“You don’t have to get snippy,” she said. “I’m cold, that’s all.”
“Have the rest of the coffee,” he said. They’d stopped at a kiosk in the airport, picked up a Styrofoam cupful of weak brew, a dry doughnut, a leaden cookie.
She shook her head. “It’s already ice,” she said.
Deal turned, twisted the key again. This time the starter chugged rapidly for a few seconds, then shifted to a much slower cycle, and finally fell away altogether with a dispiriting groan.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” she said as another gust rocked the car.
Deal sank back behind the wheel. “Look,” he said. “I’m going back inside, make them give us another car. You want to go with me or wait here?”
The wind was howling outside now, the car jiggling steadily as if it were a rail car being towed across the tundra. “Will it take long?”
Deal shook his head. “I’ll jump the line. I’ll drag the guy out myself if I have to.”
“I’ll wait,” she said. “But hurry, okay?”
He gave her a smile, then saw something in her expression that made him lean across the seat, give her a peck on the cheek. “Count on it,” he said.
He turned, was about to throw open his door when she called out, “There’s something else, Deal. About that couple.”
He rolled his eyes, glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“I was just thinking,” she said. “If they live around here, what would they be doing renting a car?”
It stopped him for a moment. “I don’t know, Janice. Maybe somebody brought them to the airport, they can’t come get them in the storm.”
She nodded, but she didn’t seem convinced.
“It’s getting dark,” Deal said, impatient, his hand on the door. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and he swung himself out into the bitter wind before he could change his mind.
***
It was an interesting question, he thought as he bent his head against the wind, paused to pull the watch cap over his ears. And even if there were a number of reasonable explanations, it was a reminder to him that Janice often picked up on things he was in too big a hurry to notice. She was probably far more suited to detective work than he was. As he pushed himself away from the car toward the terminal, he made a resolution to himself to remember that.
Outside, the lights of the terminal seemed much farther away than he’d realized. His Topsiders slipped and slid, their low-cut tops inviting in the ice and snow. In seconds his feet were soaked and freezing. He’d also been clumsy using the unfamiliar mittens when he’d pulled his cap on, he realized. He’d left half an ear uncovered, hadn’t taken a dozen steps and it had already passed through the painful stage, was rapidly turning numb.
He cursed, pulled off a mitten in his teeth, reached up to yank the cap down, stopped when the lights of a boxy-looking vehicle in the row ahead of him popped on, blinding him momentarily in the gloom.
“You got trouble?” he heard the familiar voice call, and lowered his arm to see Dexter Kittle coming around the opened door of the truck-like vehicle toward him. If he was still wearing his golf outfit, there was no way to tell. He’d donned a quilted snowmobiler’s outfit, had replaced the white loafers with a pair of lace-up rubberized boots.
“The damned car they gave me wouldn’t start,” Deal muttered. He saw the passenger door of the Kittles’ vehicle swing open, saw Iris Kittle, dressed in a matching camouflage-style getup, moving his way as well.
“That your missus in there?” Dexter said, pointing over Deal’s shoulder. Deal turned toward his disabled rental car, saw Janice’s huddled shape through the hazy rear window glass.
“That’s her…” Deal began, thinking that something good had come out of tolerating Kittle after all. Even Janice wouldn’t turn down a cozy ride back to the terminal, that much he was sure of. He was turning back, ready to prevail upon Kittle, when he felt a stunning blow at his face.
At first, blinded by pain, by the suddenness of it, he had no idea what had happened. But in the few seconds it took for him to realize he was on the ground now, he also understood that Kittle had hit him, and that his mouth was full of blood because he’d bitten his tongue, or the inside of his cheek, hard to tell because his entire head had gone numb with the cold and the force of the blow. He was trying to scramble to his feet when he felt another blow at his side, a kick that lifted him off the ground and drove his breath from him.
“She’s in the car, hon,” he heard Kittle call.
Deal was gasping, rolling over blindly. He felt another kick, but this one was glancing, muffled somewhat by the thick folds of Driscoll’s pea coat. Deal used the force of the second kick, kept himself rolling, digging his elbows into a patch of soft snow, managing to scuttle under the overhang of a van as another kick flashed past, inches from his face.
There was a heavy thud and a curse from Kittle as the toe of his boot smashed against the underside of the van’s fender.
Deal had his breath back, his vision cleared now, saw one of Kittle’s boots doing a little hop step a few inches from his nose while a string of curses whipped away in the wind. Deal spit blood from between his swollen lips, reached out to clutch Kittle’s pantleg. He curled his fingers into a death grip on the soft fabric, jerked as hard as he could.
There was another cry as Kittle’s foot slid toward him, his shin cracking against the bumper above Deal’s head. Deal yanked again, twisting the boot up until Kittle lost his balance altogether. There was a yelp and a satisfying thump as the man went down hard on his back, a groan as his breath left him.
“Deal!” he heard Janice cry somewhere. “Deal!” The sounds seemed pitiful, whipped into quick nothingness by the wind.
He clutched the fabric of Kittle’s pantleg all the harder, used the man’s weight as leverage to pull himself out from under the van.
Kittle was still groaning, trying to clamber up on his elbow, when Deal caught a fistful of quilted fabric on the man’s chest, swung mightily with his other hand.
“Sonofabitch,” Deal said as his fist caught Kittle’s cheekbone squarely. “Bastard. What is this? What are you doing?”
He was drawing back to swing again when Iris struggled out of the passageway between the van and another car. She had Janice’s chin locked under one arm, was using her free hand to pull the two of them along toward the idling truck. When she saw Deal atop her husband, she dropped Janice, moved toward them. Deal saw Janice bounce limply off the side of the van, a life-size doll cast aside.
He opened his mouth to call to her, but the sound never materialized. Iris had spun toward him in a move that seemed a blur. The sole of her boot caught him high on the cheek, numbing him, sending him over hard onto his back, his hands flying above his head as if he were trying to carve an angel in the snow.
Dowdy old Iris, he thought, bells clanging in his head. Starbursts of light. Strange animal voices. A hyena laugh.
Stick-in-the-mud Iris. She probably had a hundred bikinis and she probably looked like a well-oiled machine in every one of them, he thought dreamily. How would she finish him off, he wondered. Crossword puzzle pen plunged through his heart? Sensible-stocking noose around his throat? Who the hell were these people? What did they want?
“Get her in the car.” He heard Iris’s voice at his ear, managed to get his eyes open as she bent over to grab his coat with one hand, lift his head up off the snow. She had her other hand drawn back, he realized, a mirror image of how he’d looked a moment ago, ready to cold-cock Dexter, knock him six miles beyond Wahoo. Only difference was, Deal thought, there wasn’t much hope he could turn things around.
A fluff of her hair had escaped the hood of her camouflage suit. Little ice balls clung there, bouncing off her forehead like a flapper’s beads, like tiny beads on a frosted veil…and then he remembered. The spray of tiny berries he’d picked up in Arch’s store after the murder.
In the next instant he saw the two of them in their shiny Cadillac car, waving him across the street, Ma and Pa Gothic he’d taken them for, typical tourists, harmless geeks. He’d seen them again, in the Grove, at Lightner’s: a tall, gaunt man with his dog, a loony woman in garden attire and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. He and Janice had probably walked right past them at the Biltmore, and they’d been followed by the pair ever since. They’d killed Arch, and Fast Eddie Lightner, and Martin Rosenhaus. And now it was Deal’s turn to die.
Good as she seemed to be, he suspected it would be painless. One sharp blow and good night. And then something occurred to him, swimming up out of his hapless daze. Janice. Was that what had happened to her? Was she already gone? The way she’d fallen, limp, crumpling into the snow so lifelessly…?
He saw a sheen of amber light wash over Iris Kittle’s face then, thought at first it was a trick of his addled mind. But Iris had in fact glanced up herself, frozen momentarily, her hand drawn back, her fingers twisted into some kind of strange, death-dealing configuration.
The amber light whisked across her features again. And again. A caution flasher, Deal realized. Cop? Airport security?
He felt a tingling in his left arm now, a rush of feeling that extended, along with the sharper sensations of pain, all the way to his fingertips. His right arm was still numb, so the left would have to do. And just as well, for the left mitten was the one he’d left on, the one where the unlit Jon-ee hand warmer still jiggled inside, freezing him with its cold metallic self.
It was like carrying around a frozen flask in there, he thought as he lunged forward, putting his last ounce of strength behind the blow. She was just turning back to him when his fist met her face, the Jon-ee leading the way like a giant-size set of brass knuckles.
He heard a splatting sound, felt maximum resistance, heard her cry out as she fell over backwards. Deal rolled to his side, scrambled onto his hands and knees, shaking his head like an old bull trying to refocus himself as the picadors swarmed. Feeling was returning to his right arm now, to his pulpy lips, but he was still groggy.
One aisle over, behind a double row of cars, a snowplow was grinding swiftly along, a yellow warning flasher whirling atop the cap. A wake of ice and powder soared high into the air behind the machine, lowering the already miserable visibility to nothing.
Deal looked about the gloom for Iris, sure the blow had put her out, but stopped, staring in disbelief, when he found her on her feet, coming unsteadily his way, blood dripping from her smashed nose, from her mouth, a little dribble of it already frozen into an icicle at her chin. Dexter was trying to pull himself up by the bumper of the van, but his boots kept slipping in the bloody ice at his feet. Janice’s form still lay crumpled in the snowbank where Iris had dumped her, but Deal thought he saw movement there, her hand and arm fluttering, or maybe it was just a trick of the wind.
Iris paused before him, wiped a gloved hand over her bloody face, stared down at the mess on her glove. Then she started forward again. The fury he’d seen her train on her husband was nothing compared to the expression on her face now.
She will use her feet, Deal thought, and forced his gaze down, watching her stop, shift her weight…he would be ready, this time maybe pull her down as he had Dexter or at the least block the blow. The footing was bad, she’d have to be extra-cautious to hold her balance…
She feinted with her right, and Deal fought to keep from buying the move. Sure enough, she shifted her weight again, driving her left instep toward his temple. He couldn’t dodge it—she was too quick for that—but he managed to twist away so that the blow glanced off his shoulder.
He came up out of his crouch then, his feet sliding on the ice. It was like trying to run across a funhouse floor, he thought as he half-slid, half-stumbled toward her. The only thing he had going for him was that she was working at the same disadvantage. She was backpedaling, readying a punch as he came in on her, but she’d strayed close to where Dexter was still trying to find his footing. Her boots tangled in his and her eyes widened as she lost her balance.
Deal fell heavily against her, wrapping his arms about hers, taking them both down against the ice. They hit and rolled, Iris hissing like an angry cat, squirming, kicking, gnashing her teeth, trying for his nose, his face. She was incredibly strong, but he had a good fifty pounds on her, and if he could just keep himself astraddle her, work himself up to his knees…
He heard the awful roaring behind them then, saw the amber lights flashing off the chrome trim and bumpers, wrenched his head around to see it: the behemoth of a snowplow had made a turn, was roaring down the aisle toward them now. At first Deal thought that he might be saved, but then he realized that the machine hadn’t slowed, that if anything, it was picking up steam as it bore down upon them.
The headlights of the thing were dim points of light, one of them misaligned, pointing crazily up toward the sky, the other practically blotted out by the thick, driving snow.
Blizzard, whiteout, whatever, the driver couldn’t see them. Deal fought to roll them out of the path of the machine, up against the snowbanked nose of a van, but Iris levered her feet against its bumper, shoving them back into the lane.
He didn’t even have time to cry out. The big blade rammed Deal’s shoulder, sent Iris loose from his grasp in an instant. He was sure they would be crushed in the next instant, reduced to nothingness beneath the wheels of the huge machine, but then he felt another blow, found himself tumbling head over heels.
He came up gasping as the blade stuck him again and he realized he was rolling along in front of the blade, that he and Iris had been scooped up like any other roadway debris and were being pushed forward, for the moment at least, riding a wave of snow and broken ice piled up in front of the giant blade. Trying not to think about those massive wheels churning just a few feet away, he threw himself backwards toward the blade, tried to pull himself up onto the machine itself.
He made one lunge, grabbed some icy projection, an unknown machine thing frigid and wet and coated with grease. He dug his fingers in desperately, felt a nail splinter, felt the flesh of his palm slice open on something sharp. He shook the cumbersome mitten off his other hand, felt the Jon-ee tumble away into the mass below, flailed desperately for another handhold, but there was nothing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Iris attempting the same move, saw her latch onto something solid on the back side of the blade. She steadied herself, her arm tucked over the top of the blade now, and then, staring impassively at him, she reached inside a pocket of her heavy snowmobiler’s suit.
He caught a flash of metal as she withdrew her hand, didn’t have to look any closer to know she’d drawn a pistol. So this was it, he thought: He was about to be blown away by Killer Ma Kittle in the middle of a Nebraska snowstorm, and worse, he’d end up frozen like some woolly mastodon in the middle of a giant pile of snow, no one would even know it had happened until spring thaw, whenever the hell that might be.
He reached down, caught hold of a tumbling chunk of ice, heaved it toward her. She ducked, watched it sail well wide of her head, shook her head at his pathetic efforts. She was drawing down on him now, trying to steady her aim against the jouncing of the big metal blade. Deal lunged for another chunk of ice…and then she fired.
He saw the muzzle flash, saw a trace of liquid fire along the face of the blade as the slug tore into the metal, then glanced away, scant inches from his cheek. He threw another chunk of ice, backhanding it this time, using the blade as a backboard. The thing skidded along, skipped off the metal, slammed point first against her chest. Her grasp wavered for a moment, and he flailed about, desperate for another piece to throw.
Not bad, he thought. Not a bad idea at all, if it had been a snowball fight. But she’d already regained her purchase, was raising the pistol again…
…when suddenly the big plow screeched to a halt at the edge of an embankment and they were both catapulted out into space, free-falling now,
along with the tons of snow and ice and associated road crud that had until moments ago covered the roadway where Deal had been fighting for his life.
Deal felt himself complete one somersault, then turn again, was well into a second before he hit the bank below. He bounced, flew up, his momentum carrying him upright momentarily, flinging him down just as quickly, but not before he’d had a glimpse of what was coming next.
The snowplow operator had done the easiest thing with his load, Deal realized: he’d simply picked up a great head of steam, then shoved everything out over a sheer dropoff that bordered the rental car parking area. Deal couldn’t be sure, of course, given the brief glimpse he’d had, the bad light, the speed with which he was moving, but it had looked suspiciously like a riverbed there at the bottom of the cliff.
His legs and arms were spread wide, windmilling, trying to grasp onto anything that might slow his descent. He hit a bank of crusted-up snow chest first, tore on through it like some human cannonball. He caught sight of a spindly tree, reached for it, felt it rip through his hand like a greased rope. He was still skidding out of control, his feet pointed straight downhill in front of him, a luge racer who’d forgotten his little sled.
There was another dropoff up ahead, one he suspected was the bank to the river he’d spotted before. He clawed frantically at the snow at his sides, but he knew it was no use. Fifteen feet, ten…and then he saw it, another sapling twisting up out of the ice-crusted snow…
He would take no chances this time, no lunging, no bad handholds, no peeling off into the abyss. It took every ounce of his will to do it, but he did do it. He opened his feet wide, sighted down his crotch at the tree, and hit it dead on.
The impact drove his breath from him, spun him around toward the edge, but he locked his legs, flung out his arm, caught the slender trunk in the crook of his elbow to keep from going over. The pain was an electric bolt rocketing around the confines of his body, seeking any way out. His teeth ached, his groin was numb. He hung his head out into the darkness and retched.
Book Deal Page 23
