In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel (35 page)

Wasting no time, she quickly raised her free
arm and drove her fist downward again. He tried to swivel himself
and bring up his other leg to block; however, he was a half-beat
behind her rhythm. Her blow glanced from his upper thigh but
continued its trajectory. Although with far less force than she
intended, this time she hit squarely on her mark.

Even with having been momentarily impeded,
the strike still had the desired effect. A pained howl roared out
behind her head, and the constricting arm broke away from her
waist.

His other arm was still up around her
midsection, looser than before, but still pinning her left arm to
her side. Bending her right elbow, she cocked her arm in and
immediately reached for his hand as it momentarily unclenched.
Grabbing the first two fingers she could seize, she rotated her
shoulder upward, unlocking her left knee and rolling to the side.
The pair of digits bent backward, eliciting a sharp yelp from her
attacker, and he released his grip.

Finally free, Constance continued pitching
quickly to the left, rolling as best she could through the snow.
Twisting her body away from her attacker, she lunged forward;
scrambling away and up to her knees, she spun around. He was still
down, but she didn’t bother weighing the options of a knee drop to
the chest or a throat strike. She simply drew her arm back beneath
her coat and wrapped her cold-numbed bare hand around the grip of
her weapon.

Throughout the entire skirmish the man had
been yelling something at her. Now, more words spilled out of his
mouth.

“…
SKIP! IT’S SKIP!” the sheriff’s
pained and near breathless voice rang in her ears as she came up to
her feet with the pistol in hand. The words were punctuated by a
tight cough that blended into a groan.

“DAMMIT! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” she
shouted, stepping back so that she was well out of his reach in
case he decided to lunge at her. Assuming a tight stance, she took
square aim.

Ben’s recent words raced through her
mind—
Don’t turn your back on ‘im, okay?
She couldn’t help
thinking that she obviously should have paid that advice much more
heed.

“Put that damn…thing away…before…someone
gets…shot!” Skip panted back at her while struggling to pull
himself to his feet.

“STAY DOWN!” Constance shouted.

He continued to right himself.

“DAMMIT SKIP, STAY DOWN!”

He was already on his feet but bent over with
his hands on his knees, sucking in labored breaths as he wheezed.
“Calm down…” he huffed out between gasps. “Just…calm down…”

“GODDAMMIT, SKIP! DON’T MOVE! STAY RIGHT
WHERE YOU ARE!”

“Okay… Okay…” he replied.

“PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD AND LOCK
YOUR FINGERS TOGETHER! NOW!”

With a pained wince Skip complied. He was
standing up, not quite doubled over as before, but apparently still
in a good bit of pain from the punch to the family jewels. A dark
swath of blood smeared his face and chin where her head butt had
caused him to bite through his lip.

“Will you just calm down…and put the gun
away, Constance?” he groaned, still huffing and puffing but
starting to regain his breath. He worked his mouth for a moment,
then sputtered as he spat blood out onto the snow.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded. Her
voice was still stern and volume slightly elevated, but she was no
longer shouting. She threw a quick glance to her left at the little
girl who was slowly but steadily increasing the distance between
herself and them. She was already to the street and showing no sign
of stopping. Throwing a sideways gaze back on Sheriff Carmichael,
she called out over her shoulder, “Merrie! Stop!”

She threw another fleeting glance to the
left. The child continued on, having trudged across Evergreen Lane
as if she hadn’t heard a thing. Still focused on the sheriff and
keeping her sidearm trained on him, Constance demanded again,
“Dammit, Skip, tell me what the hell is going on here!”

“DROP YOUR WEAPON!” a new voice suddenly came
from her right. “NOW, Special Agent Mandalay!”

Constance slowly shifted her eyes and turned
her head just enough to see Deputy Broderick. He was only a few
feet away with his own weapon trained on her, having come up from a
position behind. Apparently, the fact that she was wearing a vest
hadn’t escaped him as the muzzle of his pistol was pointed straight
at her head. At this distance, unless he was the worst shot on the
planet he wasn’t likely to miss.

“You aren’t going to shoot a federal agent,”
she said, fully cognizant of the fact that the comment sounded like
dialogue from a cheesy movie. It was the kind of thing the main
character’s two-dimensional sidekick always said to the villain
right before getting riddled with bullets and becoming a martyr to
be avenged with rocket launchers and air strikes. But then to
Constance the whole past three days had seemed to play out like a
bad movie. Why break the streak now?

“Yeah, sugar,” Sheriff Carmichael grunted as
he stood up a little straighter and grimaced again. “He will if he
has to, but that’s not where any of us want this to go. Just hand
over your weapon and we can get on with what needs to be done.”

“I don’t think so,” she barked.

“Dammit, Constance,” he grumbled. “You can
have it back in a few minutes. I just need to show you something
first.”

“That little girl...” she started.

“I know,” he interrupted her. “That’s exactly
what I need to show you. Now if you aren’t gonna hand that thing
over, at least holster it, okay? We’re all on the same side here.
Nobody needs to be getting shot.”

Constance glanced between Sheriff Carmichael
and Deputy Broderick. She was in a stalemate and she knew it, but
she wasn’t about to relinquish her weapon. At least he’d offered
the second option, but that didn’t fix anything as long as
Broderick was pointing his firearm at her. Ben’s words were still
echoing through her brain on an endless loop as she searched for a
way out of this.

Skip stared back at Constance. Her resolve
must have been obvious in her expression because he sighed.
“Goddammit you’re stubborn…” He directed his attention to the
deputy. “Broderick… Stand down.”

“But, Skip…” the deputy started.

“Stand down,” he repeated, cutting him
off.

Deputy Broderick hesitated for a moment, then
lowered his weapon and slid it into his belt holster. Constance
tossed her gaze back and forth between the two of them.

“Hands behind your head,” she ordered the
deputy.

“Do what she says,” Skip told him.

Mandalay divided her attentions between them
while he complied.

“There,” Sheriff Carmichael said, directing
himself to her. “How about you put yours away too.”

Constance carefully stepped back and turned
so that they were both in her line of sight. “Where’s Deputy
Johnson?” she demanded.

Skip snorted. “If I had to guess, he’s
sitting at a desk back at the office where I sent him about nine
last night. Probably has his feet up while he’s drinking a hot cup
of coffee,” he replied.

“The office?” she spat. “He was supposed to
be watchi–”

He cut her off. “No need in all of us
freezing our asses off, young lady.”

“But you were supposed to be watching the
outside of the house.”

“We were. Did you see anyone come in?”

“That’s not the–”

“Dammit, Constance,” he retorted, cutting her
off again. “Just put your damn pistol away and I’ll give you
whatever answers I have. I promise.”

She mulled it over, staring back at both of
them as a rising surge of wind whipped her hair around her face. It
moaned dolefully through the trees before tapering off to
nothing.

“Why should I believe that? You haven’t
exactly been forthcoming with me so far.”

“I think you just saw my reason for
that.”

She continued to stare at him but didn’t
reply.

After several heartbeats he appealed, “We
really don’t have a whole lot of time. Merrie is going to be
waiting.”

Every ounce of training Constance had told
her to cuff them both, then call the Missouri Highway Patrol for
backup, then her SAC, and then just sit on this until it could all
be sorted out. She’d been lied to, physically attacked, and on the
wrong end of a gun, and those were just the high points. She was
sure there could be plenty more charges filed without even cracking
the spine on a law book.

But that was her training. Her instinct was
telling her something completely different. It was being entirely
contradictory, and she couldn’t follow both of them. Not
simultaneously. She had to make a choice between brain and gut. She
knew it was a coin toss. She also knew there was much more at stake
than who got the ball.

Going with her brain would be the safe bet.
But then there was that little girl, trudging half-dressed through
the snow, and somehow she knew that’s what this was really all
about. Following her gut might well be the option that would bring
some sense to all of this.

“Constance, if you want answers, put the gun
away. But I’m telling you now, I don’t have time for this. No
matter what, in about one minute I’m going to walk to my car and go
do what I have to do. You can either come with me, or you can shoot
me. Honestly, I’m kinda hoping for option number one.”

“What is it you have to do, Skip?”

“Come with me and you’ll see.”

She stared back at him and sighed. This was
crazy. She needed to just arrest him and his deputy and be done
with it. That would be proper procedure. Then again, it would have
also been proper procedure for the bureau to send her up here with
backup and a complete file on this case to begin with. There was
nothing SOP about any of this.

“I must be insane…” she finally muttered.

Against her better judgment, Constance slowly
and carefully held her arms out to the sides and then just as
carefully slipped the Sig Sauer back into her belt rig.

“That’s better,” the sheriff grunted,
lowering his hands and touching his fingertips to his bloody lip,
then pulling them away and giving them a quick inspection.
“Lovely,” he mumbled, then looked at her and asked. “How’s your
head?”

“It hurts like hell,” Constance said, looking
at him in earnest. “Tell me what’s going on, Skip…”

He pointed off in the direction the little
girl had gone. She looked and saw the trail through the snow, but
no sign of Merrie.

“I should probably just show you,” he said,
then started ambling across the yard toward the street. There was
an obvious pained hitch in his gait. As he passed her he added,
“Come on. My car is just around the corner.”

THREE
blocks from the house on
Evergreen Lane, Sheriff Carmichael lazily cranked the steering
wheel and brought the cruiser into a wide arc around the corner. He
and Constance had been riding in relative silence for the small
handful of minutes it had taken to traverse the distance, neither
of them speaking a word. The only real sounds to join them were the
tires against snowy pavement and the drone of warm air pushing out
of the vents.

The heat felt good to Constance. Although
both the tense excitement and the physical altercation had set her
blood moving, she still felt frozen to the core. Too much time
immobile in that deep-freeze of a house had taken a toll.

While she had brushed off before climbing
into the cruiser, she hadn’t been able to free herself of all the
snow she had picked up while rolling about on the ground. Now, here
in the warmth of the car, it was melting. Her hair was damp, even
downright wet in some spots. So were the knees and seat of her
jeans. She desperately wanted to strip down and soak in a hot bath.
She especially wanted to get out of the Kevlar vest. But neither of
those things would be happening anytime soon, and she knew it.

Skip finally broke the silence. “Almost
there.”

Spinning the steering wheel, he took the
cruiser through another languid turn. As he straightened the
vehicle and continued rolling forward, the headlights fell in a
bright swath across a small figure standing motionless in the
middle of the street. He slowed more and angled off to the side.
Eventually they came to a halt next to the curb several yards in
front of the little girl.

He cranked the shift lever into park and then
flipped on the light bar. A swath of red and blue flickered into
the night, falling across the still motionless figure standing in
the street. Each strobe highlighted the blood, dirt, and wounds
that marred her. Carmichael reached to the dash and poked a button.
A clunk sounded behind them as the trunk release popped.

With a quick glance at the digital clock on
the console he grunted, “We’re running a bit late.”