“I’m sitting there yesterday, watching Judge Judy. Next thing I know, that fakakta Kiddiot comes running inside with this big black snake hanging out of his mouth. He crawls under the divan and they’re flopping around under there, the two of them, like it’s the World Wrestling Federation. So I go to the kitchen to get the broom, to get him out of there. By the time I come back, he’s eating the snake.”
The fact that Kiddiot could catch anything, given his weight and lack of smarts, was surprising. But actually eating a snake? Now, that is truly stunning. The cat wouldn’t eat anything.
Mrs. Schmulowitz reminded me that the Denver Broncos, my favorite team, were playing on Monday night. She’d be making her usual brisket, whether I was there or not.
“No pressure,” she said. “Plus I’m thinking about baking a pie.”
“I don’t recall you ever baking anything, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Last time I even thought about baking was forty-five years ago. Funny story: my dishwasher breaks, so I call a plumber. What a hunk this guy is! Tightens this, loosens that. Tells me no charge. ‘No charge?’ I tell him. ‘I gotta pay you something.’ So he tells me I can either bake him a cake or have sex with him. My third husband, may he rest in peace, comes home after work that night. I tell him what the plumber said. He’s horrified. ‘So what kind of cake did you bake him?’ he wants to know. I tell him, ‘What do I look like? Betty Crocker?’ ”
I knew my landlady was only trying to cheer me up. I appreciated her effort. But the last thing I felt like doing was laughing.
“Was he upset?”
“Was who upset?”
“Your third husband.”
“Was he upset? What’re you, kidding me? The man didn’t talk to me for six months. But what’re you gonna do? You can’t go back, right?”
Special operators are taught to backtrack when they’re in pursuit of a target and they’ve lost contact. In the haste of the hunt, little things often get missed along the trail. A broken tree branch. An overturned stone. Small clues.
You can’t go back.
I realized I had to. I needed to double back, up to the mountains, to the crash site where my life had taken a turn toward hell.
“Thank you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“For what, bubby?”
“Being my compass.”
The rutted logging road upon which I’d driven in with Deputy Woo to rendezvous with the sheriff’s rescue team was now snow-packed and all but impassable. I drove as far as I could, fishtailing and grinding gears, traversing drifts, before getting stuck seemed likely.
I got out and walked, passing the same small, moss-roofed cabin I’d noticed that morning. The beat-up pickup that I remembered being parked out front was gone.
Forty-five exhausting, sweat-drenched minutes later, my unwaterproofed hiking shoes and feet cold and wet, I reached the trailhead. Without snowshoes, I knew that the climb up and back would easily take all day. The leg I’d scraped up after falling on my first ascent to the crash site was throbbing. I didn’t care. I was trained to adapt and overcome, “see the hill, take the hill,” no matter the odds.
Up the trail I climbed.
No one ever said being mission-oriented was synonymous with being smart.
I made it about two miles, fighting my way through snow that was at times waist-high.
Then I fell into the stream.
Anyone could’ve made the same mistake — losing their footing on slippery rocks and tumbling into icy, chest-high currents. That I did was more annoying initially to me than it was alarming. I slapped the water, angry at myself, waded to shore, and pulled myself out, drenched head to toe. Almost immediately, I began to shiver.
Shivering is the human body’s first automatic defense against the cold. Shivering causes muscle contractions, which create heat to maintain homeostasis, or a constant internal temperature. I remembered a lesson I’d learned in escape and evasion training my first year at the academy: in water approaching fifty degrees, death can occur within the first hour of immersion. The water I’d fallen into was substantially colder than that.
My teeth were chattering uncontrollably. In another few minutes, I would begin to lose muscle coordination and have difficulty thinking straight. Drowsy disorientation would set in. I would sit down along the trail and, as they say, that would be that.
My truck, I knew, was too far away, and I couldn’t very well call for help; even if there’d been adequate reception, I’d forgotten to take my phone with me, leaving it on the passenger seat when I’d started out on foot, up the trail. I needed to find someplace where I could strip down and warm up — and I needed to do it fast. There was really only one hope: the cabin I’d passed earlier.
By the time I got there, I was stumbling, willing myself forward one numb foot at a time, fighting with every waning ounce of willpower the urge to stop and rest.
I staggered onto the cabin’s small, rough-hewn front porch and pounded my fist on the wooden door.
“Hello? Anybody here? Hello?”
No answer. A window with four small panes flanked the door. I turned away from it, shattering the lowest pane with my elbow, reached my hand in, and turned the deadbolt.
The cabin was dim and warm, the air sweet with the musk of pinewood. Embers glowed in a rock fireplace big enough that I could’ve climbed into it. Split logs were stacked high on the right side.
I threw two logs on, stoking the glowing coals with a charred iron poker, and stripped naked as quickly as I could. Standing there, the flames restoring me, I glanced around at my surroundings:
The cabin was essentially one large room. There was a small Formica-topped dining table and two spindly, ladder-back chairs. A green swayback couch. A sagging La-Z-Boy recliner positioned close beside the fireplace. A galley kitchen with filthy dishes piled high in a metal, pump-handle sink. A rumpled twin bed with a brass headboard. Foreign policy magazines and engineering textbooks scattered and piled everywhere.
The logs hissed and popped, shooting embers onto the blackened slate hearth and occasionally, my legs. I didn’t care. I could feel the blood returning to my limbs, the cognitive function to my brain. I closed my eyes and began to drift amid the fragrant, delicious warmth of the fireplace.
Until the front door flew open.
TWENTY-TWO
There’s a reason why professionals use short-barrel assault weapons when breaching buildings. A short barrel allows for greater mobility in close quarters; the shooter is less likely to get his weapon hung up in a doorway or have some enterprising bad guy snatch it out of his hands as he comes around a corner.
The man who came in shooting at me obviously hadn’t gotten the memo.
Armed with an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle you see in every John Ford Western ever made, he came storming in, firing wildly from the hip.
Cock. Blam.
The first round ricocheted with a spark off the rock fireplace and took out an old brass floor lamp, missing me by mere inches.
Cock. Blam.
The second round was considerably farther off-target, knocking a barn owl, stuffed and mounted, off the wall.
Cock—
I reached from behind the door before he could get off a third shot, clamped my hand around the wooden forestock, and relieved him of the Winchester.
“Old” didn’t begin to describe him. “Ancient” did. He was bald but for the thatch of gray hairs protruding wildly from each of his Dumbo-sized ears. Baggy eyes. Yellowed teeth, missing in places. An insulated, one-piece army surplus snowsuit hung on his narrow frame like a kid wearing daddy’s pajamas.