SILENCE.

The woods around Lake Mondac were as quiet as could be, a world of difference from the churning, chaotic city where the couple spent their weekdays.

Silence, broken only by an occasional a-hoo-ah of a distant bird, the hollow siren of a frog.

And now: another sound.

A shuffle of leaves, two impatient snaps of branch or twig.

Footsteps?

No, that couldn’t be. The other vacation houses beside the lake were deserted on this cool Friday afternoon in April.

Emma Feldman, in her early thirties, set down her martini on the kitchen table, where she sat across from her husband. She tucked a strand of curly black hair behind her ear and walked to one of the grimy kitchen windows. She saw nothing but dense clusters of cedar, juniper and black spruce rising up a steep hill, whose rocks resembled cracked yellow bone.

Her husband lifted an eyebrow. “What was it?”

She shrugged and returned to her chair. “I don’t know. Didn’t see anything.”

Outside, silence again.

Emma, lean as any stark, white birch outside one of the many windows of the vacation house, shook off her blue jacket. She was wearing the matching skirt and a white blouse. Lawyer clothes. Hair in a bun. Lawyer hair. Stockings but shoeless.

Steven, turning his attention to the bar, had abandoned his jacket as well, and a wrinkled striped tie. The thirty-six-year-old, with a full head of unruly hair, was in a blue shirt and his belly protruded inexorably over the belt of his navy slacks. Emma didn’t care; she thought he was cute and always would.

“And look what I got,” he said, nodding toward the upstairs guest room and unbagging a large bottle of pulpy organic vegetable juice. Their friend, visiting from Chicago this weekend, had been flirting with liquid diets lately, drinking the most disgusting things.

Emma read the ingredients and wrinkled her nose. “It’s all hers. I’ll stick with vodka.”

“Why I love you.”

The house creaked, as it often did. The place was seventy-six years old. It featured an abundance of wood and a scarcity of steel and stone. The kitchen, where they stood, was angular and paneled in glowing yellow pine. The floor was lumpy. The colonial structure was one of three houses on this private road, each squatting on ten acres. It could be called lakefront property but only because the lake lapped at a rocky shore two hundred yards from the front door.

The house was plopped down in a small clearing on the east side of a substantial elevation. Midwest reserve kept people from labeling these hills “mountains” here in Wisconsin, though it rose easily seven or eight hundred feet into the air. At the moment the big house was bathed in blue late-afternoon shadows.

Emma gazed out at rippling Lake Mondac, far enough from the hill to catch some descending sun. Now, in early spring, the surrounding area was scruffy, reminding of wet hackles rising from a guard dog’s back. The house was much nicer than they could otherwise afford—they’d bought it through foreclosure—and she knew from the moment she’d seen it that this was the perfect vacation house.

Silence…

The colonial also had a pretty colorful history.

The owner of a big meatpacking company in Chicago had built the place before World War II. It was discovered years later that much of his fortune had come from selling black-market meat, circumventing the rationing system that limited foods here at home to make sure the troops were nourished. In 1956 the man’s body was found floating in the lake; he was possibly the victim of veterans who had learned of his scheme and killed him, then searched the house, looking for the illicit cash he’d hidden here.

No ghosts figured in any version of the death, though Emma and Steven couldn’t keep from embellishing. When guests were staying here they’d gleefully take note of who kept the bathroom lights on and who braved the dark after hearing the tales.

Two more snaps outside. Then a third.

Emma frowned. “You hear that? Again, that sound. Outside.”

Steven glanced out the window. The breeze kicked up now and then. He turned back.

Her eyes strayed to her briefcase.

“Caught that,” he said, chiding.

“What?”

“Don’t even think about opening it.”

She laughed, though without much humor.

“Work-free weekend,” he said. “We agreed.”

“And what’s in there?” she asked, nodding at the backpack he carried in lieu of an attaché case. Emma was wrestling the lid off a jar of cocktail olives.

“Only two things of relevance, Your Honor: my le Carré novel and that bottle of Merlot I had at work. Shall I introduce the latter into evid…” Voice fading. He looked to the window, through which they could see a tangle of weeds and trees and branches and rocks the color of dinosaur bones.

Emma too glanced outside.

“That I heard,” he said. He refreshed his wife’s martini. She dropped olives into both drinks.

“What was it?”

“Remember that bear?”

“He didn’t come up to the house.” They clinked glasses and sipped clear liquor.

Steven said, “You seem preoccupied. What’s up, the union case?”

Research for a corporate acquisition had revealed some possible shenanigans within the lakefront workers union in Milwaukee. The government had become involved and the acquisition was temporarily tabled, which nobody was very happy about.

But she said, “This’s something else. One of our clients makes car parts.”

“Right. Kenosha Auto. See? I do listen.”

She looked at her husband with an astonished glance. “Well, the CEO, turns out, is an absolute prick.” She explained about a wrongful death case involving components of a hybrid car engine: a freak accident, a passenger electrocuted. “The head of their R-and-D department…why, he demanded I return all the technical files. Imagine that.”

Steven said, “I liked your other case better—that state representative’s last will and testament…the sex stuff.”

“Shhhh,” she said, alarmed. “Remember, I never said a word about it.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Emma speared an olive and ate it. “And how was your day?”

Steven laughed. “Please…I don’t make enough to talk about business after hours.” The Feldmans were a shining example of a blind date gone right, despite the odds. Emma, a U of W law school valedictorian, daughter of Milwaukee-Chicago money; Steven, a city college bachelor of arts grad from the Brewline, intent on helping society. Their friends gave them six months, tops; the Door County wedding, to which all those friends were invited, had occurred exactly eight months after their first date.

Steven pulled a triangle of Brie out of a shopping bag. Found crackers and opened them.

“Oh, okay. Just a little.”

Snap, snap…

Her husband frowned. Emma said, “Honey, it’s freaking me a little. That was footsteps.”

The three vacation houses here were eight or nine miles from the nearest shop or gas station and a little over a mile from the county highway, which was accessed via a strip of dirt poorly impersonating a road. Marquette State Park, the biggest in the Wisconsin system, swallowed most of the land in the area; Lake Mondac and these houses made up an enclave of private property.

Very private.

And very deserted.

Steven walked into the utility room, pulled aside the limp beige curtain and gazed past a cut-back crepe myrtle into the side yard. “Nothing. I’m thinking we—”

Emma screamed.

“Honey, honey, honey!” her husband cried.

A face studied them through the back window. The man’s head was covered with a stocking, though you could see crew-cut, blondish hair, a colorful tattoo on his neck. The eyes were halfway surprised to see people so close. He wore an olive drab combat jacket. He knocked on the glass with one hand. In the other he was holding a shotgun, muzzle up. He was smiling eerily.

“Oh, God,” Emma whispered.

Steven pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and punched numbers, telling her, “I’ll deal with him. Go lock the front door.”

Emma ran to the entryway, dropping her glass. The olives spun amid the dancing shards, picking up dust. Crying out, she heard the kitchen door splinter inward. She looked back and saw the intruder with the shotgun rip the phone from her husband’s hand and shove him against the wall. A print of an old sepia landscape photograph crashed to the floor.

The front door too swung open. A second man, his head also covered with mesh, pushed inside. He had long dark hair, pressed close by the nylon. Taller and stockier than the first, he held a pistol. The black gun was small in his outsized hand. He pushed Emma into the kitchen, where the other man tossed him the cell phone. The bigger one stiffened at the pitch, but caught the phone one-handed. He seemed to grimace in irritation at the toss and dropped the phone in his pocket.

Steven said, “Please…What do you…?” Voice quavering.

Emma looked away quickly. The less she saw, she was thinking, the better their chances to survive.

“Please,” Steven said, “Please. You can take whatever you want. Just leave us. Please.”

Emma stared at the dark pistol in the taller man’s hand. He wore a black leather jacket and boots. His were like the other man’s, the kind soldiers wear.

Both men grew oblivious to the couple. They looked around the house.

Emma’s husband continued, “Look, you can have whatever you want. We’ve got a Mercedes outside. I’ll get the keys. You—”

“Just, don’t talk,” the taller man said, gesturing with the pistol.

“We have money. And credit cards. Debit card too. I’ll give you the PIN.”

“What do you want?” Emma asked, crying.

“Shhh.”

Somewhere, in its ancient heart, the house creaked once more.

 

“A WHAT?”

“Kinda a hang-up.”

“To nine-one-one?”

“Right. Just, somebody called and said, ‘This—’ and then hung up.”

“Said what?”

“‘This.’ The word ‘this.’”

“T-H-I-S?” Sheriff Tom Dahl asked. He was fifty-three years old, his skin smooth and freckled as an adolescent’s. Hair red. He wore a tan uniform shirt that had fit much better when his wife bought it two years ago.

“Yessir,” Todd Jackson answered, scratching his eyelid. “And then it was hung up.”

“Was hung up or he hung it up? There’s a difference.”

“I don’t know. Oh, I see what you mean.”

Five twenty-two P.M., Friday, April 17. This was one of the more peaceful hours of the day in Kennesha County, Wisconsin. People tended to kill themselves and their fellow citizens, intentionally or by accident, either earlier in the day or later. Dahl knew the schedule as if it’d been printed; if you can’t recognize the habits of your jurisdiction after fourteen years running a law enforcement agency, you have no business at the job.

Eight deputies were on duty in the Sheriff’s Department, which was next to the courthouse and city hall. The department was in an old building attached to a new one. The old being from the 1870s, the new from exactly one century later. The area of the building where Dahl and the others worked was mostly open-plan and filled with cubicles and desks. This was the new part. The officers here at the moment—six men and two women—wore uniforms that ranged from starched as wood to old bedsheet, reflecting the tour starting hours.

“We’re checking,” Jackson said. He too had infant skin, though that was unremarkable, considering he was half the sheriff’s age.

“‘This,’” Dahl mused. “You hear from the lab?”

“Oh, ’bout that Wilkins thing?” Jackson picked at his stiff collar. “Wasn’t meth. Wasn’t nothing.”

Even here, in Kennesha, a county with the sparse population of 34,021, meth was a terrible scourge. The users, tweakers, were ruthless, crazed and absolutely desperate to get the product; cookers felt exactly the same about the huge profits they made. More murders were attributed to meth than coke, heroin, pot and alcohol combined. And there were as many accidental deaths by scalding, burning and overdoses as murders related to the drug. A family of four had just died when their trailer burned down after the mother passed out while cooking a batch in her kitchen. She’d overdosed, Dahl speculated, after sampling some product fresh off the stovetop.

The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “Well, damn. Just goddamn. He’s cooking it. We all know he’s cooking. He’s playing with us is what he’s doing. And I’d like to arrest him just for that. Well, where did it come from, that nine-one-one call? Landline?”

“No, somebody’s cell. That’s what’s taking some time.”

The E911 system, which Kennesha County had had for years, gave the dispatcher the location of the caller in an emergency. The E was for “enhanced,” not “emergency.” It worked with cell calls too, though tracing them was a little more complicated and in the hilly country around this portion of Wisconsin sometimes didn’t work at all.

This…

A woman’s voice called across the cluttered space, “Todd, Com Center for you.”

The deputy headed to his cubicle. Dahl turned back to the wad of arrest reports he was correcting for English as much as for criminal procedure.

Jackson returned. He didn’t sit down in either of the two office chairs. He hovered, which he did a lot. “Okay, Sheriff. The nine-one-one call? It was from someplace around Lake Mondac.”

Creepy, Dahl thought. Never liked it up there. The lake squatted in the middle of Marquette State Park, also creepy. He’d run two rapes and two homicides there and in the last murder investigation they’d recovered only a minority of the victim’s body. He glanced at the map on his wall. Nearest town was Clausen, six, seven miles from the lake. He didn’t know the town well but assumed it was like a thousand others in Wisconsin: a gas station, a grocery store that sold as much beer as milk and a restaurant that was harder to find than the local meth cooker. “They have houses there?”

“Around the lake? Think so.”

Dahl stared at the blue pebble of Lake Mondac on the map. It was surrounded by a small amount of private land, which was in turn engulfed by huge Marquette Park.

This…

Jackson said, “And the campgrounds’re closed till May.”

“Whose phone?”

“That we’re still waiting on.” The young deputy had spiky blond hair. All the rage. Dahl had worn a crew cut for nine-tenths of his life.

The sheriff had lost interest in the routine reports and in a beer bash in honor of one of their senior deputies’ birthdays, an event that was supposed to commence in an hour at the Eagleton Tap, and which he had been looking forward to. He was thinking of last year when some guy—a registered sex offender, and a stupid one—picked up Johnny Ralston from grade school and the boy had the presence of mind to hit LAST CALL on his cell phone and slip it in his pocket as they drove around, the sicko asking him what kind of movies he liked. It took all of eight minutes to find them.

The miracle of modern electronics. God bless Edison. Or Marconi. Or Sprint.

Dahl stretched and massaged his leg near the leathery spot where a bullet had come and gone, not stinging much at the time and probably fired by one of his own men in the county’s only bank robbery shootout in recent memory. “Whatta you think, Todd? I don’t think you say, ‘This is the number I want,’ to four-one-one. I think you say, ‘This is an emergency.’ To nine-one-one.”

“And then you pass out.”

“Or get shot or stabbed. And the line just went dead?”

“And Peggy tried calling back. But it went to voice mail. Direct. No ring.”

“And the message said?”

“Just ‘This is Steven. I’m not available.’ No last name. Peggy left a message to call her.”

“Boater on the lake?” Dahl speculated. “Had a problem?”

“In this weather?” April in Wisconsin could be frigid; the temperatures tonight were predicted to dip into the high thirties.

Dahl shrugged. “My boys went into water that’d scare off polar bears. And boaters’re like golfers.”

“I don’t golf.”

Another deputy called, “Got a name, Todd.”

The young man produced a pen and notebook. Dahl couldn’t tell where they came from. “Go on.”

“Steven Feldman. Billing address for the phone is two one nine three Melbourne, Milwaukee.”

“So, it’s a vacation house on Lake Mondac. Lawyer, doctor, not a beggarman. Run him,” the sheriff ordered. “And what’s the number of the phone?”

Dahl got the numbers from Jackson, who then returned again to his cubicle, where he’d look up the particulars on the federal and state databases. All the important ones: NCIC, VICAP, Wisconsin criminal records, Google.

Out the window the April sky was a rich blue like a girl’s party dress. Dahl loved the air in this part of Wisconsin. Humboldt, the biggest town in Kennesha, had no more than seven thousand vehicles spread out over many miles. The cement plant put some crap into the air but it was the only big industry the county had so nobody complained except some local Environmental Protection Agency people and they didn’t complain very loudly. You could see for miles.

Quarter to six now.

“‘This,’” Dahl mused.

Jackson came back yet again. “Well, here we go, Sheriff. Feldman works for the city. He’s thirty-six. His wife Emma’s a lawyer. Hartigan, Reed, Soames and Carson. She’s thirty-four.”

“Ha. Lawyer. I win.”

“No warrants or anything on either of them. Have two cars. Mercedes and a Cherokee. No children. They have a house there.”

“Where?”

“I mean Lake Mondac. Found the deed, no mortgage.”

“Owning and not owing? Well.” Dahl hit REDIAL for the fifth time. Straight to voice mail again. “Hi, this is Steven. I’m not available—”

Dahl didn’t leave another message. He disconnected, let his thumb linger on the cradle, then removed it. Directory assistance had no listing for a Feldman in Mondac. He called the phone company’s local legal affairs man.

“Jerry. Caughtya ’fore you left. Tom Dahl.”

“On my way out the door. Got a warrant? We looking for terrorists?”

“Ha. Just, can you tell me there’s a landline for a house up in Lake Mondac?”

“Where?”

“About twenty miles north of here, twenty-five. House is number three Lake View.”

“That’s a town? Lake Mondac?”

“Probably just unincorporated county.”

A moment later. “Nope, no line. Us or anybody. Everybody uses their mobiles nowadays.”

“What would Ma Bell say?”

“Who?”

After they disconnected, Dahl looked at the note Jackson had given him. He called Steven Feldman’s office, the Milwaukee Department of Social Services, but got a recording. He hung up. “I’ll try the wife. Law firms don’t ever sleep. At least not ones with four names.”

A young woman, an assistant or secretary, answered and Dahl identified himself. Then said, “We’re trying to reach Mrs. Feldman.”

The pause you always got, then: “Is something wrong?”

“No. Just routine. We understand that she’s at her vacation house at Lake Mondac.”

“That’s right. Emma and her husband and a friend of hers from Chicago were driving up there after work. They were going for the weekend. Please, is anything wrong? Has there been an accident?”

In a voice with which he’d delivered news of fatal accidents and successful births Tom Dahl said, “Nothing’s wrong that we know of. I’d just like to get in touch with her. Could you give me her cell phone number?”

A pause.

“Tell you what. You don’t know me. Call back the Kennesha County Center’s main number and ask to speak to the sheriff. If it’d make you feel any better.”

“It would.”

He hung up and the phone buzzed one minute later.

“Wasn’t sure she’d call,” he said to Jackson as he was picking up the handset.

He got Emma Feldman’s mobile number from the assistant. Then he asked for the name and number of the friend driving up with them.

“She’s a woman Emma used to work with. I don’t know her name.”

Dahl told the assistant if Emma called in to have her get in touch with the Sheriff’s Department. They hung up.

Emma’s mobile went straight to voice mail too.

Dahl exhaled, “‘This,’” the way he’d let smoke ease from his lips up until seven years and four months ago. He made a decision. “I’ll sleep better…. Anybody on duty up that way?”

“Eric’s the closest. Was checking out a GTA in Hobart that turned into a mistake. Oops, should’ve called the wife first, that sort of thing.”

“Eric, hmm.”

“Called in five minutes ago. Went for dinner in Boswich Falls.”

“Eric.”

“Nobody else within twenty miles. Usually isn’t, up there, with the park closed and all, this time of year.”

Dahl looked out the interior window, over the cubicles of his deputies. Jimmy Barnes, the deputy whose birthday was tomorrow, was standing beside two coworkers, all of them laughing hard. The joke must’ve been pretty funny and it’d surely be told again and again that night.

The sheriff’s eyes settled on an empty desk. He winced as he massaged his damaged thigh.

 

“HOW’D IT GO?”

“Joey’s fine,” she said. “He’s just fine.”

Graham was in the kitchen, two skills on display, Brynn observed of her husband. He was getting the pasta going and he’d progressed with the new tile. About twenty square feet of kitchen floor were sealed off with yellow police line tape.

“Hi, Graham,” the boy called.

“Hey, young man. How you feeling?”

The lanky twelve-year-old, in cargo pants, windbreaker and black knit hat, held up his arm. “Excellent.” He was nearly his mother’s five-foot-five-inch height and his round face was dusted with freckles, which hadn’t come from Brynn, though he and his mother shared identical straight chestnut brown hair. His now protruded from under the watch cap.

“No sling? How’re you going to get any sympathy from the girls?”

“Ha, ha.” Graham’s stepson crinkled his nose at the comment about the opposite sex. The lean boy got a juice box from the fridge, poked the straw in and emptied the drink.

“Spaghetti tonight.”

“Al-right!” The boy instantly forgot skateboard injuries and female classmates. He ran to the stairs, dodging books that were stacked on the lower steps, intended for putting away at some point.

“Hat!” Graham shouted. “In the house…”

The boy yanked the cap off and continued bounding upward.

“Take it easy,” Graham called. “Your arm—”

“He’s fine,” Brynn repeated, hanging her dark green jacket in the front closet, then returning to the kitchen. Midwest pretty. Her high cheekbones made her look a bit Native-American, though she was exclusively Norwegian-Irish and in roughly the proportion her name suggested: Kristen Brynn McKenzie. People sometimes thought that, especially with her shoulder-length hair pulled back taut, she was a retired ballet dancer who’d settled into a size-eight life with few regrets, though Brynn had never danced, outside of a school or club, in her life.

Her one concession to vanity was to pluck and peroxide her eyebrows; more long-term tactics were in the planning but so far none had been put into practice. If there was any imperfection it was her jaw, which, seen from straight on, was a bit crooked. Graham said it was charming and sexy. Brynn hated the flaw.

He now asked, “His arm—it’s not broken?”

“Nope. Just lost some skin. They bounce back, that age.” She glanced at the kettle. He made good pasta.

“That’s a relief.” The kitchen was hot and six-foot-three-inch Graham Boyd rolled his sleeves up, showing strong arms, and two small scars of his own. He wore a watch with much of the gold plate worn off. His only jewelry was his wedding band, scratched and dull. Much like Brynn’s, nestled beside the engagement ring she’d had on her finger for exactly one month longer than the band.

Graham opened cans of tomatoes. The Oxo’s sharp round blade split the lids decisively under his big hands. He turned down the flame. Onion was sizzling. “Tired?”

“Some.”

She’d left the house at five-thirty. That was well before the day tour started, but she’d wanted to follow up at a trailer park, the site of a domestic dispute the afternoon before. Nobody’d been arrested and the couple had ended up remorseful, tearful and hugging. But Brynn wanted to make sure the excessive makeup on the woman’s face wasn’t concealing a bruise she didn’t want the police to see.

Nope, Brynn had learned at 6 A.M.; she just wore a lot of Max Factor.

After the predawn start she was planning to be home early—well, for her, at five, but she’d gotten a call from an EMS medical tech, a friend of hers. The woman began: “Brynn, he’s all right.”

Ten minutes later she was in the emergency room with her son.

She now puffed out her tan Sheriff’s Department uniform blouse. “I’m stinky.”

Graham consulted the triple shelves of cookbooks, about four dozen of them altogether. They were mostly Anna’s, who’d brought them with her when she moved in after her medical treatments, but Graham had been browsing through them recently, as he’d taken over that household duty. His mother-in-law hadn’t been well enough to cook, and Brynn? Well, it wasn’t exactly one of her skills.

“Ouch. I forgot the cheese,” Graham said, rummaging futilely in the pantry. “Can’t believe it.” He turned back to the pot, and his thumb and forefinger ground oregano into dust.

“How was your day?” she asked.

He told her about an irrigation system gone mad, turned on prematurely April first then cracking in a dozen places in the freeze that surprised nobody but the owner, who’d returned home to find his backyard had done a Katrina.

“You’re making headway.” She nodded at the tile.

“It’s coming along. So. The punishment fit the crime?”

She frowned.

“Joey. The skateboard.”

“Oh, I told him he’s off it for three days.”

Graham said nothing, concentrated on the sauce. Did that mean he thought she was too lenient? She said, “Well, maybe more. I said we’ll see.”

“They oughta outlaw those things,” he said. “Going down railings? Jumping in the air. It’s crazy.”

“He was just in the school yard. Those stairs there. The three stairs going down to the parking lot. All the kids do it, he said.”

“He has to wear that helmet. I see it here all the time.”

“That’s true. He’s going to. I talked to him about that too.”

Graham’s eyes followed the boy’s route to his room. “Maybe I should have a word with him. Guy-to-guy thing.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t want to overwhelm him. He got the message.”

Brynn got her own beer, drank half. Ate a handful of Wheat Thins. “So. You going to your poker game tonight?”

“Thought I might.”

She nodded as she watched him roll meatballs with his large hands.

“Honey,” a voice called. “How’s our boy?”

“Hey, Mom.”

Anna, seventy-four, stood in the doorway, dressed nice, as usual. Today the outfit was a black pantsuit and gold shell. Her short ’do had been put in place by the hairdresser just yesterday. Thursday was her day at Style Cuts.

“Just a few scrapes, a few bruises.”

Graham said, “He was skateboarding down stairs.”

“Oh, my.”

“Three steps. Not ‘stairs.’” Brynn sipped. “Everything’s fine. He won’t do it again. Nothing serious, really. We’ve all done things like that.”

Graham asked Anna, “What’d she do when she was a kid?” Nodding at his wife.

“Oh, I’ve got stories.” But she told none of them.

“I’ll take him paintballing or something,” Graham suggested. “Channel some of that energy.”

“That’d be a good idea.”

Graham ripped up lettuce with his hands. “Spaghetti okay, Anna?”

“Whatever you make’ll be lovely.” Anna took the glass of Chardonnay her son-in-law poured for her.

Brynn watched her husband take plates from the cupboard. “Think there’s some dust on them? From the tiling?”

“I sealed it off with plastic. Took it down after I was done.”

He hesitated then rinsed them anyway.

“Can somebody take me over to Rita’s tonight?” Anna asked. “Megan’s got to pick up her son. Just for an hour and a half or so. I promised to handle bathroom duty.”

“How’s she doing?” Brynn asked.

“Not good.” Anna and her dear friend had been diagnosed around the same time. Anna’s treatment had gone well, Rita’s had not.

“I’ll take you,” she told her mother. “Sure. What time?”

“Sevenish.” Anna turned back to the family room, the heart of Brynn’s small house on the outskirts of Humboldt. The nightly news was on. “Lookit. Another bomb. Those people.”

The phone rang. Graham answered. “Hi, Tom. How’s it going?”

Brynn set the beer down. Looked at her husband, holding the phone in his large hand. “Yeah, I saw it. Good game. You’re calling for Brynn, I’m guessing…. Hold on. She’s here.”

“The boss,” he whispered, offering the handset then turning back to dinner.

“Tom?”

The sheriff asked about Joey. She thought he was going to lecture her about skateboards too but he didn’t. He was explaining about a situation up in Lake Mondac. She listened carefully, nodding.

“Need somebody to check it out. You’re closer than anybody else, Brynn.”

“Eric?”

Graham lit a burner on the Kenmore stove. Blue sparks ascended.

“I’d rather it wasn’t him. You know how he gets.”

Graham stirred the pot. It was mostly the contents of cans but he still stirred like he was blending hand-diced ingredients. In the family room a man’s voice was replaced by Katie Couric’s. Anna announced, “That’s more like it. What the news should be about.”

Brynn debated. Then she said, “You owe me a half day, Tom. Give me the address.”

Which turned Graham’s head.

Dahl put on another deputy, Todd Jackson, who gave directions. Brynn wrote.

She hung up. “Might be a problem up at Lake Mondac.” She looked at the beer. Didn’t drink any more.

“Aw, baby,” Graham said.

“I’m sorry. I feel obligated. I left work early because of Joey.”

“But Tom didn’t say that.”

She hesitated. “No, he didn’t. The thing is I’m closest.”

“I heard you mention Eric.”

“He’s a problem. I told you about him.”

Eric Munce read Soldier of Fortune magazine, wore a second gun on his ankle like he was in downtown Detroit and would go prowling around for meth labs when he should have been Breathalyzing DUIs and encouraging kids to get home by 10 P.M.

From the doorway, Anna said, “Should I call Rita?”

“I guess I can take you,” Graham said.

Brynn put a stopper on her beer bottle. “Your poker game?”

Her husband paused, smiled then said, “It’ll keep. Anyway, with Joey being hurt, better to stay here, keep an eye on him.”

She said, “You guys eat. And leave the dishes. I’ll clean up when I get back. It’ll be a couple hours is all.”

“Okay,” Graham said. And everybody knew he’d clean up.

She pulled on her leather jacket, lighter weight than her Sheriff’s Department parka. “I’ll call when I get up there. Let you know when I’ll be back. Sorry about your game, Graham.”

“Bye,” he said, not looking back, as he eased the jackstraws of spaghetti into the boiling pot.

 

NORTH OF HUMBOLDT

the landscape is broken into bumpy rectangles of pastures, separated by benign fences, a few stone walls and hedgerows. The sun was sitting on the tops of the hills to the west and shone down on the landscape, making the milk cows and sheep glow like bright, bulky lawn decorations. Every few hundred yards signs lured tourists this way or that with the promise of handmade cheeses, nut rolls and nougat, maple syrup, soft drinks and pine furniture. A vineyard offered a tour. Brynn McKenzie, who enjoyed her wine and had lived in Wisconsin all her life, had never sampled anything local.

Then, eight miles out of town, the storybook vanished, just like that. Pine and oak ganged beside the road, which shrank from four lanes to two. Hills sprouted and soon the landscape was nothing but forest. A few buds were out but the leaf-bearing trees were still largely gray and black. Most of the pines were richly green but some parcels were dead, killed by acid rain or maybe blight.

Brynn recognized balsam fir, juniper, yew, spruce, hickory, some gnarly black willows and central casting’s oak, maple and birch. Beneath the trees were congregations of sedge, thistle, ragweed and blackberry. Daffodils and crocuses had been tricked into awakening by the thaw that had murdered the plants in the yard of Graham’s client.

Although married to a landscaper, she hadn’t learned about local flora from her husband. That education came from her job. The rampant growth of meth labs in out-of-the-way parts of rural America meant that police officers who’d never done anything more challenging than pulling over drunk drivers now had to make drug raids out in the boondocks.

Brynn was one of the few deputies in the department who took the State Police tactical training refresher course outside of Madison every year. It included assault and arrest techniques, part of which involved learning about plants, which ones were dangerous, which were good for cover and which might actually save your life (even young hardwoods could stop bullets fired from close range).

As she drove, the Glock 9mm pistol was high on her hip, and while the Sheriff’s Department Crown Victoria cruiser had plenty of room for accessories, the configuration of bucket seat and seat belt in the Honda she was now driving kept the boxy gun’s slide bridling against her hip bone. There’d be a mark come morning. She shifted again and put on the radio. NPR, then country, then talk, then weather. She shut it off.

Oncoming trucks, oncoming pickups. But fewer and fewer of them and soon she had the road to herself. It now angled upward and she saw the evening star ahead of her. Hilltops grew craggy and bald with rock and she could see evidence of the lakes nearby: cattails, bog bean and silver and reed canary grass. A heron stood in a marsh, immobile, his beak, and gaze, aimed directly at her.

She shivered. The outside temperature was in the midfifties but the scene was bleak and chilly.

Brynn flicked on the Honda’s lights. Her cell phone rang. “Hi, Tom.”

“Thanks again for doing this, Brynn.”

“Sure.”

“Had Todd check things out.” Dahl explained that he still couldn’t get through on either of the couple’s mobiles. As far as he knew the only people at the house were the Feldmans, Steven and Emma, and a woman from Chicago Emma used to work with, who was driving up with them.

“Just the three of them?”

“That’s what I heard. Now, there’s nothing odd about Feldman. He works for the city. But the wife, Emma…get this. She’s a lawyer at a big firm in Milwaukee. Seems that she might’ve uncovered some big scam as part of a case or a deal she was working on.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know the details. Just what a friend in Milwaukee PD tells me.”

“So she’s maybe a witness or whistle-blower or something?”

“Could be.”

“And the call, the nine-one-one call—what’d he say exactly?”

“Just ‘this.’”

She waited. “I missed it. What?”

A chuckle. “Who’s on first? I mean he said the word ‘this.’ T-H-I-S.”

“That’s all?”

“Yep.” Dahl then told her, “But it could be a big deal, this case. Todd’s been talking to the FBI in Milwaukee.”

“The Bureau’s involved? Well. Any threats against her?”

“None they heard of. But my father always said those that threaten usually don’t do. Those that do usually don’t threaten.”

Brynn’s stomach flipped—with apprehension, sure, but also with excitement. The most serious nonvehicular crime she’d run in the past month was an emotionally disturbed teenager with a baseball bat taking out plate-glass windows in Southland Mall and terrorizing customers. It was a potential disaster but she’d defused it with a brief face-to-face, smiling at his mad eyes while her heart thudded just a few beats above normal.

“You watch yourself, Brynn. Check the place out from a distance. Don’t go stumbling in. Anything looks funny, call it in and wait.”

“Sure.” Thinking: as a last resort maybe. Brynn snapped her phone shut and set it in the cup holder.

This reminded her she was thirsty—and hungry too. But she pushed the thought aside; four of the roadside restaurants she’d passed in the last ten miles were closed. She’d check out whatever was happening at Lake Mondac, then get home to Graham’s spaghetti.

For some reason she thought of dinners with Keith. Her first husband had cooked too. In fact, he did most of the cooking in the evening, unless he was working second-shift tour.

She pushed the accelerator down a bit harder, deciding that the difference in response between the Crown Vic and the Honda was as noticeable as that between fresh Idahos and instant potato buds out of a box.

Thinking, as she had been, about food.

 

“WELL, BOY, YOU

got yourself shot.”

In a downstairs bedroom of the Feldman house, shades drawn, Hart was looking at the left sleeve of his brown flannel shirt, dark to start with but darker now halfway between wrist and elbow from the blood. His leather coat was on the floor. He slouched on the guest bed.

“Yep, lookit that.” Tugging his green stud earring, skinny Lewis finished making obvious, and irritating, observations and began to roll up Hart’s cuff carefully.

The men had taken off their stocking masks and gloves.

“Just be careful what you touch,” Hart said, nodding at the other man’s bare hands.

Lewis pointedly ignored the comment. “That was a surprise, Hart. Bitch blindsided us. Never saw that coming. So who the hell is she?”

“I don’t really know, Lewis,” Hart said patiently, looking at his arm as the curtain of sleeve went up. “How would I know?”

“It’ll be a piece of cake, Hart. Hardly any risk at all. The other places’ll be vacant. And only the two of them up there. No rangers in the park and no cops for miles.”

“They have weapons?”

“Are you kidding? They’re city people. She’s a lawyer, he’s a social worker.”

Hart was in his early forties. He had a lengthy face. With the mask off, his hair came well below the bottom of his ears, which were close to the side of his head. He swept the black strands back but they didn’t stay put very well. He favored hats and had a collection. Hats also took attention away from you. His skin was rough, not from youthful eruptions but simply because it was that way. Had always been.

He gazed at his forearm, purple and yellow around the black hole, from which oozed a trickle of blood. The slug had gone through muscle. An inch to the left, it would have missed completely; to the right the bullet would have shattered bone. Did that make him lucky or unlucky?

Speaking to himself as much as to Lewis, Hart said of the blood, “Not pulsing out. Means it’s not a major vein.” Then: “Can you get some alcohol, a bar of soap and cloth for a bandage?”

“I guess.”

As the man loped off slowly, Hart wondered again why on earth anybody would have a bright red-and-blue tattoo of a Celtic cross tattooed on his neck.

From the bathroom Lewis called, “No alcohol. Whisky in the bar, I saw.”

“Get vodka. Whisky smells too much. Can give you away. Don’t forget your gloves.”

Did the thin man give an exasperated sigh?

A few minutes later Lewis returned with a bottle of vodka. True, the clear liquor didn’t smell as much as the whisky but Hart could tell that Lewis had had himself a hit. He took the bottle in his gloved hands and poured the liquid on the wound. The pain was astonishing. “Well,” he gasped, slumping forward. His eyes focused on a picture on the wall. He stared at it. A jumping fish, a fly in its mouth. Who’d buy something like that?

“Phew…”

“You’re not going to faint, are you, man?” Lewis asked as if he didn’t need this inconvenience too.

“Okay, okay…” Hart’s head dropped and his vision crinkled to black but then he breathed in deeply and came back around. He rubbed the Ivory soap over the wound.

“Why’re you doing that?”

“Cauterizes it. Stops the bleeding.”

“No shit.”

Hart tested the arm. He could raise and lower it with some control and not too much pain. When he closed his fist, the grip was weak but at least it was functioning.

“Fucking bitch,” Lewis muttered.

Hart didn’t waste much anger at the moment; he was more relieved than anything. What ended up being a shot arm had almost been a shot head.

He remembered standing in the kitchen, scratching his face through the stocking, when he’d looked up to see movement in front of him. It turned out, though, to be a reflection of the young woman moving up silently from behind, lifting the gun.

Hart had leapt aside just as she’d fired—not even aware he’d been hit—and spun around. She’d fled out the door as he’d let go with a couple of rounds from his Glock. Lewis, who’d been standing next to him—and would have been the next to die—had spun around too, dropping a bag of snacks he’d pilfered from the refrigerator.

Then they’d heard a series of cracks from outside and Hart knew she was shooting out the tires of both the Ford and the Mercedes so they couldn’t pursue her.

“Got careless there,” Hart now said ominously.

Lewis looked at him like he was being blamed, which he was—the skinny man was supposed to be in the living room, not the kitchen, at the time. But Hart let it go.

“Think you hit her?” Lewis now asked.

“No.” Hart felt dizzy. He pressed the side of the Glock pistol against his forehead. The cold calmed him.

“Who the hell is she?” Lewis repeated.

That was answered when they found her purse in the living room, a little thing with makeup, cash and credit cards inside.

“Michelle,” Hart said, glancing at a Visa credit card. He looked up. “Her name’s Michelle.”

He’d just got shot by a Michelle.

Wincing, Hart now walked across the worn rug, dark tan, and shut off the living room lights. He peered carefully out the door and into the front yard. No sign of her. Lewis started into the kitchen. “I’ll get those lights.”

“No, not there. Leave ’em on. Too many windows, no curtains. She could see you easy.”

“What’re you, some wuss? Bitch is long gone.”

Grim-faced, Hart glanced down at his arm, meaning, you want to take the chance? Lewis got the point. They looked outside again, through the front windows, and saw nothing but a tangle of woods. No lights, no shapes moving in the dusk. He heard frogs and saw a couple of bats flying obstacle courses in the clear sky.

Lewis was saying, “Wish I’d knew that soap trick. That’s pretty slick. Me and my brother were in Green Bay one time. We weren’t doing shit, just hanging, you know. I went to pee by the railroad tracks and this asshole jumped me. Had a box cutter. Got me from behind. Homeless prick…cut me down to the bone. I bled like a stuck pig.”

Hart was wondering, What’s his point? He tried to tune the man out.

“Oh, I whaled on that dude, Hart. Didn’t matter I was bleeding. He felt pain that day. Come off the worst of it, I’ll tell you.”

Hart squeezed the wound and then stopped paying attention to the pain. It was still there but was lost in the background of sensations. Gripping his black gun, he stepped outside, crouching. No shots. No rustles from the bushes. Lewis joined him. “Bitch’s gone, I’m telling you. She’s halfway to the highway by now.”

Hart looked over the cars, grimaced. “Look at that.” Both the Feldmans’ Mercedes and the Ford that Hart had stolen earlier in the day had two flats each and the wheel sizes were different; the spares wouldn’t be compatible.

Lewis said, “Shit. Well, better start hiking, you think?”

Hart scanned the deep woods surrounding them, shadowy now. He couldn’t imagine a better place in the world to hide. Good goddamn. “See if you can plug one of those.” He nodded at the Ford’s shot-out tires.

Lewis sneered. “I’m not a fucking mechanic.”

“I’d do it,” Hart said, trying to be patient, “but I’m a little disadvantaged here.” He nodded at his arm.

The skinny man tugged at his earring, a green stone, and loped off resentfully toward the car. “What’re you going to be doing?”

What the hell did he think? With his Glock at his side, he started in the direction he’d seen Michelle flee.

 

EIGHT MILES FROM

Lake Mondac the landscape ranged from indifferent to hostile. No farms here; the country was forested and hilly, with forbidding sheer cliffs of cracked rocks.

Brynn McKenzie drove through Clausen, which amounted to a few gas stations, two of the three unbranded, a few stores—convenience, package and auto parts—and a junkyard. A sign pointed to a Subway but it was 3.2 miles away. She noted another sign, for hot sausages, in the window of a Quik Mart. She was tempted, but it was closed. Across the highway was a Tudor-style building with all the windows broken out and roof collapsed. It bore a prize that had surely tempted many a local teenager but the All Girl Staff sign was just too high or too well bolted to the wall to steal.

Then this sneeze of civilization was gone and Brynn began a long sweep through tree-and rock-filled wilderness, broken only by scruffy clearings. The few residences were set well off the road, trailers or bungalows, from which gray smoke eased skyward. The windows, glowing dimly, were like sleepy eyes. The land was too harsh for farms and the sparse populace would drive their rusted pickups or Datsun-era imports to work elsewhere. If they went to work at all.

For miles the only oncoming traffic: three cars, one truck. Nobody in her lane, ahead or behind.

At 6:40 she passed a sign saying that Marquette State Park campground was ten miles up the road. Open May 20. Which meant that Lake Mondac had to be nearby. Then she saw:

 

LAKE VIEW DRIVE
PRIVATE ROAD
NO TRESPASSING
NO PUBLIC LAKE ACCESS
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

 

And howdy-do to you too….

She turned, slowing as the Honda bumbled over the gravel and dirt, thinking she should’ve taken Graham’s pickup. According to the directions that Todd Jackson had given her, the distance was 1.2 miles from the county route to 3 Lake View, the Feldmans’ vacation house. Their driveway, he’d added, was “a couple football fields long. Or that’s what it looked like on Yahoo.”

Making slow progress, Brynn drove through a tunnel of trees and bushes and blankets of leaf refuse. Mostly the landscape was needles and naked branch and bark.

Then the road widened slightly and the willow, jack pine and hemlock on her right grew sparse; she could see the lake clearly. She’d never spent much time on bodies of water, didn’t care for them. She felt more in control on dry land, for some reason. She and Keith had had a tradition of going to the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, his choice pretty much. Brynn had divided her time there between reading and taking Joey to amusement parks and the beach. Keith spent most of the time in the casino. It wasn’t her favorite locale but at least the beige water lapping at the shoreline was as easygoing and warm as the locals. Lakes around here seemed bottomless and chill and the abrupt meeting of rocky shore and black water made you feel helpless, easy prey for snakes and leeches.

She reflected on another course she’d taken through the State Police: a water safety rescue seminar. It had been held at a lake just like this and though she’d done the exercise—swimming underwater to rescue a “drowning” dummy in a sunken boat—she’d hated the experience.

She now scanned the surroundings, looking for boaters in trouble, car accidents, fires.

For intruders too.

There was still enough light to navigate by and she shut the lights out so as not to announce her presence. And drove even more slowly to keep the crunch of the tires to a minimum.

She passed the first two houses on the private road. They were dark and set at the end of long driveways winding through the woods. Large structures—four, five bedrooms—they were old, impressive, somber. There was a bleakness about the properties. Like sets in the opening scene of a family drama: the homestead boarded up, the story to be told in flashbacks to happier days.

Brynn’s own bungalow, which she’d bought after Keith bought her share of their marital house, would have fit inside either of these and still have left it half empty.

As the Honda crawled along, she passed a small bald patch between copses of fir, spruce and more hemlock, giving her a partial view of the house at number 3—the Feldmans’—ahead and to her left. It was grander than the others, though of the same style. Smoke trailed from the chimney. The windows were mostly dark, though she could see a glow behind shades or curtains in the back and on the second floor.

She drove on toward the house and it was lost to sight behind a large copse of pine. Her hand reached down and for reassurance tapped the grip of her Glock, not a superstitious gesture, but one she’d learned long ago: you had to know the exact position of your weapon in case you needed to draw it fast. Brynn recalled that she’d loaded the weapon with fresh ammo last week—thirteen rounds, which wasn’t superstitious either but more than enough for whatever she’d run into in Kennesha County. Besides, it took all your thumb strength to jam the slick brass rounds into the clip.

Tom Dahl wanted his deputies on the range for a checkup once a month but Brynn went every two weeks. It was a rarely used but vital skill, she believed, and she blew through a couple boxes of Remingtons every other Tuesday. She’d been in several firefights, usually against drunk or suicidal shooters, and had come away with the sense that the brief seconds of exchanging bullets with another human being were so chaotic and loud and terrifying that you needed any edge you could get. And a big part of that was making automatic the process of drawing and firing a weapon.

She’d had to cancel her session last week because of another incident with Joey—a fight at school—but the next morning she’d made her range time of 6 A.M. and, upset about her son, had run through two boxes of fifty rounds. Her wrist had ached from the excess for the rest of the day.

Brynn slowed about fifty yards from the Feldmans’ driveway and pulled onto the shoulder, sending a startling cluster of grouse into the air. She stopped, intending to walk the rest of the way.

She was reaching for her phone, in the cup holder, to shut the ringer off before approaching the crime scene, when it trilled. A glance at caller ID. “Tom.”

“Look, Brynn…”

“Doesn’t sound good. What? Tell me.”

He sighed. She was irritated he was delaying, though a lot more irritated at the news she knew was coming.

“I’m sorry, Brynn. Oh, brother. Wild goose chase.”

Oh, damn…“Tell me.”

“Feldman called back. The husband.”

“Called back?”

“Com Central called me. Feldman said he’s got nine-one-one on speed dial. Hit it by mistake. Hung up as soon as he realized it. Didn’t think it’d gone through.”

“Oh, Tom.” Grimacing, she stared at thrushes picking at the ground beside a wood lily.

“I know, I know.”

“I’m practically there. I can see the house.”

“You moved fast.”

“Well, it was a nine-one-one, remember.”

“I’m giving you a whole day off.”

And when would she have time for that? She exhaled long. “At least you’re buying me dinner out tonight. And not Burger King. I want Chili’s or Bennigan’s.”

“Not a single bit of problem. Enjoy it.”

“’Night, Tom.”

Brynn called Graham but got his voice mail. It rang four times before it switched over. She left a message saying the call was a false alarm. She hung up. Tried again. This time it went right to voice mail. She didn’t leave another message. Was he out?

Your poker game?

It’ll keep….

Thinking of the false alarm, though, Brynn wasn’t wholly upset. She was going to take an advanced course next week in domestic violence negotiations and could use her dinner break tonight to make some headway in the course manual she’d just received. If she’d been home she wouldn’t have been able to crack the book until bedtime.

She also had to admit that she wouldn’t mind a bit of a break from evenings with Anna, especially if a run to Rita’s was scheduled. It was odd having Anna back in the house after so many years of mutual independence. Emotions from years past surfaced. Like that night last week when her mother had shot a look her way after Brynn returned late from a shift; the tension was identical to that when, as a teenager, she’d lost herself in steeple-jumping and had come home hours after she’d promised. No fight, no lectures. Just a simple, burdened look beneath an unflappable smile.

They’d never fought. Anna wasn’t temperamental or moody. She was a perfect grandmother, which counted for a lot to Brynn. But mother and daughter had never been chummy, and during Brynn’s first marriage Anna largely faded from her life, emerging only after Joey was born.

Now divorced and with a man whom Brynn believed Anna approved of, they’d reconnected. At one point, a year ago, Brynn had wondered if mother and daughter would finally grow close. But that hadn’t happened. They were, after all, the same people they’d been twenty years ago, and, unlike her siblings, Brynn had never had much in common with her mother. Brynn had always spent her life riding, pushing, looking for something outside Eau Claire. Anna’s had been spent working unchallenging jobs—mostly four hours a day as a real estate office manager—and raising her three children. Evenings were invariably knitting, chatting and TV.

Perfectly fine for relations living apart. But when Anna moved in, after her surgery, it was like Brynn had been transported back to those days of her youth.

Oh, yes, she was looking forward to a few hours of evening time to herself.

And a free dinner at Bennigan’s. Hell, she’d even order a glass of wine.

Brynn flipped the car lights on and put the car in reverse to turn around. Then she paused. The nearest gas station was back in Clausen, a good twenty minutes.

The Feldmans were behind this mixup; the least they could do was let her use their bathroom. Brynn put the car in gear and headed for their driveway, curious to see just how far Yahoo thought two football fields was.

 

SQUATTING NEXT TO

the stolen Ford they’d driven here from Milwaukee, Lewis sucked blood off the knuckle he’d gigged on the sheet metal trying to repair one or both of the flats. He examined the wound and spat.

Great, Hart thought. Fingerprints and DNA.

And here I’m the one picked this guy to tag along tonight.

“Any sign of her?” the skinny man asked, crouched over one of the wheels.

Hart crunched over leaves, returning from making a circuit of the property. As he’d searched for Michelle, being as quiet as he could, he’d had the queasy sense of being targeted. Maybe she was gone. Maybe she wasn’t.

“Ground’s plenty muddy. I found some footprints, probably hers, going toward the county road at first but they seemed to turn that way.” He pointed to the dense woods and steep hillside behind the house. “She’s gotta be hiding there someplace. You hear anything?”

“No. But it’s freaking me out. I keep looking over my shoulder. Man, she is going down. When we get back, I am tracking down that bitch. I don’t care who she is, where she lives. She’s going down. She fucked with the wrong man.”

I’m the one who got shot, Hart reminded silently. He examined the forest again. “We almost had a problem.”

Lewis blurted sarcastically, “You think?”

“I checked his phone. Turned it back on and checked.”

“The…?”

“The husband’s.” A nod toward the house. “Remember? The one you took away from him.”

Lewis was looking defensive already. As well he should. “Got through to nine-one-one. It was a connected call,” said Hart.

“Couldn’t’ve been on it more than a second.”

“Three seconds. But it was enough.”

“Shit.” Lewis stood up and stretched.

“I think it’s okay. I called back and told ’em I was him. I said I’d called by mistake. The sheriff said they’d sent a car to check it out. He was going to tell ’em to come on back.”

“That would’ve been fucking pretty. They believe you?”

“I think so.”

“Just think?” Going on the offensive now.

Hart ignored the question. He gestured at the Ford. “Can you fix it?”

“Nope” was the glib response.

Hart studied the man, his sneering grin, his cocky stance. After Hart had agreed to do this job he’d gone out to find a partner. He’d checked around with some contacts in Milwaukee and gotten Lewis’s name. They’d met. The younger man had seemed all right, and a criminal background check revealed nothing that raised alarms—a rap sheet for some minor drug arrests and larcenies, a few pleas. The skinny guy with the big earring and the red-and-blue neck decoration would’ve been fine for the routine job this was supposed to be. But now it had gone bad. Hart was wounded, they had no wheels and an armed enemy was out in the woods nearby. It suddenly became vital to know Compton Lewis’s habits, nature and skills.

The assessment wasn’t very encouraging.

Hart had to play things carefully. He now tried some damage control and, keeping his voice as neutral as he could, said, “Think your gloves’re off.”

Lewis licked the blood again. “Couldn’t get a grip on the wrench. Detroit piece of crap.”

“Probably want to wipe everything.” A nod toward the tire iron.

Lewis laughed as if Hart had said, “Wow, did you know grass is green?”

So that’s how it was going to be.

What a night…

“I’ll tell you, my friend,” Lewis muttered, “Fix-A-Flat does shit when there’s a fucking bullet hole in the sidewall of a tire.”

Hart saw the can of tire sealant where Lewis had flung it in anger, he supposed. So that now the man’s prints were on that too.

He blinked away tears of pain. Fourteen years in a business in which firearms figured prominently and Hart had never been shot—and he’d rarely fired a weapon himself, unless of course that was what he’d been hired to do.

“The other houses. Up the road? We could try them. Might have a car parked there.”

Hart replied, “Wouldn’t make sense, leaving a car out here. Anyway, try hot-wiring a car nowadays. You need a computer.”

“I’ve done it. I can do it easy.” Lewis scoffed. “You never have?”

Hart said nothing, still scanning the brush.

“Any other ideas?”

“Call Triple A,” Hart said.

“Ha. Triple A. Well, guess that’s it. We better start hiking. It’s a couple miles to the county road. Let’s empty out the Ford and get moving.”

Hart went into the garage and came back with a roll of paper towels and glass cleaner.

“The fuck’s that for?” Lewis said. And gave one of those snide laughs again.

“Fingerprints’re oil. You need something to cut it with. Wiping just distorts them. The cops can reconstruct them a lot of times.”

“That’s bullshit. I never heard of that.”

“It’s true, Lewis. I’ve studied it.”

“Studied?” Another sarcastic laugh.

Hart began spraying the cleaner on whatever Lewis had touched. Hart himself hadn’t touched a single thing, except his own arm, with his bare hands since they’d been here.

“Heh. You do laundry too?”

As Hart scrubbed, he also was looking over the property three-sixty, listening. He said, “We can’t leave just yet.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“We’ve got to find her.”

“But…” Lewis said, with a sour smile, as if the one word conveyed a whole argument about the futility of the task.

“No choice.” Hart finished wiping. He then took out his map, examined it. They were in the middle of a huge stew of green and brown. He looked around, studied the map some more, folded it up.

Another of those irritating snickers. “Well, Hart, I know you want to fuck her up after what she did. But let’s worry about that later.”

“It’s not revenge. Revenge is pointless.”

“Beg to differ. Revenge is fun. That asshole I told you about with the box cutter? Fucking him up was more fun than seeing the Brewers. Depending on who’s pitching.”

Hart reined in a sigh. “It’s not about revenge. It’s just what we have to do.”

“Shit,” Lewis blurted.

“What?” Hart looked at him, alarmed.

Lewis tugged at his ear. “I lost the back.” Started looking down at the ground.

“Back?”

“Of my earring.” He put the emerald or whatever it was carefully into the small front pocket of his jeans.

Jesus our Lord…

Hart collected the flashlights and extra ammunition from the trunk of the Ford. Waiting until Lewis put his gloves back on, Hart handed him a box of 9mm ammo and one of 12-gauge shells for the shotgun.

“We’ve got a half hour before we lose the light completely. It’ll be a bitch to track her in the dark. Let’s get going.”

Lewis wasn’t moving. He was looking past Hart and playing with the colorful boxes of bullets like they were Rubik’s Cubes. Hart wondered if the head butting was going to start now in earnest. But it turned out that the younger man’s attention was just elsewhere. Lewis put the boxes into his pocket, snagged the shotgun, clicking off the safety, and nodded down the driveway. “We got company, Hart.”

 

AS SHE APPROACHED

the Feldman house Brynn McKenzie decided that even with the glow from behind ivory curtains the place was eerie as hell. The other two houses she’d passed might have been the sets for family dramas; this was just the place for a Stephen King movie, the kind she and her first husband, Keith, would devour like candy.

She looked up at the three-story home. You sure didn’t see many houses of this style or size in Kennesha County. White siding, which had seen better days, and a wraparound porch. She liked the porch. Her childhood house in Eau Claire had sported one. She’d loved sitting out in the chain swing at night, her brother singing and playing his battered guitar, her sister flirting with her latest boyfriend, their parents talking, talking, talking…And the home she and Keith owned had a nice wrap-around. But as for her present house, she didn’t even know where a porch would fit.

Approaching the Feldmans’, she glanced at the yard, impressed. The landscaping was expensive. The place was surrounded by strategically placed dogwoods, ligustrum and crepe myrtles that had been cut way back. She recalled her husband’s advice to his customers against this practice (“Don’t rape your crepes”).

Parking in the circular gravel drive, she caught movement inside, a shadow on the front curtain. She climbed out into the chill air, fresh and sweet with the perfume of blossoms and firewood smoke.

Hearing the comforting sound of frogs croaking and the honk of geese or ducks, Brynn walked over gravel and up the three steps to the porch. Flashed on Joey, imagining him skateboarding off this height into the school parking lot.

Well, I did talk to him.

It’ll be fine….

Her issue black Oxfords, as comfy and unstylish as shoes could be, thunked on the wood as she approached the front door. Hit the bell.

It rang but there was no response.

She pressed the button once more. The door was solid but flanked by narrow windows curtained with lace, and Brynn could see into the living room. She noted no motion, no shadows. Only a pleasant storm of flames in the fireplace.

She knocked. Loud, reverberating on the glass.

Another shadow, like before. She realized that it was from the waving of the orange flames in the fireplace. There was light from a side room but most of the other rooms on this floor were dark, and a lamp from the top of the stairs cast bony shadows of the stair railings on the hallway floor.

Maybe everybody was out back, or in a dining room. Imagine that, she thought, a house so big you’d miss the doorbell.

A throaty honk above her. Brynn looked up. The light was dim and the sky was shared by birds and mammals: mallards on final approach to the lake, a few silver-haired bats in their erratic, purposeful hunt. She smiled at the sight. Then, looking back into the house, her eye noted something out of place: behind a massive brown armchair a briefcase and backpack lay open and the contents—files, books, pens—were dumped on the floor, as if they’d been searched for valuables.

Her gut clenched and in a snap came the thought: a 911 call cut short. An intruder realizes the victim dialed the police and then calls back to say it’s a false alarm.

Brynn McKenzie drew her weapon.

She looked behind her fast. No voices, no footsteps. She was stepping back to the car to get her cell phone when she saw something curious inside.

What is that?

Brynn’s eyes focused on the edge of a rug in the kitchen. But it was glistening. How can a rug be shiny?

Blood. She was looking at a pool of blood.

All right. Think. How to handle it?

Heart stuttering, she tested the knob. The lock had been kicked out.

Cell phone in the car? Or go inside?

The blood was fresh. Three people inside. No sign of the intruders. Somebody could be hurt but alive.

Phone later.

Brynn shoved the door open, glancing right and left. Said nothing, didn’t announce her presence. Looking, looking everywhere, head dizzy.

She glanced into the lit bedroom to her left. A deep breath and she stepped inside, keeping her gun close to her side so it couldn’t be grabbed, as Keith had lectured in his class on tactical operations, the class where she’d met him.

The room was empty but the bed was mussed and first aid materials were on the floor. Her misshapen jaw quivering, she moved back into the living room, where the fire crackled. Trying to be silent, she found the carpet and navigated carefully around the empty briefcase and backpack and file folders scattered on the floor, the labels giving clues about the woman’s professional life: Haberstrom, Inc., Acquisition. Gibbons v. Kenosha Automotive Technologies. Pascoe Inc. Refinancing. Hearing—County Redistricting.

She continued on to the kitchen.

And stopped fast. Staring down at the bodies of the young couple on the floor. They wore business clothes, the shirt and blouse dark with blood. Both had been shot in the head and the wife in the neck too—she was the source of the blood. The husband had run in panic, slipping and falling; a skid mark of red led from his shoe to the carpet of blood. The wife had turned away to die. She lay on her stomach with her right arm twisted behind her, a desperate angle, as if she were trying to touch an itch above her lower spine.

Where was the friend? Brynn wondered. Had she escaped? Or had the killer taken her upstairs? She recalled the light on the second floor.

Had the intruder left?

The answer to that question came a moment later.

A voice outside whispered, “Hart? The keys aren’t in the car. She’s got ’em.”

It came from toward the front of the house, but she couldn’t tell where exactly.

Brynn flattened herself against the wall. Wiped her right palm on her left shoulder, then gripped her gun firmly.

After a moment another voice—Hart’s, she supposed—speaking firmly, not to his partner but to her: “You, lady. In the house. Bring your keys out here. We just want your car is all. You’ll be fine.”

She lifted the gun, muzzle up. Brynn McKenzie had fired a weapon at another human being four times in the decade and a half she’d been a public safety officer. Not a lot, but four times more than most deputies did in their whole careers. Like Breathalyzing drivers and comforting beaten wives, this was a part of her job and she was filled with an odd blend of tension, terror and contentment.

“Really,” Hart called. “Don’t worry. Or, tell you what, just throw ’em out the front, you don’t trust us. But otherwise we come in and get them. Believe me, we just want to be gone. Just want to be out of here.”

Brynn flicked the kitchen lights out. Now the only illumination was from the roaring fireplace and the bedroom she’d glanced into.

A whisper, its source uncertain. This meant they’d joined each other.

But where?

And were there just two? Or more? She found herself staring at the bodies of the couple.

And where was the friend?

Hart again, speaking so very calmly: “You’ve seen those folks inside. You don’t want that to happen to you. Throw the keys out here. I’m telling you not to be stupid. Please.”

Of course the moment she showed herself she’d be dead.

Should she say she was a deputy? And that more were on their way?

No, don’t give yourself away.

Pressing back against the pantry door, Brynn scanned the back windows. They reflected the living room and she gasped softly as a man appeared in the front door, slipping inside. Cautious. He was tall, solid, wearing a dark jacket. Long hair, boots. He carried a pistol in his—the reverse image confused her momentarily—his right hand. The other arm hung at his side and she got the impression he’d been injured. He disappeared. Somewhere in the living room.

Brynn tensed, gripped the pistol in a shooting pose. She stared at the reflection at the front of the house.

Go for the shot, she told herself. Your only advantage is surprise. Use it. He’s in the living room. It’s only twenty feet. Step into the doorway. Fire a burst of three, then back to cover. You can take him.

Do it.

Now.

Brynn swallowed and stepped away from the wall, turning toward the living room. She gasped as the voice from behind her, in the dining room, shouted, “Listen, lady, you do what we’re saying!” A skinny man in a combat jacket, with short, light hair, a tat on his neck and eyes mean, had come through the French doors. He was lifting a shotgun to his shoulder.

Brynn, spinning to face him.

They fired simultaneously. Her slug came closer than his buckshot—he ducked and she didn’t—puncturing a stuffed dining room chair inches from him as the pellets from his shotgun crunched into the ceiling above her. The light fixture rained down.

He crawled out the French door. “Hart! A gun! She’s got a gun.”

She wasn’t sure these were his exact words, though. The shots were thunderclap loud and had numbed her ears.

Brynn glanced into the living room. No sign of Hart. She started toward the back kitchen door. Then paused. She couldn’t just leave if the Feldmans’ friend was still here.

“I’m a sheriff’s deputy,” she shouted. “Hello! Is someone in the house? Are you upstairs?”

Silence.

Brynn desperately scanned the windows, shivered, sure somebody was aiming at her even as she crouched in the shadows. “Hello?”

Nothing.

“Is anybody here?”

The longest twenty seconds of her life.

Leave, she told herself. Get help. You can’t do anything for anybody if you’re dead.

She raced out the back door, gasping in fear and from the effort. Her keys in her left hand, she made her way to the front yard. She saw no one.

The sun was down altogether and the darkness was growing fast. But there was still just enough light in the sky, barely, to make out one of the intruders running toward some bushes. His back was to her. It was the wounded man, Hart. She drew a target but he vanished in a thicket of bearberry and rhododendron.

Brynn scanned the front yard. The other man, with the shotgun and the narrow face, wasn’t visible. She sprinted for her car. When she heard the rustle of bushes from behind her, she dropped instantly. The shotgun fired. Pellets hissed around her and clattered off the Ford. Brynn fired twice into the bush, breaking the number one rule about never shooting except at a clear target. She saw the slight man disappear behind the house, running in a crouch.

Then she stood and opened her car door. Rather than jump in, though, she remained standing, a clear target, pointing the black Glock at the bushes where Hart had fled. Struggling to steady her breathing. And her shooting grip.

Come on, come on…I can only wait a second or two—

Then Hart rose fast from the bushes. He was close enough for her to see him blink in surprise that she was waiting for him. Brynn too was surprised; she hadn’t been expecting him so far to the right, and by the time she’d corrected and fired three shots he’d dived to cover. She believed she might’ve hit him.

But now it was time to escape.

Jumping into the car, concentrating on getting the key in the ignition, not looking around. The engine roared and she slammed the shifter into reverse, flooring the limp accelerator. The car skittered backward along the gravel, whipsawing—now rear-wheel drive. She glanced behind her to see the men converging in the driveway, running flat-out after her. Answering one of her questions: she’d missed Hart, after all.

The skinny man stopped and fired the shotgun. The pellets missed.

“Our Loving Savior, look over us,” she whispered, an invocation they said as grace every night and that she’d never meant more than now.

Brynn had taken the State Police’s pursuit and evasive driving course several times. She’d used the techniques often in the high-speed chases when after a speeder or a getaway car. This, though, was the opposite: evading an attacker, something she’d never imagined would happen. Yet her hours of practice came back to her: left hand on the wheel, right arm around the passenger seat, gripping the pistol. Two long football fields…She came to the end of the driveway and debated turning around to drive in forward or just stay in reverse and back down Lake View toward the county road. To pause even for five seconds to turn around could be disastrous.

The men continued to sprint.

Brynn decided: Stay in reverse and keep going. Put some distance between them.

As she approached Lake View Drive she realized it was the right decision. They were closer than she’d thought. She never heard the shotgun fire again but pellets snapped into the windshield, starring it. She took the turn onto the private road and accelerated as fast as she dared, staring out of the dirty rear window and struggling to keep the car under control. It whipped back and forth and threatened to slam into the rocks or trees to the right or tumble down the embankment to the lake on the opposite side of the road.

But she managed to keep control.

Brynn eased off the gas a little but kept the speed at thirty. The transmission was roaring in protest. She doubted she could make it to the county road before the gears tore apart. She’d have to turn around soon. The private road was too narrow to do so but she could use the driveway at Number 2. It wasn’t close—three, four hundred yards of the serpentine private road—but she had no choice.

Her neck stung from twisting to look backward. She glanced down at the cup holder. “Goddamn.” The man who’d checked for keys had taken her cell phone. She realized she still gripped the gun in her right hand, finger around the trigger. Glocks have a very light pull. She set the weapon on the seat.

Brynn looked quickly behind her—out the front windshield. No sign of them. She turned back and steered the car through a curve to the left. The house at 2 Lake View was now about two hundred yards away.

The driveway was growing closer. She let up on the gas a bit; the raging whine of the gears diminished.

She was thinking: Pull in fast, get into drive and—

A solid load of buckshot crashed into the driver’s side of the car, both windows vanishing into hundreds of pieces of ice, pelting her. A sphere of buckshot stabbed through her right cheek and knocked out a molar. She began choking on the tooth and the blood. Tears flowed and she couldn’t see the road any longer.

Wiping her eyes, Brynn managed to hawk up the tooth and spit it out, coughing hard on the blood, which spattered the steering wheel, slippery as oil. She lost her grip and didn’t make a curve. The car, going about thirty-five, dove off the edge and started down the steep rocky hill toward the lake.

She flew out of her seat, her feet nowhere near the brakes, as the Honda rolled backward down the cliff. It dropped about six feet and the trunk slammed onto a shelf of limestone, hood pointed straight up in the air. The gun hit her in the ear.

The car balanced for a moment, with Brynn sprawled across the backs of the two front seats. Then, with the utmost leisure, the Honda continued to topple, belly flopping upside down into the lake. The car filled instantly with dark water as it sank. Brynn, stunned, was snagged beneath the steering wheel.

She screamed as the frigid water embraced her body, swatting her hands in panic. She called out, “Joey, Joey.”

And inhaled a breath that began as air and ended as water.

 

“WELL, WE’RE FUCKED,”

Lewis said. “Oh, man. She was a cop.”

“Don’t panic.”

“The fuck you talking about? She was a cop, Hart. You get your head around that? There could be a dozen of ’em in the woods. We’ve gotta leave, my friend. Leave!”

Breathing hard from the run, the men had slowed and were walking through the dense woodland, toward where they’d seen the car go off the road after Lewis had sent a load of shot into the driver’s side. They moved carefully, looking around like soldiers on patrol. They had no idea if the woman was out of commission from the crash or was in hiding, waiting for them.

And they couldn’t forget about Michelle either, who might’ve been drawn out of hiding by the ruckus.

“She wasn’t in a cruiser. And she wasn’t in a uniform jacket.”

Lewis scrunched his face up skeptically. “I didn’t see what she was wearing underneath. I was a little busy.” Again sarcastic. “And I’m not panicking.”

“I’ll bet she was probably off duty and came up here to check out that nine-one-one. Didn’t get the message it was a false alarm.”

Lewis snickered. “You say she wasn’t on duty, my friend. But she was on enough duty to nearly blow your fucking head off.” He said this as if he’d won an argument.

Your head too, Hart corrected silently. He said, “A lot of cops have to carry their pieces. All the time. Regulation.”

“I know that.” Lewis gazed at the lake. “I heard the bang, you know. Like a crash. But I wasn’t sure if there was a splash.”

“I couldn’t hear it go in the water.” Hart nodded toward the Winchester and tapped his ear. “Loud. I don’t usually use shotguns.”

“You oughta learn ’em, boy. The weapon of choice. Nothing like a scattergun. Scares the shit out of folks.”

Weapon of choice.

Crouching, they continued walking slowly. In this morass of trees and tangled brush Hart grew disoriented. They could see the road but he now had no idea where the car had gone over the side. With every step, it seemed, the vista changed.

Lewis paused, rubbed his neck.

Hart looked him over. “You hit?

“Nope. Right as rain. I dodged in time. I can sense when bullets’re coming. Like in The Matrix. Now, that was a good flick. I have the whole set. You see it?”

Hart had no idea what he was talking about. “No.”

“Jesus. You don’t get out much, do you?”

A crinkle in the bushes nearby.

Lewis swung the shotgun toward the sound.

Something low was in the grass nearby, moving fast. Badger or coyote. Maybe a dog. Lewis aimed for it, clicked the safety off.

“No, no, no…Give ourselves away.”

And you never shoot anything you don’t have to…human or animal. Who the hell was this boy?

Lewis muttered, “We take it out, whatever the fuck it is, it won’t spook us anymore.”

You’re spooked; I’m not. Hart picked up a rock and flung it nearby. The animal, an indistinct shadow, moved off.

But it moved off slowly. As if the men weren’t worth bothering about. Crouching, Hart saw a few paw prints in the mud. Not normally superstitious, he couldn’t help thinking that the prints were a warning sign of sorts. Telling them that they’d strolled casually into a very different universe from what they were used to. This is my world, the creature who’d left the prints was saying. You don’t belong here. You’ll see things that aren’t there and miss things that’re coming up right behind you.

For the first time that night, including the gunshot at the house, Hart felt a trickle of real fear.

“Fucking werewolf,” Lewis said, then looked back to the lakeshore. “So she’s gone. Gotta be. I’m saying, we gotta keep going, get out of here. After that”—he nodded back to the Feldmans’ house—“all bets are off. This thing is very fucked up. We’ll get a car on the county road. Take care of the driver. And we’re back in the city in a couple hours.” He snapped his fingers theatrically.

Hart didn’t respond. He gestured down the road. “I want to see if she went for a swim or not.”

Lewis sighed, exasperated, like a teenager. But he followed Hart. They walked stealthily toward the rocky shore in silence, pausing every so often.

The younger man was looking over the lake. It was completely shaded by dusk shadow now, the water rippling in the breeze like black snake scales. He announced, “That lake, I don’t like it. It’s freaky.”

Talking too loud, walking too loud, Hart thought angrily. He decided he had to get some control of the situation. It’d be a fine line but he had to. He whispered, “You know, Lewis, you shouldn’t’ve said anything back there. About the keys. I could’ve gotten up behind her.”

“So I gave it away, huh? It’s all my fault.”

“I’m saying we’ve gotta be more careful. And when you were in the dining room you started talking to her. You should’ve just shot.”

Lewis’s eyes were good at being defensive and surly at the same time. “I didn’t know she was a cop. How the fuck could I know that? I stood my ground and nearly took lead there, my friend.”

Took lead? Hart thought. Nobody ever said “took lead.”

“I hate this fucking place,” Lewis muttered. He rubbed the bristle on his head, poked the lobe where his earring had been. Frowned, then remembered he’d put it away. “Got a thought, Hart. It’s what, a mile back to the county road?”

“About that.”

“Let’s get the spare on the Ford, the front, and drive her to the county road, drag the bad wheel behind us. You see what I’m saying? It’s front-wheel drive. Won’t be a problem. Get to the county road. Somebody’ll stop to help. I’ll flag ’em down, then they’ll open the window and, bang, that’s it. Fucker won’t know what hit ’im. Take their car. Back home in no time. We’ll go to Jake’s. You ever go there?”

Eyes on the lake, Hart said absently, “Don’t know it.”

Lewis scowled. “And you call yourself a Milwaukee boy. Best bar in town.” Peering along the shore, he said, “I think it was there.” He pointed at a spot about fifty yards to the south.

“Hart, I hit her in the fucking head. And her car’s in the water. She’s dead, either way, from buckshot or drowning.”

Maybe, Hart thought.

But he couldn’t shake the image of her back at the Feldmans’ house, standing in the driveway. She hadn’t scurried away, she hadn’t panicked. She’d just stood tall, brownish hair pulled back off her forehead. The car keys—keys to safety, you could say—in one hand, her weapon in the other. Waiting, waiting. For him to present a target.

None of that meant she wasn’t drowned, trapped in a two-ton automobile, of course, at the bottom of the spooky lake But it did mean she wouldn’t drown without one hell of a fight.

Hart said, “Before we go anywhere let’s just make sure.”

Another scowl.

Hart was patient. “A few minutes won’t hurt. Let’s split up. You take the right side of the road, I’ll do the left. If you see anybody, it’s got to be either one of ’em so just draw a target and shoot.”

He was going to remind Lewis not to say anything, just shoot. But the skinny man was already bunching his mouth up into a little pout.

So Hart just said, “Okay?”

A nod. “I’ll just draw my target and shoot. Yes, sir, captain.” And gave a snide salute.

 

HER CHEEK RESTED

against a rock, slimy with algae. Her body was submerged in breathtakingly cold water, up to the neck.

Teeth clicking, breath staccato, cheek swollen. It seemed to push her eye out of the socket. Tears and sour lake water covering her face.

Brynn McKenzie spat blood and oil and gasoline. She shook her head to get the water out of her ears. Had no effect. She felt deaf. Wondered if a piece of buckshot or glass had pierced her eardrum. Then her left ear popped and tickling water flowed out. She heard the lapping of the lake.

After muscling her way out of the car, nestled in twenty feet of opaque water, she’d tried to swim to the surface but couldn’t—too much weight from her clothes and shoes. So she’d clawed her way to the rocks at the shore and scrabbled upward, desperate hands gripping whatever they could find, feet kicking. She’d hit the surface and sucked in air.

Now, she told herself, get out. Move.

Brynn pulled up hard. But got only a few inches. No part of her body was working the way it should and her wet clothes must’ve boosted her weight by fifty pounds. Her hands slipped on the slime and she went under again. Grabbed another rock. Pulled herself up to the surface.

Her vision blurred and she started to lose her grip on a rock. Then forced her muscles to attention. “I’m not dying here.” She believed she actually growled the words aloud. Brynn finally managed to swing her legs up and found a ledge with her left foot. The right one joined in and finally she eased herself onto the shore. She rolled through debris—metal and glass, and red and clear plastic—into a pile of rotting leaves and branches, surrounded by cattails and tall, rustling grasses. The cold air hurt worse than the water.

They’ll be coming. Of course, those two men’ll be coming after her. They wouldn’t know exactly where the car went in but they could find out easily enough.

You have to move.

Brynn climbed to her knees and tried crawling. Too slow. Move! She stood and immediately fell over. Her legs wouldn’t cooperate. In panic she wondered if she’d broken a bone and couldn’t feel the injury because of the cold. She frisked herself. Nothing seemed shattered. She rose again, steadied herself and staggered in the direction of Lake View Drive.

Her face throbbed. She touched the hole in her cheek, and with her tongue probed the gap where the molar had been. Winced. Spat more blood.

And my jaw. My poor jaw. Thinking of the impact that had cracked it years ago, and later the terrible wire, the liquid meals, the plastic surgery.

Was all that cosmetic work ruined?

Brynn wanted to cry.

The ground here was steep, rocky. Narrow stalks—willow, maple and oak—grew out of the angular ground horizontally but obeying nature turned immediately skyward. Using them as grips, she pulled herself up the hill, toward Lake View Drive. The moon, neatly sliced in half, was casting some light now and she looked behind her for the Glock. But if it had flown from the car before the dive, the weapon, perfectly camouflaged for a dark night, was nowhere to be seen.

She picked up a rock shaped a bit like an ax head. Gazed at the weapon manically.

Then Brynn recalled finding Joey bloody and gasping after eighth-grader Carl Bedermier had challenged him after school. Acting by rote, from her medical training, she’d examined the wounds, pronounced him fine and then said, “Honey, there are times to fight and times to run. Mostly, you run.”

So what the hell are you doing? she now snapped to herself, staring at the chunk of granite in her hand.

Run.

She dropped the rock and continued up the incline to the private road. As she neared the top her foot slipped, dislodging an avalanche of shale and gravel. It fell in a huge clatter. Brynn dropped to her belly, smelling compost and wet rock.

But no one came running. She wondered if the men were deafened themselves from the shooting.

Probably. Guns are much louder than people think.

Move fast while you can still take advantage of it.

Another few feet. Then ten. Twenty. The ground leveled some and she could move faster. Eventually she was at Lake View Drive. She saw no one on it and crossed fast, then rolled into a ditch on the far side, hugging herself and gasping.

No. Don’t stop.

She thought of a high-speed chase last year. Bart Pinchett in his Mustang GT, yellow as yolk.

“Why didn’t you pull over?” she’d muttered, ratcheting the cuffs on. “You knew we’d get you sooner or later.”

He’d lifted a surprised eyebrow. “Well, long as I was moving, I was still a free man.”

Brynn rolled to her knees and stood. She slogged up the hill away from the road and into the trees, plunging into a field of tall yellow and brown grass.

Ahead of her, two or three hundred yards or so, she saw the silhouette of the house at 2 Lake View. As earlier, it was dark. Would the telephone be on? Did they even have a telephone?

Brynn gave a brief prayer that they would. Then she looked around her. No sign of the attackers. She shook her head again, swiveling it from side to side until the second water bead burst.

Which made the sudden sound—footfalls charging through the grass directly toward her—all the more vivid.

Brynn gasped and started to sprint away from Hart or his partner, maybe both, when a forsythia branch caught her foot and she went down hard, breathlessly hard, in a tangle of branches, which were covered with yellow buds bright as you’d see on wallpaper in a baby’s bedroom.

 

THEY WERE DRIVING

back from Rita’s, a mile away. It seemed to Graham that every place in Humboldt was a mile away from every other place.

He’d brought Joey along—didn’t want to leave him alone, because of the skateboard injury, even if he was “fine,” and because he’d ditch homework for video games, instant messaging and MySpace on the computer and texting from his iPhone. The boy wasn’t crazy about picking up his grandmother but he was in pretty good humor as he sat in the backseat and text-messaged a friend—or half the school, to judge from the volume of his keyboarding.

They collected Anna and headed back home. There, Joey charged upstairs, taking the steps several at a time.

“Homework,” Graham called.

“I will.”

The phone rang.

Brynn? he wondered. No. A name he didn’t recognize on caller ID.

“Hello?”

“Hi. This’s Mr. Raditzky, Joey’s central section advisor.”

Middle school was a lot different nowadays, Graham reflected. He’d never had advisors. And “central section” sounded like a communist spy organization.

“Graham Boyd. I’m Brynn’s husband.”

“Sure. How you doing?”

“Good, thanks.”

“Is Ms. McKenzie there?”

“She’s out, I’m afraid. Can I take a message? Or can I help you?”

Graham had always wanted children. He made his living with plants but he had an innate desire to nurture more than that. His first wife had decided against motherhood, suddenly and emphatically—and well into the marriage. Which was a big disappointment to Graham. He believed he had instinctive skills for parenting and his radar was picking up early warning signals from Mr. Raditzky’s tone.

“Well, I want to talk to you about something…. Did you know Joey cut school today? And that he was ’phalting.” Something faintly accusatory in the tone.

“Cut school? No, he was there. I dropped him off myself. Brynn had to be at work early.”

“Well, he did cut, Mr. Boyd.”

Graham fought the urge to deny. “Go on, please.”

“Joey came to central section this morning, gave me a note that he had a doctor’s appointment. And left at ten. It was signed by Ms. McKenzie. But after we heard he hurt himself, I checked in the office. It wasn’t her signature. He forged it.”

Graham now experienced the same unexpected alarm he’d felt last summer while wheeling a plant across a customer’s yard, not realizing he’d rolled it over a yellow jackets nest. Blithe and happy, enjoying the day, unaware that the threat had already been unleashed and dozens of attackers were on their way.

“Oh.” He looked up in the direction of the boy’s bedroom. From it came the muted sounds of a video game.

Homework…

“And what else did you say? ‘Defaulting’?”

“The word is apostrophe P-H, ’phalting. As in ‘asphalt.’ It’s when kids run up behind a truck at a stoplight with their skateboards and hold on. That’s how Joey hurt himself.”

“He wasn’t in your school lot?”

“No, Mr. Boyd. One of our substitutes was on her way home. She saw him on Elden Street.”

“The highway?”

In downtown Humboldt, Elden was a broad commercial strip but once past the town line it returned to its true nature, a truck route between Eau Claire and Green Bay, where the posted limit meant nothing.

“She said the truck was doing probably forty when he fell. He’s only alive because there weren’t any cars close behind him and he veered into a patch of grass. Could’ve been a telephone pole or a building.”

“Jesus.”

“This needs some attention.”

I talked to him….

“It sure does, Mr. Raditzky. I’ll tell Brynn. I know she’ll want to talk to you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Boyd. How’s he doing?”

“Okay. Scraped up a little.”

He’s fine….

“He’s one lucky young man.” Though there was an undercurrent of criticism in the man’s tone. And Graham didn’t blame him.

He was about to say good-bye when something else popped into his head. “Mr. Raditzky.” Graham crafted a credible lie. “We were just talking about something yesterday. Was there any fallout from that scuffle Joey was in?”

A pause. “Well, which one?”

Lord, how many were there? Graham hedged. “I was thinking about the one last fall.”

“Oh, the bad one. In October. The suspension.”

Treading again blithely over a yellow jackets nest…Brynn’d told him there was a pushing match at the school’s Halloween party, nothing serious. Graham recalled Joey had stayed home afterward for a few days—because he hadn’t felt well, Brynn explained. But that was a lie, it seemed. So he’d been suspended.

The teacher said, “Ms. McKenzie told you the parents decided not to sue, didn’t she?”

Lawsuit?…What exactly had Joey done? He said, “Sure. But I was mostly wondering about the other student.”

“Oh, he transferred out. He was a problem, ED.”

“What?”

“Emotionally disturbed. He’d been taunting Joey. But that’s no excuse for nearly breaking his nose.”

“Of course not. I was just curious.”

“You folks dodged a bullet on that one. It could have cost you big.”

More criticism now.

“We were lucky.” Graham felt his gut chill. What else didn’t he know about his family?

A little pushing match. It’s nothing. Joey went to the Halloween party as a Green Bay Packer and this other boy was a Bears’ fan…. Something silly like that. A little rivalry. I’ll keep him out of school for a bit. He’s got the flu anyway.

“Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”

When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.

As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that—speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.

Hell, he’d let Brynn handle it. She’d insist on that anyway.

’Phalting…

Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna’s rocker. She asked, “Was that Brynn?”

“No. The school.”

“Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”

“No problem.”

Returning to her knitting, Anna said, “Glad I went to Rita’s. She doesn’t have long.” A tsk of her tongue. “And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn’t you?”

Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. “Sure did.”

He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.

 

THE FRANTIC YOUNG

woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold.

It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.

“You’re their friend,” Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn’t met the Feldmans’ fate. “From Chicago?”

She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.

“We stay here for the time being,” Brynn said.

Times to fight and times to run…

Times to hide too.

Brynn looked over at the couple’s houseguest. She wore chic clothes, city clothes—expensive jeans and a designer jacket with a beautiful fur collar. The leather was supple as silk. Three gold hoops were in one ear, two in the other, a stud atop both. A sparkling diamond tennis bracelet was on her left wrist and a bejeweled Rolex on her other. She was about as out of place in this muddy forest as she could possibly be.

Scanning the forest around them, Brynn could see no movement other than swaying branches and herds of leaves migrating in the breeze. The wind was pure torment on her soaked skin. “Over there,” she finally said, pointing to cover. The women crawled a dozen feet away—to a cavity beside a fallen chinquapin oak in a snarled area of the forest, fifty yards from Lake View Drive and about a hundred and fifty from the house at number 2. When they’d settled into a nest of forsythia, ragweed and sedge Brynn looked back toward the road and the Feldmans’. No sign of the killers.

As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Brynn’s uniform blouse. “You’re a policewoman.” She turned her gaze to the road. “Are there others?”

“No. I’m alone.”

She took this news without emotion and then looked at Brynn’s cheek. “Your face…I heard gunshots. They shot you too. Like Steve and Emma.” Her voice choked. “Did you call for help?”

Brynn shook her head. “You have a phone?”

“It’s back there. In the house.”

Brynn wrapped her arms around herself. It did nothing to warm her. She looked at the woman’s supple designer jacket. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped. Her nails were long and perfectly sculpted. She could have been on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, illustrating an article on ten ways to stay fit and sexy. The woman dug into her pocket and pulled on tight, stylish gloves whose price Brynn couldn’t even guess at.

Brynn shivered again and was thinking if she didn’t get dry and warm soon, she might pass out. She’d never been this cold.

“That house.” The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. “I was going to call for help. Let’s go there, let’s call the police. We can get warm. I’m so damn cold.”

“Don’t want to yet,” Brynn said. It seemed less painful to speak in abbreviation. “Don’t know where they are. Wait until we know. They could be headed there too.”

The young woman winced.

“You hurt?” Brynn asked.

“My ankle. I fell.”

Brynn had run plenty of trauma calls. She unzipped the woman’s boots—made in Italy, she noticed—and examined the joint through her black knee-highs. It didn’t look badly hurt. A sprain probably; thank God it wasn’t broken. She saw a gold ankle bracelet that probably equaled a half dozen of Brynn’s and Graham’s car payments.

The young woman stared toward the Feldmans’ house. Chewing her lip.

“What’s your name?”

“Michelle.”

“I’m Brynn McKenzie.”

“Brynn?”

A nod. She usually didn’t explain its derivation. “I’m a deputy with the county sheriff’s office.” She explained about the 911 call. “You know who they are, those men?”

“No.”

Brynn whispered, her voice growing more distorted, “Need to figure out what to do. Tell me what happened.”

“I met Emma after work and we picked up Steve and all drove up together. Got here about five, five-thirty. I went upstairs—I was going to take a shower—and I heard these bangs. I thought the stove exploded or something. Or somebody dropped something. I didn’t know. I ran downstairs and saw two men. They didn’t see me. One of them’d put down his gun. It was on the table near the stairs. I just picked it up. They were in the kitchen, standing over the…over the bodies, talking. Just looking down and they had this expression on their faces.” She shut her eyes. Whispered, “I can’t even describe it. They were, like, ‘We shot them. Okay, no big deal. What’s next?’” Her voice cracked. “One of them, he was going through the refrigerator.”

As Brynn scanned the woods the young woman continued, forcing back tears, “I started to walk toward them. I wasn’t even thinking. I was, like, numb. And one of them—one had long hair and one had a crew cut—the one with the long hair started to turn and I guess I just pulled the trigger. It just happened. There was this bang…. I don’t think I hit them.”

“No,” Brynn said. “One of them’s hurt, I think. One you just mentioned. With long hair.”

“Hurt bad?” she asked.

“His arm.”

“I should’ve…I should’ve told them to stop, or put their hands up. I don’t know. They started shooting at me. And I panicked. I just lost it completely. I ran outside. I didn’t have the car keys.” A disgusted look on her face. “I did something so stupid…. I was afraid they’d come after me so I shot out the tires. They would’ve just left if I hadn’t done that. Got in the car and left…. I was so stupid!”

“That’s all right. You did fine. Nobody’d think straight at a time like that. You have the gun still?”

Please, Brynn thought. I want a weapon so badly.

But the woman shook her head. “I used up all the bullets. I threw it into a creek by the house so they couldn’t find it. And I ran.” She squinted. “You’re a deputy. Do you have a gun?”

“I did. But lost it in the lake.”

Suddenly Michelle became animated. Almost giddy. “You know, like, I saw this show one time, it was on A&E or Discovery, and somebody’d been in a car wreck, a bad one, and they lost a lot of blood and they were in the wilderness for days. They should’ve died. But something happened, like the body stopped the bleeding itself. The doctors saved them and…”

Brynn had experienced this mania before, at car wrecks and heart attack scenes, and knew the implicit question was best answered simply and honestly. “I’m sorry. I was there, in the kitchen. I saw them. I’m afraid they’re gone.”

Michelle held on to a fragment of hope for a moment longer. Then let it go. She nodded and lowered her head.

Brynn asked, “You have any idea what they want? Ow!” She flinched. She’d bit her tongue. “Was it robbery?” Eyes lensing with tears.

“I don’t know.”

The shivering grew worse, consuming Brynn. Michelle’s perfect fingernails, she had noticed, were dark from plum-colored polish; Brynn’s, unpolished, were the same shade.

“I understand you and Emma worked together. Are you a lawyer too?”

A shake of her pretty head. “No, I was a paralegal in Milwaukee for a while before I moved to Chicago. That’s how we met. It was just a way to make some money. I’m really an actress.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her cases?”

“Not too much, no.”

“Could be—a case at her law firm. She might’ve found out about a scam or crime of some kind.”

Michelle gasped. “You mean they came up here to kill her on purpose?”

Brynn shrugged.

A snap nearby. Brynn gasped and turned fast. About twenty feet away a badger, elegant in its round, clumsy way, nosed past warily.

Wisconsin, the Badger State.

Brynn asked Michelle, “Will somebody start to wonder if they don’t hear from you?”

“My husband. Except he’s traveling. We said we’d talk in the morning. That’s why I came up here with Steve and Emma. I had the weekend free.”

“Look.” Brynn was pointing toward the Feldman house. Two flashlight beams were scanning the side yard, a quarter mile away. “They’re back there. Hurry. The other house. Let’s go.” Brynn rose to a crouch, both of them staggering forward.

 

SO THE COP

had gone into the water.

Hart and Lewis had found debris and an oil slick.

“Dead, gotta be,” Lewis’d said, looking distastefully at the lake, as if he were expecting monsters to slither out. “I’m outa here. Come on, Hart. Jake’s. I need a fucking beer. First round’s on you, my friend.”

They’d returned to the Feldman house. The fire in the hearth had burned itself out and Hart had shut off all the lights. He’d put into his pocket all the used medical supplies stained with his blood. He didn’t bother with the spent shells that littered the house and front yard; he’d worn gloves when loading the Glocks and had watched to make sure Lewis had too.

Then he sprayed and wiped everything Lewis had come near with his bare hands.

Lewis couldn’t resist a snicker at this.

“Keep that,” an irritated Hart said, pointing to Michelle’s purse.

Lewis slipped it into his combat jacket pocket and took a bottle of vodka from the bar. Chopin. “Shit. This is good stuff.” He uncorked it and took a drink. He lifted the bottle to Hart, who shook his head because he didn’t want any booze just now, though Lewis took it as a criticism about drinking on the job, which was true too. At least he wore gloves when handling the bottle.

“You worry too much, Hart,” Lewis said, laughing. “I know the score, my friend. I know how they operate in places like this. I wouldn’t do that in Milwaukee or St. Paul. But here…these cops’re like Andy in Mayberry. Not CSI. They don’t have all that fancy equipment. I know how to play it and how not to.”

Still, Hart noted that he wiped the lip of the bottle with his shirtsleeve before replacing it.

And he saw in that tiny gesture—so fast you’d miss it easily—a clue. A telling clue about Mr. Compton Lewis. He recognized the careless, aggressive attitude that he’d seen in other men—in his brother, for instance. The source was simple insecurity, which can control you the way a pinch collar controls a dog.

They returned outside. Lewis went to work on the Ford once more, getting the spare on the front, in place of one of those that’d been shot out—so they could drag the other flat on the rear, like he’d suggested.

Hart reflected on how much the disaster at the house was eating at him.

Blindsided…

Looking for clues he should’ve seen but hadn’t. He hated incompetence but hated it most when he was the guilty party. Hart had once canceled a hit in St. Louis, when it turned out that the “park” his victim used to walk home from work—a perfect shooting zone—was a neighborhood playground, filled with dozens of energetic little witnesses. Angrily, he’d realized that the two times he’d surveyed the place in preparation for the kill had been in midmorning, while the kids were still in school.

He now looked around the house and yard. There was a possibility that somewhere he’d left damning trace evidence. But probably Lewis was right; the cops here weren’t out of that famous show CSI—Crime Scene International or whatever it was called. Hart didn’t watch TV, though he knew the idea: all that expensive scientific equipment.

No, something more fundamental was bothering him. He was thinking back to the paw print and the creature who’d left it, its disregard for the men who’d invaded its territory. Any challenges here weren’t about microscopes and computers. They were more primitive.

He felt that tickle of fear again.

Lewis was moving along with the jack and the lug wrench, swapping the wheels on the Ford. He looked at his watch. “We’ll be back to civilization by ten-thirty. Man, I can taste that beer and burger now.”

And returned to the task, working fast with his small but clever fingers.

 

“NO ALARM,” BRYNN

whispered, grimacing.

“What?” Michelle asked, not understanding the mumpy voice.

She repeated slowly, “No. Alarm.” Brynn was looking over the spacious mountain house, 2 Lake View. The owners clearly had money; why no security?

She broke a window in the back door with her elbow, unlatched the lock. The women hurried into the kitchen. Brynn walked immediately to the stove and turned on a burner to warm herself, risking the light. Nothing. The propane was shut off outside. No time to find the valve and turn it on. Please, she thought, just have some dry clothes. It was cold inside but at least they were protected from the wind, and the bones of the house retained a bit of heat from the day’s sun.

She touched her face—not the bullet wound but her jaw. When the weather was cold or she was tired the reconstructed spot throbbed, though she often wondered if the sensation was imaginary.

“We’ve gotta move fast. First, look for a phone or a computer. We could e-mail or instant-message.” Joey was always online. She was sure she could get a message to him but she’d have to phrase it so that he’d get the urgency but not be upset.

There’d be no vehicular escape; they’d already peered into the garage and found it empty. Brynn continued, “And look for weapons. Not much hunting here, with the state park and most of the land posted. But they still might have a gun. Maybe a bow.”

“And arrow?” Michelle asked, her eyes panicked at the thought of shooting one at a human being. “I can’t do that. I wouldn’t know how.”

Brynn had played with one of the weapons at summer camp, once or twice, years ago. But she’d learn to handle it fast if she had to.

She was considering this fantasy when she noted that Michelle had walked away. She heard a click and a rumble.

The sound of a furnace!

Brynn ran into the living room and found the young woman at the thermostat.

“No,” Brynn said, her teeth chattering.

“I’m freezing,” Michelle said. “Why not?”

Brynn shut the unit off.

Michelle protested, “I’m so cold, it hurts.”

Tell me about it, Brynn thought. But she said, “There’ll be smoke. The men could see it.”

“It’s dark out. They won’t see anything.”

“We can’t take the chance.”

The woman shrugged resentfully.

The furnace hadn’t been on for more than a few seconds and from the distance the men wouldn’t’ve been able to see anything.

“We don’t have much time.” Brynn glanced at a clock radio, which glowed blue: 8:21. “They might decide to come here. Let’s look fast. Phone, computer, weapons.”

The darkness outside was now almost complete and the frustration intense: maybe their salvation was two feet away, a phone or gun. But it was impossible to tell. They had to search mostly by touch. Michelle was cautious, moving slowly.

“Faster,” Brynn urged.

“They have black widow spiders up here. I found one in my room when I came to visit Steve and Emma last year.”

The least of our worries.

They continued to search frantically for ten minutes, through drawers, closets, baskets of papers and personal junk. Brynn smiled as she found a Nokia, but it was an old one, no battery and a broken antenna. She dumped out all the contents on the rug and felt for a charger.

Nothing.

“Damn,” Brynn muttered, standing stiffly, her face throbbing. “I’ll check upstairs. Keep on looking down here.”

Michelle nodded uncertainly, not happy about being left alone.

Spiders…

Brynn climbed the stairs. Her search of the second floor revealed no weapons or phones or computers. She didn’t bother with the attic. A glance out the window revealed flashlights in the yard around the Feldman house but the men couldn’t be counted on to stay there much longer.

She longed to turn on a light but didn’t dare and continued feeling her way through the bedrooms, concentrating on the largest. She began ripping open drawers and closet doors and finally found some clothing. She stripped off her jacket and the leathery, wet uniform and dressed in the darkest clothing she could find: two pairs of navy blue sweat pants, two men’s T-shirts and a thick sweatshirt. She pulled on dry socks—her heels were already blistering from the waterlogged footgear—but had to put on her Sheriff’s Department Oxfords again; there were no spare shoes. She found a thick black ski parka and pulled it on, and finally began to feel warmer. She wanted to cry, the sensation was so comforting.

In the bathroom she opened the medicine cabinet and felt her way through the bottles until she found a rectangular one. She sniffed the contents to make sure it was rubbing alcohol, then soaked a wad of toilet paper with it and bathed her wounded cheek. She gasped at the pain and her legs buckled. Swabbed the inside of her mouth too, which hurt ten times more. She dropped her head before she fainted. Inhaled deeply. “Okay,” she whispered as the pain dissolved. Then pocketed the alcohol, ran downstairs.

“Any phones or guns, anything?” Michelle asked.

“No.”

“I looked…but it’s so spooky. I couldn’t go into the basement. I was afraid.”

Brynn herself took a fast look down there. She risked the light but since she’d seen no windows she figured it was safe. She found nothing helpful, though, either for communications or defense in what seemed like an endless series of small rooms and passages. Several small doorways led to what would probably be pretty good hiding places.

As Brynn returned to the kitchen Michelle whispered, “I found those.” She nodded at a block of kitchen knives. Chicago Cutlery. Brynn took one, about eight inches long. She tested the factory-honed blade with her thumb.

The deputy looked back at the Feldmans’, saw the flashlight beams still scanning the yard. She had a thought, gazed around the house. “Didn’t we see a pool table somewhere down here?”

Michelle gestured toward the dining room. “Through there, I think.”

As they walked quickly in that direction Brynn said, “The way I drove up, Six Eighty-two, was from the east. After Clausen, I didn’t see anything but some trailers and a few shacks in the distance. Nothing for miles. If I’d kept going west, would I have come to some stores or a gas station? A place with a phone?”

“I don’t know. I never went that way.”

The women entered the recreation room, a spacious place with a bar, pool table and thousands of books on built-in shelves. Beneath the big-screen TV the cable box showed the time: 8:42.

Brynn was now warm again; curious, she reflected, she had no direct memory of the cold. She recalled how terrible she’d felt but couldn’t summon up the sensation, as intense as it had been.

She studied the room, the sports memorabilia, the liquor bottles, the family pictures, the rack of pool cues, the balls aligned in their triangular nest on the table, then began rummaging through drawers at the bottom of the bookshelves.

No weapons, no phones.

“Let’s see if we can find a map.”

They began to scour the shelves and stacks of papers. Brynn was looking through a bookcase when Michelle gave a cry.

Brynn gasped and spun around.

“Look! Somebody’s coming!”

The women dropped to their knees by the window. Brynn could see, several hundred yards away, headlights moving slowly down Lake View Drive toward the county highway.

“Are there any other houses past the Feldmans’?” Brynn asked. She seemed to recall that there were only three residences here.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a neighbor. Or the police! Maybe a police car came to look for you and we missed them. If we run we can stop them! Let’s go!” Michelle rose and in a frantic, limping rush started for the door.

“Wait,” Brynn said in a harsh whisper.

“But they’ll be gone in a few minutes!” Her voice was angry. “We can’t wait! Don’t be crazy!”

Brynn held up a hand. “Michelle, no. Look.”

The moon was higher now, bright enough for them to make out the car. It was the killers’ Ford.

“Oh, no,” the young woman said through set teeth. “How can they drive it with the flat tires?”

“You shot out two, they put the spare on the front and they’ll let the other one rim. It’s front-wheel drive; they’ll just drag the rear. Look, see the dust.”

“Can they get very far?”

“Miles, yeah, if they don’t go fast.”

The taillights cast a ghostly red aura in the dust kicked up by the dragging wheel. The Ford eased around the snaky road and toward the county highway. The lights were soon obscured by a tangle of jack pine, yew and elegant willow. The car vanished.

Michelle hugged herself. She sighed with relief. “So they’re gone…. It’ll be okay, right? We can just wait here. We can put the heat on now, can’t we? Please.”

“Sure,” Brynn said, staring after the car. “Let’s put the heat on.”

 

LEWIS PILOTED THE

limping Ford along Lake View Drive, past the house at Number 2 and then turned and continued along the winding road toward the county highway.

Hart said, “Was a good shot you made with that scattergun, hitting her car all that distance.”

Lewis offered a dismissive sneer but Hart saw that the words hit home; the punk was pleased. “I wanted to take her out. That’s why I was aiming high. Compensated for the wind too. Didn’t want to hit the tires. I didn’t hit ’em, you see?”