The silence and the waiting stretched out. She tensed, the gun in her hand.
He fired three times more in succession, flooding the space with explosions one after another, raining down metal and snow from over her head. Before she realized he was firing in the air, distracting her, he was already diving across the short distance that separated them. He came from her right side, like a meteor, lightning-fast. His shoulder collided with her left arm, and she felt all her hopes fly away and abandon her as the gun spilled from her hand and skidded away on the floor. He crushed her, all his weight on top of her, embedding glass in her skin. His breath was in her face, and he put her own gun to her head.
"You lose."
She wasn't going to cry. "Fuck you."
She searched the floor with her hand, hoping the gun was still within reach, but she couldn't find it. She almost screamed with frustration, knowing there was a bullet chambered close by that she could drill into this sadist's head, payback for all the humiliation and pain she had suffered at his hands. Ending all the nightmares and memories. But he was right; she had lost.
Reality was too much, and she wished she could find the empty room in her mind in which to crawl for escape. Every sensation pricked away at her sanity. The heaviness and smell of him. The hot circles of pain. The dizziness. The cold, glass, metal, and ice. The blackness, as if it were all happening in midair, disconnected.
Boom, boom, boom.
She heard a deep thumping somewhere in her consciousness, and for a second, she thought it was the panicked beating of her heart, but it kept on like a hammer. This was something real, something unexpected. Blue Dog reared up in shock and spun off her.
Someone was pounding on the door. She could only imagine one person. Jonny. Coming for her.
Blue Dog crept for the door. The floor sagged with his footsteps. She knew he had her gun firmly in his hand. He waited. There was a long pause, and then the pounding continued, as if something heavy were beating on the frame.
She heard a voice. "Billy! Open the door!"
Her heart sank. It wasn't Jonny. The voice was familiar, but it was distant, drowned by the storm. Not a cop. Not rescue. She couldn't see Blue Dog, but she could almost feel him relax and grin. He unlocked the door and pushed it outward, and even the night was brighter than the darkness inside, and a pale triangle spilled through the opening and made him a silhouette. The wind and snow swirled through the shanty.
He started to say something, but he never finished.
Orange flame sparked and disappeared. A shotgun detonated, so loud that the storm was hushed for an instant. The smoke smelled like burnt toast. Serena felt a warm spray across her face, and she realized it wasn't snow this time. It was Blue Dog's blood.
54
Stride cannonaded down a fire road that snaked through the forest toward Hell's Lake. The wheels of his Bronco chewed at the snow. Slender birch trees hugged both sides of the road, and caps of pine trees swayed overhead, making the road like a dark tunnel. He knew he was near the lake, and then the forest opened up, as if he had bolted through the door of a church into the open air. The sky vaulted over him, angry and gray, belching out sheets of snow. His Bronco thumped off the dirt road onto the thick ice of the lake, leaving the shelter of the trees behind him. Fifty-mile-an-hour gales ambushed him and nearly upended the truck. The blizzard was a banshee here, a woman in white stretching to the sky and screaming for the dead.
The fish houses were a ghost town of shadows that appeared and disappeared in his headlights. He had to slow down to avoid piling into them. They were of all shapes and sizes, some barely larger than Dumpsters, others as large as campers, big enough for people to live in and sleep in if they wanted to escape the world entirely. Tonight, they were dark. He made circles around each one and didn't see any cars parked by the houses, because no one wanted to be caught in the tempest if a propane tank went empty or a window blew out in the wind. Stride felt tiny out here, and the world felt huge and violent.
The lake was shaped like an amoeba spread out under the microscope, with rounded fingers of land pushing into the water in wooded peninsulas and a fat, open middle where underground currents left islands of thin ice to swallow up trespassers. It stretched for miles, and from where he was, Stride could only see a fraction of its surface, and in the midst of the storm, he could see even less. He felt as if he were crawling, nudging the Bronco past each snowy hillock where a fish house was hiding.
His phone rang.
"I'm on the lake," he told Maggie. "I came in on the fire road from the southwest."
"I'm coming in from the east," she said. "I'll follow the shore and head your way."
"It's a nightmare out here. Watch out for hot spots."
"You, too. Is the cavalry coming?"
"Yeah, I've got half a dozen cars heading our way."
"Any way to narrow down the search?" Maggie asked.
"Tanjy's body popped up on the south shore, so I'm hoping she went in somewhere around there, too."
"Stay in touch."
Stride threw his phone on the passenger seat. He shot out toward the open stretch of ice, hugging the shore and following the land as it bent around toward the next inlet. The snow blinded him, but when an updraft lifted the curtain for an instant, he saw another scattering of shanties a quarter mile ahead. He steered for them, and in the midst of the blackness, he could make out a yellow diamond of light. Someone was home.
The light shone through the door of an RV, parked like a beached whale off by itself, which the owner could simply drive on and off the ice at will. Stride parked next to the RV and bailed out of his truck with his gun drawn. In an instant, he was a snowman, crusted over with a wet, white layer that clung to his hair, skin, and clothes. He jogged through the powder to the door of the camper and listened, but he couldn't hear anything inside with the wind roaring around him.
He pounded on the door with his fist. "Police!"
A few seconds later, the door slit open a crack, and he pointed his gun at the opening but quickly withdrew it when he saw an old man staring out with surprised, frightened eyes. The man wore a heavy red plaid shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty slippers. His messy gray hair flopped over his forehead. "Who the hell are you?"
"Police, sir!" Stride shouted, because that was the only way to be heard.
"I'm not leaving the lake."
"Can I come in for a minute?"
"How about showing me your badge?"
"This is a blizzard, sir, will you just give me a break!"
"Okay, okay, get inside. You're letting in the snow."
He pulled back the door, and Stride climbed the metal steps. The interior of the RV was littered with food cans, beer, and fishing equipment. A black-and-white television set was perched on a bookshelf, broadcasting a 1950s movie in between zigzagging lines. The air was freezing, and Stride could see his breath.
The old man was barely more than five feet tall. "I'm not coming off the lake," he grumbled. "I don't care about any storm. I've seen worse storms than this."
"I'm not here to kick you out, although you're crazy to be here on a night like this."
"Yeah, so, I'm crazy. What do you want?"
"I'm trying to find a man who may have a fish house on the lake. He's huge, around six foot six, and built like a linebacker. Very long black hair."
The old man nodded. He snorted and cleared his throat as if he were about to hack up a fur ball. "I've seen him. Hard to miss that guy."
Stride was exhilarated. "Where? Where does he keep his shanty?"
"Don't know exactly. It's not in this part of the lake. I've seen that purple van of his heading up around the peninsula to the northeast."