Ice Lake (24 page)

“Are you in danger?”

“Yes! I mean, I think so. They killed Andy, didn’t they? If they know about me I might be next. I know as much about everything as Andy does … did. Maybe more. Maybe less, I don’t know.”

Listening, Cinq-Mars knotted his brow and spoke in a tone that was lower, and even more stern.
“Who
will kill you? Who killed Andy?”

“You don’t
understand!’”
she cried out. “Nobody knows for sure. I can take one mighty good guess, but I can’t believe he’d
do
something like that.”

“Calm down, all right? First things first. Tell me who you are.” Cinq-Mars picked up the phone-set in his free hand and paced toward the window. He had to snap the cord to guide it around a table leg. For the first time, he noticed the blizzard, the fierce machinations of the wind, the snow flying horizontally to the ground. Outside, the porch light and the spot above the stable door illuminated the snow swarming over his brand-new vehicle, a Pathfinder, parked in the barnyard.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I have to be careful right now. I can’t be seen with you! If they think I’m talking to a cop … Oh God. I’m so
scared,
and I don’t scare easily. We have to meet in private.”

“Why did you choose to call me in the first place?” The agitation in her voice convinced him that he had not taken her fears seriously enough, and his voice softened as he sought to gain her confidence. “How’d you get my number?”

“That’s a secret. I can’t tell you right now. We had it because we were planning to talk to you.”

“Why?” Cinq-Mars pressed his mystery caller.

“Because you’re famous! We heard about you. We thought you could help. We thought we could trust you, maybe.”

“I’m sorry, I meant, what was it that you were planning to tell me?”

The woman paused, as though to consider if she should speak her piece now. In that moment of quiet Cinq-Mars stopped listening. He moved to the side of the front window that overlooked his horse farm and peered carefully out, concealed by the dark and by the curtain.

“I’m so scared now,” the woman was saying, sounding as though she needed encouragement to proceed.

Cinq-Mars had covered the mouthpiece. “Sandra!” he called back into the house. “Sandra!”

Propelled by the urgency in his voice, his wife was quickly on the move. She hurried into the room, wrapping her robe around herself. “Emile?”

“Take this.” He held out the phone to her.

“Who is it?” His alarm spurred a rampant fear of her own.

“I don’t know. A woman. Keep her on the line. She’s frightened. Try to calm her down. Get whatever information you can.”

“Émile?”

“Stay away from the window!” he told her as he bolted from the room. “Keep the lights off!”

Sandra Lowndes picked up the phone, asking tentatively, “Hello?” As she had seen her husband do, she peered around the edges of the curtain to observe what interested him so much, to see what had suddenly made him fearful.

The family dog, Sally, a mix but largely a Labrador retriever, was excited by this rare nighttime expedition by her master and leaped around as Cinq-Mars dressed hurriedly in the dark. This was not a season to be out chasing bad guys without dressing properly. He would have to put on his winter duds or be seriously disadvantaged. Possessing the element of surprise, he did not want to neutralize that benefit by being underdressed for the blizzard.

His passionate collapse into bed with Sandra did not serve him well now. Cinq-Mars had to operate in the dark, and finding socks and shoes, pants and a shirt, all merrily tossed off earlier, was difficult.
Damn!
This was not supposed to be how middle-aged married people made love! He hadn’t even brushed his teeth. To his dismay, he discovered that he still wore a drooping
condom. He peeled it away and tied a knot at the top, felt for the wastebin and tossed it in. Cinq-Mars ruffled through his closet and dresser drawers to find darker clothing, wanting to wear whatever might camouflage his presence in the night. Although—he already knew—the intruder wore white, to conceal his advance across the pasture of blowing snow.

Cinq-Mars heard his wife uttering soothing phrases as he worked his way downstairs with the dog. The dark was more pressing there. He riffled through a cupboard, identifying objects by touch and pushing them aside. Back in the days when his situation with motorcycle gangs had been highly volatile, he had armed his wife with a shotgun for her protection while alone on the farm. That was his weapon of choice now. Cinq-Mars located the gun and pulled it from its lair, knocking over a collection of brooms and mops as he did so.

Shells were elsewhere, well hidden.

Down on his knees on the kitchen floor, Cinq-Mars had to keep pushing Sally off him while he reached behind the lazy Susan in a corner cupboard for the secret cache, knocking over spices and soup cans in the process. Finally, he grasped the box of ammunition and pulled it out.

He moved from the kitchen to the den.

Cinq-Mars blindly explored a side table for his cellphone, certain that he had left it there, close to the TV. His hand finally retrieved it and his thumb hit the power button. Green lights glowed in the dark. Cinq-Mars punched the quick-dial number for his own office, loading the shotgun at the same time.

“Operations,” a woman’s voice replied.

“X-ray Yankee Zulu,” Cinq-Mars chanted in an emphatic whisper.

In an instant a man’s voice came on. “Identify.”

“Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars. Intruder on the perimeter.”

“Number?”

“One known. Firepower unknown.”

“Intention?”

“Intervention.”

“Cinq-Mars, negative.”

“He’s wiring my car! He could blow my house!”

“On the way.”

“Out.”

Cinq-Mars quickly scampered from the den and back through the kitchen to the rear mudroom, where he encountered a problem.

His winter clothes hung in the closet there, but opening the door to fetch them would automatically turn on the closet light. The light also had a chain, but he would still have to spring open the bifold doors, reach very high, perhaps jump, and snare the chain on his first try. A momentary blaze of light could not be prevented, and he could only hope that the outside intruder wouldn’t notice. Fat chance. He prayed that whoever was messing with his car was so preoccupied with planting dynamite that he would not see him awake and on the prowl.

Cinq-Mars counted down from three. He yanked the doors open and jumped. In that prolonged moment he felt himself hang in the air, as if suspended, while his fingers found, then lost, then relocated the chain. As he fell back to the floor, the light was switched off and blackness again stood fast.

Blackness, and the snow-white raging of a nocturnal winter storm.

Sally was jumping on him, wanting to wrestle.

Cinq-Mars snapped the shotgun closed.

He listened at the door. Heard only the wind’s whistling clamour.

The dog posed a dilemma. She was a good watchdog for Sandra in the sense that she’d announce a stranger’s arrival, bark an alarm. But in the uproar of
the winter storm, with the windows sealed, she had detected no intruder, and if she spotted one she’d only prance about and yap, perhaps beg to play. Sally would not attack and responded to no such command. If he let her romp outside, she’d probably get herself shot. On the other hand, if he kept her inside and left the house without her, she’d bark to be let out, putting him in jeopardy.

At the closet, Cinq-Mars threw on his outerwear and boots. A John Deere baseball cap, gloves, a big eiderdown coat. By the time he was ready he’d made a decision about the dog. He located her leash by feeling around in the dark closet and fastened it around her neck. Sally was wagging her tail now. He’d take her out the back way, make her think they were off for a stroll in the blizzard, then tie her up. By the time she realized that she was about to be left alone, and protested, he’d be around the corner of the house. No intruder would expect him to be there, even after Sally commenced a ruckus, and he’d have gained an angle of attack.

With Sally firmly clutched, shushing her constantly, Emile Cinq-Mars departed the rear of his house and made his way around to the side. A stout maple there, about a foot in diameter, served as a hitching-post.

The wind was fierce and the cold bit into them. Sally was growing less enthusiastic about this excursion. The dog was unaware that she’d been tied until her master turned the corner of the shed. Then she started to fuss and whimper, and soon she was barking.

Cinq-Mars moved quickly to gain position. He slipped around the woodpile and was headed to the front of the house when his advance was met by a retort from way off to his left. Gunfire? Cinq-Mars was stunned and had to fight with himself to react. He didn’t believe what was happening. He stumbled in his half-hearted retreat, rolled in behind the woodpile, and crouched down there in the snow in shock and amazement.
He’d been ambushed. He took a chance to look up but saw nothing, only the white snow shooting sideways and beyond that, blackness. Sally was uproarious now and he believed that he heard, from way upstairs, Sandra caterwauling his name.

Then more gunshots, which he heard strike his woodpile and the garage at his back.

He punched the emergency number on his cellphone and quickly went through the drill, not waiting for a response. “X-ray Yankee Zulu. Cinq-Mars. Cinq-Mars. Officer under fire. Officer under fire. Crank it up. Crank it up. Out.”

He heard a snowmobile’s start-up roar then, muffled by the rabid wind, and it seemed to come from the same direction as the gunfire. Had it been four shots, five, six? It seemed to Cinq-Mars that he had actually felt a bullet miss him, then strike the garage, all before the sound of the blast had registered. He told himself that he must have imagined it. He thought to fire the shotgun in the general direction of the roaring, invisible snowmobile but feared that that might panic his wife even more. The last thing he wanted was to find her out in the storm searching for him.

Then a roar, and a faint blur, crossed to the front of his house, and Cinq-Mars moved from his hiding spot. He unfastened the double safety on the shotgun he’d had retrofitted for Sandra’s sake.

Two shells to fire. Two triggers. His one chance to massacre these bastards.

Their escape route was away from his position and, cleverly, on a line passing between the corner of his house and his vehicle. Cinq-Mars had to scamper to the Pathfinder and crouch by the front tire there, listening to the diminishing bedlam of the machine. The snowmobile had been specially rigged to travel with its lights off, which was not normally possible. He still had a shot, but he worried now that his vehicle might have
been wired so that the explosion could be triggered by remote control. What if the intruders were out there waiting for a sign that he was standing alongside it, breathing his last breath next to dynamite?

Having nothing more than retreating noise to fire upon, Cinq-Mars cracked the shotgun.

He jogged back around, collected Sally, and beat a full retreat into his home. He locked the doors behind him. Leaving the lights off, he ran upstairs, with the dog at his heels. In the side-room where he had left her, Sandra stood limply in silhouette, the phone in her hand held waist-high.

“Sand?” he queried.

She did not respond.

Cinq-Mars jumped to the window and pulled the curtain across. Only then did he consent to turn on a table lamp.

Before him his wife leaned against the edge of the desk with the phone in her hand. She was looking at him. At first she seemed shocked, dazed, but as her eyes focused, her expression turned to one of terror. “Emile,” she said, as tears sprang up.

“Sand?” He took the phone from her and spoke into it. “Hello? Hello?”

Dead air on the other end, and his wife was shaking her head.

“They killed her,” Sandra said.

“What? Who?”

“Somebody shot her. I was talking to her on the phone. Emile, I heard a pop. Like a shot. This small sound—a gasp—then her body hit the floor. I heard it!”

He moved across to his wife and held her, stooping to bury his face in Sandra’s neck, kissing her gently. Cinq-Mars took a step back. He put the shotgun down on the desk and touched her face with his right hand while the fingers of his left located the digits to press on his cellphone.

“X-ray Yankee Zulu. Cinq-Mars. Turn me over.”

Seconds later he heard, “Cinq-Mars,
ETA
two minutes. Status.”

“Attack thwarted. Intruders, at least two, fled southwest by snowmobile. My vehicle could be wired with explosive. Haven’t checked in the dark. Officer safe. Repeat, officer safe, intruders repelled.”

“Wait.”

Cinq-Mars hung on while the information was dispatched to the officers speeding toward his home at that moment.