Winter Prey

like the thing to do at the time,” he said.
    She walked back into the living room, looked at the damaged walls, and said, “I’m really cranked, Davenport. Pissed and cranked. I’m gonna have to reschedule the hysterectomy I had going this morning . . . maybe I can push it back into the afternoon. Jesus, I’m wound up.”
    “You’ve got about two quarts of adrenaline working their way through your body. You’ll fall apart in an hour or so.”
    “You think so?” She was interested. “Hey, look at the holes in the walls—my God.”
    She called the hospital’s night charge nurse, explained the problem, rescheduled the operation, unloaded then reloaded her .22, asked Davenport to demonstrate his .45, went repeatedly back to the buckshot holes, poking at them with an index finger, going outside to see if they’d gone through. She found three holes in her leather couch, and was outraged all over again. Lucas let her go. He went into the kitchen, made a bowl of chicken noodle soup, ate it all, went back into the living room, and fell on the couch.
    “What about the shots you fired? Could you have hit somebody across the lake?” she demanded. She had the magazine out of his .45 and was pointing it at her own image in the mirror over the fireplace.
    “No. Some people call a .45 slug a flying ashtray. It’s fat, heavy, and slow. It’ll knock the shit out of you close up, but it’s not a long-range item. Fired from here, on the level, it wouldn’t make it halfway across.”
    “Any chance you hit him?” she asked.
    “No . . . I just didn’t want him swarming through the door with the shotgun. I might of got him, but he would have got us, too.”
    “God, it was loud,” she said. “The shots almost broke my eardrums.”
    “You lose a little high-frequency hearing every time you fire one without ear protection, and that’s a fact,” Lucas said.
    She ran out of gas. Suddenly. She stopped talking, came over and slumped next to him on the couch.
    “Snuggle up,” he said, and pulled her down. She lay quietly for a moment, her back to him, then started to softly cry. “Goddamn him, he shot my house,” she said.
    Her body shook with the anger of it, and Lucas wrapped his arm around her and held on.

CHAPTER

13
    The Iceman rode wildly across the frozen lake, off the tracks, a plume of snow thrown high behind the sled when he banked through the long, sinuous turns that would take him to the Circle Lake intersection. He could see police flashers streaming down through the town, but couldn’t hear them: and they certainly couldn’t see him. He was running without lights, his sled as black as his snowmobile suit, invisible in the night.
    The gunfight had surprised him, but not frightened him. He had simply seen the truth: not tonight. He couldn’t get at her tonight, because if he stayed, if he fought it out with whoever was inside—and it was almost certainly the cop from Minneapolis—he could be hurt. And hurt was good as dead.
    Time time time  . . .
    He was running out of it. He could feel it trickling through his fingers. Davenport and Crane had taken something out of the LaCourt house, and it was almost certainly the photograph. But they had sent it to the lab in Madison: maybe it had been ruined in the fire after all. He’d talked to the cops who’d been there when they were looking at it, but they hadno precise details. Just a piece of paper, they said.
    If Weather Karkinnen ever saw the photograph, they’d be on him.
    Weather: why was Davenport at her house? Guarding her? Screwing her? Why would they be guarding her? Had she given them something? But the only thing she had to give them was the identification, and if she’d given them that, they’d be knocking on his door.
    The intersection came up, marked by two distinctively pink sodium vapor lights. He was in luck: there were no other sleds at the crossing. If they saw him running a blacked-out sled, they’d be curious.
    He bucked through the intersection, up the boat landing, down the landing road, onto the trail built in the ditch beside the road. A moment later he turned onto Circle Creek, ran under the road and two minutes later onto the lake. He turned on his lights in the creek bed but kept cranking. There were more snowmobiles on Circle Lake, and he crossed paths with them, moving south and west.
    He worked through his options:
    He could run. Get in the car, make some excuse for a couple days’ absence, and never come