Winter Prey

lot, moving sideways. It hit a snowbank and rolled onto its side, almost as if it had been tripped. She felt it going, grabbed the door handle, tried to hold on, felt the door handle wrench away from her, fell, felt the softness of the deputy beneath her . . . Heard Bruun screaming . . .
    And finally it stopped.
    She’d lost track of anything but the sensations of impact. But she was alive, sitting on top of Bruun. She looked to her left, through the cracked windshield, saw legs . . .
    Voices. “Stay there, stay there . . .”
    And she thought: Fire.
    She could smell it, feel it. She’d worked in a burn unit, wanted nothing to do with burns. She pulled herself up, carefully avoiding Bruun, who was alive, holding himself, moaning, “Oh boy, oh boy . . .”
    She unlocked the passenger-side door, tried to push it open. It moved a few inches. More voices. Shouting.
    Faces at the windshield, then somebody on top. A man looked in the side window: Robbie, the night-orderly body-builder, who she’d not-very-secretly made fun of because of his hobby. Now he pried the door open with sheer strength, and she’d never been so happy to see a muscleman. He was scared for her: “Are you all right, Doctor?”
    “Snowmobile,” she said. “Where’s the man on the snowmobile?”
    The body-builder looked up over into the group of people still gathering, and, puzzled, asked, “Who?”

    Weather sat on the edge of the hospital bed in her scrub suit. Her left arm and leg were bruised, and she had three small cuts on the back of her left hand, none requiring stitches. No apparent internal injuries. Bruun was in the recovery room. She’d taken pellets out of his arm and chest cavity.
    “You’re gonna hurt like a sonofagun tomorrow,” said Rice, the GP who’d come to look at her, and later assisted in the operation on Bruun. “You can bet on it. Take a bunch of ibuprofen before you go to bed. And don’t do anything too strenuous tonight.” His face was solemn, but his eyes flicked at Lucas.
    “Yeah, yeah—take off,” Weather said.

    “Does everybody know?” Lucas asked when Rice had gone.
    “I imagine there’re a few Christian-school children that the secret’s been kept from,” Weather said.
    “Mmmm.”
    “So what’d you find?” she asked.
    “Just that you oughta be dead. Again. You would be if Bruun hadn’t kept the truck rolling.”
    “And the asshole got away.”
    “Yeah. He waited in the trees by the stop sign until he saw you coming. After he fired the first shots, he followed you down the road to the spot where the power line cuts through the tree farm and then cut off through the trees. There was no chance of following him unless we’d been right there with a sled. He must’ve counted on that. He did a pretty good job setting it up. If Bruun had stuck the truck in the ditch, he’d of finished you off, no problem.”
    “Why didn’t he shoot me through the door?”
    “He tried,” Lucas said. “Sometimes a double-ought pellet will make it through a car door, but most of the time it won’t. Three went all the way through. One hit Bruun and the other two hit the dashboard. And we think Bruun got the arm hit through the broken window.”
    “Jesus,” she said. She looked at Lucas. He was leaning against an exam table, his arms folded across his chest, his voice calm, almost sleepy. He might have been talking about a ball game. “You’re not pissed enough,” she said.
    Lucas had come in just before she’d gone into the operating room, and waited. Hadn’t touched her. Just watched her. She got down from the examination table, winced. Rice was right. She’d be sore.
    “I was thinking all the way over here that I’m just too fuckin’ vain and it almost caught up to me,” Lucas said. He pushed away from the exam table and caught a fistful of hair at the back of her head, squeezed it, held her by the hair, head tipped up. “I want you the fuck out of here,” he said angrily. “You’re not gonna get hurt. You understand that? You’re . . .”
    “Why are you vain?” She’d grabbed his shirtfront with both hands, held on. Their faces were four inches apart, and they rocked back and forth.
    He stopped, still holding her hair. “Because I thought he was coming after you because of me. I thought he went after the Mueller kid because of me.”
    “He didn’t?”
    “No. It’s you he wants. You know him or you know something about him. Or he thinks you do. You don’t