Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  Right, if there were bad guys in there that she could find, seize, and smack the living shit out of, if possible.

  Better yet: Sorry, Judge. But the perpetrator was resisting arrest and his head accidentally hit my bullet.

  Or Nicki might be there …

  She knelt by Dylan. The tourniquet was holding. His grip on the stick that held it tight seemed firm … for now.

  “Do not lose consciousness, do you hear me?” Her voice broke and she let it. “Dylan?”

  His eyelids fluttered open; his lips pursed in a kiss, then formed a word: Go.

  Rising, she ran, scrambling up a short, grassy path into the woods, weapon at the ready and her heart full of a clear, urgent purpose:

  To kill the next son of a bitch she met. But moments later, when she burst through into a shaded clearing surrounded by huge pines, it was obvious.

  Someone had taken care of that already.

  FIVE

  The whap-whap of an approaching helicopter broke the silence in the bloodstained clearing. Through the trees, Lizzie could see two med techs hustle beneath the turning rotors toward Dylan. The next man out of the craft was Chevrier. “Here!” she yelled.

  He stopped when he reached her, his eyes widening just as hers had. The smell of gunfire still lingered in the clearing, ringed by a half-dozen small pine-log cabins, where two men lay dead, their blood staining the pine needles under the old trees.

  One victim, clad in a fancy, multi-pocketed suede hunting coat and expensive-looking tan boots, had a single hole in his forehead. With his arms flung out and his legs together, boot toes aimed at the sky, he resembled a child making a snow angel.

  Only there was no snow, and if angels existed, it seemed he was right now meeting them. “Aw, hell,” said Chevrier quietly.

  The second man lay in a mess of the bloody feathers that had exploded out of his down jacket when the barrage of gunfire hit him. His body lay twisted and crumpled, one leg underneath him and one arm bent at the wrong angle, the way it would be if a lot of bullets slammed different parts of it in different directions.

  Lizzie had seen it, once, that herky-jerky dance. Once had been enough; she swallowed hard, then spoke.

  “He heard the first shot and came running out, maybe, to see what’s what,” she told Chevrier, who nodded.

  “Yeah, he would. That’s Harold Nussbaum, he’s been guiding up around here for forty years.” He eyed the body sorrowfully but didn’t approach it.

  There’d be a scene team; this was state police investigation material, not the county cops’. His job and Lizzie’s, too, was just to preserve the evidence as best they could.

  “You know the other dead guy?” Chevrier asked.

  On the beach, the med techs were hoisting the stretcher with Dylan strapped to it up toward the chopper. Her heart caught as his good arm fell limply off to one side.

  But then, turning his head, he waved it in a weak salute, knowing she’d be watching if she could. Dylan …

  Tears blurred her eyes; she blinked them away grimly.

  “No,” she pronounced firmly, turning back to Chevrier. “We had … that is, Lieutenant Hudson had heard that a little girl had been sighted by a lost hunter back here in the woods somewhere. I accompanied him to check it out.”

  “Yeah, huh?” Chevrier rubbed his chin thoughtfully, gazing around the clearing.

  The helicopter took off with a roar and a rush of wind that sent the pines swaying, foamy whitecaps scudding across the lake. Lizzie had a moment to wonder how she and Chevrier would get off the island.

  Not that she cared much. Hell, if worse came to worst, there were those kayaks, although even at only a little before three in the afternoon the late-autumn sun already nearly touched the tops of the purplish-black line of pointed firs to the west.

  Chevrier’s lips pursed consideringly. “So, you hear a rumor about some little kid and the first thing you do is, you get a wild hair and come flying up here, don’t check in with dispatch, just think you’ll charge right in and find out what’s going on.”

  She steadied herself, then spoke. “Sheriff Chevrier, my understanding was that the hunter was from out of the area. He might leave at any time, go home and be out of our jurisdiction, maybe even not be locatable, and we might not be able to—”

  But Chevrier wasn’t listening, instead staring again at the body of Harold Nussbaum, whom he’d probably known. “Yeah. Yeah, what the hell, that’s what I’d have done, too,” Chevrier said.

  Whew, she thought. So maybe she wasn’t going to get chewed out for—

  But then he aimed a stern index finger at her. “If I had a good reason for wondering about it all in the first place, that is,” he added. “Difference is, I’m the boss and you’re not.”

  He took a breath. “So I’ll tell you what’s what. I need you for my own reasons, so I’ve been cutting you some slack on your private motivations, okay? But when we get back to town, you’re gonna tell me what the hell you’re up to, haulin’ your city-girl butt all way up here to the boonies in the first place.”

  The chopper’s sound faded. Chevrier’s anger didn’t. “And if I like your explanation, I won’t bust your butt right the hell off this job. And maybe I won’t put the kind of recommendation in your file, anybody reads it you’ll be lucky if your next one’s working as a grade-school crossing guard.”

  By now he was toe-to-toe with her. “Agreed, Deputy?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir. Absolutely,” she said.

  Thinking, Somebody saw Nicki. That dead hunter there, maybe, and he was already talking about it.

  So to stop him, whoever has her came here and killed him.

  “Hey.” The van, an older but unrusted gray Econoline, pulled up alongside Spud as he pedaled through the early evening.

  He’d hung around all day in the office waiting for Lizzie Snow to get back. He needed to know absolutely and for sure that she wouldn’t notice the devices he’d placed, or he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight for worrying about it.

  But the morning and then the afternoon wore on and she hadn’t arrived, and the waiting had worn him down. At last, when it got to be past five o’clock, he’d decided to go—

  “You do it?” the guy demanded from the van’s driver’s-side window.

  The snooping gadgets, he meant. He looked twitchier than usual, his gaze dancing from Spud’s face to the van’s rearview mirror and back again.

  Like something frightening had happened to him recently. Or something bad. Then Spud noticed the long, groove-like wound on the guy’s jaw: like a deep, blunt claw mark.

  Or … a gunshot wound? Spud found his voice. “Yeah, I—”

  It was the first time Spud had seen the guy clearly: tan, clean-shaven, good-looking in a strange, faintly forbidding way. His eyes looked old, but the rest of his face was smooth and oddly unlined, uncreased by emotion. Like nothing could make him smile.

  Or weep. The guy had long dark hair that he wore in a thick braid. He had on a fringed suede jacket with beadwork on the fringes, but the beadwork was fake; Spud had seen the jacket at Walmart.

  “Get in.” His hands on the steering wheel were slim and strong looking, oddly long-fingered. Without wanting to, Spud imagined them gripping a knife.

  “I said, get in.” His voice was low and calmly compelling.

  Spud glanced up and down the rural road: no one coming in either direction. The guy in the van waited, expressionless.

  Then: “You want your money or not?”

  Still no one. There would be, though. Spud didn’t want to be seen with this guy, but he also didn’t want to get in the van.

  Not at all. “That’s okay,” he said, “you can just—”

  Hand it to me, Spud was about to finish. But instead the guy’s hand shot out the open window, seized a fistful of Spud’s laboriously twisted dreadlocks, and pulled.

  The guy spoke. “Dude. Don’t make me come out there. Just put the bike in the back, hop in, and chill. You read
me?”

  “I … I read you,” Spud managed, seeing stars and tasting the blood leaking from his split lip where the ring in it had hit the van door. The next thing he knew, he was inside the vehicle, his bike stashed in the cargo compartment along with what looked to Spud like guns: a half-dozen long ones and a shorter, bulkier one, all wrapped up individually in blankets.

  Soon he was riding beside the guy, with no idea where he would end up or if he would be alive when he got there. The guy had a bone-handled knife in a scabbard on his belt; once he’d seen it, Spud couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  Amusement curved the guy’s lips. “It’s just what you think it is. And I use it for just what you think I use it for.”

  The guy wore jeans and a pair of moccasins. Leather, like the jacket, Spud thought. But not factory made; too rough.

  “Look in the glove compartment.” The guy turned down the old White Oak Station Road, roughly rutted and little used now that a shorter way into town was paved.

  Fenced fields lined the road, dark and lumpy with plowed-up earth and the remnants of withered cornstalks. In the chill air, Spud could smell the sweet-sour perfume of the corn heaped up and fermenting in nearby silos, food for local cows over the coming winter.

  Spud opened the glove box, wishing he were inside one of those silos, alone in the corn-mash-perfumed dark.

  Emphasis on the alone part. Inside the glove compartment lay a rubber-banded sheaf of cash. “Take it out. Count it.”

  The inside of the van was very clean and quiet except for the crunching of the tires on the rough dirt road.

  Trying to keep his hands from shaking, Spud counted out the money: a thousand in tens and twenties. “This is too much. You said—”

  The guy’s head turned slowly, reminding Spud of wild animals in nature movies, tracking their prey. He smiled finally.

  It was not an improvement. “I mean, you already gave me five hundred, so—”

  His voice died. The guy kept looking at him. Spud calculated rapidly. He was out all night often enough so that no one would get worried about him until morning. So he was on his own here. His gaze went from the guy’s knife to the van’s door handle and back again.

  “Chill, punk. How come you’re so nervous, anyway? You some kind of a nervous Nellie?”

  The guy looked back at the road again. But he wasn’t smiling anymore, and the question didn’t sound friendly.

  The knife’s handle was carved in intricate patterns. Spud thought it resembled human bone. Although how he’d know that, he couldn’t have said. It reminded him was all.

  The guy spoke again. “I’ve got another job for you and I’m paying you in advance again, okay? Half now, half when it’s done, just like before.”

  He shoved a paper bag at Spud as they reached the old tumbledown garage that the Station Road was named after. Flanked by a huge, flat tree stump as wide as his mother’s dining room table with all its extra sections put in, forty years ago the garage had been a gas station.

  Spud looked at the bag. “What … what d’you want me to do?”

  Saplings grew up through the buckled pavement between the collapsed garage building and the two rusted skeletons of old gas pumps out front. The bent metal tops of the pumps, their glass long ago shotgun-shattered but the round frames still in place, looked to Spud like a pair of smashed heads.

  That bag’s just a trick. He just got me out here to kill me. So no one will know, I did what he wanted so now he—

  The guy slid the knife from its scabbard, so fast that Spud didn’t have time to react. “Hey!” he shouted, shrinking away in sudden fright.

  The guy looked casually up from paring a shred of cuticle from the edge of his left thumb. “Relax.”

  He put the knife away slowly. “You really are a nervous guy, aren’t you? A little pussy, with all your jewelry and your ink.”

  He regarded Spud evenly. Spud couldn’t speak, fearing that if he didn’t get out of this van soon, he might throw up or wet his pants. There was just something about the guy …

  “So are you hiding something, little Miss Nervous Nellie?”

  No words came from Spud’s mouth. Instead a surge of bitter fluid threatened to erupt from his throat. “N-no,” he managed.

  The guy sighed, seeming to believe the lie. “I didn’t think so. You’re a disappointment, you know that?”

  Spud thought that this question probably did not require an answer … fortunately, since right now it was all he could do just to catch his breath.

  “Seemed to me you might have more stones.”

  Spud’s chin lifted resentfully. He felt that under ordinary conditions, his supply of stones was adequate. More than, even.

  “But maybe I’m wrong,” the guy said, watching Spud from beneath lowered eyelids. “Am I? Do you have stones?”

  The answer to this question seemed suddenly very important to Spud, as if his life depended on it. Clearing his throat, he mustered what little voice he could summon.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah, maybe I do.”

  The guy’s lips curved upward again in what served him for a smile. Nodding, he appeared to come to some conclusion, one Spud hoped very sincerely did not involve the knife.

  “Why are you doing this, man?” he asked. Dumb, maybe. But he thought he deserved to know.

  The guy didn’t answer, pulling the van out onto the road again. Spud glanced over his shoulder at the ruined gas station, the broken gas pumps, and the skeletal trees.

  “So,” the guy said as they turned onto the paved road and started back toward town. Now that he’d scared Spud half to death, he seemed more cheerful, almost human.

  Almost. “So, open the bag.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Trey Washburn. “For one thing, how’d whoever was shooting at you get off the island? That’s where he was, right? The shooter?”

  By nine that evening, her own bed was the only place Lizzie wanted to be. Several hours of debriefing in an office at the sheriff’s department in Houlton followed by a small mountain of paperwork had taken all the energy she had. But Washburn had been insistent, and after all, she’d had to eat something.

  “Nussbaum had boats on both shores,” she told him now. “The hunting clients used them to get back and forth. Anyone could’ve taken one.”

  Washburn’s chicken cutlets in champagne-mushroom sauce were as delicious as his steak had been. She made a mental note to save a morsel for Rascal, who’d waited patiently at the office for her all day; luckily, Spud had been there to care for him so the dog had been fine when she finally picked him up.

  “As for why the shooter stopped, I was shooting at him. Maybe I hit him.”

  A dark, roiling desire for vengeance rose in her as she said it. Between the eyes would’ve been good.

  “But all I really know is that the locator beacon worked,” she added, “or Hudson might be dead now.”

  Washburn nodded, digging into his own dinner. “Yeah, I’ve got one of those myself. They’re great for hunting—the signal bounces off a NOAA satellite, so it’s fast. Lucky there was a med-flight chopper in the area, though.”

  It had been on its way back to Houlton from a training run; lucky, indeed. Washburn drank some wine. “And you and Chevrier, what, paddled back in the kayaks?”

  “Uh-huh.” This time they were eating at the kitchen island with the fire in the cookstove’s side-mounted firebox radiating warmly and the radio tuned to a French-language jazz station out of Canada. She drank some more wine, too, hoping to obliterate the mental picture of blood erupting from Dylan Hudson’s arm.

  And of the dead men in the clearing. “Anyway, thanks for the meal. I feel like I used up one of my nine lives this afternoon.”

  She looked across at Washburn, who’d dropped whatever he’d been doing when he heard what had happened. “But this helps,” she added, sipping the good Riesling. “It helps a lot.”

  “I’m glad.” When they’d finished, he got up and began clearing s
ome of the serving things, rinsing them at the sink.

  “Stay there,” he told her when she tried to get up, too. “I like doing this stuff.”

  Clearly he did, moving around the elaborate kitchen with the ease of one accustomed to being at home in it. Outside the window looking out over the long valley to the mountains beyond, an icy moon was setting behind the jagged trees, the sky a moon-washed indigo spattered with prickly stars.

  “So what did Chevrier say when you told him the whole story?” Trey Washburn wanted to know when they’d carried their coffee into the living room.

  She’d turned down the cognac. “He was pretty good about it, actually. My having other interests here wasn’t a big surprise; Hudson had filled him in before I ever came. After what happened this afternoon, though—”

  That violent red splash again, slashing across her vision; she blinked it away, settling into the luxuriously soft sofa as Trey sat beside her.

  “—he was very clear on what he wants the ground rules to be,” she finished.

  No going off alone without letting someone know where she was. No solitary meet-ups with people she didn’t know unless she had backup. And most of all, in the event she did locate Nicki, no freelance tries at removing the child or confronting whoever had her, no matter what.

  “But overall, I think I can live with what he wants,” she finished.

  The music had changed; now from the excellent sound system a duet from The Phantom of the Opera began floating through the fireplace-scented air. One of the spaniels came over and licked her hand tentatively.

  A clock struck ten somewhere; behind the brass fire screen a log popped and settled. And then, without any warning at all, she began to weep.

  Not sobs, just tears streaming. Damn. I’m a cop, dammit, that stuff isn’t supposed to affect me—

  But of course it did. It had to, and the ones who didn’t let it were the ones who ended up sitting alone with a bottle and a gun, trying to decide which one to put in their mouths this time.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, managing a little laugh as she rummaged for a tissue. “After this whole nice dinner and—”