by John A. Daly
Repeatedly Sean slammed the back of the man’s wrist against the wall, trying to jar the device loose, but the man had a death-grip on it. Sean arched his back and delivered a colossal head butt, just above the bridge of the man’s nose. The back of the man’s head slammed into the wall behind him so hard that it left a cracked depression in the drywall. His glasses snapped at their center. Half of the frame fell to the floor while the other half dangled from his ear.
Sean sent his thigh into the man’s prone stomach, knocking the air from his lungs. He lunged backwards a couple of steps and took the man with him, yanking him from the wall. Sean quickly planted his feet and swung his body as if he were about to throw a discus. Only instead of a hurling a metal plate, he launched a human being through the air. His foot caught the phone on Sean’s desk mid-flight and sent it to the floor.
The stranger landed in a heap, just in front of the stove. Seemingly fueled only by adrenaline, the man quickly but clumsily climbed to his feet. He was dazed, and without his glasses, having some trouble seeing. Sean launched forward and sent a wicked right cross directly into the man’s nose and mouth.
The man’s head snapped back sickly and his body flailed backwards on random footing until it collided with the cast iron stove. The stove tipped over, loudly stripping itself free of the cylinder-shaped ventilation flue that led up to the ceiling, and then crashed into the brick base below. The man landed on top of the stove, screaming out in pain as blistering hot metal and the flames from its open door tortured his body. Within two seconds, he rolled to his side.
Sean scanned the floor for the man’s dropped taser. Suddenly a small object pressed against his lower back and a paralyzing electric shock ripped through his body. Every muscle in his body clenched tight and burned in agony. His eyes bulged and his mouth clutched shut. The pulsation continued for several seconds. When it ended, Sean fell to his knees, gasping for breath.
“Hit him again!” groaned the man who lay shriveled up on the floor not far from him. His mouth was full of blood, his nose appeared broken, and he was reaching into his jacket pocket for something. “Hit him again and hold it there!”
Before Sean could rebound, the pressure was against his back again, and this time the jolt sent him straight down to the floor on his chest. His body shook wildly, out of his control. He was virtually helpless. The agonizing pulsing didn’t let up. He snarled, trying to pull himself forward on the floor by digging his elbows into it. The corner of his eye caught the man in black crawling over to him with something in his hand. Sean tried to get his arm up to fend off whatever was coming, but he could barely move. When the man reached him, Sean saw him lean forward. A thin, sharp object pierced the side of Sean’s neck.
Almost immediately, his head felt light. His vision went blurry and he winced at the hazy sight of bright, abstract flames that abruptly lunged into the air from the floor just feet in front of him. A breath of intense heat blew against his face and he knew that the blazing stove had rolled off its base and had somehow ignited the hardwood floor.
He could hear the loud busy signal of the unhooked phone, and he felt the urge to vomit as multiple, tortuous sensations ripped through his body at the same time.
The thought of getting his hands back around the man’s neck, and this time not letting go, was the last image that jerked through Sean’s mind before his world went dark.
Saturday
Chapter 12
It was nearly 5:45 in the morning when Ron Oldhorse saw the signal: the illumination of the narrow bathroom window along the north side of the small house, followed by a quick pulse from a lamp in the master bedroom. Though filtered through thin curtains, the brightness lit up the nearby snow-covered trees whose limbs were still drooping from the weight accumulated during the night.
Lumbergh was awake. Oldhorse wondered if the chief had managed to catch any sleep at all.
From under the concealed white tarp that served as his shelter, Oldhorse carefully removed the dark, hand-woven scarf from the bottom half of his face. It didn’t come off easy. The overnight frost and wind had secured it to his unshaven jaw like opposing pieces of Velcro.
His fingerless wool gloves released the stalk of the long hunting rifle that lay beside his frigid body. He cupped his hands to his mouth and blew warm air along them to the envy of his tingling feet inside his moccasin boots. His breath lingered visibly in the air for several seconds.
The lower half of his body was covered by a small snowdrift that had formed through the night, camouflaging him well, but ultimately without purpose. The devil’s kin hadn’t arrived that night.
Oldhorse poked his head out from under the tarp and carefully surveyed the area before climbing from his makeshift shelter. He folded up the tarp, his legs feeling strained from the change in body position as he knelt. He then strapped on a pair of wooden snowshoes that he had made years ago from hardwood and rawhide. They were designed to leave very little of a footprint behind in the snow.
With the tarp secured under his arm and the rifle in his other hand, he made his way through the thick forest that inched up to the house where the chief of police and his family lived.
When he heard the soft snap of a twig, he quickly swung his body behind a nearby boulder. The movement was so fast that anyone watching would have half-believed he disappeared into thin air. He peered up from behind the large rock. Though it was still dark out, he spotted a young mule deer with its head buried in the thick of a pine branch. A fresh dusting of snow spotted its back, likely fallen from the branch.
With multiple layers of coats and flannel wrapped around his body, Oldhorse made his way down a steep hill to a dirt service road. There, a white and gray police cruiser was parked discreetly between a pair of warped spruces whose upper branches were intertwined. He pried open the driver’s side door, shoving tree limbs aside as he did, and climbed in.
The car started hard from the freezing temperatures overnight, but it did start. He fired up the CB radio mounted under the dashboard, checked its channel, and worked the press-to-talk switch a couple of times on the handheld transmitter in a predetermined pattern. A few moments later, he received acknowledgment in the form of a similar series of breaks among the channel’s background static.
He popped the transmission into drive, pulled off the road, and slowly made his way across an open meadow driving over what was left of the cruiser’s tracks from the evening before.
Those unfamiliar with the area wouldn’t know of the meadow north of Lumbergh’s place. Thick woods surrounded it and the service road that ran parallel wasn’t on any maps. The rarely used road was never plowed in the wintertime and thus was largely inaccessible during those months. The meadow it edged up to, however, received a lot of direct sunlight, and the previous day’s unhindered rays left much of it only about two inches deep in snow.
When Oldhorse reached the north end of the meadow, he carefully navigated the cruiser through a collection of trees. He took his time, and a few minutes later crossed onto a wider dirt road that would have eventually branched off into Lumbergh’s driveway had he turned left.
He turned right, scraping the undercarriage of the car a bit on frozen terrain after the front tires dropped off the shoulder of the road. There were no fresh tire tracks in the snow now blan
keting the road. No one had come through that way during the night.
When Oldhorse reached town, he pulled into the police station and went inside. He found that Jefferson’s night had been every bit as uneventful as his, though clearly more cushy. The toasty building was seventy-degrees warm and the smell of coffee wafted through the air. Indulgences never mattered much to Oldhorse. He preferred the outdoors, even at times when the elements were harsh. He relished testing his grit whenever the occasion presented itself.
Jefferson greeted him with a quick hello and offer of coffee and a ride home, but Oldhorse declined. He returned the borrowed rifle to the officer, grabbed his pack, and made his way back out the front door. He knew it was a long trek back to his cabin on foot, but he saw it as an opportunity to stretch his legs after a long night of being immobile.
He didn’t own a car. He’d sold his years ago after deciding to make the mountains outside of Winston his home. He had become as much a part of the forest as the hills, trees, and rivers that carved their way along the terrain. His home was a small cabin along a slope near Red Cliff—a remote area about five miles from the town square—where he killed or raised the food he ate. The decades-old dwelling was devoid of most modern-day luxuries. No electricity. No gas. No indoor plumbing. Just access to well water a few hundred yards away.
For many years, Oldhorse’s lifestyle adhered to reclusiveness. He relied solely on himself, leaving no room for others. That changed six months earlier, however, shortly after he found himself chaotically racing down a narrow mountain road behind the car belonging to the lifeless corpse of Alvar Montoya.
Oldhorse was a man who avoided attention, but with Chief Lumbergh shot up by Montoya, the Indian stepped up and came between life and death. Once Lumbergh was at the hospital, however, Oldhorse watched from afar as doctors and nurses scrambled to save the chief ’s life. Lumbergh’s vital organs had been spared injury, but he’d lost a lot of blood. It was touch and go for much of the night.
When the chief ’s wife arrived, Oldhorse watched in silence as she fought her way past orderlies, frantic to get to her husband’s side. And when she did, he saw her place her trembling hands along Lumbergh’s face as tears streamed down her cheeks and onto his body. Her husband was her life—her reason for living. Oldhorse could see that.
Days later, after Lumbergh was released from the ICU, Oldhorse would slip into the hospital at night, after visitation hours, to check on him. He always came late to avoid the swarm of reporters that were stationed outside prior to the evening newscasts.
Before entering the chief ’s room, Oldhorse would sometimes stand in the dim hallway just outside and watch the glow in Lumbergh’s eyes whenever he’d look at his wife’s face. She rarely left his side, spending the nights beside him on an awkwardly shaped chair. The chair was probably designed that way to be purposely uncomfortable, discouraging family members from staying for long periods of time. It didn’t discourage Diana Lumbergh, however.
Witnessing their unbridled love and the way each of their lives depended on the other, Oldhorse felt something change inside him. He came to realize that the cell of isolation he had confined his heart to wasn’t a necessary trade-off for independence, but rather a chosen path of emptiness that ultimately led nowhere. And when he finally opened his heart to the outside world, it found the unexpected love of Joan Parker, Toby Parker’s mother.
Since then, Oldhorse had felt an unspoken affection toward Chief Lumbergh and his wife, Diana—a sense of gratitude neither of them had any clue they had earned.
It was one of the reasons why Oldhorse agreed to help when he was approached by the chief twenty-four hours earlier. Lumbergh believed that Alvar Montoya’s death had spawned a new, dire threat to him and his family. The chief had shared with Oldhorse some of the alarming details of Lautaro Montoya’s prison escape. Oldhorse had given the matter careful thought during his vigil.
He gnawed on a string of homemade deer jerky. It was nearly frozen from the long, cold night he had endured outside Lumbergh’s house. As he walked, his narrow, hawk-like eyes carefully scrutinized a pair of tire tracks carved into the snow along the lightly used road that spanned the base of his hill.
He often referred to it as his hill because he was the only person who lived on it—a steep slope heavily covered with pine and aspen that kept his cabin concealed from view from the road. However, he believed in his heart that the hill, as everything, belonged to nature.
The small, rustic home sat a few hundred yards above where he stood, wedged in a rocky crevice along a small clearing.
He slowed his pace once he noticed that the tracks came to a halt just below an unmarked path he’d often use to scale the hill up to his cabin. At that point, the vehicle had performed a sharp U-turn, doubling back down the road.
A lost traveler perhaps? It was possible. The tires looked like they belonged to a compact car; most of the locals drove four-wheel drive vehicles in the winter. Once a set of footprints revealed themselves in the snow, however, Oldhorse knew whoever had come there had done so for a purpose. The driver, who looked to be a man, had exited the vehicle and made his way on up toward the cabin before turning around and coming back.
Oldhorse shoved the jerky back into his pack and pulled out a large hunting knife from a sheath at his side. He gripped it tightly in his weathered hand and doubled back down the road a ways before veering onto the adjacent slope of the hill. He disappeared behind large rocks and trees, jogging his way up an embankment with purposeful footing that sometimes brought snow up past his knees.
Though the footprints that began at the road provided clear-cut evidence that the visitor had already come and gone, Oldhorse wasn’t taking any chances—not with a twisted man seeking vengeance on the loose. He climbed up above where his cabin rested, nestling his body in between the thick trunk of a snow-covered tree and a rock formation that jetted out of the ground at a largely vertical angle. He had a view of the backside of his cabin from there. Nothing looked out of place.
He cautiously made his way down to its rear, keeping his body low and sometimes slithering down snow mounds like a reptile sliding down sand. His disciplined eyes never strayed from the cabin’s long back window. He looked for movement inside and saw none.
When he reached the window, he carefully peered through a gap between the pair of olive-green curtains Joan had bought for him as a gift a month earlier.
“They’ll make your cabin homier,” she had told him with a grin.
He skimmed the interior through the glass as best he could. Nothing seemed out of place. He quickly tapped the window with his hand, ducking down afterwards and placing an ear to the wooden wall of the cabin to listen for movement. There was none.
He slid along the side of home and then peered around the corner to the front. There, he found the footprints that led all the way up to his front step.
The porch had largely been spared from the snowfall, thanks to the overhang of the roof where a thin row of icicles clenched onto a crude drainpipe. Still, icy footprints could be seen along the worn wooden planks, frozen flat from the moisture under the visitor’s shoes that had turned solid from the overnight winds.
Oldhorse scanned the pattern they left along the wood. His heart skipped a beat when he noticed the heel-half of a print sticking out
from under his front door. The visitor had entered his home.
Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. Maybe it was one of the local townsfolk looking for a custom woodcarving as a gift for someone. Oldhorse occasionally sold such creations to the general store in Winston for resale. Maybe the visitor knocked, and when no one answered, they poked their head inside to make sure Oldhorse was all right. After all, he never locked his door. He saw no need to, thus whoever came in wasn’t exactly breaking and entering.
Everyone in town who knew Oldhorse, however, understood how territorial he was. The thought of one of them entering his home uninvited seemed unlikely. So when he twisted the knob and pressed his elbow against the door, he let it glide all the way open before entering, knife in hand.
His controlled breathing was the only sound heard inside the small building, that and the faint whistle of a gust of wind that pressed against the outside of the cabin for the briefest of moments. There was a very subtle scent lingering in the air, possibly cologne. It seemed slightly familiar, though he couldn’t quite place where he had inhaled it before.
Initially, nothing looked out of place. Nothing appeared missing or jostled. Any wet footprints left by the man who had entered had already dried up. However, Oldhorse could tell by some matting along the long rug that covered much of the inside floor that it had been stood upon.
His steady gaze glided along the furnishings of the cabin, scrutinizing the sleeping area, the stone fireplace, and the cooking area. Everything looked just as he had left it—everything except a large, thick hunting bow that clung to a short peg sticking out from a wall in the far corner of the building.
