I locked her away and called Val out into the front of the station to bring her up to date on what had been happening. She was afraid. The situation was heating up. The tension had awakened the bad moments from the time her husband had been killed. Like most people she did not realize that evil is almost always selfish and casual. The people involved in giving pain don't consider their victims as people, they don't climb outside their own heads at all. They do whatever they want and are puzzled when the judge or some social worker asks them how they could have done it. Val had swallowed that fact along with the last of her tears for her husband, and now she was tasting its bitterness.
I promised to be back as soon as I could and I took down the station shotgun and checked the load. "You've got Sam. He can disarm anybody in a flash. And you've got the gun. If you want, I'll call the Legion and have some old soldier come down here and stick around," I offered.
"They're probably too drunk to know what's happening." She tried a tough little grin. "Don't worry. I'll be fine."
I kissed her on the nose and winked at her. "Right back. I'm going to follow up those tracks." I knew she was right about the men from the dance. If I asked for one I would get twelve, and they would be in no shape to do much more than blunder around roaring. I would move quietly and more efficiently on my own.
The wind was blowing just as hard and the snow was sifting down fine as flour. There's a local saying, "Little snow-big snow," and tonight was proving the point. We were going to end up with two feet before the night was over. I tramped back through the big drift to the garage behind the station. There was a five-gallon can of gasoline there, and something even more important-my snowshoes. I brought them out to the machine, topped up the gas tank, and clipped the snowshoes each side of the seat on the brackets I'd had installed. If the machine broke down, I would be able to tramp back over the snow without dying of exhaustion.
I cruised back into town, staying in the middle of the road. The force of the wind had drifted snow over much of the track I'd made a quarter-hour earlier, and I wondered how much I would find on the icy trail I'd been following when I encountered Freddie. But I had a hunch the others had been heading straight for shelter. And that meant I was looking for one of only a dozen or so cottages in a straight line from the last track I had been following.
I ran through town, past the Tavern, past the marina, past the line of ice sculptures that had been built during the week. The sculptures were obscured by snow, but I could pick out Carl Simmonds's effort, an eight-foot Mickey Mouse, and I grinned. Trust Carl to do something other than madonnas and snow queens and castles. He would win tomorrow. It might give him some consolation for the wrecking of his home.
I decided to follow my hunch. I would retrace my track out to the ice huts, then head north from there until I found a cottage with snowmobile activity around it. When I did, I would break in and check. It would mean I would lose the case in court. In a warm room, miles and months removed from the reality of tonight, some smooth lawyer would pillory me for violating somebody's rights. But I didn't care. I wasn't out to win cases or popularity contests. I wanted Nancy Carmichael safe. Let the lawyers scream. The people of Murphy's Harbour would back me up. They'd done it before.
I ran up the road around the lake, to the point where I had come up out of the bush and headed for town. I ducked back through the trees and out onto the ice. Going on instinct and my knowledge of the lake, I drove out to the ice huts where I had found the girl. By now the snow had been falling long enough to obliterate most of the skidoo tracks I had found earlier. Without them to follow I was more careful, remembering now what the locals had taught me about the ice in this area. Somewhere above the narrows, close to the place where the C.L.A.W. people had taken to the lake surface, there was a long open section. Some quirk of the current prevented it from freezing completely, although occasionally a treacherous inch or so of ice would cover the gap. Murphy's Harbour people referred to it as "The Cut" and could name the last dozen or so men to go through it. Most of them had been snowmobilers, but one Indian trapper had gone through and so had an exuberant drunk who had driven his pickup out to the ice huts and then had attempted to take a short cut back to Murphy's Harbour. He was still down there somewhere, in his steel coffin; the divers had never managed to locate him.
But I was confident now that I was heading north, away from the cut. I thought ahead as I drove, remembering which cottages lay on this course and what I knew about their owners. I drew the map of the lake in my mind, marking out any places that were winterized. I had checked them all a week ago, making sure none had been broken into. Some were still in use-a group of four or five on the east side of the lake, just south of the narrows, and another one on Frog Island. And that was the recollection that made me reach forward and switch off the headlights.
There was one cottage on the island, a big rambling clapboard place like a beach house on Cape Cod. It stood on a rock at the southeast corner of the island. What made it important was the owner, someone I had met once last September on a morning I had paddled my canoe up there along the reed beds. The owner had been out in a solid flat-bottomed little boat with a Remington pump-action shotgun and a limit of mallards. Duck season was open, the sight was not surprising except for one detail. The owner was a woman and she fit the description both C.L.A.W. members had given me of their society's matriarch.
I swung my snowmobile half left on a course that would take me three hundred yards downwind of the island, far enough from it that they would never hear my motor above the roaring of the wind. I reached forward and switched off the headlight so nobody would see me coming and dropped my speed. Now that I no longer had to follow tracks it was easy to drive. I watched ahead for bumps or holes and steered by the pressure of the wind coming at me from my right. My eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. The dark was almost worth being free of the hypnotic corkscrewing of the snow coming into the headlight. And suddenly the black whale-bulk of trees loomed on my right front quarter.
I coasted to a stop, put the key to the engine in my pocket, and unclipped my snowshoes from their brackets. I didn't need them on the hard surface of the ice so I tucked them under my arm until I came to the first long drifts in the lee of the trees. The snow had gathered into tapered piles that would have been pretty in bright sunlight if I'd been carrying a camera instead of a Colt.38 in my gloved hand.
I went around the island into the teeth of the wind until I reached the edge of the marsh that gave the place its name. All the frogs were four feet under the ice right now, oblivious to the cold. I almost envied them as I pushed my gun back in my pocket and crouched to slip my boots into the snowshoe bindings. I use Indian-style attachments, loops cut from an old truck inner tube. They don't look as fancy as the leather buckles you get when you buy new snowshoes from Canadian Tire, but you can slip them over your boots without taking your gloves off, and that's worth any esthetics you have to sacrifice. Besides, you can slip them on or off in seconds.
The drifts were up to eight feet high behind the rocks on the edge of the marsh, but I stamped up over the top of them, sinking in less than knee deep. By the time I reached the old snow on top of the rocks I was sinking only a couple of inches. The snow was thinner there and my snowshoes snagged every few steps in the blueberry bushes underneath. I lifted my feet higher and placed them more carefully, but still stumbled. I swore as I fell, but in the same instant I saw the wicked orange eye of a muzzle flash wink at me from a window of the cottage.
I hit the snow rolling, all my soldier's instincts taking over automatically. It was harder in my parka than it had been in my combat fatigues in Nam and the snowshoes were almost impossible to turn, but I shucked them quickly and tossed them against a tree where I would be able to find them again if I had to.
All this took about ten seconds. I jumped up and ran four steps before pitching myself down and rolling again. A bullet sang off a rock behind me and scythed its way through the branches of the pine trees.
I was below the ridge of the rock now, too low for anyone at the window to aim at me. But whoever was there fired again. I listened to the sound and assessed the weapon. It sounded like a heavy rifle, possibly a.308, big enough to kill a bear, plenty big enough to finish me. I crawled monkey fashion along to the left, toward the back of the cabin. The snow yielded under my hands and I was nose down in the coldness of it. I snorted quickly, blasting it away from my eyes and mouth. I was cold enough already, I didn't need any more problems.
The crawl brought me to a point in line with the corner of the cottage. It would have been impossible for anyone to hit me from the first position from which I'd been fired on. There was only a small window beside the back door and it looked as if there was not much room inside to maneuver a long gun.
I crouched there for a moment, running over my alternatives. I tried the first one and it failed. "Police. Chief Bennett. Stop firing!" I shouted. In return I got a high angry shout that I couldn't understand and two more shots, which I could. I stayed low and thought some more.
It seemed to me that the person inside was alone. Otherwise someone else would have moved to the back window and taken a shot at me from there. Of course, there was a chance that the second person was there but didn't have a gun. Then I remembered the Remington pump the woman had used. I wasn't anxious to take any chances against a cloud of shot, even bird shot.
I checked my surroundings as my night vision improved, the way it does under stress. There was a stack of firewood under a tarpaulin against the back door. I thought for a moment about tossing a log through a window, then racing to a different one while the rifleman followed his reflexes. It didn't make sense. I couldn't just dive through the window. I might go headlong into the stove or down the cellar steps or break my head against a table. I had to bring the people inside the cottage out. And I had to do it now. I couldn't run for help. That would take hours. The gunman would be gone, possibly forever. And another thing. Ever since Nam I have had a hatred of being shot at without returning fire. In combat, it would have been simpler. I would have rolled up alongside the window and tossed in a couple of grenades. After the explosion I would step in and hose down anything that still moved. Then consolidate, a few meters beyond the house.
I lay and pondered what I could use instead of grenades and the M16s of the other guys in the team. And as I lifted my head for a cautious glance, a sudden downshift in the wind filled my nostrils with the smell of burning hardwood. Of course! The place was heated by a stove.
Keeping low, I ducked behind the woodpile. Like most cottage woodpiles up here it was made up of neat birch logs cut from trees thin enough that the logs did not even need splitting. Each was about eighteen inches long. I eased three of them out of the back of the pile and stuffed them into the front of my parka, flinching as the wind struck through the open front. Then I ducked past the pile to take a look alongside the west side of the cottage. I was in luck. There was a maple, rare this far north, against the house. No doubt it had been left there because it added to the charm of the place. There was even a bird feeder hanging close to the house.
I thought for a moment. The feeder meant there was a window there, which could mean another gun. I knelt and drew out one of my birch logs. I threw it with all my force against the back door. It clattered there like a clumsy attempt to break in. Without waiting, I stumbled through the snow to the maple and swarmed up the trunk on the side opposite the cottage. The thickness of the tree might just save me from a first shot. I clenched my stomach muscles instinctively against the possible deadly crash of a bullet from the hunting rifle. None came. Within seconds I was above eye level from the window and swarming out on a branch that overhung the roof. Snow flopped off the branch onto the roof and I kept going, hoping nobody inside would hear it above the wind and guess what it meant.
The branch bent under my weight, bowing down within three feet of the roof, about ten feet below the crest. I let myself down gently onto the roof, praying that my weight would not start an avalanche and warn those inside that an ex-Marine was trying to take the high ground. As I touched the roof I began to slide but kept hold of the branch and used it as a lever to inch my way up to the peak. The chimney came out through the center and I made for it. The round, insulated metal pipe warmed my face with glorious heat as I sat there straddling the peak.
The chimney was covered with coarse chicken wire to discourage birds or raccoons from exploring while the owner was away. It was a problem for me but I pulled out my clasp knife, holding my right glove in my teeth as I sawed through a few strands until I could fold the wire back out of the way. The heat was intense but I managed the job without dropping knife or glove. I snapped my knife shut and slipped it into my tunic breast pocket and pulled the gloves on quickly. My hand was blistered but I didn't care. I knew now that I could win.
The birch logs in my parka were not quite big enough for my purpose. I thought for a few seconds, debating what to do, then tugged off my fur hat and held it in my teeth while I flapped up the hood of my parka and snapped it as tightly as it would go around my face. This was no time for frostbite. I slipped my log into the hat and quietly forced it into the chimney. The heat and smoke stopped at once and I eased myself backward until I was straddling the roof at the back of the house. So far I was lucky. Nobody had heard me. But when they realized what was happening they might try to loosen things up by blazing a few rounds through the roof, hoping to pierce the chimney and put themselves out of the misery I was causing. I didn't want to be in the way. I wanted to be Br'er Rabbit, sitting in the clear, waiting for things to develop my way.
It took almost ten minutes. I sat patiently, my head bowed so the wind struck the top of my hood and was deflected from the bare skin of my face, my hands tucked under my armpits for warmth. I was cold in the legs and feet, but it was bearable.
The break came as I had expected, with two quick shots up through the roof. One of them caught the edge of the chimney and weanngggged away harmlessly. And then I heard a commotion at the front door. I pulled out my last piece of birch and threw it just past the edge of the roof so it fell on the verandah in front of the door. It clattered down on some bare spot where the snow had not settled. The commotion stopped. Then came the sound I had been waiting for, glass breaking at the side of the house next to the maple I had climbed. I strained my ears in the wind and heard the gasping and coughing of a person starved for air. I guessed that he thought he would try to fool me by staying away from the doors, but when the window hadn't opened, he had panicked and smashed it.
I cocked my leg over the roof and made myself into a toboggan, sliding down the roof to the edge where I caught my heel in the eaves trough, stopped, turned over onto my stomach, and dropped the rest of the way to the ground. I saw the head sticking out of the window and grabbed it, pulling the person out until he was rocking over the sill on his stomach.
"Try anything and you're dead," I said in a low voice. He squirmed helplessly and I hoisted him the rest of the way over the sill, out of the thick smoke that poured out around him, choking me even outside in the air. It was not until I had finished blinking away the tears that I realized who I was holding.