Stalked (39 page)

The ice was breaking.

The truck lurched.

Stride was thrown forward by the jolt. The nose of the truck shuddered and dipped. He fumbled with his seat belt, pushed open the door, and threw himself outside, where he hit the ice with a cold slap and rolled. He kept crawling, hearing more ice crack around and behind him. He spread his weight out and practically swam through the snow toward the safety of a thicker shelf of ice. He could see the red flags now, warning beacons that he had driven past and missed entirely in the storm.

He stood up. The ice here was strong enough to hold him.

Twenty yards away, he watched his ten-year-old Ford Bronco disappear, carrying his past and his cell phone with it. Spiderlike cracks opened up and widened into fissures. The front wheels slurped into the lake water, which freed itself from its prison like a sea monster and surrounded the truck. The Bronco flailed, fought, and floated, but not for long. Frigid water leached into its body, and steam hissed as the engine drowned. The front end dived, and the back end settled behind it, and then the truck careened to one side and made a gentle splash as it sank between the chunky plates of ice and was swallowed up and gone.

The storm raged.

He was alone in the middle of the lake.

Blue Dog staggered back two steps, colliding into the opposite wall. A set of metal shelves collapsed under his weight, and debris clattered to the floor around him. Someone else climbed inside the shanty with them and shut the door. For an instant, the darkness was so complete again that Serena felt as if she were wearing a mask, but then the overhead bulb lit up, and even the pale light was enough to make her close her eyes and turn away.

When she blinked, she saw Lauren Erickson with a shotgun nestled against her right shoulder, pointed at Blue Dog’s head. The gun looked oversized in her small arms, but she held the barrel steady and straight.

Lauren’s eyes flicked to Serena and lingered. Her mouth was tight with anger and something that might have been guilt or regret. She turned back to Blue Dog, who was clenching his wrecked shoulder with his other hand. His wound was a mess of bone, muscle, and blood.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Lauren snapped. “You had the money. You could have left the city, and everything would have been perfect.”

“It was never about money.” He nodded his head at Serena. “Me and her, we have a history together.”

Serena interrupted them, her voice calm and firm. “Lauren, cut me loose.”

Blue Dog jabbed a finger at Lauren’s face. “You know you can’t do that. If she walks out the door, everything comes out.”

“Lauren, I don’t care what you’ve done,” Serena told her. “Look at me.
Look at me
. You could never be a part of something like this.”

Lauren stared at Serena tied to the cot. Naked. Her body streaked with blood. “I’m sorry you’re in the middle of this,” she told her.

“It’s not worth it, Lauren,” Serena said. “It doesn’t matter what you did. We can work it out.”

Lauren shook her head. “We’re way beyond that.”

She shoved the twin barrels of the shotgun into the skin of Blue Dog’s forehead.

“Lauren, do
not
pull that trigger,” Serena insisted. “Don’t do it. Once you do that, you can’t go back. Just call the police. He’s the one they want. You can work out a deal.”

Lauren took a half-step backward.

Blue Dog’s lungs rattled as he laughed. “A deal? You think you can cut a deal? Not after you killed Tanjy.”

Serena closed her eyes and swore silently to herself.

“Shut up,” Lauren hissed.

“Don’t you want Serena to know what an ice-cold bitch you are?” Blue Dog said. He grinned at Serena. “I told Lauren all about Dan’s affair. All about Tanjy’s rape fantasies. All the sick things they did together. I even had the photos. I just wanted money to keep it quiet, but Lauren here had a better idea.”

“
Shut up
,” Lauren repeated.

“She paid me to keep Dan’s ass out of the papers, and then she paid me even more. She
hired
me.”

Serena saw a primal horror in Lauren’s eyes. The small space swayed as the gales outside pounded the walls. It got even colder.

“To do what?” Serena asked, but she had begun to put it all together.

“
To rape Tanjy Powell
,” Blue Dog said. “She didn’t just want to break up Tanjy and Dan. She wanted this bitch
destroyed
. So that’s what I did.”

“Oh, my God,” Serena murmured.

“She was a twisted little whore,” Lauren said, spitting out the words.

“Yeah, and Dan couldn’t get enough of her wet, wild pussy, could he? But you fixed that.” Blue Dog’s grin came back. “Then Tanjy called and said she
knew
who raped her. That scared the shit out of you, didn’t it? If Tanjy knew about me, then she’d find out about
you
, too.”

“
Stop it
!” Lauren shouted.

“But you knew what to do, didn’t you? I bet when you swung that flashlight into the back of her head, you fucking well had the biggest orgasm of your life.”

Lauren was lost in what she had done, trembling, furious. The shotgun sagged in her hands. She didn’t see Blue Dog moving on the floor, his right hand reaching and scrabbling on the ground behind him. Serena shouted a warning, but Lauren didn’t understand and didn’t see Blue Dog as his hand emerged from behind his back with Serena’s gun. He grinned and fired, grinned and fired, two shots in two seconds, both in and out, one that drilled a tunnel through the flesh of Lauren’s elegant neck and one that broke through her collarbone with an audible crack.

Blue Dog came off the floor, his left arm frozen, his movements slow. Lauren turned to run, but her feet were clumsy, like a clown’s. He towered over her from behind. Blue Dog wrapped his forearm around Lauren’s neck and lifted her bodily off the ground. She flapped like a doll, and she swung the shotgun up as she struggled to free herself. Her eyes bulged out, and she formed an O with her mouth in a silent scream of agony. Blue Dog held Lauren in an iron grip, squeezing the life out of her.

Her finger was on the trigger. Serena followed the wild gyrations of the barrel with horror and found it pointed directly at her chest. She cringed and tried to twist away, but there was nowhere to go, no way to escape. She watched Lauren’s finger, which was in near constant spasm, and she could actually see the trigger begin to move. She sucked in a breath but didn’t close her eyes. Then the gun was gone, pointed at the ceiling, at the walls, at the door. Lauren kicked and flailed. Blue Dog spun her around, and the gun came up again, aimed at the rear wall now, away from Serena. This time the barrel coughed up a second shell. The recoil jolted them both backward, and Lauren fell from Blue Dog’s grasp. The thunder of the explosion made the cot rise up off the floor.

The shell rocketed through the space.

It blew a hole through the metal siding.

With a sharp and terrible
ping
, like a note played on a badly tuned piano, it punctured the tank of propane gas mounted behind the shanty.

Stride held up his gloved hands in front of his face but could barely see them. He was a yeti, matted with heavy snow, slogging through the drifts on the lake, fighting the headwind that bit at his skin. His long gray scarf was wrapped around his head and ears and then tied around his face and neck. Snow crusted over it and froze. Ice balls dangled from his eyelids. His leather jacket hung stiffly, like cardboard. When he stopped and listened, he heard only the incessant roar of the white banshee and wondered who she was saying would die tonight, whether it would be Serena, or himself, or both of them.

He squinted at the horizon. Once, he thought he saw the tree-lined shore as the storm briefly lifted, but since then, he could have been walking in circles. His footsteps disappeared almost as soon as he made them. He could have been crossing the same tracks, marching himself into the ground in a kind of Möbius strip that went around and around without ever ending.

He almost collided with the shanty before he saw it. When the invading snow soared upward again, he realized he was in the midst of a community towed out to the middle of the inlet, within spitting distance of the forest. He looked for light and didn’t see any. He wondered where Maggie was and how close she was to this spot and what she thought when she kept dialing his number and he didn’t answer. His phone was at the bottom of the lake.

A rumble of thunder washed over him like a wave. But not thunder. It was a shotgun blast. He spun around, trying to ascertain where the shot originated. He looked for vehicles but made out only ivory mountains.

One hundred yards away, a fish house exploded. The night turned to day, and a willowy cloud of fire roared fifty feet into the air.

Stride ran.

An instant later, the tin shack became a holocaust.

Serena felt as if she had launched into space and then fell out of orbit back to earth. The explosion split the shanty in half, and the walls made a tortured noise as they cracked. The diamond-shaped windows on the rear wall blew inward, and flame spat through them like they were the mouths of dragons. Black stains bloomed across the gray metal, which sizzled and popped as it became brittle.

The shock wave split Lauren and Blue Dog apart. The shotgun banged to the floor, empty and harmless. Lauren was thrown skyward, and she slammed into the door and then through it, spilling out of the space and disappearing with a cry. The impact struck Blue Dog square in the back and swatted him to his hands and knees. He swung his head to clear his scattered brain, and his long hair fell across his face like an Afghan hound. He pushed himself up to his feet and swayed, a silhouette framed by fire behind him. His head nearly grazed the roof of the shanty. His left arm dangled at his side, useless, but he still had Serena’s gun in his other hand.

Blue Dog raised her gun and pointed it at her head. She could make out the whites of his eyes and his bared teeth. Ash fell into his wound, making him twitch. “Do you want me to make it quick for you?” he asked.

“Fuck you.”

The flames licked at his back. “Burning to death is a horrible way to go,” he said.

Serena half-wanted him to pull the trigger.

“See you in hell,” he told her, and then he turned and leaped through the doorway.

She was alone and trapped. It felt as if she were in hell already, with huge fires and the caustic smell of melting steel to torture sinners. The winter cold vanished, and she felt a superheated burn from a ferocious, merciless sun. The rear wall was almost totally ablaze, and the fire toyed with the wood veneer on the other walls, beginning to catch and streak closer. Smoke choked the enclosure. She covered her mouth and nose with her free arm, but the gray cloud made its way inside her face. She gagged, and her eyes went dry.

Serena threw her weight to her right. The cot rocked on its frame and fell back. She tried again, trying to overturn the cot, so she could get both hands on the floor and find leverage with which to push herself backward and out the door, using the mattress and frame on her back to delay the fire’s assault. She rocked again, feeling the cot lift an inch off the floor before slamming down. She made a fist and shoved it against the wall, but the cot stayed rooted to the floor.

The shanty lurched. The opposite end, where the fire was, dipped at an angle, and Serena heard hissing as if she had poked a nest of snakes. She realized now that she was in an ice house out on the lake and that the hissing she heard was steam as the fire burned its way through the tough layer of ice. The shanty was beginning to sink, creating a slushy pool for her to drown in if the fire didn’t get her first.

The intensity of the flames shooting through the windows diminished by degrees as the propane tank slipped into the water, but the fire fed on the fish house itself now, chewing into the wood and insulation, exploding empty bottles, surging uphill toward the cot. The first of the fire trails outlined the open door in wild orange and threw a shower of sparks that made black, smoking holes on the mattress. Some of the sparks hit her skin and ate their way inside like hungry rats. She couldn’t help herself; she screamed. It was a terrible taste of the fate that awaited her, to die like that, searing away to bone and dust square inch by square inch.

She braced her left hand on the floor in a futile attempt to push herself backward from the onslaught of the fire. Her hand found something hard and cold, and she realized it was the revolver, which had slid around in the commotion and wound up back within her reach. She scooped it up and stared at it.

One bullet. It felt like a cruel joke to find the gun now, when it was useless to her.

Except for one thing.

Serena watched the flames draw closer like an inexorable army. They danced on the ceiling, and chunks of hot metal fell around her. They swirled like bright ribbons on the walls. They charred the bottoms of her feet, as if she were walking on coals. The smoke grew thick as fog and clouded around her face and blinded her. She tried to suck in air, but there was nothing to breathe but ash and fumes, nothing to see but haze, nothing to hear but the death throes of the shanty as it imploded, nothing to smell but the roasting of her own flesh.

She still had the gun in her hand. She had one bullet, and she couldn’t miss.

One bullet to escape all at once from the pain, the flames, and the poison.

One bullet to help her find the nothingness room in the corner of her soul, where she had escaped as a child, and make a home there forever.

Serena put the gun in her mouth.

Stride sprinted toward the shanty from the west. Half of the shack was fully immersed in flames, and the lake was slowly pooling around it and drawing it back into its grasp. He could feel the wave of heat from where he was. He had seen these gas fires before, and they were always deadly and complete, reducing metal, wood, glass, and tissue to a flat, smoldering wreck, nothing more than a black rectangle on the ground. It never took long, never more than a handful of minutes.