Degrees of Separation

by Sue Henry

  Through the windshield they watched him walk slowly and as quietly as possible away from the truck, across the street, and halfway up the drive toward the cabin.

  He had almost reached the spot where the motorcycle was parked when the cabin door suddenly opened. The person inside, still dressed in warm clothing, stepped out and turned the flashlight beam toward a pile of wood that was stacked next to the front step.

  Alex attempted to freeze in place. But, unfortunately, he had taken his last step onto a puddle that had frozen solid, flat, and slick in the cold. The interruption of his forward motion threw him off balance, his feet went out from under his tall frame, and he fell backward to sit down hard on the very ice that had caused his fall.

  At the sound of this, the person in the doorway swung all attention in his direction, saw him struggling to get up, whirled and, leaving the door wide open, moved swiftly to the opposite corner of the cabin and vanished around it into the dark, turning off the flashlight on the way.

  Alex regained his feet and took off in pursuit, careless now of any sound he was making in the effort.

  “That’s it,” Jessie said. “Now I am going over there.” Without further delay, she slid across the seat of the truck under the wheel, threw open the door on the driver’s side, and hopped down onto the ground, clearly intending to follow.

  “Not without me, you aren’t,” Maxie told her, opening the door on her side to exit the truck. “Hold on. I’m coming.”

  Together they trotted across the road and up the drive, carefully avoiding the slick spot where Alex had fallen, and around to the back of the cabin. There they stopped to listen.

  There were sounds from the lower part of the hillside of two people in motion, Alex and whomever he was chasing. Then they heard a thrashing of brush and curses as he stumbled off the trail, probably at one of Chuck’s carefully built switchbacks. It was clear he was all but blind in the dark in his attempt to follow the figure, who was climbing steadily ahead of him and gaining ground with the aid of the flashlight that had been turned back on.

  “It’s too dark and the ground’s almost bare. If there was more snow he could see better against it,” Jessie said, stepping forward. “Let’s go up and see if we can help. I know this trail better than he does.”

  “Wait.”

  Maxie clutched at her arm to retain her.

  “Whoever that is up there for sure won’t come back this way. With the help of that light they’ll be over the top and gone down the other side before Alex reaches it. Once out of sight, if they turn the light off they could hide anywhere in the woods and wait unseen for a chance to make a break. Or they could go straight down the trail to your place and be at the road long before Alex could make it there.”

  “So?” Jessie asked. “We can’t just let them get away.”

  “So, Alex left the keys in the truck, didn’t he? Let’s go back and drive around to the other side. It’s not that far and I’ll bet we can make it before either of them.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we can at least see who it is, yes?”

  “You’re right. Let’s do it.”

  Trotting back to the truck, they clambered hastily inside and in minutes were back on Knik Road, heading swiftly for Jessie’s place. As Jessie drove, Maxie continued to assess the situation.

  “You realize,” she said, “that person left their only transportation—the motorcycle—back in the cabin driveway. On this side of the hill they’ll have none.”

  “Interesting you should mention that,” Jessie replied. “I was just wondering what they would do if they made it to the road ahead of Alex—and they probably will. If they try to catch a ride, we could offer them one as if we were just passing by. But I don’t think that would be too smart, considering that he—she—might have a gun and we’d be instant hostages.”

  “Agreed,” Maxie said. “What occurs to me is that we’re driving Alex’s truck. Yours is still in your driveway. Is it locked? Does it have the keys in it?”

  “It’s locked and the keys are in my pocket,” Jessie assured her. “I never locked it when everybody out here knew everybody else, but with all the new people who I don’t know moving into the area, I’m not so trusting anymore.”

  “Good girl! Then there’s no way they can make a getaway in your truck.”

  “Nope! But I hope I remembered to lock the shed. There’s a couple of four-wheelers in there and the keys to them are hanging inside the door.”

  “I very much doubt they’d take the time to go looking,” Maxie reassured her. “It’d be a case of try your truck, then go to ground or try to get away before Alex catches up.”

  Jessie slowed as they neared the driveway that led to her house, but Maxie pointed on past it.

  “Go on a bit farther,” she suggested. “Alex mentioned that there was part of an old road where someone pulled off and parked a truck when Donny was killed—where they found his motorcycle down the hill in the brush. Let’s take a quick look and be sure this person hasn’t left another means of transportation there for an emergency getaway.”

  “Good idea.”

  Jessie drove on and turned into the short section of old road where she had called Alex’s attention to the tracks and footprint she had found almost a week earlier.

  By now, she thought, they’d all be washed away.

  The two women sat staring at what confronted them in the headlight beams from the truck.

  Pushed almost out of sight, facing out in the brush that had grown up on the old road, gleamed the chrome of another motorcycle, this one with black with green detailing—the colors of the Road Pirates.

  “What now?” Maxie asked after a moment’s silence.

  “What now?” Jessie was suddenly furious. “Now I’ve really had it with people killing other people—on my property or off of it—with questions and no answers, with good people like Phil Becker getting hurt. In other words, with all of it!

  “Now I make it impossible for anyone to get out of here on that thing.”

  Shoving the truck into low gear, she took her foot off the brake and stomped down on the gas. The truck lurched forward, Alex’s extra-heavy bumper slammed into the front of the motorcycle, rotating its handlebars sideways, breaking off a mirror, propelling the machine to one side, tipping it over and off the edge of the old road into the brush below, where even with the windows up they could hear it crashing down the slope over rocks and through bushes.

  The truck engine had died and everything grew very still.

  “Well,” remarked Maxie stoically, having had no time or opportunity to voice an opinion.

  “That’s one problem solved, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ALEX, ANGRY, FRUSTRATED, AND WINDED, HAD FINALLY REACHED the top of the hill over which the person he was chasing had disappeared. Panting, he stopped and stood still where the uphill trail joined the one at the top, holding his breath for a moment or two to listen, but heard nothing. There was also no sign of the light the climber ahead of him had used to gain the hill’s summit and none on the slope below, where he had hoped to follow it down.

  Gone to ground, he decided. Or already halfway down and out of sight. But he heard nothing to give him a clue.

  As he debated which way to follow—through the woods where he and Becker had found the bit of fabric caught in the bark of a tree, or on the trail that led down to the house and dog yard—he suddenly remembered that in a pants pocket he had a Bic lighter that he used to light fires in the cast-iron stove in the house below. Pulling off a glove, he thrust a hand past the elastic waistband of his insulated ski pants, retrieved it from that pocket, crouched, shielded it with the other hand, and held its small flickering over the ground to the right, then the left. It provided just enough illumination to reveal a disturbance in the leaves that littered the frozen ground and vanished into the dark to the left.

  Regretting the time this maneuver had cost him, he dropped the lighter into a jacke
t pocket and replaced his glove as he turned and stretched his long legs into a ground-covering lope on the familiar track.

  Reaching the trail that went down to Jessie’s, he took it and was finally headed downhill, though there was still no sign of the person he was trying to catch.

  Uneasily aware that he could have left that person hiding somewhere above, halfway down he was reassured to see the yard light far below flash on. It told him that someone, or something, had activated the motion sensor on the driveway side of its tall pole, for the sensor was not set to respond to the movement of the dogs in the yard, only something near the house and the drive in front of it. The person he was after could have caused it to come on, but not necessarily. He considered this uneasily, remembering that halfway up the hill from the cabin he had heard the sound of his truck starting and assumed that Jessie and Maxie, having seen what transpired after his fall on the ice and the pursuit that resulted, would believe he would continue it and so must have intended to drive back home to meet him on the other side.

  He had not heard the truck pull into the driveway below, however, and there was nothing he could do about the situation until he reached it. So he continued down the hill as rapidly as possible, hoping he was chasing the person from the cabin, whom he supposed was Robin Fenneli. But if it was, he could be chasing her straight into the two women in his truck. If she was carrying any weapon but the flashlight, that meeting could turn into real trouble.

  From where she had pulled into the old road, through the bare trunks of the birch Jessie also saw the light come on in her yard, and heard the dogs in her kennel begin to bark in response to a stranger in the area.

  Quickly restarting the truck’s engine, she backed out onto Knik Road, headed for her own drive.

  “Hold on,” she told Maxie, and made a quick left turn into it.

  The dogs she could see were tugging hard at their tethers and barking at something, or someone, near the house, but she could see nothing moving as she sped up the drive.

  If it was Alex, she calculated, he would have come to meet them. So it must be the person he had been chasing over the hill from the other side.

  Braking hard on the gravel, she slid the truck to a stop that slewed it slightly sideways behind her pickup and turned off the engine, effectively blocking in that vehicle.

  For a long minute the two women sat looking carefully around for the source of whatever—whoever—had caused the yard light to come on.

  Nothing moved.

  Then Jessie reached under the driver’s seat and retrieved a crowbar she knew Alex kept there.

  Taking it with her, she opened the door, slid out onto the ground, and turned to Maxie.

  “Stay here and lock the doors after me,” she told her.

  “I really don’t think—” Maxie began.

  But the slam of the door cut off her protest in midsentence.

  After locking the door on the passenger side, she slid across under the wheel to lock the driver’s door, then watched Jessie move, slowly and carefully, along that side of the truck.

  “Shut up, you mutts,” she heard her yell at her dogs, and, well trained and hearing the serious tone of her voice, except for a young laggard or two at the back of the yard near the woods, they abruptly did.

  The stillness that resulted was so complete that with the window down an inch, for the first time Maxie could faintly hear not-so-well-trained Stretch yapping from inside the house, where they had left him with Tank. She could also hear the crunch and echo of gravel under Jessie’s heavy boots as she tried to move quietly toward the front of the truck. A moment later she realized that it was not an echo she was hearing. It was another person walking somewhere out of sight between them and the house. From inside the cab she couldn’t tell exactly where, but it must be somewhere on the other side of Jessie’s pickup.

  Where she was half crouched beside the left front wheel, Jessie had heard it too and, keeping her head below the level of the truck’s hood and her body very close to the fender, she waited attentively.

  The sound of other footsteps stopped, with an odd sort of scuffle.

  In the minutes of long, listening silence that ensued, nothing could be heard moving. Stretch had stopped barking in the house, and, lacking motion, the yard light suddenly blinked out, leaving her temporarily blind in the dark.

  She didn’t move, but stayed where she was and considered her options until her ability to see in the dark gradually returned.

  Then, as suddenly as it had gone out, the light came on again as someone else moved, out of sight, but in range of the sensor.

  There was a slight click as a pebble rattled against another behind her. Abruptly she straightened to a standing position, but before she could whirl to confront whoever it was that stood behind her, someone spoke.

  “Don’t even think about it,” a voice warned in a low, quiet voice. “I have a gun in my hand, so stay just as you are and drop the crowbar.”

  Inside the truck, Maxie was startled to find herself looking down at a dark figure that had moved into view so close to the window that had it been open she could have reached out and laid a hand on its shoulder. Alex’s truck was not new, but it was new enough that lowering a window was as simple as pressing a button located in the door handle. Knowing that doing so would make a small but unmistakable sound, she did not attempt it. Instead, she sat still and quiet, wishing she had the crowbar Jessie had just dropped to the ground as instructed, and that the window was open, so she could have hit the person over the head with it from her perfect angle. Instead she sat silently to avoid attracting attention. Perhaps there would be something she could do later.

  Looking down from her seat in the truck it was impossible to see who the person was for a generous hood attached to a dark coat hid the face of the wearer, extending far enough forward to also shield it from the illumination of the yard light on its pole high overhead.

  “Now,” that person said to Jessie, “toss back the keys to this truck.”

  “I don’t have the keys,” she said. “They’re still inside.”

  Watching Jessie closely, the person, turning slightly toward the truck, reached out with their right hand and tried the door, allowing Maxie to see that in the left hand was, not a gun, but the flashlight they had used to light the way up the hill from the cabin on the other side.

  “It’s locked. Give me the keys or—”

  The reach for the door handle had also given Maxie an opportunity she had been wishing for—not the same chance, but chance enough. Unlocking the door with one hand as she opened it with the other, she shoved it outward as hard as she could, slamming it into the figure standing there, sending it to its knees, then over onto its back.

  “Now, Jessie—now,” Maxie called out.

  Scooping up the crowbar as she ducked and whirled around, Jessie took a couple of long steps forward to stand over the figure on the ground and take in the flashlight in lieu of a firearm.

  Keeping the crowbar raised in threat, she looked down into the face of the woman on the ground.

  “I know you,” she said. “I recognize your voice—even though you tried to disguise it then, and are trying now. You were on the hill last Monday, weren’t you? You made me give you the handgun I found next to where Donny Thompson was killed—by you? Who the hell are you?”

  At that point Alex finally made it down the hill and into the yard. He came loping past the equipment sheds, around the house into the circle cast by the yard light, and up to the three women—two of them standing over the one on the ground, who was now sitting up, her hood fallen back onto her shoulders to expose long dark hair.

  “Robin Fenneli, I presume?” he said to her, offering a hand to help her up.

  She nodded, but said nothing as she brushed herself off after pocketing the flashlight.

  “I see you’ve got things pretty well in hand here,” he said to Jessie. “Guess I shouldn’t have been in such a rush when you’re doing my work for me.”
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  “You can thank Maxie,” Jessie told him. “It was Maxie who knocked her down.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “THANK YOU, MAXIE,” ALEX SAID WITH A SMILE AND A NOD. “You have good timing.”

  He reached in to remove the keys from the ignition of his truck, then closed the door and locked it.

  “It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside where it’s warm,” he suggested, turning to guide Fenneli toward the house with a hand on her arm.

  She said nothing in response, but went without protest, the other two women following closely.

  “And, if you’ve had time to notice, Jessie,” he tossed back over a shoulder, “it’s starting to snow.”

  Jessie looked up to see a few large flakes drifting down like pale feathers in the illumination of the yard light.

  A satisfied grin spread itself across her face.

  “About time,” she said. “But we’ll see in the morning.”

  They had made it almost to the steps that led up to the porch when a voice from the darkness near the far side of the house, outside the circle of yard light, stopped them.

  “Let her go, Jensen. She may not have had a gun, but I do, so just step away and let her go.”

  Alex turned quickly, shoving Fenneli behind him.

  “Malone?” he questioned, recognizing the voice of the man who stood, feet braced wide, holding a handgun that reflected enough ambient light to define its shape. “You know I can’t do that. This won’t work.”

  “Maybe you think you can’t,” came the reply. “But you’re wrong. It’s what will work for now. Come here, Robin. You’ve been avoiding me for days.”

  Fenneli spoke for the first time.

  “No,” she said, stepping halfway from behind Alex so she could see and be seen. “It’s time this was over, Jeff. Give it up.”

  “Not a chance. Get over here before I use this thing.”

  He moved the gun so it was pointed at Maxie, who was nearest. “The old lady’ll be first,” he said, his voice rising. “Then Jessie. Do it! Now!”

  Fenneli took another step toward him, but Alex threw out an arm to stop her.