Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller (33 page)

"How do we know where north is?"

"Don't we have a compass?"

"I've got one," Hart said, stepping forward and displaying it in the palm of his hand. It was made of silver-colored iron. Inside it, the needle pointed reassuringly north. "I didn't keep it in my backpack because it's a personal possession. It was my father's."

They paused for a moment, Alex and Hart mulling over their shared knowledge.

"All right," Alex said, by way of breaking up the meeting. "I want to get to Alberta tonight, so we should get moving."

They fell into step along the worn iron of the rails, Alex in the front, Anthony bringing up the rear, still silent.

As the lid began to crack on the next day, Alex had a hunch and hurried ahead of the others. A few minutes later they heard him whooping with happiness. Each of them quickly guessed what he had found, and raced after him. Sarah turned to look behind them, was blinded by the crescent of sunlight over a distant hill in the east, and shielded her eyes, blinking out the remaining luminescent ghost. She raced to catch up with the others and found them seeking out something on the horizon that had caught all their attentions.

Alex jumped off the low bluff of the tracks and searched for a slope. Spotting one about twenty yards away, he scrambled through the grass toward it and scaled it. He thanked god, or whoever was in charge of this sort of thing, or just the unknowable internal machinations of meteorology that the pea soup fog had finally thinned.

He scanned the faraway plains, noting hills and woods, looking for the best possible route. To confirm what he'd seen, he traced the winding iron rails with his finger—and they were, indeed, bending. He descended the hill to reunite with the others.

"I guess we missed the Alberta sign in all that damn fog," he said by way of an explanation. "It doesn't matter anyway."

"Hart," Sarah asked, "which way is north?"

Hart produced the compass from the back pocket of his filthy jeans and studied it for a moment. "Over that way," he said.

"Did you find a route?" Anthony asked, with a tone clearly indicating that he could have found a better one.

"Well, keep the sun on our right, obviously," Alex began, and Anthony nodded, "follow the compass…and look for anything flat. I'm pretty sure the best way is to follow that stream, over that way," he gestured off into the distance.

Anthony grunted and set off. Alex ran ahead of him and threw out his hands. "Not now! We've been walking all night. Don't you want to rest first?"

"I guess," Anthony said; and unrolling his sleeping bag, threw it down where he was standing.

"You two get some sleep as well," Alex called back to Sarah and Hart. Hart walked ahead and lay his bag down near Anthony's. Sarah pitched hers closer to the tracks. This was slightly strange—the nature of their situation usually caused them all to camp together, and closest to whatever reminded them of civilization.

Alex walked over near Sarah and dropped his backpack and sleeping bag. Then, on a wild impulse, he bounded to the top of the hill again, and stood surveying the wild emptiness that surrounded them. The sun was releasing copious emissaries of itself, rays of light that sped across the plains and turned them green, blue, gold, any number of crazy, beautiful colors. What he saw overwhelmed him, raced through his mind and turned it over and over again, and it was all he could do to keep from shouting aloud. How could he have, in his wildest dreams, ever believed he could be here? No matter what had happened, how lucky was he to be standing here now, seeing these prairies reveal themselves in splendor, living a life that he himself had built?

Around noon he awoke with a start. He'd had a dream that was almost an exact copy of the one he'd had in Porcupine: the same dark passage, the glimmer of light, the strangling hand—and what was easily the most unsettling feature, that of standing in a deserted village during a blizzard. Was it a real place? Where was it? Had he ever been there?

A hanging question
, Alex thought,
is always worse than any answer you can give
.

He turned over and saw, to his surprise, that Sarah was lying awake as well. He rolled onto his back and searched for the sun. It appeared to be about three in the afternoon.

"Sarah?" he said softly.

She jumped in her sleeping bag. "Don't
do
that!" she hissed.

"Sorry! Christ!" he said. She rolled to face away from him. Finally he said, "So…what's keeping you up?"

"You first," she said, turning on her back again.

"Weird dreams," he muttered. "Nothing particularly special. What about you?"

"Nothing. Just, you know…thinking."

"About?" he said, teasing slightly.

"Nothing!"

"What?"

"Nothing!" she yelled, almost laughing herself now. "Well…" she quickly sobered again. "I was just thinking about…about those guys we killed at the river. Who were they? I mean, what were their names? Did they have wives? Girlfriends? Families? What were their favorite movies? And what…what…"

"—what made them become who they were?" Alex finished.

"Well…yeah," Sarah said.

"I know what you mean," Alex replied, dropping his gaze and turning over to look at some clouds drifting in from the east, chasing down the sun. "There was one of them—the leader, I think. He looked—this is really stupid—he looked like my old French teacher."

"Maybe they were brothers," Sarah said, with a hint of sarcasm she quickly tried to disguise.

"I thought that too. And I thought, if they were, what made this one a middle school teacher and that one a Moose Killer?"

"You're not actually going to try to know, are you? Did you ever consider it might have been fate?"

"I don't believe in fate. It's a completely ridiculous concept. The future hasn't happened yet."

"I didn't really expect you to."

"But these people…" Alex murmured, with a searching note in his voice, "what makes them? To us they're nothing more than moving targets, but…"

"Alex, can we talk about something else? This is making me feel a bit…" she was unable to find the word, "…a bit uneasy."

"Maybe that's how we should feel!" The words came out louder than Alex had intended. He turned over to face her. "These killers—somebody had to have been their mother and father, and they must have had hometowns, and best friends when they were little—"

"Alex!" Sarah shouted. "Stop it!"

"—and—and they might have had first times at the beach, and first kisses, and they'd have been through high school and college—"

"Alex, please!" Sarah said, almost pleading.

"They got screwed over by the system maybe, or life just beat them at their own game—and then they wound up with the Moose Killers and their families worried about them every night—and then—and then some damn kid just went and shot them!"

Sarah was drawing deep, slow breaths. Forgetting all that was surrounding her, she turned over, put a hand on Alex's shoulder, and looked into his eyes.

"I'm not saying you're wrong," she told him. "But thinking like this…it doesn't help anything. It won't change anything. And at this point…" she trailed off and began again. "At this point all we can do is believe we're the good guys."

She stopped. Alex looked back at her, and wondered if it was selfish of him to enjoy, regardless of what they'd done, this evanescent moment hovering between them.

Sarah managed to sleep soon after that, but Alex lay awake for a while longer, until just before sunset, wondering what had come over him and made him ask the questions he had. Finally he drifted into an uneasy quasi-rest.

As he awoke, the sun was sweeping down the lower end of its arc and descending below the horizon again, painting the sky with a richer palette than in the morning. He squinted, rubbed his eyes, and blinked a few times, then looked around to see if Sarah was still asleep. The quick turning of his head made him a bit dizzy so he sat still for a while until his mind could activate.

It was then that he noticed the light reflecting off something hanging in front of him, forming a short beam of bright glare. He shielded his eyes and glanced around. When he saw Anthony's face and his hand holding whatever was reflecting, he jumped backwards and landed on his hands.

"Anthony—"

"Get up," Anthony spat.

"Are you all right?"

"I am not all right. Get up right now or you won't be either."

Finally Alex's pupils shrank and his eyes focused in front of him. Anthony was holding a long, thin strip of metal by the handle—a rusty knife, notched with scars from fights long since won and lost. Alex started when he saw it and began to reflexively crawl backwards.

"What the hell are you thinking? Did we get attacked?"

"
We will!
" Anthony roared, with such ferocity Alex swore he was in actual pain. "We're goddamn well going to be!"

Alex remembered who was supposed to have the upper hand and stopped crawling backwards, instead pushing himself to a halfway standing position. Seeing Anthony's crazed stare he moved into a guarded stance.

"Hart, take his stuff," Anthony called over his shoulder. Hart jumped down from the tracks and slung Alex's backpack over his shoulder before going to stand by Anthony.

"Anthony, what the hell is wrong with you!?" Alex said, frustrated, imploringly.

"Let me tell you," Anthony shot back with a voice like a firing gun. "Let me tell you that I heard everything you and your girlfriend were talking about last night—morning—whatever."

Alex almost lunged at him but pulled himself back in time. Anthony was his ally! How could he have been listening in on his conversations?

"And when I tell you, maybe you'll realize that we can't fight killers thinking like that. Maybe you'll remember that you don't have a plan and that's almost as bad as when you did have one. Maybe you'll learn that Anthony Anderson has built himself on not taking crap from people and that he doesn't intend to start now, not for some raging dreamer slash vigilante slash idiot."

For the first time, Alex looked at Anthony and saw everything about him: the prison of persona that he had built himself into brick by brick his whole life, the foolhardy bravery that he could find nothing to do but test to ever more dangerous limits, his inner rage at seeing anything or everything collapse around him, and yet, his desperation for that very thing to happen.

"Where did you get that knife?" he asked.

"I won a fight in Niagara," Anthony answered. "You thought I'd go with you unarmed?"

Suddenly Alex knew something else.

"The knife gave you that scar, didn't it?"

Anthony was silent.

"You won it, you hid it somewhere, probably buried it," Alex said, the typical coolness entering his voice now, "then you took it back so you could slit my throat when you got sick of me."

"When you do what I do, you don't give up a weapon," Anthony said, equally cool.

Alex took a small step forward. "You were selling drugs, weren't you?"

"Aren't you clever!?" Anthony retorted, extending his knife arm to its full length. "It's too late to be clever, Alex. You broke your promise. You told me I won that race."

"Funny," Alex muttered. "With all the near-death experiences, it sort of slipped my mind."

"
It's not even about that!
" Anthony roared again with the ferocity of a tiger just released from its cage. "I'm tired of you breaking promises! I'm tired of you letting us drop, one by one, like flies! I'm tired of slogging for hundreds of miles through Canada's lower armpit! And I have gone too…freaking…long without a cigarette!"

It was beginning to dawn on Alex exactly what Anthony wanted from him.

"You can't seriously kick me out," Alex said, fighting to stop his voice and resolve from wavering. "You'll freeze to death in twelve hours."

"I can," Anthony said, so flatly that it was even more terrifying than his roar. Running out of options, Alex turned to Hart.

"Hart," he said, ghosts of pleading breaking through his voice. "Hart, you don't agree with him, do you?"

"Yeah," Hart said firmly. "Let's face it, Alex. There's death behind every tree. You're the one they're looking for. Without you the three of us will have a much better chance of survival. And you know," he said, with the air of bolting down his wits, "leader or not, you really are just dead weight."

Alex's blood boiled, but behind it, the phrase "three of us" triggered something in his mind.

"Sarah!" he called out randomly. "What the hell did you do to her!?" he growled, rounding on Anthony, who swiftly kicked him in the shin, causing him to buckle. "If you hurt her—"

"Isn't that sweet?" Anthony snarled. "Only knocked out, that's all. Once she comes around she'll side with us. But you'd better not be here when she does."

Hart came up beside Anthony, holding something large and heavy. Alex noticed: it was the rifle they'd taken at the Saskatchewan River. Hart held it out.