by L T Vargus
The gun thundered in his hand, and the glass seemed to melt away all at once. He squeezed off three more shots, pretty good angles on the retreating car. He wasn’t even sure if he was trying to stop the vehicle or the driver or both.
The little car floundered around the bend some more, still skidding, but it finally found some traction in the mess and started to move away, picking up speed.
Had he hit it? He thought so. A tire maybe?
Did it matter?
His head snapped back to the dark lump in the road just next to where the car had been. The shape wasn’t moving.
Vince.
Frank threw his door open and ran to his friend’s side, shoes crunching in the snow with every step. He hit the road on his knees, kneeling down next to big lug, the wet reaching through the fabric of his pants right away.
The wound was easy to find. It was still sending jets of bright red blood splashing across the snow crusting the street. The stirring liquid reflected back the glare of the streetlights. Brilliant red against blinding white. Vibrant enough to hypnotize you.
“Vince?” he croaked in that same voice. He grabbed the younger man by the shoulders and rolled him over.
Vince groaned. Still alive. Miraculously still alive.
“Shit.” Frank scooped Vince up under the armpits and started dragging him. “You big gorilla. You need to lose some weight, ya piece a shit. Help me out here.”
But Vince was just dead weight. He didn’t move or talk. Weak little spurts of wet were still squirting out of the hole in his head, leaking red all over the snow. Heavy droplets falling and falling. Frank had to keep stopping to catch his breath.
Finally, Frank managed to manhandle Vince into the backseat, folding the huge man’s long, heavy legs into the car because he couldn’t shove Vince any farther. He slammed the door, then ran for the driver’s seat, slipping in the snow in his rush.
Back inside, he jammed on the accelerator. The tires spun and whined, kicking slush everywhere for a second before they caught traction and the Buick lurched into motion.
“Hang on, Vince,” Frank yelled. “We’ll get you fixed up, buddy. Just hang on.”
Chapter 65
Loshak grit his teeth. Charged forward into the cold. Into the dark. Into the snow.
He felt the sloppy terrain change underfoot. Stumbled a little as he stepped onto what he thought must be a curb, though he couldn’t see much.
The agent had never seen snow like this in his life. So much. Coming down so hard. The swirling tendrils filled the sky. Endless frozen flecks plummeting. More and more appearing from the heavens to replace the fallen.
The white flakes tumbled to the earth in great rippling sheets, those and the dark blotting out most anything else — the streets and sidewalks around were blanketed with the stuff, a thick white coating applied, and the buildings had been reduced to the vaguest of dark contours visible only through the periodic gaps in the dotted white screen. Even the streetlights were mostly blocked by the snow — they looked like dying stars, cold and distant.
His mind focused on one thing and one thing only. Escape. Run and keep running. Create distance between himself and Walsh. Let the snow slide by under his feet for as long as he could muster the effort.
Plumes of steam coiled out of Loshak’s nostrils, spiraling in the air before him. He watched them a moment, and then the chill seemed to arrive all at once — catching up with him, perhaps, after the first big swell of adrenaline waned.
Soul-crushing cold snaked its way around the core of Loshak’s body and constricted. He wasn’t wearing his coat. Had he taken it off at Walsh’s apartment? He couldn’t remember. In any case, his suit jacket was no match for Tuesday in Chicago, let alone some historic blizzard like this.
Keep going, that calm voice told him. The snow might just hide you for long enough, might just save your life.
Hallucinations twitched atop the undisturbed snow all around him now. Abstract shapes. Patterns. Colorful ginghams and paisleys emerging from the mess, designs that he knew weren’t real. They were so vivid, though, so insistent that he could hardly see past them. He held his bound hands out in front as he shuffled along, feeling for obstacles, sure that any second now he was going to pitch over the edge of the void he’d seen when Walsh had slammed on the brakes and skidded toward that first red light.
Keep running.
He ran.
The wind gusted at him, the chill encroaching, pressing its advantage, going on the attack, the icy night ripping at his face. The cold cracked in his nostrils, ached in his cheeks, reached deeper into the meat of his head, of his torso — piercing cold. Already bone deep.
The change in the wind set the falling snow on a diagonal. Made it look like the whole world tilted all at once, angled itself toward him, put him on what felt like an uphill incline heading into the worst of it. He could see nothing but the endless white flecks in motion, stark white against the black of the night.
Blind. Lost. Confused.
He kept running. Kept moving.
The sky pelted his cheekbones with fresh crystals of white. Gathered them on his brow and atop his hair. They felt hard and sharp. Angular. Tiny shards of ice more than snow.
The frigid air only seemed drier and harsher as he ran, sandpaper churning in and out of his lungs. All the moisture had drained from his throat and sinuses, like they had dried to a paper-thin membrane ready to tear at the slightest disturbance.
Keep running.
He ran.
And no longer could he tell if it was the white flakes rushing downward or the blobs of dark floating up. His eyes couldn’t discern the difference anymore. No perspective. No frame of reference. Reality reduced somehow, winnowed itself down to dark and white speckles without meaning.
Nothing was real but the snow anymore. Not all the way. It was bigger, somehow, wanted to exist more than everything else. It exerted its will. Choking out all other life, all other reality.
Was he still running? He thought so. He hoped so. He pushed himself to it, even in his confusion.
Wet assailed his ankles. The material of his socks and the insides of his shoes were already soaked through, and the calves of his pants were icing over. Pins and needles speared his feet with every step — the prickle fading fast as the numb moved in.
His hands hurt the worst, though, going numb as the cold sunk into the bones. Not enough circulation to keep them warm. He knew that the zip ties were restricting the blood flow, but when he looked down at them, he saw the flesh going black with decay and bloating like balloons. Fluid there? Pus.
The confusion intensified, wrung a gasp out of his arid throat. How long had he been out in the cold? Was it possible he already had frostbite? No, his hands couldn’t be rotting already. That took much longer, especially in the cold like this.
Drugs. He was on drugs. Running away… away from…
Running. Just running. That was the only thing that mattered now. He would be fine if he just kept running. Keep running or die.
Loshak slammed into a metal pole. It caught him on one of his outstretched wrists, jammed his arm straight back into the shoulder socket, stood him up, and then knocked him a few steps to his right.
Vibrations ran through the pole, sending ripples through his hands and forearms. The hallucinatory patterns reemerged, jolting to bright red squiggles all around him, oversized versions of those pink floaters one saw after glancing into a sunset, except elongated and wriggling like tapeworms.
He couldn’t see the metal framework he’d struck through the snow any more than some vague outline against the falling white, but he was sure it was scaffolding.
He’d run into a piece of scaffolding. That would mean… that would mean a building would be close by.
He felt his way forward until his fingers found a wall. Brick. He could hear fabric flapping and shifting with the wind, probably netting to keep the brick dust down during construction. Any hope of finding a phone, or someone to cal
l 911, died right away. This place was vacant, gutted, under heavy construction, but it might have other uses.
The cycling, knocking sound of an engine echoed through the scaffolding now, approaching somewhere from behind him. The sound bounced through the paisleys making them vibrate.
On the verge of panic, Loshak fumbled along between the brick and the scaffolding until he ran into the cold, solid metal of a dumpster. He shoved it a little, making a gap between it and the brick, then jammed himself backward into the slit. He could see flashes of the scaffolding poles crisscrossing the night far away, the side of the dumpster a black mass swirling with curlicues and scrolling flourishes that pumped in time with his racing heartbeat.
He tried to listen past the thumping in his ears.
The car was still coming. Slowly. Creeping forward, little by little. Searching for him. In the blizzard-muffled silence, the gritting sound of the tires crunching over snow almost sounded like an animal chewing. The constant grating of a cow chewing its cud.
But there was something wrong about the sound. A little whump every few seconds almost like a heart beating out the counterpoint to Loshak’s. It sounded familiar.
A flat. Walsh’s Camry had a flat.
Loshak held his breath as the sound crept closer. The same two words ran through his head in an endless loop — keep driving, keep driving, keep driving.
With agonizing sluggishness, the Camry inched to a stop. The engine gave a last rattling breath, then died.
Quiet.
The wind moaned and then whistled, sent a wave of powder swishing across the top of the snow along the ground. Loshak strained his ears to hear movement beyond these noises — any sign that Walsh was headed his way. Nothing so far.
He clenched his teeth. His hands balled, icy needles stabbing through his fingernails, and he pressed the right fist against his mouth, the other hand nudging his cheek.
Then he hugged himself tighter against the bricks, made himself as small as he could. Didn’t want any kind of silhouette behind the dumpster to be visible from a distance. Hiding here was a temporary solution — probably very temporary. If Walsh happened past the dumpster, though, he thought he could shoot out the other side, disappear into the alley that way. If he was lucky he could open up some more distance between them.
At last, a car door opened in the distance, and shoes crunched down to the snowy ground.
Chapter 66
Ben squinted, the glare of the snow stinging now as he stared straight at the accumulation on the ground. He scanned the sidewalk for footprints, knowing they must be there. Couldn’t see shit just yet, but his eyes would adjust from the relative darkness of the Camry’s interior to this blinding white out here — even at night the shit burned his eyeballs.
He looked up then, tried to reorient himself. The swirls of snow danced everywhere above — ribbons of the stuff curling around themselves. The whole sky blotted out with little white dots that fell and floated and flitted around. He couldn’t make out the buildings at all, even though they must be just a few feet in front of him.
Even peering back over his shoulder, it took a second to make out the shape of the Camry — a fat blob of a thing, all its corners rounded where the snow piled itself, like frosting on a cake. The white coated the entire vehicle save for the windshield, but it was already working on that, accumulating on the glass before his eyes.
Even mostly submerged in white powder like it was, he could tell the car leaned hard to one side. That brought on a fresh wave of anger.
Fucking flat tire. Jesus.
He tried to replay the jumble of memories starting with the stupid FBI pig bolting. Tried to make sense of the sequence of events that led him to this moment.
The guy in the car behind must have shot at him, if that made any goddamn sense. He’d heard the crack of the gunfire, saw a little flicker in the rearview that might have been a muzzle flash. Must have been, even. Then the guy was out of the car, kneeling on the ground, and Ben was tearing away.
Only about half a block later, the tire was already done for. He rode it until it got too fucked to make it through the snow. Piece of shit.
He’d pulled over and here he was, wading out into the worst of it. On foot.
That was just as well, though, he reminded himself. The old man was no match for him when it came to physicality. Hunting him down would be the easy part.
Yes. He tried to unclench his teeth at that thought, perhaps succeeding a touch.
Strange marks emerged on the ground before him then. Impressions that might have been footprints before the wind and snow mussed them up, made them indistinct. They were the only place besides the road where the thick blanket of white had been disturbed.
It had to be him, didn’t it? No one else was out here in this chaos.
Ben drew the agent’s gun from his belt. Smiled a little to himself. Unless this fucking Fed could fly, he wasn’t going to sneak away.
He pressed on, following the tracks. Slow now. Careful. He didn’t think the prey was so far off after all. Didn’t want to spook him.
A grid of bricks took shape before him, the hard lines seeming to congeal out of the cold. A building. The tracks led straight to the wall from what he could tell.
The wind picked up, howling along the sides of the building. Rolling waves of snow drifted past in undulating ribbons. Snow devils, he thought somebody had called them once.
The mist of snow whipping into his face sent a shiver through him. Jesus. Even by Chicago standards, this was a bit much.
The snow devil, too, succeeded in further obscuring the tracks. It still looked like the footprints drew right up to the building and meandered along a stretch of scaffolding, but everything was less clear now.
The cold bit deeper, getting at his hands. He tucked his left hand into his coat pocket and raised the gun in his right, moving up toward the scaffolding, trying to read meaning in the mishmash of disheveled snow.
He had to give the old guy credit, he’d made it almost all the way back to Ben’s building. Maybe he was even parked around here and thought he could get to his car and make an escape.
Not tonight. Because Ben was done playing around now. The agent was going to die.
Ben stalked the tracks toward the maze of scaffolding, shoving sheets of green construction netting out of his way as he closed in on his prey.
Chapter 67
Fabric snapped and rustled. Snow crunched. Walsh crept close now, so close that Loshak could hear his breathing, something aggressive in it. Ragged. The shooter must’ve been just on the opposite side of the dumpster.
Loshak shifted his position a little, squatting, getting his legs under him, ready to spring out like a sprinter exploding off the blocks.
He licked his lips. Gave his head a little shake. He was probably about to go barehanded into a gunfight, and worse still, his hands were bound. He swallowed.
The wind changed directions. Whistled in the gap between the dumpster and the bricks. Blasted Loshak in the face with cold and dry.
Walsh went still. Quiet.
Loshak listened. Squinting and concentrating. His heart punched against the wall of his chest, making him dizzy. Pain lanced up his left shoulder, and a disconnected part of his mind wondered if he would have a heart attack now, finish the job for Walsh. Take the easy way out.
Then something snapped on the other side of the dumpster. The footsteps moved on, the trail of crunching snow slowly receding.
Loshak waited two breaths, and then leaned closer to the dumpster’s edge to get a look. This might be his chance.
Walsh’s back faced him from about ten feet on, mostly obscured by the falling snow, a faded silhouette, milky — something he could miss if he didn’t know to look for it. The gun still dangled at the end of one arm, and he still stalked forward, something deliberate in the set of his shoulders.
He stopped walking as he reached the angular lines of the scaffolding, and now his head swiveled back and forth,
angled at the ground from the looks of it. He was about to turn around, Loshak knew. About to head straight for the dumpster. But something, some instinct, told him to hold still for now.
Then Walsh tucked the gun in his belt, leaned his hands onto one of the steel scaffolding bars that was a little over waist high, and hopped over the thing like a gymnast, springing his legs out to the side. His feet slapped down on mostly bare concrete on the other side, the layers of skeletal plywood and steel above serving as an awning, protecting this little space from the snow, save for what drifted in with the wind. He had the gun back out in a flash, his head once again swiveling, scanning, searching, hunting.
Loshak’s breath stuttered in his throat. His mind racing to make sense of this development. Walsh must have gotten confused by the mess of footprints — the stumbling about after he’d run into the scaffolding post might give the impression that Loshak had entered the maze of scaffolding leading up the high rise.
Walsh pressed forward, his silhouette erased by the falling white as he moved deeper into the steel framework. Loshak had seen enough.
He shuffled himself to the other side of the dumpster, ready to go. He launched himself out of the gap and raced into an alley to his left.
Chapter 68
The cold swelled around Loshak again as he ran into the open, cinching tight around him. Gauzy blankets of white swallowed up the buildings towering over both sides of the alley, obscuring them behind a haze of snow.
He watched it all through slitted eyes as he ran. Half-blind. The wind barreled down on him, dry gusts ripping at the flesh of his face, reducing him, making him seem small. Insignificant.
He needed to create some distance between him and Walsh here and now. Then he needed to find a phone. A business would still be open on the next street, maybe. A gas station. A convenience store. Something.
Gunshots cracked behind him. Two shots. Impossibly loud in the still of the night. Percussive noises as of something being split, strangely dampened, the snow serving as acoustic panels, deadening the sound to something dull and hollow.