40

IT’S THE STILL heart of the night, a time when darkness takes on the depth of permanency and your soul clenches at the sight of it. The cab’s headlights catch a flash of green: Moose Lake 5 miles. Only five miles. A panic trips inside Fisher. All he’s doing is leading Lyle and Al straight to Bree, and they’re not going to take it well that Brian’s not there. Will Bree know enough to be scared of them? Or will she get mad if they won’t believe Brian’s dead, and things’ll get out of hand?

He has to think. He tells himself there must be something he can do, only he’s thinking so hard he’s not concentrating, doesn’t realize how much he’s let the cab slow until the pickup’s so close its lights dazzle off the mirror. He hits the gas hard enough for the cab to shimmy and slip, sees the scabby trunks of spruce, a snowbank all yellow in his lights, all of it sliding past him, then he’s wrestling the steering wheel until there, there’s the blacktop again.

He recognizes where he is: the small bridge over Deadman’s Creek that rattles when you pass over it. At the end of a track there’s a short row of mailboxes nailed to one end of a railroad tie, like a few tenacious teeth in a moose jaw; then there’s the gas station that hasn’t been open in years, the building collapsing in on itself. Jensen’s, that’s what it was called.

Then it comes to him, like a match struck in the darkness: he doesn’t have to lead Lyle and Al to Bree. All they know is that the cabin’s on the lake. He can take the third turn-off instead of the fourth and they won’t even pass the old cabin. Instead he’ll lead them up past Pa Jensen’s place with its mounds of busted-up cars, and buckets from the dredge that’s been gone for sixty years, all of it just bumps under the snow in his vast yard, and down to Jim Jensen’s cabin, right on the lake. With any luck, Jim’ll have been out there recently enough for the place not to look deserted.

And then? Fisher can’t imagine. But hasn’t he thought it far enough through for now? And he drives on like a man possessed.

 

 

When Fisher pulls up close to Jim Jensen’s cabin, the pickup pulls in right behind him. In the glare of the headlights, the cabin’s more ramshackle than he remembers, the plywood more stained, the cheap glass of the windows gleaming thin as soap bubbles. The place looks like it’s sagging into itself, but then, it looked that way fifteen years ago when he banged on the door in a panic the night Jan went into labor early with Bree.

When Fisher gets out he smells woodsmoke on the air. No vehicle parked here, though. Could be the smoke’s drifting in from across the lake, held down by the cold air. He steps up onto the narrow porch. It’s stacked with boxes and garbage bags three deep.

A shudder and a grunt behind him: the pickup’s engine shutting off, then its headlights. The cabin’s bare windows, the bags of garbage heaped on its porch, the raw teeth of a saw hanging from a nail by the door, all lose their gleam as the night sweeps in.

Beyond the dark shape of the cabin lies the frozen lake. Under the crooked peel of moon hanging in the sky, Fisher can make out its flat expanse, a curiously luminous blue. Close to the horizon, just above the trees, a few stars glitter, but the air’s too choked with ice crystals for much else to show.

He tugs at his hat. The soft, bruised flesh where the woman hit him throbs, fluids dammed up where they shouldn’t be, and the cut on his thigh prickles horribly as the cold slices into his flesh. How old he feels, his chest sore, his ribs aching, his whole self broken apart and weary. Dear God, he thinks, how did that happen so quickly? He remembers his younger self, bulky as a bear, standing outside this cabin with a suffocating tightness in his chest at the thought of his wife bunched up and moaning on their bed, and his child being born out here where there was no help to be had. Now here he is again, fifteen years later, still trying to save Bree.

Boots grunt across the packed snow and Fisher turns, catches a flash of shadow in the darkness, then he’s reeling and Lyle’s on top of him, his fist sharp against his chest. He’s yelling, “You fucker! You goddamn fucker!” Fisher’s face down in the snow. He can’t breathe. The cold’s everywhere. He shoves hard and Lyle rolls off him, far too easily. When he’s struggled to his feet he understands: there’s Lyle, lopsided, one arm hanging strangely. Broken, perhaps, or the shoulder dislocated, and Lyle’s stoked up a crazy anger, is coming at him again, crouched forward and his injured arm swinging like an ape’s.

Snow’s stuck to Fisher’s face, his neck. It’s got into his boots and squeaks as he shifts his weight to step back. Someone’s behind him. Al. He hears, “Stop right there, fucker, or I’ll shoot you in the head.” Then Al lifts his voice, calls out to Lyle, “C’mon now, you can finish him off later. Brian’s here someplace.”

Lyle turns and his face catches the moonlight. One eye’s swollen, the other furious. “Don’t be a fuckhead, Al, he’s gone. Fucking gone!”

Al steps forward with a cigarette between his lips, then he leans into the flame of his lighter. “What the fuck?”

“How’d he get here? Fly?”

Al lets smoke drift from his mouth and looks about him, slowly, like he’s taking stock: there’s the cab Fisher drove, there’s his own pickup, there’s an old car with a thick crust of snow over it.

Already Lyle’s climbing the couple of steps to the porch, and the door’s squealing open, and it’s dark inside like a space where a tooth used to be. “Get it now, fuckhead?” he yells. “Mikey here must’ve warned him!”

Fisher barely has time to taste his fear before Al shoves him hard up the steps, holds the bitingly cold end of the gun against his neck. As soon as he walks inside the cabin, Fisher catches the smell of grilled meat, the pissy stink of old beer, feels the warmth of the place swamp him. Al’s right behind him. Together they stumble through the darkness, knocking against a table, a chair, Al cussing under his breath. A rasp, then a wavering light falls across the cabin: Al has his lighter held high. From the beam hangs a lamp and Lyle unhooks it, shoves it at Al, who sucks hard on his cigarette then fiddles and cusses some more over it, pumping it hard, then holding a flame to the mantle.

The room bursts into light. The cabin’s barely twenty feet by fifteen, dishes and pots on a shelf in a corner by a plastic bowl tilted up to dry, a barrel of a woodstove against the far wall where longjohns and socks and felt boot liners hang from nails, a narrow bed with a pillow and blankets on it.

“Frisk him,” Lyle snaps at Al. Al shoves Fisher against the wall. He bats at the legs of his pants, squeezes the bulky pockets of his parka then plunges his hand in. He pulls out the new pocketknife. For a moment he looks at it, then he drops it to the floor and stamps on it with his heel. The plastic casing splinters and the short blade and tiny fork, the nail file, all its miniature tools splay out. With another stamp they come apart, and Al kicks the pieces to one side. “Piece of shit.”

Lyle turns toward Fisher. His skin looks thin, like a dying creature’s. “You better know where Brian’s at or you’re a dead man. Freezing to death’d be too easy this time. You understand?”

“You took my phone—how could I call anyone?”

With his left hand Lyle reaches for something on the windowsill and holds it up. A hunting knife. The end of the blade’s curved like a claw, meant for severing joints and sinews, for slicing apart muscle, and it shines wetly as Lyle comes close, his head tilted against his eye that’s swollen shut, his lips tight, his arm dangling all wrong.

But Lyle’s good eye slides off to the side and no wonder. The churning of an engine rough from the cold, and the three of them stand perfectly still in the hissing light of the lamp. Then Lyle says softly, “Gotcha.”

What must Jim Jensen make of two strange vehicles pulled up in his driveway, one of them a cab, of all the freaky things, with its back window shot out and its wing mirror hanging loose? No wonder the engine churns away outside. There’s no sound of a door slamming, no hollow crunch of boots across the porch, because Jim Jensen must be staring out his windshield and considering what to do.

Lyle snaps, “Kill the lamp, Al.”

“What?”

“Lamp.”

Al lays the gun on the table and reaches up. He turns the knob and shrinks the flame to nothing just as Lyle’s left hand snatches up the gun. Lyle hisses, “Take the fucking knife. Slice his throat if you have to.”

“That’s my gun.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Fuck you.” But Al takes the knife from the table and twists it in the glare of the headlights coming through the thin curtains. He walks softly toward Fisher and holds the blade against his cheek. It’s icy from lying on the windowsill.

Lyle’s nothing more than a shadow pulling back the edge of the curtain with the gun and peering out. His holds the gun awkwardly and uses the same hand to wipe the frost from the glass. Then comes the sound of his breath, a little fast, and a creak of the floor as he shifts his weight. But just as he dips his head toward the gun, as though it’s a rifle and he needs to aim carefully, the door bursts open. There’s no one there, just the dazzle of headlights. Lyle wheels around. His face is all knotted up. From a few yards away a shaky voice calls out, “Who’s there? What’s going on?”

A tension inside Fisher comes loose because here she is, safe after all, and he’s found her, but the relief won’t fit into his chest. Al’s breath’s in his face, his arm hooks around Fisher’s neck so that the blade’s biting into the soft skin beneath his chin. Lyle’s lurching toward them, Lyle with a fierce look in his good eye made all the fiercer by a wicked joy. He spits, “Tell our friends to come in, Mikey.”

Dread pools in Fisher’s belly. No, he thinks, no fucking way. He sucks in a breath, the air already cold, colder than the blade against his neck, and he yells, “Jim! Get out of here!” His words come out ragged. He wrenches himself to one side, feels the blade slip over his skin and he swings his arm. The knife flashes through the air and he kicks, hard as he can, into Al’s groin. A shot—from Lyle, he thinks—and another, then a click, but he’s falling and hits the floor so hard his bones bend, he’d swear, and his organs flatten themselves, and it’s all he can do to open his eyes and stare between the table legs toward the doorway. Ice fog’s boiling into the cabin but there, sharp against the brilliance of the headlights, is the unmistakable outline of a shotgun barrel. A man barks out, “Quit f-fighting or I’m gonna shoot you all stone dead.”