The Wind Chill Factor (12 page)

“Help me—”

The shape gurgled at me, spit, reached up toward its face.

“My face—” The words were mushy, indistinct, sounded like the rush of a sewer. “Something’s wrong—with my face.” The words were pushed past the gurgling, the product of an awesome effort.

Immobilized I watched as its hands fluttered at its chest, then a leg pushed against the snow and the shape grew taller.

And I pulled the trigger.

The sound was like a bomb going off in my pocket and the recoil almost knocked the gun from my hand. The first blast blew quite a large chunk from the left side of what was the head: bits flew away in the moonlight, seemed to float. The second blast caught him lower and lifted the shape upward and back, out of the snow, until it settled back into the glare of moonlight, legs straight before it, the torso twisted at a peculiar angle.

When I stopped shaking I felt more tired than I knew it was possible to feel and I dropped the shotgun in the snow and walked back across the wide snowy space, feeling desperately small, toward the house. I wanted only to go to sleep. I didn’t even look at the thing I had killed.

O
LAF PETERSON WAS STANDING OVER
me, peering down into my face, a contrail of blue smoke appended to his cigar. It took a minute to wake up. I was lying on the couch in the library and the night was howling outside. A draft penetrated the broken window. My head ached at the base of the skull and when I jerked my hand it knocked an empty scotch bottle onto the floor. I remembered: I’d gone off the wagon, passed out.

“What time is it?” I asked. My tongue felt thick and furry.

“About five thirty,” Peterson muttered, shaking his head. He retrieved the empty scotch bottle, held it upside down. “What the hell happened here, Cooper? How did the window get broken? Why did you leave the front door open? Why doesn’t your telephone work?”

“They cut it after I spoke with Brenner,” I said. “Which wouldn’t have given them much time—” I sat up on the couch. Peterson was standing by the broken window: blue duffel coat, gray turtleneck, black cigar, snow melting on his hairpiece. “Why are you here?”

“I worry about you, Cooper. I got to worrying about you tonight when I finally got home. I said to my wife, I’m worried about that dumb son of a bitch and she said which dumb son of a bitch is that and I said Cooper and she said why don’t you call him and that’s when I found out there was something wrong with your phone. I mean, everybody else is getting killed, at least everyone who is involved with you, so why not you—and why not Arthur Brenner? So I called Arthur, told him to make goddamned sure his doors were locked, told him to take precautions—he was asleep, naturally, sounded half snapped on toddies, but I felt better. But I wasn’t going to take any chances with you. It should have occurred to me right away.” He regarded me sourly.

I told him what had happened. It came back to me in an unexpected rush of awareness, like a dream hitting you in rapid fire while you’re taking your morning shower. The telephone call, the shot, the terror and the crawling, the gun room, the stalking, the shape rising out of the snow, the shotgun going off. …

Peterson sat staring at me after I’d finished. He said nothing, he smoked his cigar, he stared. I got up and went to the window. The eastern sky was beginning to get a little grayer than the night around it, which was still black. The moon was obscured, the wind ranted. The window was icing up at the edges. I felt sick to my stomach, cramped.

Finally he sighed and stood up.

“Let’s go find what’s left of this guy you killed.” As I buttoned my coat he said: “Jesus, I hope he hasn’t been buried in this fucking snow.”

They say that when it gets sufficiently cold you can’t tell as it gets still colder. That’s wrong. It was forty degrees below zero out there and the wind was gusting to thirty miles an hour and I can’t imagine ever having been out in such cold before. The sky kept easing toward morning and as it lightened it revealed what could have passed for another planet, long dead. The treeline was shrouded in snow and stood behind a mist of snow. The lawn was crusted and cracked like breaking ice underfoot. The bleak, broken snowmobile sat upended in the snow like the wreckage of a plane crashed thirty years ago in the Libyan desert. Snow driven across the crust eddied around it, hurried on.

The man was just a hillock of snow but I knew where to look. Peterson went to work, scraping snow away, found a frozen hand bluish and brittle and naked. The snow was rust-colored and Peterson furiously continued to work. I joined him to keep from freezing to death. It was like unwrapping a particularly hideous present. I wasn’t even curious about the man. But I kept wiping snow away. Peterson was muttering to himself. The sky was almost completely gray when we finally saw him.

Half of the head was gone, one whole side: no eye, no cheek, no ear, strings of frozen matter protruding stiffly from the stump of throat and the pellet-chewed shoulder. The half of the head that remained had been butchered as it went through the machine’s windscreen, but the contours were there, it was recognizable. His thick sheepskin coat had been blown to tatters by my second shot: it was caked with frozen blood and there were shreds of flesh stuck to the fur lining.

“Incredible,” Peterson said, straightening up, shouting over the wind. “This is just an incredible mess.” The figure lay on its back, legs broken and canted at peculiar angles, like a marionette at rest, arms cruciform, its middle hollowed by one shotgun blast, its head half gone in another: blood in the snow, frozen crystals, random bits of flesh.

“It’s the tall man who tried to kill me on the highway. There’s enough left of him, I can tell, I’m quite certain.”

Peterson looked at me to make sure he was getting it all. Then he picked up the man’s rifle, which he had apparently clutched until the end. I went back and picked up the shotgun I’d used. We began to walk back to the house.

“Cooper,” I heard him shout over his shoulder, “you sure as hell are a lot of trouble.”

“Christ—” he went on back inside—“I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get a meat wagon out here in this snow. I’ve got four snow tires on the goddamn Cadillac and it took me two hours to get here last night. God, what a pain in the ass.”

We were drinking coffee. I had found aspirin. My stomach was still unsettled from the scotch. I wasn’t used to it and I wondered if somehow I was going to start drinking again.

Together Peterson and I went over the events of the previous night which had led to my killing the gaunt man. He assured me that it was a matter of self-defense, that I had nothing to worry about, but that I would be required to make an official statement. Identifying the body might take some time if he had no papers on him but there was time to worry about that later.

What perplexed Peterson was the possible connection between the frozen carcass outside and the murders of Cyril and Paula. Were they connected at all? And if so, how? What did Cyril, Paula, and I have in common that would make them want to kill us? And who were they? Clearly, the attack on the highway could no longer be considered an isolated, random act of violence: I had been pursued with intent to kill.

“It’s unsettling, Cooper,” he said, blowing on the coffee, toying with an immense gold signet ring, “because I’ve got to believe these are very determined people and so far you’ve eluded them. It is probably very annoying for them, botching the job so badly.”

“What can I do about it?” I was weary: I hadn’t slept enough.

“Get out of this house for one thing. Get into town—or you can stay with Brenner—can’t you?”

“Not forever,” I said.

“Until we can think of something, Cooper.”

He went outside to the Cadillac and radioed for the ambulance and they said they’d try.

He came back looking sour; he wasn’t the same old Peterson, laughing and playing games and being a smartass. He sat down in my grandfather’s desk chair.

“We got the metal box open last night. It was full of pages of numbers, a good deal of fairly harmless-looking, pages of German prose, more pages of numbers and random German words, some charts of an organizational nature which had a very military look about them, lists of American cities, lists of corporations, graphs. None of it made the slightest sense to me. But still, we’re positive—well, relatively positive—that Paula died because of this stuff, this old crap.” There was heat in his voice I had not heard before.

His mouth curved down, framed by the dark crescent of mustache, and I was reminded more than ever of the Levantine.

“I’m getting sick of this whole thing, Cooper, sick of having citizens killed on my doorstep, sick of being pissed on by these bastards and I don’t give a goddamn who they are. There’s a time when I enjoy the excitement of something new, it reminds me that I’m still alive, my mind feels alert again. But that time is over. It’s really over because this is no fun, is it?”

I wasn’t sure how rhetorical his question was, but I answered: “It was never any fun for me.”

He cleared his throat, nodded. “Of course not. I realize that. It’s no fun when you’re
involved.
I wasn’t involved. I was being presented with a peculiar situation and it was fun. Now, I’m beginning to be involved. I know you people—you’re not characters in this little play being performed to keep me occupied.” He made a fist, ground his chin against it.

“Does it make any sense, Cooper?” He moved around the room, warmed himself staring into the fireplace, peered into the bullethole in the wood paneling. He lifted the rifle the dead man had used on me. He studied it, turned it, read whatever was inscribed on its underside, and grunted.

“Mauser 7.65 mm. Nice gun, well cared for up until last night. Made at the Mauser Werke at Oberndork am Neckar. Good action, hinged floorplate. Release button here on the trigger guard, nice square bridge. Hell of a rifle.” He went back to the wall and inspected the hole, touched it with a fingertip. Then he sighted through the scope. “The scope is a Zeiss 2-½-x Zielklein and the bullet … the bullet about 180 grains nipping along at 2,700 feet per second. That is more velocity than you can shake a stick at, Cooper.”

He went back to the desk and sank down in the chair. It creaked in the stillness: the fire crackled, snow rattled on the window.

“A bullet can kill you in a couple of ways. It can hit in some vital area, the brain or the spinal column near the top or the heart, and that’s the end of your story. With that kind of a hit a .22 rifle can kill a grizzly, but the margin for error is much too great. The other way of killing you is by one kind of shock or another. In this case you need enough gun, enough velocity for tremendous impact, and a bullet which expands very quickly once it hits you and gets inside you—do you follow me, Cooper? You want a bullet that will destroy as much living tissue as possible. If you destroy enough tissue you’ve got a kill. You can hit a deer in the paunch with a high-velocity rifle, carrying expanding bullets, blow most of the abdomen away, and it dies though its vital areas go untouched. The messages from the lacerated nerves short-circuit the brain, and zap, death.

“There are other kinds of shock. The sheer impact of a bullet if it’s going fast enough creates a kind of hydraulic shock not much different from the mechanism of hydraulic brakes. The pressure created by the bullet’s impact is so great and so sudden that it blitzes the veins and the arteries leading to the brain—death, again.

“Now, our dear friend was leaving nothing to chance. If he missed your vital areas, he had a soft, thin-skinned bullet which would explode inside you and destroy enough tissue to kill you even if he hit your shoulder or thigh, and the bullet was going to be traveling fast enough that any substantial hit was almost certain to cause hydraulic shock.”

Peterson’s recitation made me sicker to my stomach.

“How the hell do you know all that?” I asked.

“I’ve been around,” he said. “Grisly, isn’t it?”

As he had spoken so matter-of-factly about what the killer had wanted to do to me, my mind was instead going over what I had done to him. The first shot must have blown away much of his brain, a vital area, causing immediate death. The second would have created extensive tissue shock—but he was already dead.

Peterson was sitting at the desk making a list with a fiber-tip pen. I knew what he was doing before he said it.

“All right, while we wait, let’s go over what we’ve got here, Cooper,” the voice began again, insistent, determined. “There are certain questions we’ve got to ask ourselves. I’m not boring you, am I, Cooper?”

“No, I’m just tired.” I didn’t want to argue with him; there was no spirit in me for that. “And I’m thinking about what you’ve said. I’m very docile, Peterson.”

“Now, was this guy who tried to kill you the same guy who killed Cyril? And Paula? Wait a minute, I’m not saying he was, damn it, I’m asking. It is possible. He could have kept right on driving after they left you for dead, gotten to Cooper’s Falls ahead of you, and killed Cyril before you got here. It is
possible,
Cooper, and we’ve got to start thinking all this is connected. And he could then have killed Paula this past afternoon, taken the boxes, stashed them somewhere or given them to his buddy, the little guy in the blue duffel coat, and come out here to kill you in the night.

“The question now is, why? What was the motive? What did Cyril and Paula have in common? What, Cooper?”

“They both knew about the boxes,” I said. “They were the only people who knew about the boxes when Cyril was killed, if he was killed on the twentieth before I met Paula and she told me.”

“But if that is what ties Cyril and Paula together, what ties you—the third victim, and the
first
on the schedule—to Cyril and Paula? What do you know in common with them? Nothing, Cooper, not a damned thing, at least not about those boxes. You’ve never seen any of the contents, you’re utterly harmless, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound tough. “Ask the guy out there in the snow.”

Peterson stood up and stretched, went through the passage to the kitchen and came back with the coffeepot. He poured us both some and took the pot back to the kitchen. When he came back his eye was caught on my grandfather’s World War II position map. He studied the pins. “Do wars ever end?” he mused.