Cold Fire, page 9
‘Is it the arsonist again?’
‘Yeah,’ he wheezed, ‘but that should be arsonists. Plural. I stopped them from burning down your house, but they double-teamed me and, well, damn it, you’d better get Nicolas.’
Tess rapped her knuckles on the windshield. Po squinted back at her, saw her urgent gestures and got the message. He flicked aside his cigarette and lunged to get back inside.
‘Whassup?’
‘It’s Pinky,’ Tess warned him, as she held out the phone for them both to hear, ‘and something bad has happened.’
‘I’m sorry, man, I tried, me, but—’
Po cut him off. ‘Let’s establish something important first, Pinky. Are you OK?’
‘No, I’m smarting with shame, but I’m physically unhurt if that’s what you’re concerned about.’
‘OK. That’s good. Nothin’ else is more important than you’re OK, podnuh.’
‘You might not think that once I tell you what’s happened.’
Pinky delivered the news that Po’s precious car was now a smoldering hunk of scorched metal, burned wires and melted plastic and rubber. ‘I swear I tried putting out the fire but it was hopeless. It was already burning furiously by the time I got back. I was a fool, Nicolas; I was tricked, me, so’s the firebug could attack your car while I was off chasing shadows.’
The awful news was greeted by silence. Tess had a tough time absorbing the magnitude of what had occurred, let alone how Po must feel. He loved that car. It was as much a part of his persona as his laconic voice and the motor oil ingrained in his knuckles. She reached to touch him, the only offer of support she could make just then. Po’s reaction surprised her, and most definitely Pinky. ‘This kinda forces my hand,’ he said, calmer than anyone in their right mind would be expected to react. ‘I was thinking of trading my Mustang against a car more suited to fatherhood. A muscle car with a baby seat in back ain’t the ideal vehicle for doing the school run in.’
Tess gawped, but only for the split-second it took to understand he was trying to lessen Pinky’s pain. His normally turquoise eyes seemed so dark they were bottomless. She squeezed his forearm in consolation and could feel how tense he was.
‘Nicolas,’ Pinky went on, ‘I don’t know what to say to make things better, me. I promised I’d protect your home while you were away, and my pledge included protecting your car. I know how much she meant to you and I feel almost as bad as if I’d failed to save Tess’s life.’
‘It’s an inanimate piece of machinery,’ said Po, ‘and doesn’t compare to how I feel about Tess, so don’t fret, podnuh.’
‘Yeah, maybe it was a poor comparison, but still—’
‘Did you see who was responsible?’
‘Sorry, not once, me. While I chased one of them towards the river, his buddy must’ve snuck in behind me and set fire to your car.’
‘You didn’t get eyes on any of them?’
‘No, bruh, I didn’t. It’s blizzarding back here. Well, one of them ducked down behind the car and I took off after him, but I never once got a look at his face.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Couldn’t say for certain, me. But in my mind it was a guy, and nothing he did gave me reason to think otherwise.’
‘He ducked behind the car, then you chased him. How’d he escape?’
‘He belly-crawled away, then once in the woods he must’ve stood up and run like a jackrabbit, him. I heard movement and followed his tracks down to the river. It had frozen over in places and there were enough stepping stones for him to have gotten over to the park.’
‘Sounds as if they intended luring you away, meaning they expected to find you at home and planned accordingly.’
‘How’d they know to expect me, eh? Maybe when they lured me out they were expecting you to be the one runnin’ around in the woods?’
Tess interjected, as everything concerning the latest arson attack was pure speculation and couldn’t be verified. ‘Don’t you think we should call the cops?’
‘Not my usual style,’ said Po, ‘but under the circumstances, and the previous attacks, I must involve them.’
She noted how haunted his features had grown. The loss of his car was bad, but sat much lower in his priorities than the safety of her and their unborn child did. He was worried that his enemies had struck as close to home as this, and by what target they might choose next in order to hurt him. ‘Pinky,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna get in touch with Alex, and have him send over a squad car. If you can make the preliminary report to the cops I’d appreciate it. You OK doing that?’
‘Yeah, man, sure. The cops around here treat me with more respect than they did back home in Louisiana, but that ain’t saying much.’
‘I’ll ensure Alex knows it’s you at the house so there’s no misunderstanding.’
Alex Grey was one of Tess’s elder brothers, currently a patrol sergeant with Portland PD. He knew Jerome ‘Pinky’ Leclerc beyond his rap sheet, but the same couldn’t be said for some of his colleagues. Sadly, Pinky still lived in a world where a black man with a criminal record discovered in a white man’s home could be treated with instant suspicion and perhaps an over-zealous response.
‘Chances are,’ Tess said, ‘that they won’t risk coming back again tonight, but maybe you should go home to your own apartment. I’d hate for you to maybe fall asleep and be burned to death if those idiots do make another try at the house.’
‘I hear what you’re saying, pretty Tess, but no. I’m not running from them, and I swear I won’t shut my eyes, not even to blink, till you guys get back.’
‘We’re in Vanceboro now,’ Po informed him, ‘and will hopefully have the girl in the next half hour. Drivin’ conditions are real bad, but I think we’ll make it back to Portland again. Can’t swear how soon, but I wouldn’t bet on seein’ us till morning light.’
‘I’ve got my guns, and I’m spiked on adrenalin, me. No way I’m sleeping tonight.’
‘Don’t go waving round those pistols until after the cops have left,’ Po cautioned.
‘I don’t have no death wish, me,’ Pinky reassured him.
As the men finished up their conversation, Tess remained silent, allowing Po to guide Pinky through, among other things, the process of filing a police report that would satisfy his motor insurance provider. Po had fetched some of the cold inside with him, but the heater had soon dispelled it. She was beginning to feel hot inside her coat and beanie hat. She shifted, allowing some of her body heat to escape her coat’s confines and considered cracking open the window to let in some fresh air. She didn’t, because the blizzard kicked up again, the wind squalling around the nearest rooftops, so all their warmth must be conserved. She noted headlights glittering through the falling snow, and saw a large SUV prowling along Water Street towards the Telluride. Nothing in the car’s approach should have raised her hackles, and yet she felt itchy, as if her body reacted subconsciously to impending danger. A sharp exhalation escaped her. The SUV hove alongside, and for several seconds she met the scrutiny of the driver. It was a woman, perhaps aged in her late thirties. She was undeniably attractive, a natural redhead with green eyes, and a spray of freckles across her nose. However, there was something sour about the woman’s squint and dismissive twist of her mouth as she gave the SUV more gas and plowed on past. Beyond the woman, Tess caught a hint of her passenger, but only as an amorphous hulk that almost filled the far side of the car, topped by a huge square head Frankenstein’s monster would be proud of. She gained the impression that he – she assumed it was a male by his brutish build – had also studied Tess with as much interest as the woman had. Studied and then dismissed her as inconsequential. Tess twisted in her seat, trying to spot the SUV again, but beyond a few glimmers of light was thwarted by the blizzard.
Po had ended his call with Pinky.
‘Did you see that?’ she asked.
‘The Chevy Tahoe that went past? Sure did.’
‘What did you make of it?’
He shrugged. ‘Do I even get a clue?’
‘There was something about the occupants that got my hackles up. The driver looked at me as if I was a piece of dog crap.’
Po checked for any sign of the SUV. ‘They’ve gone. Probably just locals with no truck for strangers crazy enough to drive here in this darn storm.’
‘Yeah, maybe that’s all it was,’ she said without conviction.
FIFTEEN
Taking off her shoes was the latest of the stupid mistakes she’d made since fleeing the murder scene. Joanne had resisted the urge and the bone-deep chill, but in the end the pain in her toes had grown excruciating and she had struggled out of her shoes to try rubbing some warmth into them. Her socks were sodden and had taken some effort to pull off with fingers equally as pained as her toes. Her skin was pale blue below her ankles and worryingly there were strange grey-white blotches on several of her digits. Fear struck her so suddenly that her stomach somersaulted and acid spouted up her throat. The blotches were precursors to the flesh turning necrotic through frostbite. Most often the cure for frostbite was amputation, and how would she escape her pursuers when missing several toes on each foot? She rubbed and massaged and then rubbed some more, hoping the friction was enough to invigorate the tissue and stave off greater problems. The warmth she built was fleeting, and probably a totally pointless exercise when she wrestled back into her socks, the damp wool instantly sapping the warmth from her flesh. Her shoes wouldn’t easily go back on. She didn’t believe her feet had swollen, or that her shoes had shrunk, but it became a challenge fitting one into the other. Finally she had to stand and employ gravity to help settle her feet in her shoes again and the pain caused her to cry in despair. She forced her legs to move and she shuffled stiff-kneed across the icy paving, encouraging sluggish blood to circulate.
After completing several revolutions of the cramped space, she stood next to where she’d originally sat and shambled on the spot.
‘Where are you, Karen?’ she cried, as if her sister might appear at the door with a warm blanket and cup of steaming cocoa.
There was of course no answer.
She shambled a minute more, feeling as if an eternity had passed, and cried out again in wordless frustration. She staggered towards the door and pulled it open a few inches. Often snow flurries in Maine fell as tiny, sharp fragments of ice, blown sideways out of the north-west to bite and sting exposed flesh; the snow that fell now was the big fluffy type beloved of Christmas movies. There was nothing festive about the killer storm. Nevertheless she would rather fight it than give in to the hopelessness of being rescued from that icy tomb. She hadn’t driven too far, maybe two miles at most, from town, but had no delusion of making it back to town before succumbing. But during the drive, while contemplating passage across the river into Canada, she’d been vaguely aware of passing several homesteads built on the slopes above the road. If there were a house within a few hundred yards, she would throw herself on the mercy of the occupants. Some houses and businesses in Vanceboro had appeared decrepit, abandoned, and the same might be said of some of the homes out here in the wilderness, but it didn’t matter. Finding shelter in one of those collapsing structures, where she could at least get a fire going, was preferable to freezing in this crypt of icy stone.
She pulled her several layers of clothing around her frame again, hugging them to her stomach. Bent at the waist she again challenged the storm, but this time headed directly downhill, away from the tomb and the footprints in the snow towards the road. It was so cold it hurt to breathe. Did she have the fortitude to travel a few hundred yards through the hellish storm? The wind chittered among the denuded treetops down alongside the river, and she could swear that it was the elements laughing at her stupidity. She literally swore vehemently at those unseen spirits, and pushed on, turning towards the distant border town but hoping to come across shelter much nearer.
Previously the wind had been at her back. Now she fought against it, and each step was an effort. The snowflakes that got under her hats plastered her face and made seeing difficult. She blinked frozen eyelashes, cursing again, swearing so harshly was not in her usual vocabulary, but spitting out the coarse words helped flush her cheeks and add some steel to her spine. Angry, she battled on, conjuring words to make a sailor blush.
Her curses became whimpers in short order.
She staggered on, moaning, setting one foot in front of the other in the tire tracks she’d made coming this way. Already they’d been buried under a layer of snow, but were still definable in the weird gloom. By following her tire tracks she hoped not to blunder off route and lose the road. The cemetery was lost to the swirling void behind her, ahead was as featureless. It was only after trekking for what felt like another eternity that she grew aware of the change in direction of the wind. Before it had been at her back, but without warning it pummeled her from her left side. Rather than turn from it, she hunched into the wind and tried to make sense of her surroundings. The ghosts of giant trees loomed to each side, but there was an expanse of barely broken white sweeping up to meet the clouds. At the center of the open ground she could make out the faint delineation of a wire fence and assumed that the trough alongside it signaled an unplowed road. She couldn’t recall exactly where she’d spotted homesteads on the drive in, but this was reminiscent of the entrances to many of the housing plots. She took a final lingering look in the direction of Vanceboro and knew it was out of reach: she turned and trod through shin-deep snow, using the low fence as a marker to keep her on the track. The wind battered her, slapping and pummeling, but she set her jaw and bent into it and continued uphill.
She went down on all fours.
What? Why was she crawling?
She tried to push to her feet, again setting her chin and peering into the blustering wind. Flakes invaded her eyelids and she crunched her lashes shut. It was much easier to stay down on all fours, that way her balance wasn’t as compromised. She crawled on, then tried rising but fell again. Stay down, stay down, don’t go hurting yourself, she counseled. She crawled on but the exertion was too much. It was all those damn clothes she’d layered on top of each other, too constrictive. She dragged off the hats and cast them aside. Tried worming out of her over-large coat, but the effort wasn’t worth it. She needed to rest. She rolled on her back, comfortable on a cloud of snowflakes and laughed at the tickle of the storm’s touch across her features, and how its fingers tousled her hair. She tugged at her coat, feeling warmer now and happy; happier than she’d ever felt before; happier than she’d any right to be. She wept and her tears turned to ice on her cheeks.
The snow continued falling, and Joanne didn’t rise. Soon, she thought, all her troubles would pass.
SIXTEEN
‘They could be cops,’ Siobhan Doyle suggested to her taciturn passenger.
Bruce Harper grunted, gave a scornful shake of his head.
‘How can you be certain?’
‘I didn’t get a cop vibe off them.’
‘You put too much trust in your gut, Harp. One of these days it might be your undoing.’
‘Gut instinct and the application of logic has gotten us this far. My hunches haven’t failed me yet, have they?’
‘Who’s to say? I mean, we haven’t found Joanne Mason yet, and there’s nothing to say that she’s even within a hundred miles of here.’
Harper thumbed back the way they’d come from. ‘You’re dismissing those two too quickly.’
‘They looked out of place,’ she admitted, ‘but if they aren’t cops, who else could they be?’
‘I thought that some of the others had beaten us here, chasing the same reward that I am, but no, I don’t think that’s the case now. How could any of them beat us here to Vanceboro without access to the same clues we had.’
‘We had clues?’
‘We gained information.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That reminds me, let’s find someplace to get rid of that hard drive from the gas station before what’s recorded on it comes back to bite us.’
‘There isn’t time for that now. I need you to take us back, I want to check out that couple in the Telluride again.’
‘The woman had a good look at me,’ Siobhan said. ‘We might make ’em suspicious if we pass them going in the other direction.’
‘So take us someplace where we can see them but they can’t see us.’
‘This is a ghost town, not many places I can hide the car or blend in.’
‘Siobhan, take a look outta the goddamn window: there’s enough cover from this storm to hide a parade of pink Cadillacs.’
‘I guess,’ she muttered, although the blizzard wasn’t all it had been before, and they’d be spotted if she got too close.
She retraced their route back through town. Houses were set back on private lots, some high up on the slope above the road. It appeared that the recent lockdown hadn’t been kind on the livelihoods of some of the locals; most of the business premises they passed were either closed or simply falling into ruin. A short distance from where they’d passed the Telluride earlier, the road doglegged through some tight ninety-degree bends; Siobhan considered stopping at the last corner from where they should have a view of the target vehicle.
Snow danced on the air, but the fury had momentarily left the storm, so they could see a fair distance along Water Street. The gas station on the right indicated the vicinity in which the Telluride had previously been parked; it had been tucked against the curb facing the gas station and the approach to the border beyond, as Siobhan recalled.
‘Well, problem solved,’ she muttered. ‘They’ve bugged out, Harp. Could be miles into Canada by now.’
‘Drive to where they were parked.’
‘Why?’
Harper curled his lip and growled like a mean old junkyard dog.
Siobhan threw up her hands. ‘I’m your driver. You want me to drive, I’ll drive.’
She returned to Water Street and crawled the SUV along, coming to within ten feet of where the Telluride had previously been parked.
