Deadfall (3 page)

This guy said lightning?
Tom thought. He had detected ozone, but the sky was cloudless. No way lightning. He straightened.

“What do you know about this?”

The man shrugged. “Where are the wieners and marshmallows when you need them?”

Someone laughed.

“You were in the Hummer?” Tom's head inclined toward the big SUV. His pistol's grip felt solid under his palm. He considered freeing it from its holster, despite these visitors' lack of threatening gestures. Tom was even more disturbed by their nonchalance. But equanimity was no reason to draw a weapon.

The man turned his head to look at the Hummer, as if there were so many of the expensive vehicles in town, he wanted to make sure.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “that's ours.”

“Let me see some ID.”

The man reached behind him.Tom tensed. The hand reappeared holding a money clip. The man slipped a driver's license from the folded bills and handed it to Tom.

“Declan,”Tom read, giving the name a sharp
e
.

The girl snickered. “Deck-lan,” she corrected.

“Declan Gabriel Page.”Tom eyed him. “Seattle?”

“The Emerald City,” Declan agreed.

Tom returned the license. He scanned the scattered visitors, then gestured to them. “All of you come on over here. If you came into town with Declan, step over, please.”

No one moved.

“Come on now!”

Tom's eyes moved to Declan's. They were flat, emotionless.

Declan's smirk bent up slightly. Keeping his gaze on Tom, he called out, “Come say hi to the nice sheriff, boys!”

They shuffled closer.

Declan extended his hand to Tom. “I didn't catch your name.”

Tom gave a curt nod. “Constable Fuller, RCMP.” He added, “Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

“Ahhh,” Declan said. “A Mountie.” He turned to the girl. “See, I told you we'd run into them up here.”

The cameraman—still filming—and the black man stepped beside Declan. A teenage boy he hadn't seen earlier appeared behind the girl. His thick dark hair fell to midear, curling up at the ends. Gold loops pieced an earlobe and the left side of his bottom lip. A gold rod, bent into a rectangle at the top like a sardine-can key, harpooned his right eyebrow.

Tom wanted to know everything at once.What were their names? Why were they in town? What did they have to do with Roland's car exploding, with Roland's death? He wanted to tell the fat kid to get the camera out of his face. But because everything at once was a bit beyond his pay grade, and because he was already looking at the teenager, he asked, “Shouldn't you be in school?”

“We're tutored,” the boy said. “We have flexible schedules.”

The girl giggled, and Tom wondered how deep this weirdness was going to get. He took in the gathering of visitors. Missing one: that other boy, the youngest of the bunch.

“Where's—”

“Tom!” someone yelled—
screamed
—to his left. It was Old Man Nelson, who'd named the mercantile after his daughter. He stood in the doorway of the store, looking as if he might have seen Roland, burnt beyond recognition, get to his feet and skip into the ice cream parlor. He pointed, but Tom had already caught the object of Nelson's concern in the corner of his eye and was spinning toward it.

Looking straight into it, the diameter of the gun barrel appeared as big as a tank's. The boy pointing it at Tom looked as terrified as Tom felt. Big eyes, quivering bottom lip. The pistol wavered and shook, but at a distance of three feet, any shot at all would have taken off Tom's head.

3

“Now, son,” Tom said.
“This isn't the way to—”

Fingers gripped his wrist, firmly lifting his hand away from the butt of his gun. Declan.That nasty little smile.

Declan pulled Tom's service pistol from its holster and moved to the boy's side. “Good job, Julie.”

The boy lowered his weapon, obviously relieved to do so. Sweat had broken out on his brow beneath long bangs. He closed his eyes. He said, “It's Julian. Don't call me Julie.” He strode off toward the Hummer.

Tom expected a wisecrack from Declan:
Guess you're done asking
questions,
or even a simple
Well, well, well
. But the man only watched him, seeming to read his thoughts and intentions in the contours of his face. After a moment he called out, “Bad, round up these people. Put them where we talked about. The community center.”

The black man—had Declan called him “Bad”?—brushed past Tom, beckoning to Old Man Nelson, who was backpedaling into the shadows of the general store. Bad held a pistol high above his head, as if to say,
I got the power now. Listen to me!

“Cortland, you and Julie put out this fire,” Declan said.“Kyrill, get the phones.”

The older teen jogged toward the store. He stopped to let Nelson and Kelsie exit, prodded from behind by Bad. Then he disappeared into the store.

Tom's stomach knotted.
The phones.
He was certain Declan was referring to the town's satellite phones, their only means of quick communication. This far north, in a part of the world too sparsely populated to warrant a major investment by any corporation not mining for uranium, there was no mobile phone service, no landlines, no cable or satellite television, no Internet.

This isolation, this snub at time's technological force-feeding, was part of Fiddler Falls's charm. On Thursday nights the Elks Lodge hosted a movie night on its big-screen TV. Trouble for the movie hero often originated or was compounded by a cell phone or e-mail, and inevitably a townie would pipe up with “Wouldn't happen here!” or a “tsk tsk.” Few residents wanted the telecommunication revolution to find Fiddler Falls. Even the businesses that would benefit from selling their goods online or touting their services on a Web site recognized the negative sea change to the community's appeal that technology would bring. Several businesses had contracted with a company in La Ronge to host their Web site or online store.

Tom knew of only four satellite phones in town. One he had left charging in the storefront that acted as the RCMP's substation—so close the Hummer was stopped in front of it. Janine Red Bear, the conservation officer, maintained another phone. She had left two days ago on a weeklong trek through the district. Old Man Nelson kept a phone in his store. He charged a buck a minute to use it, which was low enough to prevent townies from investing in their own phone. John Tungsten owned one. He ran Tungsten's Outfitters and Fishing Lodge outside town.Tom had not seen John; John's wife, Margie; or Billie, their part-time cook/part-time guide, for a few days. Most likely, they had taken advantage of the change-of-season lull to make repairs on their wilderness cabins or travel to Wollaston for supplies.

The kid named Kyrill hurried out of the store, brick-sized satellite phone in hand. He navigated around Roland's metal pyre and jogged directly to the RCMP office across the street. Finding the door locked, he used the phone to smash the front window. At the sound, a woman screamed. She was part of a group of about a dozen people Bad was herding toward the community center, which occupied an entire block on the RCMP side of the street.The teen kept striking at the glass until only the top crown of the force's logo was visible on a shard clinging to the upper molding. Then he stepped through.

These visitors knew precisely where to find the phones. They knew what was needed to cut the town off completely. Even the time of year aided them: fall, after the summer tourists departed; when rainy weather made the long, unpaved roads between communities all but impassable; before the winter freeze, which paved the roads, lakes, and rivers with ice, making them more traversable than any other time of year.

A grim realization came to Tom: this had been researched and planned, this—what was it?—
taking
of the town, holding its citizens hostage, terrorizing them,
murdering
them.

He closed his eyes, then opened them to the visage of Declan's devil-may-care attitude. The man acted as though he did this sort of thing every day.
No big deal. I'm in control, and there's nothing you can
do. So just relax and enjoy the ride.

Tom's gaze dropped to the Sig Sauer semiautomatic he knew so well, now turned on him like a recalcitrant Doberman pinscher. He recalled the words Laura had directed at Dillon less than ten minutes ago.

So what are you going to do about it?

What
are
you going to do about it?
he thought. With that, he could go no further. Mental constipation, his mother had called it. A puzzle so confounding, options so numerous, the mind simply paused. And paused.

Declan's eyebrows rose as though he understood Tom's predicament and wondered how he would resolve it . . . as though
any
resolution Tom considered was fine by him.
I'm in control, and there's nothing
you can do.

Think!
Tom told himself. But unable to grasp how his world had changed in ten minutes—six hundred seconds!—with the odor of Roland's burning corpse in his nostrils and the cries of the citizens he had sworn to protect in his ears and his own service weapon pointed at his head, he stopped trying to think.

He took action.

He just did it.

He leaped for the gun.

4

Chin resting on his chest,
John Hutchinson—“Hutch” to just about everyone—had let the drone of the helicopter's engine lull him into a fitful half-sleep when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He ignored it until the nudging became hard raps. He emerged into full consciousness to find Phil's arm reaching around from the seat directly behind him with firm and insistent fingers. He twisted to face his friend.

“Look!” Phil called out, pushing his soft lips into a big grin. His cheeks lifted wire-frame glasses off the bridge of his nose. He nodded toward the side window.

David, seated behind the pilot, had his forehead pressed against the glass. Next to him, in the middle rear seat,Terry was unbuckled and half standing to see past David.

Hutch looked. As perfectly as a mirror, the lake below reflected the sky and, around its edges, Precambrian granite cliffs and staunch evergreens, like fairy-tale sentinels. Hutch watched a breeze ripple the surface, making the clouds below appear to dance in air currents unfelt by those high above. Green and brown and gold wilderness, unscarred by man, fanned out from the lake as far as he could see; it rolled over the terrain like a rumpled blanket, upon which rested a flat, glistening gem.

The Bell JetRanger glided between water and sky, and for only the fourth time in his life, Hutch felt beauty snatch his breath away. The first time it had happened, he had been shocked to realize that the concept wasn't simply the province of songwriters, but that it really, physically, literally happened. His eyes had followed the long aisle and caught sight of his bride stepping through the church door, her arm hooked through her father's. She had been halfway to him before he had remembered to breathe again.The first sight of his children, each just seconds old, had been breath-stoppers two and three.That it happened here, now, caught him off guard, not only because it was the first time the love for a human had not elicited the response, but mostly because he had been so downright ornery lately. How could anything, let alone
landscape
, have penetrated his sour disposition? It validated his decision to come up here, to get away from it all and just
be
.

He smiled at the pilot, but the man was an automaton behind mirrored Ray-Bans. Hutch consulted the topographical map in his lap, then turned and hooked an elbow over the seat back. “Black Lake!” he yelled over the din of the engine and rotors.

“Beautiful!”Terry pronounced.

Phil slapped Hutch's elbow and beamed. “So we're almost there?” he asked.

Under Phil's mask of elation, Hutch recognized fatigue and roadweariness. They all felt it. Even Hutch's butt was numb from riding in Terry's van so long: twenty-seven nonstop hours on paved roads from Denver to Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan, then nine more grueling hours on a potted, rutted dirt road to Points North Landing, where they chartered the helicopter.

After so much discomfort, Hutch wondered if Phil could appreciate spending the next two weeks living out of tents in the deep wilds of northern Canada.The trade-off—at least for Hutch, and he hoped for all of them—was the isolation. Not just the
feeling
of getting away from it all, but getting away from it all for real: no e-mail, no cell phones, no television or DVDs or video games, no golf courses, no restaurants, no work emergencies. And no way to get to any of them, even if they wanted to. Just the thought of that kind of seclusion calmed him. Since Janet had found another man, filed for divorce, and taken the kids eleven months ago—in that order and that quickly—there had been times he thought he was going to explode—not in rage or frustration, but literally—or at least stroke out. And at thirty-eight, he was too young for that.

Maybe it was true that rotten luck struck in threes, because life had recently battered Phil and Terry as well. After fourteen years at the same company, Phil had been passed over for a promotion. Passive-aggressive to his marrow, instead of confronting his boss, he opted to express his displeasure by letting his physical appearance go out the window. Anything but lithe at the start, he had gained twenty pounds in thirty days.

“If Robert DeNiro and George Clooney can do it for movies, I can certainly do it in protest!” he had said when Hutch noticed the sudden gain.

“Yeah, but Phil . . . they got paid millions, were probably under a doctor's supervision, and got back in shape when filming ended.”

Phil had grumbled something Hutch didn't catch.

“Besides,” Hutch had said, “I don't think your boss cares much about your weight.”