Lucas and Climpt crossed the well-trampled ditch, climbed on the sleds, started them.
"Kill him," Carr said.
Weather caught Lucas by the arm as they loaded the snowmobiles onto the trailer. "Can I go?"
"No."
"I want to ride."
"No. You go back to the hospital."
"I want to go," she insisted.
"No, and that's it," Lucas said, pushing her away.
Climpt had traded his shotgun for an M-16, said, "I'll drive," and hustled around to the cab. Lucas climbed in the passenger side; when they pulled away, he saw Weather recrossing the ditch to the sheriff.
"Buckle up and hold on," Climpt said. "I'm gonna hurry."
They took County Road AA south from the highway, a road of tight right-angle turns and a slippery, three-segment, two-lane bridge over the Menomin Flowage. Lucas would have taken the truck into a ditch a half-dozen times, but Climpt apparently knew the road foot-by-foot, knew when to slow down, when the turns were coming. But the snow was beating into the windshield, and the deputy had to wrestle the tailwagging truck through the tighter spots, one foot on the brake, the other on the gas, all four wheels grinding into the shoulders.
Lucas stayed on the handset with the feds.
He's either on the Menomin Branch East or the Morristown trail, still going south.
"We're coming up on you, we're on AA about to cross H," Lucas said.
Okay, we're about four miles further on. Jesus, we can't see shit.
Carr: We're loading up, heading your way. If you get him, pin him down and we'll come in and finish it.
Then the feds: Hey, he's stopped. He's definitely stopped, he's up ahead, must be along County Y, two miles east of AA. We're about four or five minutes out.
Lucas: Find a good place to stop and wait. We're all coming in. We don't know what kind of weapons he's carrying.
"There's not much down that road," Climpt said, thinking about it. His hands were tight, white on the steering wheel, holding on, his head pressed forward, searing the snowscape. "Not around there. I'm trying to think. Mostly timber."
Carr came up: Weather thinks he's at the Harris place. Duane was supposedly seeing Rosie Harris. That's a mile or so off AA on Y. Should be on the tract maps.
"Goddammit," said Lucas. "Weather's riding with Carr."
Climpt grunted. "Could of told you she wouldn't stay put."
"Gonna get her ass shot," Lucas said.
"Eight dead that we know of," Climpt said, his voice oddly soft. A red stop sign and a building loomed out of the snow, and Climpt jumped on the brake, slowing, then went on through. "Can't find Russ Harper or the Schoeneckers, and I wouldn't make any bets on them being alive, either. Goddamn, I thought it only happened in New York and Los Angeles and places like that."
"Happens all over," Lucas said as they went through the stop sign.
"But you don't believe that, living up here," Climpt said. He glanced out the window. A roadhouse showed a Coors sign in the window. Three people, unisex in their parkas, laughing, cross-country skis on their shoulders, walked toward the door. "You just don't believe it can happen."
The feds had stopped at a farmhouse a half-mile from where their ranging equipment said the radio beacon was. Visibility was twenty feet and was falling. In little more than an hour it would be dark. Lucas and Climpt pulled in behind the federal truck, climbed down, and went to the house. Tolsen met them at the door. "I'm gonna go down and watch the end of the drive, make sure he doesn't tear out of there in a car."
"Okay. Don't go in."
Tolsen nodded. "I'll wait for the troops," he said grimly. "Those two boys are gone?"
Lucas nodded, grimacing. "Yes."
"Shit."
A farm couple sat in the kitchen with a grown son, three pale people in flannel while Lansley talked on the telephone. He hung up as Lucas and Climpt came in, said, "We've got a hostage negotiator standing by on the phone from Washington. He can call in if we need him. If there's a hostage deal going down." He looked worn.
"We've got to do something quick," Climpt said. "If there's another sled in there, or if he gets out in a truck, we'll never find him."
"So what's the plan?" asked Lansley. "Where's Carr?"
"They're ten or fifteen minutes back," Lucas said. "Why don't you go down and back up Tolsen. Just watch the drive, don't get close. Gene and I'll go in on the sleds until we're close, then go in on foot. He can't see us any better than we can see him, and if we catch him outside, we can ambush him."
"You got snowshoes?"
"No. We'll just have to make the best of it," Lucas said.
The farmer cleared his throat. "We got some snowshoes," he said. He looked at his son. "Frank, whyn't you get the shoes for these folks."
Lucas and Climpt unloaded the sleds and rode them through the farmyard. The farmer had given them a compass as well as the snowshoes. Fifty feet past the barn, they needed it. Lucas took them straight west, riding over what had been a soybean field, the stubble now three feet below the surface. The snow was riding on a growing wind, coming in long curving waves across the open fields. The world was dimming out.
Lucas had strung the radio around his neck, and turned it up loud enough to hear the occasional burp: No movement… Nothing… Five minutes out… Get a couple more sleds down here, see if you can rent a couple at Lamey's.
A darker shape shimmered through the snow. Pine tree. The farmer said there was one old white pine left in the field, two hundred feet from the Harris's property windbreak. Lucas pointed and Climpt lifted a hand in acknowledgment. A minute later the windbreak loomed like a curtain, the blue spruces so dark they looked black. Climpt moved off to the left, fifteen feet, as they closed on it. At the edge of the treeline, they stopped, then Climpt pointed and shouted over the storm. "We're back too far. We gotta go through that way, I think. Windbreak's only three or four trees deep, so take it easy."
They moved back toward the road, Climpt leading. After a hundred feet he waved and cut the engine on his sled. Lucas pulled up beside him and pulled the long trapper's snowshoes off the carry-rack.
"This is fuckin' awful," Climpt said.
Inside the windbreak, the wind lessened, but swirled among the trees, building drifts. They plodded through, and a light materialized from the screen of white. Window. Lucas pointed and Climpt nodded. They slid further to the right, moving down the lines of pine, coming up on the back of the double-wide mobile home. A snowmobile track crossed the backyard, curved around the side and out of sight.
"Let's get back a bit. I don't think they could see us."
Keeping the trees between themselves and the house, they moved around to the front. A snowmobile sat next to the door. A space had been cleared for a truck or a car, but the space was empty.
"I'll watch the back," Climpt said. He'd slung the M-16 over his shoulder and now slipped it off into his hands.
"Sit where we can see each other," Lucas said. "We gotta stay in touch."
Climpt moved back the way they came, stopped, beat out a platform with the snowshoes, and sat down. He lifted a hand to Lucas and put the rifle between his knees.
Lucas spoke into the radio. "We're here. We can see a snowmobile parked in front. No other vehicle. The windows are lit."
Any sign of life?
"Not yet. There're lots of lights on."
Carr: We're here-we see you guys on the road.
Feds: Nothing's come out.
Carr got with the agents. Deputies would block County Y in both directions. Others would filter into the treeline and occupy the abandoned chicken house in back of the Harris home.
We're talking about how long we wait for him. What do you think? Carr asked.
"Not long," Lucas said into the radio. "There's no vehicle here. I don't see any fresh tracks, but I can't see the other side of the yard. It's possible that he dumped his sled and took off on another one before we got here."
The feds have some kind of shrink
on the line. He could call. We got some tear gas coming.
"Talk it out, Shelly. Talk to the hostage guy. I'm not a hostage specialist. All I can do from here is ambush the guy."
Okay.
A moment later Carr came back: We've got a pickup coming in. Stand by.
Two minutes later, from Carr: We've got Rosie and Mark Harris in the pickup. They say their sister's in there, Ginny Harris. They say Helper's seeing her, not Rosie. They say there weren't any other vehicles there. They've got only this pickup and a sled, and the sled's in the back of the pickup. So they must be inside.
"So we wait?" Lucas asked.
Just a minute.
Lucas sat in the snow, watching the door, face wet with melting snow, snow clinging to his eyelashes. Climpt was thirty feet away, a dark blob in a drift, his rifle pointed up into the storm. He'd rolled a condom over the muzzle to keep the snow out. From the distance, Lucas couldn't see the color, but back at the farmhouse, where Climpt had rolled it on, it was a shocking blue.
"Got neon lights on it?" Lucas had asked as they got ready to go out.
"Don't need no lights," Climpt said. "If you look close, you'll notice that it's an extra large."
Lucas, we're gonna have Rosie call in. We can patch her through from here. If Helper answers, she'll ask for Ginny. That's the young one. She'll tell the girl to go to the door when Helper's doing something, and just run out the front and down the driveway. Once she's out, we'll take the place apart.
Lucas didn't answer immediately. He sat in the snow, thinking, and finally Carr came back: What do you think? Think it'll work?
"I don't know," Lucas said.
You got any better ideas?
"No."
There was an even longer pause, then Carr:
We're gonna try it.
CHAPTER 28
The Iceman sat on the couch, furious, the unfairness choking his mind. He'd never had a chance, not from when he was a child. They'd always picked on him, victimized him, tortured him. And now they'd hunt him down like a dog. Kill him or put him in a cage.
"Motherfuckers," he said, knuckles pressed into his teeth. "Motherfuckers." When he closed his eyes, he could see opalescent white curtains blowing away from huge open windows, overlooking a city somewhere, a city with yellow buildings covered with light.
When he opened his eyes, he saw a rotting shag rug on the floor of a double-wide with aluminum walls. The yellow-haired girl had put a prepackaged ham-and-cheese in the microwave, and he could smell the cheap cheddar bubbling.
They'd set him up. They knew he'd done the others. The knowledge had come on him when he saw the deputies coming back, the knowledge had blown up into rage, and the gun had come up and had gone off.
He had to run now. Alaska. The Yukon. Up in the mountains.
He worked it out. The cops would call on every outlying farm and house in Ojibway County. They'd be carrying automatic weapons, wearing flak jackets. If he holed up, he wouldn't have a chance: they would simply knock on every door, look in every room in every house, until they found him.
He wouldn't wait. The storm could work for him. He could cut cross-country on the sled, along the network of Menomin Flowage snowmobile trails. He knew a guy named Bloom down at Flambeau Crossing. Bloom was a recluse, lived alone, raised retrievers and trained cutting horses. He had an almost-new four-by-four. If he could make it that far-and it was a long ride, especially with the storm-he could take Bloom's truck and ID, head out Highway 8 to Minnesota, then take the interstate through the Dakotas into Canada. And if he stuck the horse trainer's body in a snowdrift behind the barn, and unloaded enough feed to keep the animals quiet, it'd be several days before the cops started looking for Bloom and his truck.
By then…
He jumped off the couch, fists in his pants pockets, working the road map through his head. He could dump the truck somewhere in the Canadian wilderness, somewhere it wouldn't be found until spring. Then catch a bus. He'd be gone.
"Where'n the fuck are they?" he shouted at the yellow-haired girl.
"Should be here," she said calmly.
He needed Rosie and Mark to get back. Needed the gas from the truck if he was going to make the run down to Flambeau Crossing.
The yellow-haired girl had put the ham-and-cheese in the microwave and then she'd gone back to her bedroom and started changing. Longjohns, thick socks, a sweater. Got out her snowmobile suit, her pac boots, began to go through her stuff. Took pictures. Pictures of her mom, her brother and sister, found a photo of her father, flipped it facedown on the floor without a second look. She took a small gold-filled cross on a gold chain, the chain broken. She put it all in her purse. She could stuff the purse inside her snowmobile suit.
Helper had told her about the cops. There had been nothing he could do about it. They were right on top of him. She could feel the sense of entrapment, the anger. She patted him on the shoulder, held his head, then offered him food and went to pack.
She heard the watch chiming, then the ding of the microwave. She carried her stuff to the kitchen, dumped it on a chair, took the ham-and-cheese out of the oven. The package was hot, and she juggled it onto a plate. She'd put a cup of coffee in with the ham-and-cheese, but it wasn't quite ready yet. She punched it for another minute and called, "Come and get it."
Her mom used to say that a long time ago. She sometimes couldn't quite remember her face. She could remember the voice, though, whining, as often as not, but sometimes cheerful: Come and get it.
The phone rang, and without thinking she reached over and picked it up. "Hello?"
The Iceman looked at her from the couch.
Rosie spoke, her voice a harsh, excited whisper. "Ginny-don't look at Duane, okay? Don't look at him. Just listen. Duane just killed two cops and all those other people. There are cops all around the house. You gotta get out so they can come in and get him. When Duane's in the bathroom or something, whenever you get a chance, just go right out the front door and run down the driveway. Don't put a coat on or anything, just run. Okay? Now say something like 'Where the heck are you?' "
"Where the heck are you?" the yellow-haired girl said automatically. She turned to look at Duane.
"Tell him we're still downtown and we wanted to know about the roads out there. Now say something about the roads."
"Well, they're a mess. It's snowing like crazy," the yellow-haired girl said. "The drive's filling up, and a plow came by a little while ago and plowed us in."
The Iceman was off the couch, whispering. "Tell her we need them to come out. I gotta have the gas. Don't tell them I'm here."
She put a finger to her lips, then went back to the phone. "I really kind of need you out here," she said.
Rosie caught on. "Is he listening?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Tell him we'll be out in a while. And when you get a chance, you run for it. Okay?"
"Okay."
"God bless you," Rosie said. "Run for it, honey."
The yellow-haired girl nodded. Duane was focused on her, fists in his pockets. "Sure, I will," she said.
CHAPTER 29
The snow was getting heavier and the thin daylight was fading fast. Climpt was a dark lump in the snow to his left, unmoving. Lucas had settled behind a tree, the pine scent a delicate accent on the wind. And they waited.
Five minutes gone since Carr had called on the radio: Okay, the kid knows, she's gonna make a break for it. Everybody hold your fire.
A man moved along the edge of the woods opposite Lucas, and then another man, behind him, both carrying long arms. They settled in, watching the door.
The radio kept burping in Lucas' ear:
John, you set?
I'm set.
I don't think there's any way he could get out this end-the storm windows got outside fasteners.
Can't see shit out back. Where's Gene and Lucas?
Lucas: "I'm in the trees about even with the front door. Gene's looking at the back." A shadow crossed the curtain ov
er the glass viewport in the front door, stayed there. Lucas went back to the radio: "Heads up. Somebody's at the front door."
But nobody moving fast, he thought, heart sinking. The kid wasn't running. The porch light came on, throwing a circle of illumination across the dark yard. Climpt stood up, looked at him. Lucas said, "Watch the back, watch the back, could be a decoy."
Climpt lifted a hand and Lucas turned back to the trailer home. A crack of brilliant white light appeared at the door, then the large bulk of a man and a struggling child.
"Hold it, hold it!" Helper screamed. He pushed through the storm door to the concrete-block stoop, crouched behind the yellow-haired girl. He had one arm around her neck, another hand at her head. "I got a gun in her ear. Shoot me and she dies. She fuckin' dies. I got my thumb on the hammer."
Lucas waved Climpt over and Climpt half-walked, half-crawled through the snow, using the trees to screen himself from the mobile home. "What the fuck?" he grunted.
Helper and the girl were in the porch light, dressed in snowmobile suits. Helper was wearing a helmet. "I wanna talk to Carr," he screamed. "I want him up here."
Carr, on the radio: Lucas? What do you think?
Lucas ducked behind a tree, spoke as softly as he could. "Talk to him. But stay out of sight. Get one of the guys on the other side to yell back to him that you're on the way. He can't see us-we're only about thirty feet away."
"I wanna talk to Carr," Helper screamed. He jerked the girl to the left, toward his snowmobile, nearly pulling her off her feet.
A few seconds later a voice came from the forest on the other side: "Take it easy, Duane, Shelly's coming in. He's coming in from the road. Take it easy."
Helper swiveled toward the voice. "You motherfuckers, the hammer's back-you shoot me and the gun'll blow her brains all over the fuckin' lot!"
"Take it easy."
Carr, on the radio: Lucas, I'm walking up the driveway. What do I tell him?
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