The first guy, bleeding heavily, the Remington lying at his feet, staggers toward the window and slides back the door to the balcony.
Behind him, Thurston hears noises as the few guests at the motel begin to stir. He runs forward and kicks the man straight over the edge of the balcony rail.
Back in the room, Thurston drops the nail gun and scoops up the Remington and the second guy’s SIG Sauer before moving into the corridor. A woman in a bathrobe peers out at him through a crack in her door.
“Call the police!” says Thurston. She disappears. Somebody else appears at the end of the corridor.
“Get back!” shouts Thurston and the guy vanishes.
Thurston looks down and turns Terri over. She’s taken a shot to the side of the face—one of the strays from the Remington.
“Shit,” says Thurston and lowers her to the carpet.
He runs into 207, collects what little he has, and goes back into 205. He closes the door and moves to the balcony. There’s no sign of the man who fell, but a thick trail of blood leads across the parking lot. Thurston jumps and hits the snow hard. Without looking back he follows the blood trail around a corner.
The man is slumped on his back in the snow. He has his hand to his throat and is trying hard to stop the blood. He makes small gurgling sounds and his eyes are wide.
Thurston takes a step forward and puts a single round into the wounded man’s head, not sure if he’s doing it through kindness or hate. The body sinks back into a snowdrift.
The Jeep is only five meters away.
Thurston stows the guns and crossbow in the passenger footwell and opens the driver’s door. He pauses on the threshold before stepping back and returning to the dead man. Taking care not to step in the blood, Thurston drags the dead man toward the Jeep and bundles him up and over the tailgate.
He’s going to send Miller a reply.
Chapter 47
Miller’s phone vibrates around five in the morning.
He’s awake already, wired from too much coke, looking at his laptop. Mercy’s asleep, her bruised back turned to Miller. He’d been rough with her earlier, maybe got carried away, but she seems fine now. They’re resilient at that age, Miller has found. He glances at the screen expecting to see Viktor’s number.
Instead, it’s Riggs.
“Okay,” says Miller when he answers.
“I don’t know what was supposed to happen down here, Nate, but it sure don’t look like it worked out.” Riggs is whispering and Miller can hear talking in the background. “Wait a minute.”
Miller hears Riggs’s muffled voice talking to someone else and then he’s back.
“We got three dead. Two I think you might know. Foreigners.”
“Easy,” says Miller, reminding Riggs to be careful. No names.
“Yeah, okay,” says Riggs. “The woman? Y’know? Terri? She got half her face blown off. They think it was accidental, like.”
“They?”
“Well here’s the thing of it. There’s state cops here. Someone at the motel is an off-duty cop. Up here banging his girlfriend. Y’know, somewheres nice and quiet.” Riggs pauses. “Anyway, this guy, Slater, works Robbery/Homicide out of Boston Southside and recognized one of the, uh, foreigners. Called his boss and next thing you know we’re knee deep in city badges.”
“Isn’t this your town?”
“I tried that,” says Riggs, “and they said all the right things and so forth—don’t wanna step on your toes, jurisdiction, blah blah blah, but bottom line? They ain’t shiftin’. They’re gonna be doing some digging so I hope the trail don’t follow back to—”
“Shut the fuck up,” barks Miller. “There’s nothing traceable. Quit panicking and let them take it back to Boston. A few days and they’ll be chasing…the visitor. And if that doesn’t happen we got some pull down there as insurance.”
“Listen,” says Riggs after a pause. “There’s more. We have one big guy with a crossbow bolt through his eye.”
“Okay,” says Miller, thinking crossbow?
“And a smaller dude dead in the bedroom.”
Riggs pauses. “He’d been shot with a nail gun. Once in the balls and then in the top of his head.”
“Christ Almighty,” says Miller.
“And the last guy? The other guy from Boston?” says Riggs. “Looks like our ‘visitor’ took him. We got a blood trail leading across the parking lot and a wit who says she saw a body getting bundled into the back of a car. Said it sort of looked like he was, and I’m quoting here, like he was ‘taking a trophy.’”
“A trophy? What the fuck?”
“All I’m doing is passing it along.” Riggs pauses. “I don’t think this guy is going to be leaving town. I know you guys are, y’know, capable and all but I’d still be careful up there. I think he’s coming for you. I think you pissed him off.”
Miller hangs up and looks at his reflection staring back at him from the black window.
A trophy?
Chapter 48
There’s a storm coming—a bigger one.
Miller can see it in the sky and feel it in his gut. A kind of steel creeps into the already freezing air. The fog lifts slowly to reveal ugly slabs of black cloud crawling across the ridge from the west, like a sheet being drawn over a body in the morgue.
He gets his main guys together in the kitchen at the main house—the Axe, Donno, Carver, and Tannhauser—and brings them up to speed on Delamenko’s clusterfuck in Talbot.
“Fuckin’ Russians,” says the Axe. “We shouldn’ta brung them in, Nate.”
“Noted, genius,” says Miller. He holds his hands up. “I admit it, I fucked up. Should’ve kept this in-house, like. So we won’t say no more about it, okay? Here’s what’s going to happen. If this guy comes near this place I want him killed. Nothing fancy, just shoot the motherfucker. I underestimated him. That’s not going to happen again. Donno, roust a few of your crew up outta their La-Z-Boys, okay? Get ’em out here now. Same with you, Carver, Tann. All hands on deck. We—”
The kitchen door opens and one of Tannhauser’s crew comes in. Seeing Miller’s face, he holds up his hands in apology.
“Sorry, Mr. Miller, but, but…”
Tannhauser slams a palm on the table. “Spit it out, Frankie, fer Chrissakes!”
Frankie points to the door. “You got to see this.”
“What are we looking at?” says Miller.
He is standing in the middle of a group of men gathered around a pine tree that has a tarpaulin wrapped around its base.
One of his crew unties a couple of ropes and pulls the tarp free.
Miller coughs and takes a step back. He spits into the snow. “Holy fuck.”
Viktor Delamenko has been crucified. There’s no other word for it. His back lies against the trunk of a giant pine, each hand nailed to a branch on either side. He is naked and a trail of red spots can be clearly seen arcing across his chest. Here and there the light glints on a nail head standing clear of his flesh. He’s been shot once in the head through his eye.
“Jesus Christ,” whispers someone behind Miller and he whips around to see if it’s a joke but the guy realizes what he’s said and holds up a hand.
“How long’s he been here?” says Miller.
They are at the junction off the highway that leads to the compound.
Tannhauser’s guy Frankie, the one who’d brought the news, steps forward.
“Micky saw him about thirty minutes ago on his way in.” Tannhauser’s guy breaks off to point to a guy in his crew. “Micky figured he’d best cover him up—case anyone spotted him, like.”
“Yeah, good,” says Miller. He turns away from Delamenko. “Get him down. Get rid of him somewhere far away. He’s never been here.”
Tannhauser nods. Micky steps forward with a claw hammer and starts digging the nails out of Delamenko’s hands. Miller watches for a few seconds, his expression unreadable. Then he walks toward his truck. He’s at the door when he hears a shout. H
e turns to see Tannhauser looking closely at something on the trunk of the pine.
“Hey, Nate,” says Tannhauser. “Check this out.”
Miller steps over Delamenko’s body and sees the word “CHENOO” has been carved into the wood. Blood from Delamenko’s wounds has seeped into the grooves.
“Chenoo. What the fuck does that mean?”
Tannhauser shrugs. He turns to the group. “Anyone?”
One of Carver’s boys gets out his phone.
“You fuckin’ googling this?” says Miller.
The guy looks at Miller and hesitates. “Uh, yeah.”
“Good idea,” growls Miller. “How come none of the rest of you dumb shits thoughta that?”
He’s not expecting an answer and none comes.
“It’s, uh, Indian,” says the guy looking at his phone. “Like Red Indian. Native American.”
“What’s it mean?” says Miller.
The guy looks up. “Says here the Chenoo is a human whose heart’s been turned into ice. Chenoos are cannibals from the north. Once someone’s become, uh, a Chenoo, the only escape is death.”
“Fuckin’ crock,” says Miller. He points into the forest. “Carver, get our four best hunters ready and bazookaed up. Huntin’ season is officially open. First man to bag this fuckin’ ‘Chenoo’ gets a fifty grand finder’s fee. I want this bastard gutted and hung up to rot out here.”
Miller walks back to his truck with Anders. They get in and spin around toward the compound. As soon as he’s out of sight of the men, Miller punches the dash hard five or six times. When he’s done, he stops, breathing heavily. He glances in his rearview and slams on the brakes, and turns in his seat to look over his shoulder at a single word traced into the ice on the rear window of the truck.
Chenoo.
Chapter 49
Slithering back into his position in the snow-covered trees across the highway, Thurston picks up his binoculars to see the guy in front of Delamenko looking at his phone. Thurston knows the dude is looking up the word “Chenoo,” exactly like Thurston had done earlier.
Thurston knows zip about Native American myths but wanted something spooky sounding to unsettle Miller’s crew. Writing the word on Miller’s truck had been showy—and risky—but Thurston doesn’t care. It was worth it just to think about Miller’s face.
Thurston could have taken Nate Miller out with the Remington he’d picked up in the motel—shit, at this distance he’d fancy his chances of hitting him with the crossbow. But after seeing Terri lying dead in the corridor Thurston’s coming at this thing with a new intensity. He’s already in the frame for the murders of Sofi and Barb back in London so he’s pretty sure he’s going to be targeted for the deaths at the Top o’ the Lake Motel last night. All of which means Cody Thurston is no longer content to kill Nate Miller.
Thurston’s going to bring it all down.
Chapter 50
The four guys Carver sends into the forest are hard-core hunters. Like Thurston, they are ex-service and all, bar one, are Northeasterners born and bred. They know every inch of these woods.
That afternoon, Thurston contents himself with observing. He establishes three vantage points dotted around a sloping ridge. Each of these vantage points is placed high in the branches of a tree and Thurston lays a trail to bring the hunters to him. Nothing too obvious. A broken branch here, some footprints in soft snow there.
It works.
To a point.
After an hour the first of the hunters comes into view. He’s moving cautiously on a diagonal across the ridge. If Thurston hadn’t been extremely vigilant he’d never have spotted him.
Thurston slides the crossbow into position and tracks the hunter’s cautious path waiting for the moment. He sees a patch of open ground between two trees. There.
Thurston waits.
As the hunter gets to the open ground he stops, just as Thurston expects. The guy knows this section might leave him temporarily exposed. What he should do is work his way back down the ridge and then edge back up through the tree cover some eighty yards away.
He doesn’t.
Thurston’s finger tightens on the crossbow trigger and he gets ready to put a bolt in the guy’s head the second he appears in the open.
Any second now…
Thurston stops.
From everything he’s seen, these guys are good. Perhaps as good as Thurston.
So why is this dude exposing his position? Why is he taking the risk?
Suddenly Thurston realizes what’s happening. This guy is bait. They are waiting for Thurston to reveal his position. The hunter becomes the hunted.
Smart move, thinks Thurston.
He leans back against the trunk of the tree and waits.
Snow is falling heavily now, drifting down from the steel sky in fat flakes. Inside the forest, the snow-padded silence becomes tangible, the forest a white cathedral. Any noise here will sound like a thunderclap.
So Thurston waits some more.
The temperature keeps falling and he’s glad of the extra precautions he’d taken with his clothing. He’s guessing the hunters, though well-equipped, won’t have prepared as thoroughly as he has. They are local. They know there are warm beds and food no more than an hour from here on foot. They won’t be willing to wait it out as long.
Thurston’s betting his life on it.
Chapter 51
It takes almost forty minutes.
And then Thurston hears the soft crack of a twig underfoot coming from his left, and much closer than he’d imagined. He swivels his eyes and catches a trace of white vapor rising from a low snow bank about thirty yards behind his position.
These guys have been closing in. He’d been right to wait. A shot when he’d seen the first hunter would have resulted in him being trapped. All they’d have to do would be to wait it out or shoot him straight out of the tree.
Carefully Thurston takes his cell phone from his pocket and presses a single digit he’d programmed earlier.
Some hundred meters to his south comes the incongruous muffled sound of a ringtone: Delamenko’s cell placed in the crook of a tree and wrapped inside a knit cap.
Immediately all four hunters move toward the sound. They move more quickly than is advisable, keen to track the ringtone before it gives out. As they edge away from his position, Thurston silently drops to the forest floor.
Chapter 52
“Son of a bitch.”
Kane, the first of the hunters to get to the phone, holds it up as Palmer and Schmidt arrive.
Palmer grabs Kane’s sleeve and pulls him low to the ground.
“Jesus, man,” he hisses. “Why the fuck you think the phone’s there? You want to get us killed?”
Kane’s experienced enough to know he’s fucked up. A pro, he doesn’t get into an argument with Palmer. The guy’s right. Thurston’s drawn them out. They’re exposed. The three of them crawl to the bole of a big pine with two protruding protective branches. From here there is only one firing line. Unless Thurston’s dead ahead, this will work as protection.
“Where’s O’Hara?” says Palmer.
Chapter 53
Danny O’Hara’s an Arizona boy.
He cops plenty of flak on that, mainly about how he can’t handle the cold up here. Guys handing him sun lotion, that kind of shit.
But O’Hara was raised in northern Arizona, up in Williams where it gets plenty cold in winter. And he’s more cautious than the locals. You don’t get to survive six tours of duty in some of the most fucked-up places on the planet without learning a thing or two. The others on this hunt are pros but they’ve let themselves get caught up in the chase. As soon as the phone rang they were off like dogs catching the scent. O’Hara, too, at first before he’d stopped and thought some.
This was a trap. This Thurston guy? From what O’Hara had seen, he’s solid. Dangerous.
When the phone stops ringing, O’Hara wonders if the others are already dead. He listens intently, straining,
but Danny O’Hara hears nothing, not even the sound of Cody Thurston reaching around and cutting his throat in one swift, silent movement.
Chapter 54
Palmer switches to night vision goggles as darkness closes in. It turns the snow-covered forest a ghostly, milky green. Fifty yards to Palmer’s left, Kane does likewise. Fifty back, Schmidt is bringing up point, the three hunters making an open-faced triangle. They move slowly, deliberately. The phone thing has rattled them, exposed them, but that’s forgotten now.
The key for the hunters is to use their local knowledge against Thurston. With the storm worsening there are only so many places Thurston can go. A steep ravine lies to the east. In these conditions it is impassable. To the west is a scrabble of mud and weeds: a flatland area that runs about two miles from the fire trail to Lake Carlson. Even in winter it is not possible to cross.
The phone may have been a plan to draw out the hunters but—from the information they have—Thurston has made an error, trapping himself in a relatively narrow corridor leading back toward White Nation and Lake Carlson. This formation is a net in which to catch Thurston.
After ten minutes, Palmer passes a fallen pine that could make a likely spot for Thurston to mount an attack. He approaches cautiously and sees O’Hara sprawled facedown in the snow, the blood spray from his cut throat showing almost black in the night vision goggles. In the second or two it takes for Palmer to register O’Hara, Thurston pulls back the white waterproof under which he’d been waiting and puts a crossbow bolt into the back of Palmer’s head. The hunter slumps forward and lands arched across the fallen pine.
Thurston doesn’t wait. Sliding his night vision goggles onto his forehead he turns and, moving quickly, crosses a stand of trees to emerge close to Kane on the other side of the hunter’s “triangle.” Kane sees Thurston and raises his rifle.