Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  Another shotgun blast, then another, a long five seconds apart, the muzzle flash from the first lighting up the front of the room. The flash from the second seemed fainter, the pellets ricocheting around the stone fireplace.

  Five seconds passed without another shot. "He's running," Lucas said.

  "I think he's running."

  He got to his feet and dashed into Weather's bedroom, looked out on the lawn. He could see the man there, a hundred feet away, twenty feet from the shelter of the treeline, fifteen feet. "God damnit." He stepped back and fired two quick shots through the window glass, shattering it, then one more at the fleeing figure, a hopeless shot.

  The man disappeared into the trees. Lucas fired a final shot at the last spot he'd seen him, and the magazine was empty.

  "Get him? Get him?" Weather was there with the rifle.

  He snatched it from her and ran down the hall to the living room, out through the deck and into the snow. He floundered across the yard, through snow thigh deep, following the tracks, through the treeline...

  and saw the red taillight of a snowmobile scudding across the lake, three or four hundred yards away. The rifle was useless at that range.

  He was freezing. The cold caught at him, twisted him.

  He turned and began to run back toward the house, but the cold battered at him and he slowed, plodding in his bare feet, his pajamas hanging from him.

  "Jesus, Lucas, Lucas..." Weather caught him under the arms, hauled him into the house. He was shaking uncontrollably.

  "Handset in my truck. Get it," he grunted.

  "You get in the goddamn shower-just get in it."

  She turned and ran toward the garage, flipping on lights as she went.

  Lucas peeled off his sodden pajama top, so tired he could barely move, staggered back toward die. bathroom. The temperature inside the house was plunging as the night air roared through the shattered windows, but the bathroom was still warm.

  He got in the shower, turned on the hot water, let it run down his back, plastering his pajama pants to his legs. He was holding on to the shower head when Weather came back with the handset.

  "Dispatch."

  "Mis is Davenport down at Weather Karkinnen's place.

  We were just hit by a guy with a shotgun. Nobody hurt, but the house is a mess. The guy is headed west across Lincoln Lake on a snowmobile.

  He's about two minutes gone, maybe three."

  N R_ 4, "Weather, that's the damnedest, stupidist thing Carr started, but Weather shook her head and looked at the ownbl out window. "I won't leave," she said. "Not when T it's like this. I'll figure out something."

  .F.5 Lucas was wrapped in a snowmobile suit. Carr shook his head and said, "All right, I'll get somebody from Hardware Hank out here."

  The gunman had come in on snowshoes, as the LaCourt killer had. By the time an alert had been issued, he could have been any one of dozens of snowmobilers still out on the trails within two or three miles of Weather's house. The two on-duty deputies were told to stop sleds and take names.

  Nobody thought much would come of it.

  "When I got the call about the shooting, I phoned Phil Bergen," Carr told Lucas.

  "Yeah?"

  "Nobody home," Carr said.

  There was a moment of silence, then Lucas asked, "Does he have a shotgun?"

  "I don't know. Anybody can get a gun, though."

  "Why don't you have somebody check on the sled, see if it's at his house? See if he's out on it."

  "That's being done," Carr said.

  The Madisowcrime scene techs were taking pictures of the snowmobile tread tracks, the snowshoe tracks, and were digging shotgun shells out of the snow. Lucas, still shaking with cold, walked through the living room with Weather. A double-ought pellet had hit the frame on one of the photographs of her parents, but the photo was all right.

  "Why did he do it that way, why... T' "I have to think about that," Lucas said.

  "About... T' "He wanted you. by those windows. If he'd gone to a A door, you might not have let him in. And he'd need a hell of a gun to shoot through those oak doors and be sure about getting you. So the question is, did he know about the doors?"

  "I think the glass was just the way he wanted to do, it," Weather said after a minute. "He could get access up from the lake, nobody'd see him."

  "That's possible, too. If you hadn't seen him, if we didn't know about the phones, you might've walked right up to the glass."

  "I almost did anyway," she said.

  Carr came back. "We can't find Phil, but his sled's in the garage.

  His car is gone."

  "I don't know what that means," Lucas said.

  "I don't either-but I've got dispatch calling Park Falls at Hayward.

  They're checking the bars for his car."

  The man from Hardware Hank brought three sheets of plywood and a Skil saw, broke the glass fragments out of the glass doors and the window in Weather's bedroom, fitted the openings with plywood, and set them in place with nails.

  "That'll hold you for tonight," he said as he left. "I'll check back tomorrow on something permanent."

  By three o'clock that morning the crime scene techs were packing up and the phone company had come and gone.

  Bergen had still not been found.

  "I'm going home," Carr said. "I'll leave somebody."

  "No, we're okay," Weather said. "Lucas has his.45 and I have the rifle... and I seriously doubt that'd he'd be back again."

  "All right," Carr said. He flushed slightly. Lucas realized that he assumed that he and Weather were in bed together.

  "Stay on the handset."

  "Yeah," Lucas said. Then, glancing at Weather, said to Carr, "C'mere and talk a minute. Privately."

  "What?" Weather asked, hands on her hips.

  "Law enforcement talk," Lucas said.

  Carr followed him into the guest bedroom. Lucas picked up his shoulder holster, took the pistol out. He'd reloaded after he got out of the shower, and now he punched out the chambered round and reseated it in the magazine.

  "If we don't find Bergen tonight, he could get lynched tomorrow," he said.

  "I know that," Carr said. "I'm praying he's drunk somewhere. First time for that."

  "But the main thing I want to say is, we need to get Weather out of town.

  She's gonna fight it, but I've contaminated her.

  I can't quite think why, but I guess I have."

  "So work on her," Carr said.

  Lucas gestured to his bag on the floor, the rumpled bedclothes.

  "We're not quite as friendly as you think, Shelly."

  Carr flushed again, then said, "I'll talk to her tomorrow , we'll work something out. I'll have a -guy with her all day."

  "Good." When the last man left, Weather pushed the door shut, looked at Lucas.

  "What was that little bull session about?" she asked suspiciously.

  "I asked some routine questions and let Shelly get a good look at my clothes and my watch and the rumpled-up bed in the guest room," Lucas said. He shivered.

  She looked at him for a moment, then said, "Huh. I appreciate that. I guess. Are you still cold?"

  "Yeah. Freezing. But I'm okay."

  "That was the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw, you tearing through the snow like that in your bare feet. I honest to God thought you were in trouble when I got you back in here, I thought you were gonna have a heart attack."

  "Seemed like the thing to do at the time," he said.

  She walked back into the living room, looked at the damaged walls, and said, "I'm really cranked, Davenport. Pissed and cranked. I'm gonna have to reschedule the hysterectomy I had going this morning... maybe I can push it back into the afternoon. Jesus, I'm wound up."

  "You've got about two quarts of adrenaline working their way through your body. You'll fall apart in an hour or so."

  "You think soT' She was interested. "Hey, look at the holes in the wallsmy God."

  She called the hospital
's night charge nurse, explained the problem, rescheduled the operation, unloaded then reloaded her.22, asked Davenport to demonstrate his.45, went repeatedly back to the buckshot holes, poking at them with an index finger, going outside to see if they'd gone through. She found three holes in her leather couch, and was outraged all over again. Lucas let her go. He went into the kitchen, made a bowl of chicken noodle soup, ate it all, went back into the living room, and fell on the couch.

  "What about the shots you fired? Could you have hit somebody across the lake?" she demanded. She had the magazine out of his.45 and was pointing it at her own image in the mirror over the fireplace.

  "No. Some people call a.45 slug a flying ashtray. It's fat, heavy, and slow. It'll knock the shit out of you close up, but it's not a long-range item. Fired from here, on the level, it wouldn't make it halfway across."

  "Any chance you hit him?" she asked.

  "No... I just didn't want him swarming through the door with the shotgun. I might of got him, but he would have got us, too."

  "God, it was loud," she said. "The shots almost broke my eardrums."

  "You lose a little high-frequency hearing every time you fire one without ear protection, and that's a fact," Lucas said.

  She ran out of gas. Suddenly. She stopped talking, came over and slumped next to him on the couch.

  "Snuggle up," he said, and pulled her down. She lay quietly for a moment, her back to him, then started to softly cry. "Goddamn him, he shot my house," she said.

  Her body shook with the anger of it, and Lucas wrapped his arm around her and held on.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Iceman rode wildly across the frozen lake, off the tracks, a plume of snow thrown high behind the sled when he banked through the long, sinuous turns that would take him to the Circle Lake intersection. He could see police flashers streaming down through the town, but couldn't hear them: and they certainly couldn't see him. He was running without lights, his sled as black as his snowmobile suit, invisible in the night.

  The gunfight had surprised him, but not frightened him.

  He had simply seen the truth: not tonight. He couldn't get at her tonight, because if he stayed, if he fought it out with whoever was inside-and it was almost certainly the cop from Minneapolis-he could be hurt. And hurt was good as dead.

  Time time time...

  He was running out of it. He could feel it trickling through his fingers. Davenport and Crane had taken something out of the LaCourt house, and it was almost certainly the photograph. But they had sent it to the lab in Madison: maybe it had been ruined in the fire after all.

  He'd talked to the cops who'd been there when they were looking at it, but they had no precise details. Just a piece of paper, they said.

  If Weather Karkinnen ever saw the photograph, they'd be on him.

  Weather: why was Davenport at her house? Guarding her? Screwing her?

  Why would they be guarding her? Had she given them something? But the only thing she had to give them was the identification, and if she'd given them that, they'd be knocking on his door.

  The intersection came up, marked by two distinctively pink sodium vapor lights. He was in luck: there were no other sleds at the crossing. If they saw him running a blacked-out sled, they'd be curious.

  He bucked through the intersection, up the boat landing, down the landing road, onto the trail built in the ditch beside the road. A moment later he turned onto Circle Creek, ran under the road and two minutes later onto the lake. He turned on his lights in the creek bed but kept cranking. There were more snowmobiles on Circle Lake, and he crossed paths with them, moving south and west.

  He worked through his options: He could run. Get in the car, make some excuse for a couple days' absence, and never come back. By the time they started looking for him, he'd be buried in Alaska or the Northwest Territories. But if he was missing, it wouldn't take long for the cops to figure out what happened. And if he ran, he'd have to give up almost everything he had. Take only what would fit in the car, and he'd have to dump the car in a few days. And he still might get caught: they had his picture, his fingerprints.

  He could go after the other members of the club, take them all out in one night. The problem was, some of them had already taken off. The Schoeneckers: how would he find them? No good.

  He had to stay. He had to find out about the photograph.

  Had to go back for Weather. He'd missed her twice now, and he was uneasy about it. When he'd been a kid, working the schoolyard, there'd always been a few people he'd never been able to get at. They'd always outmaneuvered him, always foiled him, sometimes goading him into trouble.

  Weather was like that: he needed to get at her, but she turned him away.

  He bucked up over another intersection, down a long bumpy lane cleared through the woods by the local snowmobile club, onto the next lake, and across. He came off the lake, took the boat landing road out to the highway, sat for a moment, then turned left.

  The yellow-haired girl was waiting. So was her brother, Mark. Mark with the dark hair and the large brown eyes.

  The yellow-haired girl let him in, helped him take off his snowmobile suit. Mark was smiling nervously: he was like that, he needed to be calmed. The Iceman liked working with Mark because of the resistance.

  If the yellow-haired girl hadn't been there...

  "Let's go back to my room," she said.

  "Where's Rosie?"

  "She went out drinking," the yellow-haired girl said.

  "I gotta get going," said Mark.

  "Where're you going?" Smiling, quiet. But the shooting still boiled in his blood. God, if he could get Weather someplace alone, if he could have her for a while...

  "Out with Bob," said Mark.

  "It's cold out there," he said.

  "I'll be okay," Mark said. He wouldn't meet his eyes.

  "He's gonna pick me up."

  "And I'll be here," said the yellow-haired girl. She was wearing a sweatsuit, old and pilled, wished it were something more elegant for him.

  She plucked at the pants leg, afraid of what he might say; of cruelty in his words.

  But he said, "That's great." He touched her head and the warmth flowed through her.

  Later in the evening he was lying in her bed, smoking. He thought of Weather, of Davenport, of Carr, of the picture; of Weather, of Davenport, round and round...

  The yellow-haired girl was breathing softly next to him, her hand on his stomach.

  He needed time to find out about the photo. If he could just put them off for a few days, he could find out. He could get details.

  Without the photo, there wouldn't be a link, but he needed time.

  CHAPTER 14

  The telephone rang in the kitchen.

  Lucas let it ring, heard a voice talking into the answering machine.

  He should get it, he thought. He rolled over and looked at the green luminous numbers on the bedstand clock. Nine-fifteen.

  Four hours lying awake, with a few sporadic minutes of sleep. The air in the house was cool, almost cold, and he pulled the blankets up over his ears. The phone rang again, two rings, then stopped as the answering machine came on. There was no talk this time. Whoever it was had hung up.

  A minute later the phone rang twice again. Irritated, Lucas thought about getting up. The ringing stopped, and a moment later began again, two more rings. Angry now, he slipped out of bed, wrapped the comforter around his shoulders, stomped down the hall to the kitchen, and glared at the phone.

  Ten seconds passed. It rang again, and he snatched it up.

  "What?" he snarled.

  "Ah. I knew you were sleeping in," the nun said with satisfaction.

  "You've got a message on the answering machine, by the way."

  Lucas looked down at the machine, saw the blinking red light. "I'm freezing my butt off. Couldn't..

  "Me message isn't from me. I know you've got one because your phone's,only ringing twice before the machine answers, instead of four or five t
imes," she said, sounding even more pleased with herself.

  "How'd you get the number?"

  "Sheriff's secretary," Elle said. "She told me what happened last night, and that you're guarding the body of some lady doctor who's quite attractive. Are you okay, by the way?"

  "Elle..." Lucas said impatiently, "You sound too smug for this to be a gossip call."