Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

She reached behind the knob, felt around, and nodded her head. Pulling the door to, she tried the knob and nodded again when it held. "Okay. Time to go for help. Like you said, Jim needs to know about this, pronto."

"Wait." Johnny fumbled with one of his pockets. "Here. We can trigger this."

It was an orange electronic device the size of a pack of cigarettes. Ruthe took it. "What's that?"

"A PLB, a personal locator beacon. Kate insisted on getting one for me to carry in case I got into trouble in the Park. If I trigger it, it'll send our coordinates and a 911 call via satellite to the local police. That's Jim."

"Clever. And smart of Kate." She shook her head and handed it back to Johnny. "No can do."

"But he could fly out here, and land. There's a wind sock, I saw it on our way in."

"So did I," Ruthe said, "but he's not flying out here in the dark and landing in a place he's never landed before, also in the dark. If you trigger that thing, they'll think we're in trouble. We aren't. No. We go get him."

Johnny hesitated. "One of us should stay here. Make sure no one contaminates the crime scene."

"No," Ruthe said definitely. "I'm not leaving either one of you around here with some nut on the loose with a gun." Impossibly, she grinned, and jerked a thumb at the trailer.

"Besides, I just locked the door to the only warm place to wait."

The journey back down the side of the hill to the valley seemed a lot shorter, but it was well past dark by the time they got to the river. They stopped to gas up the snow machines and wolf down steaming bowls of ramen that Ruthe insisted they take the time to cook on her single-burner Coleman stove. "It's been a long day and we're all tired. We need fuel to get us home. Drink lots of water, too, and keep a bottle handy, tucked in somewhere it won't freeze."

She had them stuff peppermints into their outer pockets. "A sugar hit for the road," she said, "when we start to run out of steam."

"We could stop at one of the villages," Johnny said. "We could," Ruthe said. "I don't think we should. Once the word gets out, there's going to be a stream of rubberneckers up there, and some of them won't stop with looking."

She looked at Johnny. He nodded. "You're right. Best to get the word to Jim as fast as we can. He can fly in tomorrow at first light." He looked at Van. "You want to drive awhile?"

A smile broke through the strained look on her face. "Sure!"

Ruthe. The Gruening River caribou herd. The Suulutaq trailer. Mac. The rush to tell Jim. The attack.

Van.

Vanessa.

He pulled himself inch by painful inch to his knees and looked around.

His snow machine sat twenty feet away. The sled was gone. The sled with all their supplies in it. Memory returned in a terrifying rush.

"Van," he tried to say. "Ruthe." He staggered to his feet. "Van! Ruthe!"

He thought he heard a low moan from one direction and staggered toward it, almost falling over a dark, huddled lump. It was Ruthe. "Ruthe!" he said. He shook her, possibly a little less gently than he should have. "Ruthe!"

She groaned again. In the steadily increasing light of the rising moon her face looked bleached of all color, like a death mask. "Johnny?"

"Yes," he said, almost sobbing. "It's me. Are you okay? Here, squeeze my hands. Good, now push your feet. Good. Good."

"Where's the girl?" she said, raising her head.

He staggered to his feet. "Van! Vanessa! Where are you, Van?"

He found her beneath the lip of the riverbank. She didn't answer his call, she didn't move, and he was shaking so badly from fright and the cold that he could barely pull down her collar to check the pulse in her throat. It beat strongly against his fingers, warming it. "Oh, Van," he said, his head drooping. "Oh, Van."

Her voice was a thready whisper. "Johnny. What happened?"

Her voice, the sense of her words was like an on switch for a fury he hadn't known was there. He surged to his feet and very nearly howled at the sky. "Those assholes jumped us!"

"What assholes?"

"Those assholes on the snow machines!"

She raised herself painfully to one elbow. "I know you're mad, but don't yell, okay?"

Her pitiful little smile melted his heart. "Okay," he said, mastering his anger, not without effort, at least for the present, and dropping again to his knees. "Sorry."

"It's okay. I understand, believe me." Van tried to rise and faltered, putting a hand to her head. "Oh," she said, and then leaned over and vomited in the snow. He tried to help her, to hold her hair out of the way, and then brought her handfuls of clean snow so she could rinse out and off.

She looked up at him and smiled again, this time a little less tentative. "Tell me you don't know how to show a girl a good time," she said.

He surprised himself by laughing. It was a pale effort but it was real.

He got back to Ruthe to find her on her feet. She was wheezing slightly. "Are you okay?"

"Think I busted a rib," she said.

"I think that asshole busted it for you," he said, his anger coming back to a simmer. "Fucker was using a two-by-four."

"I see they took your sled. Why didn't they take the snowgo, too?"

"Not enough drivers, probably. I don't remember really well, but I think there were only three of them, one for each machine."

"Where's mine, then?"

They found it a thousand yards up the river, nose buried in a drift beneath the lip of the riverbank and miraculously still with the sled attached. "I pushed the throttle all the way up, last thing before I fell off," Ruthe said. "It must have got away from them and they were scared they'd get caught if they wasted time looking for it."

"Not as scared as they're going to be when I catch up with them," Johnny said fiercely. The thought of beating on the guy with his own two-by-four was as warming as the fire Van had started next to his snow machine.

He fumbled for the pocket that held the PLB and pulled it out. He held it up and said to Ruthe, "Are we in trouble now?"

Her sleep was made restless that night by dreams of Johnny heading off over the horizon on a snow machine, laughing over his shoulder at her just before the machine carried him over the edge of a cliff. And dreams of Jim, too, although these dreams were less story and more snapshot, Jim kissing her much against her will-really and truly, against her will-the day Roger McAniff went on a killing spree in the Park, Jim crouched behind the bar after getting his Smokey hat shot off during the most recent shoot-out between the Jeppsens and the Kreugers, Jim bleeding all over the floor of Ruthe and Dina's cabin after she'd beaned him with the file box. And bleeding all over her afterward.

She was jerked awake before she got to the really good part, by Mutt's full-throated bark and vehicle lights flashing across the interior of the house. She got up, pulled on sweats, and trotted downstairs. She reached for the.30-06 at the same time she switched on the porch light, which revealed Bobby's snow machine stopped in the yard, engine running, one person dismounting and running to the stairs. A frisson of nameless fear shivered up her spine. She put the rifle back and opened the door. "What's wrong?" she said before Dinah had her foot on the bottom step.

Dinah looked up and without preamble said, "Johnny triggered his PLB. Jim got the word and the location and he's on his way there with Bobby."

Kate ran upstairs and found clothes, ran back downstairs, pulled on bibs, parka, and boots, grabbed her gloves, goggles, and rifle, and ran outside. Dinah had pulled Kate's snow machine out of the garage and Mutt was already waiting next to it. The engine started without fuss, Mutt hopped up behind, and Kate slid the rifle into its scabbard and followed Dinah up the trail, swung wide onto the road, where both women opened up the throttles.