“What for?” Dross asked warily.
“One thing we can do is keep surveillance on the place. If Frogg is staying there, he’ll show up sooner or later.”
“That’s what you’re planning? Just to stake out the place?”
“That’s what I’m planning,” Cork said.
Azevedo glanced at Dross, who considered a moment, then slid a piece of paper and a pencil toward him across her desk. The deputy wrote down the directions and handed them to Cork.
“Long night ahead,” Dross said.
Cork stood up. “Maybe not so long as you think.”
* * *
Eustis Hancock’s place was a run-down mobile home that sat back in the woods a mile west of Babbitt. Cork parked his Land Rover at the side of the road a hundred yards from the entrance to the lane that ran to the house and hoofed it in from there. He had with him a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, which he’d presented to Anne on her sixteenth birthday when she was deep into softball and hoping like crazy to play for Notre Dame someday. He’d have preferred a firearm, but he didn’t own a firearm anymore, had given them up when he realized how profoundly braided with violence his life had become. Yet here he was again, only too ready to do violence. He decided not to think about that now.
The snow was coming down steadily. In that cold, it was dry and light as ash and, once on the ground, drifted easily in the push of the wind. Like something alive, it flowed around Cork’s boots as he stood near a corrugated metal shed twenty yards from the mobile home. A black Blazer was parked in the front of the shed, and near it lay an assortment of rusted auto parts-fenders, hoods, doors. There were a couple of ATVs. Cork was surprised not to see a snowmobile but thought maybe it was in the shed. He checked his watch. Eight-ten. As good a time as any.
He climbed the steps to the door of the mobile home. He held the ball bat at his side and a little behind him, so that it would be blocked from the view of the opened doorway and also from the window nearest the door. He knocked. A moment later, the curtain over the window was drawn aside, and then the door lock clicked open.
The man who filled the doorway was a gorilla. A very unhappy gorilla, judging from his greeting.
“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?”
Cork didn’t bother answering. He brought the ball bat up, grasped it with both hands, and drove the end of it as hard as he could into the man’s solar plexus. The big gorilla heaved a deep, retching cough and doubled over. Cork clipped the side of his head with the bat, and the man went down. Cork stepped around him into the home, grabbed him by the collar of his flannel shirt, and pulled him inside, away from the door, which he closed. Hancock lay on the floor struggling to breathe. Cork pulled a roll of silver duct tape from the pocket of his parka, rolled Hancock facedown, and taped his hands behind his back. Then he straddled him, slid the shaft of the ball bat under Hancock’s neck, and drew it up against his throat until the man’s legs kicked desperately.
“Where’s Walter Frogg?” Cork said.
The man tried to speak, but it was all gargle.
Cork eased the pressure from the bat. “Where’s Frogg?”
“Don’t know,” the gorilla rasped.
Cork pulled the bat tight again, and the man’s body jerked spasmodically. Cork released the pressure just a little.
“Still don’t know?”
“Not here,” Hancock managed.
“But you know where.”
“Not sure. He was staying here for a while. Three, four days ago, he borrowed my Polaris. Hasn’t come back.”
“Where would he go?”
“Don’t know.”
Cork gave the ball bat a tug.
“Maybe my cabin,” Hancock gasped.
“Where’s that?”
“Tamarack County. On the White Iron River.”
“Be more specific.”
“Becker Road. Where the North Star Trail crosses.”
Cork knew the area. A few miles west of Aurora. “What’s it for, the cabin?”
“Hunting, fishing. Was my old man’s. Now it’s mine.”
“Frogg knows about it?”
“Yeah. We used to hang out there, get high, you know. Still use it sometimes, but not much.”
“What’s the fire number?”
Every rural address in Tamarack County had a designated fire number that was posted on a sign at the entrance to the property and that would allow easy identification in the event of an emergency.
Hancock gave him the number.
Cork said, “You have a cell phone?”
“What?”
“A cell phone.” Cork drew the bat against his throat.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s in my pocket. Right side.”
Cork dug in the pocket of the man’s jeans and came up with the phone and a set of car keys. He stood, dropped the phone on the floor, and brought the heel of his boot down on it.
“Ah, shit, man,” Hancock said.
“I’m taking the keys to your Blazer. I assume that’s your Blazer out front.”
“Yeah, that’s my Blazer,” Hancock said, in a way that told Cork he was resigned to his fate.
“Where’s the other key?”
“What?”
“Everybody keeps an extra key. Where’s yours?”
When Hancock didn’t answer immediately, Cork tapped the back of his head lightly with the end of the bat.
“On a nail in the wall next to the refrigerator.”
Cork found it. He returned to the living room and said, “I’ll mail these to you tomorrow. You need something in the meantime, a walk to town’ll do you good.” With the toe of his boot, he nudged the fat around the man’s middle.
“What about the tape on my wrists?” Hancock said.
“Once I’m gone, you’ll figure a way to cut yourself free.”
“Who are you?” Hancock asked as Cork turned to leave.
“The guy who won’t be so nice the next time.”
CHAPTER 43
By the time the Land Rover was crawling along Becker Road back in Tamarack County, three inches of new snow had accumulated on the ground and more was falling heavily. There were no tire tracks to follow, and pushing through the storm in the dark, Cork had nothing except the mounds of old plowed snow at the edge of the road to guide him. He leaned forward, his attention focused intensely at the periphery of his headlights so that he wouldn’t miss the mounted black rectangle with the fire number for Eustis Hancock’s cabin. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. The only sign next to a recently plowed access bore the number Cork had been searching for.
The lane led off to the right, into a heavy stand of mixed evergreen. Cork knew the general area pretty well, and knew that the stand of timber was backed up against the White Iron River, not more than a hundred yards distant. He couldn’t see any lights among the trees, but that could have been simply because of the heavy curtaining of the snowfall. There were no recent tire tracks, so Frogg was either still inside, or gone and had not yet returned. Cork couldn’t take the chance that Frogg might come back and spot the tracks of the Land Rover, so he drove another quarter mile, until he came to a place where a section of the North Star, a snowmobile trail, crossed the road. He pulled the Land Rover onto the trail and into the cover of the trees. He took his Maglite from the glove box, got out, locked the doors, and started back toward Hancock’s cabin.
He kept to the side of the road, hoping his boot tracks wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone traveling in the storm. When he came to the access to Hancock’s place, he leaped the mound of plowed snow at the side of the road and began to wade through the drifts to keep from leaving any sign of his presence on the access lane.
He came to a small clearing and knew the cabin had to be near. He still saw no lights, but he killed the beam of the Maglite and went forward slowly, blindly. In the dark, he almost ran headlong into the structure. He walked around it carefully, came to the front, risked the light, found a beaten trail to the door, which he followed with the beam away from the cabin twenty yards until the light illuminated the green pickup with the mounted plow blade in front and a snowmobile trailer on the hitch in back.