“Smart-ass.” I put my arm around Ben to steady him as he hobbled around the floor of the hayloft, swearing in French under his breath, until he felt steady enough to walk by himself. He shambled out of the shed, blinking in the bright sunlight.
The cows had smelled the water and moved to the trough, shouldering each other aside in their eagerness to drink, but they gave way to us as we bellied up. While Labeck drank, I kept my eyes on the cattle. They were Herefords, mottled red and white, generally a peaceable breed, wearing vaguely worried expressions, as though wondering why they didn’t have bigger udders. I checked to make sure no bulls had gotten in with the ladies. Bulls were bad news.
“Maybe the farmer will come out to slop the cows this morning,” Labeck said hopefully, gazing off in the distance, trying to spot signs of civilization: a cellphone tower, a jet trail, a flashing neon sign for Wisconsin Dells.
“I don’t think so. Beef cattle are pretty self-sufficient. In storms they just turn their rumps to the wind. Give them enough fodder and you can leave them alone all winter.”
“So which way to the nearest Starbucks?”
Tough choice. Walking in the storm last night, we’d completely lost our sense of direction.
“We should try to find that highway we saw last night,” Labeck said. “Can you hear traffic?”
We both listened, but we could only hear the snorts and shufflings of the cattle, and the creak of the windmill. Then the crack of a rifle broke the stillness and we both jumped. It seemed to come from several miles away on a wooded ridge to the north. Another shot followed the first. I stood there, paralyzed.
“Hunters,” Labeck said. “It’s the first week of deer season.”
Just in case we weren’t in enough trouble, now we had to worry about some trigger-happy yahoo mistaking us for deer. Although I was wearing navy and Labeck was wearing black, not traditional deer-hide colors, some hunters would shoot at anything that moved. Or anything that didn’t move. The lawn tractor on my family’s farm had four bullet holes in it, courtesy of hunters who possessed the visual acuity of Stevie Wonder.
We went back to the shed, shared half a package of peanut M&M’s I found in my coat pocket, and washed it down with Agua de Cattle Trough. Running through our choices, we opted for the best of both worlds: we would walk through the field but stay close to the woods, so we could duck into the cover of the trees if our pursuers spotted us. We both felt a growing sense of urgency. We could feel Kennison’s crew out there hunting us.
“They may try to pick us off at long range,” Labeck said. “Make it look like a hunting accident.”
Quickly, we gathered up our stuff. I filled the water bottle and stuck it in my purse, then knotted on my blanket cloak and slung my purse across my chest, while Labeck tied on the jumper cables. We moved out, heading west across the field, which lay in a valley between two ridges. A few of the Herefords straggled along with us like gracious hostesses seeing us off after a sleepover. There were deep drifts of snow in spots, and we frequently had to lift our legs high to get through. It must have been agony for Labeck, but he just set his jaw and endured it. This was one hell of a tough guy.
We walked for what felt like miles, but was probably only a few hundred yards. When we were out of sight of the shed, we stopped for a minute to rest, both of us red-faced and panting for breath.
“Isn’t today Thanksgiving?” Labeck said. “We were supposed to be at your farm.”
“They’ll assume we’re late. Even if we don’t show up, they won’t worry. It just means more pie for the rest of them.”
We walked for a while, warm from the exercise. “What about you?” I asked. “Do Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving?”
“We have a harvest feast in mid-October—I guess that’s our equivalent.”
“Turkey and football?”
“Hockey and a big supper. My grand-maman prepares most of it. My favorite is her poutine.”
“What’s that?”
“French fries with gravy and cheese curds.”
I made a gagging noise. “Sounds like the dog’s dinner.”
Ben laughed. His breath steamed out in a white cloud. “It’s fabulous. When you come to my folks’ house I’ll get Grand-maman to make you a big serving.”
My heart gave a delighted skip. He wanted me to meet his folks?
“Then there’s the tourtine. Very traditional. Pork pies served with a side of beets.”
“So it’s like a punishment? Pierre, eat your spinach or you’re getting the tourtine?”
Despite the fact that we were lost, starving, and being pursued by homicidal maniacs, we found time to insult each other’s national cuisine.
“Where do Yanks get off, sneering at our stuff?” Labeck said. “I ate Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house last year, and his mother served this sweet-potato glop with toasted marshmallows on top. Marshmallows! How does that fit in with the Pilgrims?”
“Maybe the Pilgrims brought the marshmallows on the Mayflower?”
Labeck gave a shudder of disgust.
“Then after we give thanks for the marshmallows, we pass around the Founding Fathers’ green beans and canned onion rings casserole,” I said.
He muttered something in French that sounded like “execrable,” which I assumed meant the same as it did in English, except in French it sounded snottier.
“I’m thinking of uninviting you to the Maguire homestead,” I said. “I don’t think you should meet my family.”
“Am I that bad or are they that bad?”
“My brothers have driven away every boyfriend I’ve ever had. They think it’s funny. First off, you get the farmer handshake.”
“The bone crusher? Been there.”
“Then they invite you to help with chores that look easy and fun, but they’re not.”
“Like milking the bull?”
“That’s always a good one. Then there’s having you stack hay bales on a wagon, but running the bales through so fast you can’t keep up and the whole load topples over.”
“They’ve done that?”
“It’s the Darwin principle. They weed out the weaklings so I mate with someone worthy of Maguire genes.”
Swapping stories about the horrible things our littermates had done to us helped keep our minds off our misery. Under other circumstances it would have been fun. We walked for about two hours, making good progress, but then the field petered out in woods.
“Merde,” Labeck muttered.
Merde was right. I’d been certain that the field would lead us to a farm or a road, but now we were back in the woods, in all senses of the word.
“I think this is the state forest,” Labeck said. “Now what?”
I studied him, trying not to be too obvious about it. He looked tired, but his color was good and his wounds weren’t bleeding. “We could retrace our steps, try another direction.”
“Shame to waste all that effort.”
“Right. So into the woods.”
The snow beneath the trees was shallower than it was in the open, and the walking was easier. The air held the sharp, nose-prickly aroma of pine. Blue jays called from a nearby cluster of cedars; chickadees flitted through the underbrush; squirrels leaped from branch to branch. A gust of wind shook a pine bough, showering snow down Labeck’s collar and knocking off my cap. I retrieved it, brushing off the snow, taking my time because Labeck needed a rest, even if he was too proud to admit it.
He helped me tug my cap on. “What’s this?” Gently he touched the scar on my left cheekbone.
“Nothing.”
“It’s where that thug burned you when you were on the run, isn’t it?”
“You never noticed it before?”
“I guess I’ve never seen you in direct sunlight before. Your hair always covers it.”
“I asked Dr. Demento about getting it removed.”
“Removed? Why?”
“It’s ugly, duh.”
“It’s just a little scar
tissue, Mazie. Badge of courage.”
His eyes were the color of root beer in the bright morning light, his cheeks windburned red. He cupped my jaw in his hands, brought his face down to mine and kissed me. His nose was cold. His lips were warm. His eyelashes made shadows on his cheekbones; I know because I peeked. Then I closed my eyes again to fully experience the most wonderful kiss of my life, a kiss that thawed me from cowlick to toes, a kiss I returned in spades, putting all those weeks of longing into it, touching my tongue to his, giving him the full-court press, shamelessly bumping my bumpy parts against his chest and grinding my pelvis against his, in case there was any question how much I wanted him. My lips had become ultrasensitive to the slightest movement of Ben’s lips. He slipped his tongue inside my mouth, filling me with ecstatic sensations that left me reeling and light-headed. Finally we broke apart, breathing hard, staring into each other’s eyes, smiling.
“You are the A-Rod,” I said breathlessly.
“What?”
“Of kissing.”
He frowned. “You kissed Alex Rodriguez?”
I frowned back at him. “Don’t you remember what you said last night?”
“No.”
I unwound myself from him. “You said—”
That’s when we heard the buzz.
Labeck, who hadn’t grown up on the frozen tundra for nothing, caught on before I did. He jerked my hand into his and pulled me into a run.
“Is that a—”
“Snowmobiles,” he said. “At least two.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Jumper cables. Don’t leave home without ’em.
—Maguire’s Maxims
When I taught high school, I’d once volunteered at a fund-raising benefit, agreeing to a stint in the dunk tank. The dunk tank had been sitting around a chilly gym all day, and though the water may have started out warm, by the time the school’s star pitcher stepped up and hurled the baseball straight at the trip lever, the water was ice cold. As I plunged into it, a billion trillion capillaries screamed in agony.
That’s what I felt like now. Instant dunk tank. All this time I’d been picturing the three ghouls creeping through the woods on foot, hampered by the same rough footing we ourselves faced. But snowmobiles could go where cars couldn’t, and they could move at seventy miles an hour. Tracking us through the snow would have been as easy as following a trail of gumdrops. It sounded as though they were coming directly toward us, the snarl of the machines louder by the second.
But maybe it wasn’t the bad guys. Maybe it was law officers, a snowmobile rescue team. Maybe we should—
A branch just above Labeck’s head exploded. We hit the ground as the rifle clap echoed. Checking each other to make sure neither of us had been hit, we began crawling on hands and knees, Labeck leading. When we reached a thicker patch of woods we jumped to our feet and began zigzagging from tree to tree. The snowmobiles were louder now, their engines producing a distinctive rising and falling noise that sounded like a malfunctioning Mixmaster. Stopping to catch my breath, I risked a look behind. Kennison burst out of a cluster of pines on a black snowmobile, with Gozzy and Petrov close behind, riding double on a battered Arctic Cat. Kennison braked, brought his machine to a sharp stop, stood up, and got off a shot. A moment later, Gozzy’s shotgun boomed. Branches exploded; jagged splinters of wood sprayed like shrapnel; pine needles rained down.
We ran again, but the snowmobiles were closing in on us. My back itched in the exact spot where the bullet would smash into me. My breath was coming in painful, choppy gasps, my ribs seemed to be jabbing into my lungs, and I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace much longer. Labeck was in superb physical condition and wasn’t flagging, but his wound had reopened and he was dribbling blood.
The shotgun boomed again. Something punched hard into my right side and I thought I’d been hit, then saw that my purse, strapped across my chest, had been shot to shreds. Coins dribbled out. Lifesavers, lipsticks, aspirin, hairbrush—everything tumbled to the ground—including my cellphone, shaken out of some mysterious hiding place. Great—now it showed up; now, when it was too late!
We punched through a head-high tangle of blackberry bushes, hoping the snowmobiles couldn’t get through, and emerged, thorn-raked, on the other side of the thicket into a stand of huge old oaks and hickories. A yard or two ahead, Labeck suddenly dropped to the ground and rolled behind a tree. Oh God—he’d been hit! I staggered toward him, but he urgently motioned me toward a nearby tree, a shagbark hickory directly across from his oak tree. I collapsed at the foot of the hickory, clutching my aching sides, gasping for breath. Did Labeck really think we wouldn’t be spotted here? Our tracks in the snow would give away our location. The snowmobiles filled my head with an earsplitting roar, the sound of our doom bearing down upon us.
A jumper cable snaked through the air and slapped my thigh. Confused, I stared at Labeck. He pointed and slashed his hand across his throat.
Then I understood.
The Arctic Cat exploded out of the blackberry thicket and zoomed toward us, aiming straight for the gap between our trees. They were twenty feet away … ten … they were almost on us—
“Now!” Labeck yelled.
Jumping up, I gripped my end of the cable and hauled back with all my strength. Labeck yanked from the other side, pulling the cable taut between the trees. Hurtling along at fifty miles an hour, Gozzy didn’t see the cable until the instant he drove into it, hitting it at neck level, smashing into it so hard that the cable seared through my gloves and snapped out of my grip. If the cable had been wire, Gozzy’s bloody head would have bounced into the branches like a home-run baseball, but the jumper wires were sheathed in rubber and merely clotheslined him, sending his whole body slamming backward, knocking into Petrov behind him. Both men were flung violently off the snowmobile, while the machine careened on riderless until it hit a giant upraised tree root, overturned, and stalled out.
We ran to the men, who lay sprawled on the ground a few feet apart. Gozzy was on his back, semiconscious and moaning hoarsely, while Petrov lay crumpled at the base of a tree, unconscious, his left arm and leg splayed at odd angles.
“Get their guns,” Labeck said.
The force of the impact had spun Gozzy’s shotgun out of his hands and sent it sailing into the blackberry brambles. Thrusting through snags and thorns, I retrieved the weapon, handling it gingerly as though it were an angry scorpion.
For a moment we’d forgotten Kennison, but now an engine howled and he rocketed into view on his snowmobile. He slewed to a sudden, violent stop, obviously shocked to see his crew out of the game. But he recovered quickly, rose to a shooting stance on the snowmobile’s struts, raised his rifle, and sighted on Labeck.
Not on your Botox-peddling life, you sack of weasel shit! I didn’t think; I simply hiked the shotgun to my shoulder, swung it around, and without bothering to aim, jerked the trigger.
The rifle and the shotgun roared simultaneously. I found myself on my back in the snow, stunned, my ears ringing and static-filled. Then Labeck was leaning over me, looking pale and frantic. “Mazie?”
“What’d you say?”
“Are you hurt?” His voice was a deep baritone, and I was having trouble picking up the lower registers, but my hearing came back by fits and starts.
“I’m okay—just recoil.” I sat up, ears still full of static, and scrutinized Labeck.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine. His shot went wild. He took off after you hit him.”
“I didn’t kill him?”
“No, but he’s going to be picking out buckshot for a while.”
“Good!” I said viciously.
Labeck’s eyebrows rose. “I thought you hated guns.”
“I do. But I love you more than I hate guns.”
I was dazed, nearly deaf, and too deliriously happy that we were both alive to control what came out of my mouth.
“Mazie?”
“Yes?” I held my breath. Ben was goi
ng to say I love you back. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear it or not.
“Would you please, very carefully, hand me that shotgun?”
Handing over the gun, I felt a dizzying mixture of relief and disappointment. Had Labeck heard what I’d said? Maybe it was just that he was too intent on cracking open the shotgun and examined its innards. “How did you know it was loaded?” he asked.
“You have to load those things?”
He shook his head and looked at me. “Unbelievable.”
Behind us, Alex Petrov groaned. He was trying to struggle upright, but his body wasn’t cooperating. His face was white and drawn with pain. One eye was swollen and still speckled with red dye where Labeck had paintballed him yesterday. Gozzy was coming around, too, sitting up and blinking like a dinosaur who’s time-traveled to the future.
“Grrrk,” he said, clutching his throat, which had a livid purple slash across it the diameter of a jumper cable. “Ummma ulll ooo,” he growled, sounding like an ex-smoker with an artificial larynx. He didn’t seem to have any other serious injuries, living proof that God looks after drunks and drug addicts. He used a tree branch to haul himself to his feet, gazed malevolently at Labeck and lurched toward us. “Gummeee umm guhhn, yooo fuggng prrsy!”
Labeck casually swung the gun around and pointed it toward Gozzy’s chest. “That’s far enough. Sit down.”
Labeck’s default mode is polite, laid-back Canadian. But now he was in hockey warrior mode: eyes hard, mouth tight. He looked like the kind of person who would do bad things to you if you crossed him.
Gozzy wasn’t reading the signals correctly. He halted, but he wore a you-wouldn’t-dare sneer on his face. “Goh kill ooo,” he rasped.
“Now what?” I whispered.
“Tie them up, haul their sled off that tree, and ride out of here,” Labeck muttered.
I could see lots of things wrong with this plan. We weren’t out of the woods yet, in any sense of the word. Tying up Gozzy meant getting close to him. If I did, he’d grab me and turn me into a hostage. And Kennison was still out there somewhere. Wounded or not, he was dangerous. Mr. Thin-the-weaklings-out-of-the-herd could still find a place where he could snipe at us from a safe distance.
Crazy for You: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 24