Winter Prey

spoke into the radio. “We’re here. We can see a snowmobile parked in front. No other vehicle. The windows are lit.”
    Any sign of life?
    “Not yet. There’re lots of lights on.”
    Carr: We’re here—we see you guys on the road.
    Feds: Nothing’s come out.
    Carr got with the agents. Deputies would block County Y in both directions. Others would filter into the treeline and occupy the abandoned chicken house in back of the Harris home.
    We’re talking about how long we wait for him. What do you think? Carr asked.
    “Not long,” Lucas said into the radio. “There’s no vehicle here. I don’t see any fresh tracks, but I can’t see the other side of the yard. It’s possible that he dumped his sled and took off on another one before we got here.”
    The feds have some kind of shrink on the line. He could call. We got some tear gas coming.
    “Talk it out, Shelly. Talk to the hostage guy. I’m not a hostage specialist. All I can do from here is ambush the guy.”
    Okay.
    A moment later Carr came back: We’ve got a pickup coming in. Stand by.
    Two minutes later, from Carr: We’ve got Rosie and Mark Harris in the pickup. They say their sister’s in there, Ginny Harris. They say Helper’s seeing her, not Rosie. They say there weren’t any other vehicles there. They’ve got only this pickup and a sled, and the sled’s in the back of the pickup. So they must be inside.
    “So we wait?” Lucas asked.
    Just a minute.
    Lucas sat in the snow, watching the door, face wet with melting snow, snow clinging to his eyelashes. Climpt was thirty feet away, a dark blob in a drift, his rifle pointed up into the storm. He’d rolled a condom over the muzzle to keep the snow out. From the distance, Lucas couldn’t see the color, but back at the farmhouse, where Climpt had rolled it on, it was a shocking blue.
    “Got neon lights on it?” Lucas had asked as they got ready to go out.
    “Don’t need no lights,” Climpt said. “If you look close, you’ll notice that it’s an extra large.”
    Lucas, we’re gonna have Rosie call in. We can patch her through from here. If Helper answers, she’ll ask for Ginny. That’s the young one. She’ll tell the girl to go to the door when Helper’s doing something, and just run out the front and down the driveway. Once she’s out, we’ll take the place apart.
     
    Lucas didn’t answer immediately. He sat in the snow, thinking, and finally Carr came back: What do you think? Think it’ll work?
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said.
    You got any better ideas?
    “No.”
    There was an even longer pause, then Carr:
    We’re gonna try it.

CHAPTER

28
    The Iceman sat on the couch, furious, the unfairness choking his mind. He’d never had a chance, not from when he was a child. They’d always picked on him, victimized him, tortured him. And now they’d hunt him down like a dog. Kill him or put him in a cage.
    “Motherfuckers,” he said, knuckles pressed into his teeth. “Motherfuckers.” When he closed his eyes, he could see opalescent white curtains blowing away from huge open windows, overlooking a city somewhere, a city with yellow buildings covered with light.
    When he opened his eyes, he saw a rotting shag rug on the floor of a double-wide with aluminum walls. The yellow-haired girl had put a prepackaged ham-and-cheese in the microwave, and he could smell the cheap cheddar bubbling.
    They’d set him up. They knew he’d done the others. The knowledge had come on him when he saw the deputies coming back, the knowledge had blown up into rage, and the gun had come up and had gone off.
    He had to run now. Alaska. The Yukon. Up in the mountains.
    He worked it out. The cops would call on every outlying farm and house in Ojibway County. They’d be carrying automatic weapons, wearing flak jackets. If he holed up, he wouldn’t have a chance: they would simply knock on every door, look in every room in every house, until they found him.
    He wouldn’t wait. The storm could work for him. He could cut cross-country on the sled, along the network of Menomin Flowage snowmobile trails. He knew a guy named Bloom down at Flambeau Crossing. Bloom was a recluse, lived alone, raised retrievers and trained cutting horses. He had an almost-new four-by-four. If he could make it that far—and it was a long ride, especially with the storm—he could take Bloom’s truck and ID, head out Highway 8 to Minnesota, then take the interstate through the Dakotas into Canada. And if he stuck the