Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller (25 page)

Then he noticed it for the first time. A large animal was creeping along the ridge, ambling softly, moving slowly but in a way that made it seem it was sure of its surroundings. As they watched, it paused beside a gathering of small shoots, and tore them up with a heavy paw before messily consuming them.

Alex stared at it, trying to identify it from a distance, when Hart spoke, doing it for him. "It's a black bear," he said, answering Alex's unspoken question. "There's a few of them wandering around this part of Manitoba. Don't get too close!" he said quickly, flinging an arm out to stop Alex, who was making to move closer. "They can be predatory."

Alex stood transfixed, watching the bear as it lumbered through the forest away from them. "It's…um…it's beautiful."

"Isn't it?" Hart said, smiling broadly and looking truly happy for the first time since Alex had met him. "They're a wild ideal…I think every animal aspires to be the bear. If everybody lived like them the world would be a better place."

Alex was not sure he shared this opinion, so he walked off into the trees and began gathering wood to build a fire.

Ordoñez was in his element, and Levache knew it--whatever the Moose Killers could say against the assassin, he was more skilled at tracking than any of them. He commanded a certain respect for this skill, and especially for some famous exhibitions. The most talked-about of these was his spectacular shooting of a victim hiding in the Mojave. To fit with Ordoñez's sense of humor, the gun had been a Desert Eagle.

A slight misting rain had helped to preserve the party's footsteps. Ordoñez darted around the path, examining trampled vegetation, closely studying anything resembling tracks, and looking for traces of unnatural occurrences that would signal that a human had been there. Levache merely watched and followed him, knowing that his job was to pull the trigger.

"I expected this," Ordoñez had said at one point near the start, shaking his head. "They split up. The young ones always do. It looks as though two of them went this way and two of them went over there."

"I thought you said there were three of them?"

"Evidently they found another."

Ordoñez elected to follow the tracks to the left, knowing that it did not matter and that they would meet up again. He stalked the footprints mercilessly, not eating or resting, knowing that he would catch his man, as he had done every other time.

The fire was roaring with mighty crackles, and the sky was completely dark. Alex was lying beside it, mesmerized by the flickering flames, marveling at the perfect chaos of the fire. Hart, however, was sitting at the edge of the creek, staring across the wilderness.

Alex remembered his sleepwalking escapades of the previous night and wondered what was wrong with their new companion. At last he chanced to speak. "Hart. Are you all right?"

"What?" Hart said, as though he was barely registering the words. "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."

"You are not fine."

"What makes you think that?"

"The fire is over here. It's warm. But you're over there, where it's cold. Why?"

"Maybe I just want to enjoy the night air."

"Did you know you sleepwalk?"

He had obviously touched on something. Hart turned around and fixed Alex's eyes with a piercing gaze. But there was something beyond that. Alex had been trying to see what Hart was thinking ever since he had met him, and now he found it--deep below his defenses Hart carried the burden of sorrow.

"I do not sleepwalk," he said pointedly.

"I saw you! Just before we left Porcupine, you went and walked past the entrance to the town."

"Why the hell would I do that?"

Alex sighed. "Who are you, Hart? What's your story?"

Hart turned around again so Alex could no longer read him. "I'll tell you if you go first."

Alex sighed. "If you want."

"I do want. People don't end up in the middle of the Canadian wilderness for no reason at all."

Alex took another breath and began. "I was born in New York--"

"City?"

"Upstate. And please don't interrupt me. Woodsbrook, New York, in August of 1993. I lived there for about twelve years with my evil father and indifferent mother, and--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Hart held up his hands. "Back up. Tell me about them."

"Them?" Alex retorted. "Who wants to know about them?"

"Twelve years with those kind of people...that would have shaped you more than anything else."

"Okay. My mother, Catherine...I would say maybe ten words a day to her. She was obnoxious and self-satisfied, and would never let me forget that she'd rather have had a girl. My father--now there's a piece of work. My mother was unpleasant. He was evil. Real evil."

Hart laughed slightly. "Are you making this up?"

"Do you think I could make this kind of thing up?"

"Actually, I don't."

"This guy ran my town. He took absolutely no crap from anybody. He was sadistic, and enjoyed watching people mentally and emotionally suffer. After I ran away from him he hired a hitman to come after me."

"
What
!?"

"Don't worry, I think he's given up. But he took a bit of me with him. If not for him we would have had uneven teams."

"There was a fifth?"

"I had no friends in Woodsbrook except for this one guy, Jake. And I found out later he was just using me...but..." Alex put his face in his hands. "I can't bring myself to hate him for it. It's so easy for me to hate other people but I can't hate him."

"I know..." Hart said uncertainly.

"Really."

Hart said nothing.

"Okay," Alex said, lying back in his sleeping bag. "Your turn. Where'd you come from?"

Hart continued staring out across the river. "Well, I'm from Colorado. My mother died in a car accident almost the day I was born. My father..." He slowly shook his head. "He was a great man. A soldier, actually, a real war hero. Decorated by the president and everything."

Alex thought he knew what was coming.

"But...that didn't really translate into being a good father. He was never around...so I had to learn my own way. And since Dad had made himself by killing people, the only way I knew how was to fight. Combat helped my find some purpose, even if it was just with people my age. But it also made me a few enemies. Then Dad..." he trailed off.

"What?" Alex wanted to hear the end of the story.

"He vanished. Just disappeared from the front lines."

"Where was he?"

"Iraq. One of the first ones there. It was 2003, and just four years ago he had left Kosovo...he was in Bosnia and Kuwait as well. Some say he was captured, some say he died."

"What do you say?"

"I think maybe...he just got disillusioned. Tired of it all. He just walked off...and nobody saw him again. I was ten."

"What did you do when he vanished?"

"Well, like I said, at that point I was in a lot of people's bad books, including the cops."

"I feel your pain."

"So, I had to flee the country. And I just wound up here, and kept fighting, because in places like Porcupine, it earns you respect. But I never forgot...and sometimes at night, I can't help myself going looking for him."

Alex had been sitting up, but collapsed again. This was a lot to handle--he was no longer the only one of them who had had a rough life. Then, he remembered Sarah in the orphanage, the death of Jake's parents, and the indifference of Anthony's. He rolled over and lay facedown, resting his head on his arms. These people had all been through as bad as he had, and Alex had been deluding himself that he was the martyr.

"Okay," he said at last. "Let's get some sleep."

Hart threw his bag down on the opposite side of the fire. "G'night."

"Good night."

Alex lay back, and let sleep overtake him. He made it a long time, to almost five in the morning, when he was awakened by a scream followed by two shots from a pistol aimed into the air.

CHAPTER 18

Fifteen Miles Out

The first shot woke Alex to the point of grogginess, but the second brought him sharply awake. He forced himself out of his sleeping bag, stuffed it back into his backpack, and looked around for his coat before realizing that he was wearing it. He jumped over the fire, which had burned itself to embers, and kicked Hart several times.

"Alex, what the hell..."

"Get up! C'mon!"

"What's happening? Do you think we're losing?"

"There's a lot the other team stands to lose! I heard gunshots! Now get the hell up!"

"Jesus Christ!" Hart leapt up immediately, slung his backpack over the shoulder, and picked up the rifle. "Where did they come from!?"

"I--I don't know!" Alex had always had a great weakness when it came to identifying the origins of sounds. "I--I think...somewhere in that direction..."

Hart forced Alex aside as he waded into the creek. "This'll get us there fastest. Hurry!"

Alex checked that he was carrying everything, stamped out the fire, and then leapt into the stream after Hart. His legs, up to his knees, were instantly drenched in frigid, icy, burning water. His teeth started chattering viciously. Hart raised the rifle and fired toward the sky in acknowledgement of the call for help.

The fog was particularly dense that early morning, and Alex could not see more than a foot ahead of him. He followed the course of the stream, and could not help but think about what was happening to Sarah and Anthony while they were heading towards them. At last Hart called his name and told him to get out of the river to the right.

"Are they here?" Alex yelled into the fog.

"Probably!"

Suddenly they heard another scream sounding from no more than yards to their left. Alex raced in the general direction and found a tangle of bushes and trees blocking his path. Roaring in rage, he kicked and tore with his hands and feet, forcing a sizable hole in the brush at the expense of numerous cuts and bruises along his limbs. He struggled his way through, and found the source of the gunshots and scream.

Anthony was lying on the ground, conscious but not making any sound, as Sarah kneeled by his leg, binding it with a piece of cloth they had purchased in Porcupine. The leg itself was lying in a pool of blood, and was covered with tears and what appeared to be bite marks. As she wound the bandage he screamed again.

"Dammit, Sarah!" he shouted angrily. "Why can't you be more careful!"

"I'm sorry!" Sarah said in a desperate tone of voice, fighting to finish the bandage. "I--Alex! Hart!"

"What happened to you?" Hart asked.

"We were--I--that is to say, we..." Anthony seemed reluctant to finish the sentence.

"We were attacked by a bear," Sarah finished for him. Anthony looked down as though ashamed of himself.

Alex and Hart exchanged looks.

"We saw the bear too," Hart said.

"It didn't see us, though," Alex put in. "It was just walking along a ridge. It looked so peaceful."

"I'm never trusting animals again," Anthony grumbled.

Hart rounded on him. "That isn't fair!" he shouted. "Black bears really rarely attack humans. We just happened to run across the one that was out for blood."

Sarah walked between them to cut off an unnecessary argument, and began to explain. "We went to sleep in this clearing, and the bear woke us up just a little while ago. It went for Anthony first, and got his leg. Tore it up pretty badly, too...I yelled and shouted, and got Anthony to do it too, and we scared it off. If we hadn't we might be having a very different conversation right now. But that doesn't mean it's not still out there."

"I can't believe it. How could I have screwed up so badly!?" Anthony yelled. "I didn't even think about bears! Why did none of you tell me?"

"We didn't know," Alex told him.

"Hart must have known!"

"I didn't either. Bear attacks don't happen often around here, like I just said."

Anthony had no reply, but simply hung his head and allowed Sarah to finish binding his leg. Alex knew what was happening: Anthony was making this a question of his failed leadership, and not of his bad luck in running across a murderous bear. Suddenly, with a jolt, he remembered the contest.

Sarah turned to him. "So what do we do know?"

Alex considered the question for a long time, staring at the sky between the leaves of the trees. Finally he spoke. "I think we should continue the contest."

"What!?" said Sarah and Hart in unison, then looked at each other. Anthony nodded in agreement, as Alex thought he would.

"Alex," Sarah said, "think about this."

"Do you think I didn't?"

"What's more important!?" she shouted, scowling murderously and looking angrier than Alex had ever seen her. "Your argument with Anthony or all our lives?"