Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller (36 page)

It turned out to be a young, blond enforcer, recently hired, whose name neither Potard nor anybody else had yet bothered to learn. He stood up from his position near the end of the table. "Mr. McTavish," he said, somewhat nervously, "I have a report to make."

"Then make it," McTavish snapped. "Our time is valuable."

The enforcer gathered himself. "I'm worried that we're under suspicion."

A murmur swept across the table, everybody offering their own opinion on what had just been voiced. McTavish called for silence. "What reason do you have to suspect this?"

"Well…" A certain boldness seemed to enter the enforcer's voice. "I've seen men, sitting on benches outside—in this weather—reading newspapers, sometimes for hours at a time. It's not natural."

"I thought as much," McTavish sighed. "May we continue this meeting?"

"Wait!" The enforcer's voice was picking up speed; he was speaking now to the table at large. "Haven't you all seen that every police car in the city seems to be driving be here twice a day? There never used to be that many cops on the road out there."

Some of the men turned to each other, nodding in silent agreement.

"Haven't you noticed the parked vans, the suspicious bunches of people? Do you think the McTavish group's reputation alone has earned us two new clients since yesterday?"

"You can't seriously…" McTavish began, but trailed off, realizing that nobody was listening to him. The murmur was growing louder, more animated.

"
That's it!
" He slammed his fists on the table. "This meeting is adjourned!"

Snow was beginning to drift now, preparing to fall in earnest and drop an extra blanket of white onto the landscape. The moon searched desperately through the cracks in the clouds for a place to shine its light, but would only appear for seconds before being shrouded once again.

The grass crunched menacingly beneath Sarah's feet as she burst out of the forest, not giving up her burst of momentum until she had stumbled onto the ribbon of asphalt. Attempting to throw out her hands on instinct, she shifted her weight backward and came to a full stop, retreating to the edge of the road to pant.

She turned her ear back toward the forest and listened for the telltale crunching sound to come from somewhere other than her—and cursed the fact that as well as evading her enemies, she now had to evade her friends. She knew she had been extremely lucky; Hart and Anthony, having lain awake all night waiting for their opportunity, had stopped to rest for an hour and bound her again.

She then brought her thoughts back to what she should have been doing, and looked around for a tree with rough bark. Finding one a short distance away, she made for it and placed her tied wrists against it, sawing viciously up and down. After about fifteen seconds of this, she stopped to regain her breath, then went at it again, hacking the ropes to pieces on the naturally sharp edge. At last the ropes fell away, and Sarah rubbed her wrists in relief. In his tired haze, Anthony hadn't bothered to look for a tree, and just left her in her sleeping bag before collapsing in his own.

She shook her head, and realized she felt sorry for him—as sorry as she had felt for Alex on their first meeting. Hart, though…Hart could have been saved, had Anthony not appealed to his baser instincts the way he did.

Heading forward, she stepped onto the highway, and tried to remember what she had planned so resolutely to do. She knew she must have armed herself for a reason—even with her hands tied, she took one of the pistols before fleeing.
Perhaps I knew what it might come to—

She purged the thought.
It will never come to that.

She realized again what she was supposed to be doing: finding Alex, and warning him. Alex, she knew, would have pushed on to Cold Lake, and after that, made a bid for Sawtooth. But, although it was near, he couldn't be there already; he was likely still at Cold Lake.

It had been an ingenious plan: using Hart's compass, she had led them to the northwest, knowing they would eventually stop and rest. Once escaping, she had continued on in the same direction, hoping to find a highway she knew led into Cold Lake from the west. She would follow it, then search for Alex, and then the two of them would make a stand to defend themselves against…who? Sarah clutched her face in her hands. She had, at last, forgotten who the bad guys were.

She fought to reorient herself. Hart and Anthony were still on their side, just misguided—and they were all against a common enemy, the Moose Killers. But why them?

She was suddenly struck with an idea, coming from something remembered almost three weeks ago, in the endlessly far off kingdom known as Ridge City. Alex had hung up a phone, and relayed a conversation to her and Anthony—the arguments they had used to prove Jake's innocence. After that, though, the caller—Henry Machry—had told Alex something else. She remembered the exact words:
Get in touch with me again once he's free.
She knew that now was the time to follow through on that. Before they faced the guns of the MK again, she wanted to know exactly why they were being shot at.

A pair of headlights, shockingly bright against the night sky and the drifting flurries, appeared against the horizon. Sarah didn't know how she was planning to carry out her plan before, but she had a chance now.

The car, a sky-blue pickup truck, materialized into fuller view. Judging from the headlights and the meager moonlight, it was no more than a hundred yards away from her. Without pausing to consider who would be driving this late, she began waving her arms frantically.

Mere yards from her, the truck skidded to a halt with an unsettling screech. The driver's door opened, and a large man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, wearing a graying muzzle of hair on his face, stepped out. His voice was set in a deep Canadian accent. "Are you alright?" he asked worriedly. "Coulda killed you! You'll want to be more careful, eh."

"I'm sorry, sir," Sarah replied, walking toward him.

The driver leaned on the hood of the truck. "What are you doing out here anyway?"

Sarah thought quickly and came up with a credible story. "I'm out camping with my parents, by Cold Lake," she told him, as calmly as she could while her mind was working so furiously, "we were hiking, and got separated…I'm sure they went back to look for help, but I just want to let them know I'm all right."

The driver seemed to believe her, and his face held a sympathetic look. Sarah pushed on.

"You don't have a cell phone with you, do you? If I could borrow it—"

"Of course you can borrow it!" the driver interjected. "What kind of heartless guy do you think I am, eh? It's right in here…" He dug around in the open driver's seat, and came out with a large, old-model cell phone. "Go off in the trees and use it," he told her, gesturing toward the forest. "I won't listen in, eh."

"Thank you," she said, managing a grateful expression with a hint of truth to it. She ran off into the trees, now illuminated by the headlights.

The sequence of numbers that she had seen Alex dial that day appeared in her mind as though it had never left. Her heart pounded as she heard the ringing, a signal being sent effortlessly over the thousand miles they had journeyed. The phone clicked, and a voice on the other side answered, "Hello?"

"Mr. Machry?" she asked.

"He isn't here," the voice said.

Sarah's stomach lurched. "Then who are you?"

"A police investigator. Machry's at the station."

Horror began to creep up on her. "Why!? He isn't—"

"They're questioning him. Testimony in a murder case. If you need to speak to him, I can put you through."

A minute later, she was listening again to the ringing sound, and again to the click. "Who do you need?" another voice said.

"Machry!" she said, louder than intended.

"Machry…Machry…you can talk to him," the voice answered. "Keep it short, though."

Seconds later, a familiar voice at last replied. "Hello?"

"Mr. Machry?"

"Speaking."

"It's Sarah Jones."

Machry exhaled into the receiver. "Just when I thought this day couldn't get any weirder…"

"Machry, why are you at the police station…?"

"Never mind that. Are you all alive?"

"All of us. Except Jake…"

Machry was silent for a deafening moment. Finally he asked, "Why are you calling?"

"I need to know everything," she said hastily. "It's urgent."

"I can tell you everything."

Ten minutes later, she returned to the asphalt and handed the phone back to the driver. "Thank you," she said, and turned to leave.

"Wait!" he called. "You need a lift, eh? I can take you as far as Cold Lake."

"That would be great!" she said, smiling, and headed for the passenger door.

An hour later, when the snow had begun to sweep in the wind across the headlight beams, Sarah bade the man goodbye and climbed from the seat. The truck sped off into the darkness, and she turned away. Meager moonlight was reflecting in a long, ethereal beam across the surface of Cold Lake. Reflected in it, as much a part of the scene as the water or the trees, sat a single figure.

Sarah approached, crushing the blanket of snow underfoot.

CHAPTER 25

Cold Lake

Another careful footstep, and Alex bolted upright, groping for the rifle he had dropped in the snow. He wasn't at all ready to handle an attacker, and had only been watching the lake, allowing himself to take a short break and let his mind wander across the water. At last his near-frozen hand closed around the handle, and he looked for his target, only to hear it yell.

"Wait! Wait! I'm not here to—"

Alex lowered the barrel cautiously and examined the apparition. Whoever it was hurried into the emerging moonlight, giving Alex a clear view of her face. When he saw, it was evident—he barely managed to avoid dropping the gun.

"Sarah?" he asked tentatively, refusing to believe his eyes.

"Alex," she replied, smiling. "Don't rush to greet me."

"You—wait—did Anthony get to you too?" he said, pointing the rifle at her again.

"He tied me up and beat me," she said sourly. "Not the most effective methods."

"He did—" Alex found his anger difficult to rein in. "Where is he? Is he here? I'll shoot him, I swear—"

"Alex, no!" she said forcefully, and, moving swiftly toward the gun, pushed it from his loose grip with one hand and let it drop in the snow. "Anthony would shoot. You wouldn't. That's what keeps you apart."

"You're probably right," he murmured, not meeting her eyes. He turned away and began to watch the silver light paint across the lake again: a minimalist canvas.

"Are you okay?" she asked, coming up beside him, with a look in her eyes that said she was serious. "A week ago you would never have agreed with me."

Alex looked directly at her; their eyes met, and they both paused for a long moment. She recalled his face from when she had first met him, sleeping in a treehouse at the beginning of February. His face had been boyish then, full of the hope that came only from oppression, full of the conflict that came only from attempting the impossible. She had watched it for a long time, and now saw how much it had changed. It was now as though that same conflict had been resolved, and that Alex had come to terms with the fact that, whatever side he was on, he was fighting a losing battle.

"It's been a bad day," he said eventually. He wandered slowly but purposefully toward the shore of the lake and dropped to upper bank in a patch of green still relatively untouched by the lightly falling snow. Sarah let him stay there for a while, gazing across the lake as he was. At length he asked, "Why did you come?"

"I had to get away," she replied. "They won't be following us. I tied them both up before I left. And after that…I didn't really know where to go. But…I knew I wanted to make sure you were," she began to say
alive
but stopped herself, "…okay."

"I'll take your word for it," he told her.

After another short time, she remembered something else. "Alex, I…there's another reason."

"Is this one going to be better than the last one?"

"Shut up for once," she said, with a hint of jest. "What happened was—I know everything. I know the whole reason that we're being shot at."

This was enough to make him turn away from the spectacle of the lake. "Are you serious?"

"It's hardly the time for kidding."

"You'd better sit down, then," Alex said, brushing away some snow beside him. Sarah walked over and sat down, carefully positioning herself so as not to land in a patch of snow. "Alright," Alex told her, in a somewhat eager voice. "Let's see if you're telling the truth."

Ordoñez's watch told him that it was 11:39 PM, though to his annoyance it was unable to tell him what would have been most useful; that Alex was about a mile around the circumference of the lake from his position. He slammed the door of his convertible, the impending snow having finally forced him to raise the top, and resigned himself to looking the old-fashioned way. Cold Lake, however, was large enough to appear on national maps, and he despaired at how long it would take to search every inch. His first instincts as a tracker told him to look for marks that Alex had passed through—but he knew just as quickly that Alex would be hurrying northward from the lake, not leisurely strolling around it.