Murder on Ice (14 page)

I knelt, and he held out one hand again but I still didn't take it. "Where are they keeping the woman? Tell me or I'll walk away and leave you."

"In a cottage near here. Get me out and I'll take you there, honestly." He was stuttering with cold. A few more seconds and he would be too far gone to help himself. A tougher, calmer man might have lasted five minutes. He was too weak and scared. He would die.

"Which cottage?"

His face was a white disk, like a cartoonist's impression. The eyes and mouth were dark circles. Without help he would die soon and I was tempted to leave him, but he came through with an answer.

"On the point. Please. I'll take you there."

Now I reached out and took his hand, taking care to hold him by the fingers. I didn't want him gripping me and sliding me along the ice into the water beside him. "Kick hard and pull your belly up on the ice," I shouted. And when he made no move I shook his hand, snapping the words up into his brain. "Kick hard and lift your belly on top."

He did it, half clearing the water, and I was able to tug him back. The ice edge crumbled under him and he whimpered with fear, but I held on and he finally slithered out, flat on the surface, wet and black as a seal, gasping and spitting water.

I dragged him back well clear of the cut, and pulled him to his feet. He was tall, big enough to be trouble when he dried out, and I still had to move him with me on my snow machine. Because he had already tried to kill me and might do so again I did what I had to, clinically. As he stood staring at me, teeth chattering, I drew my stick and chopped him hard on the brachial plexus of his right arm. He yelped and held the place with his left hand, but his right hung limp. He would not be a threat for an hour or two.

"Try anything funny and I'll immobilize your other arm." I meant it. He was getting off lightly. "Now run." I shoved him and he turned and started stumbling over the ice, holding his dead right arm in his left hand, toward the light of my snow machine.

I ambled after him and reached the machine before he did. He got on behind me, holding timidly with his left hand onto my shoulder. I started away, trying to recreate the map of the lake in my mind. The point he meant was north of us on the clear ice, north of the cut, about a quarter of a mile away. By the time we got there his clothes would be an icy suit of armor and he would be close to frostbite or pneumonia. I had to move fast.

I gunned away, keeping straight and careful so he could hold on. His teeth were chattering just behind my ear and he was making a small whimpering sound like a spanked child. I didn't expect any trouble from him.

I followed parallel to the crack in the ice all the way to the shore line, realizing that they had known I must do so and had set up the ambush accordingly. I wondered if they had a second layer of defense. They hadn't, and I turned left, heading north. "Point the place out," I shouted over my shoulder.

After a minute or so he started shaking my shoulder, then swayed nervously as he let go with his left hand to point awkwardly around me. "Over there. Look." It was a two-story place set close to the water. There were lights in the downstairs windows. That meant they were not expecting me. They were waiting for their boy to come back with the news that he had wasted me so they could all raise their glasses and toast the revolution. Then they would come out and tie my body to my snow machine and push it through the ice. I would never be found. The perfect crime. Except that I had survived and was here, ready to shoot anybody who tried to finish what my prisoner had started.

I decided on boldness. They would be expecting their own man to come back, lights blazing. As far as they were concerned, this was his machine. I slowed, then stopped to pull out my gun and reload all the chambers. I would have words for the woman in my second cell when I got back to the station.

With the gun loaded I pulled off my right glove and gripped the Colt properly. Then I told the prisoner, "Get off. Walk in front and don't do anything to let them know I'm with you. If you do, I bust your head."

He was so rigid with cold that he could barely get off the machine and his teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak. I jabbed him with the gun, hard. I wanted him terrified of me. I didn't know how many people were inside or how well they were armed. If I could cancel him, out of fear, it was one less variable to worry about.

He started up the steps from the dock, bent over like an old man with the rigidity that had set in during our short ride. Nobody had noticed our arrival. Or if they had, they hadn't put on any outside lights. He stumbled and I prodded him again, in the kidney. He was too cold to feel much but he moaned and tried to move faster up the steps. I saw there was only one skidoo outside the door. It had been driven right up the rock that sloped out of the lake. It had been parked in the lee of the building and was almost free of new snow. I wondered where the other machine could be, and what its absence meant in future trouble.

As we reached the door I prodded my guy one last time and growled at him, "Open it up and say nothing. Understand?"

He nodded, a tight, tuning-fork tremor of his head. We passed in front of the window, me crouched as low as I could, out of the line of sight. He reached the front door and fumbled with it, his frozen left hand hardly able to press the latch.

He opened it, and then the inner door, and I was struck with the sudden, ridiculously fragrant aroma of hot coffee. He stepped into the room, the big main living room of the cottage, and I shoved him aside, tripping him so he sprawled helplessly on the rug, and swept the room with a glance. There were two women sitting there but neither one was Nancy Carmichael, and I swore. These were not the women I wanted. I wanted Nancy.

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W
here's the girl?" I shouted it and they shrank back, open mouthed with fear and surprise. "The girl, Carmichael. Where is she?"

The older one spoke then. She was perhaps fifty-five, and I recognized her as the duck hunter I had seen months earlier at her own place on Frog Island. She was short and growing heavier with middle age but she had an olive complexion and a patrician look that would have commanded respect anywhere, even among people who knew she was full-blooded Ojibway and not a Roman countess.

"I don't know. She went with the man," she said. She was shaken. They had obviously expected me to be out of their lives for keeps. Now here I was, risen from the dead, waving a gun and spoiling their plans. And I was angry enough to shake anybody.

"Who else is in this cottage, besides you people?" I kept my gun on them and the younger one looked first at her partner, then at me, wondering where to find direction. She was trembling, while the older woman had become calm again. It was the older one who said finally, "There's nobody here. Do you want to search the place?"

"Yes. You come with me. You others lie on the floor and put your hands on top of your heads. Face down. Do it!"

The man I had brought in was glad to be where there was warmth. He squirmed close to the stove and lay there in a cloud of steam, his bare hands stretched out to the heat. I should have warned him they would be agonizing when they thawed out but he didn't care, not yet.

The younger woman knelt, then flattened herself as I had said. I turned to the older woman. "Go in front of me and don't get cute. There's three people dead already. I don't mind making it four."

"We're alone here," she said. I could tell from the vibrato in her voice that she was scared, but she did not show it in any other way. She was a tough lady.

"Lead the way. Open each door in turn and take two steps inside." She went ahead of me, first into the kitchen and the bathroom on the ground floor, then upstairs to each of the three bedrooms. I looked under all the beds, in the closets. There was nobody there. As we started down the stairs I could see that the two people in the living room were lying the way I had ordered them to, so I pushed my gun back into the holster pocket. "Draw all the drapes," I told the woman. She did. "Right. Now you get down on the floor like the others."

She did and I walked into the bathroom and pulled out all the towels I could see. I threw them to the man. "Here. Strip and dry yourself." He reached up and caught them clumsily with his left hand. I studied him more closely. He was young, perhaps twenty-three. He had blonde hair a little too long, an intellectual's cut. He was lean but not hard, a man who watched every mouthful he ate but never exercised. He stood up and stripped, still shivering. He made no attempt to conceal his nakedness from the women and it confirmed what I was beginning to think. He was not interested in them. Women were nonpersons. I saw that he had a good tan except for a bikini-sized patch at his loins. He was well-off. January tans are rare in Murphy's Harbour, except for the brown, burned faces of the bush-workers. Jamaica isn't on our circuit. And he had a petulant look about him, a droop to the corners of his mouth. I didn't like anything about him.

But I did the charitable thing anyway. The coffee pot was on the propane stove in the kitchen. I poured two cups and returned to give him one. He took it and sipped noisily, spilling coffee down his bare chest and onto the towel he had finally wrapped around him. I sipped my own, then set it on the table. It was strong and I could feel the effect of the caffeine at once, like a jolt behind my eyes.

I undid my parka, noticing almost with surprise that it was wet from my rescue work, took the gun from the pocket, and slipped out of the parka and hung it over a chair back close to the stove.

"You can sit up now," I told the women. "Crossed-legged, hands on your heads."

They turned over and rolled themselves up, sitting as I told them. The younger one had gotten her own courage back now and she said, "Really, is all this play-acting necessary?"

I kept my voice reasonable but let the anger come through in my expression. "So far, since this kidnapping happened, one of your party has been strangled. A man has been killed with a hand grenade and another man has been beaten to death. You will do as I say or I will take whatever action I deem necessary. Understood?"

She looked at the older woman. "Somebody's dead? Freddie didn't make it?"

"Strangled. And it's not Freddie. She's in custody. It's the woman in cabin six at the motel. Her name was Katie."

I was watching the older woman. You learn to read faces, to pick out genuine reactions from carefully rehearsed responses. Her shock was genuine. Her mouth fell open. The killing was news to her.

The young man was still standing, hunching his back as he pushed himself close to the stove for warmth. I gestured to him. "You sit down, like the others." He did it, moving languidly. His circle might have found it coquettish. He tucked his towel around his front and lowered himself gracefully. He had thawed through and could be trouble.

"You three are going to prison," I told them. "Your little game of hide-and-seek has been infiltrated by real criminals. The best deal you can hope for will come from working with me before anybody else gets hurt." None of them spoke. The older woman looked at me impassively, the boy made a big show of yawning. Only the younger woman looked concerned. I concentrated on her.

"Where have you put Nancy Carmichael? Why isn't she here?"

I studied her face. It was pinched and pale, the complexion of late nights and black coffee and too many cigarettes. Whoever she was, there was nothing joyful in her life. The ideal member for a team like this. But she was slowly getting control of her fears and she did not rush to tell me what I wanted to know. At last it was the other woman who spoke, in a flat hostile voice. "She was supposed to go to my place on the island. When we got there that loud-mouth from the Tavern at the dock in town was there. He'd broken in. He said Nancy had hired him as a bodyguard. Nancy said she hadn't made any such request. So we left him there, sabotaged his machine, and went on."

It wasn't the story Irv had told but there was no way to check it. "Went on where? I already know about the island."

She moved a strand of iron-gray hair away from her eyes, looking oddly young as she did so—a grade-school girl in a wig. I was aware that she had once been beautiful, the kind of peach you find occasionally in out-of-the-way places, like villes I have seen in Nam and Indian reserves.

"We came here. This is our fall-back rendezvous."

"So where's the Carmichael girl? And where's the big heavy guy who went with you to Carl Simmonds's place?"

"They went on."

"Where?" I almost shouted it. "You're dealing with murder here. If the kid is killed you'll die before you get out of the pen. While you've got a chance, help me."

She shrugged. "I can't tell you what I don't know." I didn't believe her. She knew, but she also knew that I wouldn't try to force her to tell. Not a woman. But I was angry enough to turn and grab the young man by the hair and pull him to his feet. His towel slipped and he tugged at it with his left hand, wincing. "Where did you get your instructions to shoot me?"

He decided to play it tough. Except for the whack on the collarbone I had done nothing to let him know I hated his guts. I'd rescued him, given him coffee. Now he was warm and secure and had seen that I hadn't pressed the women. "I have nothing to say to you," he said primly. "You're an enemy of the people."

I cracked him a baseball pitcher's swing across the mouth. It landed like a gunshot and sent him cartwheeling to the corner of the room in a tangle of arms and legs. I went over to him and prodded him with my foot. He looked up, wide-eyed in horror. Nobody had ever explained things to him quite that simply before.

I crouched and spoke to him in a soft tone, the way you talk to mean horses. "We can do this one of three ways," I explained. "You can tell me what you know right now. Or we can take your towel away and sit you out in a snowdrift until you feel like talking. Or I can save time by sitting you on the stove."

He stared at me through honestly terrified eyes. This was the first time he had seen the real face of violence. Up until now it had been a game, as intellectual as chess. Good guys versus bad guys. See the good guys make a bomb. See the bad guys lose. Point made, no harm done—not to the good guys. Now he understood Bennett's Axiom, a rule I had been taught on two continents. Pain hurts.