Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

"Is that his last name, or what?"

"First name, of course." He was surprised. He had never visited an Indian reserve where half the men had surnames that had once been somebody's Christian name.

"Where was he when he asked you to wait for me on the ice and shoot down my headlights?"

"At our field headquarters." He was enjoying talking now. He had slowed his delivery, like the drunk who gets you in a corner and holds you by the lapel.

"Don't play games. Where were you geographically, not philosophically?"

"It was the cottage on the island." Now he hesitated, looking up at me as if measuring the odds of my hitting him again. He needn't have worried. Hitting isn't a hobby with me. It's an occasional function I have to attend to, but I don't enjoy it. He looked down at the floor and mumbled, "We were at the cottage where you killed Michael."

More gasping from the women. I ignored them. "Did you arrive at the same time as Tom? And if so, was the man dead when you got there?"

"Tom was there before me. He was examining Michael. Michael's head was a mess!" From the way his voice ran up at the end of the sentence he might have been describing a bad haircut rather than a fatal beating.

"Was the Carmichael girl with Tom?"

"No." He shook his head. His hair had dried completely now and I could see that it was dark at the roots.

"And where had you come from?"

He had come from another motel, just south of the park. He had driven his vehicle there after dropping the women off, and had picked up a skidoo from there. He had gone to the cottage on the island, found Tom, listened to the tale of my villainy, and had waited close to the cut to ambush me and revenge his group. He had waited for the first skidoo. Tom had told him it would be me, that I was too dangerous to tackle in a fair fight, I would have to be taken by surprise.

"Where are the others-Tom and what's his name, Sam?" I asked the one question but I needed answers to twenty. The second one would have been, Why had the three men shown themselves at the Lakeshore Tavern? Why give anybody a clear look at you when you plan to be involved in a crime? The only answer that made sense was vanity. They had enjoyed the limelight of fighting in the bar, never guessing that they would be seen again later. They hadn't expected any real resistance. I wondered if one of them was staked out for me close to the station, waiting for me to come back, waiting with another gun-perhaps a shotgun this time-something that would put me away for keeps.

"I don't know." He shrugged his shoulders, though one of them didn't work. His towel slipped and he gripped it with his good hand.

I pushed him some more, went over the questions again, but nothing new came out. He was scared enough to be telling the truth. Which meant the girl was still missing and that there were two people somewhere outside this cabin who could justify themselves if they killed me.

Neither of the women added anything to what he had told me. Under steady questioning, the younger one said that it must have been Nancy's blabbing that let the People's Revolutionary Guard know what was going to happen. But she herself knew nothing about the Guard. If it was a terrorist group, it was new.

So far in Canada we've been lucky. The only terrorists we've had have been the Quebec F.L.Q., a bunch of Moscow-sponsored hooligans who stirred up the country for a few months during 1970. Our federal government gets all its strength in Quebec and most of the bad boys had been allowed to get away with their murder. They had been given free passage to Cuba, whence they went on to France and came home after ten years to the kind of jail terms you expect for stealing candies. In the meantime, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who had been told to prosecute them, had themselves been arrested and hassled. I guess we don't have terrorists because the other side doesn't have much more to win here.

I gave up and concentrated on the older woman. "You must be 'Margaret.' What's your last name?"

"Sumner." That meant she would be Mrs. I've never met a Sumner on any of the Indian reserves. We have lots of Sinclairs, no Sumners.

"Mrs. Sumner. You understand that this Tom character has killed two men-one with a booby trap, the other one beaten to death. He may also be the person responsible for killing your own group member under the name of Katie at the motel."

"All this is assumption," she said quietly.

"I also know that you and he wrecked Carl Simmonds's house."

She looked away from me, gazing at the stove as if it were a Rodin sculpture. Her profile was toward me and I could see how she had impressed these younger women. There was strength and dignity to her that looked classical.

"I'm not proud of what we did. I just wanted those negatives."

"That's a great comfort to him as he cleans up the damage."

"I'll pay." She glared at me, nostrils pinched. "I'll compensate the little faggot, don't worry."

That surprised me. It was the first heat she had shown. Was she herself a fag-basher? Most women aren't, only insecure men need to thump homosexuals, but there was real hatred in her voice. No, the wild card in the deck was Tom. I turned the topic back to him.

"I need to know where Tom has taken the girl. She's in real danger."

She said nothing and I tried a new tack. "He has already killed, and he nearly killed another one of your group, that girl he stripped on the ice and left to die." That was when Mrs. Sumner laughed at me, a big, genuine laugh right down to her gut, shaking her whole body, making her let go of her head and dangle her arms helplessly.

"You predictable, chauvinist bastard. Don't you understand? He didn't strip her. She volunteered."

My astonishment opened her up like a book. She couldn't tell me fast enough what a fool I'd been. They had seen me overtaking them across the ice, my headlight bobbing along behind. Margaret had been in front and she had stopped close to the fishing huts and made her suggestion to the girl. The plan was for them to leave her where they were sure I would find her, then press on with the lights out, Margaret in the lead. I guess she had the knack of finding her way in the dark better than most people can follow street signs. They would have their lights out, although she had bet that I wouldn't come after them even if I saw their lights, not with a damsel in distress to rescue.

So I had done my Sir Galahad impersonation and they had gotten away and Irv Whiteside was dead. The girl had done her own part by unloading my gun when I left it with her so I would be at a disadvantage next time I needed it.

The two women and the kid in his towel all had a good smirk at my predictability, but I ignored them. If people can still get my attention by expecting me to act humanely, I have nothing to be ashamed of.

When they had made their point, I acted a little humble. It worked. Margaret gave me her version of the story. She was serious about feminist action. They had planned this kidnapping as a rehearsal. They knew about my service in Viet Nam, but with the feminine equivalent of arrogance they had ignored it as a threat. To them it made me some kind of knee-jerk trigger-puller with no brains. I was obviously no match for a subtle group of women. The only fly in their ointment was Nancy's failure to understand she was just the cheese in a mousetrap, not the star of the show. She had bragged about the plan to some boy and he had let it slip to somebody else, and finally a member of this crazy Guard group had heard and wanted in. It would give them some cheap and easy publicity. And even more important, it would give them leverage in their struggle against the arms race. As I already knew, Nancy's father was the president of Astro-Control Systems, the Toronto outfit that made guidance systems for American missiles. Some wild-eyed group had already bombed the plant. Now this new outfit was planning to do by stealth what the others had failed to do with dynamite.