Winter Prey

more of us. Keep the cordon along the road. Davenport got off a half-dozen shots at him, Gene chopped up the woods—I think there’s a good chance that he’s down. What we need . . .”
    “Wait,” Lacey snapped. He held up a gloved hand, turned, and looked northeast at an angle toward the road. He seemed to be straining into the dark.
    “What?”
    “Sounded like a scream,” Lacey said.
    They listened together for a moment, heard the chatter of the deputies around them, the distant muffled mutter of trucks idling on the road, and beneath it all the profoundly subtle rumble of the falling snow.
    Nothing at all like the scream of a man being eaten alive.
    Carr shook his head. “Probably just the wind,” he said.

CHAPTER

31
    He was on snowshoes, working along the ridges across the access road to his cabin. After the first mile, he was damp with sweat. He took his watch cap off, stuffed it in his pocket, unzipped his parka to cool down, and moved on.
    The alders caught at his legs, tangled him. They were small, bushy trees with thumb-sized trunks marked with speckles, like wild cherries. In some places they’d been buried by the frequent snowfalls. When he stepped over a buried bush, his snowshoe would collapse beneath him as though he’d stepped in a hole, which, in fact, he had—a snow dome, held up by the flexible branches of a buried alder. Then he’d be up to his knee or even his crotch, struggling to get back on the level.
    As he fought across the swamp, a rime of ice formed on his sunglasses, and his heart thumped like a drum in the silence of the North Woods. He climbed the side of a narrow finger ridge; when he reached its spine, he turned downhill and followed it back to the swamp. At the point where the ridge subsided into the swamp, a tangle of red cedars hugged the snow. Deer had bedded all through the cedars, shedding hair, discoloring the snow. There werepinkish urine holes everywhere, piles of scat like liver-colored .45 shells; but no deer. He would have been as obvious to them as a locomotive, and they’d be long gone. He felt a spasm of guilt. He shouldn’t be running deer, not this winter. They’d be weak enough.
    His legs twitched, twitched against the pristine white sheets, white like the snow. The winter faded.
    “Wake up, you . . .”
    Lucas opened his eyes, groaned. His back was stiff, his neck stretched and immobile in the plastic brace. “Goddamn, I was out of it,” he said hoarsely. “What time is it?”
    “Four o’clock,” Weather said, smiling down at him. She was wearing her surgeon’s scrub suit. “It’ll be dark in an hour. How’re you feeling?”
    Lucas tested his throat, flexing. “Still hurts, but not so bad. Feels more like tight.”
    “It’ll do that as it heals. If it gets worse, we’ll go back in and release some of the scar tissue.”
    “I can live with the tight feeling,” he said.
    “What? You don’t trust me?” The .22 slug had entered below his jawbone, penetrating upwards, parallel to his tongue, finally burying itself in the soft tissue at the back of his throat. When he’d tried to inhale, he’d sucked down a flap of loose tissue not much bigger than a nickel and had almost choked to death. Weather had fixed the damage with an hour of work on the table at Lincoln Memorial.
    “Trust a woman, the next thing you know, they’re cutting your throat,” Lucas said.
    “All right, so now I’m not going to tell you about the Schoeneckers.”
    “What?” He started to sit up, but she pushed him down. “They found them?”
    “Camping in Baja. This morning. They used a gas credit card last night, and they found them about ten o’clock our time. Henry Lacey called and said the folks don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, but one of the girls is giving them quite an earful. Henry may fly out there with a couple of other deputies to bring them back.”
    “Far out. They can squeeze them on the other people in the sex thing.”
    “They? You’re not going to help?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Not my territory anymore. I gotta figure out something to do. Maybe go back to Minneapolis.”
    “Hmph,” she said.
    “Well, Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, picking up her change of mood, “I was hoping you’d help me figure it out. One way or another, you’ll be around, right?”
    “We gotta talk,” she said. “When you get out of here.”
    “What does that mean? You don’t want to be around?”
    “I want to be around,” she said.