Stalked

by Brian Freeman

  “Wow, you really did block it out. Well, good for you. I shouldn’t have said anything. The fact is, the guy’s hands smelled like fish. Even through the gloves. It was this dank, briny smell, like he was underwater. Awful.”

  The memory didn’t even knock at the door. It smashed the lock, broke the door down, galloped into Maggie’s brain, and suffocated her. Her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes squeezed shut. She could smell it as if it was happening to her all over again. “Oh, my God.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry.”

  Maggie clenched her fists. “No, it’s okay, it’s okay. This is important. Do you remember anything else?”

  “Nope. It was just me and Charlie the Tuna.”

  Maggie yanked her cell phone out of her pocket and called Stride. He answered on the first ring. “Fish,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “Fish. This guy’s hands smell like fish. I’m in Katrina’s apartment, and she reminded me that his hands stank. It’s got to mean something. Maybe he has a smoker or something, or he works in a processing plant.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Are you there?” Maggie asked.

  “Wood paneling,” Stride said.

  “You lost me.”

  “He had a photo of wood paneling on his computer. Like from a camper or something. He had fish in his freezer, too—not from a store, it was wrapped in foil. He caught it.”

  “He’s in a fish house,” Maggie concluded.

  “Exactly right. That has to be it. He’s out on one of the lakes.”

  “But which one?”

  “Tanjy’s body was found in Hell’s Lake,” Stride said. “It’s a good chance he dumped her in the same lake where he has his shanty.”

  “Are you close?” Maggie asked.

  “I’m chasing down warehouses near the airport. I can be out on the ice in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Serena buried the fish hook in the strip of cloth that tied her hand to the bed frame, and it sank into the fabric like butter. When she yanked it down, the cloth screamed and tore. Blue Dog heard it and threw his weight toward her shoulder, but she freed her arm with a single thrust before he could pin her down. She curled her arm around his back, where he still had the gun tucked under his belt, and clawed for the butt of the revolver. It was facing the wrong way, and she fumbled it in her fingers, but then she spun it around and the butt nestled in her palm and her finger found the trigger.

  She was right-handed, and the gun felt awkward in her other hand, but she found the hammer with her thumb and cocked it and fired all at once. The gun was pointed toward the muscled, hard flesh in Blue Dog’s hip, but he was already moving when she got the shot off. He bellowed in pain and dove off the cot, landing heavily on the floor and scrambling backward away from her. She fired again, but the shot went wild and took out one of the rear windows in the shanty with a burst of glass. The smell of burnt metal and smoke filled the space.

  He danced from wall to wall, his hand pressed against his side. A small trickle of blood oozed through his knuckles. She followed him with the gun, but didn’t fire. She only had two shots left and didn’t trust her aim from her left hand.

  “You’re good,” he told her.

  “If you leave now, I won’t shoot,” Serena said. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her head was pounding. The hot spot in her skull where the gun had landed on her temple throbbed and made her vision wobble and then refocus. She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. Something warm ran on her skin, and she realized blood was leaking from her shoulder where he had stabbed her. She could see her flat stomach, too, which was a gooey mess of red streaks, and when she moved, the muscles in her abdomen howled with pain.

  She swung the gun back and forth, left and right, until she was dizzy. She couldn’t keep this up forever, and he knew it. He was waiting her out.

  “Drop it, and I promise I’ll make it quick,” Blue Dog said.

  “Fuck you. Come close, and watch me blow your head off.”

  “You’re bleeding,” he told her.

  “So are you.”

  She watched his eyes as they locked onto a shelf in the middle of the shanty, and she saw her own gun there and the magazine of bullets lying next to it.

  “Go for it,” she said. If he got that close, she knew she could nail him.

  He bent and scooped a glass beer bottle off the floor. The cap was still on; the bottle was full. He held the bottle by the neck and made circles with his wrist like he was slinging a lasso. Foam hissed and fizzed from under the cap. Serena gripped the gun tighter and aimed at the shelf, knowing that’s where he wanted to go. Blue Dog zigzagged the other way and flung the bottle underhanded at the cot. The glass shot over her head, missing her by inches, and shattered against the rear wall, cascading over her skin in a storm of beer and hail. Involuntarily, she flinched and closed her eyes. It took only a second, but the second was too long, and she heard him dive for the gun.

  She had no choice. She had to fire. The gun recoiled, and her bare skin burned. The shot missed Blue Dog, but he had to hit the floor before his hand reached the shelf, and he was smart enough to know he didn’t have time to try again without winding up in her sights. He skittered backward like a bug. She kept her eyes open, despite the beer leaching into her tear ducts and trickling down her face. Some of it found its way to her lips, and she lapped it with her tongue.

  Sam Adams. Good stuff.

  He was at the rear of the shanty again, but he was slowing down. He couldn’t keep moving forever, and she couldn’t stay conscious forever, and sooner or later, one of them was going to slip.

  “One bullet,” Blue Dog told her. “You only have one bullet left.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  But she knew the odds were against her. She glanced around, hunting for another weapon, and her eyes landed on the knife he had used to torture her, which was lying on the floor just beyond the reach of the cot. If she could free her right hand, she could stretch her arm out and grab it. She knew the fish hook was somewhere under her body, and it would be easy to reach around and slash the cloth that tied her down, but that would mean putting down the gun first. She couldn’t do that.

  He smiled at her dilemma. “You’re running out of time.”

  “You’re not looking so good yourself.”

  His voice was casual, as if they were two friends talking over old times. “Back in Phoenix, I knew you got into it sometimes. A man can tell.”

  “Yeah, I really got into it. Sure. You stupid bastard.”

  “Some women get off on it. Like Tanjy.”

  “She got off on fantasies. I guarantee you, she didn’t like the real thing.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to like it. It was supposed to be punishment.”

  “What?”

  He made his move, surprising her. He feinted toward the gun and then jerked in the other direction and dove across the width of the shanty. His fingers clawed at the wall switch. Before she could get off a shot, he slapped the switch, fell back to the ground, and rolled away.

  The light went off. She was so blind that she couldn’t even see the gun in front of her, and all she could do was listen. Where was he?

  The storm was loud, and the wind leaked through the tear in the tape and the broken window at the rear of the shanty. Water kept dripping and falling on her body through the ceiling. She stared into the blackness and tried to remember what it was like in the light, so she could guess where he would go and how he would attack her. She pricked her ears for every creak and groan in the metal floor, but she didn’t hear a thing other than the blizzard. He was waiting somewhere. Not moving.

  One bullet.

  She took a huge risk. If she couldn’t see him, then he couldn’t see her. She put the gun down on her chest and felt around the cot silently for the fish hook. When she heard a s
hriek of metal, and felt the shanty sway, she grabbed the gun again and pointed at nothing. He was creeping, moving, getting closer. She didn’t have much time. She tried to find the hook, but she realized it must have fallen back to the floor as she struggled with Blue Dog. With the gun on her chest again, she reached back down and skated her fingers along the metal floor and found the hook. Quickly, she slid it into her hand. She eased the gun off her body, so it didn’t slide away, and then she craned her body around, trying to stretch her left arm until she could reach the strip of cloth that tied her right hand.

  The frame of the cot squeaked. She hoped he didn’t realized what she was doing. The distance down to her right wrist was farther than she realized, and her body strained in protest as she twisted. The cut in her shoulder sent out ripples of pain and heat. Glass pieces from the beer bottle cut her skin and sprinkled loudly on the floor. Her head spun, and the darkness turned upside down.

  Somewhere, he took two hurried steps, very close by, and before she could take up the gun again, he moved away and she heard the sickening sound of the clip being shoved into the grip of her own gun.

  His voice came out of the night.

  “Guess what I have?”

  She had to move fast. She reached out again, pulling every inch of distance out of the muscles in her back, and her fingers trembled so much that she almost dropped the fish hook. She stretched as far as she could with her right hand in the other direction until the binds pulled her back. She didn’t know how far away she was, but it may as well have been a mile. She couldn’t get close enough. She couldn’t free herself.

  Blue Dog fired. The noise rocked the shanty. The bullet missed her head by no more than six inches; she could feel its heat as it streaked by. Bits of metal ricocheted off the wall behind her. She scooped up the other gun again and aimed where she had had seen the flash of the barrel, but she could hear him moving.

  “I’ve got plenty of bullets,” he said.

  He fired again, and he was gone again, before she could return fire. This time, the bullet seared across the top of her thigh before burying itself in the wall, and she gasped loudly as her leg seemed to catch fire, and the fire spread through her body. He knew where she was. There was nowhere for her to go.

  The silence and the waiting stretched out. She tensed, the gun in her hand.

  He fired three times more in succession, flooding the space with explosions one after another, raining down metal and snow from over her head. Before she realized he was firing in the air, distracting her, he was already diving across the short distance that separated them. He came from her right side, like a meteor, lightning-fast. His shoulder collided with her left arm, and she felt all her hopes fly away and abandon her as the gun spilled from her hand and skidded away on the floor. He crushed her, all his weight on top of her, embedding glass in her skin. His breath was in her face, and he put her own gun to her head.

  “You lose.”

  She wasn’t going to cry. “Fuck you.”

  She searched the floor with her hand, hoping the gun was still within reach, but she couldn’t find it. She almost screamed with frustration, knowing there was a bullet chambered close by that she could drill into this sadist’s head, payback for all the humiliation and pain she had suffered at his hands. Ending all the nightmares and memories. But he was right; she had lost.

  Reality was too much, and she wished she could find the empty room in her mind in which to crawl for escape. Every sensation pricked away at her sanity. The heaviness and smell of him. The hot circles of pain. The dizziness. The cold, glass, metal, and ice. The blackness, as if it were all happening in midair, disconnected.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  She heard a deep thumping somewhere in her consciousness, and for a second, she thought it was the panicked beating of her heart, but it kept on like a hammer. This was something real, something unexpected. Blue Dog reared up in shock and spun off her.

  Someone was pounding on the door. She could only imagine one person. Jonny. Coming for her.

  Blue Dog crept for the door. The floor sagged with his footsteps. She knew he had her gun firmly in his hand. He waited. There was a long pause, and then the pounding continued, as if something heavy were beating on the frame.

  She heard a voice. “Billy! Open the door!”

  Her heart sank. It wasn’t Jonny. The voice was familiar, but it was distant, drowned by the storm. Not a cop. Not rescue. She couldn’t see Blue Dog, but she could almost feel him relax and grin. He unlocked the door and pushed it outward, and even the night was brighter than the darkness inside, and a pale triangle spilled through the opening and made him a silhouette. The wind and snow swirled through the shanty.

  He started to say something, but he never finished.

  Orange flame sparked and disappeared. A shotgun detonated, so loud that the storm was hushed for an instant. The smoke smelled like burnt toast. Serena felt a warm spray across her face, and she realized it wasn’t snow this time. It was Blue Dog’s blood.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Stride cannonaded down a fire road that snaked through the forest toward Hell’s Lake. The wheels of his Bronco chewed at the snow. Slender birch trees hugged both sides of the road, and caps of pine trees swayed overhead, making the road like a dark tunnel. He knew he was near the lake, and then the forest opened up, as if he had bolted through the door of a church into the open air. The sky vaulted over him, angry and gray, belching out sheets of snow. His Bronco thumped off the dirt road onto the thick ice of the lake, leaving the shelter of the trees behind him. Fifty-mile-an-hour gales ambushed him and nearly upended the truck. The blizzard was a banshee here, a woman in white stretching to the sky and screaming for the dead.

  The fish houses were a ghost town of shadows that appeared and disappeared in his headlights. He had to slow down to avoid piling into them. They were of all shapes and sizes, some barely larger than Dumpsters, others as large as campers, big enough for people to live in and sleep in if they wanted to escape the world entirely. Tonight, they were dark. He made circles around each one and didn’t see any cars parked by the houses, because no one wanted to be caught in the tempest if a propane tank went empty or a window blew out in the wind. Stride felt tiny out here, and the world felt huge and violent.

  The lake was shaped like an amoeba spread out under the microscope, with rounded fingers of land pushing into the water in wooded peninsulas and a fat, open middle where underground currents left islands of thin ice to swallow up trespassers. It stretched for miles, and from where he was, Stride could only see a fraction of its surface, and in the midst of the storm, he could see even less. He felt as if he were crawling, nudging the Bronco past each snowy hillock where a fish house was hiding.

  His phone rang.

  “I’m on the lake,” he told Maggie. “I came in on the fire road from the southwest.”

  “I’m coming in from the east,” she said. “I’ll follow the shore and head your way.”

  “It’s a nightmare out here. Watch out for hot spots.”

  “You, too. Is the cavalry coming?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got half a dozen cars heading our way.”

  “Any way to narrow down the search?” Maggie asked.

  “Tanjy’s body popped up on the south shore, so I’m hoping she went in somewhere around there, too.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  Stride threw his phone on the passenger seat. He shot out toward the open stretch of ice, hugging the shore and following the land as it bent around toward the next inlet. The snow blinded him, but when an updraft lifted the curtain for an instant, he saw another scattering of shanties a quarter mile ahead. He steered for them, and in the midst of the blackness, he could make out a yellow diamond of light. Someone was home.

  The light shone through the door of an RV, parked like a beached whale off by itself, which the owner could simply drive on and off the ice at will. Stride parked next to the RV and bailed out of his truck with his gun drawn. In an inst
ant, he was a snowman, crusted over with a wet, white layer that clung to his hair, skin, and clothes. He jogged through the powder to the door of the camper and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything inside with the wind roaring around him.

  He pounded on the door with his fist. “Police!”

  A few seconds later, the door slit open a crack, and he pointed his gun at the opening but quickly withdrew it when he saw an old man staring out with surprised, frightened eyes. The man wore a heavy red plaid shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty slippers. His messy gray hair flopped over his forehead. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Police, sir!” Stride shouted, because that was the only way to be heard.

  “I’m not leaving the lake.”

  “Can I come in for a minute?”

  “How about showing me your badge?”

  “This is a blizzard, sir, will you just give me a break!”

  “Okay, okay, get inside. You’re letting in the snow.”

  He pulled back the door, and Stride climbed the metal steps. The interior of the RV was littered with food cans, beer, and fishing equipment. A black-and-white television set was perched on a bookshelf, broadcasting a 1950s movie in between zigzagging lines. The air was freezing, and Stride could see his breath.

  The old man was barely more than five feet tall. “I’m not coming off the lake,” he grumbled. “I don’t care about any storm. I’ve seen worse storms than this.”

  “I’m not here to kick you out, although you’re crazy to be here on a night like this.”

  “Yeah, so, I’m crazy. What do you want?”

  “I’m trying to find a man who may have a fish house on the lake. He’s huge, around six foot six, and built like a linebacker. Very long black hair.”

  The old man nodded. He snorted and cleared his throat as if he were about to hack up a fur ball. “I’ve seen him. Hard to miss that guy.”

  Stride was exhilarated. “Where? Where does he keep his shanty?”

  “Don’t know exactly. It’s not in this part of the lake. I’ve seen that purple van of his heading up around the peninsula to the northeast.”