Winter Study Read online

  Winter outfitters had lightweight high-tech blankets that salvaged body heat and harvested the heat of the sun with the efficiency of a Dune Freman’s stillsuit. The Park Service had an army blanket. Anna wrapped it around her shoulders and lifted out the rest of the cache. The flares and first-aid kit she shoved into her jacket on top of the rude sling of a half-zipped coat. Working one-handed and moving her feet as little as possible, she put one edge of the tarp beneath her boots, then shook it like a bedsheet. The fold of the material billowed four or five feet away from her knees.

  In the short time since Bob had bludgeoned it, her damaged ankle had swollen. This was good. The swelling filled the boot, and the makeshift splint of twigs became more rigid. Anna found she could stand and even walk a bit, at least as well as she had before the more recent topplings and batterings.

  The remaining third of the plastic she draped over the snowmobile, creating a bivouac, with the tarp forming floor and ceiling and the Bearcat the wall. The rude tent would keep her dry and keep out the wind. With luck, and the army blanket, she would still be alive when Ridley got word where she was.

  Anna lowered herself gingerly to hand and knees to wriggle into her den.

  A low, piggish “Ungh!” ground through the sifting silence of the snow. Bears grunted that way. Boars did. On ISRO, the only thing that made that sound was Bob Menechinn.

  The grunting became staccato: “Ungh! Ungh! Ungh!”

  Bob was running or maybe limping; the grunts were from pain, not exertion. Either way, he was up and moving. He was coming after her. Bob was always interested in saving himself. He’d be scared. Maybe he’d leave her alone, leave her to die of “natural causes” as he’d done on the cliff top. Unless he hadn’t come across Katherine’s cell phone with the damning pictures and messages – the one Anna no longer had – then he’d take her apart trying to find it.

  Anna scuttled backward into the trees. She hadn’t time or strength to cover much ground. A couple yards from the sled, she stopped and whipped the snow with the army blanket to help obscure her track. That done, she wormed beneath the low boughs of a spruce tree, pulled her knees up under her chin, spread the army blanket over her head, reached up and shook the bough, bringing down an avalanche of snow on herself. Theoretically, under the dark brown wool and snow, she would look like a rock. Army blankets put high-tech thermal wraps to shame when it came to disguising women as rocks.

  Bob would kill her; he was that much of a rotter. But she was hoping he was too lazy and cowardly to go out of his way to kill her. She was hoping he would try to start the Bearcat, then leave without bothering to look farther than the plastic lean-to.

  Hoping, hoping, hoping.

  Anna stopped that chant before the gay blue fish could swim any further into her mind. Hoping was well and good, but it was better to focus on Plan B in case the hoped-for didn’t manifest.

  The grunts stopped.

  She opened a tiny window in her wall of rough wool. Menechinn was not yet in sight.

  A whuff gusted from up the trail, then regular panting and the crunch of boots on snow.

  Pushing pain and fear out on a soft sigh, Anna stilled herself internally and tried to think rocklike thoughts. Behind the bough of the tree, in the purdah of wool, snow falling thickly, she was nearly blind. For a moment, it panicked her, as if to see was to be in control.

  Poor eyesight is the least of your problems, she mocked herself. She had become as the littlest things in the wilderness. Concealment and cleverness, blending in and putting away acorns for an unseen winter, were the keys to survival. Bunnies and ducklings, chipmunks and sparrows, were not nature’s big risk takers. Anna schooled herself to timidity and hugged her protective coloration around her.

  A black square loomed out of the trees at the switchback. Bob was walking with a list as if gale-force winds buffeted him from the north. Either being bashed by a tree limb or being scraped against rocks had injured his left leg. The imaginary gale let up, and he staggered the other direction for a few steps, then went back to favoring his left side. Head injury or ketamine, or both, was affecting his balance. The goose down sticking out from where his jacket had been torn was a rich true red.

  A nice color, Anna thought. His nose was white and waxy, as were his cheekbones and the tips of his ears. Gone to frostbite. They’d be black in twenty-four hours.

  Black was a nice color too. Anna wanted to be around to watch parts of him fall off in painful and ugly ways.

  “Ungh!” Bob saw the snowmobile in its blue shroud and began to run down the hill, his arms windmilling to keep him from falling. Spittle flew from his mouth and appeared on the snow in spots of red.

  A broken tooth, a split lip, Anna told herself, not wanting to count on massive internal injuries bringing him down anytime soon. Bob braked his downward rush by slamming into the side of the snowmobile. The Bearcat rocked up, showing the tractor treads that powered the sled. Packed with snow, the treads looked like the maw of a beast with many rotting teeth. They bit down again, and the heavy machine creaked with the force. Bob continued to lean on the seat, supported by his arms, hands on the saddle.

  Anna’d forgotten how big he was. His splayed fingers reached across the vinyl seat. His shoulders, rounded and padded, heaved like a walrus’s back when it barks. Liquid ran through his gasps, the gurgling of lungs worked too hard in air too cold to process. The blood on his face had turned dark, forming into lumps that cracked to show the brilliant red of the new blood beneath as his jaws worked, trying to chew more oxygen from the air.

  Drool fell from his lips to the seat and he pawed it up, surprised maybe at how much red was in it. Anna expected him to rip the tarp free, jump on the Bearcat, then go nuts when he didn’t find the key in the ignition. Unless he was blind with desperation, he’d find it in the side where she’d used it to unlock the storage compartment, get back on the snowmobile and go through the whole fit again when he realized it was out of gas.

  Bob did none of these things. Straightening, he looked around him, as if there might be prying eyes from the upstairs unit of the spruce tree next door. With an expression Anna could only describe as crafty, an overblown twisting of his face the way an actor’s playing Fagin in Oliver Twist might when playing to the back row, he tiptoed around the sled. As in the sly moue of a moment before there was an element of exaggeration, of the theatrical, in the way he picked his big feet up, bending the knee, and put them down toe first.

  A terrifying urge to laugh swelled inside Anna’s lungs, a need to howl and guffaw. Partly the long tension, the waiting, but mostly because Menechinn was being funny. Very funny. Adrenaline born of the fear that she would give away her hiding place did nothing to quell the hilarity. Balling her hand into a fist, she punched her boot above the place Bob had so diligently applied the wrench. Searing pain cleansed her of laughter. Nausea and relief took its place, and she began to shake. Her teeth started to chatter uncontrollably, and she shoved the corner of her shirt collar between them lest the clatter call his attention to her. Her body trembled so hard, she could feel her skin touch the fabric of her clothes in a rapid pattern of waves and retreats. Belly and bowels and heart and spleen and liver shook inside of her.

  Holding herself together, teeth clamped on the fleece, she watched Bob finish his half circuit of the sled. In front of the slit she’d been about to crawl through into her plastic lean-to when he’d announced his impending visit in porcine fashion, he stopped. Bending at the waist, he started to peek inside. A better idea came to him before he’d gotten his eye to the proper level. He straightened again, shuffled back three steps, took a running leap and came down, crushing the tarp to the ground. Demons took him then, and he stomped and kicked and jumped till the tarp was ripped free of the sled and mangled in the snow. Nowhere did it stick up more than an inch or so.

  He had meant Anna to be inside.

  He meant to trample her to death.

  That was so rude. It had crossed Anna’s mind that,
at some future date, she would take a moment to feel guilty for all the evils she’d wished upon him. Now, should opportunity present itself, she would gloat. The shaking ebbed. Maybe she was getting better. Maybe that was her body’s last attempt to shiver warmth into her, and her vital organs would start shutting down.

  The fit of violence over, he stood in the ruin of the tarpaulin and looked around him, eyes narrowed against the snow, breath coming in wet gasps. He was so close, Anna could smell the sweat boil off of him. She envied his heat, his ability to move. She wasn’t sure she could move anymore, that, if a time came when it would be safe to stand, she would be able to get up.

  Tilting his huge head back, Bob sniffed the air. Less than three yards separating them, Anna could see his nares expanding and contracting the way a dog’s will when it seeks scent. Fleetingly she wished Katherine’s cell phone hadn’t been responsible for the howls, that a pack of wolves had come to devour her. It would have been more civilized than dealing with Bob Menechinn. What with the killing and maiming and the nearly being killed and actually being maimed, along with the hallucinogenic effects of the ketamine, he had been stripped of the veneer of urbanity he cultivated. Even the coat of arrogance had been taken from him.

  Bob’s inner man was this stomping, sniffing brute, a beast that preyed on women, for whom the physical rape was merely the appetizer. Control by fear and humiliation was the main course. Hate rose from him with the sweat smell, hate and a darker odor. Shame, Anna guessed. Not for what he did; he was proud of that. Shame for not doing it well enough, for letting Anna and who knows what other women see him afraid, for whatever had been done to him that made him what he was, shame that every witness in the world who had seen it was not yet dead.

  Suddenly Anna knew what the wild shaking had been about. She was scared to death of Menechinn. Occasionally there had been those who wanted to kill her. That she could understand. Occasionally there’d been those she’d wished to kill. The difference between her and the people she arrested was that she didn’t do it. Violence was a passing thought, not a way of life. Violent people scared her, but they didn’t terrify her, not like Bob did.

  Bob didn’t merely want her dead. He wanted her, like Katherine and Cynthia and Robin, disgraced, ruined, savaged. He wanted them shamed, their memory shamed and the memory of their deaths in those still living to crush out the life and sow their souls with salt that nothing green could ever grow there again.

  Bob needed to annihilate women.

  Burning holes in his too-fleshy face, his eyes scanned across the bough she sat beneath. They remained dead. He’d not seen her. Turning full circle, he began to whistle “Pop Goes the Weasel” under his breath.

  Anna’d never liked the tune, and she’d never liked jack-in-the boxes. When the clown popped out, she did not squeal with childish delight; she smacked the clown down again.

  Pivoting, he searched the circumference of their shared landscape. Blue tarp twisted beneath his heels and rucked up in a ridge around his boots. The big gloved hands opened and closed at his sides. The eyes passed Anna’s tree again, lower down this time. The shaking started, and she fought it back with the clench of her jaws and the wall of her teeth and will. Another full circle, the volcano neck of blue plastic rose to his knees as he churned the fabric.

  For the third round, he dropped his gaze to the ground. When he faced Anna’s hiding place, his eyes followed the trail she’d not had time to completely erase; they followed it, climbed the branches and bored into the slit in the army blanket that camouflaged her.

  His chin pulled back. The slow, tucked-in smile started, then metastasized.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  35

  “Hi, Bob,” Anna said. By rights, her voice should have been squeaky and high, the voice of a mouse being swooped up out of a meadow by a hawk, but the world-class screaming she’d indulged in trying to run Menechinn down with the sled, then hurtling down the switchbacks, had given it a nice brave, gravelly quality. “You should put a hat on. Your ears and nose are frostbitten. They’ll rot away and leave black holes. Hard to get a date, once the ears and nose go.” She didn’t lower the army blanket. She didn’t even widen the gap through which she looked at him with one eye.

  Bob’s smile pulled another half inch back toward his spine, his eyes momentarily invisible behind the slabs of cheek. Rictus apparently set in; the smile stayed exactly the same as the eyes came back out a fraction, and Anna had the weird feeling that she was watching the thing that was Bob Menechinn, the thing that wasn’t human at all, peeking out from under the rock of his brow bone.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you if you make a face, it will freeze like that?” Anna snapped to make the thing go back inside Bob’s skull.

  “Did your mother ever tell you you’re a fucking cunt?” he asked with the same razor-edged merriment he’d used with Katherine.

  He had to be in pain. His brain had to be crashing from the cat tranquilizer. The parts of him that weren’t past feeling the cold must ache with it. Still, it was clear he was beginning to enjoy himself.

  Tucking her chin against her chest so the blanket wouldn’t fall, Anna loosened her fingers where they clutched the rough wool over her face and let her hand slide slowly down her chest till it rested on top of the arm dislocated at the shoulder. “No,” she said. “‘Fucking cunt’ doesn’t ring any bells. Once in a while she called me ‘knucklehead,’ but I think she meant it in a loving way.”

  Bob seemed to suck her words through the screen of spruce needles and into his nose. Against the gray static of snow and clouds, his head was enormous, and Anna believed she saw it swell when her words were vacuumed into his brain. It bobbed, balloonlike, and she had to remind herself to stay in her skin, stay alert, when what she most wanted to do was close her eyes and let it all be a dream.

  “What did Katherine say?” Anna asked conversationally. “The night she died, she called you. What did she say?”

  “You think if you keep me talking long enough, somebody will come and rescue you?” Bob put his hands on his knees and bent forward, the better to peer into her hiding place. “They won’t. The girl never gets rescued. Nobody fucking cares about you – any of you.”

  “That has crossed my mind a time or two,” Anna admitted. The blanket started to fall away from her head and face. She clamped her chin down more tightly to hold it in place.

  “Aaaaw,” Bob crooned. “You’re all shy and virginal now, got your blankie covering your face? Gonna hide under the covers?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Hiding under the covers never fails. Monsters can’t find you under the covers. What did Katherine say when she called you?”

  “She said, ‘Anna Pigeon is a cunt.’ Nobody likes you, Danger Ranger.”

  “It seems we have something in common after all,” Anna said.

  “What did she say after the cunt proclamation?” A searing flare of agony fired her shoulder as she moved her damaged arm. Pride touched through the pain when she did not let her hurts show, not in her voice, not in any untoward disturbance of the blanket covering her from head to toe. The story of the Spartan boy, the stolen fox held tight to his middle, showing such stoicism the guard questioning him never suspected until the fox had eaten so far into the boy’s innards that the kid died on his feet, flickered in her mind. Anna wished the story had ended better. The guard adopting the little boy; fox and the lad becoming fast friends, chasing goats together through the Grecian hills; maybe the fox saving little Timmy Tchopotoulis from some Greek variation of a well.

  “Bobby,” she said in her sharpest schoolmarm voice. “Tell me what Katherine said or you’ll be in big trouble.”

  Bob blinked twice, his face lost all tension as if she’d slapped him. “She thought she’d broken her ankle,” he said quickly.

  “And?”

  Bob was stoned and traumatized and a wretched excuse for a man, but he wasn’t stupid. Two more blinks and he dragged himself out of whatever place An
na’s authoritarian voice had taken him.

  “Why do women ask so many questions?” he asked, his terrifying bonhomie back in place.

  “For the sheer joy of hearing men talk,” Anna replied. Wrestling with her metaphorical fox, she accidentally dislodged the blanket and it began to slip away from her face. “What else did Katherine say?” she managed before she caught it and held it between her teeth. Half her face was exposed, and the overwhelming relief startled her. Maybe women had to be raised in burkas before they could seem like protection instead of prison. The wool tasted of motor oil and its coarse fuzz drew the moisture from her mouth.

  Bob shook his head from side to side as if trying to clear it. His hands slid from his knees up his thighs as he pushed himself upright. He was tiring of the game. Anna wondered how Scheherezade had managed to keep her train of thought going a thousand and one nights when a misstep meant her death.

  She unclenched her teeth. The blanket slid a couple of inches down her chest but didn’t fall off of her shoulders. The cold felt clean and good on her neck. “Katherine thought you’d killed the wolf, shot it with a tranquilizer, then cut its throat,” she said, desperate to put off whatever was coming for another minute. “She figured you for the kind of guy who liked other people out cold, didn’t have the balls to deal with the conscious – woman or wolf. At least that’s what she said to me. ‘Everything’s big about Bob but his heart and his cock,’ I think she said. Yeah, that was it, verbatim. Shrinkage: cold heart, shriveled cock. Makes sense, you know. Based in language: cockles of the heart, warm the cockles, cock-” Anna was babbling, but she was doing so in such a reasonable tone of voice that for half a moment she listened to what she was saying, thinking it might actually make sense.

  “I told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody, you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and laughed.