Dead of Winter

by Gerri Brightwell

  The newspaper. Fisher can’t help himself. He wheels around until he’s spotted the pile of papers like a truncated pillar by the counter, feels a surge of panic as he hauls himself closer to read the headline. What’s it going to be? CABBIE CAUGHT UP IN MURDER PLOT? Or POLICE HUNTING TEEN KILLER? Which would make his blood run colder? He couldn’t say.

  The headline doesn’t make sense. His thoughts twist on one word: SLAIN. But the photo beneath it is of a young blond man. Not Brian. No, a cop, smiling, in his uniform. MISSING TROOPER FOUND SLAIN.

  Fisher lets out his breath, even bends forward in relief, as though all that’s kept him upright is fear.

  The fat kid’s looking at him and Fisher grabs up the paper and has to decide: Which guy? The fat one? Or the guy with the earrings and the worn-out look? If he wasn’t such a dumb-ass, he’d have asked Frisbee the guy’s name. Only he didn’t. He pretended he knew Bree had been dating someone, like he was the sort of dad who’d be cool about it, the sort of dad a daughter could really talk to.

  The fat kid calls out, “Ready, sir?”

  Fisher pretends not to hear. He tucks the newspaper under his arm and walks back through the short aisles, and lets his eyes run over the bars of chocolate, and the bags of hard candies, and when he’s worked his way across the store, he turns back to the checkout where the second guy’s hunched over his paper.

  Fisher slides his cup and a bearclaw onto a small patch of empty counter, but he has nowhere to put the newspaper except on the paper the guy’s reading. The guy looks up in annoyance, then turns to the cash register and sends his fingers darting over the buttons. He’s still looking at the screen when he calls out, “Four forty-eight, need a bag?”

  “No bag.” Fisher digs in his wallet for a five. He doesn’t lay it on the counter but holds it, and doesn’t let go when the guy tries to take it. “Hey,” Fisher says, “I think you know Bree Fisher. Is that right?”

  Only now does the guy look into his face. His eyes are a curious even gray like they’ve been punched out of tin, and tiny dark hairs show on the soft skin just above his cheeks. The hair gives him a grubby look, as though he’s rubbed soot into his face and not managed to wash it off. One hand rests on the plastic wrapper of the bearclaw, the other’s still holding the five, but he’s stopped dead. “Bree Fisher?” He shakes his head. “Never heard of her.”

  Fisher lets the guy take the five and ring it up in the cash register, and dump his change onto the stippled rubber mat by the take-a-penny dish. He’s already put the pastry and newspaper into a bag, and now he adds the receipt. He passes the bag to Fisher, says, “Have a good one,” then busies himself squirting cleaner from a bottle onto the screen of the register, and wiping it with a cloth in quick sleek movements, never mind that ­Fisher’s still standing on the other side of the counter.

  Fisher lets him spray and wipe and spray again, and only when the fat guy turns round and says to his co-worker, “Hey,” with a nod at Fisher, does he stop and lean straight-armed onto the counter. In one hand the cloth is balled, the other’s a fist. The floor behind the counter must be raised because he looms over Fisher. “Anything else I can help you with, sir?”

  Fisher’s top lip’s cool with sweat and he rubs it with one finger. “Bree’s in trouble. I need to find her.”

  “Like I said, never heard of her.”

  Fisher glances at the fat kid, says, “I heard her ex works here. Bree Fisher—d’you know her?”

  The fat kid says, “Nope,” and folds his hands over his belly. He leans back against the counter, like he’s settling in for a show.

  “But one of you—at least, that’s what—”

  The leaner guy tilts forward onto his fists. “You need to leave, right now. Get it?”

  There’s such menace coiled into his voice that Fisher steps back, the bag swinging ridiculously from his wrist, but he doesn’t leave. That menace holds him there, for what can it mean except that the guy’s lying? “Just tell me,” he says, “is she all right?”

  “D’you have a hearing problem, huhn? I said you needed to get out of here.”

  There’s just the counter between them, and the guy perches farther forward, taut as a cat, like he means to leap over it and come at Fisher. Fisher’s ears are singing and he knows he’s afraid. This is what it’s like to work the nightshift and have some fare pull a knife on you, or having to go into some guy’s apartment and take his TV or his hunting knife as collateral, and the whole time his hate’s washing out from where he’s watching you, like it’s your fault he can’t pay his fare.

  You don’t let the fear take over. You push back at it. Fisher notices that his fingers are burning on the cup and a muscle beside his eye’s twitching. He swallows to loosen his throat, says, “I’m just asking for your help, that’s all.”

  “Finding someone who doesn’t want you to find them? What kind of a creep are you?”

  But there’s something too worked-up about his voice, like he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying. Fisher sets his coffee on the counter. “I’m her dad. Last night she left me a message saying to come get her because she was in trouble. By the time I got there she’d gone and now I’m real worried.”

  The guy’s eyes shift, then he ducks his head. The light flashes off the earrings corrugating his ear. Over his shoulder he says to the fat kid, “I’m taking my break, Josh. Don’t fuck up this time.”

  16

  IN OTHER TOWNS, in other seasons, Fisher and the guy would have stood out back by the dumpsters and the guy would have smoked his cigarette there, tapping the ash onto the broken concrete and staring up at con trails burrowing across the sky. As it is, once the guy’s snatched up his cigarettes from under the counter, there’s nowhere to go except out to Fisher’s car.

  Fisher’s left it running. Even with the rush of cold air when they get in and sit side by side, staring out the windshield at the blank brick wall of the store, the sudden warmth is cloying. It doesn’t help that the guy puts a cigarette between his lips and slides a lighter out of the pack.

  Fisher wants to say, “Hey! Don’t smoke in my car.”

  He wants to tell this guy, “I’ve got bad sinuses, c’mon now.”

  Instead, rather than piss him off, he watches the flame show up the creases in his face. He has the wizened look you see on malnourished infants, skin in folds, the eyes a little too big. How old is he? Twenty-five? Thirty? How the hell did Bree get mixed up with someone his age?

  The guy snaps out the lighter and sends twin plumes of smoke rushing from his nostrils. In an instant the car’s clouded with it. Fisher digs a tissue from his parka pocket and holds it against his nose, as though that’s going to do any good. The guy turns to him. “She came over last night.”

  “What time?”

  “I dunno—maybe around seven. She wouldn’t come in, just stood in the arctic entryway saying she needed to borrow whatever money I could lend her.”

  “And did you? How much?”

  He gives a lazy shrug. “A hundred. All I could spare and hey, since we split, you know—what the hell, I still care and all, but it’s not like we’re together.”

  “She tell you where she was headed? Was it Anchorage?”

  “How the hell would I know?” and he shoots Fisher a sullen look. “She didn’t say much. She was freaked out about something, I could see that. I wasn’t going to push her.” He taps the ash off his cigarette and onto his jeans. He rubs it in with the ends of his fingers, then glances out the side window.

  “That’s it? She wanted money and you gave it to her? C’mon, she must’ve said something.”

  “Yeah,” and his voice is dull, “she said she was getting out of town for a while. Soon as I gave her the money, she took off.”

  “Took off? You mean, she was driving?”

  He holds the cigarette to the dark hole of his mouth and draws the smoke dee
p into his lungs. “Fuck yeah—her step-dad’s Highlander. If he was pissed at her, he must’ve been pissed as hell when she took it. But I guess that’s the least of his worries now,” and he gives a short laugh.

  A tickle of panic catches Fisher in the throat. Bree—did she tell this guy what she’d done? That she’d left Brian shot dead on her bathroom floor? Why not? Because how can you keep something like that held down inside you? Those calls he hadn’t picked up—shit. And so she told this guy instead, and now he’s pretending he doesn’t know Brian’s dead, like he can’t trust Fisher.

  Fisher mashes the tissue in his hand. “What exactly did she tell you?”

  “I said already: she was freaked out. Scared, even.” He turns to Fisher. “You ever held a mouse? Know how they tremble all the time like they’re scared half to death? That’s how she was—like she couldn’t stop trembling. It’s no fucking wonder, when her step-dad’s mixed up in some serious shit.”

  Those words hang in the air. Fisher thinks, Serious shit? Militia serious shit? Or the kind of serious shit that leaves you naked and dead on your step-daughter’s bathroom floor? He doesn’t look at the guy when he says, “You mean the militia?”

  “You need to read the paper. That missing cop showed up dead at their place. Your ex came home late last night and found him. Can’t blame Bree for taking off like she did. Fuck,” and he lets out a half-laugh.

  It takes a moment for what the guy’s said to catch up with Fisher. Then the inside of the car’s too small. It’s a fragile space run through with invisible wires wrapping around his head and he can’t think, can’t move, hears his own breath sawing through the narrow openings of his nostrils, has to open his mouth and heave in a lungful of air, never mind that it’s curdled with smoke. Then he curls forward like he’s been knocked hard in the belly.

  The guy’s saying, “It’s all in the paper.”

  A pickup pulls in beside them and Fisher flinches. Just a pickup and a woman in a sweatshirt trotting hunch-shouldered into the store. Ridiculously, Fisher holds onto the steering wheel. The plastic’s worn and beyond it the light from the store catches the dust on the dashboard, the crack in the windshield running like forked lightning from left to right.

  Before long, Fisher thinks, his life will have come to a halt. Hiding evidence of a murder—that’s one thing. But now there’s a dead cop caught up in this mess, and how’s he going to explain he didn’t have anything to do with that? Christ, he could go down for years. He imagines himself in an orange jumpsuit, and the dreariness of being locked into a cell for so many days they add up to decades, and everything he meant to do—saving Bree, building his house, making something of his life before it’s too late—it’s all gone to hell.

  The guy’s saying, “He’s got himself into some serious shit all right, him and his sovereign citizen buddies. Sovereign citizens, my ass—bunch of motherfuckers who like playing with guns. All that crap about being ready to defend Alaska—from what? Huhn? Goddamn Canadians gonna storm the border? You know what it’s all about, really? Their jackass leader not wanting to pay his fucking taxes. He gets together a bunch of shit-for-brains guys and tells them they’re the Alaska Citizens Guard, and they’re all sovereign citizens and they have to protect each other when the feds show up. Which means protecting him. Fuck. That stash of weapons the cops found at the ice park last week? That was them. Now they’ve killed a trooper, and Bree’s caught up in it just when it could all turn real bad.” He lowers the window just enough to push out what’s left of his cigarette.

  “She was supposed to be going down to Anchorage with her mom.”

  Without his cigarette the guy’s hands fall into his lap and stay there like dead things. He must feel it too, because he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the pack. He lights another and sucks on it hard. “The way I see it, they’re having a meeting at Brian’s place—you know, what the fuck to do now that the cops are onto them and a bunch of their weapons have been found. They think they’re on their own because your ex and Bree are off to Anchortown. Then this cop shows up snooping around, and they’re such fuckheads one of them shoots him: Brian, that’s who. But Bree’s home. She fucked things up with her mom and has been laying low. She hears the shot and comes down. Brian sees her and knows he’s really in the shit, they’re all in the shit because they can’t have a witness. Somehow she gets out of there. Or maybe Brian doesn’t see her—she sneaks down to the garage and takes off in his car. Either way, she’s going to be scared shitless because she knows too much, and she knows they’ll be after her.” He lifts his cigarette, takes another drag.

  Fisher closes his eyes. It’s too much. All of it coming at him, and he’s trying to make it fit. “She said Brian was going ape-shit.”

  “So he did see her. Fuck. And now he’s looking for her. Shit, this is not good.”

  Fisher opens his eyes. There’s the cracked windshield, and beyond it frost thick as moss on the store wall by the doorway. He says, “No, that’s not right—” Shut up, another part of him says, shut the fuck up. The guy’s watching, but Fisher can’t look back at him. He had the words on his tongue: No, that’s not right, Brian’s dead. Except he needs to forget finding Brian slumped against the bathroom wall, and wrapping him in the tarp, and rolling him into the river, like none of that happened. But how the hell do you make yourself forget something like that?

  The guy’s still looking at him and Fisher licks his lips. He says, “Maybe, but he’s her step-dad. Christ, I don’t know, I really don’t,” and those words are just filling the space between them while he’s sifting through what might have happened, and what he can say without giving himself away. One thing makes sense: Brian shot the cop, and Bree saw him, and he wanted to shut her up, so she shot him first. One thing doesn’t fit: Brian was naked. Why’d he be naked in her bathroom?

  This is how he felt at school in math class. Not the simple stuff of calculation—that was just a matter of being careful—but the problems that sat in front of you like a solid slippery mass that you glanced off no matter which way you came at them. Sometimes he’d imagine that his life depended on solving one of those problems and feel himself getting sweaty as he sat there with his pencil between his fingers. And in a way his life did depend on it. What happens if you don’t make it to college? If you don’t even go to technical school because you think you’re too dumb? You drive a cab for a living and consider yourself lucky, because it’s better than some other jobs you’ve had, that’s for sure.

  The guy puts the cigarette between his lips and takes hold of the doorhandle. He looks cold in his shirt, despite the shelter of the car and the heat rushing from the vents. He speaks around the cigarette, says, “He’d do it. He’d kill her. Christ, he’d just shot a cop, and anyway, the guy’s a big enough prick.” With that he opens the door and gets out. Then he ducks back. “Tell me if you find her.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Zane—I’m here most mornings,” and he swings the door shut.

  17

  AFTER PULLING OUT onto the main drag, the first thing Fisher does is crack the windows. Cold whistles in where his hat should be, across his scalp and his forehead, a freezing burn that he squints against. He’s thinking: Brian shot a cop. The guy who’s been step-dad to Bree, the guy Jan left him for, went nuts and shot a cop, and if he wasn’t dead, he’d be out hunting for Bree and he’d shoot her too. Does it make him feel angry? Sure—but not as angry as thinking about why Brian was naked in her bathroom.

  He thinks: Goddamn freak, he’d have killed her too.

  He thinks: Always knew there was something wrong with him.

  He thinks: Naked. In her bathroom. What the hell?

  His ears are going numb. He tugs up his hood, never mind that it makes him feel like a deep-sea diver, his world shrunk to what’s right in front of him.

  The inside of his head’s aching from Zane’s smoke. Th
e bottle of ibuprofen in the glove compartment’s empty. He needs coffee. What happened to the coffee he bought at the convenience store? Must have left it behind, and now the nearest place is the coffee hut down at the intersection with Bartlett. He drives one-handed, the radio on high and his right hand punching through the pre-sets, but it’s past the hour and there’s no news on. The paper’s behind him in its plastic bag. Part of him wants to reach back for it and pull over to the side of the road, right here, right now. C’mon Fisher, he tells himself, be better than that.

  Although the fog’s not so bad this morning, nothing’s where it should be—the burger joint with its bright windows shining out into the murk when he thought he’d passed it, the gas station suddenly on his right, the turn-off to the coffee hut coming up so fast he has to swerve to make it.

  A woman leans out the serving window in a pink knitted hat pulled down almost to her eyes. He tells her all he wants is a regular coffee. “Regular size?” she asks, and he tells her sure. “Medium roast?” and he says sure. “Cream and sugar?” and he says, “Go to town, why not.”

  The cup she passes him isn’t what he’d call regular. At least, it’s not what you’d call regular if you buy your coffee in convenience stores and diners. It’s so big he has to stretch his fingers around it, so tall it towers out of his cup holder. He drives across the lumpy snow to the movie theater parking lot, which is empty except for two dead-looking cars. He pulls up far away, just in case, and spreads the newspaper over the steering wheel. Already his heart’s jumping against his ribs. He turns on the dome light and there’s his shadow across the paper, and it grows sharper as he leans forward to read.

  This is what he finds out: last night local business woman Janice Armstrong returned early from a brief trip out of town and found a man’s body on her deck. She didn’t recognize him. The body was quickly identified as that of the missing trooper. He had a bullet wound to the chest. No statement about possible suspects has been issued. Mrs Armstrong was being questioned. Both her husband, Brian Armstrong, and fifteen-year-old daughter, Bree Fisher, are missing and the police are requesting information as to their whereabouts. No mention of the militia. No mention of missing guns and computer equipment.