Then the third rattled up the valley and he'd stopped, cocking his head to give a listen.
A man might miss a rabbit twice. But it was unlikely that the creature would hang around for a third shot.
Maybe he'd wounded it and was finishing it off.
Pretty damned lousy shooting.
Marty had gone back to work. And he wouldn't even have heard the next shot if he hadn't stopped to give the sluice another shake.
That was a shotgun. More of a booming sound. And farther away.
What the hell were they shooting at?
Had to be a bear.
People shooting grizzlies made Marty nervous. The only reason for shooting the big bastards out of season was to protect yourself and that was always a dicey affair. By the time you decided you were in trouble it took a cannon to kill a damned Griz. Marty had plenty of experience with bears. They were always hanging around the valley, looking for garbage or foraging for berries. But in twenty years in the bush he'd never had to shoot one.
He tried to remember exactly where he'd heard the first shots coming from. But sound was funny in the valley. The ravines and canyons created weird echoes and dead spots. The thick forest muffled some areas and the rock walls amplified sound in others.
The shots sounded like they came from Howard's. Or maybe Terry Glorianus or even Micky's cabin. But it might have been over at El Hoskins's place.
Marty frowned.
Some of them had sounded like pistol shots. Like the roar a big.44 might make.
The thought of El shooting at a bear with his pistol left Marty with mixed emotions.
He felt sorry for anyone who had to face a grizzly with a pistol. But the picture of El doing it was humorous.
El, his mirror glasses glinting, his legs splayed, shoulders back like Gary Cooper, facing off on Main Street with Yogi the Bear.
“Dumb-ass,” muttered Marty, spitting into the creek.
He tossed the hammer back into his plastic bucket and wrapped a piece of tarp over the top, tying it with a bungee cord. He climbed back up to the top of the sluice and picked up his shovel. A couple of snowflakes fluttered against his face.
Another shotgun sounded and he stopped.
What the hell was going on?
1:56
ONCE AGAIN DAWN CROUCHED in the alders. The airstrip was a couple of hundred yards behind her. But there was no help there.
Clive lay across his four-wheeler, ten feet from the front stoop.
And, although she couldn't see Rita, Dawn knew by the way El was sidling in and out of the door that he was stepping over her body.
At first Dawn thought that El was intent on stealing everything in the store. He'd made trip after trip, his arms full of boxes and bags, piling them a few yards away from Clive and the four-wheeler. Then he started putting rifles on top, stacking them in a neat pyramid.
She couldn't figure out how he intended to get away with all of the goods he was taking, but it occurred to her that he couldn't haul them all off at once. He'd have to leave some of them where they were and she might get a chance to grab a gun. Even if he didn't leave any guns, she could sneak back into the store and use the phone to call Anchorage for help. That thought brought her her first real ray of hope.
This time, when El came back out, he carried a red Jerry can and he began to soak down the heap of weapons with the contents of the can. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a butane lighter. Then he grabbed one of the gleaming wet rifles and touched the flame to it. The gunstock burst into flame and he tossed it into the pile.
The heap erupted with a fierce whoomp. The heat surged and shells popped like firecrackers. El backed toward Dawn's hiding place and she crouched tensely, prepared to dash for deeper cover at the slightest sign that he had spotted her.
He was so close that she could hear him muttering to himself.
“You can't stay here,” he kept saying. “None of you can stay here.”
He seemed to be having an inner quarrel with someone. Dawn had no idea who was winning or whether or not it was that kind of argument. After a minute, El ambled back down to the store and disappeared through the door into the storage shed.
2:00
MICKY DIDN'T RUN.
She threw her legs out in front of her, down the slope, and then followed them. It was a lurching gait. A controlled fall. But it used less energy.
Let the mountain do the work.
It's still a long way down.
Don't want to wear out before I get there.
She was almost to the turnoff to Damon's place.
She had to stop and at least see if Damon was home, to warn him. Damon would walk right up to El and say hi. Never knowing. Damon insisted on being friendly to El. Damon was friendly to everyone.
More than anything she wanted to reach her cabin and hold the Glock in her hands. Suddenly the gun didn't seem so evil to her. She could feel its comforting heft. She wanted its power.
Because right now, if she raced around a corner and El was standing in the trail with that big Ruger, she wouldn't have as much chance as one of the timid bunnies.
It's El.
Each crunch of her boot in the gravel pounded his name into her brain.
He's finally snapped.
She could picture him at the moment he slid into that dark abyss in his mind. His face deadly calm, just a slight tremor in his hands. His body tight as a drum. Graceful as a dancer, yet tense. Like the shooter in the padded suit. Like the killer in her parents’ shop.
That had been the last chance to stop him before someone got killed. Right then, when his brain was boiling but before he exploded like a stick of dynamite.
But how could I have foreseen that moment?
How could I have stopped him before this happened?
Shoot him?
For what? Because maybe he'd killed Clive's dog? Because he looked crazy? Because both she and Rita were scared of him and Aaron hated his guts? Because he reminded her every time she saw him of the murders in her past?
She reached the fork in the trail and trotted through the alders toward Damon's place. The cabin was buried in the deep woods, the clearing barely extant, trees almost touching above his roof. She couldn't understand why he liked it that way. He hated being cooped up even worse than she. He'd torn all the interior walls out of the house so that the downstairs was just one large open area. Even his outhouse had no door.
But he'd refused to cut down one tree on his property.
She knocked on the door but the hollow echo told her all she needed to know.
It looked like Damon was gone as usual.
Out in the woods somewhere. Looking for that damned mythical mine.
She pushed open the door and stepped inside.
“Damon?”
Sunlight through the windows turned the interior to gold. Every surface inside was polished and pampered. The dish towel was folded neatly on the sink. The two chairs stood at attention beside the table. Books on the shelf beside Damon's recliner were arranged in alphabetical order. Wherever El was, it looked like he hadn't been here.
She stepped back onto the porch and started to close the door.
A firecracker rattle coming from the direction of Cabels’ Store startled her.
2:02
STAN HELD THE SHOVEL at shoulder height. The blade rested upside down on the edge of the two-by-twelve side of the sluice chute. He barely heard the gravel sloshing down the washboard bottom or the sound of South Fork above his head. He was trying to place the popping noise coming from far off down the valley.
He wondered if it had anything to do with the earlier gunshots.
Gunfire wasn't unusual in the valley. People were always potting rabbits. Calibrating their gunsights. And, of course, this time of year, there was the possibility of someone trying to scare off a bear. Gunfire didn't trouble Stan. Hell, if no one in the valley complained about his dynamiting, who was he to bitch about a little target shooting? But the popping Stan kept hearing wasn'
t someone hunting rabbits.
It sounded like a celebration. Stan was always up for a party.
He shoveled another spadeful of gravel into the sluice, then picked up what remained in the bucket and dumped it in. Hooking the bucket onto the end of the shovel and the shovel over his shoulder, he climbed to the creek bank, balancing on the narrow path. The wind whipped down the narrow defile and low clouds ran like an upside-down river, flowing through the ravine.
Scattered flakes danced in the wind.
Marty would give him a hard time for quitting early. But he headed down the trail anyway.
Stan worked the easier pickings in the gravel of the high South Fork, where the stream disappeared into the mountain. Marty eked out a living on the lower run of the creek, just above Damon's claim. Rolling boulders with a sevenfoot steel pry bar, to find his nuggets. But both shared the wealth, having pooled their claims from the first week they met, years before. Marty bitched about Stan's laziness. But he knew that Stan found the gold easier and faster than he did. It was a fair partnership.
Stan tugged his sweatshirt hood down tight and his gloves out of his back pocket, tossing the shovel and bucket onto the trailside, where he could pick them up later. If it snowed a few inches, the tools would be buried. And since he'd conveniently broken all his other shovels in the past three weeks, he wouldn't be able to work again until the snow melted.
Too bad.
He crossed the narrow stream and picked up the trail again on the other side, heading downhill. The creek cut a deep jagged swath through the mountainside, and retreating glaciers had, over the eons, left rugged boulders and gravel strewn along the walls and floor of the tiny canyon.
The farther downstream he went, the more popping he heard. Where the canyon widened into a tree-lined clearing, Stan found Marty leaning on his shovel, facing downstream. Marty never wore a cap, his sunburned bald head shone like a welcome beacon.
“Get to work!” shouted Stan, startling Marty. When Marty swung around there was a curious look on his face. He nodded back downstream.
“What's that, you think?” he asked, with just the slightest trace of a Scandinavian accent.
Stan shook his head, frowning in the direction of the noise.
“Can't figure it.” He moved up alongside Marty. “Sounds like Clive is celebrating something.”
“Celebrating?”
Stan shrugged. “You know. Fireworks?”
Marty gave him that look that said what are you, a dunce?
Stan hated that look.
“That isn't firecrackers,” insisted Marty. “Listen.”
For the first time Stan really considered what he was hearing. Marty was right. It didn't sound like firecrackers. It sounded like gunfire. Only there was something different about it.
“Sounds like shells going off. Raw shells. Like someone threw them in a fire,” said Marty.
That was it. The explosions had that odd pop to them. They didn't sound compressed like the explosion inside a gun. And there were no accompanying cracking noises that bullets made tearing through the trees.
“That's not right,” said Marty and Stan had to agree. Someone was trying to tell them something.
“I think we better get down to the store,” said Stan.
Marty nodded, dropping his shovel.
“Better grab a couple of rifles,” said Stan, following the smaller man down the trail to Marty's cabin.
2:04
THE CLICK OF THE latch on Damon's door mixed with the machine-gun chatter coming from the direction of the store. Micky froze on Damon's stoop, listening.
What the hell is that?
It sounded like ten strings of firecrackers going off at once.
But Clive didn't sell fireworks. Too much fire risk in McRay. And Alaskans celebrated with guns, not firecrackers.
On any other day Micky might have been just curious.
But after discovering Aaron's body—and having had the time on her run down the mountain to percolate some of the possibilities—she was increasingly apprehensive.
Ravens and jays screeched overhead, scattering. The noise was driving them up the valley.
Her own animal instincts told her to flee.
To hide.
She walked slowly back toward the main trail, listening, trying to understand the sound.
It sounded like fireworks. Only it wasn't.
What then?
Bullets.
But not the staccato, regular rhythm of a machine gun. Not the compact noise bullets made exiting a gun.
Bullets exploding.
Someone had put a lot of them into a fire. It sounded like cases of them.
Clive would never do anything like that. Like anyone else, he'd fire his rifle if he was in distress and keep firing. But he wouldn't set off a case of shells like that.
Aaron had been dead for hours.
El had had plenty of time to hike back down the trail and get to the store. If he was on a killing spree and Clive wasn't prepared, he could easily have murdered both Clive and Rita.
But that didn't explain the bursting bullets.
Or maybe she had it all wrong.
Maybe there was another explanation for the noise and El had already vanished up into the mountains to hide.
She hoped that he had.
Let the troopers find him and deal with him.
The popping noise died away just as she turned along the creek toward her cabin.
Toward El's.
El's place appeared through the trees, across the stream and she stopped.
The place looked deserted. But it always had that feel to it. The door was closed. She could see the padlock on its hasp. El was the only one in town who locked his door. But at least he couldn't be inside.
She breathed a little easier.
The one front window was very dark.
A drape?
The stream here was narrow and no deeper than her calves. She thought about crossing to investigate. But she had no time and she still wasn't armed.
That was the most important priority.
To get a gun.
There was no telling where El was right now.
For all she knew he could be behind the next bend in the trail.
2:05
DAWN WATCHED AS THE last of the rounds exploded in the flames. The fire was dying down. The rifle stocks and pistol grips were blackened fiery embers, the barrels redhot. El had disappeared inside the store.
It was growing colder by the minute. The winds were out of the north, blowing frigid air down right off the Pole.
When El returned, he had a rifle in his hands and his pistol was back in its holster. He leaned the rifle on the porch rail and strode to Clive's four-wheeler. He was talking and gesturing with his hands and once again Dawn had the queer sense that he believed he could communicate with the dead. She wondered if he was explaining to Clive just why Clive couldn't live in McRay any longer.
Grabbing Clive by the cuffs of his pants, El dragged his body toward the porch. Dawn looked away as Clive's head struck the ground.
When Dawn turned back, El had Clive halfway to the front steps. But it seemed to be more of a job than he had planned on. He leaned on his knees, huffing and puffing and still talking. Then he straightened, hands on his hips, breathing deeply, and surveyed the scene. Dawn remembered what he had said to her when she was hiding by the creek, about putting her inside with her mother to protect her from the animals. She wondered if he had stopped to put Howard inside their cabin.
El took another deep breath and grabbed Clive's legs again. Eventually he disappeared inside with the body.
Dawn seized that opportunity to crawl a little deeper into the alders. She wanted to be farther from the airstrip trail, should El decide to explore in that direction. But she also needed a good view of the store through the branches.
As long as El was inside the store she couldn't summon help. Her mother and Howard were dead and the mail plane wouldn't be comi
ng for hours. El knew the plane was coming and Dawn figured that he had that contingency all planned for too. It seemed to Dawn that he'd been masterminding this for a long time. That thought stirred a fire of rage in her stomach that didn't burn the fear out of her, but did give her a little strength.
El had murdered everybody he came into contact with and he had been planning on doing it since who knew when. Planning on murdering people who had never been anything but kind to him.
He came back out on the porch and took a long time peering around the clearing. Dawn was pretty sure that El had no idea that she had run from her hiding place by the creek up to the store. He hadn't seen her when he shot Rita.
That was about the only advantage she had.
El took another long look around, then shouldered the rifle, tapping the butt of the pistol with the palm of his right hand, as though tamping it into place. He stepped down onto the trail beside the four-wheeler and seemed to be admiring it. Then, he climbed on the machine and cranked the motor, whipping the Honda into a tight 180-degree turn.
He shot off up the trail toward Micky Ascherfeld's place.
Micky was alone.
And she didn't know El was coming or what he'd been doing.
But there was nothing that she could do for Micky now.
Dawn had her own troubles.
2:10
MICKY HURRIED DOWN THE trail to her cabin when she heard the reassuring sound of Clive's four-wheeler, but she was still a quarter mile from the cabin and from the sound, he was just reaching it from the other side.
Why was he returning?
He might have forgotten something simple like closing the door. Or he might have forgotten bringing something on her list. Clive was good about things like that.
She thought about the bursting shells.
Was it a warning?
Or something worse?
She hurried down the path, careful not to twist her ankle or rush through a turn and bust her ass.
The day was darkening, the frigid wind ripping through the trees.
It was starting to snow like a bastard.
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