The Deep Dark Descending

by Eskens,Allen

  I got to my feet and grabbed the log that I’d knocked down and heaved it at the snowmobile. Mikhail had climbed onto the seat and had his helmet in his hands when my log hit him square in the back. The helmet went tumbling and Mikhail fell forward. I charged toward him, closing to within ten feet before he popped the sled into gear and screamed away.

  I looked around for my gun, but in my disorientation, I had no idea where to look. I gave a quick scan for holes in the snow where it may have fallen, but I had made a mess of the area with my thrashing about. I didn’t have time.

  That’s when I saw the ax handle sticking out of the snow near the stack of firewood. I ran and grabbed it, expecting to have the whole ax, but it lifted light in my hand. It was only the handle. It would have to do. Mikhail was getting away. I put my glove back onto my bare right hand and began running.

  I headed down the path laid by the track of the snowmobile, sinking into the snow with each step, but not nearly as bad as it would have been without the track. I ran at a full charge for the first hundred feet, but then reason began to replace adrenaline. He was on a snowmobile heading for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The snowmobile trail would end in a mile or two, and from there he would be forced to go it on foot. He’ll have a head start, but in this deep snow, I would have the advantage of stepping in his tracks.

  I could hear the scream of the snowmobile engine in the distance. It swung in great crescendos, dropping to near silence after each—hitting the gas hard on the short straightaways and breaking for the turns. Reckless.

  I slowed to a jog, working to get into a rhythm that would keep my breathing down so that the air didn’t burn my lungs. I just needed to keep my head and gain on him in small increments.

  As the sound of the engine grew faint, I heard it suddenly die. I paused to listen and could hear nothing. He couldn’t have been to the end of the trail yet. He hadn’t gone far enough for that to be the cause of the silence. Something went wrong.

  I picked up my pace.

  The trail bounced up and down with some climbs, steep enough that I was nearly on my hands and knees. I would slow on those hills, half expecting an ambush. I had considered that Mikhail may have a gun, but I discarded that concern early on. He would have shot me at the cabin instead of throwing logs at me. He must have been in the final stages of preparation for his escape north. I caught him off guard.

  As I approached my next hill, I could see a glint of yellow in the trees. I slowed to a walk and tested my grip on the ax handle.

  Then I charged up the hill with my weapon at the ready only to find the abandoned snowmobile jammed into the craw of a group of saplings. Mikhail had been moving too fast to make the turn. I could see the holes in the snow where his legs carried him north. Here is where my advantage would begin.

  Mikhail’s tracks led down a gentle slope to a valley and up the opposite hill. I couldn’t see him but he had to be just beyond the crest. I stepped into his footprints and gave chase. The mechanics of cutting a fresh trail through deep snow is so much harder than walking in another man’s tracks. I would be limited to his gait, but not his pace. I could go faster, maybe only slightly, but I would be faster. Catching him would be a mathematical certainty, as long as we had enough distance to cover, and I knew that we had plenty of distance before he would find civilization on the Canadian side of the border.

  I moved as efficiently as I could, using the ax handle as a walking stick on the uphill climb. I needed to keep from falling down, which was difficult in the deep snow. Every stumble cost me valuable seconds. I could see where Mikhail tripped as he scurried down the slopes, and his wild, flailing steps as he climbed them.

  Slow and steady, I whispered to myself.

  As I came to the top of the second ridge, the snow fall had ebbed to a fine glitter, the lake opening up below me, beautiful and white, maybe half a mile wide. A quarter of the way onto that lake, a tiny red figure trudged forward, lurching from one foot to the next as he fought to get across the lake.

  I took a moment to catch my breath, my hands resting on my knees as I sucked in oxygen, my eyes focused on the man in red. He stopped and turned. With my gray pants and brown coat, I was pretty sure he couldn’t see me, but he picked up his pace anyway. The race was on.

  I smiled and charged down the hill, stumbling only once, but recovering quickly. Again I had to remind myself to keep a steady pace. I didn’t want to be physically depleted when I caught him. I punched through the last of the pine and aspen and found myself on the edge of the lake. I could see him well enough to see his arm swinging wildly, trying to keep his momentum going forward.

  He was mine.

  I slogged ahead, doing my best to ignore the pain in my chest. The cold air sizzled and wheezed as it abraded the tissue in my lungs. Snot from my nose froze against the stubble of whiskers on my upper lip. Tears, born of the cold breeze in my face, ran down my cheeks, and I had to blink hard to clear my eyes.

  I was gaining.

  I could hear him coughing. The chase was destroying him. He glanced over his shoulder every ten or fifteen steps. He had to see the futility of his circumstance. Yet he kept up his pace—and I kept up mine.

  We neared the northern shore of the lake and he began to lean forward with every step, as if he were trying to reach out and grab the air to pull himself off the lake and out of my grasp. He yelled something over his shoulder, gibberish that vanished into the dwindling snow.

  I was fifty feet behind him and he was almost to the shoreline. He looked back at me and I could see the fear and exhaustion in his eyes.

  Forty feet. I heard him yell something that sounded like “Leave me alone.”

  Thirty feet. He reached the edge of the lake, pulling on a birch sapling to drag himself off the ice. Staggering forward, his head turning sharply to the left and right as if trying to find a path, which did not exist.

  I used the same birch to pull myself off the lake and now he was only fifteen feet away, his back still to me, his head swiveling in confusion.

  I gripped my ax handle and raised it, charging with the last of my strength. He turned in time to see that chunk of hickory slicing through the air at his head. He raised his left arm to meet my blow and I heard a crack of bone.

  He screamed in pain and stumbled back. I raised the ax for a second blow. As I started my downswing, I saw the knife. He lunged. I juked and drove my ax handle into his head. He dropped to his knees. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell backward into the snow.

  I took a breath and raised the ax for the third blow, the one that would kill the man who killed my wife. And there, the ax remained.

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 40

  The last hole is the hardest to drill. The ice seems to have turned to stone, and I can’t feel my fingers on either hand. My feet throb as if they are being crushed in a vice. My arms and chest are so cramped and gnawed by fatigue that I can barely turn the crank. Every few turns, I have to stop and rest, yet resting only prolongs the suffering. The wind has picked up with gusts that push me into the auger. I feel like I may fall down at any moment.

  A full moon is rising in the east, casting a dark blue patina across the lake, and rolling my shadow out ten feet behind me. I can see well enough to know that Mikhail is shivering violently, his words rattling as he speaks. “You can’t do this,” he says. “This is wrong—it’s murder.”

  I gave him his trial. He could have come clean. No one—not even Nancy—can say I didn’t try. Lie upon lie upon lie. He had all day to do the right thing. I gave him every opportunity and I feel half dead from the effort. He knew what was coming; he chose this path.

  I can no longer push down on the auger with my arm. It hurts too much. I lean forward and rest my forehead atop my hand on the cap of the auger. As I turn the crank, I use my neck muscles to press the auger into the ice. The sounds and vibrations pulsing up through the shaft fill my skull with noise. I welcome it because it helps to block out Mikhail’s pleadin
g. But I can still hear him. Like a runner at the end of a marathon, I push until I think I will collapse. But I don’t break through and I have to rest. I’m so very close.

  “Please, I told you, it was all Ana. You can’t do this; you can’t live with this. For God’s sake listen to me.”

  I don’t want to talk to Mikhail, but I ask a question that, he has to see, is his last chance to purge his sins. “Tell me about Zoya,” I say. My words are cracked and weak as they climb from my tattered throat. “Tell me how she died.”

  “She’s dead?”

  My shoulders slump with disappointment. “Come on, Mikhail. We’ve come too far for you to pretend now.” I try to swallow, but I have no spit left. “Tell me how she died.”

  “I don’t know. I swear to—”

  “I know . . . you swear to God.” I shake my head. “You’ve sworn to God so many times today. And every time that you said that, you were lying to me.”

  He’s gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering and doesn’t answer me.

  “Haven’t I been fair, Mikhail? Don’t you want to save yourself? I’m going to ask you one last time . . . and I want you to answer as though your life depends on it—because it does. How . . . did . . . Zoya . . . die?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had nothing to do with her death.”

  I smile. “That’s right. You’re an innocent man. You don’t know how Zoya died. You weren’t involved in my wife’s death? This is all a big misunderstanding.”

  “I told you what happened. That’s the truth.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear you say that, Mikhail.”

  I stand back up and go back to drilling my last hole.

  “This is wrong,” he yells.

  My auger catches and breaks through to the lake.

  “You’re doing this because of Ana,” he says. “She’s manipulated you, and you can’t see it.”

  Each of the eight holes is separated from its neighbor by a wall of ice about as thin as a pane of glass. I use the head of the auger, stabbing into each hole at an angle to chip away those final impediments.

  “You can’t do this. Please . . . please, I beg you, look at the facts. It’s not me. It’s Ana. You’re being used.”

  As long as I keep my shadow behind me, I can see well enough by the moonlight to finish my pit.

  “Think about it. With me dead . . . and Reece Whitton dead, she has it all to herself.”

  When I cut through the last wall the chunk of ice in the center lifts in the water and floats a few inches higher than the rest of the icy surface. I know that I am too weak to heave it out of the water, so I use the auger to push it down. When it clears the bottom, the chunk turns sideways and knocks against the underside of the lake ice. The pit is open, jagged and dark and cold.

  “You’re insane,” Mikhail says. He’s working the cord against his zipper. In the moonlight, his eyes seem as big as hen’s eggs. I have my hands on my thighs. I am exhausted. I begin to cough and it feels like my lungs are tearing free of my chest.

  When I catch my breath, I search through the darkness until I find the loose end of the rope. I’m breathing like I’d just summited Mount Everest, and I curse at my poor condition. It won’t be much longer.

  “Listen to me,” Mikhail pleads. “You can’t do this. You have no proof. I’m telling you the truth. It was Ana.”

  I tie the sack of rocks to the rope around Mikhail’s legs, three feet of slack between his heels and the bundle.

  “God dammit! Stop!” Mikhail’s voice carries up and seems to fill the entire sky. “Would you just stop!”

  I finish tying Mikhail to the rocks and I crawl up to sit beside him, my elbow in the snow near his head. “I’ve given you a chance to come clean,” I say.

  “But I’m telling you—”

  “No. Don’t say another word. I want you to be quiet and listen to me now.”

  Mikhail is breathing heavily. I can see the fear in his eyes, but he stops talking.

  “Before I came here, I was with Ana. You saw me at the club, so you know this already. But she told me a story and I want to tell it to you now.”

  I think back to that moment when I was about to leave the Lodge and Ana held me back. I have something to tell you, she said. It’s about your wife’s death. In that brief conversation, Ana handed to me a final piece of my puzzle, a nugget of proof that has been here on the lake with us the entire day, hiding, waiting to be unveiled.

  I speak. “Four and a half years ago, Zoya Savvin was beaten by one of your clients and thrown through a motel window. A patrol officer found her and took her to Hennepin County Medical Center where she met my wife. Because her assault appeared to be related to prostitution, the Vice Unit was called. Reece Whitton took the call himself and went to the hospital. Zoya must have known that Reece worked for you because when Whitton showed up, Zoya got scared and wouldn’t say a word.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” Mikhail says. “I don’t—”

  I slap my hand down on Mikhail’s broken arm and give it a squeeze. He lets loose a howl that tears open the night sky. I probably squeeze a bit harder than I need to, but I really want him to shut up and listen.

  A faint green light, like the smoky flame of burning copper, is pulsing above the crown of the Canadian hills. The Aurora Borealis—the Northern Lights. I pause in my story for a moment to take in the beauty. In some weird way, that glow makes me feel warm inside. But that could also be hypothermia setting in.

  “I’m guessing you thought you were in the clear,” I continue. “Maybe you thought Zoya would be a good soldier—keep her mouth shut after she saw Whitton. But that didn’t happen. Zoya talked to my wife. She said quite a bit once she thought she was safe from Whitton. The problem was Zoya’s spoke in Belarussian. Jenni wrote the words down in a notebook, not knowing that those words would lead to her own death.”

  “I had nothing to do with her death.”

  I take the glove off my right hand and pull the fillet knife from my boot. Then I wrap the glove around the knife handle.

  “Please, no. I swear. Don’t you see? It was—”

  I use the knife handle to shove the glove into Mikhail’s mouth before he thinks to close it. He bites down and growls his rage and pain.

  “I told you not to talk. You’ve had your chance. Now you’re going to listen.”

  I pull the knife back out and put my left hand over the glove to keep it in place. In my right hand I brandish the knife, swiveling it slightly to catch the glint of the moon as I continue my story.

  “Jenni sounded out some of those words to Reece Whitton who understood full well what Jenni was saying—what Zoya was saying. Zoya was not being the good soldier, so Whitton called you. You needed Zoya out of that hospital and you needed to burn those notes. You, Mikhail Vetrov, ordered Reece Whitton and Ray Kroll to kill my wife.”

  Mikhail begins slinging his head back and forth, the muffled “no” barely making it past the glove in his mouth.

  “You told them to make it look like an accident—a hit-and-run. Make sure Jenni had the notes with her in the parking ramp. Kill her. Bring the notes back to you.”

  I lay the knife down so my hand is free.

  “When the time came to kill her, Kroll sped down the ramp where Whitton had lured Jenni. Whitton shoved her into the path of the car. Then he collected the notebook and walked away.”

  I climb onto Mikhail’s stomach. I can feel his body tremble against my thighs.

  “Ana told me something else this morning, something that I’d missed completely.”

  I reach for the zipper of his snowsuit, my fingers too cold to grasp it, so I hack at the zipper with the side of my hand until I work it open.

  Mikhail starts to twist and flail. Beneath his coat, he’s wearing a winter cycling jacket. He’d dressed well for his journey to Canada. I try to unzip the jacket, but the zipper is too small and my fingers are useless, so I bend down and grip the zipper in my teeth.
He’s bucking and trying to dig his chin into the top of my head. He knows what I’m looking for. I lower the zipper as far as I can.

  “Kroll said something in that conversation with Whitton that I didn’t pick up on. He said ‘another drop of blood and we do all the work.’ I thought he was just trying to sound cold, like he’s killed before, and this is no big deal.”

  Under his cycling jacket, Mikhail’s wearing a thermal undershirt. I pick up the knife and cut it down the front.

  “But that’s not the case, is it Mikhail. He wasn’t just playing at being a stone-cold killer. He was talking about you, about the tattoo on your chest.”

  I rip open his shirt to expose a dagger tattoo in the middle of his torso, the handle up and the blade pointing down.

  “This is the salute you give to your bosses in the old country—your record of accomplishment. Ana told me all about it.”

  Mikhail is yanking his head from side to side, trying to spit out the glove, but I hold it in place with my left hand as I trace the tattoo’s blade with the point of the fillet knife. At the bottom of the dagger on his chest are four drops of blood inked to look as if they are dripping down his abdomen.

  “Ana said this first drop of blood, your first kill, is for a rival that you had to dispose of for your bosses. Kind of a good-faith initiation.”

  I slide the blade of the fillet knife down his skin until the point rests on the second tattoo droplet.

  “But this one . . . this one is for my wife. That’s the drop of blood that Kroll mentions in the recording—your mark of achievement. He was complaining that he and Whitton would do the murder, but you would take the credit.”

  I move the point of the blade to the next drop of blood.

  “This . . . is for Zoya, I presume. And this,” I touch the fourth drop, “I’m betting this is Kroll.”

  I move the tip of the knife back up and rest it on the skin beside Jenni’s mark.

  “But you made a mistake,” I say. “You didn’t just kill my wife that day.”