Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1)

by L. L. Enger

  “Didn’t steal much,” said Gun.

  He had made the drive from Stony to Winnepeg before. Depending on the time of the year, it took between three and four hours to traverse the northwest quarter of Minnesota, then another ninety minutes from the border across the wavy fields and willowy lowlands of lower Manitoba. He had made the trip once in late December to pick up Mazy on a Christmas flight from San Diego, and the snow beating across the Canadian prairie had nearly frozen him for a holiday funeral. He’d put the old Ford into neutral three, four, five times while getting out to heave at the back bumper. But this was June, backing into May, and he was catching a flight, not meeting one. Gun tapped the dash impatiently with the tips of his wide fingers.

  The rattling of the truck and the growing spaces between water towers in Minnesota’s extreme north-

  west made both men thoughtful and anxious. Gun was surprised once to look down and see the needle quivering past the eighty mark. Jack cracked the knuckles of both hands with a noise like the Fourth of July.

  “I think she’s okay,” Gun said. “The round trippers aren’t due to come back until Wednesday.”

  “When this is over, I want Hedman,” Jack said.

  “I want Mazy first. Then we’ll talk about who gets Lyle.”

  They made the border about eleven at night. A tall, square-shaped guard in a gray uniform stepped out of the concrete customs office. He looked too big to fit back in. Gun rolled down his window.

  “Destination,” said the guard, shaking his legs one at a time, as if to dispel cramps.

  “Winnipeg,” said Gun.

  “Any alcohol on board?”

  “Nope.”

  “Firearms?”

  “Nope.”

  “Length of stay,” said the guard. His feet were planted now, and his palms jammed to his hips. He did a deep back arch, speaking to the sky. “I’m supposed to ask that,” he said.

  “Forty-eight hours,” said Gun. “At the most.”

  The guard put both hands at the back of his neck and did a round-the-world with his head. “Have a nice night,” he said. Gun could hear the stiffness creak in the guard’s neck even over the Ford’s idle.

  “You too,” said Gun. He upshifted and nosed the truck toward Winnipeg.

  The airport was clean concrete and Sunday-night barren. Gun drove into the parking ramp and took a pink ticket that poked like a tongue from the humming metal box. “Two nights,” said Gun. “Twenty bucks Canadian.”

  “They have such pretty money,” said Jack.

  The woman at the airline desk smiled at Gun and told him about the delay. “They’re experiencing severe thunderstorm conditions over Alberta right now,” she said. “Nobody’s flying in at all. There’s a snack bar down the hall, to pass the time.”

  “Nobody’s flying in? No charters, nothing?” said Gun. He leaned down close to the woman’s orchard cheeks.

  “We’re in contact with the Calgary airport, sir. No takeoffs, no landings.” The woman tilted her face up to Gun’s. “And that’s it, sir, until further notice. There is a snack bar, though, to help pass the time.”

  Gun straightened and sighed and looked at Jack. He said, “Coffee?”

  The snack shop owned a dozen round white tables, anchored to the floor by steel legs, and a self-serve spigot that gave forth clear and ineffectual coffee. Jack inhaled at the rim of his Styrofoam cup. “It doesn’t have a smell,” he said.

  The white-faced clock next to the Snack Shop sign read 9:15. They should have been in the air by now. Gun watched the clouds through the high west windows. It would be three hours by plane, another two or three to gather some necessities and search out Hedman’s cabin. The actual work, getting in and getting out, the cleanup job, fifteen minutes tops. About six hours, Gun figured. It had better be enough. He shut his eyes, imagining the storm over Calgary.

  They each drank about a dozen cups of coffee before a woman’s voice came out of the ceiling with the news that flights to Alberta were getting ready to board. Gun’s stride made Jack jog to keep pace as they went to the concourse, through the metal-witching doorframe, down the canvas-topped tube to the 727.

  First class meant breathing room for Gun’s knees. “Guy could do aerobics in here,” said Jack. It was one p.m.

  The flight began smoothly, the Boeing lifting itself in a two-hundred-mile wedge to proper elevation, and got lumpy over western Saskatchewan. Calgary’s storm front was carrying east.

  “We’re hitting some turbulence now,” inter-commed the captain’s voice. “Please remain calm and keep your seat belts fastened.”

  “I’m calm,” said Jack. Arms crossed, he looked as short and tight as a fifty-gallon drum in the contoured seat. Jack’s eyes were at the window, a cloudy-milk square. “Never flown before,” he said.

  “First-time flyers,” said the captain, “think of this as a bumpy road. Lots of potholes.”

  The 727 hit a deep pothole and Gun felt himself lift briefly from the seat. The belt held him down. He thought, Is this what Amanda felt? The pressure was flat across his hips. He saw Jack’s fingers squeeze the armrests. A baby back in coach hiccuped, then howled.

  “We’re thirty thousand feet above Moose Jaw,” said the pilot. “These bad roads should be settling out real soon.”

  “They buried Jeremy Devitz today,” Gun said, trying to see down through the clouds.

  “I’ve been thinking about Bowser.”

  “Me too.”

  They landed in Calgary on a blacktop runway slippery with rain. Gun’s thick flannel could not seal out the chill, and he realized this trip could have been better planned. It was cool down here in the city, and Hedman’s retreat was across the border into a province known mainly for trees and altitude. It would be cooler there. Much cooler.

  “You know the way, right?” said Jack.

  “About a hundred miles west,” said Gun, “and a mile or so straight up.”

  The dapper young man at the Avis desk quoted them a low, low price for the Jeep they wanted. “Some places would charge you a third more than that,” he said, his teeth white as slivered almonds. “And paying that kind of money really Hertz. Heh, heh.”

  “Thanks,” Gun said. He took the keys.

  “Idiot,” Jack grumbled.

  On the west edge of town they located a false-fronted pawn shop with Oriental throwing stars in the windows and a locked rack of guns behind the counter. A woman Gun’s age with hair like an orange Lava lamp undid the lock and handed them weapons for inspection.

  “What you goin’ after?” the woman said. Her voice was Lucille Ball’s, a tin scraper. “Moose, out of season. Elk, out of season. Bear, out of season. Hey?”

  “Varmints,” said Jack. Lucy smiled and turned back to the rack. Her hips hung on her like rucksacks full of birdshot. One of them supported a leather-holstered .357.

  “We got plenty of those,” she said. “Good luck.”

  The choice was limited. Gun picked an Ithaca Model 37 twelve-gauge with a Deerslayer barrel, a goose gun modified for slugs. The ammo was heavy and expensive. Jack chose a Savage over-and-under. He bought a box each of twelve-gauge and 30-30 ammunition. “For close-range or far-away varmints,” he explained.

  Lucy grinned. “Or several varmints at once.”

  They paid for the guns, leather gloves, and two woolen parkas, black-and-green buffalo plaid. Lucy called to them as they left the shop.

  “You two are real cute,” she said, waving the bills

  they’d stacked on the counter. “Now I never want to hear from you again.”

  As the Jeep left Calgary and began its ascent, the time-and-temp billboard of a stucco-sided bank showed fifty degrees and three-thirty p.m. “Jack,” Gun said, “you got a watch.”

  Jack read his wrist. “Four-thirty.”

  Gun remembered. “The time change,” he said. “We skipped a zone. We’ve got another hour.” Gun leaned back in the Jeep and stepped on the gas. A spray of weighted raindrops snapped suddenly
across the windshield, like hand-flung pebbles.

  33

  Samuel Barr had fingered a highway leading west out of Calgary some seventy miles before swinging north into spiky pine hills. Gun drove the Jeep at hazardous speeds, but the roads were so bad it was almost three hours before they saw the yellow crossroads sign the minister had described. It had been mistreated with a big-game rifle. “One whole corner of it’s been shot away,” Barr had said, nursing his lump over Gun’s atlas. “You gotta take a right.”

  Gun took a right onto a road deep with sugar sand. Jack flipped open the Jeep’s glove box and pulled out a folded road map. He pressed it flat against his knees. “Gee, this is handy,” he said. “Florida. With a detail of Orlando on the back side.” He rustled the map back into the glove box. “Gun,” he said, “how come Barr knew about that blown-up road sign?”

  “Said he’d been out here before. With Hedman. Fishing trip.”

  “I was thinking,” Jack said, “that I really hate being put into the position of having to trust that guy.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s the position Rutherford was in.”

  “Rutherford didn’t know the size of the game he’d got into. We do.”

  The sugar sand subsided as the path led upward, as if the road’s entire surface had crumbled loose one rainy night and slipped down the grade to congregate as talus at the bottom. What remained was an adobe-hard trail with craters and black canals that slapped and ground at the four-wheel drive. Gun flipped on the headlights in the thickening dusk. Near the crest of a steep climb a well-tended trail branched right.

  “Kenya Drive,” said Gun. “Canada style.”

  The Hedman cabin was nearly a mile through the thick dark pines by foot. The trail would have been easily passable by Jeep, but the engine’s loud growl would announce them like a banner on a pole. If it hadn’t already. Gun squeezed the Ithaca in his chilled fingers and reminded himself that there were at least five people in that cabin besides Mazy. The surprise would have to be total.

  The two of them separated on the walk in, each moving about thirty feet to one side of the trail. The sun was below the rim now. Evergreens shaded to gray. Some distance to his left Gun could catch the occasional glow of Jack’s Savage. The pine needles were quiet as corn silk under Gun’s boots and sent up the smell of fresh creation.

  Another smell gave them their first alert. A slow evening wind reached across Gun’s face and brought with it a swish of sweet tobacco. He stopped. Jack was standing stone-silent. Gun’s twilight vision picked out the blued Savage barrel, pulled to a ready forty-five degrees. Neither one moved. The tobacco smell increased with the wind, then faded. They held position

  for a thick quarter hour and eyed the trees, which grew lighter the higher they looked. Straight overhead Gun could see their tops still getting touched by sun. The smell arrived again on the breeze, and following its direction back with his eyes, Gun saw the source.

  A man in a dark spruce Army jacket perched on a stool in a tree stand at the head of the trail. The stand was about nine feet high and constructed of two-by-fours, which had gone gray with weather—a deer stand, Gun thought. Deer were out of season.

  It was still light enough to catch Jack’s eye. Jack nodded and the stalk began again, slower now. The man in the stand was holding an open-sighted rifle across his knees. His head was helmeted in a bush of rabbit fur. Puffs of smoke floated up from his face and curled off on the wind. As they came nearer, Gun and Jack began to converge, veeing in on the tree. Gun was grateful for the man’s rabbit cap. It must have blocked a measure of sound.

  They reached the foot of the tree just as the moon peeked up over the hills behind the cabin. The guard looked up at it and shifted his butt on the little stool. Gun reached high and gripped a two-by-four support.

  The stand came down with less effort than Gun had expected. The guard gave forth only the noise of an amazed inhale before Jack knelt and put his compact strength into a cheekbone punch.

  “He sleeps,” Jack said, standing. He shook his hand, fingers splayed. “Ow.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two, three hours,” said Jack. His Roman face produced a short grin. “All that sneaking around kind of wound up my spring.”

  They emptied the guard’s 30-06 and tossed the shells into the trees. The cabin was a Hedman-sized structure of stripped logs standing off across a wild-flower clearing. A yellow yardlight burned next to a

  square-stacked woodpile. Someone had started a fire, and the smell of smoke and coffee lifted from the chimney.

  “We’d better stay back,” Gun said. “Far enough in so we can’t be seen from the yard. We’ll take the cabin from the rear.”

  “They might have another guard up somewhere.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think they’d stick two guys up in trees.”

  The low-profile hike kept the cabin in constant view and took another thirty minutes. The moon was an indistinct platter behind the haze when they reached a set of red pines twenty yards off the back porch.

  “Let’s go in like wild men,” Jack said softly. His cheeks were ruddy as a child’s, and Gun thought he could feel a schoolground heat come off him. “Butch and Sundance,” Jack whispered. He was crouching, as wide in that position as he was tall.

  “You go around to the front door,” said Gun. “I’ll get up on the back porch. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  “See you in about five minutes,” Jack said, and he went, the Savage looking mean but comfortable riding in his hand. He reached the left rear corner of the cabin, paused there, threw a grin back at the trees. It made Gun wonder at their bravado. Three, four rifles at least inside that cabin, and he and Jack outside, talking like third graders about cutting down enemy cornstalks. Butch and Sundance.

  Now Jack was gone from sight, rolling up the left side of the cabin, no doubt moving fast to reach the door. Gun stooped only slightly—if anyone were looking, six-and-a-half feet would be seen whether he was bent over or not—and made the porch. Like everything else Hedman owned, the cabin was well-built. The porch boards didn’t creak under Gun’s weight. He crept to a window, tilted a glance inside, saw three heavy men at a knotty-pine table. They wore

  buttoned underwear shirts and black suspenders. Real lumberjacks. They were eating ham steaks. Gun wondered where Lyle was, wondered if Lyle was even along, and then he heard the door.

  It slammed at the front of the cabin, and at first Gun thought Jack had gone in. But there was no noise afterward. Gun moved across the window and stood next to the porch door, his back against log siding. If anyone had come out, he hadn’t seen Jack. There was no disturbance. Gun gripped the door handle and set himself. He pulled the Ithaca ready. He was taken by surprise when someone tall, not Jack, appeared in his corner vision.

  “Hey!” the guard yelled. He was evidently surprised too, but recovered quickly enough to unholster the .44 at his hip.

  “Drop it,” Gun said. The Ithaca was aimed. The tall man did not register the action. He fired the pistol, and Gun felt hot teeth tear at the flesh of his left ribs. He stayed steady and shot the guard through the chest.

  Gun’s shirt and jacket were drawing blood, and now the air was soaked with noise. Dark roars as the lumberjacks seized their guns, the steely snap of a rifle from the front of the cabin, yells crowding each other for help. Gun’s ears pulled Mazy’s voice from the mob. He pumped a new slug into the chamber and put his shoulder to the door.

  The lock broke on the second blow and Gun swung in off balance. A white-faced guard, braced before a door on the right-hand wall, took hurried aim and released a buckshot charge. The Ithaca snaked in Gun’s hand and came up with the stock blown off. Gun flung the barrel at the guard and dove for the nearest cover, a wide woodstove that stood out from the wall. The guard’s shotgun blasted again but the stove was stern iron and sent buckshot rocketing. The stove still held fire, and Gun was grateful for his thick woolen coat and gloves. Through the hell of shotgu
n roar and lead fire Gun could feel the heavy shake of cabin walls, as though a bear were belting the logs. He heard a wild barking laugh outside. He heard, from somewhere behind the panicked guard, a willful angry scream from Mazy. The scream tore at a nerve of memory and pain, and Gun stood without thinking and gripped the stove in his leathered hands.

  The guard howled as Gun raised the stove from the floor. Rivets made peeling metal shrieks as the chimney flue came in two. An elbowed section of twelve-inch pipe hung on the wall, dropping cinders. Gun staggered forward, the stove out front. The guard fired once more before Gun reached him, and this time several pellets entered Gun’s vulnerable legs. The stove became impossibly heavy. His hands and chest smoked against the black iron. He felt himself come near the guard, and the guard’s howl come from ahead and meet behind him, and then the stove came down. Gun’s nostrils jerked at a cannibal heat. His hands were scorched like the lids of cutout pumpkins. The guard was silent beneath the woodstove, which sat angled on its side and coughed up ashes through its broken spout.

  “Who’s out there?” quailed a voice. It came from behind the door where the guard had stood. Gun recognized it.

  “Just me, Geoff,” he said. “Now get my girl out here. Before this place burns.” Live sparks were spattering from the stove. One flamed up in the sleeve of the guard. Gun stamped it out.

  “Dad?” The lock clacked, the door inched open. Gun heard Mazy’s voice, but Geoff’s face filled the crack.

  “She’s okay, Mr. Pedersen,” said Geoff.

  Gun didn’t answer. He pushed through Geoff and saw Mazy sitting on an ill-made bed.

  “Dad. You’re hurt.”

  They heard the front door slam and Jack coughing as he went past the smoldering stove. “Gettysburg,” he said, beating the air before his face. “Mazy! You’re okay?” He caught sight of Geoff, on his butt in shock, and looked at him as though considering a kick to the crotch.

  Geoff spoke slowly from the floor, head in his hands. “You guys are nuts.”