We rigged a small litter from a couple of shotguns and an extra pair of snowshoes someone had brought along for Cioffi. It was too short to lie on, and sitting astride proved too painful, so Cioffi sat as on a park bench, with both feet dangling off one side. It was a precarious rig, by nature unbalanced, but it was the best we could think of. I walked along one side, holding Cioffi’s hand to keep him from toppling off like a rag doll. Katz was on the other side and McNaughton and one trooper held the point ahead of the stretcher bearers. It was the best we could do to shield Cioffi from any line of fire.
31
Some five minutes into our silent return trip, Cioffi gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “I feel a little silly, holding hands.”
“You’d feel even sillier lying on your back with your legs in the air.”
He let out a small chuckle and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”
He sighed and tilted his face up, letting the snowflakes collect on his eyelids, as we all used to do as children. It was a gentle gesture, and grotesquely out of kilter with the image we had formed of him. But then, he’d done nothing but debunk that image from the moment we had found him.
In itself, that didn’t surprise me. Violent criminals often reflect startlingly peaceful exteriors. But this man had been made part of a larger and bloodier whole over the past month. The road leading to him had been veiled in pain and deceit and littered with the bodies of friends and strangers alike. Had Helen of Troy been revealed as a fat and pimply teenager with an addiction for chocolate eclairs, the irony would have been no greater.
Perhaps it was because of this absurdity-that the pursuit had utterly overshadowed the prize-that I couldn’t suppress a shared wistfulness with this man, made all the more real by the intertwining of our hands. Somehow, sitting there like a child at the park, he had become less the cause of all this mayhem and more its ultimate victim. The toss by him of the very first stone was ending in an avalanche that would sweep the mountain from beneath him.
“Did you kill her?”
He opened his eyes and blinked at me. The question obviously startled him, as if the correct answer might somehow get him off the hook even now. But then he looked around and let out a little sigh. “Is that man really after me? To kill me?”
“You murdered his daughter.”
He nodded dreamily. “I guess I saw it as self-defense,” he said softly.
I noticed McNaughton turn to say something-no doubt some tough cop wisecrack that would make Cioffi clam up-but he didn’t, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned back to watch where he was going.
Cioffi shook his head and smiled gently. “It was such a long time ago.”
I waited for more, the self-cleansing confession, but he lapsed into silence and studied our joined hands, bobbing chest-high before him. I noticed his false beard was beginning to peel away at the temple. I let a few minutes elapse, but nothing happened. Normally, I might have left it at that-a tentative beginning on which later conversation could be based. But the self-defense line was irresistible. Of all the possibilities that occurred to me while I had stared at the photos of Pam Stark’s bound and strangled body, that one had never even flickered.
“How was it self-defense?”
“To keep Teicher in line.” There was a small pop from behind me, as from a champagne cork sprung from far, far away. Simultaneously, a red dot appeared in the middle of Cioffi’s forehead. He raised his free, mittened hand to it in astonishment and silently toppled backward off his stretcher, landing at Katz’s feet.
“Down,” McNaughton shouted. “Everybody down.”
Both stretcher-bearers dropped like stones, grappling for their sidearms. McNaughton let off two booming rounds from his shotgun. Only Katz and I remained standing, staring at each other as if frozen in time. His left arm and leg were splattered with red and there was a small pink lump of something stuck to his cheek. He looked down the length of his body to his boot, where most of Cioffi’s head rested sleepily. The face, aside from the hole, looked normal enough, but from a point behind his ear, the skull’s contour lost its definition. It looked soft, deflated, and it pumped blood onto Katz’s snowy boot with a rapidly decreasing rhythm.
“I said get down, you stupid bastards.”
I looked at McNaughton, spread-eagled and half-buried, and then I glanced over my shoulder. The mesmerizing, shimmering wall of falling white snow was as impenetrable as ever. I took a couple of steps into it and sensed, more than saw, a small white rectangle detach itself from its surroundings. It was a sheet, propped up by two stakes, looking like one half of a dissected pup tent. I looked over its top at the trampled snow behind it.
“He’s gone.”
I heard some swearing behind me as McNaughton and his two troopers regained their footing and composure. I also heard Katz throwing up.
McNaughton shuffled up next to me, his face red with fury.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a blind.”
“I know what the fuck it is. Oh, Jesus. What a fucking mess. How the hell?”
I pointed at two thin parallel tracks in the snow. “Cross-country skis. He used them to follow our footprints and then waited. Chances were pretty good we’d retrace our steps.”
I left him to cur se some more and to radio in the results of our little hike. Katz was kneeling in the snow beyond the body, retching. He’d pulled his foot out of his boot and had left both boot and snowshoe where Cioffi had pinned them. I slipped them from under the head and tried to wipe them off a little with my mittened hand, mostly just smearing them with pink snow. I crouched by Katz’s leg, separated the boot from the snowshoe, and began to put it on him.
He pulled away. “Don’t.”
“Your foot’ll freeze.”
I reached out and straightened his leg, loosened the laces, and put the boot back on. Katz was as submissive as a child.
“What happened?”
“We were ambushed. He stalked us on skis, set up shop behind a white sheet, and blew our friend away with something like a twenty-two, I’d guess.”
“Come on. A twenty-two?”
I finished lacing the boot and stood up. “Explosive shell.” I leaned over him, and flicked the small lump of brain from his cheek. He stared at it and gagged again. Then he rubbed his face with snow.
In the distance, I could hear the low growl of a Sno-Cat engine. McNaughton was standing over Cioffi’s body. “The troops?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Too little, too late.”
“Join the club.”
32
Gail found me fast asleep on a hallway bench outside Kunkle’s hospital room. I dreamed of her before I saw her, interspersing her face with dim snow-shrouded images of shouting policemen, Eskimos with crossbows, and peaceful half-heads haloed in pink blood.
She brought me back with a few gentle strokes across my forehead. “You want to go to bed?” She smiled.
“Aren’t we in bed?” I blinked hard several times and rubbed my eyes. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees, and looked at the floor. It was speckled linoleum, with bright stripes running down the middle.
Gail rubbed my back; the sensation was muted by my coat.
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight. How’s Kunkle?”
“Depressed-that’s normal for him. I’ll give him good cause this time, though. Doctor says he might lose the arm. He’ll sure as hell never play basketball again.”
“What happened out there, anyway?”
I rubbed my eyes again. “The roof fell in. It all came apart. Pretty fitting end to this whole stupid mess.”
She stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Come on home.”
It had stopped snowing sometime that afternoon, the storm dissipating with the suddenness of its arrival. The sun had glared from low on the horizon on a snow-thickened landscape of gentle curves and dips. The Sno-Cats had crawled in various directions across this smooth and sparkling world, inanely following Stark’s dim ski tracks, carrying Cioffi and the dead trooper back to the highway or just wandering back and forth across Mount Washington’s broad foot, their growls rendered tinny and ineffectual by the unimpressed white mountains staring down at them.