47

  I watched as they found the note I had left for them. Given the picture-postcard weather I felt a bit like their Secret Santa, only my gift would prove a lot costlier than a five-buck minimum. They looked confused. Angry. Not a little pissed. All in all, it couldn’t have gone any better.

  I wasn’t about to let them into my little trick for breaking into their car: sometimes life has to have a little magic or things get real dull real fast. Let them bicker about it for a while, let them stew, blaming each other for leaving it unlocked. Let them stop trusting each other, even if just a little. Given enough time I might have been able to lock it again, which would really have messed with their heads.

  But this was not a game.

  It was a lot of other things, though. For Wayne it was a chance at something approaching the life he’d lost all those years ago when his wife died and his daughter fled. I’d noticed he never used his wife’s name. I took that as a sign of just how deeply she’d wounded him. Maybe, just maybe, this would go some small way to giving her back to him, or at least some memories that weren’t reflected in their daughter’s addiction. For Raelynn it was a chance at a fresh start, even if it was a case of going back to the beginning. Sometimes that was the best place to be. For the kids, Anna and Chase, it was a shot at a normal childhood, and who wouldn’t have moved mountains to give that to a couple of kids?

  So, yes, I wanted this over. But I wanted it done right.

  And not least for Jim Lowry, whom I didn’t know, but he was an ordinary decent man and he didn’t deserve to end up dead in the snow outside Wayne’s place simply because he was trying to be neighborly.

  The guy I’d seen kill Lowry seemed to be running the show. He had my note screwed up in his hand and was looking around for me, but was utterly oblivious to me hiding there in plain sight. The snow helped.

  He looked right at me, but didn’t see me. I used my burner phone to take pictures, first of him, and then his skin-and-bone partner leaning on the roof. The shots might help, they might not, but they were all part of getting to know the enemy.

  I watched them take a couple of holdalls out of the trunk, which, judging by the weight and the sudden flare of joy that blazed through the snow, was them tooling up. Guns and ammo were their porn, I guess.

  48

  Henry locked the car again. This time he made sure to check the door before heading back inside the diner. Their booth at the window had been taken by the two old-timers who had gone inside as they had left. He wasn’t in the mood to be polite. They could move.

  “The booth’s taken,” he said.

  One of the guys, with a grey handlebar moustache, looked up defiantly, “Didn’t see no reserved sign,” he said. “Weren’t no food or drinks on the table. And, point of fact, weren’t no sign of youse, either. Plenty of seats. Take another. I like this one.”

  Henry looked from him to the waitress. She didn’t hold his eye. He really didn’t like the way the old sow kept doing that, looking away like he was worth nothing. Henry had seen that often enough, and every time it was either fear or contempt that made someone do it.

  The old guy wasn’t afraid, though. He belligerently held his ground. His intransigence pushed Henry’s buttons.

  “You want me to move him, H?” Dale said.

  Moustache Man’s partner started to slide out of the booth, but his friend told him to stay put.

  “Bad move, mister. Believe me. Of all the things you’ve done today that you will live to regret, this one right here, this is the one, the motherfucking payload.”

  “I don’t like your mouth, boy. No need for that gutter language when there’s ladies present.”

  “Oh, do fuck off and die,” Henry said conversationally. It was far more menacing when you threw out the threats like they were nothing, just casual jibes.

  “We have every right to sit here if we want to.”

  “Ask yourself this, why don’t you? Do you want that seat so much you’re willing to trade your testicles for it? Because if you don’t move I’m going to follow you out of this place when you’re done with your burger and fries, all the way to your house, where I’m going to follow you in, cut your fucking nuts off and stuff them into your wife’s mouth until she chokes. You want it that bad?”

  The man looked at him as though he couldn’t trust his ears, or thought maybe Henry had been possessed by the devil and was speaking in tongues. But he didn’t move.

  Henry dropped his bag on the floor and, rattlesnake fast, reached over to grab the man by the throat, one hand squeezing hard around his neck. He could feel the old-timer’s pulse fluttering against his fingers.

  And still the guy resisted.

  He had some balls, he’d give him that. Proper, pendulous things.

  But Henry was having none of it. Too many people took liberties, these days, and that wasn’t good for the soul. Sometimes you just had to make a stand, even if it was in a shit-hole of a place like Maeve’s Diner. It was a matter of principle.

  The man eased himself out of the seat, looking cowed.

  Henry stood over him, watching.

  The moment he was out of the booth, Henry slammed a hand into the middle of his chest and pushed him toward his dinner companion, who barely kept his feet.

  “I don’t know who you think you are,” the old guy said, “but you can’t go around treating people like this.”

  “Pretty sure no one here’s gonna stop me. What do you think?” Henry reached to the back of his pants and pulled out his Desert Eagle. He pressed the muzzle to the man’s cheek, right up close to his gray moustache. The old guy’s skin turned white with pressure around the metal. “I didn’t think so.”

  “We don’t do things like this here. This is a good place. This is a peaceful, law-abiding place. Good people. Everyone cares,” he said, somehow still finding the guts to stand up to Henry. “Just saying, a little politeness goes a long way. We ain’t some big city where you need to bully folk to be heard.” And all of this with the barrel of a gun pressed into his face? Henry had misjudged the old coot: he didn’t have balls he had a death wish.

  “I could be your genie,” Henry said, confusing the man. “Just rub the barrel of my gun and I’ll make your wish come true.”

  “There’s no need for this, mister,” Maeve said, moving toward them. “He’s just an old man. Why don’t you boys sit yourselves down and I’ll bring you anything you want, on the house. Last thing any of us want is trouble. What you say?”

  “Maeve, isn’t it? Do you mind if I call you Maeve?” She shook her head, all fake smiles again, like he wasn’t holding a gun. “You cleared our table before we’d finished with it.”

  “I thought—”

  “And you know what? You thought wrong. All you need to worry about, Maeve, is taking orders and serving food. Leave the thinking to the important people.”

  “Leave her alone,” the old man blustered.

  “You know what?” Dale said. “If these fine folks don’t like it, why don’t they call the sheriff?” His grin was vile. He scratched his fingernails along the inside of his thumbs, like there was a fire beneath his skin he couldn’t put out.

  Henry laughed at that.

  They were the only two who got the joke.

  There was no support for the old guy among the other diners. Survival instinct had kicked in. They were keeping their heads down. Good for them. It paid to be smart sometimes.

  “Why don’t you sit over here with me, George?” Maeve said to the old guy. She gave another guy in the joint a sort of sideways glance.

  Maybe she reckons I’m simple, Henry thought. She couldn’t have expected him to miss it. Whatever. It didn’t matter. He picked the bag up and slid it onto the bench seat beside him as he sat down in the booth. “Now, how about a cup of your mighty fine coffee, darlin’?”

  Henry met the stares of each and every diner brave enough not to look away. This was getting ugly, fast.

  And that was just the way he liked it.

  49

  Not knowing what to expect inside, I pushed open the door to the Sheriff’s Department. It was a one-man show, so I figured the place would be empty if the dispatcher wasn’t around.

  “Anybody home?” I called, poking around the reception desk. It was nothing like a law office in a larger town. It was three rooms, essentially: Lowry’s office, wood-paneled with a plate-glass window that had the sheriff’s crest on the glass, a holding cell, which was basically a drunk tank where some of the locals slept it off before staggering home the worse for wear, and the reception area where the dispatcher operated the radio. “Hello?” I called. No response.

  The place was deserted.

  While that didn’t come as much of a surprise—this was a small town, calls would be redirected to a cellphone once the office closed for the day—it didn’t explain why the door was wide open.

  A sense of unease combined with déjà vu had me go back to check out the door. It had been forced. In that instant everything became about situational awareness. I listened hard, eyes darting over every inch of the place, looking for anything out of place, anything that shouldn’t have been there, or anything missing that should have been there.

  Part of the counter lifted to allow access to the holding cell. There was little point in working out where the release was to trip it. I bumped myself up onto the counter and swung my legs over to the other side.

  This side of the barrier, I saw everything I’d missed coming in: Lowry’s office had been ransacked. Any other time, any other place, I’d have been on my guard, instinctively on edge, looking for the perpetrator, but I knew exactly who was behind this, and where they were right now.

  The desk had been tipped over, papers spilled on the floor. They hadn’t come in here looking to trash the place. They weren’t petty criminals. They’d come in with a purpose, and I had a sinking feeling theirs was the same as mine.

  It didn’t take me long to confirm at least one of their purposes: the telephone cable had been cut and the internet router smashed beyond recognition. Again, not random violence: they were cutting lines of communication to the sheriff’s office. State troopers, anyone else calling in from outside, would just get the in-box signal. I could probably fix the telephone line, it was just splicing the cable by the look of it, but the rest was beyond me. The dispatcher was in for a nasty shock when she rolled into work in the morning.

  I needed to have more than just the SIG Sauer I had tucked in my jeans, especially as I’d already fired off more than half of the rounds I had in the clip.

  I kicked myself that I hadn’t taken Lowry’s own weapon—it wasn’t like the dead man needed it—or the other Stooge’s weapon. I’d only seen him using the knife to torture Lowry, but there was no way he wasn’t packing. It was too late to worry about it now, and there was no way I was going back up the mountain.

  I was working on the theory that Lowry had a weapons cabinet. If I was going to arm myself for the coming fight, this was the place.

  I’d come prepared. I dropped the crowbar I had been carrying up my sleeve. The gun safe was at the back of the office. It wasn’t as secure as a lot of the ones I’d seen, but it was going to require some serious force to pry it open. Thankfully, I had an almost infinite supply.

  It didn’t take me long to liberate an over-and-under shotgun and another handgun, a Glock, along with a box of ammunition for each.

  I stashed the weapons in my backpack along with a couple of short-wave radios. I checked they were charged.

  I turned to go, then stopped. I figured I could spend a couple of minutes looking around in case there was anything else that might come in handy. Over by the door I saw a fireproof cabinet with a combination lock. Chances were it just held records that needed to be kept confidential, and hadn’t been transferred to the computer system yet. A combination lock seemed like overkill over a little burg like Winter’s Rage. But maybe, just maybe …

  It took longer to prise open than the gun safe. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me as I strained to break the lock.

  But the treasure inside was completely different.

  I looked into what passed for an evidence locker in Winter’s Rage. There was an array of plastic bags in there, some of which, I saw, contained small quantities of a variety of street drugs. It wasn’t hard to imagine the sheriff confiscating stuff and letting someone off with a warning. Winter’s Rage had always struck me as more of a meth place than a coke one, anyway. Plenty of old caravans hidden out in the wilderness around the old town, with a ribbon of dirt tracks leading everywhere and nowhere. It wasn’t hard to imagine a ma and pa still out there, set up to run meth and moonshine.

  There were a couple of guns, knives and other odds and ends. One very odd item, though maybe not for this part of the country. An old metal bear trap. A big one.

  I took everything I might need, left what I didn’t. And had one last look around. The damage I had done had been no worse than the mess the two Stooges had made before I had arrived. My prints were everywhere, but that couldn’t be helped, even if it did put me in the frame for Jim Lowry’s murder.

  I headed back outside to find that the brief respite in the snow had given way to a full-on blizzard. It came down around me with a vengeance, cutting Winter’s Rage off from the rest of the world.

  50

  “More coffee over here when you’re ready, Maeve, there’s a good girl,” said Henry, sweet as pie.

  She came over and filled two cups without a word.

  As she was about to return to her other customers, Dale grabbed hold of her wrist. He might have looked like a weedy little runt, all skin and bone, but his body-fat ratio was way down in the low single figures. He was all muscle, and the muscles that corded around his bones were steel. She tried to pull away, but there was no way she was breaking his grip.

  He squeezed tighter, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her arm. “You were in here when we were asking about a friend of ours, weren’t you?”

  She nodded. “Raelynn,” she said, compliant. “Wayne Cardiman’s daughter.”

  “That’s the girl. Now, I’ve got a little question for you. Think carefully about how you answer. Have you seen her since she came back?”

  Without hesitation, Maeve shook her head. She winced with pain as Dale dug his dirty fingernails in deep. “You absolutely sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  Henry looked into her eyes. She wasn’t lying. “What about Wayne?” he asked.

  “He hasn’t been in for a couple of days.”

  “Is that so? And that’s strange, is it?”

  “People can come and go as they please. Nothing says they have to eat here.”

  “But does he normally eat here?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He’s a regular.”

  “And does he dine alone?”

  She looked at him, and he could see the mental processes swirling away back there. She was considering a lie. He encouraged her not to. “Did you know when you lie your heart rate changes? You can’t help it. And Dale here, he can feel the pulse hammering through your veins right now. Lie and he’ll know. So I’m going to ask you again. Take your time. Does Wayne normally come in here alone?”

  “No,” she said. Nothing more than that.

  “That’s good, Maeve. That wasn’t too difficult, was it? Now, how about a name? Who does he normally come in with?”

  “Mike.”

  “That’s half a name. Mike who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stranger, is he?”

  “He’s been here a couple of months,” she said. “Wayne was looking for someone to help him out. Building a cabin for Raelynn coming home.”

  “Good, that’s really good, Maeve. So now, the big question, let’s not fuck it up, where might we find this Mike?”

  “He has a place up on the mountain somewhere.”

  Dale squeezed again.

  Henry studied her. She was holding something back. He couldn’t tell what. “Such a shame. You were doing so well,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Please, you’re hurting me.”

  Okay, so whatever it was that she knew, it wasn’t where he was living. She wasn’t trying to hold out on them. “Dale, let her go,” he said. Dale did as he was told. Immediately Maeve rubbed the red marks his nails had left in her skin.

  She waited until he nodded, dismissing her, before she moved away.

  Still holding his Desert Eagle, moving it from one hand to the other, Henry eased out of the booth and swaggered over to where the other diners were sitting.

  “Pop quiz, ladies and gents. Your prize, should you answer first, is the chance to walk out of that door.” He indicated the street with the barrel of the gun. “So, best of luck. Your first question, where do I find Mike?”

  Silence.

  “Come on. Surely someone wants to get out of here alive. Really? At least one of you must know. This is a small town. You’re all in each other’s shit. That’s just the way it is after generations of inbreeding, right?”

  “There isn’t a street address, not really, but some of the locals have given it a nickname,” a woman said. Henry raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to explain. “He’s in a shack on the mountain, maybe a mile or so from Wayne’s place, same road, couple of turnings higher.”

  “Now, see, that wasn’t too hard, was it? How about you go for a bonus round and draw us a nice map?” He plucked a paper napkin from the dispenser and flattened it out on the table in front of the woman. “I’m sure Maeve here will be able to lend you a pencil.”

  The waitress did as she was told, taking the stub of one from behind her ear and passing it to the woman.

  Henry watched the short-order cook behind the counter. The man didn’t have a heroic bone in his body. But he did make a decent burger.

  A couple of seconds later the woman pushed a crude drawing over to him. He counted the turns. It ought to be easy enough to find. Henry sauntered back to the booth where Dale sat with a grin as wide as his face.

 

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