Winter at the Door (31 page)

The guy gazed impassively at him. From the other side of the blazing fire, the woman stared, too, huddled under a fur blanket.

The child Spud had seen the last time he was here was not in sight, and neither was—

Spud turned his head and puked, ejecting a thin stream of sour liquid. The guy straightened and went away, Spud didn’t see where. A little while later he returned with a steaming mug.

“Drink this.”

Spud struggled up and took the mug in both hands. “Thanks,” he whispered, trying for a smile and failing.

The guy didn’t smile, either. His face was like well-tanned leather, youthfully smooth and yet oddly old in its expression. Or the lack of one, like nothing had ever fazed him.

Like nothing would. Spud sipped from the mug, nearly puked again at the bitter taste. Some unfamiliar herb, as aromatic as pine tar but way more repulsive, plumed up into his sinuses and burned down his throat.

But the next sip was better, setting up a glowing warmth in his face and chest. He drank the rest, its heat spreading in him.

When he looked up again, the guy had a gun aimed at him. “I want you to tell me why you came here,” the guy said evenly. “If you don’t, I’m going to shoot you on the count of three.”

Spud stared, dumbfounded, the stuff he’d drunk threatening to return. Promising, even.

“… two …” The guy’s smooth, slim hand was unwavering.

Spud jumped up, hands out, palms forward. “Okay! Okay, I …”

The words tumbled out. “Look, I need to stay here. I’m just like you, man,” he pleaded, “free and independent, you know? But now the cops are after me, and—”

As the words left his mouth he realized it was the wrong thing to say. But instead of just chasing Spud out into the cold forest, the guy laughed.

“Well, you’ve come to the wrong place, then.”

As he spoke, a child’s fretful wail came from one of the lean-tos. Spud nearly fainted at the overwhelming wave of gratefulness that washed over him, that the kid he’d stolen was still alive.

But this wasn’t going at all the way he’d hoped. The guy went to the lean-to, brought back an open laptop, the device looking strange and out of place here in the wilderness.

Spud turned puzzledly to the guy. “I don’t get it. How’d you …?”

The guy pressed some keys on the laptop and the screen lit up. “Remember those little cameras you bought for me, and those microphones? And stuck them up in—”

Her office
. And he did remember, but when he was here before, he’d seen no power source, no way to view what the cameras saw and recorded, storing it online so it could be seen later. So he’d forgotten about it.

Now, though, Spud recognized the scene. In it: Cody Chevrier and Lizzie Snow. Then Missy Brantwell burst in, looking upset.

Sound came from the device’s tiny speaker. Arguing, protests from Missy. Then a revelation; Spud looked up. “That’s …”

The guy nodded. “Yeah. It’s my kid you took. His mom had him and that was okay for a while, when he was so little. But now he needs a dad. And it’s time for me to go, so he’s coming along.”

Go?
thought Spud.
Go where?
The guy shut the laptop. “As for you, though …”

He tucked the laptop under his arm, leaned down, and gazed into Spud’s face. The guy’s own eyes were dark, like deep pools of the bitter liquid Spud had drunk; under their examination Spud felt his secrets being picked through, his shames uncovered.

A flash of contempt mingled with pity showed in the guy’s face
briefly, then vanished. He thrust the gun at Spud, urging him to take it. “Here.”

Nervously, Spud fumbled the thing, then finally got hold of it. “What’s this for?”

“For when they get here.” The guy paused on his way back to the lean-to. “ ’Cause I don’t know what you were thinking of, coming here,” he added. “But those cops are right behind you.”

Spud looked around the campsite, eerily firelit, sheltered from the snow by the evergreen canopy spreading above. Only a bit of sky showed, thin smoke spiraling up into it.

The kid’s wails had quieted, the little blond girl still out of sight. The woman was gone, too, Spud realized.

All was quiet. It struck him suddenly, too, that they’d taken a much less direct route coming in here than the one he recalled.

“But don’t worry. I’m ready,” the guy said quietly.

Ready? How could he be …
 Then, at a sudden cry of pain from somewhere out there in the snowy forest, Spud understood.

The snowshoes that Chevrier had rounded up for all of them felt like tennis rackets strapped to Lizzie’s feet, and getting them out of each other’s way was a puzzle needing to be solved at every step.

“Lift and slide,” Chevrier had told her, but after a hundred yards she felt her more likely mantra was “Fall down and die.”

Dylan wasn’t doing much better, and from the way he held his injured arm tightly to his side, she knew this trip was most certainly not what the doctor ordered. Even Chevrier seemed less than practiced in the gear; only Missy Brantwell breezed along, one swift foot after the other into the woods.

Around them the night was silent, the snow falling in tiny flakes. “I hope you know where you’re going,” Lizzie managed to Chevrier, who was bringing up the rear.

“Yeah,” he grated out. “I do.” At Missy’s direction he’d pulled over and left the Blazer by the road, then produced a GPS tracker with the flyover coordinates programmed into it and handed it to her.

“Here. You might think you know the way. But at night in the snow it’s different.”

He’d been right, though, about letting Missy lead. It was her kid out there somewhere, or at least they all hoped he was; moving along tirelessly, the desperate young mother’s feet churned through the snow, and if not for the cops struggling behind her she’d have been making even better time.

Toward what, though? That was Lizzie’s big question. The notion that her own dead sister’s child might also be out here seemed merely a foolish fantasy, now that they were out here for real.

Crazy, you must be
—What little illumination there was came from their flashlights, showing only snow plastered against huge trees and clumped in brushy thickets. The trail vanished quickly, the stub near the road becoming trackless wilderness in minutes.

Missy stopped. “I’m not sure,” she said doubtfully, her head bent to peer at the GPS device’s glowing screen.

Dylan clomped past her on his snowshoes, strobing the snowy darkness ahead with his flashlight.

“I think …,” he began as something huge flew out of the darkness at him. There was a heavy thud, then came his shout of surprise and pain.

“Damn,” said Chevrier, running clumsily past Lizzie. “It’s some kind of …”

But she already knew:
trap
. Hobbled by the damned snowshoes, she struggled forward to where Dylan lay in the snow, saw that he was—

Alive
. Propped up on his elbow with one hand to his forehead, he swore a blue streak of the filthiest and most reassuring curses she’d ever heard.

Missy bent swiftly to him, pressing a paper towel full of snow to his head. “Ouch,” he uttered grimly, and then, squinting around, “What the hell was that thing? Nearly knocked my block off.”

Cautiously Chevrier ventured toward the object, now hanging motionless, suspended by thick rope from a massive pine branch thrust out over their heads.

“Looks like a log, barbed wire wrapped around it,” he said.

“Oh, great. That’s just great.” Lizzie clenched her fists at the darkness; if not for the clumsy snowshoes, she’d have kicked something. “So now this bozo’s got the place booby-trapped?”

“Seems like.” Chevrier looked unhappy. “And for all I know, we may have already missed a few. Which means …”

“… that we could hit them on the way out,” she finished for him. “Oh, this guy, when I get him, I’m going to …”

“It means something else,” said Missy, looking up white-faced from where she was tending to Dylan’s head wound. The pulse of terror Lizzie had felt when he’d been hit was fading now. But she still had a bad feeling.

A very bad one; this guy was smart and competent. And he’d known they were coming, somehow; you didn’t climb way up there in that tree, make this hideous device, just on the off chance.

Missy thought the same. “He knows we’re here. And this is just the beginning of his tricks. But how? How could he—”

Chevrier looked up from examining the rope the log hung on. “Yeah, this knot’s fresh. So who knows? Maybe the flyover did put him onto us. If he’s paranoid enough …”

“I don’t know,” said Missy again. “Maybe I was wrong, maybe we should go back and get more people, all the hunters around here, and—”

“Nope.” Dylan got up, first to his hands and knees, then clumsily up onto his snowshoes again. The thing had only grazed him.

“Our guy’s here now. But if he’s as nervous as we think, then if we give him a chance he’ll take the baby and run.”

They were silent a moment, absorbing this. “Obviously we’re going to have to be more careful,” said Dylan, as calmly as if he hadn’t just almost had his head removed.

“But we should go on,” he said. “By the look of the GPS, we’re already more than halfway there. And this might be our only chance.” Chevrier nodded reluctantly. “In for a penny,” he said, his voice grim. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve got a personal axe to grind with this son of a bitch.”

“Me, too,” Lizzie said. She took a breath of the cold, fresh air, feeling better suddenly. Anger could do that to a person.

And, after all, she’d done pretty well on that snowy road back there: using it, not letting it stop her. Not letting Roger Brantwell stop her, either.

But there was still something wrong.
You’d already decided how you wanted things to go
, Missy had said the other night after the dustup in Area 51.
To make things work out the way you want
.

And now here she was again, doing the same thing.
Trust me
, she’d told Missy.
I’ll explain
. Only this time it wasn’t just a matter of her versus some dope in a bar, brandishing a junky weapon.

This time, other people’s lives were at stake, too.
We’re all out here because I told Missy I’d come. If I hadn’t, Dylan and Chevrier would never have gotten on board, they’d have talked Missy out of it, stopped her if need be. Instead
—

Lizzie looked around: deep woods, deep snow. Deep trouble, maybe, too.
Instead, here we all are. And she still thinks I just want to help her. That it’s all I want
—

Maybe it was time to be honest about that. To earn Missy’s trust instead of merely demanding it.

To deserve it, even. “Listen,” she said. “You should know I’ve got my own reasons for being here. For wanting to go on.”

Then she looked at Missy and told her about Nicki: who she was—
my only family in this world
—and that she might be here.

Emphasis on
might
. “So if you want to keep going, I’m in,” Lizzie finished. “Just don’t assume I’ve got your best interests at heart. Because it wouldn’t … it wouldn’t be the truth.”

Damn, that hadn’t come out the way she’d meant it. All she’d intended was to come clean on her own motives, but now from what she’d said, it must seem as if she didn’t care about Missy’s child at all, that all she cared about was her own family.

If I still have any
. And Missy’s reply made her feel even more foolish: “But, Lizzie, we’ve all got reasons.”

Her voice—
even after I just arrested her father
, Lizzie thought;
man, that girl’s made of something. Titanium, maybe
—was full of sympathy.

“Cody wants to arrest Daniel, I want Jeffrey back—”

She glanced toward Dylan, whose motives for being here were less clear to her.
To me, too
, thought Lizzie.

“Anyway, I’m glad for your help, all of you. For whatever your reasons,” Missy finished simply.

Then Dylan spoke up. “Yeah. So don’t worry, Lizzie. No one suspects you of any generous motives. Or whatever it is you’re so worried about.”

His voice was chilly. “By the way, since apparently it’s truth-telling time, I lent my motel room in Houlton to one of the Maine DEA cops last night; she got stuck late on that meth bust.”

He stomped his snowshoes up and down, getting the feel of them again. “When we get out of here, somebody remind me to call her and tell her she can keep it, will you? Because I’m going back to Bangor. I’ve got a case of my own to work.”

So that was it. He was a detective, for heaven’s sake; it wouldn’t have taken much for him to figure out that Lizzie had called his room, heard a woman’s voice, and decided he was lying to her yet again. Probably the DEA cop had mentioned the hang-up, and he’d connected the dots. And now …

Now he’d had the nerve to get his feelings hurt about it.
Yeah, well, you bought that trip, buddy
, she thought at his down-jacketed back as he moved ahead into the darkness.
If you don’t want to be figured for a liar, then don’t tell …

But he hadn’t been lying, had he? Not this time. The truth was, she’d been wrong.

But before she could think any more about that, Dylan put a hand up.
Something up there
, the sharp gesture communicated. She hurried to join him, but as she reached him his arm thrust out suddenly, shoving her sideways into a snowdrift, and then he hurled himself after her.

An instant later the shooting started.

Spud crouched in the lean-to, holding the gun the guy had given him in both cold hands. Behind him in the gloom huddled the woman and the little blond girl, both of them swathed thickly in blankets.

The woman held Missy Brantwell’s baby in her arms. She was spooning some kind of porridge to its lips, rocking the child gently as she did so. The little blond-haired girl looked on, her pale face serene as she rested against the woman.

It all looked so peaceful … or anyway it did until the woman turned her head. By the light of the oil lantern hanging from the lean-to’s ridgepole, the scar on her face was a purplish ridge running diagonally from her right ear all the way to the corner of her mouth.