Cold Heart (16 page)

“Sounds like shells going off. Raw shells. Like someone threw them in a fire,” said Marty.

That was it. The explosions had that odd
pop
to them. They didn't sound compressed like the explosion inside a gun. And there were no accompanying cracking noises that bullets made tearing through the trees.

“That's not right,” said Marty and Stan had to agree. Someone was trying to tell them something.

“I think we better get down to the store,” said Stan.

Marty nodded, dropping his shovel.

“Better grab a couple of rifles,” said Stan, following the smaller man down the trail to Marty's cabin.

T
HE CLICK OF THE
latch on Damon's door mixed with the machine-gun chatter coming from the direction of the store. Micky froze on Damon's stoop, listening.

What the hell is that?

It sounded like ten strings of firecrackers going off at once.

But Clive didn't sell fireworks. Too much fire risk in McRay. And Alaskans celebrated with guns, not firecrackers.

On any other day Micky might have been just curious.

But after discovering Aaron's body—and having had the time on her run down the mountain to percolate some of the possibilities—she was increasingly apprehensive.

Ravens and jays screeched overhead, scattering. The noise was driving them up the valley.

Her own animal instincts told her to flee.

To hide.

She walked slowly back toward the main trail, listening, trying to understand the sound.

It sounded like fireworks. Only it wasn't.

What then?

Bullets.

But not the staccato, regular rhythm of a machine gun. Not the compact noise bullets made exiting a gun.

Bullets exploding.

Someone had put a lot of them into a fire. It sounded like cases of them.

Clive would never do anything like that. Like anyone else, he'd fire his rifle if he was in distress and keep firing. But he wouldn't set off a case of shells like that.

Aaron had been dead for hours.

El had had plenty of time to hike back down the trail and get to the store. If he was on a killing spree and Clive wasn't prepared, he could easily have murdered both Clive and Rita.

But that didn't explain the bursting bullets.

Or maybe she had it all wrong.

Maybe there was another explanation for the noise and El had already vanished up into the mountains to hide.

She hoped that he had.

Let the troopers find him and deal with him.

The popping noise died away just as she turned along the creek toward her cabin.

Toward El's.

El's place appeared through the trees, across the stream and she stopped.

The place looked deserted. But it always had that feel to it. The door was closed. She could see the padlock on its hasp. El was the only one in town who locked his door. But at least he couldn't be inside.

She breathed a little easier.

The one front window was very dark.

A drape?

The stream here was narrow and no deeper than her calves. She thought about crossing to investigate. But she had no time and she still wasn't armed.

That was the most important priority.

To get a gun.

There was no telling where El was right now.

For all she knew he could be behind the next bend in the trail.

D
AWN WATCHED AS THE
last of the rounds exploded in the flames. The fire was dying down. The rifle stocks and pistol grips were blackened fiery embers, the barrels redhot. El had disappeared inside the store.

It was growing colder by the minute. The winds were out of the north, blowing frigid air down right off the Pole.

When El returned, he had a rifle in his hands and his pistol was back in its holster. He leaned the rifle on the porch rail and strode to Clive's four-wheeler. He was talking and gesturing with his hands and once again Dawn had the queer sense that he believed he could communicate with the dead. She wondered if he was explaining to Clive just why Clive couldn't live in McRay any longer.

Grabbing Clive by the cuffs of his pants, El dragged his body toward the porch. Dawn looked away as Clive's head struck the ground.

When Dawn turned back, El had Clive halfway to the front steps. But it seemed to be more of a job than he had planned on. He leaned on his knees, huffing and puffing and still talking. Then he straightened, hands on his hips, breathing deeply, and surveyed the scene. Dawn remembered what he had said to her when she was hiding by the creek, about putting her inside with her mother to protect
her from the animals. She wondered if he had stopped to put Howard inside their cabin.

El took another deep breath and grabbed Clive's legs again. Eventually he disappeared inside with the body.

Dawn seized that opportunity to crawl a little deeper into the alders. She wanted to be farther from the airstrip trail, should El decide to explore in that direction. But she also needed a good view of the store through the branches.

As long as El was inside the store she couldn't summon help. Her mother and Howard were dead and the mail plane wouldn't be coming for hours. El knew the plane was coming and Dawn figured that he had that contingency all planned for too. It seemed to Dawn that he'd been masterminding this for a long time. That thought stirred a fire of rage in her stomach that didn't burn the fear out of her, but did give her a little strength.

El had murdered everybody he came into contact with and he had been planning on doing it since who knew when. Planning on murdering people who had never been anything but kind to him.

He came back out on the porch and took a long time peering around the clearing. Dawn was pretty sure that El had no idea that she had run from her hiding place by the creek up to the store. He hadn't seen her when he shot Rita.

That was about the only advantage she had.

El took another long look around, then shouldered the rifle, tapping the butt of the pistol with the palm of his right hand, as though tamping it into place. He stepped down onto the trail beside the four-wheeler and seemed to be admiring it. Then, he climbed on the machine and cranked the motor, whipping the Honda into a tight 180-degree turn.

He shot off up the trail toward Micky Ascherfeld's place.

Micky was alone.

And she didn't know El was coming or what he'd been doing.

But there was nothing that she could do for Micky now.

Dawn had her own troubles.

M
ICKY HURRIED DOWN THE
trail to her cabin when she heard the reassuring sound of Clive's four-wheeler, but she was still a quarter mile from the cabin and from the sound, he was just reaching it from the other side.

Why was he returning?

He might have forgotten something simple like closing the door. Or he might have forgotten bringing something on her list. Clive was good about things like that.

She thought about the bursting shells.

Was it a warning?

Or something worse?

She hurried down the path, careful not to twist her ankle or rush through a turn and bust her ass.

The day was darkening, the frigid wind ripping through the trees.

It was starting to snow like a bastard.

D
AWN COULDN'T LIE IN
the alders and wait until the mail plane came in. She'd freeze to death and if El was planning on murdering the pilot—and Dawn was certain now that he was—then she wouldn't be able to stop him. Her only chance was to get a message to the outside and to do that she had to go back into the store.

She wasn't afraid so much of crossing the thirty yards of open ground. She had heard the four-wheeler shutting off clear over at Micky's place. It would take El at least three or four minutes to get back. As soon as she heard the motor crank up again she could be back in the woods before he showed up.

But she didn't want to go back into the store.

She stood in the middle of the trail, gathering her courage and at the same time bracing against the shots that she expected to hear from Micky's place any second. The bullets would crack through the woods like whips snapping. She could feel them in the middle of her back even though they'd be aimed at Micky and not her. Guilt had stung her as she stood watching El murder her mother. The frustration at not being able to help Micky was like a knife in her chest.

She shuffled hesitantly down the trail.

When she reached the center of the clearing, she felt completely exposed. Then she ran. The faster she ran, the more exposed she felt, until she hit the side of the log building hard, stopping herself with spread arms, her heart pounding madly. Sweat was icy on her forehead and her legs quivered. She stared at the sliding door, then shook her head.

Instead she walked up the front stoop, tossing frightened glances over her shoulder in the direction that El had gone, but there was no sound of the four-wheeler and no shot. It occurred to her then that he might just leave the fourwheeler at Micky's and hike back. Then she'd have no way of hearing him. But at least it would take him longer to return. Dawn estimated five or six minutes. She didn't have much time. She needed to get in and get out.

She opened the front door and stood staring into the gloom.

El had put out all but one of the mantel lamps. It sat in the middle of the counter, throwing weird shadows around the crowded store, mixing them with the shadows cast by the last of the light from outside. The sun wasn't due to set for another four hours. But it looked as though it already had. The wind made eerie whistling noises through the eaves and Dawn found it harder and harder to take that first step into the interior of the building where two corpses waited.

She stepped silently inside and put her back against the door.

The store was a mess.

Boxes had been pulled from all the shelves and lay in scattered heaps along the walls and on top of the counter. The glass cases had been smashed and the items inside were thrown here and there.

Even the woodstove had not escaped El's rampage. The cast-iron door was off its hinges, lying on the floor. Dawn couldn't decide whether El had been looking for something inside the stove or if he was trying to cover up something on the floor.

Rita's body was gone.

Dawn noticed that there were ashes around her feet and she was making tracks in them.

Her footprints were a death warrant if El returned. She glanced around and saw Rita's broom, leaning behind the
counter. She brushed away her tracks, careful now where she stood.

The trail of ashes led from the door, along the far wall and into the glassed-in phone room. It looked as though El had taken a shovel and scooped ashes from the stove and then shaken them in a wide path through the store. Dawn knew then what the ashes were for. El was soaking up the blood. He'd dragged Rita's body into the phone room and then covered the bloody trail of her body with ashes.

Dawn stared at the little room.

It was about six feet square, sitting in the rear corner of the store, there was no ceiling in the phone room, and the walls didn't reach the high-beamed roof; they gave privacy to whoever was on the phone, but the bottom of the walls were pine-sided only as high as Dawn's waist. The rest was glass. The telephone rested in its cradle on the table. There was nothing else in the cubicle but a couple of chairs.

Dawn had used the phone a couple of times. She'd spoken to her aunt in California and to her best friend in Anchorage. It suddenly occurred to Dawn that she had made a stupid mistake because she had no idea how the radio connection was made. Clive had always done that from the back room.

But she knew that that just was an excuse.

She had to at least
try
to contact someone.

How hard can it be to make a connection on the phone?

It's probably just a switch.

She glanced around the counter at the door to the workshed, remembering El dragging Clive in through the side door. But the outside door was closed now and it looked even darker in there than before.

She eased around the counter, then stopped. There was cardboard and broken glass on the floor, covered with what appeared to be flour, and El had scattered the contents of a large can of coffee over the mess. One of the shelves had broken in half. It looked as though El might have tried to climb it. Big jars that had been on the shelf lay shattered. One lid was overturned with a jagged crown of glass still centered in it. It sat in the middle of the floor like some kind of deadly trap.

She stepped gingerly, careful not to tread on coffee or flour and leave footprints. She reached the door to the workshed and peered into the room. The tiny window admitted almost no light. Somewhere in that darkness lay Clive's body and she had the weirdest sensation that he was watching her with dead, empty eyes.

She backed up to the counter and picked up the lantern, holding it in front of her with both hands. It threw a steady golden glow but it also lightened the things in front of her and blinded her completely to things on the periphery. The room closed in around her. Whenever she glanced to the right or left there was only lurking, silent darkness. Now she had a corpse behind her in the gloom and one somewhere ahead, yet to be discovered.

She knew that she had nothing to fear from either Rita's or Clive's bodies. They had been friends in life. Surely they wouldn't harm her in death. But a childish, unreasoning part of her mind questioned that assumption.

Who knew what happened to people after they died?

What if they were controlled by El now?

What if they were like zombies, under El's spell?

Or some kind of vampires?

She wanted to scream at her own mind to stop, to leave her alone and quit coming up with bullshit horror stories. But the more she denied them, the more they tormented her, the more her palms grew clammy and her skin crawled. The more the wind creaked and the building squeaked and shifted, as though people she could not see were moving about in the shadows.