Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  “Cody wants to arrest Daniel, I want Jeffrey back—”

  She glanced toward Dylan, whose motives for being here were less clear to her. To me, too, thought Lizzie.

  “Anyway, I’m glad for your help, all of you. For whatever your reasons,” Missy finished simply.

  Then Dylan spoke up. “Yeah. So don’t worry, Lizzie. No one suspects you of any generous motives. Or whatever it is you’re so worried about.”

  His voice was chilly. “By the way, since apparently it’s truth-telling time, I lent my motel room in Houlton to one of the Maine DEA cops last night; she got stuck late on that meth bust.”

  He stomped his snowshoes up and down, getting the feel of them again. “When we get out of here, somebody remind me to call her and tell her she can keep it, will you? Because I’m going back to Bangor. I’ve got a case of my own to work.”

  So that was it. He was a detective, for heaven’s sake; it wouldn’t have taken much for him to figure out that Lizzie had called his room, heard a woman’s voice, and decided he was lying to her yet again. Probably the DEA cop had mentioned the hang-up, and he’d connected the dots. And now …

  Now he’d had the nerve to get his feelings hurt about it. Yeah, well, you bought that trip, buddy, she thought at his down-jacketed back as he moved ahead into the darkness. If you don’t want to be figured for a liar, then don’t tell …

  But he hadn’t been lying, had he? Not this time. The truth was, she’d been wrong.

  But before she could think any more about that, Dylan put a hand up. Something up there, the sharp gesture communicated. She hurried to join him, but as she reached him his arm thrust out suddenly, shoving her sideways into a snowdrift, and then he hurled himself after her.

  An instant later the shooting started.

  TWELVE

  Spud crouched in the lean-to, holding the gun the guy had given him in both cold hands. Behind him in the gloom huddled the woman and the little blond girl, both of them swathed thickly in blankets.

  The woman held Missy Brantwell’s baby in her arms. She was spooning some kind of porridge to its lips, rocking the child gently as she did so. The little blond-haired girl looked on, her pale face serene as she rested against the woman.

  It all looked so peaceful … or anyway it did until the woman turned her head. By the light of the oil lantern hanging from the lean-to’s ridgepole, the scar on her face was a purplish ridge running diagonally from her right ear all the way to the corner of her mouth.

  He tried smiling at the woman, wanting very badly to let her know that she wasn’t in this alone, mostly so he could feel that way himself. But in response she only winced, turning away and pulling the blanket up to hide both herself and the baby while the little girl buried her face shyly once more.

  So much for friendliness, Spud thought. Bad enough she had a face like that, but did she have to be a sourpuss on the inside, too? It just went to show what the guy must be like at heart, he thought; having her here, taking her in and caring for her when no one else would, probably; her and the girl.

  Then came gunshots, somewhere beyond the clearing’s edge. Spud’s heart was still pounding anxiously when the guy appeared at the lean-to’s mouth.

  Wordlessly the guy jerked his head; Spud jumped up and clambered out of the shelter as if yanked by an invisible string. Overhead the wind thrashed the towering evergreen tops, but down here in the firelit clearing only the occasional icy gust of snow blew in, dusting the matted pine needles with white.

  “Here.” The guy led Spud toward the clearing’s edge, past the end of a row of wooden pallets stretching back in among the big trees.

  A heavy swath of clear plastic sheeting was pulled back from the pallets, which Spud felt sure had been stacked with plastic-wrapped packages last time he’d been here. But now all but one of them was empty.

  “Hey.” The guy spoke flatly. Spud hurried to where he’d been summoned; when he got there, the guy pointed at the ground.

  “Sit. When they come through here, you shoot them.” Without waiting for a reply, the guy turned and padded away.

  Spud looked down again at the gun in his hands: a pistol, heavy and foreign feeling. A hunting trip had been offered to him every autumn since he was nine—back then, his dad hadn’t been such a loser—but he’d refused.

  Hunting was too much work. Even at that age, he’d preferred firstperson shooter games that could be played in the privacy of his comfortable room and that offered human figures as targets.

  But as a result he’d never fired a real gun. Now he turned the pistol over in his hands, finding the trigger, lifting and aiming the gun experimentally. Cold, wicked looking, the thing had a lethal charm that enthralled him at once.

  Shoot them, the guy had said. Admiring the seductive glint of the firelight off the weapon’s dark metal, Spud let his left hand caress the gun barrel while his right clutched the grip.

  Shoot them. Oh, yeah.

  He could definitely do that.

  Lizzie bucked upward, choking on snow, trying to get free of …“Get off me, dammit!”

  Somewhere nearby, Chevrier cursed fervently and Missy was screaming something. Grabbing a snow-glazed sapling with both hands, Lizzie hauled herself free, then bent to turn the figure that had fallen on her.

  “Hey,” said Dylan, smiling weakly. “Crazy, huh? Twice in …”

  Twice in three days. The hole in his down jacket was leaking a few feathers.

  Whitely, innocently. “Oh,” she heard herself say, dropping to his side. He was saying something else but she couldn’t hear him.

  “Missy, shut up!” Abruptly the girl obeyed, the silence afterward even more terrifying.

  “Dylan?” No answer. “Dylan!”

  Then Chevrier appeared, his hood’s trim a wreath of snow. “Okay, this ends now,” he said, pulling his phone out.

  “But there’s no—” Signal way out here, Lizzie was about to finish, then saw it wasn’t a phone at all.

  “Satellite phone,” he said. “Pilot program, feds threw us a bone. We’d never have one otherwise; they cost a couple of grand each.”

  But it was paying for itself now, Lizzie thought. “Dispatch can get us some game wardens out here in twenty minutes or so,” he added. “Good as deputies. Maybe better, in this environment.”

  He rattled off a string of commands into the device, then stuffed it away again as Lizzie found her voice.

  “Missy, have you got a diaper in that baby bag you brought?” From Dylan’s side she reached up blindly, felt Missy thrust the thick pad into her hand.

  “Okay, now, you get down here and put pressure on this,” she said, and the girl obeyed as the guttural pop of gunfire sounded again, small branches crackling as rounds whizzed through them.

  She looked up at Chevrier, who nodded in understanding. “Oh, yeah, that’s gotta stop,” he said, unholstering his weapon.

  “Stay here,” he added to Missy, “until you hear the good guys coming.”

  The wardens he’d summoned, he meant. “Then you run and guide ’em in, got it?”

  Missy nodded. Dylan coughed, a wet, painful sound that left him gasping.

  He’d dropped his gun somewhere in the snow. Lizzie held out her own. “You know how to fire this?”

  Thinking that Missy wouldn’t. But the girl took the gun confidently, checked the safety and magazine. “Dad showed me.”

  Yeah, he’d been handy with a firearm, all right. Lizzie banished the thought as Chevrier jerked his head: You go that way.

  Nodding her understanding, she made her way past the trees to a shallow ravine, worked her way along it. The snow was much deeper here; battling through it, she first hit a hole that felt bottomless and hauled herself out, then slammed her knee into a rock masquerading as a snowdrift.

  But eventually she found herself at the edge of a clearing. A campfire flared at the center of it; the perimeter all around the fire had been swept clean of the fallen pine needles carpeting the rest of the ope
n area. Small sheds, lean-tos, and a long row of wooden pallets, most of them empty, ringed the clearing.

  Then: “Hush. Keep still.”

  Like hell, she thought as her training clicked in automatically: Crouch, pivot, and—

  Something touched her neck. Not a gun barrel. Cold, sharp …

  “I want you to turn toward me. Slowly now.”

  Lizzie obeyed, thinking, Duck, turn, head butt—

  Also, she had her own weapon. Gripped in her right hand, the HK semiauto she’d taken from Brantwell still had all ten rounds; the other three clips were in her pockets.

  But as she turned, the sharp, pointy thing stayed pressed against her skin, drawing a bright stinging line around her neck until the point of it reached the soft flesh under her chin, and her captor stood before her.

  Tall and smooth-faced, wearing a ragged fur hat that looked as if he’d made it himself …“Don’t move,” he cautioned calmly.

  He carried a small battery lantern, so she saw clearly his rough costume of furs and … what was that, deerskin?

  Great, she thought, I’m being held prisoner by the Last of the Mohicans. The blade touching her throat took most of the humor out of it, though.

  Or all of it, actually. He moved the weapon away slightly: an arrow, she saw, its head a viciously barbed slice of metal that looked sharp enough to pierce steel.

  “Show me the gun. Clips, too—you wouldn’t have come without ’em.” She held them up.

  “Drop ’em in the pouch,” he said, so she did that, too.

  “That way,” he instructed, gesturing with one hand. “Ahead of me.”

  She swallowed hard, still feeling the blade. “Listen, Missy just wants her baby back, so …”

  Without warning, the arrow tip returned and struck, fanglike; a trickle of hot blood leaked down into her shirt.

  “Just walk,” the guy instructed, so she did, one step after another, into the firelit clearing.

  “Oh, you’re kidding me,” she said when she saw Spud. The boy looked ridiculous with his frizzy blond hair, wild tattoos, and—the only non-ridiculous part—a gun in his hand.

  “Over there,” said the guy with the arrow tip still at Lizzie’s throat; she followed his gesture to a lean-to made of logs, saplings, and pine boughs.

  “You,” the guy told Spud, “watch her.” His wave seemed to levitate Spud up off the log he sat on, then send him lumbering toward the lean-to.

  “God, Spud,” she told him, “if I’d known all you wanted was someone to boss you around, I could’ve done it.”

  “Shut up.” Glowering inexpertly at her, he waved the gun at the lean-to’s interior. “Just get in there.”

  Good, Lizzie thought. He’ll sit outside, and maybe I’ll find something to hit him with from behind. Hit him hard …

  She ducked into the lamplit shelter, which had a thickly pine-needled floor. The fragrance of the evergreens mingled with the smell of campfire smoke. There were two low benches and at the rear what she thought at first was a pile of blankets.

  Then the blankets shifted. A woman huddled in them, her face half hidden. And beside her, staring white-faced, was …

  A little girl. Thin, unsmiling … The child wore a woolen hat, a few wisps of hair sticking out. Pale blond hair …

  “Nicki?” Lizzie whispered it, her heart thudding.

  “I said shut up!” Spud bellowed over his shoulder.

  The child shrank back, burrowing against the woman. Then a wail came from deep within the blankets—

  A baby’s cry. The woman shifted, one white arm emerging from the coverings to retrieve a plastic baby bottle tucked in amidst a small cache of other baby items, piled against the lean-to’s slanted wall.

  The baby fell silent, faint sucking noises coming now from his warm refuge. The little girl, too, settled down by the woman again, her thumb in her mouth.

  He’s stolen himself a family, Lizzie thought. But the guy’s motivations were the least of her interests now. Returning to the lean-to’s entry, where Spud still hunkered with his weapon, she whispered insistently.

  “You little idiot, what the hell are you doing?” If she could get him talking, then maybe she could distract him and—

  “Shut up,” he hissed. “Who asked you to come here, anyway?”

  Half turning, he leaned in toward her. “And the next person who calls me an idiot gets a bullet in the fucking brain. I’m done being called things, get it?”

  He aimed the gun at her, voice shaking with anger, but his hand terrifyingly steady. “I’m done,” he began, “and—”

  “Hey.” Behind him, the guy appeared, blank-faced. Spud’s went still, looking all at once devoid of emotion.

  Like his new mentor, Lizzie thought, a thrill of real fright going through her at the idea. She’d seen it before, a young guy with no hope and no future finding direction in a gang, idolizing whoever was the ringleader.

  They were always the most violent ones, at least until they got killed by the cops or by some newer and even hungrier little savage.

  “Yeah,” Spud managed. “Sorry, I’ll—”

  The guy turned away without waiting for Spud to finish. He carried an armload of plastic bags now, and in the bags …

  Something whitish was in them, like the crack cocaine she used to confiscate when she was back on patrol, when she first became a cop in Boston.

  Or like methamphetamine. “Hey, Spud. Your guy’s a freakin’ drug dealer, you know that?”

  No response from the teenager. Behind Lizzie, the woman and the little kids went on cowering in their blankets. Lizzie wanted badly to go back there. Nicki, have I found you?

  Have I finally—“Yeah, he’s pushing meth.” A picture of the place the DEA had raided that morning—was it only this morning?—rose in her mind’s eye.

  “At,” she added, “a nice profit for himself. Yeah, he’s the lord of the forest, all right. If by ‘lord’ you mean ‘slumlord.’ ”

  “Shut up,” Spud growled. He sat sideways with one eye on the lean-to’s opening, the other on his fearless leader.

  Back and forth, emptying the final pallet at the clearing’s edge, the guy worked steadily. Finally he took off out through the trees with a big plastic garbage bag over his shoulder.

  But his absence only increased her anxiety. Probably he had a vehicle somewhere nearer the road; once he’d finished here, he could take off in it just the way Izzy Dolaby had predicted.

  That’s his plan. First, though, he’ll have to finish us.

  Minutes passed; she began thinking she was wrong. Maybe the guy had decided just to go while the going was good. But then, just when she thought he wasn’t coming back, that they might get out of here without any more bloodshed once Spud figured it out, too, the guy came out of the woods again with Chevrier in front of him, marching the sheriff along.

  Not with an arrow at the throat of his captive this time, though; this time, he had Chevrier’s gun.

  “Get out here.” The guy gestured sharply with his free hand. Spud backed off as Lizzie exited the lean-to.

  “Sit, both of you.” Chevrier scowled furiously, obeying; at the guy’s urging, Lizzie had no choice but to join the sheriff on the cold ground.

  Inside the lean-to the baby began crying again, loud yells that sounded as if they must carry for miles in the silent woods. Lizzie’s heart sank:

  If Missy hears that, we’re done for. She’ll come running, and the wardens will never find Dylan if she’s not out there to guide them.

  And they’ll never find us. Not until they find our bodies …

  Because it was clear now what the guy must mean to do. He’d know he had to get away, that if they’d found him out here, then others would find him soon, too.

  And he must know he’d have to go alone, not take his stolen family. Or not all of it; only the baby, Lizzie was willing to bet.

  Only his own flesh and blood. As if to prove it, he shoved her aside, ducking into the lean-to and emerging with th
e child under his arm, wedged there like a bundle of rags. The woman scrambled after him, her arms stretched out imploringly. But then she stopped short, her face upturned in a mask of anguish.

  The child whimpered as the guy hefted him a little higher under his arm, ignoring the weeping woman.

  “Keep the gun on them,” he told Spud. He eyed Chevrier and Lizzie flatly, then looked back at his helper, who by now seemed extremely nervous.

  “But what if …?” Spud began, an anxious whine creeping into his voice. The baby stopped crying, then coughed several times, a thick, wet hacking that Lizzie didn’t like the sound of one bit.

  The guy didn’t seem to notice. “Don’t worry,” he told Spud. “You’ve got the gun, remember?”

  He looked down at Lizzie, then at Chevrier. “So if either one of them moves one freaking muscle,” he finished flatly, “just kill them both.”

  The two cops spoke quietly to each other. Spud didn’t try to stop them; after all, what could they do?

  And anyway, the guy hadn’t said not to let them talk. So he watched silently, proud of the responsibility he’d been given, waiting for his newfound friend to return.

  Around him the trees seemed to wait silently, too. The wind had dropped off, snow gusts no longer blowing into the campsite, and the fire’s flames aimed straight up as if pointing out the clearing sky overhead, stars winking between the treetops.

  But as the clouds thinned, the cold bit down hard. Spud’s skin chilled down as well, wet from the snow that had melted into his clothes. The fire helped a little, but not nearly enough.

  His feet throbbed miserably; he imagined how his toes must look. Red and swollen, as they had when he was a kid and stayed out too long sledding? Or was frostbite transforming them to dead flesh, blackened gangrene that would rot off and—

  “Hey, Spud.”

  He grunted irritably. Why Lizzie Snow thought anything she said might interest him was beyond him. Didn’t she know she was going to die out here soon?

  “It’s not that easy, you know,” she said. “Killing people, I mean. You’d better make sure you’ve got the stones for it before you try aiming that thing and pulling the trigger.”