The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Cooper,” I heard him shout over his shoulder, “you sure as hell are a lot of trouble.”

  “Christ—” he went on back inside—“I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get a meat wagon out here in this snow. I’ve got four snow tires on the goddamn Cadillac and it took me two hours to get here last night. God, what a pain in the ass.”

  We were drinking coffee. I had found aspirin. My stomach was still unsettled from the scotch. I wasn’t used to it and I wondered if somehow I was going to start drinking again.

  Together Peterson and I went over the events of the previous night which had led to my killing the gaunt man. He assured me that it was a matter of self-defense, that I had nothing to worry about, but that I would be required to make an official statement. Identifying the body might take some time if he had no papers on him but there was time to worry about that later.

  What perplexed Peterson was the possible connection between the frozen carcass outside and the murders of Cyril and Paula. Were they connected at all? And if so, how? What did Cyril, Paula, and I have in common that would make them want to kill us? And who were they? Clearly, the attack on the highway could no longer be considered an isolated, random act of violence: I had been pursued with intent to kill.

  “It’s unsettling, Cooper,” he said, blowing on the coffee, toying with an immense gold signet ring, “because I’ve got to believe these are very determined people and so far you’ve eluded them. It is probably very annoying for them, botching the job so badly.”

  “What can I do about it?” I was weary: I hadn’t slept enough.

  “Get out of this house for one thing. Get into town—or you can stay with Brenner—can’t you?”

  “Not forever,” I said.

  “Until we can think of something, Cooper.”

  He went outside to the Cadillac and radioed for the ambulance and they said they’d try.

  He came back looking sour; he wasn’t the same old Peterson, laughing and playing games and being a smartass. He sat down in my grandfather’s desk chair.

  “We got the metal box open last night. It was full of pages of numbers, a good deal of fairly harmless-looking, pages of German prose, more pages of numbers and random German words, some charts of an organizational nature which had a very military look about them, lists of American cities, lists of corporations, graphs. None of it made the slightest sense to me. But still, we’re positive—well, relatively positive—that Paula died because of this stuff, this old crap.” There was heat in his voice I had not heard before.

  His mouth curved down, framed by the dark crescent of mustache, and I was reminded more than ever of the Levantine.

  “I’m getting sick of this whole thing, Cooper, sick of having citizens killed on my doorstep, sick of being pissed on by these bastards and I don’t give a goddamn who they are. There’s a time when I enjoy the excitement of something new, it reminds me that I’m still alive, my mind feels alert again. But that time is over. It’s really over because this is no fun, is it?”

  I wasn’t sure how rhetorical his question was, but I answered: “It was never any fun for me.”

  He cleared his throat, nodded. “Of course not. I realize that. It’s no fun when you’re involved. I wasn’t involved. I was being presented with a peculiar situation and it was fun. Now, I’m beginning to be involved. I know you people—you’re not characters in this little play being performed to keep me occupied.” He made a fist, ground his chin against it.

  “Does it make any sense, Cooper?” He moved around the room, warmed himself staring into the fireplace, peered into the bullethole in the wood paneling. He lifted the rifle the dead man had used on me. He studied it, turned it, read whatever was inscribed on its underside, and grunted.

  “Mauser 7.65 mm. Nice gun, well cared for up until last night. Made at the Mauser Werke at Oberndork am Neckar. Good action, hinged floorplate. Release button here on the trigger guard, nice square bridge. Hell of a rifle.” He went back to the wall and inspected the hole, touched it with a fingertip. Then he sighted through the scope. “The scope is a Zeiss 2-½-x Zielklein and the bullet … the bullet about 180 grains nipping along at 2,700 feet per second. That is more velocity than you can shake a stick at, Cooper.”

  He went back to the desk and sank down in the chair. It creaked in the stillness: the fire crackled, snow rattled on the window.

  “A bullet can kill you in a couple of ways. It can hit in some vital area, the brain or the spinal column near the top or the heart, and that’s the end of your story. With that kind of a hit a .22 rifle can kill a grizzly, but the margin for error is much too great. The other way of killing you is by one kind of shock or another. In this case you need enough gun, enough velocity for tremendous impact, and a bullet which expands very quickly once it hits you and gets inside you—do you follow me, Cooper? You want a bullet that will destroy as much living tissue as possible. If you destroy enough tissue you’ve got a kill. You can hit a deer in the paunch with a high-velocity rifle, carrying expanding bullets, blow most of the abdomen away, and it dies though its vital areas go untouched. The messages from the lacerated nerves short-circuit the brain, and zap, death.

  “There are other kinds of shock. The sheer impact of a bullet if it’s going fast enough creates a kind of hydraulic shock not much different from the mechanism of hydraulic brakes. The pressure created by the bullet’s impact is so great and so sudden that it blitzes the veins and the arteries leading to the brain—death, again.

  “Now, our dear friend was leaving nothing to chance. If he missed your vital areas, he had a soft, thin-skinned bullet which would explode inside you and destroy enough tissue to kill you even if he hit your shoulder or thigh, and the bullet was going to be traveling fast enough that any substantial hit was almost certain to cause hydraulic shock.”

  Peterson’s recitation made me sicker to my stomach.

  “How the hell do you know all that?” I asked.

  “I’ve been around,” he said. “Grisly, isn’t it?”

  As he had spoken so matter-of-factly about what the killer had wanted to do to me, my mind was instead going over what I had done to him. The first shot must have blown away much of his brain, a vital area, causing immediate death. The second would have created extensive tissue shock—but he was already dead.

  Peterson was sitting at the desk making a list with a fiber-tip pen. I knew what he was doing before he said it.

  “All right, while we wait, let’s go over what we’ve got here, Cooper,” the voice began again, insistent, determined. “There are certain questions we’ve got to ask ourselves. I’m not boring you, am I, Cooper?”

  “No, I’m just tired.” I didn’t want to argue with him; there was no spirit in me for that. “And I’m thinking about what you’ve said. I’m very docile, Peterson.”

  “Now, was this guy who tried to kill you the same guy who killed Cyril? And Paula? Wait a minute, I’m not saying he was, damn it, I’m asking. It is possible. He could have kept right on driving after they left you for dead, gotten to Cooper’s Falls ahead of you, and killed Cyril before you got here. It is possible, Cooper, and we’ve got to start thinking all this is connected. And he could then have killed Paula this past afternoon, taken the boxes, stashed them somewhere or given them to his buddy, the little guy in the blue duffel coat, and come out here to kill you in the night.

  “The question now is, why? What was the motive? What did Cyril and Paula have in common? What, Cooper?”

  “They both knew about the boxes,” I said. “They were the only people who knew about the boxes when Cyril was killed, if he was killed on the twentieth before I met Paula and she told me.”

  “But if that is what ties Cyril and Paula together, what ties you—the third victim, and the first on the schedule—to Cyril and Paula? What do you know in common with them? Nothing, Cooper, not a damned thing, at least not about those boxes. You’ve never seen any of the contents, you’re utterly harmless, aren’t you?” />
  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound tough. “Ask the guy out there in the snow.”

  Peterson stood up and stretched, went through the passage to the kitchen and came back with the coffeepot. He poured us both some and took the pot back to the kitchen. When he came back his eye was caught on my grandfather’s World War II position map. He studied the pins. “Do wars ever end?” he mused.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s peculiar but for some people they never end, every so often they find some poor bastard holed away in a Berlin attic or a Jap somewhere on some Pacific rock who still think there’s a war on. People are funny, as the man on the radio used to say.”

  He stood at the window drinking his coffee.

  “But the people who want you dead don’t know that you don’t know … anything, really. After all, you’re Cyril’s brother and he knows about the boxes, he knows enough to bring him back from Buenos Aires. Put yourself in their shoes. Since Cyril knows about the boxes—whatever there is about those boxes, and we still don’t know—he may have told you and as long as that possibility exists they figure that you’ll have to die, too. Cyril may have told you in his wire for all they know. He may have telephoned you from Buenos Aires, he may somehow have gotten the word about the boxes to you.

  “Those boxes, which had been sitting around that library for years, are terribly important to someone, Cooper. Whether or not Paula knew anything about them, she had them—and they killed her to get them. So we’re left with those boxes. What’s in them? And what’s in the one they left behind? And who was the man who tried to kill you? And who else is in danger? Anyone you’ve talked to? Doctor Bradlee? Brenner? Me, for Christ’s sake? I’ve got the goddamn box—I may be next on their goddamn list. And, believe me, Cooper, this piece of frozen hamburger out there in the snow didn’t do all this by himself—not by a long shot.”

  Perspiration was standing out on Peterson’s forehead and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. It was the first time I’d noticed any evidence of nerves. By talking through it to convince me of the danger, I believe he had opened up some new vistas for himself. I think he was just getting an inkling of the enormity of what was happening, an inkling which had not reached me in my tiredness and sorrow and revulsion at what had happened.

  We didn’t say much more until the ambulance came and then I heard Peterson giving orders to the men who were going out to get the body. “Be careful not to break him,” Peterson warned. “He should be pretty damn brittle by now.”

  It took us an hour to get my Lincoln and his Cadillac free of the driveway and then I followed him into town. It was twenty-five degrees below zero and the wind was blowing snow everywhere. You couldn’t see anything but snow when you looked away from the tail-lights ahead of you. It was one thirty in the afternoon of January 23.

  Eighteen

  THE ATTACK ON ARTHUR BRENNER was already over by the time Peterson and I were driving into Cooper’s Falls. It had begun about noon and continued until one o’clock without interruption and then stopped.

  With the storm making travel next to impossible, we might have gone even longer than we did without knowing what had happened. But Peterson had begun to get nervous about Brenner in midafternoon. When he tried to call him there was no answer at his home, no answer at his office in the hotel, and he had not been seen by anyone at the hotel all morning. Peterson looked at me.

  Together we drove toward Brenner’s house, which sat on the outskirts of town overlooking the river, masked from the road by a hill covered with firs and evergreens and pines. The path had been plowed, was one-car wide, but the tremendous gales had partially refilled the way with powdery snow. We said nothing as we drove. My stomach burned with a bilious nausea; my knees shook. The Cadillac with its four snow tires got stuck at one narrow turn, the front end buried in a wall of snow which extended well above the top of the car. I’d heard of such walls caving in and burying cars, leaving the passengers, with no way of pushing the doors open, to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or freeze if the motor was turned off. Peterson rocked the car back and forth and finally it freed itself as a portion of the wall cascaded down across the hood with enough impact to be felt inside, enough impact to send a shudder through almost three tons of Cadillac.

  Coming around the final corner, we saw the house dimly through the curtain of snow, a shapeless mass blending into the grayness of the storm which hung over the river below. As we moved closer, with an agonizing slowness, we saw that the house was dark.

  “My God!” There was a quality of awe in Peterson’s voice.

  An explosion had ripped a hole in the front of Arthur Brenner’s white Colonial house. Where there should have been a door there was a jagged cavity, blackened. Windows on the front of the house were blown in.

  Peterson stopped the car and we ran as best we could across the snow, sinking to our knees through the crust that bit at us like ragged edges of broken glass.

  “Brenner,” I heard him calling. “Brenner!” There was desperation in that cry, sorrow and fear and despair.

  The front door had been snapped off its hinges and lay smoking in the front hall. A mirror was shattered, a vase of flowers in pieces on the snow-covered hallway floor.

  Directly in line with the door and the hole in the front of the house, Arthur Brenner lay face down on the carpeted stairway as if he were trying somehow to crawl up the stairs. He was wearing a heavy wool bathrobe and seemed to be in one piece. He lay very still.

  Miraculously, Arthur Brenner was not only alive, but almost untouched. His cheek had been bruised and he had been knocked unconscious by the impact of the blast. But Arthur, huge and elongated on the steps, fluttered open his heavy-lidded eyes, stared up at us, and moved his mouth slowly without making sounds.

  “They booby-trapped the door,” Peterson said. “Get him some brandy.”

  The brandy seemed to revive Brenner and he nodded, swallowing. “I heard the door chimes, I opened the door, and there was an explosion and the next thing I knew you were here.”

  “I can’t tell you how lucky you are,” Peterson said.

  “I know, I know. They wanted me dead.”

  Apparently there were no ill effects. In a few minutes Arthur was on his feet, shaking his great head, leading us into his study. While Brenner went to his basement workroom to check his porcelain figures, Peterson quickly built a fire in the grate and had it roaring when the old man came back. He was smiling and had a Band-Aid on his cheek. Not a single piece had been broken.

  After giving Arthur a detailed report on what had been happening in the hours since he had bade me goodnight with the suggestion that I say my prayers, Peterson leaned back in the chintz-covered armchair and finally lit a cigar.

  “It all adds up to one rather startling fact. Almost impossible to believe. We are under siege. This is a war and we are cut off by the elements, under attack from unknown forces. We have killed one of their number. They have killed two of us and tried to kill two more. They have attacked us in our homes with rifle and explosives.” He looked at us and I had the feeling of unreality you get when watching a certain kind of movie, when the danger is part of the movie and not of your own life. Of course I was wrong: this was no movie.

  “Why?” Brenner asked softly.

  “They want that box,” Peterson said.

  “More,” I said. I was terribly tired. “They want to kill anyone who may have seen the contents. Anyone who may have seen the contents.”

  “They are frightened,” Peterson said.

  “So am I,” Brenner said.

  In the late afternoon we all climbed back into the Cadillac, negotiated the narrow canyon of driveway, and laboriously made our way back to town. We were at war.

  The mayor of Cooper’s Falls was waiting for us when we finally got to Petersons office in the courthouse. He was wearing a purple Minnesota Vikings snowmobile suit and holding a visored purple helmet in his left hand. He belonged to the purple snowmobile standing a
t the courthouse steps. His face was pale, he was forty-four years old, he owned an insurance agency, and his name was Richard Aho. He was a Finn.

  “Peterson,” he said calmly as we stood in the outer office with Alice watching us. There was the overpowering reek of strong coffee. The radiators sizzled. It was five o’clock. “Peterson, what is going on here, in this town? I come into the office to try out my new snowmobile, a Christmas present from Phyllis, and I start hearing all sorts of shit.”

  “What shit, Richard?” Peterson slid out of his coat and hung it on a hook. “Sandwiches, Alice, get ’em over at the hotel, an assortment. And, Alice—you’re a dear.” He walked through to his own office. “What shit have you been hearing, Richard?” We all went into the office. It was stifling.

  “Dead people? That shit.” Aho looked persistently at Peterson. “One of the Coopers, of all people, and the librarian, Paula … Smithies. Are they dead? Murdered?” He unzipped the purple quilted suit: “Christ, it’s hot in here.”

  “Yes, they’ve been murdered. And this fellow here”—he pointed at me—“is another Cooper, John Cooper, and they’ve tried twice to kill him and last night he killed one of them out at the Cooper place. This afternoon they rigged a bomb to Arthur Brenner’s house and blew the front off.”

  Aho took the news with a quiet, staring amazement. Though I had never heard of him, Cooper’s Falls was his town, too. From time to time he looked at me. Finally he said: “Mr. Cooper, trouble seems to follow you.”

  Peterson grinned. Aho’s coal-colored eyes bored into me.

  I yawned.

  “Seems to,” I said.

  We all ate the sandwiches and learned that our telephone connections to the outside were gone. The storm had taken lines down all along the St. Croix as well as in many rural areas across the state. We could contact the Twin Cities by short wave but so far our little war was ours alone: no word had been sent. Peterson argued that it would do no good since we were unreachable. The highways were all blocked, all airplanes were grounded. Snowmobiles could get through, at least in theory, but the cold was too intense and the visibility in the storm was nil. Unlikely as it seemed, we were cut off from the outside world. Aho nodded his agreement.