Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (19 page)

Wham!
More dirt and smoke, and a ragged disk of light opened in the floor in the corner diagonally opposite mine. Dirt jumped up from the bottom, forming a shallow crater. The antique piece had to be ten-gauge, a mammoth caliber that went out with robbing stagecoaches. I don’t know where she found the ammunition.

She cleared the barrels, reloaded, and struck off the length of the house, a rolling gait. The place swayed like an offshore oil derrick. Halfway down she stopped.

Panicking, I rose into a jackknife crouch and made for the anomalous patch of wall and possibly freedom. My head struck ductwork, but the reverberating boom was lost in another explosion from above. I covered my mouth to avoid breathing pure earth. The low ceiling was beginning to look like a whack-a-mole game, from the point of view of the mole. I was in a bit of a tight.

Tunk, tunk. Plunk, plunk. Slam
. The minor chords were almost as bad as the major.

I braced myself on one hand, my head still echoing from contact with the duct, and took aim at the spot where she’d stopped, but I held off. At that angle I couldn’t be sure if the bullet would penetrate the floor, and the report would place her target. I put the gun back in its pocket and made like a bug.

I reached the wall and spread my palm against a network of coarse wood. The diamond pattern, visible in the light gushing down now from above, belonged to a three-foot section of lattice
set into a space between blocks. I felt cold air from the other side. My fingers curled around the slats. Quarter-inch pine.

Floorboards creaked. Through the hole nearest me I saw a pair of spread galoshes with thick ankles clad in blue jersey growing out of the tops. A pair of shining tubes bound side by side poked through the hole, angling in my general direction. Smoke drifted out of the muzzles.

I wished I hadn’t put away my gun; but I wouldn’t have had the time anyway. My left palm was resting on yet another tiny pyramid of stone. I closed my fingers around it, leaned my shoulder against a cinder block for leverage, and flung the stone with a snap of the wrist that propelled it toward the long wall to my right; a girl’s throw, emasculated by exhaustion and the world’s worst position for throwing. The stone made a hollow click bouncing off the concrete.

Before it fell to the ground, the air compressed all around me, boxing both ears, and a fireworks of red-and-yellow flame sprayed the crawl space with blinding light, knocking a chunk out of the porous concrete where the stone had struck. A bee stung my right cheek at the top of the bone. An inch and a half to the left and the ricocheting pellet would have taken out my eye.

I only thought about that later, and felt the sting itself only in a delayed reaction. Just as she’d pulled the trigger I rammed my right fist in a haymaker beginning at the shoulder straight through the lattice, routing deep gouges along my forearm to the elbow, and then along both cheeks as I stuck my head through the hole, and without giving up momentum launched the upper half of my body behind it, snaring the splintered wooden edges on all four sides and bringing the whole patched-in piece with me as I shoved off with the balls of my feet and wriggled the bottom half of my body through the space I’d made. Meanwhile she got off another shot with the one barrel she’d reloaded, hurrying; a hot wind
smacked my right hip and pellets rattled off cinderblock like seeds in a gourd.

It was lakeside. Snow had pushed up above the foundation. I was in darkness, darkness with texture and cold that filled my eyes, nose, and mouth and tunneled under my collar all the way to the waistband of my trousers, which were soaked through with snow and sweat. Possibly blood; you never know in a situation like that how many times you’ve been hit.

I burrowed desperately, flailing my arms and angling upward, swimming through surf as coarse as sand, and popped out suddenly into the beautiful freezing air, wearing the rectangular section of lattice around my hips like a tutu. I stumbled upright, pushed it down and off, scraping an ankle in the process, and turned right, toward the front of the house and away from the vast expanse of white separating me from the state highway, where cars and trucks followed their pencil beams along the shore of the lake. That was a shooting range, and even if I could flounder out of shotgun reach, Miss Maebelle had ample time to retreat to the snowmobile, fire it up, and hunt me down with all the ease and safety of a kid playing a video game.

A revolver is scant protection against a vehicle that can turn on a pin and a street sweeper in the hands of a woman who isn’t afraid to use it. I didn’t want to die out there in the snow like a deer and spend the rest of forever on the bottom of Lake Huron with Maebelle’s dead beloved Jim.

That gave me an idea, but before I could think it through I ran straight into the shotgun.

W
e surprised each other. I’d expected her to try for a shot from the windows, and she hadn’t expected me to double back. When I came around the corner she had one foot on the porch, the other on the ground next to the snowmobile, a yeti in a man’s faded red-and-black-checked Mackinaw and the ear-flapped woolen cap I’d seen in the office. She looked even bigger than she had there, and the way she held the shotgun cradled along her forearm said it hadn’t spent all its time hanging on the wall.

Before she could swing it up, I ducked around the bed of the huge pickup. I was still dragging one foot; the gun bellowed and snow sprayed the back of my pants leg halfway up the calf.

Fat people often move fast when motivated. Once they overcome the problem of inertia they’re mostly momentum, like a barrel rolling downhill, and this one knew how to get around in deep snow. She cleared the end of the bed just as I reached the door on the driver’s seat, slamming shut the breech as she ran, stopped, spread her feet, and swiveled the shotgun to her hip. The twin bores were as big around as beer cans.

I had a foot on the step plate. I worked the door handle, pushed off, and swung around with the door, hanging on with one hand
and using the door as a shield. That part was illusion. Steel side rails or not, a car door is no guarantee against buckshot fired at close range. But she seemed unwilling to damage a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of heavy equipment. She hesitated.

I was less picky. Hanging on tight, I clawed the revolver out with my free hand and fired through the window in the door.

I didn’t aim. I’d closed my eyes tight to keep out pulverized glass and didn’t see where I hit. When I opened them, Miss Mae-belle was nowhere in sight.

I didn’t look for her. I pivoted around the edge of the door, pebbles of shattered glass showering off me, swung into the driver’s seat, and twisted the key in the ignition. The leather seat was slick and cold, but not as cold as the engine. It turned over sluggishly, like a fat bear stirring. I didn’t know how long it had been hibernating in those temperatures.

Maebelle had overcome her first timid impulse. I saw a flash of movement through the window on the passenger’s side and ducked just as the window flew apart.

I stayed down, shoulders jammed between the seat and the curved underside of the dash, turning the key and pressing the accelerator pedal with the hand holding the revolver. Above me, the cab’s headliner hung in ribbons; she’d fired at an upward angle from the ground. The engine muttered, chuckled, muttered again. Diesels are as slow to wake up as teenage boys.

The cab listed slightly toward the passenger’s side. Miss Maebelle had climbed onto the step plate.

The engine caught, rumbling through my spine where it pressed against the hump over the drive shaft. I forced the pedal to the floor. The truck pounced forward three feet and stalled.

But the motion had been enough to jar loose the fat woman’s grip. There was no sign of her in the vacant window as I propelled myself back into the seat and ground the starter to life again. A
glittering blanket of broken glass covered both seats and crunched under my hip pockets.

I found Drive and spun the wheel left, away from the house and toward the country road that ran past the Sportsmen’s Rest. The tires alone were taller than the drifts that had stopped the Cutlass.

The top of Maebelle’s cap nudged above the sill on the passenger’s side. She’d managed to grab hold again. I fired at it and it vanished.

Meanwhile the truck was still turning. It had come all the way around the end of the house, putting the road behind me.

That didn’t upset me. On the dash, an illuminated simulation of the chassis told me all four wheels were in drive. I groped for the switch and shifted from high to low. The gears grumbled, hunkering down. If I wanted to, I could make my own road.

I wanted to. A handful of rubble nattered off the window behind my head. The pulse of the shotgun came after. I pressed the pedal to the fire wall, putting the truck the rest of the way out of range. White fantails spread away on both sides of the cab.

The nose dipped, plunging into a drift as high as the windshield, then shot skyward. I floated above the seat and slammed back down, jarring my tailbone and snapping my jaw shut. My organs scrambled to adjust.

I couldn’t see through the windshield. I groped for a smart stick, found it on the left side of the steering column, and skidded my fingers past the sliding switch that operated the cruise control, bringing them to rest finally on the barrel cylinder that activated the wipers. I twisted it all the way forward. The blades cracked loose and scooped away two pounds of thick powder. A sea of snow opened in front of the headlamps, bisected three hundred yards ahead by the shining black belt of the state highway, polished by the friction of many tires. Past there I couldn’t tell earth from ice, right up until the empty dark maw where open water met sky.

The ludicrous Brobdingnagian truck kept rolling as if it were on the Autobahn. I was a convert. I could sit next to the gear jammers in the Air Horn, watching
Duel
and rooting against the hero in his silly little car.

A spitting whine stood my skin on end, an angry hornet trapped in a dice cup. In the rearview mirror I saw the cyclops eye of a snowmobile’s headlamp closing fast. The truck had more horsepower, but most of it went into plowing through snow. The snowmobile rode on top of it. I’d be back inside shotgun range in less than a minute.

Maebelle ran a test. Orange flame blossomed in the mirror, followed closely by thunder. I hunched my shoulders out of instinct. Nothing hit the truck. I leaned forward, as if that would make it go faster.

Now I was climbing the long grade toward the highway. It was dinnertime, and traffic had thinned, but there was always another pair of headlamps coming from upstate and down. I didn’t think she’d risk another shot in full view of other motorists, but I didn’t know her. She might welcome the challenge.

Twenty-five feet of steel guardrail prevented spinouts from plummeting down the steepest part of the bank. The near end bent down into the earth, a feature devised to avoid impaling those vehicles that ran off the road and struck it head-on. I’d once lost a close friend that way, and nearly my own life. I still had flashbacks.

Climbing, I turned to go around the end. If my timing worked I could swing into the outside lane in the gap between an approaching house trailer and the tanker downshifting behind it to take the next hill.

Something struck a spark off the side-view mirror mounted outside my window, crazing the glass. The snowmobile’s light reflected back at me in disjointed quarters. She was almost on my
rear bumper, and didn’t care who saw what from the highway. That rugged individual pioneer spirit was a pain in the ass. I slumped down in the seat and punched the transmission back into four high, for the speed. That was a risk. If I got stuck now they’d be sponging me off the upholstery. The frame shuddered, but the truck leaped forward, putting on another ten miles per hour.

In the same instant I changed plans. I couldn’t turn left without bringing my head into her line of fire, and I couldn’t turn right without hitting the tanker head-on. When the house trailer passed, I straightened my leg against the pedal and shot across both lanes.

The tanker blasted its horn. I felt it in the roots of my teeth. Then it was behind me and I heard its air brakes hiss; I knew without looking that Maebelle was still on my bumper. I braved one glance at the rearview and saw sparks flying from her skis on bare asphalt. That bought me some space, but she had the scent. Nothing would stop her except a broadside, and a yellow fastback accelerating to pass the slowing tanker on the inside lane spun 180 degrees on its brakes as the snowmobile flamed in front of it. When the fastback collided with a vehicle following the tanker I felt the impact pulse in the soles of my feet.

Another guardrail came up, too fast to avoid. My plow blade made a hole through it without slowing down. A two-foot section of broken four-by-four bounded up over the hood and cartwheeled away into the night.

I almost stood the truck on its nose coming off the built-up highway onto the apron of snow-covered earth that separated it from the lake. The snow was over my hubs. My tires spun for a heart-stopping instant. I switched back to four-wheel low and stumbled out of the hole. Snow spouted out both sides of my prow.

I may have taken out a road sign. Something dragged beneath the undercarriage, growling, snagged in the frozen earth, and
scraped the bottom of the fuel tank as I passed over it. I hoped the tank hadn’t torn through.

Something struck the tailgate like a deck chair in a hurricane. Whatever Miss Maebelle’s opinions about snowmobilers in general, she knew how to steer with one hand while reloading with the other. She might have spent her summer breaks from school hunting rhinoceroses from a Land Rover. I sunk my head between my shoulders and charted a course straight for the lake.

My tires told me when I’d left dry land for ice. The surface was smoother than fresh pavement and as slick as talcum on glass. The rear tires slewed right. I rode the skid, hands off the wheel, then gently coaxed the front end the other way. The rear end fishtailed and locked back into line. That put a fisherman’s shanty square in my path. It was built of black Cellotex, invisible until the owner’s name and address lettered in white paint sprang up in my lights. I corrected right, not in time. My left front bumper clipped a corner, sending me into a spin that swept the left side of the truck around like a sickle, broadsiding the structure and folding it like origami. It wasn’t lighted. I hoped the fisherman had gone home for the night. I straightened out coming out of a wide arc. In the mirror, I saw the snowmobile’s light veer sharp left, then right, then straight, threading a hasty path through the wreckage.