Was it someone else? Some other kid who needed a place to stay? For Chrissake, it wouldn’t have been hard to work out that the place was empty. But his mind won’t settle on that thought. Those footprints leading around the house. More than one set. Maybe one person going back and forth, or maybe more than one person poking around. Looking for someone. Breaking a window because whoever was inside was too scared to answer the door.
How hard would it have been for someone else to work out where Bree was hiding? A realtors’ kid: for sure she’d hole up in an empty property. Any dumbass could work that out.
An SUV edges in close behind him to use the pump, but Fisher doesn’t move. He feels the earth’s gravity dragging at him so hard his head’s an unbearable weight and his hands want to slump into his lap. Fuck, he thinks, have the militia got Bree?
A blare of horn behind him but he doesn’t move. He needs to think but he can’t. He can’t hold his thoughts together.
He tells himself, I’ll call the cops. But what would he say? That his daughter killed her militia-gonzo step-dad, and he dumped the guy’s body in the river to hide it, but could they please go rescue her from a bunch of second amendment nut-jobs?
He thinks, I’ll buy me a gun and go after them. Oh yeah, that’s what someone in a movie would do. But he’s just a sad-ass, overweight, useless-fuck of a cabbie. He doesn’t even know who these guys are, or where they are.
Then it comes to him. He’s got it the wrong way around. If the militia nuts’ve got Grisby and Bree, they’ll be looking for him too. And if he’s not home, how would someone find him? By calling his cell and asking for a ride. Or by calling Bear Cabs and asking for a non-smoking cab. Just like Grisby does. And it wouldn’t take much to get Grisby to talk. He’s a candy-ass, and besides, loyalty isn’t his thing.
It’s been months since Fisher’s gun was stolen and he hasn’t bought another. But there’s the supermarket entrance, just a few dozen yards away, and while he’s in there, he can pick up some ibuprofen too.
27
THE DAY NOW has a curious splintered feel to it. Every time a call comes through, Fisher starts to sweat and a tense ache runs through his butt, and his hand goes to the gun tucked between his legs. But so far all he’s had has been a fare from the supermarket to the apartment complex down by the hospital—a young woman who tried to chat, like maybe he needed conversation—and another out to the airport, a smooth-faced older guy in a pricy wool coat who didn’t say a word the whole way, and a few shorter rides from a box store to a nearby housing development and another from the university to a Thai restaurant just down the hill. Through the window he glimpses people chatting and smiling and lifting forkfuls of steaming food to their mouths. His own lunch is fries already gone cold and a soggy burger. Down the front of his parka cling limp strands of lettuce and drips of sauce he wipes at with the wrapper. His belly doesn’t feel full, just less empty than before.
He turns up the radio for the hourly news, but there’s nothing about a body being pulled from the river, or a teenager being kidnapped; nothing except a repeat of the news about the dead cop, and a car wreck out on the highway, then the weather forecast that says the cold’s not going to let up for another couple days.
No wonder Fisher feels out of sorts. It’s not just what’s happened, or that sense of waiting when nothing out of the ordinary’s going on, but the fact that Reggie didn’t let him take the Ford he usually drives, said the brake drums need replacing. He’s mad at Fisher for calling in sick, and madder at him for showing up hours late, so he’s given him the rest of Gabe’s shift, because Gabe didn’t show up either. Reggie’s a big enough jerk that he insisted Fisher take the Plymouth Villager because, Christ, it’s no-smoking isn’t it? And it’s just come out of the shop with a new transmission.
So this afternoon Fisher’s driving the Barf Mobile. It’s no one’s favorite. A minivan means kids yelling or crying or throwing things, or a carload of drunks in suits staggering after lunch at some fancy restaurant who want you to drop them all over downtown, who fight over paying or try to stiff you because hey, didn’t Bob or Pete or whoever the hell else pay the fare before they got out? As for a tip, forget it.
The reek of vanilla air-freshener’s almost too much. Fisher tries not to breathe it in, but why resist? He’s going to have to put up with it until he gets off shift at six. But better that sweet stink than what it’s hiding.
At least the fog’s mostly gone, just a few pockets here and there like wind-blown snow caught in corners. He drives up Airport Road and turns onto Fifth. The air has a crystalline quality to it and everything’s bronzed by the setting sun. How about that, he thinks, sundown already, and the sun’s so far away there’s no warmth to it. Instead it casts a syrupy glow over the snow along the road, and the exhaust lingering in the air, and the frost bearding road signs and fences and heating vents.
A little after two thirty and Fisher’s given up any hope of finding Bree today. She vanished and all he could think of to do was go to work and hope she found him, or the militia found him, or someone who knows what the hell’s going on found him. So here he is driving round and thinking up excuses for when she asks him what the fuck he was thinking: is he really so useless, so lacking in imagination?
To which the answer is yes, he decides. He’s that useless, and he’s that lacking in imagination. Words her mother used against him. Funny that, how he’s putting them in their daughter’s mouth. As for Jan, he wonders where she is. At the police station? After all, she hasn’t called him back. He pictures her distraught, the way her mouth goes slack and her eyes empty, and he feels a twinge of pity. Except she doesn’t know the worst yet. That their daughter’s shot her husband dead and he’s lying in the river and might not be found for months.
Poor Jan, he hears himself think. Her world’s coming apart. Then a meaner part of him decides she deserves to know what it’s like, because isn’t that pretty much what she did to him when she left and took Bree with her? No warning, no explanation. He’d been driving a truck route to Prudhoe Bay and got home to find her stuff gone and Bree’s too. It took him three days to find where she’d moved to. He stood on the doorstep of her apartment and asked, what did I do? She’d kept the door half-closed so Bree couldn’t run out to him and said, if you don’t know, there’s no point explaining it, is there?
He’s wearied by it all, by what happened long ago and his own still sore resentment. Be better than that, he tells himself, but he knows he can’t be, and that’s been the trouble all along.
He glances at the clock on the dash. Still just after two thirty. Three more hours to go, unless he quits early. Fuck Reggie if he doesn’t like it and goes on about Bear Cabs’ reputation, and needing to have cabs at the ready and all that crap, when he should wake up and see that Bear Cabs is on the way out.
He’s got a pick up at Fifth and Dunkel. On the corner sits a low square building housing a bar on the ground floor and a pool hall upstairs. He pulls up just past the entrance and checks his mirrors: some guy leaving the doorway with his shoulders hunched against the cold. A black down jacket. A black knitted hat. Fisher snaps on the radio while he waits, finds his hands rubbing the steering wheel and his breath whistling through his teeth with the music.
He lets his eyes close and thinks about how Bree was when she was small. How she’d sit on his knee and plant kiss after kiss on his jaw, very intently, and hold his head if he tried to turn away. The first few times after he and Jan split up, when he went to fetch her for a day out together, she’d throw herself at him in joy. That joy had quickly evaporated. Soon he had to go into the apartment to carry her out and she’d cry and hit him, even if he told her his plans for the day, made up on the spot: ice cream and a train ride at the park, wouldn’t that be fun? No, no it wouldn’t, she hated him, she hated train rides at the park. It was like she’d soaked up every drop of her mom’s bitterness at having once loved him when he’d t
urned out to be a loser, a nothing. And what’s he done since except try to prove that wrong, and failing over and over?
The side door slides open, and he looks around. The guy’s not wearing a hat. He’s wearing a black ski mask. That’s not so unusual when it’s this cold, right? The guy has to duck to get into the minivan, and he only comes half in. It’s then that Fisher notices two things: the guy doesn’t shut the door, and when he straightens up there’s a gun in his hand.
28
IT’S A DIFFICULT business kidnapping someone, never mind that when Fisher’s hauled out of the cab his brand-new gun tumbles into the snow, or that he doesn’t go for the pocketknife in his parka. There are two men, both with ski masks pulled down over their faces, and both wearing black down jackets like it’s some kind of uniform. The first guy wants to tie Fisher’s hands behind his back, but the other guy says, “So anyone looking out the bar’s gonna see him with his hands tied? Getting into my truck? Screw that.”
The first guy’s voice has a tightness to it like air escaping an overfilled balloon. “You want him getting away? Huhn?”
“Just hold the gun on him and make him drive. I’ll follow.”
“Oh sure. And he’s not gonna see where we’re taking him. Is your brain up your ass?”
“Just until we get out of town, fuckwit.”
The first guy waves the gun at Fisher. “Gas station on the Lewis Highway. Got it? And no funny business.”
The second guy lets out a huff of exasperation. “Not the gas station. Christ. The pipeline-viewing spot. There won’t be anyone there.”
“There’s always someone there.”
“At fifty-fucking-below? Get real. Let’s go, I’m freezing my balls off out here.”
They shove Fisher back behind the wheel of his cab. Where his gun fell there’s empty snow—which of them grabbed it? He doesn’t know. It’s gone now, a dumb idea anyway.
The first guy gets into the passenger seat. He keeps the gun on Fisher, and when Fisher reaches for the gearshift—an awkward damn thing, up by the steering wheel—the guy’s eyes follow. He must notice the same moment Fisher does, and the same thought occurs to him: the cab’s radio. The guy’s hand whips out and snatches the handset, wrenches it so hard the coiled wire stretches straight. Then he gives a jerk and the cord snaps back and swings emptily against the dash, and the handset’s just a lump of plastic in his hand. He looks at it, then lowers the window and tosses it out into the street.
When he looks back at Fisher, his eyes peering through the holes of the ski mask have a meaner look. He holds the gun right up against Fisher’s head, cold metal against Fisher’s scalp, and the lump where the woman hit him sings with pain. Fisher doesn’t flinch, though, he doesn’t move. He lets the guy dig around in the pockets of his parka and pull out his phone, his wallet, his pocketknife, his bottle of ibuprofen, and the guy gives a snort of laughter. “Now drive,” he says, “and don’t try nothing stupid or you’ll be sorry.”
So Fisher drives. And he doesn’t do anything stupid. He indicates each lane change, he stays under the speed limit, but not so far under that a cop would stop him, and though this is what he wanted, to be on his way at last to the men who might have Bree, a terrible fear’s clawing at his insides.
29
SOMETHING SO SIMPLE as tying someone up is no easy matter at fifty below. Fisher could have warned them about that. The duct tape’s been lying in the back of the second guy’s pickup and the glue’s frozen, and when he does manage to pull off a length he can’t get it to stick around Fisher’s wrists. They’ve got him facing the pipeline—a steel tube thicker than the trunk of any tree in the Interior, coming crooked as a bendy straw down the hill into the valley then vanishing up over the next rise on steel legs like saw horses. A viewpoint for tourists. Busloads of them are brought here in the summer. Christ, thinks Fisher, might as well go and view the power plant. At least it has lights.
There’s a warning sign on the pipeline, bristly with frost. Don’t climb onto the pipeline. Don’t fire your gun at the pipeline. What to do in case of flames coming out of the pipeline. It takes his mind off the cold, at least, because his kidnappers have taken off his gloves, and they’ve been fucking around for so long with the duct tape that his hands have gone numb from the fingertips down to where his fingers meet his palms. A throbbing starts up in his left thumb then slowly fades, erased by the cold. The first guy’s smoking now and his cigarette looks obscene sticking from his mouth in the middle of that ski mask. As for the second guy, he’s still struggling with the tape. “Hundred and one freaking uses,” he mutters, “except to tie a guy up. Should write and fucking complain.”
The first guy’s passing his gun from hand to hand. He huffs between his teeth and his breath spills out in great wobbling clouds toward whichever hand he has free. His gloves aren’t thick enough, and you just try holding a piece of metal while it’s burning your hand with cold. He draws hard on his cigarette as though that’s going to warm him, and the smoke billows around Fisher. He turns his head—not so you’d notice really, he thinks—but the guy steps closer and breathes the smoke straight into his face, those cut-out eyes staring right at him.
The second guy says, “That’ll have to fucking do. I’m not gonna spend all day on this shit,” and he tosses the roll of tape back into the truck.
“How about his eyes, man?”
“Give him your mask.”
“Fuck no! Use the goddamn tape.”
“It’s shit in this cold. Give him your mask and pull it down.”
“It has freaking eyeholes.”
“Backwards, you moron.”
The first guy snaps at Fisher in his tight voice, “Shut your eyes,” and he does. The guy’s rough. He wrenches the mask down, but with his gloves on he can’t get a proper hold and it bunches up over Fisher’s eyes. The guy paws at Fisher’s head, knocking the soft lump where the woman hit him a lifetime ago, trying to pull the mask all the way down without taking off his gloves. He puffs under his breath as he tries again, jerking Fisher’s head to the side, and a second time, and that’s when Fisher lets his eyes open for an instant. By a miracle the guy doesn’t see, he’s so intent on the mask. Then it comes down over Fisher’s face, and his chest tightens as though he’s been hit. Not because of the second-hand warmth, or the stink of greasy skin and tobacco. No, because of what he’s just seen, a strange face, blank as an egg. No hair, no eyebrows, the skull rounded and gleaming and bare as a knee, the eye-sockets scarcely more than a slight dent in the flesh. The sight of that egg face leaves him with a sick feeling of fear.
Behind the mask he opens his eyes. Blackness patterned with tiny lozenges of light, everything blurred. He tilts his head to where he thinks that monstrous face was, tries to make it out through the weave of the mask, but the guys are moving about, their boots squeaking over the snow, and besides, it’s all just dizzying speckles of brightness against the dark. He shuts his eyes again. Is this what it’s like to be a worm, he wonders, living in darkness as though that’s all there is? A tube of blind flesh exposed to all kinds of dangers it can’t see?
A roaring from the highway, a car storming down the hill toward them, the noise of its engine fractured in the cold air. Fisher leans forward as though the sound’s reeling him in, but an arm falls across his chest like a bar. The second guy says, “Don’t get any ideas.” Then he calls out, “Open the truck door so we can get him in.”
Mr Egg Face, the guy with the tight voice, must be standing a few yards away now. He shouts back, “Fuck no—put him in the backseat of the cab.”
“We’re ditching it.”
A crunch and squeak of snow. The second guy’s voice is louder now. “How big a fuckwit are you? Weren’t you listening? We keep a low profile.”
“You’re the one wanted him to drive it out here.”
“And you’re gonna drive it up to—fuck it, the res
t of the way. OK? Then we can ditch it.”
“Your fucking idea, you drive it.”
“If you don’t like it, you should have brought your own goddamn truck.” There’s the crunch of boots on snow, the groan of a door being opened. “Get on with it, we’re already late and the Commander’s not gonna like it. Just don’t go and fucking wreck it.” A door slams. The tone of the truck’s engine swoops upward and suddenly the air stinks of exhaust.
Mr Egg Face isn’t pleased. He grabs Fisher by the back of his parka and yanks him nearly off his feet. Off they stumble, off to where the cab waits, then Fisher’s shoved inside. His face slides against the seat. Even through the ski mask it feels cold. He shifts his head so that the sore lump is cooled by it. Lying like this, he opens his eyes and makes out a square of bright sky that flickers as the cab lurches off along the road. He remembers a Hitchcock film where some guy tries to remember the sounds he heard as he was driven around blindfolded, but there’s nothing to hear except the engine. He thinks he should try to work out the route by the turns the cab takes—isn’t that what a clever man would do?—but although he knows this road, each curve and climb and dip, all the way out to the small settlement of Beecher, he’s lost within minutes.
It doesn’t help that the guy’s driving the cab so hard the engine whines and the turns are too tight. Every once in a while he shouts out, “Any trouble and you’re a dead man—get it?” and, “Stay down or you’ll get one between the eyes.” So Fisher stays down and twists at the tape binding his hands. He forces his hands apart until the tape stretches a little and its glue pulls at the hair on his wrists. Fuck, he thinks, tied up twice in one day—what are the chances of that? Only the duct tape’s tougher to escape from. He tugs and tugs, feels the bite of it into his flesh, the way it sticks as he tries to pull one hand free, works at it so hard it rubs his skin until it smarts. But he keeps trying. He imagines himself wrenching open the door and jumping for it. He pictures how he’d fall, and the crush of his bones against the road. He thinks how, if he’s a goddamn lucky sunuvabitch, someone will see him and pull over, and Mr Egg Face will just have to let him be saved. He can almost taste it: the sweetness of relief, of safety.
Dead of Winter Page 13