Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

The tracks turned off on top of those I had left earlier and I slammed up beside the cottage door and jumped onto the snow, clicking off the safety from my shotgun. I opened the back screen door, not even checking to see if it was wired, and fired my first round up through the glass of the back door into the ceiling above. I heard a yell of alarm from inside and I reached in and unlocked the door.

The Elliot kid was standing facing me. He had his pants on, but the cuffs had kept him from dressing further and he had a towel over his shoulders. There was no sign of anyone else.

"On the floor," I told him. He got down, but slowly, sneeringly. I knew I was in the right place. I prayed I was still in time. "Who else is here?"

He grinned even more broadly, half bowing mockingly. "Simply everybody," he said, and I heard a woman's voice shriek, "Reid! He's holding a knife on my neck."

Two sounds blended. One was a cackle from Elliot, the other was a man's voice telling me, "She's right, Bennett, put the gun down."

I kept the gun, swinging it toward the voice, which came from upstairs. "I'm putting nothing down until I see my policewoman is all right. If she isn't I'll blow your legs off." I tried to keep my voice even. I was a businessman making an offer.

"We're coming down now," the voice said. I heard the stairs creak, then saw Valerie coming toward me. I was debating whether to drop the shotgun and draw my pistol, hoping for a shot at his elbow on the arm he must be holding up to menace her throat. But he was too clever even to give me that opportunity. He was holding her hair, pulling her head back, and the knife and his arm were out of sight behind her. "He's got it in my back now," Valerie said. Her voice was high and scratchy. I could see a thin red line along her throat. He had marked her, letting her feel the sharpness of the knife. "Put the gun down," he said again from behind her.

"What if I say no?"

"Then the next thing that happens is I push this shiv into her." He let that hang before going on, "Not to kill her. I'll hit her in the neck so she'll be a basket case. You want that?" I looked at Val. She had shut her eyes and her lips were moving softly. I knew what I had to do. If she had been a policeman or another Marine in the same situation I would not have surrendered, but she was a trusting woman in a situation she could have avoided by staying at the Legion and leaving me to play copper on my own.

"All right. You win." I pointed the gun at the floor and worked the action, spilling out the shells on the floor. "There." I tossed it aside and Elliot jumped past me to grab it, then grovel for the shells, stuffing them back into the magazine.

"One's enough. Cock it and hold it on him." The man had straightened up now behind Valerie. He was dark, with an unkempt beard, but his clothes were expensive. I judged him to be five-eleven, two hundred pounds, and he looked mean. He pushed Valerie to one side and she sprawled away from him onto the couch. Then he flipped his knife, a neat little motion that made it circle once and thunk into the panel wall.

Elliot was holding the gun on me, aiming at my stomach. The other man came forward, staring at me as if I were in a zoo. He stayed clear of the gun. I had no chance to swing him in front of it and throw him at Elliot. I kept my arms by my side. "The kid's back with her parents," I told him. "It's all over."

He snorted. "All over. Hell, it ain't hardly started yet." I studied him, trying to make out the face to compare it with the photographs of terrorists and most-wanteds that the R.C.M.P. put out. I couldn't recognize him. I could see that he had a slabby usefulness to his build. He had been a manual worker at one time. There were tiny black pits on his face. I figured he had worked in the coal mines but I couldn't pick out any regional accent-not Nova Scotia nor Alberta nor any of the Yankee states.

He reached out to the kid. "Keep the gun on him, Elliot, but bring it here." Elliot handed it over, never letting the muzzle waver. I had no chance to move. When the older one had the gun he said, "Put your hands on your head, Bennett."

I did it, slowly, wondering why he was using my name. He might have learned it in a briefing before all this began, but in a normal situation like this he would have called me "pig" or "copper." This was almost personal. I wondered why, and how the news could help me.

He told the kid, "Look on his belt, he'll have keys for them cuffs." Elliot took a step toward me but Tom stopped him. "Work from behind him, this is a mean one, this is a real he-eero."

Elliot wasn't smirking now. He came behind me and felt around under my parka until he found the key ring on its chain. I felt the tugging as he uncuffed himself. "Now put them on him. Crank 'em up good, we wouldn't want him getting too comfortable, would we?"

I hoped he would cuff my hands as they lay on top of my head-that would mean I could bring them down in front of me, a tiny advantage, but Tom was too clever for that. "Hands behind you, Bennett," he said.

I lowered them and Elliot snapped the handcuffs over my wrists. I was splaying my fingers, pulling my hands up into my sleeves, but he carefully pulled the sleeves back and clamped the metal on my bare arm tight enough to cut the flesh.

"Done," he said triumphantly. It hurt but I was grateful that he had not cuffed me around something. I would be mobile, at least, handicapped as I was.

"That's good." The dark guy grinned, a humorless parting of his lips, a crinkling of the small amount of skin I could see outside his beard. His eyes stayed cold as the night outside. Now he pushed the gun under his arm as if he was going hunting. I weighed the odds. It would give me an extra second but I needed more. He was eight feet away and I was slowed by the handcuffs, they pulled my shoulders back and dulled my edge. I knew he would step back a pace if I moved and cover me, perhaps even shoot. I had to wait for a better chance. I needed a clear kick, at least.

He reached behind him for a chair and sat down, gun on his knees, looking at me. "You don't remember me, do you?"

"Should I?"

"Yeah. I think you should. You cost me six years of my life, you know that?"

I fed his face through my memory again. How many men have I sent to prison? How many of them looked like this man had, years earlier?

"Six years. In Millhaven, mostly. And that ain't no summer camp, you know that."

Now I remembered. My heart thumped hard. Millhaven, Canada 's toughest maximum-security prison. Tom? Tom Burfoot. He grabbed ten years on an extortion charge. Extortion, nothing. It had been a dynamiting group. The year I joined the Toronto Police Department after three with the Marines. They put me undercover, infiltrating a group that had started up to copycat the successes the F.L.Q. had scored in Quebec. They had claimed they were revolutionaries, but that story was a scam. They were booked for straight violence, bombing restaurants and movie houses to collect money for their cause. None of the money was recovered. Tom had spent most of it on vacations and on betting at the track. They had been very skillful. Their bombs were dirty, filled with scrap metal and soaked in oil to tattoo survivors forever with black scars. Fortunately only one of the bombs had been set while people were in the restaurant. Only one man had been wounded seriously, the owner. He lived his last few years in a wheelchair, fewer years than this man had spent inside.

"Yes, I remember you."

"Ever been in Millhaven?" He asked it casually. I shook my head. The longer he talked, the looser he would be, the more chance I might have to rush him.

"Yeah. It's where they put the bad-asses, all of them. There's a bunch of bikers in there. They hang together, run the drugs, hand out the punks."