Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

Irv reached for his outdoor clothes, a one-piece skidoo suit, extra large, to cover his out-of-place gray suit. I waited while he dressed and pulled on big rubber boots over his shoes. "Have you got any more shells for that rifle?"

He patted the pocket of his skidoo suit. "I already put them in here."

"Load up. You may need that thing."

I left him doing that while I went out back to the tree where I had dumped my showshoes and slipped them on. Irv came out of the back door as I finished. "Wait here," I told him, and stumped out to my snow machine. It was standing in the center of its very own snowdrift, but it started first try. I brushed the snow off the seat and drove up to the front of the cottage. Irv came down the steps to meet me, plunging waist deep in one drift. He climbed on behind me and I asked him, "Which way did they take off?"

He pointed vaguely west and I started off that way, making a big loop first to my left, then right again until I picked up the trail. They had done their best to run Indian file so the track would be less obvious, but it was the only track on the lake not yet covered with new snow. I followed it toward the far shore through the hypnotic dazzle of the snow that was still falling as fast as ever.

The track led straight to the shore line, then turned north until it reached a big older place, one of the summer houses that had once belonged to some lumber baron or other. Right now I wasn't interested in history. I just knew it would be a pig to search, especially if the guy with the gun was alive and well and hiding somewhere inside. I would have given anything to have had Sam with me instead of Irv Whiteside.

I drove right past the place without stopping. Irv was bumping me on the back trying to get my attention, but I just held up my free hand to let him know I'd heard. This was no time for a frontal attack.

We stopped a hundred yards past the place and I switched off the lights and the motor and strapped on my snowshoes. It was hard to talk over the rushing of the wind, but when I was set to go I beckoned to Irv and he leaned close.

"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.