John Sandford - Winter Prey

The Iceman sensed them coming; not so much heard them, but simply knew. Cocked his head up; that was as far as he could move now. But still: if they got him right into town, they could save him. They could still save him.

"Help me," he groaned.

Something skittered away, then returned.

"Help."

Something touched his face; something colder than he was. He moved and they fell away. And came back. Nipped at him; there was a snarl, then a twisting flight, then they were back.

Coyotes. Brought by the scent of blood and the protection of the dark.

Hungry this year.

Hungry with the deep snow. Most of the deer dead and gone.

They came closer; he tried to move; failed. Tried to lift his hand, tried to roll, tried to cover his face. Failed.

Mind clear as water. Sharper teeth at his face, snapping, ripping, pulling him apart. He opened his mouth to scream; teeth at his lips.

Nine deputies were at the scene, four of them as pickets, guarding against the return of Helper. The rest worked over the scene, searching for blood sign and shells, or simply watched. The yellow-haired girl was a bump under a blue plastic tarp. Lacey and Carr stood to one side, Carr talking into the radio. When he signed off, Lacey was looking into the dark. "I still think if we went slow…"

"Forget it," Carr said. "If he's laying up, he'd just take out more of us. Keep the cordon along the road. Davenport got off a half-dozen shots at him, Gene chopped up the woods-I think there's a good chance that he's down. What we need…"

"Wait," Lacey snapped. He held up a gloved hand, turned, and looked northeast at an angle toward the road. He seemed to be straining into the dark.

"What?"

"Sounded like a scream," Lacey said.

They listened together for a moment, heard the chatter of the deputies around them, the distant muffled mutter of trucks idling on the road, and beneath it all the profoundly subtle rumble of the falling snow.

Nothing at all like the scream of a man being eaten alive.

Carr shook his head. "Probably just the wind," he said.

He was on snowshoes, working along the ridges across the access road to his cabin. After the first mile, he was damp with sweat. He took his watch cap off, stuffed it in his pocket, unzipped his parka to cool down, and moved on.

The alders caught at his legs, tangled him. They were small, bushy trees with thumb-sized trunks marked with speckles, like wild cherries. In some places they'd been buried by the frequent snowfalls. When he stepped over a buried bush, his snowshoe would collapse beneath him as though he'd stepped in a hole, which, in fact, he had-a snow dome, held up by the flexible branches of a buried alder. Then he'd be up to his knee or even his crotch, struggling to get back on the level.

As he fought across the swamp, a rime of ice formed on his sunglasses, and his heart thumped like a drum in the silence of the North Woods. He climbed the side of a narrow finger ridge; when he reached its spine, he turned downhill and followed it back to the swamp. At the point where the ridge subsided into the swamp, a tangle of red cedars hugged the snow. Deer had bedded all through the cedars, shedding hair, discoloring the snow. There were pinkish urine holes everywhere, piles of scat like liver-colored.45 shells; but no deer. He would have been as obvious to them as a locomotive, and they'd be long gone. He felt a spasm of guilt. He shouldn't be running deer, not this winter. They'd be weak enough.

His legs twitched, twitched against the pristine white sheets, white like the snow. The winter faded.

"Wake up, you…"

Lucas opened his eyes, groaned. His back was stiff, his neck stretched and immobile in the plastic brace. "Goddamn, I was out of it," he said hoarsely. "What time is it?"

"Four o'clock," Weather said, smiling down at him. She was wearing her surgeon's scrub suit. "It'll be dark in an hour. How're you feeling?"

Lucas tested his throat, flexing. "Still hurts, but not so bad. Feels more like tight."

"It'll do that as it heals. If it gets worse, we'll go back in and release some of the scar tissue."

"I can live with the tight feeling," he said.

"What? You don't trust me?" The.22 slug had entered below his jawbone, penetrating upwards, parallel to his tongue, finally burying itself in the soft tissue at the back of his throat. When he'd tried to inhale, he'd sucked down a flap of loose tissue not much bigger than a nickel and had almost choked to death. Weather had fixed the damage with an hour of work on the table at Lincoln Memorial.

"Trust a woman, the next thing you know, they're cutting your throat," Lucas said.

"All right, so now I'm not going to tell you about the Schoeneckers."

"What?" He started to sit up, but she pushed him down. "They found them?"

"Camping in Baja. This morning. They used a gas credit card last night, and they found them about ten o'clock our time. Henry Lacey called and said the folks don't know nothin' about nothin', but one of the girls is giving them quite an earful. Henry may fly out there with a couple of other deputies to bring them back."

"Far out. They can squeeze them on the other people in the sex thing."

"They? You're not going to help?"

Lucas shook his head. "Not my territory anymore. I gotta figure out something to do. Maybe go back to Minneapolis."

"Hmph," she said.

"Well, Jesus Christ," Lucas said, picking up her change of mood, "I was hoping you'd help me figure it out. One way or another, you'll be around, right?"

"We gotta talk," she said. "When you get out of here."

"What does that mean? You don't want to be around?"

"I want to be around," she said. "But we gotta talk."

"All right."

Shelly Carr knocked on the door. "Visiting hours?" He had a wool-plaid hunting cap in his hands, with earflaps.

"Come on in," Lucas croaked. Carr asked, and Lucas said he felt fine. "What's the word on Harper? Weather says you found his truck."

"Yeah-out on a lake. There's a big collection of fishing shacks. Lot of people around there. We think he might have met somebody, got a ride so we couldn't put out a bulletin on his license. God knows where he is now, but we're looking."

"You look pretty good," Lucas said.

"Got some rest," Carr said.

"Have you talked to Gene again?"

"Yeah. He's still up at your cabin," Carr said. "He just sits up there and watches television and reads. I'm kind of worried."

"He needs professional help, but there's no chance he'd talk to a psychiatrist," Weather said. "Big macho guy like that, no chance."

"Yeah, well… I know where he's at," Lucas said. "It's like the Church. If you don't believe, it won't do you any good to go. He's gonna have to work it out himself."

"The whole thing was odd," Carr said. "He was okay until he went to her funeral. He shouldn't have gone, I told him that."

"He might of had to," Lucas said.

"Yeah, I know," Carr said reluctantly. "But as soon as he saw her face, that was that. I mean, she looked like an angel. You know about his daughter."

"Yeah."

They sat for a moment, not talking, then Carr said, "I gotta go." He whacked Lucas twice on the leg. "Get better."

When he was gone, Weather said, "Shelly's doing all right politically. Lacey's made sure that everybody knows about him walking up the driveway to deal with Helper."

"Took some balls," Lucas said.

"And somehow all the dead people are just… dead. Seems like nobody really talks about it that much. It's been less than a week."

"That's the way it goes," Lucas said.

"Did you see the paper?" she asked.

"A nurse brought it in this morning, just after you left," he said.

"Great picture, Shelly with the FBI guys, taking credit," she said. "Kind of made me mad."