Swing (Gun Pedersen Book 2)

by L. L. Enger

  43

  The whoom of the gas going up was all but drowned by the wind, but the tar shingles had absorbed enough to catch and hold the fire that ripped and danced against the storm. Flames leapt up ten feet, twenty, threatened to hush, then built up slow and hot as Gun hastily wrapped his oars in gas-drenched rags and laid them over the roof. In minutes the fire didn’t smell of fuel anymore but of tar and scorching kiln-dried pine, and even in the storm Gun felt the heat of it. He crouched at the corner of the lake-stone hut, watching the house, trusses roaring above him. It took longer than it should have. About the time he was starting to think, Too late, much longer and the roof’s gonna go, his front door swung open and he ducked out of sight. Two men. The hoods of their parkas were drawn up like blinders and they held rifles crossways on their chests as they waded down through the snow. Pick it up, move, go fast, go hard. Go in. Gun flattened against the stones. Held the forked spear close so the frozen tines pressed his cheek. Sensed the men as they reached the opposite side of the boat house from where he stood. In. He felt the tremor of the door being yanked open and needing to trust his plan lowered the spear and stepped around the corner. There was a thump and a windblown yell and he saw one of them stooping over the other where he lay half-in, half-out, the open door. He charged the one standing, the deep snow slowing him to madness until at last the guy looked up gaping, one armed his rifle to point at exactly the place where the wind-shell’s zipper opened to the throat and tried to fire but was delayed by mittened fingers just long enough to take the spear in the soft V beneath the rib cage. The man released his gun and a warble of high-pitched panic that made Gun loathe himself, but he grabbed for the rifle anyway, seeing as he did so the first man lying in the doorway senseless, the Danforth anchor on its side by his head. It had gone the way it had to. He realized now that the side of his face toward the boat house was cooking and he looked up to see the entire roof ablaze and screaming with the abundance of oxygen. With the spitted man gone quiet and a sense of debt he knew was misplaced Gun let go of the rifle and pulled the unconscious man out before the fire fell in on him. Then a chunk of rock next to his head blew itself into fine gray rain and he heard the far-off crackle of gunfire like popcorn in the storm. Men on his porch, shooting, swinging their coats on, and he dove on his face behind the corner of the boat house. And saw another gun. Pointed at him. In a hand that held him solid in the sights until he peered up and beheld its short square-bodied owner.

  “Jack,” Gun said.

  The pistol lowered. “Better late,” said Jack LaSalle.

  “Maybe,” said Gun, and then they were away down the jagged shore of Stony Lake, keeping the boat house between themselves and the rifles, knowing only the clean brute cut of the air in their throats and the drag of the snow as they ran.

  A quarter mile, a half. They’d left the open shore for the cover of trees, but it cost them speed and there was no covering or confusion of trail in such snow. Two feet of stiff powder. It was like trying to run with rubber hobbles on your ankles.

  “Warrior Point,” Gun gasped. His lungs filled, froze, plunged, said don’t mess with us no more.

  Jack nodded with his head and shoulders and kept the pace. Warrior Point Resort, a few hundred yards farther on. Old place, abandoned a few years back. Not the Alamo exactly but lots of empty buildings, and Jack had a pistol.

  And then he didn’t anymore. They crossed a small clear space in the pines where the wind stopped completely, and going through it was like moving across another season in a world that bore no noise, and just as they reached the trees again there was a small white hiss of bullet. Gun saw Jack look down at his hand, saw him register disbelief and stumble briefly until anger lifted him straight again and made him keep on. Blood sickled rhythmically onto the snow before him and Gun saw that he plowed the last ten yards into Warrior Point with his eyes jammed

  closed before holding up his right hand. It was bare, stripped of gun and leather glove, and where Jade’s thick index finger had been was a deep crimson hollow, like an empty eye socket filling with blood.

  44

  The first cabin they tried was locked, the door too heavy and well-bolted for any he-man nonsense, but the cabin nearest the lake had been roundly vandalized and opened up like a dead clam. Jack said, “Can’t stop here,” but his face was white and it was plain they had to. Gun had the wind-shell off, ripped a strip out of the back, ran to the door, scooped a handful of snow.

  “Pressure,” he said. He took Jack’s plundered hand and packed the wound with snow, then wound it as tightly as he could with the cloth and told Jack to hold it while he used what chairs there were to block the door closed.

  “Yah,” Jack said. He sat on the cigarette-scarred Formica of the kitchen table, rocking the pain. Behind him on the wall was an attempt at obscenity and a slogan in fuzzy copper spray paint: underachievers, class of ’91. Gun was suddenly busy at the stove, a ceramic-white antique connected to a tall steel cylinder. “Gun,” Jack said, “they’re gonna get here in about three seconds. You gonna have them in for coffee?”

  Gun had all four burners hissing. “There’s still gas.

  Smell.” He turned back to the stove, sniffed. “Not fast enough.” Not bothering to turn off the burners he bent, test rocked the stove once, got a grip, and lifted. It twisted free of the wall and the cylinder tipped and fell, crinkling the copper pipe that fed gas to the stove. The hiss got louder.

  “What, more fires?” Jack said.

  “Maybe it gets their minds off us. Maybe it gets somebody else’s attention.”

  “Maybe we’re out of smarts.” Jack coughed into his hands.

  The gas was enough now to scorch the lungs, shrivel the lining of the nostrils. Almost there. Breathing shallow as a kitten Gun grappled the big cylinder to a standing position. Lifted it cleanly, balanced it on his palms. Heard two firm knocks at the front door, almost polite, and the voice of Casper Leavitt: “Hello, Pedersen. Don’t this weather make the snot run?” Then he jerked the cylinder up over his head and brought it down hard on the edge of the stove, straight across the nozzle. Ceramic finish splintered, something hit the door with the weight of a black bear forcing it half a foot open, and the gas hiss became a full loose-nozzled squeal. “A match,” Gun whispered. He’d used his last sending up the boat house.

  “Don’t have one,” Jack said. The back door was just off the kitchen and without time to wonder who was watching it Gun and Jack slammed through and went for the trees. Behind them they heard the front door crash and go to ruin and the little cabin crowd up. The real air was a relief but underfoot the snow seemed stickier, heavier, murderous to run through. Gun’s breath was shortening and he willed the reserves to open but they were all through, caverns filled with sand. He slowed. Jack clutched at his right hand and his eyes were closed again. But there was no chase, not yet, and in the sparse-standing trees still too near the cabin Gun turned and saw why.

  Louis had him in his sights. He was standing in the kitchen, just far enough back from the window to raise his large-bore rifle. Gun saw the foreshortened weapon lying easy in Louis’s big hands. There were lines of pleasure at the corners of his eyes, a little shine of tooth showing next to the trigger guard. Gun recognized the restless shin of shoulder as Louis started to squeeze. In that trigger-hair of time Gun wondered how he could breathe in all that gas, and then he dove and Louis fired. At the barrel’s tip he saw the tiny spark of flame, then the barrel disappeared in the sun white clot of fire that was suddenly the kitchen window. The clot was a pure square of glory until its own whoosh reached his ears, then it burst with a monstrous crunching explosion that brought the roof a foot off the walls, light coming out the crack between before it fell back, off center, leaning, and there was no more noise.

  A few shy flames explored along the roof-ridge of the cabin. At the kitchen window, no sign of Louis. Gun sat in the snow, seeing it gray now instead of white. After the fireball, nothing could look so bright. He looked over
at Jack, who’d been blown off his feet. He’d forgotten about his hand and the bandage was coming unwrapped, bleeding again. Gun thought he had never understood the gift that was destruction.

  And they got to their feet and went to the cabin, which after the shock was just settling into a good burn, and there found that Casper had somehow lived. He sat upright upon his butt in the snow, five feet outside the doorway he’d been lucky enough to be blown through. His thick brows were bunched over eyes gone bloody and sightless and he held his heavy arms straight out from the shoulders, tentatively, the arms tipping and balancing like a ropewalker’s. His face was beflecked with bits of Louis.

  “Casper,” Gun said.

  “Oof,” Casper said in the loud voice of the newly deaf. “Louis.”

  Gun said, “Can you see anything? Hear?”

  Casper slowly pulled in his wings and folded them like a child in a storm. His legs were disappearing in the still-heavy snow.

  This time Gun shouted. “Casper!”

  It got through. “Pedersen?”

  “Yes!”

  Hearing now, however faintly, Casper lowered his voice. He shook his head, made no attempt to stand. “I guess you’ll be braggin’ now,” he said. “Do you know, I never lost before, and now here it is. Oof. I can’t even see. My ass is freezing off and I can’t even watch it go. Lotus!”

  “Dead!” Gun said, bending to Casper’s ear.

  “Yes. He would be.” Casper ungloved a hand and reached up, stroked blood off his well-bred nose. “Never owned a mind, that one. What I’m tellin’ you, you try to pass on the attributes you got, improve the family, but sometimes it don’t take. Now the other fellows—dead, all of them?”

  Gun looked at Jack dragging a half-conscious man out the cabin door. There was groaning. Not loud enough for Casper to hear.

  “Not all,” Gun said.

  “You’ll be wanting to finish it, then,” said Casper. It didn’t seem to bother him. He sat waiting, not blinking as snowflakes landed in his eyes.

  Gun crouched again, the cold getting to him now like he was back in the freeze of Jack Knife Lake. He shouted into Casper’s ear, “You’re an old man. You should die at home.”

  “Oof, shit,” said Casper.

  45

  Actually three of them lived, though none felt good enough to be all that happy about it. Casper had gone to muttering and casting his arms about in the dark around him; the other two needed salve and tape and a little hot chicken broth in Gun’s kitchen. Funny, how the malice disappeared now that the old man was too weak to stir it up.

  The snow kept dropping down, piling up high on the eaves and branches, not drifting so much since the wind had died. Jack sat on a kitchen stool with his disinfected right hand knotted in his left. Casper’s men drank broth in silence, likely thinking of the others. There’d been two of them whole, and then what they could find of Louis, and all of this they buried in the sand in the bed of one of the pickup trucks. When the broth was gone they saw that Casper had dropped to sleep in his straight-backed chair, and the bigger man picked him up like a midnight child and carried him out to his truck. Two drivers meant they had to leave one of the overbuilt trucks behind. They didn’t speak of it. Just started up, backed out onto the highway, and rumbled off slowly in respect of the snow.

  Gun thought of going to the phone, of course, and dialing the State Police. You boys might want to watch for a couple of big four-wheelers, sporting Florida plates and heading south. If you care to have a look, you’ll find they’re loaded with sand and dead men. But

  then he thought about the questions they’d have for him. Hours of questions. Days. Like who are these guys anyway, and why are some of them dead? And why didn’t you call us earlier? And though Gun had the answers, the right ones, he didn’t have the will or the strength at this point to put them into words. Instead, he sat at the table letting his coffee go cold and he pictured Casper slouched on the bench seat of the truck, fighting himself through a troubled, coughing sleep. He pictured the abandoned vehicle in the snow outside the cabin and schemed half a dozen ways to make it disappear. Within an hour’s drive were tracts of forest, vast and dense and penetrated only by overgrown logging trails. Just drive in a mile or two and park it. There was also the lake, deep, more than a hundred and fifty feet in places. Plenty of other vehicles down there already, too. He stayed away from the phone.

  The strangest thing about not having any food in the house was how long Gun took to notice it. Two days went by in which he slept late, then rose and went into the poststorm newness to walk dreaming in the snow. To believe the landscape, none of it had happened; only the fires. His boat house was a mess, a stone foundation filled with hull and cinders, and the cabin at Warrior Point was plain gone except for the melted appliances. Nobody’d even noticed it yet. You want help, never have a fire in a blizzard.

  On the third day Gun noticed that his push-ups lacked definition. They bobbed a little, and there weren’t as many of them. He sat up, felt the whiskers on his cheeks. He thought, Oh. Food.

  But there wasn’t anything, just some buttermilk that had been in the fridge since before the call from Moses and a little of Carol’s cold goose. He tossed it out.

  Two hours’ shoveling freed the old Ford and had

  him shaking with a weakness he somehow recognized. It seemed to him more than exhaustion and hunger, more than the aftershock of fear and proximity of death. It was, he thought suddenly, the soul of cold itself, and it had turned on him. Before, the purity of cold had always worked for him, given his lungs the clean shock they seemed to need; cold simmered his blood and lined his brain. In the cold he’d worked his hardest, and loved it. And now, somehow, it was different. The frozen air tapped his strength and muddied thought. Cold was a thing to be survived.

  The truck’s old engine started without a fight, knocked around a little and evened down into a comfortable roar. Gun steered it out of the garage, turned the heater on with the fan low until things warmed up. Shivering hollow-gutted inside the parka he fought the cold. It’s this snow, he thought, that’s the difference. There’s too much blood in it.

  He bought bright red meat in Stony, a chilly bagful of it, and also some pale broccoli and asparagus, potatoes, milk, Swiss Miss. He passed a pyramid of oranges that were somehow fresh and the scent gave him Diane for a moment and his gut warmed, but only briefly. The checkout girl looked at him for too long on the way out, as if his face gave her worries she didn’t need.

  The way home took him past the newspaper and Carol’s office. He drove slowly and saw her faithful Plymouth, angle parked. She’d be there, she said it herself, if he wanted company.

  Too soon to be sure about that.

  At home he started a modest roast: seared it on both sides, the noise of it rising like steam in his ears, the beef smell almost pain. When red had gone to deep brown he added pepper, salt, water from the kettle. Potatoes, some of the asparagus. He left the kitchen for the davenport and lay down. There was sun on the windows. With the storm gone away February had entered Minnesota, and Gun knew he’d feel March coming on sooner than usual this year.

  Sweet Lord, how he needed to.

  In the kitchen the roast began to fret and bubble. Gun hunched himself into the davenport, closed his eyes. When the dark hours come, sleep, sleep long.

  Read all the Gun Pedersen mysteries:

  #1: Comeback

  #2: Swing

  #3: Strike

  #4: Sacrifice

  #5: The Sinners’ League

 

 

 
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