Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  One shot. Then another two in quick succession. And as he fired, he dragged Abby back against the side of the station, keeping her between him and the spot where Lee was standing, wondering what the hell had gone wrong.

  She brought the Blackhawk up again, hesitated. It was too long a shot under the conditions. The falling snow made vision uncertain and the light wasn’t good. Add to that the fact that almost all of Mikkelitz’s body was shielded by Abby’s and the odds were simply too long. She’d have to move for a better position, she thought, and began to do so, angling forward and to her right.

  Then freezing in place as she heard Mikkelitz call out and Jesse’s voice answer him.

  Shaky and little more than a croak maybe, but Jesse, nevertheless. She felt a thrill of hope that he was alive, realized that all the while she’d been unable to contact him by radio, she’d feared, deep down, that Mikkelitz had killed him.

  Then the first surge of hope turned to cold fear again as she realized that Jesse was hurt, maybe badly. She could hear it in his voice as he called for Mikkelitz to let Abby go.

  So could the killer. She saw his confidence growing, his certainty that he had the situation well in control and there was nothing Jesse could do to stop him. Realizing that the man’s attention was riveted on wherever it was that Jesse was standing, Lee took advantage of the distraction and moved quickly forward to the edge of the tree line. She was maybe thirty-five yards from where Mikkelitz and Abby crouched against the side of the building. She stopped, set her feet a little sideways to present a narrower target to the gunman, and heard his final, mocking speech to Jesse.

  And decided it was time she took a hand in things.

  As she spoke, Mikkelitz whirled halfway around to meet her, dragging Abby with him. The gun in his hand was jammed hard up under Abby’s jaw again as he backed up to the rough concrete wall behind him. For a moment, she saw the shock in his eyes as he realized things were sliding out of his control.

  She held the Blackhawk loosely in her right hand, angled down at forty-five degrees. There was no point in wearing herself out by keeping it leveled at him. The gun weighed close to three pounds and it wasn’t the sort of thing you kept at arm’s length until you wanted it there. She could almost read the thought in Mikkelitz’s mind as he glanced down at his own pistol—a Walther automatic, she noticed. With its three-inch barrel, he’d be lucky to hit her with any sort of snap shot, and to shoot at her, he’d have to take the gun away from its threatening position, jammed against Abby’s throat.

  She saw his eyes drop to the seven-inch length of the Blackhawk’s barrel. He knew he was outgunned. Knew that, at more than thirty yards’ distance, Lee had the advantage in firepower and accuracy.

  He also knew she’d never dare use that advantage, as long as he had the Walther pressed tight up against Abby’s head like this. He shook his head at the snow-covered figure by the trees.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You got any more of you out there in the woods?”

  “You’ll never know,” Lee replied evenly. “Now why don’t you do what Jesse said, and let the girl go?”

  He shook his head savagely. “Oh no. Oh no. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen here.”

  Lee frowned slightly. The speech was rapid and jerky. Mikkelitz was teetering on the brink here. He could snap at any moment, and it would be the end of Abby if he did. And, much as Lee could have killed Abby herself for ruining things between her and Jesse, she knew she wouldn’t stand by and see her murdered. She spoke again, keeping her voice calm and level.

  “Mikkelitz, it’s over. Now let Abby go and put that gun down. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt here. Okay?”

  “Oh no. It’s not okay you see, Sheriff. You see, you have no idea, do you, why I’ve been leading you such a dance these past weeks, do you?”

  She forced herself to speak calmly. “Well, we figured you wanted to get even with the town, seeing as how you were sacked from your job here,” she replied.

  She realized immediately that had been a mistake. Realized she should have left Mikkelitz his pretense of mystery. She saw his arm tighten around Abby’s throat and the girl was jerked backward off balance against him. She let out a little cry. Lee had seen her gather herself while Mikkelitz and Jesse were talking, saw her summon her courage to face whatever was coming. Now she saw the last of that courage melt away like the last trace of snow in the thaw. Abby was sobbing helplessly as the gun pressed against her head.

  “So you knew that, did you?” he asked savagely. Lee said nothing and he ground the gun against Abby’s face, forcing another cry of pain and terror from her.

  “Did you?” he shouted.

  “Well … we guessed, I guess,” Lee said carefully. She thought that maybe she was going to have to take a shot anyway, some time in the next few seconds.

  “Well, aren’t you guys just the smartest fucking pair of hick-town fucking cops?” he spat at her. Slowly, she began to raise the .44 to shoulder level. He saw the movement, shook his head at her in warning, looking meaningfully at his own gun, pressing into the soft skin beside Abby’s eye.

  “Don’t try it!” he warned her. But she kept the long barrel coming up to the point of aim she wanted, eased back the hammer to full cock and held the gun there.

  The blade of the foresight sat neatly into the rear sight groove, and the two of them, foresight and rear sight, locked together, wandered smoothly across the aiming picture she’d created.

  No one can hold a handgun absolutely rock steady without any form of hand rest. The sights will always waver slightly across the sighting picture. The real skill comes in timing the release of the trigger to the moment when the sight is crossing the center of the aiming point. And the temptation for ninety-nine percent of shooters is to anticipate that moment and snatch at the trigger, pulling the shot off-line. Lee breathed evenly and regularly, watching the sights move in a small circle, crossing Mikkelitz’s head, just taking in a part of Abby’s, then circling back again. Her forefinger rested lightly against the grooved trigger.

  She could make the shot. She knew it. But the gun against Abby’s head would almost certainly be triggered by Mikkelitz’s dying reflex.

  And for just a fleeting fraction of a moment, Lee found herself wondering if that would be such a bad thing. She would have tried. She would have done her best. There was even a chance that Abby might survive. Maybe she should just leave it in the hands of chance. After all, she owed Abby nothing. And no one would ever know what she’d done.

  “That you there, Lee?” It was Jesse’s voice, sounding weak and full of pain. She remained focused on the sight picture, both eyes open, arm and hand holding firmly but not so tightly that the muscles cramped.

  “It’s me all right, Jess,” she called. “You okay there?”

  Mikkelitz’s eyes snapped around to his left as Jesse spoke. From the way the gunman had to lean forward, Lee guessed that Jesse was momentarily out of his line of sight.

  “Can’t move much,” he replied. “But I’ll heal.”

  And in that moment, she knew she had to wait till the Walther was no longer threatening Abby. Maybe if she fired now, if she took the chance, nobody else would ever know what she’d done. But Jesse would. And she would. And she couldn’t live with either one of those.

  “So, Sheriff,” Mikkelitz was saying. “We’ve got ourselves a stalemate here. So maybe you’d better just back off and put down that great big gun of yours.”

  “Or?” Just the one word.

  “Or I’m going to kill this girl. I’ll do it. Believe me. You know I will.”

  Lee didn’t hesitate. “The moment you do, you’re a dead man,” she said flatly. She sensed that Mikkelitz was getting back to that dangerous edge of hysteria again as he saw no way out. She knew she couldn’t crowd him. Knew she couldn’t back down.

  She knew all the things she couldn’t do, she admitted to herself. It was just she didn’t seem to know one thing she could do.

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nbsp; “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll kill her and then I’ll kill you too.” Slowly, she shook her head, meeting his eyes above the gunsights.

  “I don’t think so,” she said flatly. Mikkelitz considered the statement for a few seconds, then shrugged.

  “Either way, one thing’s certain, the girl will be dead. You want that on your conscience, Sheriff?”

  It was the tone of his voice that convinced her. He’d gone past that jerky, almost hysterical tone and had now realized that there was no way out. And having realized that, he’d found a way to win.

  To him, surviving didn’t matter any longer. Winning mattered. And winning was simply a matter of making sure she lost. If Abby, whom they’d come up here to help, should die, that would be enough for him now. Sure, he’d take the chance on getting away after he killed her. But Lee knew that killing her was really all that mattered to him now, and she racked her brains to find a way to defuse the situation.

  No ideas came. They were on a knife-edge, she knew. She considered setting her own gun down, but realized that, if she did, he was just as likely to kill Abby immediately, then try for her and Jesse—if he were still conscious.

  The one element that was still keeping him from acting was the fact that her gun was trained steadily on him. There was still one last fiber of survival instinct within him that was stopping him from killing Abby.

  How much longer it would last, Lee didn’t want to think about. The silence between them grew, broken only by a soft whimpering sound that Lee realized was coming from Abby. Her arm was beginning to ache, extended like this, but she couldn’t break the tableau. She didn’t know what would happen if she changed the delicate balance that existed between them.

  Then, in her peripheral vision, she saw movement. She winced in concentration as she just stopped herself from looking away from the sights. The movement came again and now she realized it was Jesse, on hands and knees, dragging himself through the snow, his big Colt in one hand.

  She risked a quick side glance at him, moving only her eyes. His right leg, blood-soaked from thigh to ankle, was dragging stiffly in the snow behind him. He was still hidden from Mikkelitz’s view by the corner of the building. But, as he moved slowly forward, he would soon be exposed. There was no chance that he could take Mikkelitz by surprise, wounded and slow-moving as he was, and for a moment, Lee wondered what the hell he was doing.

  And then she realized. He was giving her the chance for one clear shot, and one only.

  Then it came. As Jesse edged forward into view, Mikkelitz’s gun left Abby’s throat and leveled at the spot where he could suddenly see the injured deputy.

  The Walther and the Blackhawk both moved to their final aim points at the same moment. Lee saw the killer’s head in sharp focus as the sights moved smoothly across it, saw Abby’s blond hair shining and slightly fuzzy on the edge of her focus picture and calmly, gently, stroked the trigger.

  Her right arm shot up almost vertical with the savage recoil and the deep boom of the shot echoed from the weather station walls.

  Abby screamed as the metal jacketed slug ripped past her face, barely three inches away, at supersonic speed, and slammed into the middle of Mikkelitz’s forehead.

  He was hurled back against the rough wall like a rag doll, dragging the terrified Abby with him as he went. His right hand spasmed and involuntarily tightened on the trigger of the Walther, sending one shot high into the air, to explode a clump of snow from the top branches of a pine tree.

  He was dead when he hit the snow, and his left arm relaxed around Abby’s throat, allowing her to roll away from him, weeping in shock and fear. She’d stared down the barrel of Lee’s gun, mesmerized by the sight of it, as it appeared to aim right at her. She’d seen the brief flash in the fading light, waited for the bullet to hit her, heard the obscenely loud crack of its passage and the ugly wet smack as it tore through Mikkelitz’s skull and savaged his brain. Felt herself hurled back with him.

  For a few seconds, Abby was convinced that the bullet had hit her. That she was dead. That it was all over. And she buried her face in the cold snow and wept.

  Until she felt Jesse’s gentle hands on her shoulders, rolling her over, and his calm voice soothing her, and his arms going around her and holding her as he knelt beside her in the snow.

  At the edge of the tree line, Lee stood immobile, the big, single-action revolver hanging loosely by her side as Jesse scrambled painfully toward the stricken woman in the snow. She watched in silence as the man she loved put his arms around his former wife and held the pale blond head against his shoulders. She saw his lips moving in soothing, tender words that were meant for Abby’s ears and no others.

  And, as she watched, the sheriff of Routt County felt the hot, sharp pain of the tears in the back of her eyes.

  SEVENTY

  Lee sat in her office staring, unseeing, at a note from Ned Puckett on the desk in front of her.

  She sighed deeply, picked up the single sheet of paper and, for the tenth time that morning, tried to concentrate on its contents. Vaguely, she was aware that Ned was querying the use of town funds to buy meals from the Steamboat Yacht Club.

  Equally vaguely, she remembered authorizing Tom Legros to do just that a few days earlier, when she’d kept the residents of Mrs. McLaren’s boardinghouse locked in the Public Safety Building for eight hours. Unfortunately, when she’d lit out in Ray Newton’s helicopter, and Jesse had radioed her to tell her Mikkelitz was on Mount Werner, she’d neglected to tell Tom he could let the guests return home. As a result, they’d had lunch and dinner supplied by one of the more expensive eating houses in town courtesy of the Steamboat Springs municipal budget, and Ned wasn’t exactly delighted about the fact.

  She looked at the letter now, realized she’d have to do something about it, crumpled it in one fist and tossed it at the wastepaper basket in the corner. She missed, thought about walking across the room to pick it up, then decided, the hell with it.

  “I’ll deal with it later,” she told herself.

  Three days had passed since the confrontation on Storm Peak. She’d recalled Ray in the Jet Ranger and he’d flown Jesse and Abby to the district hospital, where one of Mikkelitz’s intended victims was still a patient. Lee had chosen to wait with the body, riding down in a convoy of oversnow vehicles she summoned by radio.

  They’d found a diary in Mikkelitz’s room, a chilling collection of random, wandering thoughts, all with a recurring theme of victimization and revenge. Reading the diary, it became obvious that Mikkelitz had ultimately planned to avenge himself on the man who had fired him—but this time, he wanted the whole town to suffer as well.

  There were references in the diary to other events in the past, other slights and acts of revenge. It seemed that, previously, he’d been content to kill and slip away undetected. The Storm Peak killings represented an escalation in his thinking. It was as well they’d stopped him, she thought.

  She’d passed the diary on to FBI headquarters. A phone call the previous day told her they had found unsolved murders in three states that might just be the work of Anton Mikkelitz.

  She glanced out the window at the mid-morning traffic on Lincoln. The ski shuttle bus was pulling away from the curb, the racks on its sides more than half-full of skis. She smiled wanly. There’d been a hurricane of media coverage once word got out that the Mountain Murders case had been solved and that the killer himself was dead. For two days, you could hardly move along Lincoln Street without being stopped by TV crews, half blinded by the glare of their lights, or knocked unconscious by the sudden thrust of a microphone in your face.

  The news teams had been bad enough. Lee had made an official statement to a bank of cameras, lights and tape recorders, then got the hell out of the room, followed by a hundred shouted questions. Later that evening, a producer from 60 Minutes had approached her, wanting to discuss a story on “The dead shot who’d put the ‘she’ in sheriff,” dressing it up to sound like a piece on women in new age law enf
orcement. Lee saw it for what it was intended to be—a sensational piece, emphasizing her role in killing the murderer.

  Politely, she’d declined to be interviewed for the piece. The producer insisted. Less politely, Lee told her to fuck off.

  That seemed to do the trick.

  She felt no remorse about the death of Mikkelitz. She didn’t glory in it. She didn’t regret it. Rather, she accepted it. He’d chosen the path, she reasoned, and he deserved no better. Given the chance, she would have taken him into custody and seen him stand trial. As it was, she thought the way things had turned out made a more satisfactory conclusion. Mikkelitz may have been-in fact, almost certainly was—insane. But he was criminally insane and dangerous to all around him. This way there’d be no trial. No legal double-talk. No slight chance that he might find himself out on the street, free to murder once more. It had happened before, she knew, and more than once.

  He was gone and she didn’t regret it for a moment.

  She’d been to see Jesse once in the hospital. He was recovering from the gunshot wound and a severe loss of blood. He’d been sedated and only half aware of her presence and she felt awkward, standing by his bed, holding his hand in both of hers. She kept remembering him kneeling in the snow beside Abby. Holding her. Comforting her. Lee had to admit it, they looked good together.

  She’d seen Abby as well. The reporter was also in the hospital, being treated for shock, the gunshot wound to her leg—and for a whole faceful of bruises and contusions where Mikkelitz had beaten her. They’d shaken hands, although Abby had seemed more inclined to want to hug her, and Lee had stood awkwardly while the other woman thanked her, the terror of the hours she’d spent with Mikkelitz still visible, deep behind her perfect blue eyes. Lee had left the hospital room a little more abruptly than the occasion warranted.

  And now, today, the media had packed up and gone. The Mountain Murderer story was cold news and the tourists were slowly returning to Steamboat and Mount Werner, encouraged by the fact that accommodation was available and special discount prices were being offered as local traders tried to save something from the season.