01 Storm Peak (26 page)
More shouting. More cans crashing and spinning through the trees.
Then she heard the words, “I see you! I know you’re there!” from the deranged man at the cabin. She started forward, convinced for a second that, somehow, he had actually seen her. Then common sense prevailed and she froze in her tracks. There was no way he could have seen her. Maybe he suspected the presence of someone and was bluffing. Or maybe he was just plain crazy as a June bug.
Then she heard another sound, a familiar sound, from a little farther away and suddenly she was running.
THIRTY-THREES
he broke clear of the trees fringing the cabin and stopped, for a moment uncertain of her next move. There was nobody in sight. Then she heard the sound again, realized it was coming from behind the cabin.
he broke clear of the trees fringing the cabin and stopped, for a moment uncertain of her next move. There was nobody in sight. Then she heard the sound again, realized it was coming from behind the cabin.
It was the brief coughing explosion of a two-stroke motor as someone yanked on the starter cord. The cough now swelled into a continuous roar, revved three times, then settled.
It could have been a generator. Or a chain saw. But she knew it wasn’t either of those things.
It was a snowmobile starting up.
Even as she thought it, the black Polaris broke from behind the cabin with a figure hunched over the handlebars, driving the little snow bike through the deep drifts and toward the far edge of the clearing.
A tail of thrown snow hung in the air behind the drive track as Miller gunned the engine. He saw her and yelled something she couldn’t make out above the noise of the engine.
She threw up the Blackhawk at arm’s length, her thumb snagging the hammer back to full cock, called a warning.
“Miller! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
She never knew if he heard her or not, and it was that uncertainty that made her hesitate a fraction of a second too long. She wasn’t absolutely positive that this was her man. The hunched figure was sitting just above the thick blade of her foresight as she sighted, both eyes open. Then, at the last moment, she raised the sight and fired above him, the heavy Magnum load kicking her arm up to an almost vertical position. Her thumb worked the hammer again on the way back down. There was an explosion of snow and wood splinters in the pines eight feet above Miller’s head, then he kicked the little snowmobile into a skidding turn and disappeared from sight among the trees.
“Shit!” said Lee, cursing herself for firing a warning shot. She blundered awkwardly through the snow to the edge of the trees.
There was a trail inside the tree line, winding down to the right, following the slope of the land. She ran a few yards farther, the sound of the engine fading among the trees, then came to a clear stretch.
Below her, down a steep, uneven slope, the trail doubled back, emerging maybe two hundred yards away. She’d never run the distance in the thick snow before the Polaris made it back to the point below her. She thought of the carbine she’d left in the gun rack in the Renegade, cursed herself for not bringing it.
The buzz of the two-stroke was getting louder now and she realized that Miller had made the turn and was heading back to the point below her. Thick scrubby bushes and deep snow separated the two sections of the trail, with an occasional full-grown pine. Beyond that, she could see what was obviously the snow-covered surface of a frozen lake. The vegetation stopped where the trail emerged from the trees and the smooth, even snow stretched away for at least a mile. At the far bank, there were more trees and she knew if Miller got that far, she’d never see him again.
She caught an occasional glimpse of the black Polaris as he threaded his way back down the trail. She guessed he’d be directly below her in a few minutes.
Lee looked around, saw what she wanted in a fallen pine—a massive mound in the snow. Climbing over it, she checked she had a clear view of the trail below, and sat back, leaning her shoulders and back against the snow-covered wood. She stretched her left leg out in the snow, bent her right knee and rested her forearm on it. Now, shoulders and back supported by the tree trunk, hand supported by her bent right knee, she had a steady platform for shooting.
Once, years before, she’d hit a rabid dog at over two hundred yards from this shooting position but, she remembered grimly, the dog hadn’t been moving. There was no problem with the gun reaching the distance. The .44 Magnum is a high-velocity load and her Blackhawk had the extra accuracy of a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. The only limitation in this situation was the shooter’s ability to keep a steady hand and she figured that she’d given herself the best position for that. The knee rest was steadier than a two-handed shot, and it allowed her to set the pistol a little farther away from her eye, in effect making it a longer gun and reducing the angular variation in the shot.
Now she could see the Polaris, just ten yards or so from the edge of the frozen lake. Fortunately, there was an upward incline for a few yards and it slowed the little machine down. She centered the blade foresight on a point five yards ahead of the machine and, just before the snowmobile had reached the point, she stroked the trigger lightly.
The original specification for a Magnum load came from the Highway Patrol. The requirement was for a handgun that had the hitting power to stop a moving car. The .357 Magnum, the first load of its kind, coupled a comparatively enormous charge with a hard-jacketed, high-penetration slug. Tested by the Highway Patrol, the .357 Magnum slug had gone clean through the trunk of an Oldsmobile, ripped through the rear seat, front seat and firewall as if they weren’t there, penetrated the cast-iron block of the engine and jammed one of the pistons on its downstroke.
Effectively stopping the car.
The slug Lee fired was also hard-jacketed. It was a heavier caliber and it had an even more explosive wallop behind it. And it was hitting something a good deal lighter than an Oldsmobile.
The thin fiberglass cowling of the snowmobile barely slowed the big .44 projectile. Then it slammed into the aluminium alloy of the single-finned cylinder head and blew an enormous chunk of it into aluminium dust. The gaping hole in the side of the head released the rapidly moving piston from its tightly contained world of controlled combustion and let it blow out to one side in a sudden explosion of gas and smoke. The connecting rod shattered, shards of metal exploded in all directions and the drive train virtually destroyed itself in the space of half a second.
As the drive track seized solid, the snowmobile slammed to a halt as if it had hit a brick wall. Miller shot forward, his face slamming into the instrument binnacle, shattering his jaw and knocking him unconscious.
He rolled sideways off the wrecked snowmobile, blood from his battered face staining the snow bright scarlet.
Lee maintained her position for a few seconds. The enormous recoil of the gun had slammed her right arm almost vertical again and it was second nature for her to re-cock the hammer for another shot on the return movement. She held the long barrel lined up on the inert figure in the snow until she was sure there was no likelihood of him moving. Then she came to her feet and, with gun still ready, began to pick her way down the steep side of the hill, through the scrub, the stunted trees and the deep snow to where he lay.
It took her over five minutes, sometimes sinking thigh deep in the thick snow. He was beginning to stir when she reached him, but was still only semiconscious. Grabbing the back of his collar, she dragged him through the snow a little closer to the wrecked snowmobile, then snapped her cuffs onto his right wrist. She looked for a suitable anchor-point on the snowmobile, found it in the support strut for the left front skid and clicked the other half of the cuffs shut on it.
“Stay here,” she told the semiconscious man, and began to leg it back up the slope to where she’d left the Renegade.
S
he was ten yards short of her car when she became aware of a familiar buzzbox whine of a small, worn-out engine at high revs. She stopped and looked back down the road toward the town. Jesse’s battered little Subaru wagon was rocketing toward her, seeming to rear itself up from the ground as he kept the pedal firmly nailed to the floor.
he was ten yards short of her car when she became aware of a familiar buzzbox whine of a small, worn-out engine at high revs. She stopped and looked back down the road toward the town. Jesse’s battered little Subaru wagon was rocketing toward her, seeming to rear itself up from the ground as he kept the pedal firmly nailed to the floor.
She waited while he veered onto the shoulder of the road just past her and came to a halt in a welter of snow, ice and gravel. The driver’s side door shrieked open and he was out of the car and running toward her.
He stopped a yard away, his eyes frantic.
“Lee?” he said, staring at her arm in horror. “Are you okay?”
She glanced down, realized for the first time that she had some of Miller’s blood soaked onto her sleeve. It must have happened when she dragged him toward the snowmobile, she realized. She grinned at him reassuringly.
“It’s not mine,” she said. “I’m just fine.”
She felt the relief radiating off him. He hesitated, then grabbed her in a bear hug, holding her tight against him and she thought how damn good it felt to have someone do that. Particularly him.
“Jesus,” he said quietly. “I thought I’d go crazy when Denise said you were going after Miller on your own.”
She leaned back in his arms, frowned lightly at him.
“That is part of my job specification, you know,” she said and he nodded hurriedly.
“I know. I know. You’ve done it all before. But now it’s different.”
And she thought about that and decided that that felt pretty damn good too. Then Jesse was looking around, a question in his eyes. Before he could ask it, she gestured toward the dirt road leading back to the cabin.
“He’s in there a piece, handcuffed to a snowmobile. I was just getting the Jeep to fetch him out.”
“He’s alive?” Jesse asked, not caring too much if the answer was a negative.
Lee nodded. “Got a broken jaw, I’d say. Other than that, he’s fine. Crazy as a bedbug, but fine,” she added.
Jesse fell into step with her and they walked the remaining few yards to the Renegade. She fished in her shirt pocket for the keys and unlocked it. As she was doing this, Jesse looked at her curiously.
“You break his jaw?” he asked, finally. She shook her head.
“Snowmobile did that,” she told him.
He nodded, digesting that piece of information. “What did you do?”
“I broke the snowmobile,” she said simply and he nodded again.
There really wasn’t any answer to that.
THIRTY-FOURM
iller, dazed and delirious with pain, was regaining consciousness by the time they got the Renegade back to the site of the crash.
iller, dazed and delirious with pain, was regaining consciousness by the time they got the Renegade back to the site of the crash.
Lee frisked him, found no weapons. She unlocked the cuff holding him to the Polaris and together they half-led, half-dragged the groaning man to the Jeep.
Lee tilted the passenger seat forward, and they heaved the injured man into the rear of the Jeep. It had been specially fitted out in the event that Lee might carry a prisoner there. There were several solid steel rings welded to the rear seat frame. Jesse snapped the empty cuff onto one of these, securing Miller once more.
“You read him his rights?” he asked, climbing into the passenger seat. Lee backed and filled several times, turning the Jeep around in the narrow track, then fed in power slowly. The wheels spun a little, then the snow tires bit down through the snow, packed it hard and found purchase, and the Jeep lurched and crabbed its way back up the trail.
“No point to it yet,” she said. “He’s so whacked out he can’t hear a word we say.”
Jesse leaned down to peer up the slope to the point where Lee had fired from. He raised one eyebrow in admiration.
“You shot from way up there?” he asked.
“Didn’t have time to pick a better spot,” she replied evenly. He nodded several times to himself.
“That was one hell of a shot,” he said.
“I guess,” she replied, her attention on the snow-covered track before them.
He looked at her with respect. Lee had a disturbing habit of hitting what she aimed at. Jesse glanced back at the prisoner. Miller was lolling on the metal floor of the Jeep, his eyes half-closed, blood streaming from the shattered jaw. Normally, Jesse knew, Lee wouldn’t shackle a badly injured man in the back of the Jeep like that. But this was the guy who’d killed Walt and, somehow, Jesse didn’t feel any sympathy for him.
“So, what was it that put the finger on our friend back here?” he asked.
“Walt knew him,” she replied. “The woman heard him say the name ‘Mike.’ Put that together with the facts you’d already dug up on him, then add in that one of Felix’s men actually ran into him in town a few nights ago and there you have it.”
“A cop recognized him?” Jesse said incredulously. “Why the hell didn’t he think to tell someone?”
“No reason why he should,” she replied. “We didn’t circulate a list of suspects. You were just asking around employers to see if any of them could shed a little light on things.”
He realized she was right.
“Then, when I got here, he was acting crazy, yelling at the trees and throwing things. Seems he got some idea that I was here and he tried to light out on the Polaris. I gave him one warning shot and he just kept going. That sort of clinched it. I figured if he wasn’t our man, there was no reason for him to run.”
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