A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  He was, all in all, a very handsome fellow indeed. Well, Mutt was no hag herself, and Kate understood the impetus behind and almost wavered beneath the onslaught of imploring yips and entreating howls from both lovers. She managed to pull herself together, though, and spoke in a stern voice. “Dammit, Mutt, I told you. We don’t need any more puppies around here. The last bunch like to drove both of us into running away from home. We’re lucky they turned out to be halfway trainable so Mandy could put them to work.”

  Mutt ignored the voice of reason, quivering, her ruff standing straight up, her tail curled coquettishly, her wide yellow eyes fixed on the wolf. He paused in his approach, glancing for the first time in Kate’s direction, taking her in at a single glance and dismissing her as negligible. Kate wasn’t quite sure she even registered on his peripheral vision as human and therefore a potential threat; his attention was clearly fixed elsewhere.

  She moved over to the wire. Mutt danced around her eagerly, and Kate took one cautionary wind of the leash around her forearm, regarded it for a moment and took another. “Never underestimate the power of love,” she muttered, and Mutt proved her point by almost jerking her arm out of its socket when Kate detached the leash from the wire. Mutt pulled avidly for the trees, Kate grimly for the cabin. Sweating, straining, and swearing all the way, the tug-of-war turned her hands and forearm dark red and numb to all feeling. Finally, Kate managed to get her shivering, whining roommate back inside and the cabin door safely closed and latched behind her. She subsided limply on the doorstep and mopped her overheated brow. “Besides,” she told the eager scrabble of toenails against the other side of the door, “if I can do without, so can you.”

  From the edge of the clearing the wolf howled, a long, lovelorn sound that rose to a frustrated crescendo. “Oh, shut up,” Kate snapped, and returned to vent her spleen on the woodpile.

  *

  “Well, hey there, my first customer of the morning.” The portly, cheerful man turned to face him across the counter. “The mail plane hasn’t been in yet, so—”

  The killer shot once. The expanding nose of the soft-tipped bullet shredded the back of the man’s head and stuccoed the wall of wooden cubbyholes behind him in grayish white and dark red. The man’s body stood, swaying for a moment, before slumping slowly and somehow gracefully to the floor.

  There was a still, silent moment. The killer heard a quick, sharp intake of breath and wheeled to see the curtain that separated the post office from the rest of the house moving, as if someone had been holding it open and had just released it. He jerked it back, to reveal an empty living room, the door to it swinging wide. He went to the door and looked out, and saw her running down the long, narrow length of the airstrip, a pudgy little gray-haired woman in jeans and sweatshirt and stocking feet. He thought she screamed. A movement caught his eye and he looked beyond her. Two people on a snow machine broke out of the trees at the middle of the strip. The running woman yelled and waved her arms. The driver looked her way and turned the snow machine in her direction. The woman screamed and waved her arms more frantically.

  The killer brought the 30.06 to his shoulder in one smooth motion and shot once. The driver slumped over the handlebars and the machine swerved abruptly. The passenger screamed and tried to shove the driver aside so she could grasp the handlebars, to no avail. She screamed again, and went on screaming, as the machine slewed and swerved, back and forth, across the airstrip. Lining up the sight, the killer exhaled, held it and shot again. The screaming stopped abruptly. The snow machine, riderless, ran into the plowed snowbank at the side of the strip and flipped over.

  He gave the Winchester a fond pat and looked around for the running woman. He found her all the way down at the end of the strip, stubby legs pumping tirelessly beneath the spur of adrenaline. Sighting carefully through the peephole, down the barrel and over the darkened bead that stood out so clearly against the hard-packed snow of the runway, he closed his fingers almost gently around the trigger, heard the shot and its echo immediately following, felt the kick of the butt against his shoulder, saw her stagger and fall. She lay still for a moment, before lifting herself up on her forearms and dragging herself into the trees. He shook his head, almost in admiration, and went after her.

  He paused at the edge of the strip to look at the bodies of the two from the snow machine. He turned them face up with one foot, careful not to let the blood dull the gloss of his new boots. One body no longer had a face, the other no chest. The killer straightened one’s shirt, the other’s legs, and followed the tracks into the trees.

  A sharp crack echoed through the woods, and instinctively he threw himself down and rolled. He came up shooting, working the bolt and spacing his shots in an arc. He paused to reload, listening. There was complete silence, and then he saw the broken branch in one of his own footprints. He clucked at his over-reaction and recovered her trail. A few yards down it, he found the body.

  He approached cautiously, rifle held in front of him, a round in the chamber and the safety off. Mukluks, bright pink bib overalls, a checked shirt. “Oh,” he said, on a long note of discovery when at last he saw her face, and sank to his knees, beside her in the stained snow.

  She was blonde and she was beautiful, even in death. The last time he’d seen her, that fair skin had been flushed, the full, red lips twisted away from her white, straight teeth in a sneer, the widely-spaced dark blue eyes narrowed in contempt. She had laughed at him.

  He smiled down at her now, touched her cheek. It was cooling rapidly. He raised one lid to see if her eye was as blue as he remembered. It was. He admired the perfect fans her thick lashes made on her cheeks. His hand slid down her throat, shaped one breast, stroked her narrow waist, cupped between her thighs.

  A small whisper, perhaps of wind, rustled through the grove. A sound, perhaps the whimper of a frightened squirrel, came from deeper in the stand of trees. It was enough to make him withdraw his hand.

  He rose to his feet and threaded his way through the trees to the airstrip. Righting the overturned snow machine, he mounted it and thumbed the electric starter. It caught on the first try.

  *

  The pile of split wood was waist high when Kate heard the rapid whap-whap-whap of a helicopter’s rotor. The sun was high in a still-cloudless sky, and her shirt was damp down her spine and beneath her arms. She sunk the axe into the tree stump that served as her chopping block and went inside to pump up a drink of water. She drained the glass, refilled it and brought it back outside, narrowly missing Mutt’s nose in the door. She sat down on the front step, groaning a little from sore muscles. A rustle of underbrush called her attention to the edge of the clearing, where Mutt’s would-be lover sat beneath a mountain hemlock. For a change he was not looking yearningly at the cabin but in an inquiring fashion at the sky. She squinted up as the noise of the helicopter became louder, and jumped to her feet when it roared the last few feet to hover over her clearing.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yelled, her voice a furious croak. “You can’t land here!”

  Mutt’s lover decided it was a better day for discretion than valor and broke for the high country. As the Bell Jet Ranger with the distinctive blue-and-gold markings of the Alaska State Troopers lowered to the exact center of the clearing, Kate was forced back up against the door of the cabin. She held her breath, watching the ends of the rotors sweep dangerously close to the eaves of every building in the semicircle of her homestead.

  The blades slowed their rotation but didn’t stop. The engine powered down, and the door of the helicopter opened and a man in a state trooper’s uniform emerged. Holding on to his hat, he crouched over the few running steps that brought him face to crotch with Kate.

  She glared down at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jim? You’re lucky you didn’t take the roof off everything I own!”

  “Get inside!” he yelled, and suited word to deed by reaching around her to open the door and shove her inside, thudd
ing up the steps and in behind her and pulling the door shut after him.

  He was a tall man and a large one, and he filled up the cabin more than she liked. “What the hell do you think you’re doing,” she snapped, “pushing your way in here? What’s going on?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  He strode over to her scanner and snapped it on, to be greeted by dead air. He shook his head and swore. “Dammit, I told them to broadcast a warning and keep broadcasting it until we catch the fucker.”

  “What fucker? What warning?” she said angrily. And then she saw his expression. In that instant her anger changed to apprehension. The words devoid of heat, she repeated. “Jim, what’s going on?”

  He turned and surveyed the room, Kate mystified, Mutt alert, both of them wary. “At least you’re all right.”

  “Of course I’m all right.” Kate’s gaze sharpened. “Who isn’t?”

  His lips thinned. “Two people we know of, so far.”

  “Niniltna?” He nodded curtly, and she tensed. Next to her Mutt whined once, a keen, anxious sound. “What happened?” Kate said flatly.

  He blew out a breath. “Near as we can figure, some guy’s running around shooting at people with a 30.06.”

  Her mouth went dry. “Who?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know yet.”

  “Who’s been shot?”

  A gleam of understanding crossed his face, but he shook his head again. “We don’t that yet, either. He shot at the mail plane as it was coming in to land. George Perry saw some bodies lying at the end of the strip. Then a guy on a snow machine started shooting and he hit the throttle. He climbed to five thousand feet and circled long enough to put out an SOS. He saw the guy on the snow machine take off. That’s about all we know, except…”

  “Except?”

  “Except that he’s headed this way.” The trooper saw Kate’s reaction and nodded once for emphasis. “The mail plane called the tower in Tok, the tower called me, and I got in the air right away. I’ve been hitting every homestead on the way in.”

  Kate walked around him and got the shotgun down from the rack over the door. She broke it open to check that it was loaded. It was. She turned. “Okay. Now I know. You’d better get on with passing the word.”

  His expression relaxed, and he gave half a laugh and amazed her by swooping down for a swift, hard kiss. He laughed again at her expression and chucked her beneath the chin. “Probably the only chance I’ll ever get, how could I resist?”

  The shotgun was on its way up and if the helicopter hadn’t been right in back of him she might even have fired off a round. He looked from her furious face to the shotgun and back, laughed again and actually had the gall to salute her. “If he gets here before I get him, he’s wearing a black-and-red mackinaw and a brown billed cap with ear-flaps. He’s driving a Polaris. Watch your ass, Shugak.”

  He ducked and ran to the helicopter. The engine pitch and blade rotation increased immediately. In five seconds he was in the air, in seven over the trees, and in ten out of sight.

  *

  “Go!” the farmer yelled at the two open-mouthed, petrified figures of his children. “Run, dammit!” He turned back to the killer and waved his arms. “Here! Over here, you lousy bastard! Come get me, I dare you!”

  The killer looked at him without expression. The farmer, lying against his barn with a shattered leg and his life’s blood oozing away, clutched frantically around him for something to throw. He found nothing but melting snow, and so he threw that, in handfuls that fell far short of their target in ineffective, disintegrating pieces. “Shit!” The killer watched him without moving. “Motherfucker!” the farmer yelled and flipped him the bird with both hands. “Joe! Mary! Run!”

  The two children finally broke and ran, straight out across the frozen pond that fronted the farm buildings. The killer took half a step forward, swiveled and brought up the rifle. He frowned at the running figures through the sights. They were so small and they ran so fast. He squeezed off two shots. One hit, one missed. “No!” the farmer screamed, “no, no, no goddam you, no!” The killer shot a third time. The second figure fell hard on the grainy ice of the little lake and slid ten feet before coming to a stop.

  The farmer, sobbing, crying, gasping for breath, was clawing his body to the edge of the lake when the killer stepped up next to him. Their eyes met. The killer’s face was calm and still, the farmer’s contorted with grief and rage.

  “Fuck you,” the farmer hissed. “Do it.”

  *

  Kate leaned the shotgun against the woodpile and picked up the axe. After staring at it for a moment, she put the axe back down and picked up the shotgun. She felt like pacing, but pacing back and forth across the clearing with a crazy person going around shooting at people seemed like a bad idea. It might have been the safest thing to do, but she couldn’t bear the thought of cooping herself up in the cabin. She turned to the woods. A frustrated whine and an eager scratching at the inside of the door told her Mutt had seen her. She paused. There was a rustle across the clearing. The timber wolf was back. “Damn.” In the state she was in and with this embodiment of lupine perfection hanging around, Mutt would be no use to her. Squaring her shoulders, she walked across the clearing and up the path that led to the road.

  *

  The miner vanished into the trees as the killer reloaded the Winchester. The frantic, laboring sound of someone crashing through thick woods and a winter’s worth of snow cover came clearly to him through the still air. He threw in the bolt and cast a speculative glance toward the sound. He stretched and yawned. The snow under the trees was too darn deep to hassle with. The miner would probably bleed to death anyway. Besides, he was tired. His stomach growled. Hungry, too.

  *

  Kate was dozing when she heard it. At first it had sounded like a single, distinct crash, like a large-scale breaking of glass, but now there was no doubt about it. It was a snow machine, and it was coming her way.

  She’d walked from where the path that led to her homestead intersected the old railroad bed until she found a long, straight stretch of the road. At the end of the straight stretch farthest from Niniltna, she searched out a squat, thickly branched spruce tree that was neither too close nor too far away from the edge of the road, stamped out a path and forced her way in between the branches. She squatted beneath it now with the shotgun resting across her knees. Peering out between the branches, she had a perfect view of half a mile of road, from where it curved to avoid Honker Pond to where she crouched.

  The noise of the snow machine grew louder. The sky was clear and pale and innocent of helicopters or planes or any other kind of cavalry. “Damn you, Jim. Isn’t that just like a cop, never around when you need him.” When she looked back down the snow machine had rounded Honker Pond and was headed straight for her. There was no one else in sight.

  She muttered a curse and clicked the safety off the shotgun. She rechecked the load, pulled the stock in against her shoulder, sighted carefully down the barrel, and waited.

  The snow machine labored up the slight slope, until she could see his face, red from the force of the wind against it, lips pulled back from his teeth in a humorless grimace. It was a Polaris snow machine, all right, and the guy was wearing a red-and-black checked mackinaw and a brown-billed cap with earflaps. A chill shivered down her spine. She took her time lining up her shot. No matter what this yo-yo had done, she didn’t want to kill him. She had enough on her conscience without another death, however justified.

  He was almost upon her when the snow of the road exploded in front of his machine. Pieces of ice flew up and hit the windshield and his face. He yelled and jerked. The machine swerved. The handlebars ripped out of his hands and he fell, rolling awkwardly, slung rifle and all.

  Kate plunged out between the branches of the spruce. One caught in her hair and almost yanked her off her feet. She slipped and lost her grip on the shotgun. It smacked into the snow a
nd slid several feet from her. Across the road, the killer staggered to his. feet and unslung his rifle. She felt around and grasped a piece of deadwood and threw it at him as hard as she could. It caught him square across the face. He staggered a little. “Doggone it,” he said. He recovered, and in one automatic action raised his rifle and sighted down at her.

  Her hair still tangled in the spruce, the stock of the shotgun several feet away, Kate froze. She stared across the hard, packed roadbed into his calm, clear, quite mad eyes, and she knew she was staring at an escape from pain, a loss of laughter, the cessation of joy, all of them, straight in the face. She didn’t move, couldn’t.

  He smiled at her. “Know anywhere around here somebody might get a bite to eat?”

  There was a crash of tearing brush, and Kate was hit hard in the back of the knees. Her feet went out from under her, her hair ripped free of the branch and the world whirled around as she made a perfect backward somersault, landing on her chest with a thump that drove all the breath out of her.

  Mutt’s forepaws hit the killer square in the chest. He fell flat on his back with a hundred and forty pounds of proprietary rage on top of him. In a movement faster than Kate could follow Mutt clamped her teeth in the stock of the Winchester and shook it loose from his grip like a bear shaking off a mosquito. The rifle hit the ice six feet away and slid for twenty more. The killer lay where he was, dazed, his throat exposed, and Mutt lunged directly for it, her teeth closing in on either side.

  Kate’s breath returned with a rush. “Hold!” she shouted.

  Mutt froze, her teeth indenting but not breaking the skin of his throat. “Hold, girl,” Kate repeated, grasping at air, her voice a husky croak, “hold.”