Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  Nothing but a single word, which seemed not so much a sound as a line of type, a word cut from a newspaper: "knife"

  CHAPTER 30

  The Iceman was there, almost in the treeline, when the shot ripped through his back, between his spine and his shoulder blade. He went down facefirst, and a burst of automatic weapons fire tore up the aspen overhead. His mind was clear as ice, but his body felt like a flame.

  There was another burst, slashing through the trees, then another, but the last was directed somewhere else. The Iceman got to his feet, pain riding his back like a thousandpound knapsack. He pushed deeper into the woods, deeper. Couldn't go far, had to sit down With the sudden profusion of lights below, he could see the vague outlines of trees around him, and he fought through them, heading at an angle toward the road. Behind him, his tracks filled with snow almost as fast as he made holes in it. Then he was out of the light.

  Caught in the darkness, he probed ahead with his hands. The pain in his back grew like a cancer, spreading through him, into his belly, his legs, turning his body to lead. A tree limb caught him in the face mask, snapped his head back. His breath came harder: he pulled off the helmet, threw it away. He needed to feel... He was bleeding. He could feel the blood flowing down his belly and his back, warm, sticking between his shirt and his skin. He took another step, waving his hands like a blind man; another, waving his hands. A branch snapped him in the face, and he swore, twisted, tripped, went down.

  Swore, struggled to his feet, took another three steps, fell in a hole, tried to get up. Failed this time. Felt so quiet. Lay there, resting; all he needed was a little rest, then he could get up.

  Yukon. Alaska.

  Weather, coming up, saw Lucas on the snow and the blood on his face, screamed, "No, God..."

  "He's hit, he's hit," Climpt screamed. He was cradling Lucas' head, Henry Lacey standing over both Lucas and Climpt, Carr beside the yellow-haired girl, other deputies milling through the snow.

  Like a scene shot in slow motion, Weather saw Lacey's teeth flashing in the snowmobile headlights, saw the face of the little girl, serene, dead, her coat puckered with bullet holes, and she thought, Gone to the angels, as she dropped to her knees next to Lucas. Lucas thrashed, his eyes half open, the whites showing, straining, straining. She grabbed his jaw, found blood, tipped his head back, saw the entry -wound, a small puncture that might have been made with a ballpoint pen. He couldn't breathe. She pulled off her gloves, pried open his jaws, and pushed one of the gloves into the corner of his mouth to keep him from snapping his teeth on her fingers.

  With his mouth wedged open, she probed his throat with her fingers, found the blockage, a chunk of soft tissue where there shouldn't have been anything. Her mind went cold, analytical. "Knife," she said to Lacey.

  "What?" Lacey shouted down at her, shocked. She realized that he had a gun in his hand. "Give me your fuckin' knife-your knife!"

  "Here, here." Climpt thrust a red jackknife at her, a Swiss Army knife, and she scratched open the larger of the two blades. "Hold his head down," she said to Climpt. Lacey dropped to his knees to help as she straddled Lucas' chest. "Put your hand on his forehead. Push down." She pushed the point of the blade into Lucas' throat below the Adam's apple and twisted it, prying... and there was a sudden frightening croak as air rushed into his lungs.

  "Keep his head down-keep his head down." She thrust her index finger into the incision and crimped it, keeping the hole open. "Let's get him outlet's get him out," she shouted, slipping off his chest. Lucas seemed to levitate, men at each thigh and two more at either shoulder.

  "Keep his head down." They rushed him out of the woods, up to the sheriff's Suburban. With each awkward, bloody breath, Lucas, eyes closed now, said, "Awwwk... awk" like a dying crow. A siren screamed away down the road just above him.

  Helper was lying in the ditch below the road, he realized. All he had to do was crawl to the top, and when the cops were gone, flag a car. A small piece of rationality bit back at him: the cops wouldn't be going.

  Not now.

  They knew he was here, now. The Iceman laughed. They'd find him, they were coming.

  He tried to roll, get up; he would crawl to the top, flag the cops.

  Quit.

  After he healed, he could try again. There was always the possibility of breaking out of jail, always possibilities. But he couldn't get up.

  Couldn't move. His mind was still clear, working wonderfully. He analyzed the problem. He was stiff from the wound, he thought. Not a bad wound, not a killer, but he was stiffening up like a wounded deer.

  When you shot a deer and failed to knock it down, you waited a half hour or so and invariably found it lying close by, unable to move. If he was going to live, he had to get up. But he couldn't. Tried.

  Couldn't. They'd come, he thought. Come and get him. The trail was only a couple of hundred yards long. They'd track him, they'd find him. All he hadto do was wait. "If he's not hit, then going in there'd be suicide. If he is hit, he's dead. Just set up the cordon and let it go until daylight," Carr said. Lacey nodded, stepped to another deputy to relay the word. ' I "I want three or. four men together everywhere," Carr called after him. "I don't want anyone out there alone, okay? Just in case." They found him lying in the ditch beside the road. Still alive, still alert. The Iceman sensed them coming; not so much heard them, but simply knew. Cocked his head up; that was as far as he could move now. But still: if they got him right into town, they could save him. They could still save him. "Help me," he groaned. Something skittered away, then returned. "Help."

  Something touched his face; something colder than he was. He moved and they fell away. And came back. Nipped at him; there was a snarl, then a twisting flight, then they were back. Coyotes.

  Brought by the scent of blood and the protection of the dark. Hungry this year. Hungry with the deep snow. Most of the deer dead and gone.

  They came closer; he tried to move; failed. Tried to lift his hand, tried to roll, tried to cover his face. Failed.

  Mind clear as water. Sharper teeth at his face, snapping, ripping, pulling him apart. He opened his mouth to scream; teeth at his lips.

  Nine deputies were at the scene, four of them as pickets, guarding against the return of Helper. The rest worked over the scene, searching for blood sign and shells, or simply watched. The yellow-haired girl was a bump under a blue plastic tarp. Lacey and Carr stood to one side, Carr talking into the radio. When he signed off, Lacey was looking into the dark. "I still think if we went slow.

  .."

  "Forget it," Carr said. "If he's laying up, he'd just take out more of us. Keep the cordon along the road. Davenport got off a half-dozen shots at him, Gene chopped up the woods-I think there's a good chance that he's down. What we need..."

  "Wait," Lacey snapped. He held up a gloved hand, turned, and looked northeast at an angle toward the road. He seemed to be straining into the dark. "What?"

  "Sounded like a scream," Lacey said. They listened together for a moment, heard the chatter of the deputies around them, the distant muffled mutter of trucks idling on the road, and beneath it all the profoundly subtle rumble of the falling snow.

  Nothing at all like the scream of a man being eaten alive.

  Carr shook his head. "Probably just the wind," he said.

  CHAPTER 31

  He was on snowshoes, working along the ridges across the access road to his cabin. After the first mile, he was damp with sweat. He took his watch cap off, stuffed it in his pocket, unzipped his parka to cool down, and moved on. The alders caught at his legs, tangled him. They were small, bushy trees with thumb-sized trunks marked with speckles, like wild cherries. In some places they'd been buried by the frequent snowfalls. When he stepped over a buried bush, his snowshoe would collapse beneath him as though he'd stepped in a hole, which, in fact, he had-a snow dome, held up by the flexible branches of a buried alder.

  Then he'd be up to his knee or even his crotch, struggling to get back on the level. As he
fought across the swamp, a time of ice formed on his sunglasses, and his heart thumped like a drum in the silence of the North Woods. He climbed the side of a narrow finger ridge; when he reached its spine, he turned downhill and followed it back to the swamp. At the point where the ridge subsided into the swamp, a tangle of red cedars hugged the snow. Deer had bedded all through the cedars, shedding hair, discoloring the snow. There were pinkish urine holes everywhere, piles of scat like livercolored.45 shells; but no deer.

  He would have been as obvious to them as a locomotive, and they'd be long gone. He felt a spasm of guilt. He shouldn't be running deer,-not this winter. They'd be weak enough. His legs twitched, twitched against the pristine white sheets, white like the snow. The winter faded. "Wake UP, you... Lucas opened his eyes, groaned. His back was stiff, his neck stretched and immobile in the plastic brace.

  "Goddamn, I was out of it," he said hoarsely. "What time is it?"

  "Four o'clock," Weather said, smiling down at him. She was wearing her surgeon's scrub suit. "It'll be dark in an hour.

  How're you feeling?" Lucas tested his throat, flexing. "Still hurts, but not so bad. Feels more like tight."

  "It'll do that as it heals. If it gets worse, we'll go back in and release some of the scar tissue."

  "I can live with the tight feeling," he said. "What? You don't trust me?" The.22 slug had entered below his jawbone, penetrating upwards, parallel to his tongue, finally burying itself in the soft tissue at the back of his throat. When he'd tried to inhale, he'd sucked down a flap of loose tissue not much bigger than a nickel and had almost choked to death. Weather had fixed the damage with an hour of work on the table at Lincoln Memorial. "Trust a woman, the next thing you know, they're cutting your throat," Lucas said.

  "All right, so now I'm not going to tell you about the Schoeneckers."

  "What?" He started to sit up, but she pushed him down. "They found them?"

  "Camping in Baja. This morning. They used a gas credit card last night, and they found them about ten o'clock our time. Henry Lacey called and said the folks don't know nothin' about nothin', but one of the girls is giving them quite an earful. Henry may fly out there with a couple of other deputies to bring them back."

  "Far out. They can squeeze them on the other people in the sex thing."

  "They? You're not going to help?" Lucas shook his head. "Not my territory anymore. I gotta figure out something to do. Maybe go back to Minneapolis."

  "Hmph," she said. "Well, Jesus Christ," Lucas said, picking up her change of mood, "I was hoping you'd help me figure it out. One way or another, you'll be around, right?"

  "We gotta talk," she said. "When you get out of here."

  "What does that mean? You don't want to be around?"

  "I want to be around," she said. "But we gotta talk."

  "All right." Shelly Carr knocked on the door. "Visiting hours?" He had a wool-plaid hunting cap in his hands, with earflaps. "Come on in," Lucas croaked. Carr asked, and Lucas said he felt fine. "What's the word on Harper? Weather says you found his truck."

  "Yeah-out on a lake. There's a big collection of fishing shacks. Lot of people around there. We think he might have met somebody, got a ride so we couldn't put out a bulletin on his license. God knows where he is now, but we're looking."

  "You look pretty good," Lucas said. "Got some rest," Carr said. "Have you talked to Gene again?"

  "Yeah. He's still up at your cabin," Carr said. "He just sits up there and watches television and reads. I'm kind of worried."

  "He needs professional help, but there's no chance he'd talk to a psychiatrist," Weather said. "Big macho guy like that, no chance."

  "Yeah, well... I know where he's at," Lucas said. "It's like the Church. If you don't believe, it won't do you any good to go. He's gonna have to work it out himself."

  "The whole thing was odd," Carr said. "He was okay until he went to her funeral. He shouldn't have gone, I told him that."

  "He might of had to," Lucas said. "Yeah, I know," Carr said reluctantly.

  "But as soon as he saw her face, that was that. I mean, she looked like an angel. You know about his daughter."

  "Yeah." They sat for a moment, not talking, then Carr said, "I gotta go." He whacked Lucas twice on the leg.

  "Get better." When he was gone, Weather said, "Shelly's doing all right politically. Lacey's made sure that everybody knows about him walking up the driveway to deal with Helper."

  "Took some balls," Lucas said. "And somehow all the dead people are just... dead. Seems like nobody really talks about it that much.

  It's been less than a week."

  "That's the way it goes," Lucas said. "Did you see the paper?" she asked. "A nurse brought it in this morning, just after you left," he said. "Great picture, Shelly with the FBI guys, taking credit," she said. "Kind of made me mad."

  "Shelly's just taking care of business," Lucas said mildly. He was amused. "I know. I had a little talk with him about his wife, by the way. I suggested that they both might be better off divorced."

  "What'd he say?"

  "He said, 'Divorce is a sin."' After a few minutes he said, "Push the door shut."

  She looked at the door, then stepped over, pushed it shut, sat on the bed next to him, kissed him. He couldn't turn his head much, but he could move his arm, and he held her to him as long and hard as he could. She finally pulled away, laughing, straightened her hair.

  "Jeer, it's hard not to take advantage of you, a man in your condition," she said.

  "Hey. I don't hurt all that bad. So come back here." He tried to reach for her, but she danced away. "I wasn't referring to your getting shot. I was referring to the fact that you're falling in love with me."

  "I am?"

  "Take my word for it," she said. She stepped closer, bent over, kissed him lightly on the forehead. He tried to reach for her again, but she danced away. "Try to get some rest. You're probably gonna need it when you get out."

  "You've got a sense of humor like a cop," Lucas said. "Nasty. And you hide behind it. Like a cop." She'd been smiling, but now the smile narrowed, turned uncertain. "I guess I do."

  "Because you're right. I am falling in love with you. You don't have to be funny about it." This time she touched him on the tip of the nose and said, "Get well." She was smiling, but seemed to have tears in her eyes, and she left in a hurry.

  Lucas drifted for a while, punched up the TV, turned it off, used the bedlift control to raise his head. He could see out the window, across the lawn toward the town, with the small houses and the smoke curling out of the chimneys. Not much to see: white snow, blue sky, small houses. And it was bitterly cold, everybody said the worst cold of the winter. From inside it didn't look so bad. From inside, it looked pretty good He smiled and closed his eyes.

  The End