Authors: Ted Wood
Murder on Ice (12 page)
"I want to go round the back of that place with the tracks. How good are you with that rifle?"
"Not bad," he said automatically, then remembered I could prove different and added an apologetic, "Not usually, anyhow."
"Good. I want you out in front of the place, where you can see the top windows. Give me five minutes. Then loose off a round that hits the roof line. Don't shoot the window out, there may be some poor innocent bastard inside and you'll kill him. I just want you to get everybody diverted. Can you do that?"
He by God could. I patted him on the shoulder and said, "Count to five hundred." Then I jogged clumsily on my showshoes over the lake snow and up the slope, about a hundred yards north of the cabin. I was lucky. The original rich owner had owned enough of the shore line that there was no other building around to confuse the issue. I cut through the wood, ducking under the snow-laden branches of the second-growth spruce near the shore. Then I was up on smooth rock at the level of the cottage. After my experience with Irv, I was careful to keep my silhouette always against the trees, even though the snow was so thick I could hardly have been seen anyway. The flakes stung my face, biting at me endlessly as if I were under a carefully directed dry shower.
It took me four minutes to get close to the cottage. The first thing I saw was a light in the window. I inched forward, checking for some sentry posted outside. That's where a soldier would have waited. But these people weren't soldiers. There was nobody there, no track in the snow. What was more, I couldn't see any snowmobiles on the back or north sides of the house. I would have checked all around but it was getting close to Irv's time and I wanted to be in position.
I waited the remaining forty-five seconds, hunched against the wind, blinking away the gritty snow. Then I heard the smash of Irv's rifle and the angry buzz of a ricochet off the high front of the house. There was a thirty-second silence, then a second shot, closer this time. Irv was creeping up on his target, letting off some of his anger by blasting the house.
I crept closer to the window and peeked in from a yard away. It would have been a dumb thing to do normally, but I could see no disturbance in the snow outside. Nobody had booby-trapped the window to snare eavesdroppers. The room was like the interior of a thousand other cottages. Heavy wooden furniture, propane lamps, two of them lit. A bookcase filled with the kind of soft-backed junk people read on holiday, a pretty good rack from a white-tailed deer. No people. I wondered if our birds had already been and flown. And if so, why were the lights burning? I kicked off my snowshoes, took out my flashlight, and went to the back door. There was a heavy old screen door on the outside and I could tell from the pie-slice depression in the snow that someone had opened it that evening. It must have been an hour or so earlier, the depression was drifting in. And there were no footprints away from the door.
I stood and thought about that for a moment, wondering what had happened. Had someone inside made a run to escape, then been caught at the doorway and dragged back inside? It was not logical that anybody had come to the back door, there were no tracks there except my own. I flashed my light around in the snow as Irv loosed off his third round in front. I was looking for stains in the snow, a sign that someone had emptied a coffee pot or a man had relieved himself here. But there was nothing. I straightened up and gave three long whistles through my teeth. After a couple of repeats, Irv responded and then came out of the snow, rifle at the ready.
"It looks like they've gone," I told him. "But they've been here, or somebody has, inside the last couple of hours. I'm going in."
"Good idea." He held the rifle in his left hand and swung his numbed arm against his side a couple of times. "I'm goddamn freezing."
He reached out for the storm door but I stopped him. "Don't touch it yet, I'm not sure what's going on here."
He shrugged, a vague, disinterested move in the dark. "You worry too much, y'ask me."
"It's kept me alive so far." I went around the corner of the cottage. There were no lights on this side, no disturbances in the snow, either. I crept up to the closest window, ducked under and past it, then reached up to the corner closest to the back of the house and shone my light in. Nothing happened. Nobody shot at my light. I relaxed a touch and straightened up to peer in and check the inside catches. I was lucky. It was a single-glazed casement made up of six panes of glass. I pulled my glove tightly on my right hand and punched out the pane closest to the handle. Then I reached in sideways to the window as I unfastened the catch. It was that turn that saved me. I was a narrow target, hunched into my fur hat, my collar raised right to the edge of the hat covering my entire bare skin from harm when the blast hit, showering me with broken glass from the remaining window panes. I fell to the ground, rolling instinctively close to the wall for shelter while my head unscrambled. My eardrums were saved by my leather hat but both ears were deaf.
I pulled off my right glove and drew my gun. Then I stood up and hoisted myself over the window sill into the room. In the flashlight beam I could see it was a bedroom and the door was blown in toward me, broken off its hinges. I guessed what had happened but ran forward anyway, through the familiar smell of explosive smoke into the kitchen. The back door of the cottage was flung in shreds around the room. Outside in the snow I could see the ruin of the storm door and the bloodstains that told their own story.
Irv Whiteside was dead. The blast had taken him waist high. One leg was severed, the other hanging by a clotted strand of flesh. His entrails were spread around him. I stood for a minute, playing my flashlight over him as if the beam were a magic wand that would put him back together again. Shocked as I was, I knew what had caused those wounds. He had walked into a booby trap, something triggered by opening the storm door. And by the mess he was in, I knew what had been the device at the heart of it. Those wounds came from a fragmentation grenade.
I
've seen a lot of men killed. Some of them the same way as Irv Whiteside, literally blown away. But they were all guys who knew the odds. They didn't like them but accepted the thought that a mortar shell could land close enough to leave nothing behind but their boots. It didn't make things easier, they lived with fear the way civilians might live with toothache, but they weren't innocent the way Irv had been, the way a two-year-old is when it totters out onto a highway. It made his death more sad, made me more angry.
I brought him inside where the foxes and raccoons wouldn't insult his broken body any further. There was a plastic snow shovel leaning against the woodpile and I used it to pick up everything I could find. It took longer than I wanted. So did the task of slipping the hinge pins off an inside door and wedging it into place in the damaged door frame of the back door.
I began to concentrate on the people who had booby-trapped the cabin. If they had access to grenades they were part of something far better organized than C.L.A.W. It was impossible to know what their mission was, but it had nothing to do with winning free ink for Nancy Carmichael. And then I remembered, some of her father's money came from a company in Toronto. The company made missile systems, including one for the American missile that had brought out the peace-lovers on the city streets. Maybe the kidnapping was all a scam. Carmichael was the target.
I put the spread from the bedroom over the mess that had been Irv Whiteside and then stood for a while, looking down at the body and wondering what to do next. A million thoughts needled me, distracted me. I realized that the murderer must have fastened the grenade to the door frame with a line from the pull pin to the outside door. He had opened the outside door once to check how much line he needed so that a man would open the door without thinking, without enough time or light to recognize the clack when the lever flew away and the last four seconds of his life started. The murderer had planned it so the pin would be out and the fuse working while the person was still opening the door, his body fully exposed to the blast without even the inadequate pine boards of the outer door to shield him. The cloud of steel fragments would hit him from two feet away at waist height. A one-hundred-percent kill.
Slowly I moved Irv out of my mind and started assessing priorities. These people were professional haters. They had killed twice, almost three times. They would not hesitate to use Nancy Carmichael as a bargaining tool. They would not hesitate to kill her if they decided there was a need to do so. I had to find her right away. Nothing else mattered. Not revenge for Irv's death, not rest or sleep or extra armament. Nancy Carmichael was in real trouble and I was the only one who could save her.
I debated with myself before I reached that conclusion. I recognized that nobody would have blamed me for giving up, going to the phone and calling for help which would not reach me before noon at least, for going back to the Legion and bringing up a dozen volunteers, old men who weren't as able to handle the cold and exposure as I was. Doing that would have been logical and safe, and totally useless. No, I was on my own, without even Sam to help me. If the girl was in danger, and I thought she was, the danger was immediate. A delay would bring me to her after she was dead. I had to find her. But how? Were she and the others all somewhere along this row of cottages? Or had they gone out to the highway and the car the man had used to drive the two C.L.A.W. women to the park? Whichever it was, they were somewhere else while I stood in a rising smell of broken guts, handling the guilt for responsibility for Irv's death.
I checked the door one last time. It would not hold against a bear, but if I could get back within a day or so it would stay in place against the shoving of foxes or other vermin. I went out, opening the front door carefully in case it too was boobytrapped, and put on my snowshoes, which were lying in the snow.
Irv's footprints led me back to my machine and I started it, hunching down against the everlasting snow, still wondering what to do next. I had one real murderer against me and a couple of very tough women.
I started back, staying on the lake ice, the details chasing one another through my mind as endlessly as the beads on my mother's rosary. I needed someone to talk to. I have an assistant, a young Indian kid called George Horn. He's tireless and intelligent and eager, but this month he was tending his family's trap line. If he were here instead of curled into a shelter somewhere, it would be good to sit and thrash out possible scenarios, to try and make some sense of the night. I was too close to everything, the lead hound of the pack, so close to the fox's brush I couldn't see where I was heading. I needed perspective and I needed time, but there wasn't any time to spare.
I drove carefully, keeping to the east shore of the lake, far enough out to be clear of the weak patches of ice where springs bubbled out of the shallows, warming the water and thinning the ice above treacherously. The trees of the shore line broke the wind for me and I began to feel almost warm, drowsy. My chin was pulled down into the collar of my parka and the scorched leather hat was tight over my ears. I was tired and shaken, and the numbness that follows the death of a comrade, even a cherry guy you never got a chance to know, was pulling me into myself. I was traveling fast but time seemed extended, as if I were on some kind of high. Every thought seemed to take minutes to pass through my head and the machine seemed almost stationary, although I was clipping along at close to thirty, watching the ice surface ahead.
And then I realized what I had to do. It was my only chance and I would have done it earlier if I hadn't been so hell-bent to chase down the kidnappers along their own skidoo tracks. I turned the machine half right and pushed out over the center of the lake toward the cottage where I had left Nighswander. He would be conscious by now—sore, but able to talk. Maybe he wouldn't want to, but I was in no mood for playing games. If necessary, I would convince him.
I was running by guesswork, concentrating on my thoughts, and might have missed the whole island if I had not suddenly found myself staring at a crack in the ice dead ahead, a black break in the play-back of light from my machine as it bored through the corkscrewing snowflakes. I'd found the cut. I swung further right, and I must have run half a mile when I saw the trees loom in front of me. I had reached my island after all. As I approached it, still thirty yards clear of the crack in the ice, I recognized the configuration of the rocks at the south end, to my left.
I pulled in beside them, tucking the machine up close to the vertical surface where nobody could come at me as I put my snowshoes on. It's only in Roy Rogers movies that guys leap on other guys from fifteen-foot heights. It doesn't happen in the snow, in the dark. I was safe against my rock.
I took off my right glove and put my hand deep in my pocket, cradling the .38 Colt. It would have been foolish to draw it, numbing my hand with cold. A quick draw isn't important. A clean, accurate shot is, and that would have been impossible with my fingers frozen. I did not use my flashlight. It seemed to me that the snow in front of the cottage was more broken than I had left it. It was not smoothed over the way it should have been after an hour or two of steady snow. That made me hesitate. Had they come here, too? Had they set up another frag trap for me? And if they had, would they have used the same mechanism? I kept low and made a complete circuit of the cottage. The light was still burning in the room where I had fought Nighswander and left him cuffed to the log box. No other lights were lit. I crouched by the back door for a few moments, wondering how best to go in.
At last I made my decision. I had an advantage that Irv Whiteside had never earned. I know grenades. I have thrown my share of them. I know you've got a count of four to get out of the way when the pin is pulled and the lever flies away. In four seconds I could be around the corner of the cottage and flat on the ground where splinters wouldn't hit me. I decided to try it.