Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  It was a relief when Lenore turned inland, into the forested hills. Although the road was paved and better maintained than the streets of Chicago, winter’s freeze-thaw cycle had created cracks and holes. The Jeep had a bone-jolting suspension; I began to suspect that Lenore was heading straight for the holes to show us we were too delicate for the route we’d chosen.

  Once we left the county road for Cowboys Road, we left pavement as well. The Jeep grabbed the gravel surface, but the jolting became more intense. I thought I heard a louder engine above the noise of the Jeep, but I didn’t see anything else on the road.

  Lenore heard it, too. She slowed down long enough to stick her head out the window.

  “Steve Thuxton’s up there in his helicopter. Wonder if someone’s lost. It is goddamn easy to disappear in these woods; you two understand that? Bogs that aren’t on any maps, lynx, bears coming out of hibernation—you got to know what you’re doing.”

  Rasima paled. I probably did as well. Even sheltered in a house, how had Tarik managed on his own?

  We were passing a sign pointing to the portage trailhead when a thunderclap shook the Jeep. A boulder splintered and a fist-size piece struck the windshield. A series of loud whines and pops and the ice and dirt along the road churned and spat.

  “What the hey—” Lenore shouted.

  “They’re shooting from the chopper!” I cried. “Get off the road, get under the trees!”

  She wrestled with the steering and the gears and drove into the ditch by the road and up the other side into the woods. The gunfire stopped; the helicopter noise receded.

  Lenore was furious. She hit a speed-dial button on her phone. “Steve Thuxton, what in hell was that about? You taking wolf hunters up? You damn near—what? Who?”

  She was silent as someone spoke at length on the other end. When she hung up, her face was white with anger.

  “Okay. You two, out of the car, now. When I saw this gal with an Arab scarf, I wondered, but it’s a free country, more or less. I have a gun with me and I’m prepared to use it: we’re on the lookout for terrorists this side of the border, whatever they want to do in Canada.”

  “Who is Steve Thuxton?” I asked. “And what was that shooting about?”

  “As if you didn’t know.” She pulled her gun from under her seat. It was a Glock, but had dirt on it from the car floor.

  “Pretend I don’t know. We’re up here to hike near the Pigeon River. Who was shooting at you?”

  Lenore shook her head, eyes blazing. “Thuxton told me he has a couple of ICE agents looking for Arab terrorists, father and daughter, hiding in these woods.”

  “If you think I’m anyone’s father, let me explain the difference between the x and y chromosome,” I said. “But please ask Mr. Thuxton to describe his ICE agents. If they are the size of redwood trees, with bearskins on their heads passing for hair, they are not with ICE: they are members of the Russian mob. They will kill him and you, and me, and my niece for no reason other than they get a great deal of pleasure out of hurting people.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Lenore’s mouth was uncompromising. “You get out. You hike if you really are hikers and I’ll go back and see who’s who.”

  She waved the gun at Rasima, whose own face was pinched with fear. Rasima unbuckled herself and got out of the Jeep on shaking legs.

  “You’d best keep that gun in a box or a holster,” I said as I climbed out with our backpacks. “The Glock Nineteen doesn’t like a lot of dirt in its muzzle; it could backfire on you.”

  Lenore only ordered me to shut the door; she needed both hands to handle the Jeep but she was afraid to put the Glock down in case I or my terrorist companion dove for it. She backed up the side of the ditch with an energy that almost tilted the Jeep onto its left side.

  “I’m sorry, Victoria,” Rasima whispered. “Now I have put you in danger of your life.”

  I shook my head. “This is like the weeping that you said wastes time and energy. Recriminations also waste time and energy. We’re near the Portage Trailhead; we’ll put on our boots and micro-spikes, get water and snacks, and map our route.”

  62

  Fire and Ice

  The helicopter stayed close to the Border Trail. As much as possible, Rasima and I kept to the trees, although pushing through bracken and sidestepping bogs made our going rough. I wasn’t sure how visible we were through the spruce canopy above us, but at least no one shot at us. No bears came after us, either.

  We should have bought walking sticks when we were at the Buy-Smart. Large chocolate bars, a utility knife, air mattresses, a camp stove, all these things would have been a help. No wonder Lenore Pizzola thought “we gals” weren’t really hikers: we weren’t. When we found some fallen branches, we used them as improvised walking sticks, which made the going easier.

  We were working with a compass and Felix’s handwritten instructions—he had worried too much about someone hacking into his computer to type them up.

  As we walked, Rasima filled me in on Felix’s part in the story. When he drove up here with Tarik, he had rented a cheap cabin near Grand Marais, one where the owners didn’t provide any housekeeping. Tarik hid there during the day while Felix scouted the border.

  “They couldn’t call me, of course, and I sat in Chicago for four days completely terrified, but they were frightened, too. Several of the native people had noticed Felix on repeated days: very few people live here, and a stranger stands out.

  “The native people told Felix he needed to be very careful, as the immigration border patrol was—there is a word, I can’t remember it—anyway, they are active. Finally, Felix felt he had to confide in someone and he took the risk with these people.”

  They offered Tarik the use of an abandoned house, deeper in the woods, not on a marked trail, but not hard to walk to if you knew where you were going. They promised to look after Tarik until Felix and Rasima came back with the Dagon; then they could try to cross the border farther inland, when the weather made walking easier.

  It was that house Rasima and I were trying to reach. We followed Felix’s instructions painstakingly, left the Border Trail after hiking alongside it for 1.23 miles, struck northwest-north through the woods. Over the singing of birds and the rustling of ground animals, we kept hearing the helicopter circling, moving away to the west, looping out toward the big lake, returning.

  Rasima tripped over a log and fell headfirst into a thornbush. She didn’t let out as much as a whimper as I pulled thorns from her face and hands. I slipped on an ice patch and landed in mud. Good camouflage, I muttered, using my jacket sleeve to wipe enough mud from my eyes to carry on. We took turns with the compass and directions. Our spirits sagged as cold and fatigue sapped our reserves: neither of us had slept last night, but I worried especially about Rasima, weakened by her time in prison. It was past three o’clock and the dark woods were darkening further as the sun began to sink behind the hills.

  We had veered off course when Rasima spotted the house to our left. Its moss-covered gray stone walls blended in with the surrounding woods.

  The house wasn’t much bigger than the shed where Reno had been held in the forest preserve. As we approached, we saw a stovepipe emerging from the single window on the north side. Additional pipe had been added and laid on the ground so that smoke emerged some thirty feet from the house, where it dissipated into the underbrush.

  Rasima ran to the door, fatigue forgotten, crying, “Baba, Baba, enema Rasima!”

  The narrow door opened and a man emerged, almost as small as Rasima. He flapped his arms, shooing her away, shouting something in Arabic. Rasima stopped, her face suffused with hurt. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. A big white man appeared behind Tarik. He was wearing a new orange hunting jacket, but his graying hair was still pomaded away from his face in a sculptured side sweep.

  “Gervase Kettie!” I stepped forward, smiling. “I think of you more as the Havre-des-Anges beach kind of guy, not a woodsman. I hope you left yo
ur Sumerian serpent at home—if it got caught on the trees you’d have a hard time finding it.”

  “Whoever you are, get out of the way. I want the girl and I’ll shoot you to get her.”

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski, Gervase. We met outside the elevators in the Grommet Building a few weeks ago. You were with your lawyers, who don’t seem able to protect you from people hacking into your Rest EZ system, do they? What is it money can’t buy? Not just happiness, but savvy. You have so much money and so much power you forget you need a little old-fashioned common sense.”

  “Vic!” Rasima gasped next to me. “Don’t stir him up.”

  “He’s like Bashar,” I said. “Placate him or stir him up, he’ll still move forward like a puffing bull.” I lowered my voice. “Tell your baba in Arabic that when I start to run he must drop to the ground and get out of the way. You, too.”

  I kept walking toward the house, keeping a tree more or less between me and Kettie. A movement on my right side caught the corner of my eye. Mitty, the bodyguard, automatic weapon under his arm.

  “Yarborough’s first wife. The ballbuster,” Kettie said. “I remember you now. Dickie will be glad to know I’ve shot you for him, cleared one mess out of his life. I want the gold statue, I want it now. And I will shoot to kill.”

  I stuck my hand in my backpack and pulled out a dark sock. “It’s in this bag. You want it, come and get it.”

  I ducked low and began to run a zigzag course past the house. Rasima shouted in Arabic. Gunfire. Shouts, screams, feet crashing after me. I couldn’t risk turning. My skin prickled, expecting a bullet.

  I stepped in a bog, pulled my foot free, swerved right. A stich in my side, but the crashing and flailing behind me propelled me forward.

  The river appeared so unexpectedly that I didn’t have time to stop. I fell forward, face landing on ice, feet in water so cold they were numb almost before I pulled them out.

  Brown water, churning uneasily under blocks of ice. I didn’t try to stand but began sliding on my butt across the ice toward the far bank. The block I was on cracked, started to break. I stretched out an arm for another piece and managed to slide across just as the first block splintered.

  I saw Kettie’s orange jacket. He was running full tilt, but Mitty grabbed him a second before he fell into the river. Mitty fired at me. My second ice block began to crack, and I slithered, feet down in the water, arms grasping the edges. I twisted, flopped forward. The ice bounced but righted itself. A small branch floated by. My hands were almost useless, lumps of ice themselves, but I managed to grasp the branch and use it as a makeshift paddle.

  I was in the middle of the river. The current was strong and spun me around, pulling me toward the big water. I braced myself with my branch and heaved myself to my feet.

  “Come for your Dagon, Kettie: it’s going to be in Canada in five minutes.”

  I swung the sock over my head in a loop. Mitty started to fire again, but Kettie shoved him away—if a bullet got me midriver the Dagon was gone forever.

  I turned my back on him and began a clumsy steering of my ice sheet. It was shrinking, water was sloshing over my feet. I banged into a tree that the river was carrying. The impact knocked me off my feet. I grabbed at the tree as I fell and managed to straddle it. The tree slammed against an ice mass that heaved with the swollen water. An unstable dam of ice connecting the United States to Canada sixty feet away. I can go sixty feet to Canada. One inch after another, it’s how we get there, get to safety, to freedom.

  River fog rose in front of me. Cold owned me. I turned and saw Kettie’s orange jacket, coming toward me fast. He’d made his way to the American end of the ice dam and was almost running toward me.

  “It’s yours, Gervase, you win,” I screamed, and hurled the wet sock toward him.

  Kettie lunged and grabbed the sock as it hit the water. He pried it open and stuck his hand inside. When he realized all he had was wet wool, he roared with fury and flung it into the river. Mitty fired again, a rifle spraying bullets across the ice. There came a sudden roar; the ice dam broke and the river hurled billionaire and bodyguard out toward the big water.

  63

  Border Crossing

  Someone grabbed me from behind but there was nothing left in me. They rolled me in a blanket; I had no strength to resist. I was a lifeless rug locked into the back of a van. I woke to bright lights, a hand on my neck. I beat at it feebly.

  “Stop, miss, stop. You’re safe. You’re at a hospital.”

  Members of the Anishinaabe Nation had lifted me from the icy rocks along the riverbank on the Canadian side, but I learned that only later. Later, at the hospital in Thunder Bay. Later, when I was recovering from hypothermia and frostbite, while Canadian immigration authorities confronted me over my illegal crossing.

  My passport was in my backpack, which I’d dropped as I ran through the woods on Wednesday. I took refuge in my injuries and feigned sleep under the weight of their interrogation. I didn’t want to explain what I was doing at the border until I knew where Rasima was and whether I needed to protect her from authorities on either side of the river. The Anishinaabe provided more help: they found my passport and delivered it to the Canadians.

  Lying in my Thunder Bay hospital bed, I saw Kettie’s dead body on the evening news. He and Mitty had been swept down the river toward Superior, but the current had thrown them onto a rock at the river’s mouth. A Thunder Bay camera crew showed the heroic efforts of the local paramedics to revive the pair.

  “The Pigeon River claims more than one life a year from inexperienced tourists who think they can beat the ice or the rapids. Chicago detective V.I. Warshawski was exceptionally lucky to emerge with mild frostbite; the American mogul Gervase Kettie and his bodyguard, Dmitri Rakitin, were not so fortunate.”

  In the close-up of the rescue efforts, the camera lingered on the serpent ring on Kettie’s right hand. “We’ve learned that this unusual charm is a museum-quality piece from the ancient Middle East. Mr. Kettie was well known as a collector of artifacts from Iraq and Syria; his daughter told our reporter that this was a recent acquisition, one that he thought would bring him good fortune in the many-layered enterprises he oversaw. Sadly, it could not protect him from the Pigeon River’s treacherous crosscurrents.”

  I liked to think that the goddess had exacted revenge against Kettie for his savage dismemberment of her arms. My salvation had been a side effect, for which I was grateful. I would have to ask Sansen what kind of sacrifices a Sumerian goddess would expect for bestowing such an outsize favor.

  I hoped that her favors extended to protecting Rasima and her father, but I fretted all night in my hospital room, unable to ask about them for fear of alerting border patrols.

  The next day, the hospital allowed one of the Anishinaabe elders to visit; she told me what had happened. The elder said that the Anishinaabe had been alerted by the gunshots at Tarik’s hideout. They do not allow weapons on their land, except with a permit to hunt, issued by the tribal leadership. A group of men had raced to Tarik’s hideout, but by then Kettie and Mitty were chasing me through the woods. Mitty had tried to shoot Rasima and Tarik, but Kettie yelled that they would keep for later; they needed to get moving before I disappeared.

  The Anishinaabe wanted to take the Katabas to the tribal building for warmth and safety, but Rasima insisted on following Kettie: “We aren’t going to sit in safety while Victoria risks her life for us,” she said.

  It didn’t take much skill for the Anishinaabe to follow the trail of broken branches and muddy footsteps Kettie and I left. They reached the river as Kettie and Mitty headed onto the ice.

  “My cousins saw you in the river and were terrified for your safety but had no way to reach you. They texted our cousins on the Canadian side. Our cousins drove up with a raft but you were already falling off your log onto the riverbank.”

  She gave a dry laugh. “You were trying to fight them and they were trying to save you. As for the two dead men—when the ice
broke last week, dead tree branches formed a natural dam that blocked some of the ice. That’s where they were crossing, but when they started firing those weapons, the sound waves broke up the dam. I don’t know why they thought they could come onto our land to murder people, so I feel no grief at their passing.”

  I felt no grief myself. Someone with Kettie’s money and power could wrap himself in so many protective legal layers that I hadn’t been able to imagine a way to bring him to justice.

  Lenore Pizzola helped deal with authorities on both sides of the river. On my second day in the hospital, she showed up full of contrition. After she dumped Rasima and me out to meet our fates, she’d driven down to the U.S. border station at the mouth of the Pigeon River.

  “I said I knew they were after a pair of terrorists, but that their agents damn near destroyed my Jeep in the process. That got the border guards all lathered up because of course they didn’t have any agents up in a chopper. They radioed Steve, wanting to know what the hey was going on. By then, these two giants were pointing guns at him to make him stay up. I don’t know what they thought they’d do when he came down. Shoot him, too, maybe.”

  “They’re used to getting away with everything they do—assault, rape, murder,” I said. “They worked for a billionaire, their home is in Russia—no one ever arrested them, let alone made them face a judge.”

  Lenore made a face. “I guess that’s right. Steve told me they was looking for the house where your young gal’s father was living in the woods. They were guiding that Kettie fellow and another Russian from up above. Every now and then Steve would get a glimpse of you and your friend, and those two Russkies would laugh, but Steve couldn’t make out the lingo so he didn’t know what they were saying.”