Both Ends of the Night Page 24

  I asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Caught cold… out in the damned woods. Haven’t been able to shake it.” He turned his back and moved into the shadows.

  I glanced at Hy; he nodded agreement. From the sound of those coughs, Walker’s cold might have gone into pneumonia.

  A moment later an oil lamp flared. A sleeping bag and backpack lay on the floor next to a kerosene heater; Walker shook out the match and sat down there.

  I took off my cap and gloves and then the blankets that were still draped around my shoulders. After I folded them, I laid them down like cushions, and Hy and I sat.

  Walker asked, “How’s Zach dealing with Matty’s death?”

  I said, “He’s grieving. He’ll need time to get past it—time and your help.”

  Walker didn’t respond. His gaze grew remote, focused on a dark corner of the hangar.

  I let it go for now. “You still haven’t answered Hy’s question. What about Stirling?”

  “He was gone when I got here.”

  “Gone? Where would he go without his plane?”

  “Hunting, maybe. There’s not much meat in the cache behind the cabin; he probably needed to lay in a store for winter.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “What is today?”

  “December fourth.”

  He shut his eyes, calculating. “Okay, three days to find my way through the woods means I got here November eighteenth.”

  “You think he’s been hunting for seventeen days?”

  He shrugged.

  Something wrong here—very wrong. “And you’ve been waiting for him all that time?”

  His eyes flashed angrily. “What the hell else was I supposed to do? The piece of crap that I rented lost its engine, and I had to put it down on a logging road. I got so turned around trying to get to this place that I’ll never find the plane again.”

  “We found the Super Cub. But what about Stirling’s Maule?” I motioned at its dark shape.

  “As useless as the other. It was torn apart when I got here; even the radio’s shot. I’ve been working on it, hoping to get it airworthy enough to fly to Arrowhead, but I’m not really a mechanic.”

  Hy had been staring silently at the flickering oil lamp. Now he said, “It’s possible Stirling hiked out or drove a snowmobile; we don’t know that the one at the cabin is the only one he owns. But you know? What if this J.D. Wilson isn’t Dunc Stirling after all? We didn’t show the woman at Arrowhead a photograph, since that wouldn’t have fit the story we gave her.”

  “I know for a fact he’s Stirling,” Walker said. “I searched the cabin and found a favorite rifle of his—a fairly uncommon Enfield, distinctive because his initials are etched into the barrel.” He took it from behind the backpack and gave it to Hy.

  Hy turned the rifle over in his hands. Ran his fingers over the initials and grimaced. “There’s also the possibility that he’s abandoned this place.”

  “He wouldn’t leave without that rifle. Besides, when I got here the woodstove was still warm.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s coming back soon, though. He might even have gotten out of here for the winter. Seventeen days is a hell of a long time.”

  Walker started coughing again; when he stopped, his breath came in bubbly wheezes from deep in his chest. I said, “You need to see a doctor. We’ll fly you to Ely first thing in the morning.”

  “But Stirling—”

  “We’ll notify the FBI where their fugitive’s been living, and they can take it from there.”

  Walker’s lips twitched and he looked away from me, clearly not liking the idea. Hy was staring at Stirling’s rifle; he seemed unaware I was watching him, as if he were hypnotized by the weapon. When he finally spoke, it was to Walker.

  “You give up on the Maule?”

  “A few days ago, when I started to feel really lousy.”

  “What’ve you been doing for food?”

  “I brought some, and when that ran out, I pilfered from Stirling’s stores. Last time was yesterday, and I knew I couldn’t make another trip. Thank God you guys showed up.”

  “How come you didn’t move into the cabin? It’d be more comfortable.”

  “… Well, in case Dunc came back, I didn’t want him to be forewarned that somebody was here by smoke from the chimney. The woodstove’s the only heating at the cabin, and this kerosene heater’s too heavy to lug that distance.”

  “I see.”

  Something definitely wrong here, I thought, and Hy feels it too.

  Walker was shivering now. Hy got up, unfolded the blanket he’d been sitting on, and handed it to him. Walker nodded thanks and wrapped it tightly around his upper body.

  “Give me that pack, would you?” Hy said to me. I passed it over, and he took out a pint bottle of whiskey that I hadn’t noticed him appropriate from the cabin. “Have some of this.” He extended it to Walker.

  Walker took it, twisted off the cap, and drank, his teeth chattering against its mouth.

  Suddenly I felt bone-tired. I wished I could lie down, slide into dreamless sleep. But that wouldn’t do—not in this desolate place, not at the midpoint of this endless, frozen night.

  I said to Walker, “We know that Winthrop Reade and Calder Franklin spotted you at Los Alegres Airport. What did Reade say to you?”

  “He said he’d wondered what had happened to me. I told him I had a new life, had no intention of ever going back to Arkansas. I asked him not to mention seeing me to anyone, and he promised he wouldn’t.”

  “But then you saw Cal Franklin…”

  “And I just plain freaked. I thought I could trust Win not to say anything, but I knew Cal would use the information to hurt me, maybe even manage to locate Dunc and let him know where I was. Anyway, the sight of him sparked old terrors. The way my wife died—do you know about that?”

  I nodded.

  Walker took another swallow of whiskey. “The way she died kept flashing through my mind. It was like watching a movie: Andie waving to us, Andie falling. And then the previews of coming attractions started: Zach, Matty. I couldn’t let that happen to them.” He heard his words, and pain crumpled his face; half of it had happened. Before he went on, he tipped up the bottle.

  “It’d been ten years. A whole decade. I felt safe. I was happy, dammit! And when you feel that way, your defenses come down, and the memories you’ve been fighting off creep into your dreams. A couple of weeks before Cal and Win showed up, I’d had this dream where Dunc and I were landing at a surreal, futuristic airport. He cautioned me against using his name in front of the people there. ‘Here I’m somebody else entirely,’ he told me. “If you have to call me anything, make it J.D.’ And then I dropped him off and took the Whisper southeast to a city of bridges and rivers, where I wandered in a maze, feeling frightened. Zach had been telling me the plot of one of his sci-fi novels at dinner the evening before, so I put the dream off to that.” He drank again.

  “After I saw Win and Cal at Los Alegres, though, I realized that the dream was based on an actual experience. The airport was a thinly disguised Arrowhead, where I flew Dunc one time when he had a knee injury. The city of bridges was Minneapolis, where I stayed while Dunc did whatever he did—he claimed he was seeing a woman—up there. I remember doing a lot of walking in Minneapolis, feeling confused and scared because I knew I was going to take my evidence to the FBI soon. Why, a dozen years later, I was so sure this was where he’d run to, I don’t know. Anyway, it was the only idea I had, and a place to start. I made my plans and flew commercially to Chisholm-Hibbing, because the FBO there was the only one with a Super Cub—the plane I’m most comfortable in—that was willing to rent long-term to a stranger. And… well, you probably know the rest.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of what you might find here?” I asked. “Didn’t it occur to you that Dunc might be running the same kind of operation he had in Arkansas?”

  “Of course. I planned to check the place out carefully fro
m the air. But he’s not running anything from here, is he? From the looks of it, he’s gone to ground.”

  Walker drank again; half the pint was gone and his eyelids were sagging. Quickly I asked, “What’d you plan to do to him, Ash?”

  He coughed, drank again, looked away from me.

  “What were you planning?”

  “I told myself I’d track him down—here, someplace else, wherever he might be. I thought about turning him over to the FBI, told myself it was the right thing to do. But then I thought, Look what happened the last time. Look what it did to Andie, to your life. So instead I decided I’d use leverage: my silence in exchange for him leaving my new family and me alone. I decided a lot of things, but…”

  “But what?”

  He shook his head. After a long silence he said, “All I wanted was for the fear to end. All I wanted was to be able to stop looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wanted to give Zach and Matty and myself a chance at a life.”

  Hy spoke, his voice rough with anger. “Tell me, Walker, when you arranged for the transfer of funds to Matty’s account and wrote her the letter, were you really thinking of her? Did you once think about what she’d be giving up? How she’d feel when she found out you’d kept all of this from her? Did you think of your boy? How it would be for him, maybe growing up without a father and without so much as a photograph of his mother?”

  Walker flinched and drew back; the bottle slipped from his fingers. For a moment he and Hy faced each other down, Hy’s eyes shining with fury, Walker’s dull with illness and pain. Then Walker flopped sideways onto the sleeping bag, turned his back to us, and curled up into a fetal position.

  Hy made a disgusted sound; when I looked at his face I saw it was as much for his own behavior as for Walker’s. “Jesus, McCone, hold me,” he whispered, and pulled me against his chest.

  We remained that way for a time, listening to Walker’s breathing deepen, bubbling and rasping as he sank into sleep. Finally I got up, went over and slipped the gun from his belt. Hy lowered the flame on the lamp, and we moved next to the double doors, sharing the blanket, our backs to the wall.

  Hy said, “He may have told himself all those things—about turning Stirling over to the feds, using leverage—but he came here for the same reason we did. He planned to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s wrong with the picture we’re looking at?”

  “Something, but I can’t pin it down. I’m too tired to think clearly, and I’m glad he passed out. He won’t give us any trouble that way.”

  “Still, we better watch him. He didn’t like the idea of notifying the feds about where Stirling’s been living and… I don’t know. I don’t trust him, or like him.”

  “Me either.”

  “We’ll sleep in shifts, then. I’ll take the first, wake you later.”

  I yawned and leaned my head against his shoulder. “And at first light we’ll be out of here.”

  We were silent for a while. I closed my eyes, but the flickering from the oil lamp played against their lids. My mind moved sluggishly from one detail of the day to the other, connecting none of them.

  After a bit Hy asked, “What about this revenge thing, McCone? If we’d come face to face with Stirling, would we have killed him?”

  “Probably.”

  “What does that say about us?”

  “I’m not sure what it says about us. Maybe that we’re human, but our experiences have made us colder and harder than most people. I do know what it says about our feelings toward the Dunc Stirlings of the world—and about our feelings for the Mattys.”

  Twenty-three

  I woke feeling an urgent need to pee. The oil lamp was guttering and the hangar was cold. I still leaned against the wall, but Hy curled on his side, his arm cradling his tousled head. So much for sleeping in shifts, I thought. Ash Walker’s breath rasped loudly.

  I moved off my section of the blanket and wrapped it around Hy. He didn’t stir. When I stood, my cramped joints protested, so I stretched this way and that to work the kinks out of them. Then I went to check on Walker. His brow was damp and hot, his hair and clothing soaked. Pneumonia, or close to it.

  When I opened the hanger door, I saw it was still dark, but to the east the tops of the trees were black against a purpling sky and a morning star hung high above them. We’d almost reached the other end of the long night, and the day showed promise of clear air and unlimited visibility. If the Cessna wasn’t too deeply mired in snow, we’d be able to fly out early, to whatever airport was closest to an emergency medical facility. And after we delivered Walker there, we’d phone the FBI—

  Wait a minute. There was an easier way to get the medical attention he needed.

  By the time I’d half frozen the more tender portions of my anatomy, I’d formulated a plan. While Hy and Walker slept, I’d trek around the lake to the logging road and use the 172’s radio to call Arrowhead’s unicom. They could have a medevac chopper sent directly to the airstrip, and I’d be back there by the time it arrived.

  The idea made the prospect of a long, cold early-morning walk through the snow seem almost tolerable.

  I went back inside the hangar and carefully extracted the plane’s key from Hy’s jeans pocket. Checked Walker again, picked up the extra jacket I’d worn away from the cabin last night, and piled it on top of him. Then I found a pad of paper and a pen in a seatback pocket in the Maule and scribbled a brief explanatory note, which I weighted down with a wrench on the floor next to Hy. On the way out, I grabbed the flashlight, some jerky, and a package of trail mix.

  The snow was dark gray in the predawn light, and in places it had drifted as high as my waist. The wind had stilled; silence hung heavy around me. I struck out for the trees that indicated where the shoreline was and kept to the left of them. My flashlight made the snow cover glisten; the hard crunch of my footsteps told me it was many degrees below zero, but the extreme cold didn’t bother me. I felt curiously alert for one who had slept little, curiously optimistic for one who had feared she wouldn’t live to see the end of this icy night.

  With optimism came hunger. I opened the package of trail mix and, even though I’d never been fond of such stuff, enjoyed my breakfast. I bit off a piece of jerky and gnawed happily, not at all minding that I resembled a cow chewing its cud. The eastern sky became stained with violet, then ruby. By the time I reached the clearing where the cabin stood, I was enveloped in murky predawn gray.

  I’d meant to go straight to the logging road, but the sight of the cabin stopped me. The same feeling of wrongness that had stolen over me at the hangar was back, stronger than ever. After a moment I scrambled up the lake’s bank, not knowing what I was looking for but unwilling to go on until I’d looked around some more.

  I lighted the oil lamp and searched the small room again. All was as we’d left it. I shone my flash down at the bloodstains under the table, followed a trail of small drops to the door.

  Proves nothing, McCone.

  Nothing, in and of itself.

  I blocked out the room into segments, as I often did when examining a scene. Studied each slowly and thoroughly. When I scanned the table, I spotted a sticker on the spine of one of the books in the stack: “Ely Public Library.”

  I went over there, picked up the volume containing the introduction by Hy’s dead wife, and opened it. A slip of paper fell out. The book had been borrowed on November 20.

  The glass that Hy had said smelled of sour mash whiskey caught my attention. I picked it up, smelled the hard-caked residue; a faint odor remained. How long would it retain its smell after the drink was consumed? A week? Maybe. Over two? Doubtful.

  He’d been here. Been here recently. Maybe been here the whole time.

  Before I stepped out of the cabin I took my .38 from the deep pocket of my jacket. A solid weapon, and I was a good shot, but it seemed scant protection against a skilled marksman and hunter like Dunc Stirling. All the advantages were on
his side, including knowing these woods.

  On the narrow porch I paused to look around and listen. The branches and limbs of the trees around the clearing moved in the wind off the frozen lake; shadows were clotted among them. He could be right over there, watching me. He could be aiming a high-powered rifle, lining me up in the crosshairs.…

  Fear made my skin prickle and my heart beat faster. Without half trying I’d succeeded in spooking myself. The adrenaline rush sent me down the steps and around the cabin’s side wall at a trot. There was no whine of a bullet, no boom of a shot, but the trees over here were as dense as the others. He could—

  Drone of a plane in the distance. Suddenly I realized that it was possible Stirling owned another aircraft. I craned my neck around the cabin’s corner, saw it banking on the far side of the lake, turning this way. Ski-plane, the ultimate in escape vehicles for fishermen and hunters wishing to reach isolated camps in winter—but this one might be piloted by a very different kind of hunter.

  I sprinted around the cabin, headed for the large rough-board shed that I knew couldn’t be seen from the air. Under cover of forest I stopped and looked back at the plane. It was light blue, a single-engine two-seater, but I couldn’t identify its make. It circled the clearing, descending.

  I ducked into the shed.

  Pitch-dark in there and cold as a meat locker. The roar of the plane’s engine increased, became deafening; it had to be dangerously low by now. I put my eye to a knothole and tried to spot it, but could see only treetops backlit by the glow of the rising sun.

  The sound of the engine changed abruptly; the pilot had put in power, was climbing. I let out my breath in a sigh of relief; probably sportsmen, wondering if this was the camp they were looking for. Not Dunc Stirling.

  So where was he?

  I slipped my .38 into my pocket and took the flashlight from another. I’d stay inside until the plane gained altitude; no point in being spotted, no matter how innocent its occupants. Shining the beam around, I saw the shed contained shelves of supplies and a makeshift worktable cluttered with tools and hardware, a lantern and a heavy coil of rope. A newish-looking outboard motor sat beneath the table, and—