Winter at the Door (29 page)

He kicked at Washburn’s unconscious form. Washburn moaned and shifted a little, then was still again.

“The whole plan,” Brantwell went on. “Where Jeffrey is. And who’s got him. His father.
Daniel
,” he snarled, as if out of the whole awful situation this was the worst part.

As if he already knew Daniel, but that couldn’t be right … could it? Lizzie dared another glance to the street outside. But she spotted no Chevrier. No Dylan, either. And now Brantwell had Washburn’s shotgun, which he handled easily, as if he knew how to use it.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why’s it so especially bad that he’s Jeffrey’s father?”

But then she did understand, or she began to, anyway: Brantwell had money troubles. He traveled often to New York, in a Cadillac Escalade whose cargo area had plenty of room. And if Daniel was one link in the meth-moving scheme—

“You’re in business with him,” she said. “He picked up the product from the individual meth cooks. Izzy Dolaby did the packaging. And you …”

Brantwell made the big-shipment deliveries, the next step up in the distribution system in New York. Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have been profitable; the Mexican manufacturers had been well established and well funded.

But nowadays with immigration a big issue and the southwest border getting much more enforcement attention …

He saw her getting it. “Yeah. I bet Daniel thought it was real funny, too. I bet every time he saw me, he thought about how funny it was, that he’d been screwing my daughter.”

He hefted the shotgun. “Now turn around.” When she did, he touched the back of her neck with the end of the gun barrel, then took her duty weapon from its holster.

“Empty your pack.”

Once she had, showing him there were no other weapons in it, he made her fill it again, aiming the shotgun at her, keeping the barrel out of her reach.

“Come on,” she said as she obeyed, “you aren’t going to blow me away with a shotgun right here in town, are you?”

“Good question,” he replied. But he had an answer for it:

“Accident. Terrible thing. I saw Washburn with the gun, he seemed to be threatening you, and I hit him. That’s when the gun went off.”

He looked down at Washburn. “Killing you,” he added. “And I must’ve hit Trey too hard with that brick.”

Washburn lay motionless except for his breathing, which was hitching and too slow. Lizzie had seen blunt-force head trauma victims before, and this one didn’t look merely unconscious.

He looked comatose. “Although,” Brantwell went on, bending fast to snatch up the brick again, “it could be I was forced to hit him
twice
.”

“They’ll be back here,” Lizzie said quickly, “Chevrier and the others, they’ll come looking for me any time now and—”

Brantwell lowered the brick grudgingly. “You’re right. And he never saw me, so even if he does wake up …”

Which without swift medical attention was unlikely, Lizzie thought. She’d seen it happen; accidents, assaults. Even with the proper care, a severe blunt-force head injury could be … 
Trey
, she thought sorrowfully.

“Come on,” Brantwell snapped. “Turn the lights out. Lock the door. You’re going to go around to the Blazer’s passenger side and get in that way, then slide across. I’ll be right behind you.”

Which he was, the gun under his right arm, ready to drop into his hand. From the easy, practiced way he handled the weapon, she knew he wouldn’t fumble it or drop it. For a brief instant in the Blazer’s cab, she thought she might get the glove box open—

His hand clamped hard around her wrist. “Ah-ah,” he warned pleasantly, punctuating this with a nudge from the gun barrel.

She settled as best she could in the driver’s seat while he watched approvingly. “So listen,” he said. “I realize it must come as a shock to you, all this being out of your control all of a sudden.”

You
, she thought clearly,
have a big shock coming to you, too. I don’t know how yet. Or when. But
—

But I am a freaking cop, dammit. And somehow, I will find a way to wipe that smug look off your face if it’s the last freaking thing I do
.

Right now, though, all she could do was hope hard that it wouldn’t be.

An hour after he’d stolen it from the parking lot and aimed it north, Spud nosed the car off the road, gunning it hard until it stalled in a snow-clogged ditch.

He wouldn’t need it again. One way or another, for him this was the end of the road. The dead girl, the lost nose stud …

Lizzie Snow’s current suspicions were bad enough. But once the authorities got their act together and figured out that he’d killed the girl last night, they’d find out about the other ones, too. His only hope was to get back to the campsite, throw himself on the guy’s mercy, convince him that a person like Spud could be useful, good to have around.

That despite their superficial differences, they were really just alike. Outlaws, men of freedom …

A freedom that Spud was in danger of losing, maybe forever. The thought urged him out of the car. Around him, in utter silence, the snow kept falling, piling up on branches, coating the trees, so white that even in darkness there was enough light to see by once his eyes had adjusted.

Trudging away from the car, he looked back to find it snow-covered already, the tracks he made filling up even as he stepped out of them. The driver of a passing plow—or, God forbid, a squad car—might not even see it, and anyway, investigation of it would reveal only that it was stolen, not by whom.

So he still had a little time. From deep in the forest came a sharp, crackling
snap!
as a snow-laden branch broke off, then a long, crashing chain reaction of thuds and further snappings as the branch fell through other trees to earth.

That gave him pause. The entrance to the trail they’d been on the first time he’d been here, hidden in a clump of barberry if he recalled it right, was … there. He was just about to cross the road toward it when headlights appeared from around the curve.

Panicked, he hurled himself headlong over the plow-heaped snow-bank at the road’s edge, burrowed himself deep into a drift, and lay there barely breathing. The car slowed; he held still.

Not a cop
 … the engine ran too roughly for that, and a loud belch from the vehicle’s muffler only reinforced the impression of an old, unhappy car or small truck, forced out on this awful night by some guy’s persistent hankering for beer and cigarettes, plus maybe a pack of Ring Dings and a Powerball ticket.

The car stopped. Spud unburrowed himself, readying to run, then heard the emergency brake engage with a
clunk!
The glow of the guy’s flashers—
red-red-red!
—seeped through the fluffy top of the snow-bank, diluted cherry pink.

Go away
, he thought.
Go away, go
—

“Hello?” A man’s voice. He’d gotten out of his vehicle, the guy had, some goofball Good Samaritan type. “Anybody in there?”

Spud peeked over the snowdrift as the man stomped through the snow to the stolen car, wiped at the window. “Hello?”

Melting snow iced Spud’s thighs and seeped down into his collar as he lay there, trying to think what to do. The man might go home, call the cops. He might even return and wait for them.

That might turn out to be the kind of idiot he was, and
if
he was, then the best thing for Spud to do right now, in fact the
only
thing—

The stolen car’s door creaked open; the man must be looking inside. Then: “Anybody around here? Somebody need help? Holler out if you can hear me!”

Lit up by his own headlights—it was an old Ford pickup with a jerry-rigged cap over the bed—the man slogged back toward the road, muttering to himself.

Good
, thought Spud.
Get in your truck and
—

The man stopped suddenly. His hands went to his chest, clasping themselves there. He dropped to his knees, a wide-eyed look of startlement coming onto his face.

He’d begun toppling forward when Spud realized what the stain was, spreading on the gray sweatshirt.

Blood …
 Something yanked Spud by the collar. Falling back, he saw the trees towering high above him, snowflakes swirling down thickly through them.

And then the guy’s face: flat, slit-eyed, his braid tucked up into a rough skin cap made from the pelt of some furry animal. The guy looked down at Spud, then dragged him to his feet.

The fallen man did not move. He wasn’t going to, Spud knew from the amount of blood darkening the snow all around him.

And from the arrow shaft sticking out of his back. The guy let go of Spud, shoving him away sharply. “Stay,” he commanded.

Like I’m some kind of dog
, Spud thought, resentment flaring in him, but his legs felt watery-shaky and he couldn’t quite get his breath, so he did stay. The guy crossed the road—

On snowshoes
, Spud realized.
I should have brought …

The guy rolled the dead man halfway over with one hand, put the other around the arrow shaft protruding from his chest, and pulled. The arrow slid free; the guy wiped it in the snow, then thrust it into a long pouch strapped across his chest.

The bow was nowhere in sight. Spud didn’t feel like asking about it when the guy came back.

“Why … why did you do that?” The dead man’s truck still stood idling in the road.

The guy seized Spud, shoved him. When Spud took a step, the snow came up to his kneecap; at the next, it reached his thigh.

Spud felt a prickle between his shoulders where the arrow might go. Behind the barberry thicket, some pines made a shelter, the snow-clogged boughs bent down like tent flaps.

“Wait.” The guy vanished back out into the weather, leaving Spud sitting anxiously on the pine needles under the trees, cold and terrified.

He waited for ten minutes or perhaps for an hour; he didn’t know, only that somewhere during that time he stopped hearing the truck’s engine. Soon after that the guy returned.

“Up.” Spud obeyed. “Walk.” The guy pointed.

Spud obeyed once more, his numb, frozen feet clublike as he lifted them, hauling them agonizingly up from the deep snow and plunging them in again.

Again and again, the guy right behind him, silent.

Lizzie pulled the Blazer into the lot by the potato barn on the edge of town. Chevrier’s nearly identical vehicle was already there, pale vapor-puffs chuffing from its exhaust in the cold.

She watched Dylan get out and approach, shoulders hunched against the blowing snow. Someone had lent him a parka; as she put the Blazer’s window down, he peered from deep in its hood.

“You okay?” he asked, his eyebrows going up at the sight of Brantwell. No friendliness in his voice, though; there hadn’t been back in the office, either, she realized suddenly.

“I’m Missy’s dad,” Brantwell said before Lizzie could reply. “Tell her I’m coming along to help.”

He’d put the shotgun down once they were in the Blazer, producing instead a pistol, which he had hidden under his jacket now, leveled at her.

“Okay,” said Dylan, not seeming to think anything was wrong with this, and why would he? And since Missy knew the way, she was in the lead vehicle with Chevrier, while Dylan …

Dylan hadn’t wanted to ride with her, Lizzie realized as she watched him sprint back to Chevrier’s vehicle.

“Nicely done,” said Brantwell approvingly. “Make sure you keep it up when we get there.”

“Or what, you’ll blow my head off?” she retorted, pulling out behind the first Blazer. “How do you think you’ll get away with that in front of witnesses? And let me remind you that ‘the devil made me do it’ is not a legal defense.”

The road, plowed but snow-glazed, stretched ahead, white gusts blowing almost horizontally across it. Brantwell didn’t reply, which gave her the answer she didn’t want: that he wasn’t planning for there to be any witnesses to what he did tonight.

But there was still one person she didn’t think Brantwell was planning to sacrifice. “Missy’s not going to go along with this.”

To the murder of three cops, she meant, and the concealment of their bodies so that with any luck, they might not ever be found. Because as Washburn had warned her, the Great North Woods was a big place. A person could get lost in it.

Especially if they were dead. “Missy’s going to stay out of it. She’s going to wait by the road, in Chevrier’s Blazer.”

Lizzie blew a contemptuous breath out. “Yeah, right. She’s ready to walk through fire for that baby, you think she’s going to just—”

He whipped the gun out, aimed it unwaveringly. “Missy,” he grated out viciously, “will do what I say. When I tell her that I know everything, that all is forgiven. That I love Jeffrey and I don’t care who his father is, and that I love her.”

His voice softened. “And especially,” he finished, “when I tell her I’m going to bring Jeffrey back. When I swear it, and tell her she needs to be safe and well to take care of him, once it’s done.”

All of which was true, Lizzie realized sinkingly. It would work; he’d be saying exactly what Missy wanted to hear.

“And if when we get there I jump out of the Blazer yelling for them to take you down, what then?”

On either side of the road, wide farm fields lay under rising drifts. Occasional access lanes for mechanized farm equipment bridged the ditches between the white-frosted fence posts and the pavement.

“You can’t shoot three cops with one shotgun,” she added. “And even if you could, Missy would see.”

The ditches, she recalled, were perhaps two feet deep, and the
plows had thrown up high ridges over the access ways. The Blazer, even with new snow tires, would never make it.

“You do that, the jig’s up,” Brantwell admitted. “So I’ll tell you what. You do what you said, and I’ll just shoot that dark-haired cop, the one who stuck his head in the window just now before we left.”

Dylan, he meant. Brantwell continued: “I saw the look you gave him. You like him pretty well, I think, and he’s ticked off at you, isn’t he?”

He chuckled unpleasantly. “You open your mouth when we get there, I’m done for. And you’re right about me not being able to shoot everyone, too.”