Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

I dragged him back well clear of the cut, and pulled him to his feet. He was tall, big enough to be trouble when he dried out, and I still had to move him with me on my snow machine. Because he had already tried to kill me and might do so again I did what I had to, clinically. As he stood staring at me, teeth chattering, I drew my stick and chopped him hard on the brachial plexus of his right arm. He yelped and held the place with his left hand, but his right hung limp. He would not be a threat for an hour or two.

"Try anything funny and I'll immobilize your other arm." I meant it. He was getting off lightly. "Now run." I shoved him and he turned and started stumbling over the ice, holding his dead right arm in his left hand, toward the light of my snow machine.

I ambled after him and reached the machine before he did. He got on behind me, holding timidly with his left hand onto my shoulder. I started away, trying to recreate the map of the lake in my mind. The point he meant was north of us on the clear ice, north of the cut, about a quarter of a mile away. By the time we got there his clothes would be an icy suit of armor and he would be close to frostbite or pneumonia. I had to move fast.

I gunned away, keeping straight and careful so he could hold on. His teeth were chattering just behind my ear and he was making a small whimpering sound like a spanked child. I didn't expect any trouble from him.

I followed parallel to the crack in the ice all the way to the shore line, realizing that they had known I must do so and had set up the ambush accordingly. I wondered if they had a second layer of defense. They hadn't, and I turned left, heading north. "Point the place out," I shouted over my shoulder.

After a minute or so he started shaking my shoulder, then swayed nervously as he let go with his left hand to point awkwardly around me. "Over there. Look." It was a two-story place set close to the water. There were lights in the downstairs windows. That meant they were not expecting me. They were waiting for their boy to come back with the news that he had wasted me so they could all raise their glasses and toast the revolution. Then they would come out and tie my body to my snow machine and push it through the ice. I would never be found. The perfect crime. Except that I had survived and was here, ready to shoot anybody who tried to finish what my prisoner had started.

I decided on boldness. They would be expecting their own man to come back, lights blazing. As far as they were concerned, this was his machine. I slowed, then stopped to pull out my gun and reload all the chambers. I would have words for the woman in my second cell when I got back to the station.

With the gun loaded I pulled off my right glove and gripped the Colt properly. Then I told the prisoner, "Get off. Walk in front and don't do anything to let them know I'm with you. If you do, I bust your head."

He was so rigid with cold that he could barely get off the machine and his teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak. I jabbed him with the gun, hard. I wanted him terrified of me. I didn't know how many people were inside or how well they were armed. If I could cancel him, out of fear, it was one less variable to worry about.

He started up the steps from the dock, bent over like an old man with the rigidity that had set in during our short ride. Nobody had noticed our arrival. Or if they had, they hadn't put on any outside lights. He stumbled and I prodded him again, in the kidney. He was too cold to feel much but he moaned and tried to move faster up the steps. I saw there was only one skidoo outside the door. It had been driven right up the rock that sloped out of the lake. It had been parked in the lee of the building and was almost free of new snow. I wondered where the other machine could be, and what its absence meant in future trouble.

As we reached the door I prodded my guy one last time and growled at him, "Open it up and say nothing. Understand?"

He nodded, a tight, tuning-fork tremor of his head. We passed in front of the window, me crouched as low as I could, out of the line of sight. He reached the front door and fumbled with it, his frozen left hand hardly able to press the latch.

He opened it, and then the inner door, and I was struck with the sudden, ridiculously fragrant aroma of hot coffee. He stepped into the room, the big main living room of the cottage, and I shoved him aside, tripping him so he sprawled helplessly on the rug, and swept the room with a glance. There were two women sitting there but neither one was Nancy Carmichael, and I swore. These were not the women I wanted. I wanted Nancy.

Where's the girl?" I shouted it and they shrank back, open mouthed with fear and surprise. "The girl, Carmichael. Where is she?"

The older one spoke then. She was perhaps fifty-five, and I recognized her as the duck hunter I had seen months earlier at her own place on Frog Island. She was short and growing heavier with middle age but she had an olive complexion and a patrician look that would have commanded respect anywhere, even among people who knew she was full-blooded Ojibway and not a Roman countess.

"I don't know. She went with the man," she said. She was shaken. They had obviously expected me to be out of their lives for keeps. Now here I was, risen from the dead, waving a gun and spoiling their plans. And I was angry enough to shake anybody.

"Who else is in this cottage, besides you people?" I kept my gun on them and the younger one looked first at her partner, then at me, wondering where to find direction. She was trembling, while the older woman had become calm again. It was the older one who said finally, "There's nobody here. Do you want to search the place?"

"Yes. You come with me. You others lie on the floor and put your hands on top of your heads. Face down. Do it!"

The man I had brought in was glad to be where there was warmth. He squirmed close to the stove and lay there in a cloud of steam, his bare hands stretched out to the heat. I should have warned him they would be agonizing when they thawed out but he didn't care, not yet.

The younger woman knelt, then flattened herself as I had said. I turned to the older woman. "Go in front of me and don't get cute. There's three people dead already. I don't mind making it four."

"We're alone here," she said. I could tell from the vibrato in her voice that she was scared, but she did not show it in any other way. She was a tough lady.

"Lead the way. Open each door in turn and take two steps inside." She went ahead of me, first into the kitchen and the bathroom on the ground floor, then upstairs to each of the three bedrooms. I looked under all the beds, in the closets. There was nobody there. As we started down the stairs I could see that the two people in the living room were lying the way I had ordered them to, so I pushed my gun back into the holster pocket. "Draw all the drapes," I told the woman. She did. "Right. Now you get down on the floor like the others."

She did and I walked into the bathroom and pulled out all the towels I could see. I threw them to the man. "Here. Strip and dry yourself." He reached up and caught them clumsily with his left hand. I studied him more closely. He was young, perhaps twenty-three. He had blonde hair a little too long, an intellectual's cut. He was lean but not hard, a man who watched every mouthful he ate but never exercised. He stood up and stripped, still shivering. He made no attempt to conceal his nakedness from the women and it confirmed what I was beginning to think. He was not interested in them. Women were nonpersons. I saw that he had a good tan except for a bikini-sized patch at his loins. He was well-off. January tans are rare in Murphy's Harbour, except for the brown, burned faces of the bush-workers. Jamaica isn't on our circuit. And he had a petulant look about him, a droop to the corners of his mouth. I didn't like anything about him.