Chet was snoring to Megadeath’s Rust In Peace, when Leroy burst through the camper door. Chet bolted upright to see blood covering the lower half of his Leroy’s ski mask, red splotches dotting his winter camouflage like holly berries on a snowy bush. When Leroy yanked the mask off, his nose was the size of a turnip.
“Holy shit,” cried Chet. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Turn the music up,” Leroy said urgently. “I don’t want Crazy Horse to hear this.”
Chet reached to turn his ancient boom box up to full volume. As Megadeath started rattling the windows of the camper, Leroy sat down close beside him.
“Kimmeegirl’s back at the cabin,” he whispered.
Chet snorted, thinking Leroy must have bloodied his brain along with his nose. “Along with Santa and the reindeers?”
“She’s there with another woman,” Leroy went on. “Sitting in front of the fireplace.”
“Doing what?”
“Just sitting there. Kimmeegirl was rubbing her ankle. The woman just looked pissed.”
“Probably Kimmeegirl’s mother,” said Chet.
Leroy frowned. “I don’t know. Kimmeegirl never mentioned her mother being up here.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is,” said Chet. What did you do?”
“I sneaked around the back of the cabin, to see if anybody else was there.”
“And?”
“Nobody but Kimmeegirl and her pal,” said Leroy. “They’d cleaned all the snow off that truck. I figured they were planning on driving out tomorrow, so I slit their tires.”
Chet eyed Leroy’s bloody nose. “And did one of those tires bite back?”
“I fell down and banged my nose against your damn gun.” Leroy wiped blood away from one nostril.
Chet blinked. “Let me get this straight. You say Kimmeegirl and a woman who could be her mom are right now in that cabin, with no way out?”
“Not unless they walk. Or fly.”
Chet felt a sudden throb of desire. He’d always dreamed of doing two women at the same time, arms, legs and lips all intertwined together. Now, according to Leroy, his dream lay twenty cold minutes away in a cabin, just waiting to become reality.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Leroy.
“Leave the Indian here. Go to the cabin, do whatever the fuck we please with mother and daughter, then take Crazy Horse to Oklahoma and collect our ten grand.”
Leroy giggled. “Right.”
“What does the other woman look like?”
“Older,” said Leroy. “But still pretty.”
They double-checked the lock on Crazy Horse’s cave and left Megadeath yowling at full blast. Then they followed Leroy’s blood-speckled path to the cabin. The walking was easier in the tamped-down snow, and the clouds parted briefly, revealing an anemic moon. For a moment the landscape looked like a fantasy world, tree limbs glittering in rime ice. But new clouds quickly rolled across the moon and Chet again felt as if they were walking through pocket lint.
They crested the rise that allowed them a view of the cabin. Chet had envisioned a Christmas card scene, the women having candles flickering and smoke rising from the chimney, but the cabin stood cold and closed up, with not even the dimmest glow coming from the front windows.
He frowned. “Leroy, if this is some of your bullshit, I will fucking kill you.”
“I swear to God they’re in the front room,” said Leroy. “They pulled a mattress in there, close to the fire.”
Chet was tempted to run up and blast open the door again, but that might be a repeat of their first disaster. The women might be sleeping in shifts; one might be standing at a window keeping watch. The mother might well have a gun. He turned to his brother.
“You sneak around the cabin and guard the back door. I’ll go in the front. When you hear the bullpup, come in.”
“Okay,” said Leroy.
As Leroy lumbered awkwardly towards the rear of the cabin, Chet headed east, to the far end of the little parking lot. He strode through the snow carefully, but moving with purpose. After pausing behind a bank of snow-laden rhododendrons, Chet took the safety off the bullpup and made a run for the porch.
He reached the corner and pressed himself against the logs. The angle made him invisible to anyone looking out of the cabin, so all he had to do was stay below the windows and slither to the entrance.
Dropping to his knees, Chet crawled along the porch until he reached the front door. Then he stood up and checked his watch, giving Leroy another three minutes to get into position. When he figured that even his flabby brother could have made it to the back door, he unstrapped the bullpup and took a deep breath. Operation Cutie was about to begin.
He kicked open the front door, rifle at the ready, expecting screams, terrified women running for their lives. Instead, he found only an empty mattress pulled in front of a dying fire. Rushing down the hall toward the bedrooms, he heard Leroy coming in the kitchen door. “Nobody by the fire,” Chet yelled. “Check the bedrooms.”
Chet headed into the nearest one. By the crap strewn all over the floor, he guessed it was the girl’s. Clothes had been dumped from the closet, pictures piled on the floor. When he found no one hiding under the bed, he raced down the hall, almost running into Leroy.
“They’re gone, Chet,” his brother announced sadly. “I saw fresh tracks outside.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Leroy shook his head. Chet muscled past him, into the kitchen and out the back door, where a line of footprints dotted the snow from the back porch to the smokehouse.
Just as before, Chet followed them, around the smokehouse, across a small field and into the woods beyond. For fifty yards he read the tracks easily, but then thick trees shielded the undergrowth from snow, and the footprints vanished in tangles of weeds and bushes. He tried to pick up the trail deeper in the woods, but he knew it was pointless. The girl owned this terrain; he could not beat her in these woods.
He turned and went back to the cabin, seething. This was all Leroy’s fault. He was clumsy and loud. He’d probably cried like a baby when he broke his damn nose and they’d heard him. Furious, Chet stalked back into the kitchen. Leroy was in the bathroom, leaning over the toilet, as if he might vomit.
“Find them?” Leroy looked up, bleary eyed.
“No.” Chet unzipped his parka. “I lost them in the damn woods.”
“You didn’t follow them?”
“I can’t make a miracle, Leroy. They know their shit here. You probably sounded like a wounded elephant when you fell on that gun. They heard you and took off. You blew it, you dumb fuck.”
“I did not sound like an elephant,” Leroy insisted.
Chet glared at his brother, his finger twitching on the trigger of the bullpup. At this moment he could blow a hole in Leroy and not think twice about it.
As Chet stood there in a murderous rage, Leroy turned around and pulled up his shirt. The gut wound that had just oozed blood before had now flooded his menstrual pad, dripping a stream of fresh blood onto his pants.
“Good Lord, Leroy,” said Chet, his own stomach clenching at the sight of his brother’s gut. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”
“Look in the closet,” whispered Leroy. “Grab me another one of those pads.”
Chet rummaged through the linen closet, pulling out a box of pads and a handful of Band-Aids. “Damn.They’ve got enough shit in there for a whole sorority house.”
“Could you help me here?” said Leroy, ripping away the bloody pad. “Get a new pad on?”
“Ugh.” Holding his breath against the stink of the rotting wound, Chet grabbed a clean menstrual pad and pressed it Leroy’s belly. As he taped the thing on with Band-Aids, he again thought about the women. They could be miles away by now. Or they could be just minutes away, watching this cabin, maybe sighting down the barrel of their own rifle. His mood turned even fouler as he realized that Leroy had once again suckered him into another disaster. Last time it was Spitfire, tonight Kimmeegirl.
“There,” he said, as he slapped the last Band-Aid in place. “That should hold you for a while. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“You don’t want to wait for them?” Leroy sounded surprised.“Try to find them?”
“Leroy, I want to take the Indian and leave. I’m done with the snow and the cold and the ice and your stink and the two cuties you claimed were here.”
“But…”
“You can wait here if you want. But tomorrow, I’m driving out. Be at the camper if you want to come, too.”
Leroy looked at him a long moment, as if plumbing the depths of Chet’s fury. He soon realized that arguing was pointless, so he stood up and began filling his pockets with more pads and Band-Aids. “Okay,” he said, disappointed. “I guess you’re right.”
Angrily, Chet headed out the back door, Leroy bobbing like a cork in his brother’s furious wake. They’d just turned the corner of the driveway when Chet spotted a small gas-powered generator under the eave of the roof. He walked over, kicked the snow off the thing, and gave Leroy a sly grin.
“Wanna leave ‘em something to remember us by?”
“Okay,” said Leroy, knowing that the best way to de-fuse Chet was to let him blow off his steam.
“Go inside and turn on their propane stove, full tilt. I’ll bleed the gas off this generator and slosh it all over the inside. Once we get back in the woods, I’ll fire a round from the bullpup into the kitchen. This whole cabin will go off like a rocket.”
“And then what?”
“And then nothing. If Kimmeegirl and her mom are out there laughing at us now, they won’t be laughing much longer.”