Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

rifle range, and they’d find her trapped like a staked goat. This was not the way she wanted to die. Exposed and helpless. She took a breath and nodded to Rat. “Do it.”
    He wrapped both hands around her ankle and began to pull. Pulled so hard that he groaned with the effort, so hard that she thought her foot would be torn apart. The pain ripped a cry from her throat. All at once her foot wrenched free of the boot and she sprawled backward onto the snow.
    “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Rat cried. She smelled his sweat and fear, heard him wheezing in the cold as he grabbed her under the arms and hauled her up. Her right foot was clad only in a wool sock, and when she put her weight down on it, her leg sank knee-deep in snow.
    “Lean on me. We’ll get up the trail together.” He draped her arm over his neck and grabbed her around the waist. “Come on,” he urged. “You can make it. I know you can make it.”
    But can you?
With every step they took together, she could feel his muscles straining with the effort. If ever I had a son, she thought, this is the kind of boy I would want him to be. As loyal, as courageous, as Julian Perkins. She clutched him tighter, and the warmth of their bodies mingled as they fought their way up the mountain. This was the son she’d never had and probably never would have. Already they were bonded, their union forged in battle.
And I won’t let them hurt him
.
    Their snowshoes creaked in unison, and the steam from their breaths joined in a single cloud. Her exposed sock was soaked, her toes aching in the cold. Bear scrambled ahead of them, but they moved slowly, so slowly. Surely their pursuers could mark their quarry’s progress up the barren slope.
    She heard Bear growl, and she looked up the trail. The dogstood stock-still, his ears laid back. But he was not facing their pursuers in the valley; he was looking toward a plateau above them, where something dark was moving.
    Gunfire cracked, echoing like thunder against the cliffs.
    Maura felt Rat stumble against her. Suddenly the shoulder that had been supporting her collapsed and his arm slid away from her waist. As his knees buckled, she was the one trying to hold him up, but she wasn’t strong enough. The best she could do was to break his fall as he sank to the ground. He fell beside a stand of boulders and lay on his back, as though to make a snow angel. He stared up at her with a look of astonishment. Only then did she notice the splatters of blood on the snow.
    “No,” she cried. “Oh God,
no
.”
    “Go,” he whispered.
    “Rat. Honey,” she murmured, fighting not to cry, to keep her voice steady. “You’re going to be okay. I swear you’re going to be okay, baby.”
    She unzipped his jacket and stared down in horror at the stain spreading across his shirt. She ripped the fabric apart and exposed the bullet wound that had punched into his chest. He was still breathing, but his jugular veins were distended, bulging like thick blue pipes. She touched his skin and felt the crackle of crepitus as air leaked from his chest and infiltrated the soft tissues, distorting his face, his neck.
Punctured right lung. Pneumothorax
.
    Bear bounded back and licked Rat’s face as the boy struggled to speak. Maura had to push the dog away so she could hear the boy’s words.
    “They’re coming,” he whispered. “Use the gun. Take it …”
    She looked down at the deputy’s weapon, which he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. So this is how it’s going to end, she thought. Their attackers had given them no warning, made no attempt to negotiate. The first shot had been meant to kill. There would be no chance to surrender; this was to be an execution.
    And she was their next target.
    Maura rose to a crouch to peer over the boulders. A lone man was moving down the mountain toward them. He carried a rifle.
    Bear gave a threatening bark, but before he could lunge from the cover of the boulders, Maura grabbed his collar and commanded: “Stay.
Stay.”
    Rat’s lips had darkened to blue. With every breath he took, the punctured lung was leaking air into the chest cavity, where it was trapped, unable to escape. The pressure was building, squeezing that lung, shifting all the organs in his chest. If I don’t act now, she thought, he will die.
    She yanked open Rat’s backpack and scrabbled through the contents for his knife. Sliding open the blade, she found it streaked with rust and dirt. To hell with sterility; he had only