GABBY STANDS atop some sort of platform two feet from the ground, arms extended above her head bound at the wrists with twine to an overhead rafter. Her legs are tied at the ankle with duct tape. Her mouth is sealed with a strip of tape. She balances on her tip-toes, and a hangman's noose is fastened around her neck.
But there is no blood, and Gabby’s eyes are wide and blinking.
She’s alive.
Breathing heavily through her nostrils, she snorts steam into the frigid night air. The sound of running water still has me confused until finally, I see it; a garden hose positioned so that the water runs evenly over the surface of the platform on which Gabby stands.
I decide to figure out what this means, later.
With two steps, I stand beside her. It’s not until I am close that I realize the meaning of the running water. Gabby teeters on a platform of block ice, a frozen rectangle two feet high, two feet wide, three feet long, and disintegrating rapidly
On her tip-toes, she’s just able to reduce her weight enough to keep the noose from cutting off her air supply. The water keeps the block of ice slick. If Gabby slips from the ice now, she’ll fall, and the noose will snap her neck. If she doesn’t fall, the running water guarantees a slow painful death by asphyxiation as the ice gradually melts away from beneath her feet leaving her dangling.
It’s sick, but ingenious.
The first thing I do is remove the hose, reduce the rate of melt to buy time. Next, I search the small enclosure for something on which to stand. I can’t risk reaching for the noose, misjudging, and have Gabby slip from the block of ice to dangle and choke in mid-air while I scramble to get her down. I don’t have a knife, which means I can’t cut her free. With nothing to elevate me, I’ll need to find where the rope is tied off.
In my urgency to release Gabby, I totally ignore the potential threat from The Chatterbox lurking somewhere nearby.
That’s when I feel it, because the burning sensation of the gunshot hits me before I hear the sound. A quirk of the mountain air? I wonder as I drop to all fours. My weapon flies from my hand, lost in the dark amid the junk littering the smokehouse floor.
Angry and in pain, the first thing I say to The Chatterbox is, “Coward! Show yourself! I thought you had bigger balls than to shoot me in the back. But what can you expect from a man who beats up on women?”
The Chatterbox ignores the insult. “It took you long enough to get here. If you’d been sooner, Gabby would have more time. That ice-block won’t last forever, you know.”
Though the dark makes me blind, the sound of his voice helps me to fix his position. I remove a second weapon from my shoulder holster. The Chatterbox stands at the far side of the deck, perhaps thirty feet away, close to the cabin wall in case I open fire and he feels a need to duck for cover. I’m a crappy shot at the best of times, so even with a clear shot in broad daylight, from this distance, The Chatterbox would be safe.
But he doesn’t know it.
“You only winged me,” I shout. “It stings, but the wound is not mortal.” Truthfully, though, I know if I don’t reach a hospital or get first aid soon, I’ll bleed out. “And I’m packing an arsenal, asshole. I have enough rounds and firepower to shoot holes through that shit-box of a cabin you’re using for cover. Or to pin you down until help arrives.”
“You may have fire-power, but the cabin is built from six-by-six inch cedar beam. Unless you have an RPG?”
He laughs.
“You can’t hole-up in there forever. The State Police are on their way. Might as well give yourself up now.”
“I’ll hear them long before they arrive. The State Police like to make a splashy entrance. By that time, you and Gabby will be dead.”
“Mel?”
“It’s too late for Mel. I told you if you blabbed someone would die.”
I swallow back a wave of emotion. “You’re a dead man, asshole!”
My three Glock 9mm’s hold seventeen rounds each, which is why cops love them. With three spare clips, I have one hundred two rounds. Having lost one weapon, I’m down seventeen rounds to eighty-five. Not enough to shoot up the cabin, but maybe enough to keep him preoccupied and buy us more time. I turn to Gabby. The tips of her toes barely touch the ice. She’s running out of time faster than I am.
In one move, I crouch down low and exit the smokehouse moving quickly to my left as I do. I empty eight rounds at the location by the cabin where I think The Chatterbox stands. I dive back into the smokehouse and close the door.
My only option, I decide, is to untie the rope supporting Gabby from where it’s fastened. With nothing for me to stand on, it’s too risky to loosen the noose by hand. In the dark, I fumble along the walls of the smokehouse searching by feel for the place where the rope is tied off. It’s been a minute, and I still can’t find it. I’m becoming frantic.
Meanwhile, Gabby grunts and groans. I think she’s in distress until I realize she’s trying to get my attention. In a minute, The Chatterbox will come out of hiding and fill the smokehouse full of holes. I don’t know his weapon of choice—handgun, by the sound of it—but I doubt the smokehouse walls will withstand an onslaught. Finally, I turn to Gabby. I think she’s telling me to remove the gag which, reaching, I do.
She grimaces as I peel back the tape, taking a layer of skin with it.
“He’s tied me off to the rafters.” Her voice is hoarse, barely a whisper.
A glance up tells me the rafters are ten feet high. “Ladder?”
“In the lake.”
Just then, The Chatterbox opens fire with a round of slugs. The smokehouse splinters, but it holds. My more pressing concern is to untie Gabby.
“Listen, partner,” she rasps. “These blocks of ice weigh a million pounds. No way The Uke hauled them up out of his ice-hole alone. There must be an ice hook or a grappling hook somewhere in here. He must use that rafter-beam up there as a lever.”
“Right.” The rafter beam is the same The Chatterbox has used to suspend Gabby.
After fumbling about in the dark two minutes more, I find it stashed in a box used by The Uke to store various odds and ends. It’s a grappling hook with four menacing-looking twelve-inch tangs attached to a length of two-inch thick braided twine. With just my gun hand exposed through a crack in the door, I take the time to spray the deck and the cabin with a second round of gun-fire, emptying my clip, hoping to keep The Chatterbox at bay. The gunshots, the crash of broken glass, and the sound of the splintering wood deck are deafening.
In the forest, there is the commotion of a thousand terrified animals running every which way to save themselves from the unhinged beasts of the night turning their home into a shooting gallery.
Before she has to say it, I know what Gabby is thinking. I set to work trying to loop the loose end of the twine around the rafter. The beam is ten feet high, it’s dark, and the slug that has taken out my left shoulder makes it tricky. It takes me three tries, but finally I get it. Holding the loose end of the rope in my weakened left hand, with my right, I slip a tang of the grappling hook in the back through Gabby’s belt. It’s sturdy leather that I think should carry her weight.
I’m becoming woozy from blood loss and pain but using mostly my right arm, I eventually raise Gabby to a level where her boots are no longer supported by the block-ice, and her weight is removed from her neck. I tie off the rope by looping and knotting it through the remaining three tangs of the grappling hook at Gabby’s back. Her own body mass will now act as a counter-weight, keeping her suspended. If the belt gives, she dies; if my knot slips, she dies; if the rope snaps, she dies.
It isn’t perfect, but Gabby is safe, for now.
“Thank Christ for platform sole-shoes,” she says. “Those two inches bought me a half hour of time.” Her voice is still hoarse, but without the noose around her neck, stronger.
“I need to get you down.”
“No. You need to distract The Chatterbox or kill him. You aren’t bullshitting, help is on the way?”
I nod. “Eventually.”
“Good. Chase him into the forest, let the dogs track him down. At this point, I don’t give a shit if he gets away.”
“Mel?”
“She was breathing last time I saw her. Don’t believe a word he says, Dex.”
“The Uke?”
Gabby simply shakes her head. I take it to mean The Uke didn’t make it.
“How many weapons on you?” Gabby wants to know.
In response, I pass her the Glock strapped to my back. “Had three, now down to two, two clips in reserve.”
“No. Keep it.” I force the weapon on her. “No,” she says, adamant.
I slip the weapon into her waistband.
“Fine, but before you go, you need to chew through the tape on my ankles and wrists. Nothing I can do with my hands tied.”
After three minutes, Gabby’s arms and legs are free. She palms the Glock.
“You sure you’ll be okay?”
“Go!” is her only frantic response.
“I do all the heavy lifting, and you just hang around?”
Amazingly, given our predicament, Gabby laughs. It causes her body to rotate in a half-circle. I steady her, and before leaving, I say, “No need to show me out, I’ll close the door behind me.”
Like a gunfighter, I exit the smokehouse weapon in hand. Behind me, I close the door on Gabby hoping the image of her dangling helplessly from the beam is not the last thing I live to see.