by Giles Blunt
“Mine’s got better snow tires.”
She got in and he had the car moving before she had the belt done up. He took a right on Sutton, merged onto the highway and headed north. She was curious about his stop at the Highlands, and normally she wouldn’t have thought twice about asking him. But Cardinal didn’t speak or even look at her, and his mouth was set in a hard line. She was fed up lately with trying to pry answers out of him, so she made an inner vow to say exactly nothing unless spoken to.
They passed the first subdivisions, and then Trout Lake on the right.
“It’s getting so dark,” Delorme said, and then remembered she had meant to stay silent.
Cardinal didn’t respond. She couldn’t tell if he was angry or worried. He was utterly transparent about small things; whenever he was irritated or impatient, she knew instantly. But it was precisely when he was feeling the most that he became most unreadable. All those times his wife had been admitted to hospital, you never would have known from his day-today behaviour. A little quieter maybe, nothing more than that.
The only exception was when his wife had died. Even a stoic like Cardinal couldn’t keep that to himself, and it had been heartbreaking to watch. He continued working right through his grief, of course, which was his way of dealing with it. Delorme thought she would have done the same thing. No, she corrected herself, I would have tried to do the same thing.
They drove out past Island Road, out past Clayton Crossroads, until they were well beyond the built-up areas. The forest closed in around the highway, the rock cuts glistened, ridged with snow. A uniform greyness descended, grew darker and seemed to grip the road. Storm.
“This is looking serious,” Delorme said. “I thought it was supposed to hit Parry Sound, not us.” Weather didn’t usually make her nervous, but the onset was sudden, the change in light dramatic.
Cardinal’s expression, or his lack of one, did not change and he did not speak. He kept right at the speed limit, slowing slightly and without comment when it began to snow. The first flakes were large, swaying leaflike as they fell. But as the colder temperature took hold, the flakes got smaller, the wind blowing them into fine slanting lines.
Delorme had never been to Black Lake, had never even heard of it before that morning. She had googled it and found it to be little more than a black dot surrounded by white, a full stop on an empty page. Except the page was actually forest.
She didn’t know how Cardinal even saw the sign, which was small and obscured by clinging snow, but he turned off the highway onto a road that was deeply rutted under the snow.
“Four-by-four territory,” she said, and put a hand on the dash.
“Lots of people come out here,” Cardinal said. “Popular area with hunters.”
“Not in this weather.”
The car dipped and jounced and Cardinal had to slow to a crawl. The snow was falling so thick and fine, it was almost like looking into fog.
Cardinal’s phone rang and he unzipped his coat to reach inside. He checked the readout, but they hit a bump and he had to grab the wheel. “It’s Chouinard. You take it.”
“Where are you?” Chouinard said. “Where’s Cardinal? Why aren’t you on radio?”
“We’re in John’s car, heading out to Black Lake.”
“That’s unfortunate—you’re going to miss the big show. Suspect’s been sighted on 124, big fur farm down there. OPP SWAT team should be hitting it in about fifteen minutes.”
“Damn,” Delorme said. “We’d never make it. Hold on a sec.” She told Cardinal what was going on, asked him what he wanted to do.
“We’re out here now, we may as well interview Kreeger. If he knows Winston from way back, it could be useful in court.”
Delorme related this to Chouinard.
“Stick with it,” the D.S. told her. “Oh, and keep an eye out—we got a report on a couple of lost hunters. Tony and Gary Burwell. Last the family heard, they thought they were near Black Lake, but they’re not sure. I thought everybody had GPS these days, but apparently not. No way we can mount a search party in this weather. How’s the driving?”
“It’s shit.”
“I figured.”
Delorme closed the phone and dropped it into Cardinal’s outside pocket. “D.S. says to keep an eye out for a couple of lost hunters.”
“Actually, I’m thinking we should head back. Clearly the weatherman was stoned when he called this one.”
“If you can find somewhere to turn around.”
He steered them slightly toward the right then hard left and came to a stop.
“Did you hear that?” Delorme said.
He paused with his hand on the shift. Delorme rolled down her window a couple of inches. Snow swirled in. The cry came again, a man’s voice. Distant enough to be faint, close enough for them to hear the distortion of panic.
“That way,” Cardinal said, indicating west, the forest.
“I hope you have snowshoes in the trunk.”
“I don’t.”
37
OPP SERGEANT TYLER ADAMS used his right-hand tactical glove to pull back his sleeve and check his field watch. He was on the ground in a specialized assault vehicle along with five members of a Tactics and Rescue Unit, three guys and two females. They were as fit as a SWAT team could be, as highly trained. All of them were expert in special weaponry, explosives and marksmanship.
They were crammed into the Forced Entry and Rescue truck, parked in a field behind a barn off Highway 124, waiting for the chopper that would carry the other half of the team. The FEAR truck is a highly modified Hummer that can drive through pretty much anything. It features a hydraulic lift system that is useful for surprising an enemy by ignoring the ground floor and inserting personnel directly into an upstairs bedroom.
The team were double-checking their weapons and supplies, the flashbang and Stinger grenades, the nine- and ten-millimetre Heckler & Koch submachine guns along with the sniper rifles, and a bulky infrared motion sensor that filled up most of the interior. Adams checked his watch again. The chopper was due in three minutes.
Information was thin. A man in his fifties, armed to the teeth, had taken over the Magnet-One Ranch three miles up the road, one of the bigger mink-farming outfits in the province. Husband away at the auction in Algonquin Bay, wife and kids possible hostages. According to the 911 call from a terrified ranch hand, the guy was claiming credit for chopping heads in Algonquin Bay.
Adams was new to the position as commander of the TRU team. The last commander, Glenn Freitag, had successfully taken down many highly defended grow ops and defused his share of nasty hostage situations, but his last deployment was to take back a park that had been commandeered by militant Mohawks, and it had gone terribly wrong. A couple of Indians were shot dead and Freitag was reassigned and off the force long before the SIU and all the public inquiries had finished digesting it.
A SWAT team is not for show, Adams thought. It’s a loaded weapon and you don’t draw it out of the holster unless you’re serious.
He heard the whup-whup-whup of rotors and stepped out of the truck. He had to squint, his eyes dazzled by sunlight on snow. The Eurocopter TwinStar came over the trees, scarlet against an indigo sky, low enough for its twin engines to kick ground snow into Adams’s face. His number two’s voice came over the radio, crystal clear on the new FleetNet frequency. “So what happened to the blizzard?”
“We shipped it to Algonquin Bay. They responded by sending us a total wacko.”
“Nice. We’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll in here, just tell us where you want us.”
—
Cardinal and Delorme were only a couple of hundred yards into the bush, but already you would never have known there was a highway nearby. The snow was mid-shin level, just high enough to get into their boots. Cardinal pointed to the west where a line of hydro poles stretched over a slight rise in the terrain. “Keep those as a landmark. Even if we get totally disoriented, we can follow them home.”
&n
bsp; “I plan to stay oriented, thanks.”
They walked on, enveloped in the deep hush of snowfall, the only sounds the nylon of their parkas rubbing against itself, the occasional muffled snap of a twig, and the huff of their breathing.
They passed a dilapidated shack on their left, all but hidden among the trees. In summer it would have been invisible.
“Trapper’s cabin,” Cardinal said. “Totally illegal, no doubt.”
For a while the wind was somewhat baffled by the woods, the odd breeze causing a sudden vortex of snow. But soon it came in earnest and drove the snow into their faces. Cardinal could no longer hear their steps, or Delorme’s breathing, only his own.
They stopped and listened. Cardinal called out—once, twice—and they waited for an answering cry, but none came.
“This is so not good,” Delorme said.
Cardinal pointed to the hydro wires, still faintly visible. A single heavy wire branched off. “That’ll be for Lloyd Kreeger’s place. Black Lake’s the only thing on the map around here.”
“Well, if those hunters are here, presumably they’ll figure that out too.” The fur trim of Delorme’s hood was entirely white, as were her eyebrows and eyelashes.
“I’m still not seeing any tracks. Not that they’ll last long in this. Let’s follow the wire. They could be further up ahead. If they’re not, we’ll stop at Kreeger’s and get warm and alert search and rescue. They’ll come out the minute this is over.”
Cardinal angled off to follow the direction of the new hydro line. The snow flew thick and wild. The hydro line was getting harder to make out.
Cardinal stopped and called out again. Even though the temperature was now well into the sub-zero zone, he was sweating. “Voice isn’t going to carry far in this. Are you up to keep moving? We could go back to the trapper’s shack, wait till visibility improves.”
“We must be pretty close to Kreeger’s, no?” Delorme’s white eyebrows looked like stage makeup. “I say keep going.”
She pressed on ahead of him.
Every few yards they had to pause and wait until the wind dropped or changed direction enough to allow a glimpse of the hydro wire. It too was covered with clinging snow. There was a broken birch up ahead, one large branch angling down to the ground. Cardinal made note of it, happy for anything that might be a landmark. He called out again. They waited. Heard nothing. Moved on.
The shriek when it came was so loud, so inhuman, that Cardinal did not immediately associate it with Delorme. She staggered and fell in front of him, but he thought that was in response to the scream. He scanned the forest, but the world around them was a grey-white nothing.
Delorme was writhing on the ground. She was screaming again, but suppressing it so that it came out as a desperate growling.
Cardinal went to her. The iron clamps of a bear trap were closed on her shin.
“Try to hold still,” he said.
Cardinal was no hunter. He had never even seen a bear trap up close. He brushed snow away. The thing looked ancient, a malevolent jaw of black iron.
Delorme was hyperventilating, growling through her teeth.
Cardinal searched for a release mechanism amid the springs and levers. He found a loop of metal and pulled on it. It was rusty, but finally the long pin came free. He pulled the clamps apart and Delorme fainted, her head lolling to one side. Cardinal gently felt her shin. The break was palpable through her jeans.
Her face had gone white. That would be shock, the blood retreating from the extremities. The unconsciousness was merciful, but she was more vulnerable in this condition to hypothermia and frostbite.
Cardinal sat on his heels and pulled Delorme into a seated position so that her head hung down over her outstretched legs. He rubbed at her wrists and slapped her face lightly to bring the blood back.
She came to and vomited, choking. Cardinal turned her on her side and she cried out and vomited again, coughing into the snow. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. Oh, fuck, it’s bad, John.”
“We’re going to have to get you back to the trapper’s shack. I could try to carry you.”
“No. That would hurt worse.”
“Can you get up on one leg?”
Delorme grabbed a handful of snow, reaching past the steaming vomit, and washed it over her face. She took another small handful into her mouth.
“Pull me up.”
Cardinal got to his feet. He took off his glove and reached down. Delorme took off her mitten and put it in her mouth and bit down on it. Their hands locked together.
“On three,” Cardinal said. “One. Two …” On three he pulled hard and Delorme raised herself on her good leg, growling through the leather mitten.
She swayed against him and Cardinal thought she was going to faint again, but she didn’t. They arranged themselves so that Delorme had one hand on Cardinal’s shoulder and he had an arm around her waist. Every time she had to take a step, he held her tight, taking her weight.
Their tracks were already nearly obliterated. It took them more than half an hour to cover ground that had taken ten minutes. Delorme had to pause after each step and take deep breaths. Blasts of wind hurled the snow into their eyes, obscuring all but the few feet in front of them. Panic began to crash through Cardinal’s bloodstream. Finally the cabin came into view, pillowed in snow. It was boarded up, padlocked.
“Do you want to lie down while I try and open this place?”
“If I lie down, I’ll just have to get up again.” She leaned against a tree. Cardinal pulled her hood forward and fastened the snaps.
He examined the padlock. It was not the biggest lock he had ever seen, but he had nothing to bash it with. There was nothing under the overhang except firewood. He unzipped his parka and took out his Beretta. The first shot dented the lock. The second broke it open.
The shack wasn’t much, two tiny rooms with two bunks in each, a wood stove in the middle. Cardinal left the door open so he could see, and helped Delorme inside and onto the closest bunk. He wanted to ease her broken leg onto the bed, but she wouldn’t let him. She lay there, barely conscious, wrapped in her parka.
Cardinal went back out and pulled some firewood from the middle of the pile. He found a small hatchet and used it to split one of the logs into kindling. He primed it with some charcoal starter, lit it and closed the stove door.
Blankets were piled up on one of the bunks. Cardinal spread one over Delorme. He found a Coleman lantern that still had fuel in it and got it going. The cabin was lighter, but with the door closed and the windows boarded up, it still looked like midnight.
“You want me to try and take your boots off?”
Delorme didn’t open her eyes. Her cheeks were wet with melting snow. Cardinal got a towel, almost clean, and wiped off her face. Shadows pulsed around him.
There was nothing to do now but wait out the storm. He lay down on the other bunk and, without intending to, fell asleep.
“John. John, wake up.”
It was warmer now. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep.
“John, wake up.”
He sat up and rubbed his face.
“I heard something.” Delorme spoke in an urgent whisper, as if someone might be listening. “Someone in trouble.”
Cardinal pulled on his boots.
The cry came again, muffled, all but lost in the wind.
“Must be close,” Cardinal said, “or we wouldn’t even hear it.”
Cardinal stepped out into the storm. Snow blew hard across the opening in his hood. He had no peripheral vision at all. He made his way back the way they had come as far as the broken birch. The cry came again. Cardinal strained to see through the snow. A dim flash of orange.
“Hold on there,” Cardinal called out. “Police.”
The figure came lurching toward him, yelling incoherently, a man in a hunter’s vest.
“It’s okay,” Cardinal said. “You’re okay. Police.”
“There’s a man. You have to help me. A man.
He killed my brother. He killed him. He’s insane. He’s going to kill me too.” The man ran toward Cardinal, tripped and sprawled into the snow.
“Are you one of the Burwells?” Cardinal said.
“What?” The man was on his knees now, swaying, stunned. “Yes. Tony Burwell. Please, you have to help me. There’s a fucking lunatic out there. A bunch of them. They shot my brother. They tried to shoot me.”
“All right, you’re okay now.” Cardinal had drawn his Beretta, safety on. “Where’s this man?”
Burwell didn’t appear to hear him. He scrambled to his feet. “They took our wallets, they took our guns, they took everything. They killed my brother! Get me the fuck out of here!” The man broke into sobs. “Oh, Jesus …”
“It’s okay. You’re all right. There’s a cabin nearby.”
“Jesus, my brother. Fucking insane people out here.”
Cardinal led him to the cabin. The moment he opened the door, the man sank down in a corner and hugged his knees to his chest. “Shut the door, man. Shut the door. They’re gonna find us.”
“What happened?” Delorme said.
“Mr. Burwell was attacked, along with his brother. His brother’s dead.”
“You got to get me out of here,” Burwell said. He seemed unaware he was shouting. “I do not want to be here. Can’t you radio for a helicopter or something? I need to not be here.”
“There’s nothing flying in this weather. We’re just going to have to wait it out. Tell us how it happened.”
“Oh, God. We got lost. My brother and me. It was my fault. I was supposed to bring my GPS and I forgot—I just fucking forgot. We didn’t have a compass or nothing. Storm’s about to hit and we see a hydro wire. Follow it a ways until we come to this tiny lake. House on the far side. Like a real house, not a cabin. So we head for it and—Jesus, I still can’t fucking believe it—my brother ends up with his leg in a trap. Can you believe that? A fucking trap.”
“I can believe it,” Delorme said faintly.
“Go on,” Cardinal said.
“Oh, God.” The man squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God. I panicked. I just totally panicked.” He turned pleading eyes to Cardinal. “He was screaming. My brother was screaming and I was trying to figure out the trap and I couldn’t. I mean, I’ve never even seen a trap like that.
