Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  You, she thought clearly, have a big shock coming to you, too. I don’t know how yet. Or when. But—

  But I am a freaking cop, dammit. And somehow, I will find a way to wipe that smug look off your face if it’s the last freaking thing I do.

  Right now, though, all she could do was hope hard that it wouldn’t be.

  An hour after he’d stolen it from the parking lot and aimed it north, Spud nosed the car off the road, gunning it hard until it stalled in a snow-clogged ditch.

  He wouldn’t need it again. One way or another, for him this was the end of the road. The dead girl, the lost nose stud …

  Lizzie Snow’s current suspicions were bad enough. But once the authorities got their act together and figured out that he’d killed the girl last night, they’d find out about the other ones, too. His only hope was to get back to the campsite, throw himself on the guy’s mercy, convince him that a person like Spud could be useful, good to have around.

  That despite their superficial differences, they were really just alike. Outlaws, men of freedom …

  A freedom that Spud was in danger of losing, maybe forever. The thought urged him out of the car. Around him, in utter silence, the snow kept falling, piling up on branches, coating the trees, so white that even in darkness there was enough light to see by once his eyes had adjusted.

  Trudging away from the car, he looked back to find it snow-covered already, the tracks he made filling up even as he stepped out of them. The driver of a passing plow—or, God forbid, a squad car—might not even see it, and anyway, investigation of it would reveal only that it was stolen, not by whom.

  So he still had a little time. From deep in the forest came a sharp, crackling snap! as a snow-laden branch broke off, then a long, crashing chain reaction of thuds and further snappings as the branch fell through other trees to earth.

  That gave him pause. The entrance to the trail they’d been on the first time he’d been here, hidden in a clump of barberry if he recalled it right, was … there. He was just about to cross the road toward it when headlights appeared from around the curve.

  Panicked, he hurled himself headlong over the plow-heaped snow-bank at the road’s edge, burrowed himself deep into a drift, and lay there barely breathing. The car slowed; he held still.

  Not a cop … the engine ran too roughly for that, and a loud belch from the vehicle’s muffler only reinforced the impression of an old, unhappy car or small truck, forced out on this awful night by some guy’s persistent hankering for beer and cigarettes, plus maybe a pack of Ring Dings and a Powerball ticket.

  The car stopped. Spud unburrowed himself, readying to run, then heard the emergency brake engage with a clunk! The glow of the guy’s flashers—red-red-red!—seeped through the fluffy top of the snow-bank, diluted cherry pink.

  Go away, he thought. Go away, go—

  “Hello?” A man’s voice. He’d gotten out of his vehicle, the guy had, some goofball Good Samaritan type. “Anybody in there?”

  Spud peeked over the snowdrift as the man stomped through the snow to the stolen car, wiped at the window. “Hello?”

  Melting snow iced Spud’s thighs and seeped down into his collar as he lay there, trying to think what to do. The man might go home, call the cops. He might even return and wait for them.

  That might turn out to be the kind of idiot he was, and if he was, then the best thing for Spud to do right now, in fact the only thing—

  The stolen car’s door creaked open; the man must be looking inside. Then: “Anybody around here? Somebody need help? Holler out if you can hear me!”

  Lit up by his own headlights—it was an old Ford pickup with a jerry-rigged cap over the bed—the man slogged back toward the road, muttering to himself.

  Good, thought Spud. Get in your truck and—

  The man stopped suddenly. His hands went to his chest, clasping themselves there. He dropped to his knees, a wide-eyed look of startlement coming onto his face.

  He’d begun toppling forward when Spud realized what the stain was, spreading on the gray sweatshirt.

  Blood … Something yanked Spud by the collar. Falling back, he saw the trees towering high above him, snowflakes swirling down thickly through them.

  And then the guy’s face: flat, slit-eyed, his braid tucked up into a rough skin cap made from the pelt of some furry animal. The guy looked down at Spud, then dragged him to his feet.

  The fallen man did not move. He wasn’t going to, Spud knew from the amount of blood darkening the snow all around him.

  And from the arrow shaft sticking out of his back. The guy let go of Spud, shoving him away sharply. “Stay,” he commanded.

  Like I’m some kind of dog, Spud thought, resentment flaring in him, but his legs felt watery-shaky and he couldn’t quite get his breath, so he did stay. The guy crossed the road—

  On snowshoes, Spud realized. I should have brought …

  The guy rolled the dead man halfway over with one hand, put the other around the arrow shaft protruding from his chest, and pulled. The arrow slid free; the guy wiped it in the snow, then thrust it into a long pouch strapped across his chest.

  The bow was nowhere in sight. Spud didn’t feel like asking about it when the guy came back.

  “Why … why did you do that?” The dead man’s truck still stood idling in the road.

  The guy seized Spud, shoved him. When Spud took a step, the snow came up to his kneecap; at the next, it reached his thigh.

  Spud felt a prickle between his shoulders where the arrow might go. Behind the barberry thicket, some pines made a shelter, the snow-clogged boughs bent down like tent flaps.

  “Wait.” The guy vanished back out into the weather, leaving Spud sitting anxiously on the pine needles under the trees, cold and terrified.

  He waited for ten minutes or perhaps for an hour; he didn’t know, only that somewhere during that time he stopped hearing the truck’s engine. Soon after that the guy returned.

  “Up.” Spud obeyed. “Walk.” The guy pointed.

  Spud obeyed once more, his numb, frozen feet clublike as he lifted them, hauling them agonizingly up from the deep snow and plunging them in again.

  Again and again, the guy right behind him, silent.

  ELEVEN

  Lizzie pulled the Blazer into the lot by the potato barn on the edge of town. Chevrier’s nearly identical vehicle was already there, pale vapor-puffs chuffing from its exhaust in the cold.

  She watched Dylan get out and approach, shoulders hunched against the blowing snow. Someone had lent him a parka; as she put the Blazer’s window down, he peered from deep in its hood.

  “You okay?” he asked, his eyebrows going up at the sight of Brantwell. No friendliness in his voice, though; there hadn’t been back in the office, either, she realized suddenly.

  “I’m Missy’s dad,” Brantwell said before Lizzie could reply. “Tell her I’m coming along to help.”

  He’d put the shotgun down once they were in the Blazer, producing instead a pistol, which he had hidden under his jacket now, leveled at her.

  “Okay,” said Dylan, not seeming to think anything was wrong with this, and why would he? And since Missy knew the way, she was in the lead vehicle with Chevrier, while Dylan …

  Dylan hadn’t wanted to ride with her, Lizzie realized as she watched him sprint back to Chevrier’s vehicle.

  “Nicely done,” said Brantwell approvingly. “Make sure you keep it up when we get there.”

  “Or what, you’ll blow my head off?” she retorted, pulling out behind the first Blazer. “How do you think you’ll get away with that in front of witnesses? And let me remind you that ‘the devil made me do it’ is not a legal defense.”

  The road, plowed but snow-glazed, stretched ahead, white gusts blowing almost horizontally across it. Brantwell didn’t reply, which gave her the answer she didn’t want: that he wasn’t planning for there to be any witnesses to what he did tonight.

  But there was still one person she didn’t
think Brantwell was planning to sacrifice. “Missy’s not going to go along with this.”

  To the murder of three cops, she meant, and the concealment of their bodies so that with any luck, they might not ever be found. Because as Washburn had warned her, the Great North Woods was a big place. A person could get lost in it.

  Especially if they were dead. “Missy’s going to stay out of it. She’s going to wait by the road, in Chevrier’s Blazer.”

  Lizzie blew a contemptuous breath out. “Yeah, right. She’s ready to walk through fire for that baby, you think she’s going to just—”

  He whipped the gun out, aimed it unwaveringly. “Missy,” he grated out viciously, “will do what I say. When I tell her that I know everything, that all is forgiven. That I love Jeffrey and I don’t care who his father is, and that I love her.”

  His voice softened. “And especially,” he finished, “when I tell her I’m going to bring Jeffrey back. When I swear it, and tell her she needs to be safe and well to take care of him, once it’s done.”

  All of which was true, Lizzie realized sinkingly. It would work; he’d be saying exactly what Missy wanted to hear.

  “And if when we get there I jump out of the Blazer yelling for them to take you down, what then?”

  On either side of the road, wide farm fields lay under rising drifts. Occasional access lanes for mechanized farm equipment bridged the ditches between the white-frosted fence posts and the pavement.

  “You can’t shoot three cops with one shotgun,” she added. “And even if you could, Missy would see.”

  The ditches, she recalled, were perhaps two feet deep, and the plows had thrown up high ridges over the access ways. The Blazer, even with new snow tires, would never make it.

  “You do that, the jig’s up,” Brantwell admitted. “So I’ll tell you what. You do what you said, and I’ll just shoot that dark-haired cop, the one who stuck his head in the window just now before we left.”

  Dylan, he meant. Brantwell continued: “I saw the look you gave him. You like him pretty well, I think, and he’s ticked off at you, isn’t he?”

  He chuckled unpleasantly. “You open your mouth when we get there, I’m done for. And you’re right about me not being able to shoot everyone, too.”

  As he spoke she felt Brantwell’s gaze on her in the dimness of the Blazer cab: gloating, triumphant.

  “So I’ll just shoot him,” Brantwell said.

  She managed a laugh, not wanting him to see how the threat affected her. “Well, then, you might want to adjust your target. Heck, I’ve wanted to put a bullet through Dylan’s head myself.”

  No answer from Brantwell. Ahead, Chevrier’s taillights pulled swiftly away. He had much more practice on snowy roads than she did, and tonight was a hell of a night to be learning, but she was going to have to keep up, like it or not.

  She stepped on the gas and felt the Blazer surge forward.

  The handgun Brantwell had chosen, she’d noticed when she glanced at it, was an HK P30, and she particularly did not enjoy thinking about the external safety indicator the weapon possessed; the red stripe showed a round in the chamber.

  The silence lengthened. Let it go on, she told herself. Wait for him to—

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  —talk. “Yeah? You mean how’d a guy like you get into a mess like this? You’re right.”

  He wasn’t. But she might as well let him believe it. Maybe he’d say something to give her an edge.

  “Missy’s mom is sick,” he said. “Pretty soon she’s going to need care. Expensive,” he added, “residential care.”

  Another puzzle piece slotted into place. “The forgetfulness Missy mentioned? You mean she’s—”

  Brantwell nodded, staring ahead. “It started a couple of years ago. Not Alzheimer’s. But like that. Nothing bad, little things she’d forget. But the doctors said it would get worse.”

  He paused, then went on. “And now it has. Just in the past few weeks, she leaves the stove on, she’s wandering at night. Now this thing with Jeffrey, I’m sure that’s how it must’ve happened. She just lost track.”

  His voice thickened; he got control of it again. “We don’t have long-term care insurance. Once she had a diagnosis, it was too late, we couldn’t afford it. But pretty soon she’s going to need twenty-four hour care, either at our home or in a …”

  He stopped, went on. “A facility. They say eventually she’s going to forget how to swallow food, how to …”

  Another silence. Then: “So I needed money. I needed it soon. Laying off help, selling acreage, that wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Have you talked it over with Missy?”

  Twenty miles out of town, no more ditches lined the road. Instead, short upslopes led from the pavement to the forest’s edge, where white-clotted scrub trees and thickets of brush intermingled with old, wide-trunked evergreens.

  Brantwell shook his head. “I should have. But I wanted to protect her. And anyway, what could she do about it?”

  “So you had to find a way yourself.”

  “Yeah. No choice. I started skimming off the farm’s books, putting money away. But that wasn’t enough, and it couldn’t go on forever. My foreman sees those books, too, and sooner or later he’d put two and two together.”

  Outside, the dark night went by, the storm hurling snow at the windshield and the wipers slap-slapping it away while Lizzie forced the speedometer upward, trying to keep pace with Chevrier.

  Brantwell continued: “And then, out of the blue, right after Jeffrey was born, this Daniel guy pulled up alongside me one day in his van and just … I didn’t know about him and Missy. I don’t even know how he knew me. But he just laid it all out for me, what he wanted.”

  “And what he would pay. For you to be a drug courier.”

  This last silence was the longest of all. Finally: “Yeah. It was a lot. And then it got to be more. The New York people, they wanted things moved, too. Connecticut, Massachusetts—that I-95 corridor, you know—I was on it often anyway. So I made stops.”

  Made deliveries, he meant, or pickups. She squinted ahead; by now the snow was nearly blinding, Chevrier’s vehicle appearing between gusts and then vanishing again.

  “So how d’you think Daniel realized you’d be open to his—”

  The words caught in her throat as something big bounded all at once from the side of the road, loomed huge in the Blazer’s headlights, and missed the bumper by inches. Reflexively her foot went for the brake pedal, touching it before she could think.

  A deer. “No,” Brantwell said urgently, “stay off the—”

  The barest touch of the brakes sent the Blazer sideways on the iced roadway, the rear end fishtailing as she gritted her teeth and forced herself to steer into the skid. Wait. Hands on the wheel, but lightly, easy does it …

  Just for an instant, the Blazer was crossways in the road, aimed at the woods. But then it straightened seemingly on its own with a liquid-feeling glide, the front end swinging around back into its own lane.

  She let out her breath. Ahead, Chevrier’s brake lights came on very briefly; so he’d seen it in his rearview, the deer in her headlights. But then he rounded another curve and was gone.

  “You do that again,” Brantwell grated, his ugly side back in control, “I’ll—”

  “What?” she snapped. “Shoot me? Hey, put a lid on that crap, okay?” She peered ahead. “You clip me while I’m driving, I’ll be dead, all right. Or as good as, maybe. But you might be, too.”

  They’d been on the road nearly an hour now; it couldn’t be much farther. “Or maybe you’ll wind up paralyzed, huh? Neck down, hooked to a respirator for the rest of your life.”

  Chevrier’s taillights appeared again. And here the roadway was protected somewhat by the big trees, so the snowplow drifts on either side of it weren’t very high.

  She could ditch them here, throw him off balance and get the gun—she hoped. On the other hand, once she got off the road, she�
�d have to miss the trees …

  But that was a chance she’d have to take, and if she was going to do it, she didn’t have much time.

  “Yeah, that’ll be you. Just a head in a bed, and how will you care for your wife then?” she said, and yanked the wheel hard left, hitting the gas and slapping on the Blazer’s high-low siren switch at the same time.

  “Hey!” yelled Brantwell as the Blazer spun into a 180, slid sideways, then shot off the road, ramming into the fresh snow heaped up there and straight through it.

  It happened fast, but it seemed to take forever: Brantwell’s head flying back, his gun arm sailing up; the exploding airbags blocking out his snarl of mingled fury and alarm.

  Yeah, you’ll shoot me, all right. At the last instant, a tree trunk loomed up in the windshield; yanking the steering wheel, she prayed those new tires would catch traction somewhere, hearing the Blazer’s siren still howling bloody murder.

  Yeah. You’ll shoot me. But first—

  The Blazer’s right side panel scraped the tree with a sound like a giant tin can being torn open. The bouncing stopped. The pounding stopped. The Blazer stopped, clouds of steam rising from its crumpled hood.

  And then … nothing. A thick coating of airbag powder made her cough, but nothing was bleeding or broken as far as she could tell.

  But Brantwell wasn’t so fortunate. He’d disdained the seatbelt; now he groaned, half-conscious. Meanwhile, the gun—

  The gun, dammit. Clumsily unbuckling herself, she shoved aside the limp remains of the passenger-side airbag, scrabbled around on the floor by his feet, and—

  Got it. Straightening, she tucked the thick, blocky little weapon into her bag and zipped it. Yeah, you’ll shoot me.

  Now that he no longer had the thing aimed at her, anger washed over her. But first—

  First you’ll have to get your head out of your butt.

  Chevrier’s Blazer roared up outside. Moments later, someone began pounding on her window, shouting something at her, but she couldn’t hear through the strange howling—