Winter Prey

screamed at him: “Go, go, go, I’ll be there, get started.”
    “Where . . . ?” The driver stood up, mouth hanging.
    Lucas, not knowing where the ambulance was, shouted, “Go,” and the driver went, across the room, through double hardwood doors into a garage. The ambulance faced out, and the driver hit a palm-sized button and the outside door started up. He went left and Lucas right, climbed inside. The back doors opened, and a white-suited attendant scrambled aboard, carrying his parka, then Weather with her bag and Climpt with his shotgun.
    “Where?” the driver shouted over his shoulder, already on the gas.
    “Right down the frontage road, Janes’ woodlot, right down the road.”
    “What happened?”
    “Guys might be shot—deputies.” And she chanted, staring at Lucas: “Oh, Jesus, Oh, Jesus God . . .”
    The ambulance fishtailed out of the parking garage, headed across the parking lot to the hospital road. A deputy was running down the road ahead of them, hatless, gloveless, hair flying, a chrome revolver held almost in front of his face. Henry Lacey, running as hard as he could. They passed him, looking to the right, in the ditch and up the far bank, snow pelting the windshield, the wipers struggling against it.
    “There,” Lucas said. The snowmobiles sat together, side-by-side, what looked like logs beside them.
    “Stay here,” Lucas shouted back at Weather.
    “What?”
    “He might still be up there.”
    The ambulance slid to a full stop and Lucas bolted through the door, pistol in front of him, scanning the edge of the treeline for movement. The body armor pressed against him and he waited for the impact, waited, looking, Climpt out to his right, the muzzle of the shotgun probing the brush.
    Nothing. Lucas wallowed across the ditch, Climpt covering. The deputies looked like the victims of some obscure third-world execution, rendered black-and-white by the snow and their snowmobile suits, like a grainy newsphoto. Their bodies were upside down, uncomfortable, untidy, torn, unmoving. Rusty’s face mask was starred with a bullet hole. Lucas lifted the mask, carefully; the slug had gone through the deputy’s left eye. He was dead. Dusty was crumbled beside him, facedown, helmet gone, the back of his head looking as though he’d been hit by an ax. Then Lucas saw the pucker in the back of his snowmobile suit, another hit, and then a third, lower, on the spine. He looked at Rusty: more hits in the chest, hard to see in the black nylon. Dusty’s rifle was muzzledown in the snow. He’d cleared the scabbard, no more.
    Climpt came up, weapon still on the timber. “Gone,” he said. He meant the deputies.
    “Yeah.” Lucas lumbered into the woods, saw the ragged trail of a third machine, fading into the falling snow. He couldn’t hear anything but the people behind him. No snowmobile sound. Nothing.
    He turned back, and Weather was there. She dropped her bag. “Dead,” she said. She spread her arms, looking at him. “They were children.”
    The ambulance driver and the attendant struggled through the snow with an aluminum basket-stretcher, saw the bodies, dropped the basket in the snow, stood with their hands in their pockets. Henry Lacey ran up, still holding the gun in front of his face.
    “No, no, no,” he said. And he kept saying it, holding his head with one hand, as though he’d been wounded himself: “No, no . . .”
    Carr pulled up in his Suburban, jumped out. Carr looked at them, his chief deputy wandering in circles chanting, “No, no,” both hands to his head now, as though to keep it from exploding.
    “Where is he?” Carr shouted.
    “He’s gone. The feds better have him, because it’d be hell trying to follow him,” Lucas shouted back.
    The feds called: We still got him, he’s way off-road and moving fast, what’s going on?
    “We got two down and dead,” Lucas called back. “We’re heading back to the hospital, gearing up. You track him, we’ll be with you in ten minutes.”
    Lucas and Climpt took Carr’s Suburban, churned back to the hospital. Lucas stripped off the body armor, got into his parka and insulated pants.
    “Rusty’s truck is around back, right? With the trailer?”
    “Yeah.”
    “We’ll take the sleds,” Lucas said. “Right now we need a decent map.”
    They found one in the ambulance dispatch room, a large-scale township map of Ojibway County. The feds wereusing tract maps from the assessor’s office, even better. Lucas got