him from the brush. Then another. There was a snap, and a growl. They never did this, never. Coyotes were invisible.

He pulled down the zip on his suit, took the .44 out of the inside pocket, looked nervously into the brush. They were gone, he thought. Somewhere.

Headlights turned the corner down at the lake road. Had to be Weather. He shifted the pistol to his other hand, his brake hand. And, for the first time, tried to figure out the details of the attack. With one hand on the accelerator and the other on the brake . . . . He was one hand short. Nothing to shoot with. He’d have to improvise. He’d have to use his brake hand. But . . .

He put the gun in his outside leg pocket as the headlights closed on him. The Jeep flashed by and he registered a quick flickering image of Weather in the window, parka hood down, hat off.

He gunned the sled, started after her, rolling down the shallow ditch on the left side of the road. The Jeep gained on him, gained some more. Its tires threw up a cloud of ice and salt pellets, which popped off his suit and helmet like BBs.

She was traveling faster than he’d expected. Other snowmobiles had been down the ditch, so there was the semblance of a trail, obscured by the day’s snow; still, it wasn’t an official trail. He hit a heavy hummock of swamp grass and suddenly found himself up in the air, holding on.

The flight might have been exhilarating on another day,
when he could see, but this time he almost lost it. He landed with a jarring impact and the sled bucked under him, swaying. He fought it, got it straight. He was fifty yards behind her. He rolled the accelerator grip forward, picking up speed, rattling over broken snow, the tops of small bushes, invisible bumps . . . his teeth chattered with the rough ride.

A snowplow had been down the highway earlier in the evening, and the irregular waves of plowed snow flashed by on his right. He moved further left, away from the plowed stuff: it’d be hard and irregular, it’d throw him for sure. Weather’s taillights were right
there.
He inched closer. He was moving so fast that he would not be able to brake inside his headlight’s reach: if there was a tree down across the ditch, he’d hit it.

He’d just thought of that when he saw the hump coming; he knew what it was as soon as he picked it up, a bale of hay pegged to the bottom of the ditch to slow spring erosion. The deep snow made it into a perfect snowmobile jump, but he didn’t want to jump. But he had no time to go around it. He had no time to do anything but brace himself, and he was in the air again.

He came down like a bomb, hard, bounced, the sled skidding through the softer snow up the left bank. He wrestled it to the right, lost it, climbed the right bank toward the plowed snow, wrestled it left, carved a long curve back to the bottom.

Got it.

The Iceman was shaken, thought for an instant about giving it up; but she was right
there,
so close. He gritted his teeth and pushed harder, closing. Thirty yards. Twenty . . .

Weather glanced in her side mirror, saw the sled’s headlight. He was coming fast. Too fast. Idiot. She smiled, remembering last year’s countywide outrage. Intersections of snowmobile trails and ordinary roads were marked with diamond-shaped signs painted with the silhouette of a snowmobile. Like deer-crossing signs, but wordless. The year
before, someone had used black spray paint to stencil
IDIOT CROSSING
on half the snowmobile signs in Ojibway County. Had done the job neatly, with a stencil, a few signs every night for a week. The paper had been full of it.

Davenport.

An image of his face, shoulders, and hands popped into her mind. He was beat-up, wary, like he’d been hurt and needed help; at the same time, he looked tough as a railroad spike. She’d felt almost tongue-tied with him, found herself trying to interest him. Instead, half the things she’d said sounded like borderline insults.
Try not to shoot anyone.

God, had she said that? She bit her tongue. Why? Trying to impress him. When he’d focused on her, he seemed to be looking right into her. And she liked it.

The bobbing light in her side mirror caught her eye again. The fool on the snowmobile was still in the ditch, but had drawn almost up beside her. She glanced back over her shoulder. If she remembered right, Forest Drive was coming up. There’d be a culvert, and the guy would catapult into Price County if he tried to ride over the embankment at this speed. Was he racing her? Maybe she should slow down.

The Iceman was befuddled by the mechanics of the assassination; if he’d had a sense of humor, he might have laughed. He couldn’t let go of the accelerator and keep up with her. If he let go of the brake . . . he just didn’t feel safe without some connection with the brake. But he had no choice: he took his hand off the brake lever, pulled open the Velcro-sealed pocket flap, got a good grip on the pistol, slid it out of his pocket. He was fifteen feet back, ten feet. Saw her glance back at him . . .

Five feet back, fifteen feet to the left of her, slightly lower . . . the snow thrown up by the Jeep was still pelting him, rattling off his helmet. Her brake lights flashed, once, twice, three times. Pumping the brakes. Why? Something coming? He could see nothing up ahead. He lifted the gun, found he couldn’t keep it on the window, or even the truck’s cab, much less her head. He saw the edge of her face as she
looked back, her brake lights still flashing . . . What? What was she doing?

He pushed closer, his left hand jumped wildly as he held it awkwardly across his body; the ride was getting rougher. He tried to hold it, the two vehicles ripping along at fifty miles an hour, forty-five, forty, her brakes flashing . . .