Dead of Winter

by P J Parrish

  “L-11, where are you hit?” Edna demanded.

  “In the back!” he gasped. He keyed his radio again. “L-8! L-8! Do you copy me?”

  There was no answer and he lowered his head, his fingers tightening around the radio. He had to get back.

  He forced himself to his knees and ripped his gun from his holster. Move! Move!

  He crept behind the oil drum, facing the pines. He peered into the dark wall trying to slow his racing heart. Slowly, he realized the pain in his back was not getting worse. Christ, the vest! The bullet had hit the vest. But Ollie had a vest, too. Why hadn’t he answered?

  Edna’s voice crackled over the radio, still trying to raise Ollie. Another rifle shot zinged overhead and snapped branches far to his right.

  “Central,” he said. “Sniper fire. Repeat, sniper fire, no visual, no visual.”

  “L-11, what is your location?”

  “Road 329...in a field. We’re separated!” His voice sounded hollow, almost feeble. The sound of it sent a spasm of terror through him. He was scared. Jesus, he was so scared.

  Edna called to Ollie. “Advise code-4, Loon-8.”

  Louis stared at the radio. “C’mon, man, answer,” he whispered.

  Edna came back to Louis. “Loon-11, what is your condition?”

  “I’m okay! I’m okay!”

  “What is your proximity to Loon-8?”

  “I...about eighty feet.”

  Louis took a deep breath, his heart pounding. He wiped his face, keeping his eyes trained on the trees.

  “Loon-11, advise. How many shots fired?”

  “Three...no, four!”

  “Do you have a direction of fire?”

  Louis looked at the trees to his left. “Shots fired from the east, Central. It’s quiet now.”

  “Can you determine shooter’s location?”

  Louis wet his lips. “Negative. Negative.”

  Edna came back, her voice steady but underscored with fear. “Loon-11, be advised Loon-5 and 6 are 10-8. ETA seven minutes.”

  Visions of the shooter ambushing the units raged in his head. He wanted to scream into the radio but he forced his words out slowly. “Central, repeat, no location on shooter. Advise all units to proceed with caution.”

  The oil drum at his back was hot, but he shivered as the wind swirled the snow around him. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, his fingers tingling. He had to get back to the cruiser.

  The fire in the oil drum was slowly dying out, but he needed the cover of darkness. He scooped up two handfuls of snow and tossed it in the drum. The fire sizzled and died.

  He began to creep on his knees, his eyes probing the darkness, his ears pricked for anything that moved. His bare hands grew numb as he inched through the snow toward the cruiser. He kept waiting for more shots. He knew that even in the darkness he had to be visible, his uniform dark against the snow.

  A rustle of brittle branches drifted to him from his left. He froze. The sound came again, farther away this time. Then he saw him, just a flash of movement near the road. He was coming from the eastern trees, visible only for a second as the red and blue lights of the cruiser swept over him. Then he was gone.

  Louis struggled to his feet and started running.

  The lights caught the figure again as he emerged from the brush and crossed the road. He was only twenty yards away, angling away from Louis. He carried a long, dark object. A rifle.

  The man moved quickly, expertly, through the white beams of the cruiser’s headlights, then disappeared behind it.

  Louis froze, thrusting his arms rigid in front of him, his gun aimed. “Stop! Stop!” he shouted. “Stop, you motherfucker!”

  Two shots, that was all he was going to get. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger. A flash exploded in front of him and he had to blink the runner back into focus. He fired again.

  He couldn’t see where he was shooting. Then he saw him again. He was almost to the trees on the opposite side of the road.

  “Loon-11. Loon-11. Are you code-4?” Edna called.

  Damn it! Damn it!

  Louis ran, stumbling in the deep drifts. He fell and struggled to his feet, raised his gun and fired again as the man leapt into the trees. Branches splintered as the darkness swallowed him up.

  “Son of a bitch!” Louis yelled.

  “Eleven! Advise code-4!”

  He gripped his weapon and emptied it at the trees, the gun buckling in his hands, the explosions reverberating in the night.

  Click, click, click. Hammer against empty chamber.

  Louis lowered the gun, panting. With trembling hands, he jammed the speed-loader into the cylinder and slapped it shut. “You fucking bastard!” he shouted to the darkness. “Motherfucking bastard!”

  “Loon-11, advise your status!”

  He started to run toward the cruiser but his legs bogged down in the heavy drifts. In the distance, he heard an engine roar to life and ran toward it. He stumbled up onto the asphalt in time to see two red taillights disappear into the night, heading east on County Road 329.

  “Loon-11! Advise your status!” Edna called.

  Louis ran back to the cruiser and froze.

  Ollie was slumped in the seat, his leg dangling out the door. His eyes were open, his gun still in his hand. He was shot in the throat. Blood was gushing from the wound, covering the dark blue fur of the nylon parka.

  “Loon-11. Please advise your status!”

  Ollie’s lips were moving. His eyes were locked on Louis, frightened, birdlike. He was alive. Jesus, he was alive.

  Louis seized the radio off the dash. “I need an ambulance out here now!” he shouted. “Now!”

  Ollie lifted his trembling hand. Louis took it, gripping Ollie’s fingers in his. They felt damp and cool as clay.

  “Central, where is my backup!” Louis yelled into the mike, bracing his elbow on the hood.

  Ollie’s fingers wiggled limply in his. “Help me,” he said, his voice thick with blood.

  Jesus, everything was red. Ollie’s throat, his shirt, the car, the lights. Oh, Jesus...He had to stop it, he had to stop it.

  Louis tossed the radio on the dash and leaned in the car, placing his hand on the wound. Warm blood oozed over his skin and he could feel Ollie’s weak pulse under his fingertips.

  “Hang on, man,” Louis whispered. “Hang on.”

  “Loon-11, what’s the situation out there?” It wasn’t Edna’s calm voice now. It was Gibralter’s, hard and firm.

  Louis reached across Ollie for the radio but froze as he saw Ollie’s eyes looking up at him. They were dull. It took a moment before he realized the pulsating under his fingers had stopped.

  He slowly withdrew his hand, staring at it. For a second, the radio traffic stopped and it was absolutely silent.

  A deep, slicing pain moved through him, doubling him over. He pressed his bloody hand to his forehead.

  “Loon-11!” Gibralter shouted.

  Louis squeezed his eyes closed, his fist banging on the roof of the cruiser.

  “Kincaid!”

  Numbly, he reached back for the radio. He turned away from Ollie and clicked on the radio but when he tried to speak the words caught in his throat. He knew what he needed to say. He had heard it before a hundred times. But not for real. On television and in the movies. Not for real. Not for real.

  “Central...we have...we have a 10-99.”

  He looked up quickly, up into the snowflakes.

  “Officer down.”

  There was silence. Then, suddenly, the radio burst alive with urgent voices. Other Loon Lake officers, and on the other channel, the sheriff’s department.

  Edna silenced them all with a few words. “Hold all traffic. Loon-11?”

  Louis wiped his face with his sleeve and looked down the empty road in the direction of the sirens. He raised the radio back to his mouth, lowering his head into his hand.

  “Suspect is armed with a large-caliber...rifle. In a vehicle of unknown description...headed...
headed east on Road 329.”

  “Eleven!” Gibralter shouted. “What kind of description is that? What happened out there? Did you return fire? Where are you?”

  “I don’t...affirmative, affirmative.”

  The sirens were closer, the wails rising and falling on the wind. In his clouded head, they sounded almost human.

  His fingers gripped the radio as his mind grappled to hold on to some sense of reality. He could smell the blood on his hands, strangely metallic. Ollie’s blood. He looked down at his hand. It was covered with blood. The radio was covered with blood. His pants legs were stained with blood. He stared at it in morbid curiosity. It was black...not red, black.

  “Loon-11!” Gibralter yelled. “What’s happening out there?”

  Something drifted into his dulled mind in that moment, something about the rifle. He keyed the radio. The words flooded forward on a wave of anger and he could not stop them.

  “Coward!” he spat into the radio. “He’s a fucking coward! Lacey used a goddamn nightscope! He didn’t have a chance! Ollie didn’t have a chance!” Louis’s voice cracked into a sob and he gulped in a cold, icy breath.

  “Kincaid!”

  “We can’t catch him! We need help. Damn it, can’t you see that? We need help!”

  “Loon-11, pull yourself together!”

  Louis threw the radio down to the wet asphalt. It bounced and gave out a final burst of static. He lifted his face to the sky. He could feel the flakes settling on his face, feel each one, so terribly gentle.

  CHAPTER 27

  His teeth were chattering and he clenched them to make them stop. He looked up into the black sky, trying to find a place to store the vivid images that swam in his mind. And so many sounds. Wailing sirens. Radio static. Shouts. All these men shouting and he was doing nothing.

  A door slammed and Louis spun around. Ambulance, just the ambulance. It pulled away slowly, with no sense of urgency.

  Someone touched him and he turned. Jesse was a silhouette against the glare of the spotlights aimed at Ollie’s cruiser. For a second, the voices and sirens seemed muted.

  Jesse reached for him. Louis stiffened, pulling back. But the need for touch, for human contact, was too strong. Slowly, he surrendered to Jesse’s embrace. He closed his eyes, lowering his head to the stiff nylon of Jesse’s jacket.

  “Harrison!”

  Jesse pulled back, leaving a void of cold wind. Louis blinked to focus on Gibralter’s silhouette as it came toward him.

  “How did this happen?” Gibralter whispered hoarsely.

  How did this happen? How did this happen? Louis’s eyes drifted to the spotlit cruiser, dark forms crawling around it, over it, in it.

  “Kincaid! How did this happen?”

  It happened because I let Lacey go. It happened because I went into the field and Ollie stayed by the cruiser. It happened because I couldn’t get back to Ollie in time. It happened because I didn’t react fast enough, I didn’t shoot straight enough, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t...

  “I want your report tonight,” Gibralter said, bringing him back.

  Did he say “Yes, sir,” or nod? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that Gibralter had turned away. In the glare of the lights, Louis was vaguely aware of Jesse hovering somewhere nearby. The sounds came to him again —- the voices, the radios, the rush of noise that hurt his head.

  “Damn it...damn it.”

  It took him a moment to separate the words from the noise. It was Gibralter repeating the words to himself.

  “Damn it...why him?”

  The last two words made Louis look up. Why him? He looked over again at the cruiser and in his mind saw Ollie lying on the front seat, felt the warmth of Ollie’s blood as it pulsed against his hand. Why him?

  He looked back to see Gibralter watching him. The words were unspoken but there in his eyes. Why not you?

  Gibralter turned and walked away.

  Louis moved woodenly back to Gibralter’s Bronco. He reached in the driver’s side and picked up a clipboard. He slowly unzipped his jacket and fumbled for a pen. His hand touched the rough nylon of the vest. For the first time, he became aware of its weight, became aware, too, of the dull ache above his kidney where the vest had stopped Lacey’s bullet.

  He threw the clipboard to the seat and yanked off his jacket. He tore at the Velcro strips, pulled the vest over his head and threw it to the floor of the Bronco. He stood for a few moments, breathing heavily. He shut his eyes tight.

  Stop, stop...stop! He opened his eyes to look at the shapes moving around him. State troopers, deputies, crime-scene techs. He saw the familiar blue parkas of his own department’s officers. He saw, far off in the snowy field, the play of flashlights as men searched for where Lacey had been hiding. The men were doing their jobs. He had to pull himself together to do his.

  He picked up the clipboard and sat down on the edge of the passenger seat, pulling his jacket up over his shoulders. He faced away from the field and the lights.

  Slowly, the words came. They came, the words that explained what had happened, pouring out onto the lined form. They were the words of his job, words like suspect, victim and pursuit and shots fired, words unweighted with emotion. Safe, efficient, unhuman words, and he found comfort in their blankness.

  When he was done he set the report aside and leaned back in the seat. A huge wave of fatigue rolled slowly over him and he had to fight to keep his eyes open. He pushed himself up, put on his jacket and got out of the Bronco.

  He searched the crowd for Gibralter, finally spotting him standing by the open door of Ollie’s cruiser. Louis walked over to him.

  “The report is finished. What do you want me to do now?”

  “Go home,” Gibralter said, not looking at him.

  “Chief —- ”

  “I said go home.”

  “I need to be here.”

  “This isn’t about what you need, Kincaid. You’re on administrative leave pending psychiatric evaluation.”

  “A shrink? I don’t need a shrink.”

  “It’s departmental policy. Make an appointment in the morning.”

  “I can help search -- ”

  “We don’t need you,” Gibralter said. He turned away before Louis could answer. “Evans!” he called out.

  The other officer looked up and trotted over.

  “Evans, take Kincaid home.”

  “Wait a minute,” Louis said, moving into Gibralter’s line of vision. “I want —- ”

  “I don’t care what you want,” Gibralter said sharply. “In your mental state, you’re no use to us. Now go home.”

  Louis walked stiffly to Evans’s cruiser and got in, unable to look at Evans as he started the engine. They pulled slowly away and were soon engulfed by the darkness and quiet.

  Louis leaned his head back on the seat. A thought penetrated the fog in his head. “Did they find it?” he asked dully.

  “Find what?” Evans said.

  “The card.”

  Evans hesitated. “Yeah.”

  “Where was it?”

  “On the floor of the cruiser.”

  Louis closed his eyes. That’s why the motherfucker ran near the cruiser, to throw in the damn card.

  “What was it? What card?” Louis asked.

  “Eight of clubs.”

  Eight? Just like Ollie’s call number.

  Something inside him stirred. Fred Lovejoy’s number was ten. “Radio numbers,” Louis mumbled softly. “He’s using their damn call numbers.”

  Evans glanced at him. “What?”

  Except Pryce. Pryce’s number was two, not one as the ace of spades would indicate. Why hadn’t Pryce been tossed a two?

  Evans brought the car to a sudden stop. Louis looked up, saw he was home and jumped out of the cruiser without a word. He went inside and walked to the kitchen. He uncapped the bottle of Christian Brothers and took a long swallow. It dribbled down his chin and he coughed, setting the bottle down. Bent over the sink, he wiped h
is chin with his hand.

  You’re no use to us....

  His hand was trembling. He brought it up to his face, turning it over slowly. He stared at his nails, rimmed with dried blood. He turned on the faucet, grabbed a Brillo pad and thrust his hands under the water, tearing the pad across his nails. Finally, he threw it aside and turned off the water.

  There was a knock and his eyes shot to the door. His hand went to his holster. It was empty; he had turned over his gun at the scene as routine procedure.

  “Louis?” a soft voice called. “Louis? It’s Zoe.”

  He let out a breath, went slowly to the door and opened it. She stood there in the darkness of the porch, her head uncovered, her face shadowed. She waited and finally he moved aside and she came in.

  The cabin was dark, the only light filtering in from the kitchen. She looked around, her eyes coming back finally to him. He saw them move down from his face to his chest. He had forgotten he was still wearing his police parka, the front stained brown with Ollie’s blood.

  He turned away, going to the sofa. He switched on a lamp and slipped off the jacket, throwing it in a corner. He sat down, leaning forward, hands on his knees, closing his eyes. After a moment, he felt the sofa sag with her weight as she sat down next to him.

  “I heard what happened,” she said.

  Her voice was distant in his brain, childlike, fearful. He didn’t want to answer. He was afraid his own would sound the same.

  “I had to come,” she said.

  He shook his head slowly, not daring to look at her. He wanted to ask her why she had to come back but he didn’t want to hear what he knew was the truth, that she came back of pity.

  “Go away, Zoe,” he said softly.

  “Louis...”

  “I need to be alone right now.”

  She touched his back. “Don’t push me away. I understand –- ”

  “Please...please go. Now, please.” He started to pull away, but her hand moved up to his neck, pulling him closer.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  He tried to push away but her hand grew firmer. “Don’t,” she said.

  He began to tremble and shut his eyes.

  “Don’t” she whispered.

  Something ripped inside his chest and he fell against her. Her arms encircled his back and she pulled him to her. He began to cry.