Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller (40 page)

In the tenth of a second that followed, Alex prepared himself to die. He came back again to the moment of standing at Roland's front door.
This is what I vowed,
he told himself.
This is just what I vowed to do.

In a final surge of determination, Alex grasped Ordoñez's wrist with one hand and the handle of the pistol with the other, and drove his fingers repeatedly into the trigger. The gun blasted upwards, once, twice, and then three, four, five, six, seven times, one for each bullet left. They both let it drop into the snow, still smoking, useless. As if they had agreed on the schedule, both of them clambered to their feet.

Ordoñez lunged first, knocking Alex backwards and slamming him, upright, into a tree. The breath was knocked out of him for the second time in almost as many minutes. He drove his foot into Ordoñez's knee, intent on causing pain. Ordoñez fell backwards and Alex moved forwards toward him, only to feel something like a truck smash into the side of his head. He fell toward the ground and put out his hands to steady himself; to his horror, he realized he was spitting blood. He pushed onto his feet and turned around, putting up his hands reflexively. Ordoñez stretched back for another hook, but Alex landed the first punch, an uppercut to where Ordoñez's nose had been a minute ago.

Each in their own fighting stance, they circled around each other. Alex jabbed through the flurries and Ordoñez stopped it with his hand, wrenching Alex's arm. Alex rushed again, knowing that the assassin was infinitely better prepared, and threw a flurry of punches at every part of his adversary that was visible. Ordoñez's hands flew twice as fast as his, stopping everything Alex had—but one solitary jab landed on Ordoñez's stomach.

Alex knew he had hit the right spot when the assassin lurched backwards, clutching his solar plexus. He bent double in pain—and something fell from his back pocket. Alex's eyes widened in shock. Ordoñez reacted instantly, sweeping his hand across the snow and taking the object into his fingers. "You'll never guess what I forgot I had," he said as he did so, breaking the silence. Alex, again possessed by instinct, flung up his arm—

The Moose Killers, just as they had been earlier that day, were assembled together; all of Canada's greatest hunters and killers, standing in the lobby of the building in downtown Ottawa. Nobody dared to move or speak—they would only stand there, armed and tense, watching the red and blue lights play across the glass facade.

Edmund McTavish emerged out of the stairwell, walking expressionlessly behind the crowd of enforcers. Finally, he asked, to nobody in particular, "How bad is it?"

"Bad, sir, very bad," somebody said tensely. "The whole building's surrounded, from what I can tell."

"Has anyone gone outside to check?"

"Nobody, sir. Too dangerous."

"
Dangerous
!?" McTavish shouted, echoing through the atrium. "You are Moose Killers! You are
revolutionaries
! You were not trained to be afraid of
dangerous
!" He turned toward the gathering, livid with anger directed at both sides. "They are police, and they are the ones who are scared. Everybody who believes in the cause, come forward to fight them; everybody who is too scared, go out now! Give yourselves up! We have no use for you!"

The Moose Killers remained motionless. "The right decision," McTavish spat, then held up two fingers for silence. A scratchy bullhorn, tarnished with feedback, invaded the lobby. The men, rooted to the spot and clutching their weapons, hardly listened to it. McTavish walked toward the end of the line.

"…if you do not come out within one minute, we will be forced to approach," the message finished.

The enforcers' hands were drenched with sweat, their formerly cold weapons now warm. Some of them clenched their teeth, bit their lips, closed their eyes. The seconds ticked by agonizingly—ten, thirty, fifty, sixty.

The police began trickling past their barricade, nearing the doors.

McTavish called out, "We refuse!"

The glass wall dissolved.

It tore into him, searing through him with a white-hot fury. He was barely aware of screaming, and just had time to be embarrassed with himself for doing so before he collapsed to the ground. He tried to clutch his leg with his hands but could not reach it.
I knew it,
he thought,
this is what death feels like.

A knife, fire, a sword, an arrow. Alex searched his litany of words with his fading mind but was unable to come up with anything equaling this pain. His eyes were covered with a haze of red; he could see that the snow around his right leg was no longer white. He tried to run at Ordoñez, but could only drag himself forward, crawling and falling limp again. Ordoñez, meanwhile, was leaning against a tree, folding his arms and looking pleased with himself.

But, even through the wall of his mind, he could see his opening. Ordoñez had left the second gun lying in the snow; he appeared to not even notice it was there. Slowly, inexorably, Alex pulled himself and reached toward it. If he was going to die now, he was going to bring his killer down with him.

He clutched the weapon, aimed it at Ordoñez's chest, and fired.

Nothing.

He rarely cried, but thought this might be a good time to start. He fought against it, sinking gradually into despair.

Ordoñez was still leaning on his tree, watching the scene unfold with the confident air that comes from being a manipulator. "It's an old Moose Killer trick," he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and unfolded his arms. "Potard himself came up with it. More than one bullet in the gun—and there might be accidents."

Alex could say nothing.

"Know what I'm going to do now, Alex?" Ordoñez said brightly, unfolding his arms and smiling nonchalantly as if he'd found a better produce deal at a different grocery store. "I'm going to watch you die. It's not yet one o'clock. We've got hours together. When the sun comes up, there will only be one of us."

Alex was struggling to speak. "It's not…that…"

"Alex, please!" Ordoñez was laughing now. The laugh was completely joyless, void of all happiness, replaced instead with a demented satisfaction. The assassin was reveling in his return to the soulless, unfeeling machine he had done a very good job of convincing himself he was. His hollow mirth rang in Alex's ears. It was a horrible sound, one he would remember long years after; and it remained the deepest he'd ever seen into the assassin's soul. "It's that bad, I can assure you," Ordoñez went on. "Nobody's going to make it through this weather. Unless you get medical attention by morning it's going to be
very
bad." With that, he folded his arms across his chest again, leaned back against his tree, and fixed his eyes on Alex's recumbent form.

Alex, sinking deeper, wondered how much truth there was to this. In his heart—and much of the rest of him—he knew he was right to despair. This field would be his field of death. He turned his head to the side, so as not to have to look at Ordoñez and his perverse fulfillment. He fixed his eyes instead on the only spot of difference he could see through the flying snow—a shadow, moving somewhere off in the distance. As his leg seared again, and the snow burned cold against his body, he was determined to watch it until he could watch no more.

As he watched the shadow it began to change and gradually get larger. Suddenly, he realized in a flash that it was not just a mass—it was a moving form; no, even more than that, it was a
human
form. Ordoñez had said that nobody would come, but who was this? Another of his assassin friends?

Alex hung to the questions—all that was keeping him from slipping further. Whoever this person was, they were a wrench in the situation—meaning that his predicament was not inescapable. His right leg was all but unusable, but he could find a way around that. He put his hands against the ground, testing the surface, and began to haul himself up.

Though he only fell back down as he saw Hart McGee crash into Ordoñez's side, tackling him into the storm.

Machry and Roland had been forced to share the backseat for the ride back to station, which made Machry incredibly uncomfortable despite the fact that Roland had been handcuffed. To take his mind off it, he leaned his arm on the window and watched Woodsbrook roll past. The last thing he remembered—the moment he would later testify about—was the patrol car turning onto the town's main thoroughfare, beginning to sidle past the shops and offices of downtown, watching some flurries of snow begin to fall.

He heard something scratch against something else, turned his head around, and for a moment was unable to register what he was seeing. There was a point of flickering light behind Roland's hands; it slipped from his fingers and fell to the seat. Machry's brain finally figured out exactly what it was.

"No!" he shouted. He dove for it, trying to smother it, but succeeded only in scorching his hand and recoiling in pain. He stared at his palm, where a jagged burn mark had etched itself. Fire was now spreading from the original flame, which Machry could see had been ignited by a match—perhaps one of the same kind that had recently lit his house on fire. "Stop the car!" he yelled, frantically.

It was only too late that he understood that this was exactly what Roland wanted him to do. The patrolman looked back and his eyes widened. He motioned quickly to the detective and told her she should take the request to heart. The patrol car pulled over by the sidewalk, and the patrolman opened his door. Machry and the detective exited as quickly as the could, and as Machry watched the entire backseat flare up, Roland flew out of his door and slammed his head into the patrolman's stomach. Something shining dropped from the cop's hand.

"Don't let him get that—" the detective barked, but in vain. Roland had already snatched up the ring of keys; and with remarkable skill, unlocked his own shackles while on his feet and running hard.

"Shoot him!" Machry shouted.

"We can't shoot him!" the detective replied disgustedly. "He's not shooting us!"

"He just set your car on fire!" Machry yelled. In his heart he knew it was futile. The police weren't going to give him the help he needed.

The patrolman had already given chase, but Machry was thinner, faster, and less weighed down with equipment; in seconds of running he overtook the cop and set his sights on Roland as the detective shouted indistinctly behind him. Roland was already tearing around the corner of a side street branching off the main. Machry followed a streetlight, through which he could see falling snowflakes. He sped off towards it, beginning to pant, forcing his legs to move and careening with momentum.

He hit the halo of light and caught his breath in time to see Roland racing along the center of the pavement, heading toward a large sign:
Interstate 81.
That was his plan, then—Roland Johnson was to leave civilization, to escape on the open road. Machry hurried even faster, and Roland turned quickly, catching him in pursuit. Both of them forced themselves to move.

Machry had been right: Roland was leading the chase away from downtown, toward the on-ramp to the interstate on which Alex had escaped months ago. Turning the corner at the end of the road, he saw I-81 in its glory, speckled with fallen, melting snow. Roland was going for the access ramp, right underneath the town's favorite sign:
Technological Capital of Upstate New York
. Machry could hear his own labored breathing, almost in rhythm with the pounding of his footsteps on the asphalt.

Ahead of him, Roland vaulted the concrete wall, hoping to land on the grassy slope below. Instead he was unable to plant his feet, and slipped onto his side, rolling over and over to the bottom like a child playing. Machry followed his lead and was careful to make contact before taking off, quickly but tentatively. Roland's blunder had allowed Machry to gain ground; by the time Roland managed to haul himself up and begin the chase again, Machry was less then ten yards behind him. Faced with this image of Roland, silhouetted against falling snow, sprinting down the right lane of I-81, Machry had to wonder where he thought he was going. Did he think he could run away from the lives he'd ruined, the evil he'd done, the house he'd burned that may have had a woman and child inside? Did he seriously believe that he could run down the interstate, out of Woodsbrook, and escape his own life? Did he truly think that by running, he would no longer be Roland Johnson?

And how much of this did Machry believe?

He was so lost in thought and running that he barely noticed that Roland had stopped, and turned to face him. Machry slammed his feet to the asphalt and stood facing his quarry down in the center of the lane—no cars would come tonight, not in this ominous snow.

Roland did not speak; instead, he charged at Machry and struck him violently across the face. Machry had no time to react—he was still on his feet, but barely. Instead of striking back, he wiped his face to check that there was no blood, stood up again, and wondered how he'd gotten himself into this. Roland hit him again, not once but repeatedly—on the face, the torso, the arms—grunting in rage as he did it, eventually causing Machry to fall to the road. "I'm going to kill you, Machry!" he shouted, kicking him. "You're dying for what you did to me!"

Machry assumed that Roland believed they were in a fight: between every attack he seemed to waiting for Machry to strike back. Machry could do nothing but brace himself against the assault. He screwed up his body, tightened his muscles, and told himself that each successive kick would be the last. Mostly, he tried to ignore his nagging internal voice: that Roland intended to kill him, and would finish the job in a heartbeat.