Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  “Oh,” she said. “So that’ll take like …”

  “Good chunk of the rest of the day. He’s on an island, takes a boat ride to get there even after the drive, but …” He looked impatient. “Why, you got something to do? Go help give rabies shots, maybe?”

  “Oh, stop it,” she retorted. “I just—”

  There was no reason, really, why she shouldn’t go, but she should let Chevrier know; she was still new here, after all, and if he tried to find her and couldn’t, he might become alarmed.

  On the other hand, if she did tell him, and he objected …

  “Lizzie, it’s already nearly noon and it gets dark early, remember?” Dylan persisted. “And I don’t know when that visiting hunter is leaving the camp.”

  To go home, Dylan meant, and if that happened, then she might never get the chance to ask the hunter about what he’d—

  “Okay,” she decided abruptly, and turned north; almost at once they were in thick forest again, with massive evergreens and hardwoods crowded up to the road like eager if not particularly friendly spectators. Chevrier, she convinced herself as she drove among them, would probably not even notice she was gone.

  Spud rolled on his bike up to the front of Lizzie’s office in Bearkill just as her Blazer pulled away from the curb; as her taillights flashed at the stop sign on the corner, he let himself in. A couple of days earlier he’d watched a technician sweep the space electronically for snooping devices and come up empty.

  So now was Spud’s chance. He pulled the items he’d ordered online, specifying overnight delivery, from under his jacket:

  The microphones, smaller than dime-sized, that he fastened to the desk and phone. The wireless camera, no bigger than his thumb; stuck to the ceiling, it would be invisible unless you looked hard.

  Which she wouldn’t. There was nothing up there to look at; in his fervor to make himself indispensable, he’d turned the place into a clean, bright space with new furniture, fresh carpeting, and light beige grass-patterned wall covering to hide the old fake-wood paneling.

  Still, he might not have much time to do this. Glancing out the front window nervously, he hurriedly got the stepladder from the utility room and scrambled up it to stick the tiny camera in next to the edge of the lighting fixture over her desk.

  He’d been told what to order online by the guy in the van and given access to the PayPal account he was supposed to use to order it. And he’d followed his instructions explicitly.

  The camera. The microphones. For this office, and for her house, too; that part would be a trick. A shiver of apprehension went through him as he thought of it, clambering down.

  What he was doing was big-time crime; she was a cop, after all. And considering what else they’d probably find out about him if ever he got arrested for anything, he had to be careful.

  Very careful. But when the guy in the van had told Spud that there was five hundred bucks in the job, Spud hadn’t argued. Five hundred up front and the same again when the tasks were done.

  What the guy hadn’t said was why. But now, as Spud returned the ladder to its place in the utility room, he decided again:

  Not my business. He’d barely glimpsed the guy’s face in the van’s dim dashboard glow, but what he had seen had not reassured him. Young, slim, coldly impassive, with eyes that seemed to glitter unpleasantly even in the gloom of the van’s front seat …

  No, Spud didn’t want to know any more about that guy at all. He’d be perfectly content not meeting him again, in fact, even if it meant not getting the other five hundred.

  Still, he knew he would get it. That had been the scariest thing of all about the guy, the vibe he gave off of being someone who always did what he said he’d do. And what he’d said was:

  “Screw this up and I’ll kill you.”

  Then he’d driven off, leaving Spud with no doubt in his mind whatsoever that the guy really would.

  I did what he said, though. I’m doing it now.

  The tiny camera by the light fixture was invisible. So he’ll pay me. And he won’t kill me. And the rest …

  The rest was none of his business.

  “Big bust coming up soon,” said Dylan. “Major cop doings in Bearkill.”

  They’d been driving for an hour through thickly forested wilderness so remote that there wasn’t a cell phone signal.

  “Yeah?” Lizzie watched for deer crossing the road—and, God forbid, moose—although luckily they hadn’t met any.

  Dylan nodded. “What I hear. That’s what the meeting Chevrier went to was about, give him a heads-up that the drug enforcement crew is on the way. I hear it’s a bunch of meth freaks.”

  “Not my department.” Or if it was, she’d hear of it when she needed to. Right now all she wanted was to get off this endless ribbon of blacktop snaking through the remote north woods.

  “So,” said Dylan after another little while, “any progress on that thing of Chevrier’s?”

  “No. Dylan, I’m trying to—” A big truck had appeared from around a curve, an eighteen-wheeler hauling God knew what to God knew where. Straight at them, but the driver got it back over into his own lane in time.

  “—drive,” she finished, gripping the wheel. The Chevrier thing, as Dylan called it, was shaping up to be just that: his theory, based mostly, she feared, on his feeling that his friend Bogart wouldn’t have killed himself, that four ex-cops had been murdered. And Althea Sprague had only cemented Lizzie’s opinion.

  “Different guys, different jobs, different deaths,” she told Dylan now that the big truck had blown by. “None of them lived near each other or had any cases in common. I can’t find anything to link them at all, in fact …”

  They weren’t related, and neither were their wives. They hadn’t owed money to anyone, and none had cases pending that they needed to testify in, or perps they had testified against getting out of jail or prison recently. Nothing at all to—

  “There,” said Dylan suddenly, pointing at an arrow sign as they came up on a crossroads; five minutes later, they’d arrived in front of a tiny convenience store with two pumps, one gas and one diesel.

  She got out and looked around, stretching her legs. And you thought Bearkill was a small town …

  But compared to that busy little metropolis with its own police force, the Food King, and even a bar and an office-supply store, for heaven’s sake, Allagash was little more than a wide place in the road. Lizzie gazed around at its few small wooden houses, all clustered around a crossroads as if fearing to get out any farther into the woods than they already were.

  From the trees a few last maple leaves waved like tattered orange rags against a blue sky. The silence was complete. Dylan frowned, tracing his finger across a map.

  “Okay, I think it’s—”

  The old gas pumps still rang up gas in ten-cent increments, and you didn’t have to pay inside first. While Dylan continued puzzling over his directions, she filled the Blazer’s tank.

  Past the pumps, under a sign that read MAINE REGISTRATION TAGGING STATION, a man hoisted a dead deer on a tripod scale. The animal reminded her unhappily of the ones in her backyard.

  “What’s that all about?” she asked, meaning the scale.

  Dylan looked up. “What? Oh, when you get a deer, you tag it and bring it to the station to weigh it and register it. That’s how the Fish and Game division knows how many animals are being taken. There’s stations like these set up all over the County, at little stores, gas stations, and so on.”

  “Huh.” She replaced the gas nozzle thoughtfully. “So if you wanted to get word out to every hunter in the area …”

  But Dylan had gone back to his map. Inside the store, a boy of about twelve dressed in forest camouflage and a blaze-orange vest bought drinks and snacks, then went outside again.

  “Well, hello there,” said the clerk pleasantly to Lizzie. He had a bushy gray mustache and eyebrows to match. With a glance out at the Blazer, he added, “I’ll bet you’re the new deputy,
ain’t you?”

  He pronounced it “deppity.” “Heard about you,” he said, “and ain’t you just as pretty and smart looking as they told me, now?”

  “Smaht,” the Maine way of saying it. And the gossip wire works even way up here …

  On the wall behind him ranged tins of chewing tobacco, Slim Jims, and fishing bobbers, phone cards and rolls of lottery tickets. Beer, soda, and bottled water filled the wall coolers, and the shelves offered a few canned goods, cereal, and coffee.

  Only the cooler’s selection of premade sandwiches was a disappointment, the labels differing but the fillings all looking like the same unappetizing mystery meat.

  “Take care,” the clerk advised kindly as she paid for the gas and returned to where Dylan had gotten his bearings at last.

  “That way,” he stated, pointing down a small side road on the map, “three miles. Supposed to take us right to the lake.”

  “You’ve been here before, though, right?”

  She steered the Blazer the way he said, noting that the road was narrow, unpaved, and generously furnished with spine-jangling ruts and bumps.

  “Dylan? I said, you’ve been here?”

  “Mmm,” he replied, studying the map once more. “Not exactly. But up here there ought to be a—”

  “Dylan!” She slammed on the brakes; he looked up, annoyed.

  “Oh, come on, Lizzie, just because I haven’t done this route before myself, that doesn’t mean—Oh.”

  He looked through the front windshield, then once more to make sure what he saw was really there, and sat back nonplussed.

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to a live moose before.”

  And I, Lizzie thought grimly, don’t ever want to be this close to one again.

  Slowly the moose turned his head. His dark, round eye was as big as a pie plate, or it looked that way, anyhow. And those antlers—

  They were as wide as the Blazer. If he turned his head fast, he could smash that massive rack of branching bone right through the windshield and—

  Chewing, the moose regarded them. Lizzie touched the horn lightly. The moose scowled, his fleshy lower lip thrusting out. It was not at all the sort of look she wanted to see on a—

  “Hey!” Dylan’s head was stuck out his lowered window. “Hey, you big galoot! Get along now, or I’ll—”

  She turned, unable to repress a smile. “Dylan, where in the world did you learn to use a word like—”

  The moose blatted, spraying half-chewed vegetation onto the Blazer’s windshield, where the wiper’s sprayer struggled to remove it. But then, as if taking Dylan’s order to heart, the animal turned and plodded up the road ahead of them thirty yards or so before sidling off into the brush; moments later they’d reached the end of the dirt road, pulling up into a grassy area.

  “Well, this is a fine mess you’ve gotten us both into,” said Dylan, and of course she did not punch him in the head.

  “Kidding, kidding,” he added, holding his hands up in mock surrender. They got out of the Blazer.

  “Hunting camp, eh?” she said in disgust. In the grassy area was a picnic table, a rough stone fire pit, a green metal trash barrel, and a small painted sign reading OUTHOUSE with an arrow pointing down a path into the woods.

  “What do they hunt for here, sandwiches?” she demanded.

  Speaking of which, she could use one. It was way past noon, and except for the prewrapped horrors she’d seen in the general store, there probably wasn’t any lunch material for miles.

  Dylan pushed cautiously through the brush at the far side of the clearing, then vanished entirely into it. His voice came out of the tangled undergrowth: “Hey! Hey, Lizzie, look over here!”

  Grousing, she pushed in after him, then blinked in surprise. Past the thickets, a sandy beach spread to the left and right. Straight ahead, a blue lake glittered.

  Two kayaks rested side by side on the sand; Dylan crouched to peer at a note taped to one of them.

  “ ‘Camp is directly across lake. Paddle toward flag. Regards, Herman Nussbaum,’ ” he read aloud. “That’s the guy that I told you about,” he added, straightening, “the hunting-camp guy who—”

  In the kayaks lay black plastic paddles and bright orange life jackets. Dylan eyed them speculatively, frowning.

  “I thought he’d come get us. In,” Dylan added, “a motorboat. But if this is the way over there …” He lifted a paddle.

  “Oh, no.” Lizzie backed away. This must’ve been what the guide meant about getting ready, she realized; towing these tiny deathtraps over here for them to use to get to the island.

  Or as he probably put it in his hunting-guide brochures, “Arranging water transport.”

  Of which, she had already decided, she was having no part.

  “No, we’ll call this guy. I’m not an outdoorswoman, Dylan. I’ve never been in a kayak in my …”

  Because first of all, what would a little girl be doing at a hunting camp reachable only by boat? Or by small plane, maybe. Which was yet another large messy can of remote backwoods worms she had no intention of opening, or at least not without careful research on the aircraft and its operator first.

  And maybe not even then. “Come on, Lizzie, it’s less than a mile,” Dylan said. “Don’t you want to talk to the guy in person?”

  Dylan was already donning a life jacket. But the kayaks were so small and precarious looking, and how in the world did you get into one of them without getting drenched, anyway?

  “Dylan, for all I know, this is all a complete false alarm. And anyway …”

  “Here, put this on.” He took her arm, eased one side of the jacket up onto it, then did the other. “Worst case, you’ll get a scenic boat ride.”

  That was not her idea of what the worst case might be. He finished fastening the jacket’s straps and snugged the sliders up tight across her front. “There. You look right out of L.L.Bean.”

  Which was not, to put it mildly, among her ambitions. He seized her shoulders gently and turned her to face the water.

  “Look. Just look and tell me you don’t want to …”

  The sky overhead was paint-box blue, the water so clear she could see straight down through it to the pale green plants swaying on the rippled sand. As she watched, a huge hook-taloned bird hurtled down, struck the water with a great splash, and rose again, gripping a shiny fish.

  “Lizzie. Come on. The guy’s not going to be there forever.”

  “Well,” she said doubtfully, “I suppose with life jackets at least we aren’t going to …”

  Finally, at his continued urging, she gave in and lowered herself inexpertly into the kayak. Dylan gave it a push, sliding it smoothly out onto the shining water.

  “Paddle,” he called, so she did, clumsily at first, but soon they were skimming across the small, bouncy waves together, the paddling an easy, intuitive motion.

  “Oh,” she said happily, and Dylan smiled sideways at her. A loon called from somewhere up the lake; a fish jumped.

  This could be it, she thought. In a little while, I might be talking to someone who’s seen Nicki and—

  Then they heard the gunshots coming from the island.

  Pop. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Too fast for a standard rifle—

  “Shit,” snapped Dylan, recognizing the sound at once just as she had. It was automatic-weapon fire coming from just beyond the line of trees marching along the island’s rocky shore, thirty or so yards distant.

  Paddling hard toward the skimpy cover offered by the rocks—more like boulders, really, they were at least half her size, but Gibraltar wouldn’t be enough right now—she was acutely aware that her chest was protected only by the layer of foam in the life jacket.

  In other words they were sitting ducks out here. “Maybe just somebody target shooting?” she called hopefully.

  But then a round whizzed by her ear with an ugly zzzt! and Dylan’s arm came up abruptly, shreds of his jacket sleeve flyin
g.

  Bloody shreds. Fright pierced her, and she couldn’t shoot while she paddled. “Dylan?”

  No answer. He kept paddling, too, but when they hit the beach between the boulders, he hauled himself from the kayak and fell.

  Jesus … Jumping from her own boat, she crab-walked clumsily, keeping her head low and scanning the tree line until she reached him. There was blood in the water and on the sand. She pulled the Glock from her bag, fired twice over the rocks, then twice more.

  “Dylan?” He already had his phone out; if she hadn’t been so pumped with fright and fury, she’d have wept at the sight. No signal …

  But then she saw that it wasn’t a phone at all. It was Chevrier’s locator beacon; Dylan must’ve grabbed it from the Blazer.

  “Gotta get someone out here,” he managed as he activated it, “gotta let ’em know we’re …”

  Good old Dylan … Of course he’d grabbed it. On the Boston PD, they used to say the only way he’d ever stop thinking was if you cut off his head.

  “Fine.” If it works … She eyed his bleeding arm, then poked her head up to scan the trees again. The gunfire had stopped.

  For now. Hauling him up, she helped him stagger toward the tree line. Her face pressed his rough cheek.

  “A little farther,” she urged him. The shooter might still be back there, but on the beach, they were ridiculously easy pickings.

  They reached a massive blowdown, some ancient tree that had lost its rooted hold long ago and fallen outward toward the lake. Gasping, she let him down as gently as she could, then pulled his jacket off, followed by his shirt, and ripped the shirt swiftly into strips.

  The wound in his upper arm was a small round mouth spitting gouts of dark blood. She wrapped a torn strip of cloth around it, then several more, twisting them all together tightly by winding a length of fallen branch through them and turning it like a crank.

  “Hold that,” she ordered. “Can you?”

  Because if he couldn’t, she couldn’t leave him; the wound was arterial, she knew from its regular pulsing. He’d bleed to death.

  “Go on. I’m fine.” His feeble smile said otherwise, as did his color, now nearly as pale as the remains of his white shirt. He angled his head at the woods. “See if …”