Neither did the tracks in the snow.
The snow had drifted and in places didn’t come up over my shoes and in other places was up to my waist and to Janet’s boobs. Over in the parking lot the snow-heavy cars were strange shapes amidst rolling drifts of white, while the stretch of ground between the lodge and its tool shed was barely a foot deep. And that was where the set of tracks was visible, two pairs of overlapping footprints leading away from the lodge, another set, a single pair of footprints, leading back. The tracks headed toward the shed but stopped about halfway, where someone had apparently fallen; then a smooth path had been made from that point on, as if by a sled, right up to the double doors of the shed.
Janet and I studied the tracks in silence for a while, then exchanged puzzled looks, and I said, “I’m going in there and have a look.”
“What do I do?”
“Wait here.”
“What… what if somebody’s in there?”
“Then somebody besides me may come out.”
“What do I do then?”
“Make a run for it, wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“You’re joking.”
“Yeah. Right. Me and Waddsworth and Harry’ll all have a laugh about it in the showers after the game.”
“Where… where would I run to?”
“I don’t know. Improvise. Down into the woods would be best. You’re just going to have to fend for yourself.”
“You’re a real comfort.”
“I’m going to work hard at not getting killed in there. That’s the best I got to offer you.”
“Jack…”
“What?”
“I’m just scared, that’s all. Shook up, is all. Jack.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go ahead. Go in your goddamn shed, will you?”
I walked toward the shed. The panel truck parked against it was engulfed in a drift and any thought I might’ve had about somebody hiding in the truck was immediately discarded. As I walked I checked my pockets for possible weapons. At one point I’d had wire cutters, but I’d tossed them away, after snipping the phone wires; I’d had a screwdriver, too, which I left in the shed. Terrific. Well, I had my car keys, and I slid each of three keys between my knuckles so that the jagged-edged little pieces of metal extended from the fist that seemed to be the only weapon I had on me.
I kicked the door open. Why fuck around. And I threw myself in, like you’d throw something down off a truck you were helping unload. The snowmobile stopped me. It’s what I knocked into, and bounced off of, rolling over against the wall and by that time I’d seen that Turner wasn’t in there, and neither was anybody else.
I put my car keys away.
Someone had been in here: apparently whoever it was had tried to start the snowmobile, because the tarp was off and lay bubbled over against the far wall.
I bent over the trunk-like tool chest and opened it and dug down, looking for the nine-millimeter. I came up immediately with the silencer, which I had detached and hidden in there separately, and kept digging and came rapidly to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to find it.
The nine-millimeter was gone.
I stood and indulged in a long sigh and went over and checked the other tool chest, the one with the garden tools, where I’d hidden the rotors from the cars, and checked the jar of nails, where I’d put the sparkplugs from the snowmobile and snowplow and everything was where I put it.
Just that one thing missing: the gun.
Like I told Janet, sometimes you have to improvise, so I dug back around in the tool chest and found a small crow bar, which was certainly a better makeshift weapon than my fist and some car keys, and as I was doing that, I noticed a red puddle over by the canvas tarp that had been flung against the wall, by whoever tried to start the snowmobile.
So I went over and lifted the tarp off the floor to see where the red puddle had come from and found the answer.
Richie.
28
Castile met us at the door.
“Where’s your wife?” I said, stepping inside.
“She was tired, “ he said. “Had a headache, wanted to be by herself a while.”
“I told you to stay together.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“I said it.”
“We just searched the lodge, remember? There’s nobody in here but us.”
Janet was huddling behind me. Shivering.
“What’s wrong with her?” Castile said.
“She didn’t like what I just told her,” I said.
“What did you tell her?”
“That I saw Richie in the shed.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Not much. He’s under a tarp with his throat cut. Ear to ear. Like a great big smile.”
“Jesus,” Castile said.
“Take me up to your wife.”
“She’s resting, I said.”
“Take me up there. Now.”
“Okay,” he said, and turned to lead the way. I hit him in the back with the crow bar.
29
A few minutes shy of two hours later, Castile woke up. He was sitting, tied to a straight-back chair, in the sunken living room in front of the fireplace, on the fake fur rug where, not so long ago, his wife and Frankie Waddsworth had humped for the cameras. Even now the massive black camera, a boom mike, the lights on tripods, looked silently on.
“What… Jesus… what’s going…”
He tried to move and couldn’t and looked down at himself and saw the thick rubberized cable I’d used to tie him to the chair and when he saw it, going around his chest perhaps twenty times, and then down around his legs and through the rungs of the chairs, he knew there was no reason to try to budge.
“Good morning,” I said.
“What the fuck are you doing to me?”
“It’s almost dawn.”
“Where’s my wife?”
“You know where you wife is. She’s upstairs with her throat slashed. Where you left her.”
“This is a mistake…”
“Right. Anyway, we’re alone in the place, Castile. I sent Janet away. Of course we’re not exactly alone… there’s Waddsworth over there, and Harry’s upstairs, and Richie’s outside… and then there’s your wife…”
His face became slack. His body too. It was like he was a figure molded in clay that was starting to lose shape. His red hair, once so carefully groomed by his ex-hairdresser wife to disguise that it was thinning, looked wilted now.
“I… I guess there isn’t much point in… pretending I don’t understand what you’re saying…”
“I guess not,” I said.
He could see the nine-millimeter in my gloved hand. I’d found the gun upstairs, in one of the built-in bureaus in one of the unused bedrooms on the fourth floor.
He got a weary smile going. “And now what… you kill me?”
“No.”
“Then, what? Oh. You… you figure to… leave me here, and this Turner will come along and finish his job.”
“Turner’s not going to kill you. He’s going to come in here in a while and take one look at any one of the dead bodies you’ve accumulated and he’s going to get his ass out. First rule of the profession is if anything’s out of whack, if things aren’t going exactly according to plan, then fuck it. Get out. And he will. So you aren’t in any danger from him, if I should decide to just leave you here.”
“You… you’d do that? Just leave me here, and go?”
“I might.”
“What do you want for it… money? I told you before… I can get you money. Eight thousand, we were talking… I could get you that, I could get you more…”
“That’s not what I want from you.”
“Then what… what do you want?”
“I want what happened… and I want it here.” And I tapped the big tape recorder I’d brought over from the table by the wail, where Janet had sat and done the sound on the film.