Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

She tried again, this time shoving her hand against his chest. She managed to roll away from his arm, but Ross reached out and caught her arm before she could get away.

“What are you doing? Let go, Alan! It isn’t funny.”

From a distance it might have looked like a dance. Astaire and Rogers. The man in the long coat leaning back slightly to hold the weight of the woman at the end of his arm, the two of them arching backward like a pair of wings opening up. But there was nothing graceful in the sudden appearance of the black iron rod. Or in the way that it came down on the woman’s head over and over and over.

Nothing graceful at all.

MEGAN WAS UNABLE to get a signal. The last she’d spoken with Malone, he was still stuck in the snarl of vehicles around the accident. Megan had taken Route 27A to avoid the mess. Even there, she had passed several tow trucks on either side of the road, securing a pair of cars on their beds.

She pulled to a stop in front of Alan Ross’s driveway. She could make out tire tracks in the snow leading up to the garage. The garage door was closed. Megan decided to keep her car where it was and approach the house by foot. The wind was gusting hard, and when Megan opened the car door, a blast of whipping snow stung her in the face.

There were no lights on in the house that Megan could see. She knelt down to inspect the tire tracks. They seemed fairly fresh, the tread marks still quite distinct, not covered with any appreciable snowfall. The car that had made them could not have been here for long.

Approaching the garage, Megan made out two sets of footprints leading around the side of the house. She followed them through a wooden gate, where they led into the spacious backyard. As Megan moved forward, crouching somewhat so she could follow alongside the two pairs of footprints, she was unable to clear from her mind the evening-just over a year before-when she had located the Swede on his houseboat at the marina in Sheepshead Bay. Walking stealthily down the pier in the dark, placing her feet with the silence of a cat, her heart thumping hard in her chest, just like it was doing now. She tried to will the memory to recede, but it refused to budge.

Through the blowing snow, Megan could make out a small dark structure. The footsteps appeared to head in that direction. A boathouse. As she moved forward, a light appeared briefly in one of the windows. A brief, buttery flash and then it was gone. Then it happened again. A flashlight. Someone was waving a flashlight around.

Some hundred feet from the boathouse, Megan froze. The footprints in the snow stopped being parallel pairs and the snow became a scramble, like a cluster of failed snow angels. Several feet beyond, there was something dark on the snow. Megan knelt down and scooped up a handful of the dark snow. She touched the fingers of her other hand to the snow, and they came away darkened.

Megan wiped the bloody snow off against her coat and blew into her cupped hands, then reached to her hip holster and unfastened the safety strap. Her pistol felt heavy. She felt like she was palming a lead brick. Megan’s heart was no longer simply slamming in her chest; it seemed to have expanded to fill her entire torso. No need to step softly, as the snow would muffle her footsteps. She plunged forward. The darkness on the snow ran in smears, alongside a wide track, the imprint of a body being dragged. Megan ran her arm across her eyes to clear the blowing snow. She heard a voice letting out a fearful whisper. It could only be her own.

Helen.

ROSS WAS GOING to take the Boston Whaler. He’d have preferred the Chaparral, especially in this sort of weather, but the sleek runabout wasn’t wise for his purposes. Though not without effort, he’d be able to paddle the Whaler out into the ocean some distance before turning over the engine. That was one consideration. The other, frankly, was cleanup. What he had to do was going to be messy. The Chaparral had white leather seats, cream-colored cushioning, the padded dashboard. Much easier to mop down the Whaler.

Ross couldn’t wait until this whole stupid episode was over. All he wanted was to get the mess over with and go inside and crawl into his bed. Grabbing the prone body of Tracy Jacobs by the arm and dragging her along the dock beside the Whaler, Ross glanced up through one of the boathouse’s windows, where he could see the rear of his house, see his bedroom window. He was shocked to see that a light was on. For an instant, panic flooded his system. Slow, he told himself. It’s probably just a timer. Focus. One thing at a time, you know how this has to be done.

He thought of Cynthia. That one hadn’t been planned. There’d been no time for the sort of organization that he prided himself on. After it was concluded, yes, sure. A quick minute to think things through. The bit with the hand over the heart. A smart move. The others had been more to his liking. Problem. Plan. Execution. In Ross’s view, a smart person could accomplish anything he set out to accomplish. Anything. You just had to be the one in control of the situation. Plan. Execute. And make sure your ass was covered. Life was so simple, really, it was laughable.

Ross didn’t know whether the young woman was alive or dead. It didn’t matter. She was out cold, that was the important thing. It was her own fault, those several extra hits with the crowbar. She’d just been so fucking irritating . And not just now but in general. All he’d done for her. He’d given her a life , for Christ’s sake. If only she’d remained on her side of the country.

Ross paused and looked at the battered head at his feet. He thought he might throw up. He hadn’t needed to hit her that hard. It was Fox, dammit. He was the person to blame for all this. Marshall and his insatiable ego. And Cynthia, of course. The both of them. What Ross still marveled at was how in the world those two had managed to pull off their affair without Ross knowing. The secrecy, and especially the betrayal, that’s what was so infuriating. How many times had Ross made a complete ass of himself in front of Cynthia Blair, begging her, begging her to take his feelings for her seriously? She had no idea how urgently she had mesmerized him. No idea at all. She never listened properly. She never heard . Cynthia had said she was “flattered.” Who the hell cared about flattery? Alan Ross flattered people every day of the week; he could flatter a cement wall if he had to. Cynthia didn’t understand. He had to have her. This wasn’t a negotiation, it was a requirement. It was a need . Ross had groomed Cynthia at the network. He’d watched her grow and develop. He’d helped train her, helped her to sharpen her skills, to put the bite into her work. And hadn’t it paid off when he brought Marshall onto the scene? His two creations? His creations. Cynthia owed him. Big-time. Ross treasured the dynamic he and Gloria had established in the industry. They’d become a true power team. But that was Act One. Ross wanted the intoxication again, this time with Cynthia. He needed it. He needed to do it all over again, with fresh supple blood. If Cynthia played her cards right, she was definitely going places. Ross planned on going there with her, as simple as that. And if patience was what it required, he was prepared to remain patient. Power comes from action; it can also come from patience.

What Ross hadn’t been prepared for was running into Cynthia leaving Marshall’s building in tears one night the previous April. He had not been prepared for their walk through Central Park and her confession of her affair with Marshall. She’d allowed Ross to hold her, to keep his arm around her as she told him the squalid details. The words had moved about in Ross’s head at precarious angles, crashing into one another. Marshall. Lovers. Affair . Cynthia had allowed Ross a closeness like never before. She had told him she trusted him more than anybody else in her life, that his coming along at that precise moment was a miracle. The two had traveled arm in arm along the southern portion of the park, past the boat pond, pausing at the Alice in Wonderland statue, so creepy in the moonlight. Especially the Mad Hatter, with his large bony nose and his bad teeth. They’d moved on, traveling north, pausing at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, where Cynthia had said she had something else she needed to tell Alan. Something more important to her than anything else in the world and that he had to promise not to breathe a word to anyone. This was something she would be handling in her own way. She had already made her decision, she said, and she was ready to live with the consequences. In fact, she was overjoyed with her decision. Taking hold of Ross’s hands, Cynthia had placed them on her stomach and held them there. Her touch sent an electrical current jolting through Ross’s system. He dared to massage her belly, ever so lightly. His fingertips kneading her pliant flesh. Then she smiled at him. Ross had never seen Cynthia smile like this before. Angelic.