“How about we finish those decoys tomorrow. By a fire. I’ll make you chili, over,” Karen says on the walkie. Because the truth is, Karen and George have played at being best friends for the past year. She doesn’t like to duck hunt, that’s not her thing. But she does like to paint decoys with George in his heated greenhouse painting room, while they listen to crime podcasts and audiobooks. And she makes him chili. George always tells Karen how he likes her sun-washed blonde hair under her hot pink hat, and how he truly loves her chili. Yes, the feeling is a mutual one, George is sure.
“I never say no to your chili, Karen. I’m heading up with the new guy, Reeker, over,” George says, but only half in the conversation, for he’s staring back at Reeker. Something is off. The man hasn’t blinked.
“Tell him to turn his walkie on, over,” Karen Safety Captain says.
Reeker doesn’t look down at his walkie as he turns it on. He stares on at George, nimble like a master surgeon with the switch on the walkie.
“It’s on, over,” George says.
“He number four? Over.” Karen asks.
On the back of Reeker’s walkie is a round #4 sticker.
“Yes, ma’am, over,” George says.
“Good check, I got him. And you’re eight-ball as normal? Over?”
“Yes, ma’am, number 8, over.”
“Alright then, good check. Take him up. You have cold side, as usual. Don’t let your Cat tumble on the steeps. River’s a rager in this storm, over.”
“Copy. You in your perch? Over.”
“Snug as a bug, and my dashboard is lit like a Christmas tree. All set, over.”
“Alrighty then, we’re heading up. Out.”
“Out.”
After driving George’s regular Cat out of the barn, past other Cats and several snowmobiles, all with thick, deep treads, George and Reeker sit side by side. Reeker had given a few, rather sparse, answers to George up to now about where he came from and who he was. All George knows is Reeker had come in from another mountain out west and he was living in an apartment in Bloom, Vermont. That is all.
The roar of the Cat engine, the corkscrew-howling wind, and the crush of Cat treads on snow, causes a clatter of vibration through the cab. Reeker sits straight as a pin, silent, and staring out the window, never blinking despite the wild thrust, back and forth, of the scrapers and the thudding of heavy falling snow on the windshield that makes most men blink.
They’re halfway up Front Face when Reeker swivels in his seat to face George. He says nothing. Waiting two beats, fearful to acknowledge a man staring at him in such close quarters, for he fears doing so will make it true, George finally braves a slow look at Reeker.
Reeker’s black eyes stare back, and in this moment, all doubt leaves George. This is the same man who he’d seen naked and bathing in a stream in the spring. And this is the same killer the news had warned about in a victim’s sketch.
Reeker tunnels cold eyes, black eyes, dead eyes, no emotions into George. Says nothing.
Nobody at Malforson’s will believe this tale, if George lives to tell it. But son of a demon from hell, I’m looking into the dead soul of the Spine Ripper.
Then, as George is about to slam on the brakes and punch him square in the jaw, or do something, Reeker spins to his own door, opens it, looks over his shoulder, and yells, “Forgot my thermos,” before jumping out of the moving snowcat.
George slams on the brakes, jams the locks on both doors, and searches the rearview mirror through the back glass, which also has wild scrapers scraping, to see nothing. No Reeker. Nobody. Nothing.
George can’t safely turn the snowcat around at this angle on this part of Front Face. He has to continue straight up to Malforson’s lift landing and turn around. Malforson being a long-ago village founder, hence the bar name, hence the landing.
George’s nerves are on fire, electrified. Prickles, like a million pins, poke up from his core and out his skin, everywhere all over his body. Like when the paramedics gave him blockers to fend off possible tachycardia on the day Martha died in his arms.
He looks to the passenger seat and sees that Reeker has left his walkie, the #4 sticker facing up to the ceiling.
George depresses the talk button on his own #8, “George to Karen, George to Karen.”
He gets static in return. He tries several more times in his drive to the top.
At the top, the Malforson lift floodlights allow for visibility, although blurred through driving snow, around the entire landing area, where George starts to turn the Cat. The light bleeds into the snow-drenched evergreens some several dozen feet to the side and backside, which is the cold side of the mountain.
A seam between Front Face and cold side rivers down the side of the mountain, and mid-way down, after and between numerous evergreens, ski glades, and snowmobile trails, sits Karen’s Safety Headquarters, a log cabin that the staff calls “The Perch.” Down below Karen’s Perch, and still within the seam, are three staff cabins. One of which should be emptied by now by fired not-Kyle. And down below and behind those and where nobody goes at night, is the roughest part of a rumbling river that snakes around the backside base of Richard’s Mountain and through the village and along the highway, the highway stretch being where George had first seen the naked Reeker. He knows it was Reeker.
As George turns the Cat and marries his headlights with the floodlights of the lift landing, he sees running through the trees, down the seam, and toward Karen’s Perch — a man with a robot cardboard box on his head.
George blinks slow. He’s still there.
George doesn’t wait to consider doubts about all of his wildest tales colliding tonight. He doesn’t care if he is insane and imagining his robot foe. He needs to face all of this lunacy. He stops the Cat, jumps out, and runs headlong for the robot man. It is not Reeker. The man ahead has the frame of a skeleton with skin. This man wears the same jeans and boots as fake-Kyle in the bar. George remembers logging Kyle’s mid-calf Timberland’s when he removed his snow-cleats in Malforson’s mudroom.
“Kyle, it was you! You killed Martha!” George yells. “Stop!”
Robot Man stops, turns, and pauses as George stops short. Facing George, he opens his coat, withdraws the Dickinson, and flings it flat, like a skipping stone, to sink deep in snow between two birches.
Next, he pulls George’s hunting knife from his back pocket.
“I guess it’s mano a mano now, rude boy,” Robot Man says.
In the cold, the smell of George’s breakfast sandwich, still hot given the aluminum wrapper, wafts. It blooms around him.
“Take off that fucking box,” George yells. His rage will not allow him to assess the danger of a man with an extended knife. He feels his rage and his need to remedy Martha’s murder makes him a triple lumberjack and must-be Kyle a toothpick.
Robot Man removes the robot box, throws it to the side.
“Remember me now, rude boy? Ten years ago?”
It is indeed Kyle, but George does not remember him from ten years ago.
“You’re a fucking psychopath. I have no idea who you are.”
“Of course you wouldn’t, rude boy. Of course some big man like you wouldn’t see an insignificant ant like me and would stomp on my foot and walk away. No apologies.”
“That day in the Strand? I accidentally stepped on you? This is why? That’s why you murdered her?” George’s voice is hysterical now, he can barely contain himself from launching at Kyle, hell with his own hunting knife in Kyle’s hands.
“You know, rude boy, that’s the thing with big men like you. You never think you need to care about the people you push out of your way. You never think that maybe, maybe us insignificant ants are mightier than you. Never think we’re a threat. Well I’m a fucking threat, rude boy. I’ll snake away from you, and I’ll kill Karen before you catch up. I’ll take all your life away, make you as insignificant as an ant. I was on my way for you, yeah, when I got popped 9 years ago. I’ve grown madder at you every single fucking day I sat in that cell box. I got your plate number. I knew who you were.”