Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

But I did the charitable thing anyway. The coffee pot was on the propane stove in the kitchen. I poured two cups and returned to give him one. He took it and sipped noisily, spilling coffee down his bare chest and onto the towel he had finally wrapped around him. I sipped my own, then set it on the table. It was strong and I could feel the effect of the caffeine at once, like a jolt behind my eyes.

I undid my parka, noticing almost with surprise that it was wet from my rescue work, took the gun from the pocket, and slipped out of the parka and hung it over a chair back close to the stove.

"You can sit up now," I told the women. "Crossed-legged, hands on your heads."

They turned over and rolled themselves up, sitting as I told them. The younger one had gotten her own courage back now and she said, "Really, is all this play-acting necessary?"

I kept my voice reasonable but let the anger come through in my expression. "So far, since this kidnapping happened, one of your party has been strangled. A man has been killed with a hand grenade and another man has been beaten to death. You will do as I say or I will take whatever action I deem necessary. Understood?"

She looked at the older woman. "Somebody's dead? Freddie didn't make it?"

"Strangled. And it's not Freddie. She's in custody. It's the woman in cabin six at the motel. Her name was Katie."

I was watching the older woman. You learn to read faces, to pick out genuine reactions from carefully rehearsed responses. Her shock was genuine. Her mouth fell open. The killing was news to her.

The young man was still standing, hunching his back as he pushed himself close to the stove for warmth. I gestured to him. "You sit down, like the others." He did it, moving languidly. His circle might have found it coquettish. He tucked his towel around his front and lowered himself gracefully. He had thawed through and could be trouble.

"You three are going to prison," I told them. "Your little game of hide-and-seek has been infiltrated by real criminals. The best deal you can hope for will come from working with me before anybody else gets hurt." None of them spoke. The older woman looked at me impassively, the boy made a big show of yawning. Only the younger woman looked concerned. I concentrated on her.

"Where have you put Nancy Carmichael? Why isn't she here?"

I studied her face. It was pinched and pale, the complexion of late nights and black coffee and too many cigarettes. Whoever she was, there was nothing joyful in her life. The ideal member for a team like this. But she was slowly getting control of her fears and she did not rush to tell me what I wanted to know. At last it was the other woman who spoke, in a flat hostile voice. "She was supposed to go to my place on the island. When we got there that loud-mouth from the Tavern at the dock in town was there. He'd broken in. He said Nancy had hired him as a bodyguard. Nancy said she hadn't made any such request. So we left him there, sabotaged his machine, and went on."

It wasn't the story Irv had told but there was no way to check it. "Went on where? I already know about the island."

She moved a strand of iron-gray hair away from her eyes, looking oddly young as she did so-a grade-school girl in a wig. I was aware that she had once been beautiful, the kind of peach you find occasionally in out-of-the-way places, like villes I have seen in Nam and Indian reserves.

"We came here. This is our fall-back rendezvous."

"So where's the Carmichael girl? And where's the big heavy guy who went with you to Carl Simmonds's place?"

"They went on."

"Where?" I almost shouted it. "You're dealing with murder here. If the kid is killed you'll die before you get out of the pen. While you've got a chance, help me."

She shrugged. "I can't tell you what I don't know." I didn't believe her. She knew, but she also knew that I wouldn't try to force her to tell. Not a woman. But I was angry enough to turn and grab the young man by the hair and pull him to his feet. His towel slipped and he tugged at it with his left hand, wincing. "Where did you get your instructions to shoot me?"

He decided to play it tough. Except for the whack on the collarbone I had done nothing to let him know I hated his guts. I'd rescued him, given him coffee. Now he was warm and secure and had seen that I hadn't pressed the women. "I have nothing to say to you," he said primly. "You're an enemy of the people."

I cracked him a baseball pitcher's swing across the mouth. It landed like a gunshot and sent him cartwheeling to the corner of the room in a tangle of arms and legs. I went over to him and prodded him with my foot. He looked up, wide-eyed in horror. Nobody had ever explained things to him quite that simply before.

I crouched and spoke to him in a soft tone, the way you talk to mean horses. "We can do this one of three ways," I explained. "You can tell me what you know right now. Or we can take your towel away and sit you out in a snowdrift until you feel like talking. Or I can save time by sitting you on the stove."

He stared at me through honestly terrified eyes. This was the first time he had seen the real face of violence. Up until now it had been a game, as intellectual as chess. Good guys versus bad guys. See the good guys make a bomb. See the bad guys lose. Point made, no harm done-not to the good guys. Now he understood Bennett's Axiom, a rule I had been taught on two continents. Pain hurts.

"I'll talk," he said shakily. And then he added the most surprising comment I had heard all night. "You don't have to torture me. This isn't Viet Nam."

I looked into his eyes but there was no sarcasm there, just fear. "How did you know I was in Viet Nam?"

He waved his working hand, dismissing the question. "We checked this town out from top to bottom before we decided to join in."

"Who's we?"

He straightened up, imperious, except for the purple and white clown stripes on his left cheek. "The People's Revolutionary Guard."

"Is C.L.A.W. some part of the same outfit?" Know your enemy, even if he uses dumb names to throw you off.

He laughed, a condescending, bitter sound. "C.L.A.W. is just a bunch of brainless broads playing games."

The younger woman shouted something. I told her, "Shut up. You can have your turn in a minute." She subsided and I bored in on the kid.

"How many of your Guard are up here tonight?" It was the least he could tell me. I wanted more, names, locations-especially locations-but numbers would be a start.

"Four."

"Names?" I took out my notebook, then realized I had gutted it to start a fire in the fishing hut a thousand years earlier. I looked around for paper and found a writing pad tucked into the top drawer of a sideboard against the wall. "Names?" I asked again, and he began to back off.

"I took an oath."

"Yeah, so did I, but mine is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, so forget yours."

"I can't break it," he said unsteadily.

"If you don't, somebody else is liable to get hurt and the first candidate would be you," I said softly.

He backed away, a pace closer to the stove and the reminder of my threat.

"You heard him." He appealed to the women. "This policeman threatened to torture me. He said he would sit me on the stove. I have to talk."

The older woman surprised me. "Why talk? Say nothing, you scum. I'd like to see you burn."

That ended any play-acting on his part. He gave me the names. His own was Elliot. Really it was Peter Hawthorne, but he had always admired T.S. Eliot so he had taken the name as his code name. Eliot was an English poet, he explained helpfully. I didn't bother explaining that I had read the occasional book. The others were Michael and Sam and Tom. Tom was the leader, the heavy-set mystery man who had trashed Carl Simmonds's house.