Winter Prey

feet,” she said.
    “You’re gettin’ kinda bossy, ya little cunt,” Harper said. But he crossed his feet. She taped them in a minute.
    “Now your hands,” she said. Harper looked at the gun, shrugged, and crossed his hands. “Behind you.”
    “Goddammit.”
    When he was taped, she stood up and looked at the Iceman. “Got him,” she said.
    “Go check,” the Iceman said, tipping his head toward the door. “Go a half-mile up the road, both ways.”
    “What . . .” Harper began.
    “Shut up,” said the Iceman.
    “Listen, motherfucker . . .”
    The Iceman stepped close to him and hit him with the stock of the shotgun. The blow caught Harper on the ear and knocked him off the couch.
    “You mother—” Harper groaned. He struggled to get up. The Iceman put a foot on his head and pressed. Harper thrashed, but the Iceman rode him, giggling. The girl pulled on a snowmobile suit, boots, ran out the door and started the snowmobile. She was back in five minutes.
    “Nobody out there,” she said.
    “Is the tape strong enough to hold him?” the Iceman asked. He was sitting on Harper’s head, Harper cursing weakly.
    “That’s all I got except for some of that paper tape,” the yellow-haired girl said. Then brightened. “There’s some wire that Rosie was gonna use for clothesline.”
    “Get it. And some pliers.”
    They wrapped the soft steel wire around Harper’s wrists, and the yellow-haired girl turned it until Harper started toscream. “Fuckin’ hurts, don’t it,” she said to him. She took three more turns, saw blood.
    “Careful,” the Iceman said. “Cops look for blood.” Blood is evidence.
    She nodded, and carefully wired his feet, wrapping it all the way to his knees. “That’s got it,” she said.
    The Iceman stood up. Harper lay still for a moment, then tried to get to his knees. When he was halfway up, the Iceman kicked him in the middle of the back, and he pitched over on his face. “Motherfucker . . .”
    “Hurts, don’t it,” the yellow-haired girl said, squatting next to him so she could look in his eyes. His eyelids flickered, showing the first sign of real fear. She reached down into his underpants. “You know what I think I’ll do?” she asked playfully. “I think I’ll get a knife and cut your dick off. How’d you like that?”
    The Iceman, climbing into his snowmobile suit, said, “We don’t have time to fuck around. You know how to get there?”
    “Meet you in ten minutes,” she said, intense, excited.
    “Take it easy in the dark,” the Iceman said.
    Harper was thrashing on the floor again, managed to roll onto his back, tried to sit up. He was bleeding from his nose. The Iceman stooped, caught the wires between his ankles, and dragged him across the room, through the front door, down the porch. The yellow-haired girl was on the Iceman’s snowmobile, waved, and pulled away. Harper’s head banged off the stoop, and the Iceman pulled him through the snow to Harper’s own truck, picked him up with some effort, and threw him in the back. Then he went back inside, gathered up Harper’s clothes, got the truck keys, and went back out.

    The trip to the sandpit took seven or eight minutes. The Iceman took the right down to the pit, pulled off the road into the area beaten down by deputies’ trucks when they’d found the Mueller kid. He climbed out, walked around in back, dropped the tailgate, and jerked Harper out of theback, letting him fall to the ground.
    “You still alive?” he asked as Harper groaned. The temperature was below zero; in his underwear, Harper wouldn’t last long. The Iceman dragged him around into the truck headlights as a snowmobile curved in from the trail. The yellow-haired girl stopped beside the truck and got down.
    Harper, on his back, his face a mask of blood, spit once and then croaked, “You kill Jim?”
    “Yup. Enjoyed it,” the Iceman said. “Fucked him first.”
    “Thought you might of,” Harper said. He thrashed for a moment, then began to weep, his body heaving. The Iceman walked back to the snowmobile, pulled his snowshoes off the rack, stepped into them and clipped them over his toes.
    The yellow-haired girl was standing over Harper, watching him, her hand in her pocket.
    “Got your gun?” the Iceman asked.
    “Yup.” She’d had it in her hand, and she pulled it out of her pocket.
    “So shoot him.”
    “Me?” Harper tried to roll, but just managed to get facedown. She stared in fascination at the