“We’ll split up here,” Roy said. “You ride east, I’ll ride west. Whoever it is can’t follow both of us. Whichever one of us gets away comes back later for the pelts and takes them to Minto. If it’s me, I’ll get your share of the sale money to your mother. If it’s you, see that my share gets to the Martinson Institute in Anchorage in the name of Danny Sand. Deal?”
“Deal,” Tootega said.
They locked eyes for a fleeting moment, then both said, “Chimo!” and passed their left hands over their hearts.
At a gallop, they rode off in different directions.
Smart, Joe Kell thought as he observed the two mounted men separate and ride off.
The snow was falling more rapidly now, visibility diminishing by the minute — but not fast enough, Kell knew, to conceal horse tracks if someone was no more than half a mile or so behind. He would be able to follow those tracks easily enough.
But which set of tracks? he wondered.
Then he remembered his cell-phone conversation with Ben Axton. Roy Sand had left Kobuk with an Inuit partner. Raising the binoculars to his eyes, Kell moved them back and forth to study the two riders. The one heading east was reining his horse with one hand, trailing the other arm to his side and back, like most Inuits learned to ride. The rider heading west was hunched forward in the saddle with both elbows tucked to his sides and both hands on the reins, like most white cowboys.
Smiling tightly, Kell gently steered the Cat toward the rider heading west.
Looking up at the snow-filled sky, he judged that there was maybe ninety minutes of daylight left. With luck he would catch up with Roy Sand within an hour.
It took him just under an hour.
Roy was sitting on the side of a banked snowdrift when Kell came to a stop twenty feet away, the Cat beginning to sputter as its fuel cylinder ran dry. Roy’s horse was lying nearby, whinnying in pain, an edge of bone showing just behind the right rear fetlock. Kell stepped out of the snowmobile, rifle in hand, and moved cautiously toward the man and the horse. Roy held both hands up.
“I don’t have no gun. Horse slipped on an icy rock.”
Kell stepped over to the agonized animal and shot it once, cleanly, in the head. The shot seemed to echo forever. Then there was only silence, not even a wind sound, and the snow continued falling heavily.
“You the law?” Roy asked when Kell turned back to him.
“Close enough to it,” Kell replied. He jerked his head toward the Cat. Roy rose and walked to it, Kell just behind him with the rifle. Kell pulled a haversack out of the rear seat and set it on the ground. “Get a fuel cylinder out of there,” he said.
Kneeling, Roy opened the haversack, examined its contents, then looked dumbfoundedly up at Kell. Frowning, Kell checked inside the haversack himself. It contained a quart thermos, some disposable hand warmers, and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels. No fuel cylinders.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Kell muttered. Flipping open his cell phone, he tried half a dozen times to get a signal, all without success.
The two men looked at each other, then around at the rapidly drifting snow. It wasn’t necessary to speak; there was nothing to say. This was blizzard snow, pure and simple. Kell put the rifle in the front seat of the Cat and they both sat down in the snow and leaned back against it. Kell took the bottle out of the haversack and opened it. He wondered what Doris would think if she knew he had bought a bottle five days ago and not even opened it.
Opening it now, he took a long swallow, then passed the bottle to Roy.
“Know where we went wrong, you and me?” he asked rhetorically. “We should have gone into the goddamned insurance business.”
Roy stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever you say, mister.” He raised the bottle to his lips.
After a while, the snow was falling so heavily that the two men could not even see their own feet.
Copyright © 2009 by Clark Howard
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
With due respect to the New York majors, the publishers whose offerings I anticipate most eagerly are located in Norfolk, Virginia (Crippen & Landru), Lyons, Colorado (Rue Morgue), Vancleave, Mississippi (Ramble House), and Eureka, California (Stark House). Latest from the latter is a threesome by paperback master Harry Whittington, To Find Cora/Like Mink for Murder/Body and Passion ($17.95), novels obscurely published in 1963, 1957, and 1952, respectively. The middle title, published in France as T’asdes Visions! and revised for the American sleaze market as Passion Hangover (Corinth, 1965; as by J.X. Williams), was molded into its current desleazed state by editor David Laurence Wilson. Noir elements are familiar (ex-con trying to go straight, naive nice girl and avaricious femme fatale, pressure to do one final job), but emotionally heightened narrative, quick pace, and surprising twists demonstrate how good even lesser Whittington could be. Wilson’s account of tracking down Whittington’s pseudonymous work is an enthralling nonfictional detective story.
**** Ed Gorman: The Midnight Room, Leisure, $7.99. In a small Midwestern city, widely admired Dr. Peter Olson loses more than his money in a home-invasion burglary: two DVDs reveal Olson’s secret life as rapist and killer of young women. Police seeking a third missing girl include detectives Michael Scanlon, his dissolute brother Steve, and Kim Pierce, who is currently dating the charming Dr. Olson. The novel is expertly written, rich in pointed social commentary, and brilliantly plotted — you’ll do well to guess any of the twists, including some visceral shocks. But as usual with Gorman, the key element is the deeply realized and painfully real characters, including an especially memorable villain — and not the one you think.
**** Hallie Ephron: Never Tell a Lie, Morrow, $24.99. Pregnant Ivy Rose’s happy life in suburban Massachusetts is threatened when another expectant mother, an acquaintance from high school days, turns up at her yard sale, is taken inside by Ivy’s husband David for a tour of the house, and disappears. Ephron’s first solo mystery, with the intricate structure of a Mary Higgins Clark novel and a more flavorful style, is a suspenseful and well-wrought example of the am-I-married-to-a-murderer subgenre that dates back at least as far as Francis Iles’s 1932 classic Before the Fact.
*** Dean Koontz: Relentless, Bantam, $27. Bestselling novelist Cullen Greenwich, menaced (not just in print) by an evil book critic, goes on the run with plucky wife, genius six-year-old son, and mysteriously gifted dog. Is this suspense, horror, satire, conspiracy thriller, science fiction, fantasy, spiritual allegory? Try all of the above. Over every top and off every wall, combining the sunniest of humor with the darkest and bloodiest of events, Koontz is sui gen-eris: no one else could have written this.
*** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop, Obsidian, $22.95. Obsessive compulsive Adrian Monk, laid off from his consultancy job with the San Francisco police, joins a P.I. firm. As in the TV series created by Andy Breckman, sharp character comedy combines with ingenious and fairly clued puzzle-spinning. The main problem concerns the arrest of Captain Stottlemeyer for murder; two of the secondary mysteries (“Mr. Monk and the Old Lesson” and “Mr. Monk and the Godfather”) could stand alone as short stories. Don’t miss Lt. Disher’s hilariously nonsensical variation on Sherlock Holmes’s “eliminate the impossible” dictum.
*** Anthony Boucher and Denis Green: The Casebook of Gregory Hood, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $20 trade paperback. The Holmes radio scripters also wrote its 1946 summer replacement, introducing San Francisco importer and gentleman sleuth Hood. Fourteen lively scripts, rich in detail of the period and locale and often including allusions to real-life Bay Area personalities, feature Boucher’s fair-play puzzle plotting. Joe R. Christopher’s introduction, notes, and episode checklist are models of thorough scholarship.