Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Her shout roused Bob. He rolled onto all fours and swayed back and forth, his eyes never leaving her. For an instant, she thought he was going to charge like a grizzly, and the fear of being torn apart by teeth made for grinding corn sent a jolt of fear through her that brought the bile to her throat. His eyes focused, and he pulled himself to a standing position, using the tree he’d been taking advantage of since he’d fled the cliff’s edge. Upright, he looked no less like a grizzly and no more like a man.

Blinking the image away, Anna tried to rise. She failed.

Bob Menechinn walked toward her. He was unsteady on his feet, but she thought his eyes were clearer. If Adam administered the ketamine awhile before Anna arrived on scene, the stuff might be wearing off – or at least wearing thin.

“Give me a hand up, if you would, Bob,” Anna said, hoping normalcy would beget normalcy. She stuck out her good hand. Bob reached down and grasped it firmly. Apparently without effort, he drew her to her feet.

Anna started to thank him, but he kept right on drawing her, pulling her into his chest and belly.

“Easy, easy, Bob,” Anna said. “Enough. Enough. Back off, God dammit.” Her face mashed into his parka and his arm crushed her bad shoulder into him. He held her like a lover, his other hand groping down her side, under her arm.

Fighting a revulsion that made the pain pale by comparison, Anna jerked a knee toward his groin, stomped his instep and scraped his shin with the side of her boot. It was like struggling in a dream. Thick-layered clothing swathed them both, and she fluttered like a moth in the soft and killing folds of a spiderweb.

His big hands crawled over her body, pulling at her clothes. Then he stepped back and shoved her hard in the chest. Anna landed on her rear end so hard that, without the padding she’d just been cursing, she would have broken her tailbone.

He held up a rectangle of black and waggled it back and forth. He’d been frisking her for her radio. As she watched, he carried it to the cliff edge and threw it over.

She didn’t ask what he was doing. She had a bad feeling; she knew. He plucked the skis out of the snow one by one, then the poles. They followed the radio over the escarpment.

Displaying the same ease with which he’d lifted her, Bob set the snowmobile to rights. The key was still in the ignition.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Pardon?” Anna asked politely, hoping to get him to come closer to her. What she would do, should she succeed, she had no idea, but there was nothing she could do from thirty feet away, and she knew, if she could rise again, it was going to take a while.

“You heard me,” he said. He threw a leg over the seat of the snow-mobile and reached for the ignition key.

“Yeah,” Anna said to stop him leaving. “Sure, I’m scared. What kind of an idiot wouldn’t be scared.”

He sat back and smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing a smile uncoil as slowly as Bob’s did. It came over the lower half of his face, then rose to his eyes in the malicious sunrise of the day of Armageddon.

“You and Robin thought it was pretty funny when Ridley’s pet monster was pawing at our tent, didn’t you? Smirking like teenage cunts at a sleepover. Let’s see you smirk now. Come on, one little smirk. What’s the matter, ice got your tongue?”

Anna stared at him. Adam was dead, Katherine killed, Robin missing and this was what Bob was thinking of: that two women had seen him panic.

“Smirk,” Anna said.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” Bob said, his smile still in place.

Anna’s legs were hurting. Soon they would stop hurting. They would be completely numb. Then standing would be a bitch. “Okay,” she said. “I can smirk. What’s it worth to you?”

“Maybe a ride back to the bunkhouse. Maybe nothing.”

“Deal,” she said. “I’m only going to do it once. Get your fat ass over where you can get a good look,” she said nastily. The insult moved him off the machine. Anna’s left hand was shoved in her pocket. She worked it out of its glove.

“Women want balls now, that it? Fast-tracked into jobs you can’t handle. Scraping babies out of your cunts because you fuck everything that moves and don’t want to be mamas. You don’t want to wear the pants. No, that’s not good enough for you, is it? You want to have the cock. No more pretend. No more strapping it on and fucking your girlfriends. A real cock. You think you can take it right off a man, don’t you?”

Bob was working up a good head of steam. The euphoria of the cat tranquilizer was double-edged, and the dark side was rising. He stopped eight or ten feet from her.

Too far.

“Well, I wouldn’t take yours,” Anna said scornfully. “Size does matter.”

Bob stepped into her, almost straddling her. He grabbed her hood and jerked her head up. His fist went back.

And Anna’s went up. Bare-knuckled and hammer-hard, she punched up into his crotch. Her fist buried itself in cloth and soft flesh. Bob screamed and fell, crashing down on his side, his gloved hands between his legs. Scooping up snow, Anna flung it in his face, curled her fingers into claws and launched herself at his eyes. Her shoulder cracked again as she bounced into his chest, and she knew she’d broken the floating end of the collarbone. Her vision blacked at the periphery.

Bob backhanded her. As easily as a grown man would throw a cat off, Bob knocked her off him. One hand still on his privates, he crawled away. Confused by the ketamine and the sudden assault, he took a minute or more to get his bearings. Then he stood and went back to the snowmobile. From beneath the seat, he took out a spanner used to tighten the tractor treads and started back to where Anna lay on her back, holding her arm across her chest.

“Bob, you’re not guilty of murder, but you kill me and you will be,” Anna said rationally – or as rationally as she could from a supine position. Maybe I should have tried the rational approach before he’d gone for the spanner, she thought, but that was blood under the bridge now.

“I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to have an accident. ” He grabbed her right boot, jerked it off and pulled her sock down. Holding the bare foot against the snow-covered rock, he smashed her ankle bone with the wrench.

Through the haze of misery that followed, Anna heard the snow-mobile motoring down the Greenstone.

Winter was going to do Bob’s dirty work for him.

For a while, there was nothing but the blinding pain and the knowledge that she could not save herself; that she couldn’t walk out. Had the thought of losing to an idiot like Bob not been anathema, Anna might have given up. Instead she opened her eyes; she sat up. With her uninjured hand, she hooked the boot Bob had jerked off and put it back on her foot. If one was going to die, it was important to die with one’s boots on. Soon the ankle would begin to swell. Then even the bulbous Sorel wouldn’t fit over it.

Put ice on it, Anna thought and almost smiled.

The glove she’d removed, the better to bust Bob’s balls, was still in her coat pocket. Wriggling her fingers like so many eels, she worked her hand into it. Then she sat, exhausted by the pain, wishing she believed in God that she might convince Him to get back into the smiting business. Without a radio, there was no one else she could call upon.

For what seemed an eternity, she sat in her broken bones and cooling blood and thought about Paul. It had been so good to talk with him.

On Katherine’s satellite phone.

“Thank you, Paul,” she said. The phone was in her pocket. She’d been carrying the wretched thing since she’d found it. Fumbling, twice dropping it, she got it out and again exposed her fingers to the cold. In CONTACTS, Katherine had the number for the Park Service offices in Houghton, Michigan. Anna pushed the SEND button and mashed the phone to her ear.