The two men stood up and took their coats off. They put them on the bench behind them. The bigger one, the one with the hard face and the nose that had been broken, he looked at me with the cold eyes of a natural killer. He flexed his hands in their black leather gloves.
I waited for what would happen next. My whole body was tight. I will not shake, I told myself. I will not let them see me shake.
The other man. I saw him blink. He sneaked a look at his partner, and then at Molinov.
Molinov raised his arm sideways and shot both of the men.
They fell backwards, first one, then the other. The bench fell over with them. The shots rang in my ears. Molinov’s upraised arm did not move.
“I understand,” he finally said, lowering his arm, “that when my associates were questioning Mr. Gobi and his female companion about Mr. Bruckman’s whereabouts, they committed an act of extreme brutality. The woman was innocent. There was no reason to kill her.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Not at all,” he said. “Now I wonder if you’d be so kind as to collect their coats. I believe you’ll find the keys to the vehicle in Mr. Pearl’s pocket.”
“Which one is he?”
“They didn’t introduce themselves? How impolite. Mr. Pearl is on the left.”
When I stood up, the room began to spin around me. I grabbed the bench to stop from falling over.
“Careful, Mr. McKnight,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to fall through that hole and join Mr. Bruckman.”
I shook my head clear and went over to the two men on the floor. They were both staring at the ceiling, with holes perfectly centered in their chests. I pulled the coat out from under him, the one named Pearl. I found the keys and pulled them out.
“Bring them to me,” he said.
I turned and took two steps toward him. I looked him in the eyes.
And then I dropped the keys into the water. They disappeared instantly.
He looked down at the water, then back up at my face. He smiled.
“You have seen death before,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re not afraid of me right now, are you? Not enough to beg me for your life.”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “We’re both stuck out here together.”
“Are you cold?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You don’t know what it is to be cold,” he said. He slipped his free hand out of its glove, switched the gun, then took the other glove off. His fingers had all been amputated down to the first knuckle, all of them except his right index finger. His trigger finger.
“I believe the heater has run out of kerosene,” he said. “This room is not comfortable anymore. The smell of death isn’t very pleasant, either.” He stood up, his fur coat reaching all the way to the floor. We were exactly the same height, his dark eyes dead-even with mine. He picked up the lantern and walked to the door. On his way, he pulled the other coat out from under the other dead man. He looked at it closely, brushing away some sawdust.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“To the car,” he said.
“You don’t have the keys.”
“I have my own keys,” he said. “I asked you to take Mr. Pearl’s keys because I wanted to see what you would do with them. If you had given them to me, I would have been very disappointed. But you didn’t. I believe you when you say that you don’t know where Miss Parrish is. As for the matter of Mr. Fulton, I will need to look into that situation a little further. I believe I see some unique… opportunities there. If you really are a private investigator, I assume that your services are available for hire. Sometime in the future, I may wish to retain those services.”
“You’re going to leave me here,” I said. “I’ll freeze to death.”
“Perhaps you will,” he said. “Perhaps you won’t. If you survive, then that will tell me something very important about you. It will tell me that you are a man who may be of great use to me.”
I stood there watching him. There were no words to say.
“If you survive,” he said, “we will have something in common. Something very rare. You see, I was in a similar situation myself once. I didn’t freeze to death. But I must warn you. The cold can take away a piece of you. Not just your physical body. I mean inside of you.”
He opened the door, then stopped. The brutal air rushed in. I could feel my shirt frozen against my chest. “Once you freeze all the way through to your soul,” he said, “you will never feel warm again. You’ll see.”
He closed the door, leaving me in the cold darkness.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I was alone in the ice shanty, alone except for two men dead on the floor and Bruckman underneath us somewhere, wearing my coat, either sinking to the bottom or bobbing against the ice itself. The heater was dead. Molinov had taken the lantern. It was completely dark and getting colder by the minute.
Okay, think. You’re alive. You want to stay alive. What do you do?
I started to remember something. I’m sitting in the barber shop, waiting for the chair. An old copy of Michigan Out of Doors there, pick it up, there’s an article about hypothermia and frostbite. What the hell did it say? I wish I had paid more attention…
I felt my shirt, frozen solid where I got splashed, like having a block of ice strapped to my chest. That was the first problem.
No, wait, my hands. They are so cold. Where are my gloves? I went down on my knees, felt around on the floor for them. I couldn’t even remember taking them off. Maybe when I went digging in the dead man’s pockets for the car keys.
I felt around on the rough wooden floor. There! There’s one of them. I put it on my left hand. Now, where’s the other one? I felt around with my bare right hand. It’s here somewhere.
What’s that? Oh fuck! I shifted my weight before I realized what I was doing, felt the icy sting of the cold water all the way up to my elbow.
That’s just what I need right now. Fall through the fucking hole in the ice. Say hello to Bruckman on the way down.
I sat back and shook my hand. When I put it back down, I felt leather.
Great, it was right under me. I put it on. Okay, now what do I do about this wet shirt? What did that article say? Something about how snow soaks up water. When you’re wet, you’re supposed to roll around in the snow.
No, I don’t think so. I’m not going out there and rolling around in the snow. I don’t care what the magazine said.
The dead men. What about their clothes? Molinov took their coats. What a wonderful thing to do. But what about the rest of their clothes? Two shirts, two pairs of pants.
Yeah, I’m going to go find the two dead guys in the pitch black, strip their clothes off.
Easy, Alex. Listen to your breathing. You’re using up all your energy. Just sit here for a minute. Relax and think about it.
I found the bench, the one I had been sitting on from the beginning. My hands felt cold even with the gloves on, especially my right hand after the ice bath. I tucked them under my armpits. The wind picked up again outside, rattling every inch of the place. I put my head down and felt the shivers take control of my body.
This is not good, Alex. This is not good at all.
I tried to remember what the place looked like. I went down on my hands and knees again and crawled toward the back corner, feeling for the heater. When I came to it, I picked it up. It was too light. I shook it. Nothing. Maybe there was more kerosene somewhere. I felt around the back wall. I came upon the heavy metal ice spud that they used to break through the ice. I kept feeling against the wall.
There! A metal can! I picked it up. It was empty.
Matches. Could there be matches somewhere? I could start a fire, burn some wood or something. I came to a wooden box, took my gloves off and opened it. A fish hook bit into my finger. It was just a tackle box.
What a stupid fucking sport, anyway. Sitting in a little shack in the middle of a frozen lake with a fishing pole.