There was no visible road. The only sign of any activity was a light, faint in the distance, appearing and disappearing as the snow gusted.
Charlie drove, Flynn navigated with the handheld GPS that was part of each equipment pack.
“He has a team,” Flynn said to Diana. “You indicated that.”
“Has to. At least one accomplice, probably more.”
They came out onto a plowed road. Now there were more lights, a snow-clad Motel 6 sign, beyond it a place called The Swashbuckler, a bar of the kind that grew like mushrooms in little places like Ridge, one mushroom per town. Inside, there’d be a bartender and a waitress snapping gum, in the back a cook. Along with the customers, they would have grown up here. In small towns, everybody had everything on everybody. Bitter places. Could also be murderous, especially on hard winter nights when you couldn’t escape from those you loved and despised.
They pulled up at a big tin structure lit by a barely visible sign: “Rosen Surplus.”
He got out and pushed his way into the store, which turned out to be cave-like. There was an elderly woman with a tight gray bun sitting in a chair in front of rows of surplus fatigues. Hunter stuff.
“I need some warm clothes,” Flynn said.
The old woman looked up at him. “You sure do,” she said. Her face blossomed into a big, open smile. “Where’d you come from in that stuff, anyway?”
“Nowhere close by.”
She didn’t inquire further. She was too old to be curious about strangers anymore. She wanted his money, not his story.
“We got parkas on sale, thirty-six bucks. US Army mountain gear. Good stuff.”
He bought a parka, found a pair of boots that almost fit, some lined gloves, a hat, and an olive drab scarf that knew the services of moths. She showed him a dressing room behind a curtain where he put on two pairs of long johns and the rest of the clothes.
“Now you might live a while,” she said when he came out.
“Let’s hope.” He paid her a hundred and sixty bucks in cash and got a receipt for his expenses.
It was warm in the Jeep. Nobody spoke. Charlie backed out into the snow-swept street.
Flynn could feel the mission closing in. The absolute silence in the truck told him that these people sensed a whole lot of danger. Not sensed, knew. They knew that they were in great danger.
They drove off into a rampage of snow.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Louie was stationed a hundred yards away from Flynn, but he might as well have been in another state for all the good it did in this hell. The others were on the far side of the Hoffman house. The storm had come on even stronger than the Billings weatherman had said it would, and the snow rushed in the sky, pelting Flynn’s parka and hood and working its way in under his scarf.
They’d been watching the house now since seven fifteen, and it was pushing nine o’clock. It was an excellent night for a perp who suspected he was under observation to make a move.
He had proven, however, that he could take them any time of year, from any kind of a dwelling, and never leave a trace of himself behind.
Off to his right, Flynn heard a distinct sound. A throaty growl.
It came again, and this time he thought maybe it was a tree scraping. Or could it be a car on the road, its engine straining?
The wind roared around him and the cold invaded his sleeves, the seam of the hood, anywhere it could get in, and that was pretty much everywhere. The scarf was a joke, the socks were a joke. The boots were waterproof, but no boots could keep out cold like this. It made him worry that he wasn’t feeling enough pain from his feet, it numbed his hands and made his face burn.
When it comes to cold, after the pain ends is when death begins, and it is a line you can cross without ever knowing it.
The Hoffman place was a prairie Victorian with lighted windows downstairs, looking as warm and inviting as it could be. From time to time, he caught a whiff of oil smoke from what had to be a blazing furnace. In the living room, he could see a fire flickering in the fireplace, and that smoke would drift this way, too. Professor Hoffman, Gail’s father, sat in a wing chair before the fire, from time to time sipping at a mug that stood on a small table beside him.
Gail was cleaning up in the kitchen, moving elegantly about, her long arms putting away dishes. Girl-perfect, she reminded him powerfully of Abby.
Flynn was a snow-covered bulge in the earth and that was good. He was well concealed from the road, and the snow would insulate him a little. From time to time, he raised a stealthy, gloved hand and blew into it to warm his nose and face. He rocked from side to side, dipped his knees a little, keeping moving just enough to avoid becoming stiff.
If they weren’t properly cleaned and oiled, guns could freeze solid in weather like this, even in your pocket. So he gripped his pistol. He also tried the MindRay. Once, he might have picked up a signal from the direction of the house. Another time he might have detected Louis. Out here, though, the display that had been clear and steady in the hangar flickered and changed so quickly that it meant, essentially, nothing. He was sure now that the thing was high-tech junk. Maybe the Rangers trusted it and maybe they didn’t. He didn’t.
He also tried the beautifully compact night vision equipment, only to find that the snow made it crazy. All he saw were flashes. He would’ve been better off bringing his own homemade scope.
He kept old-fashioned naked eye watch and nursed his Glock.
About fifteen minutes later, the living room went dark, then a front bedroom lit up. Professor Hoffman was heading up to bed at nine twenty-five.
Flynn had about decided to make an approach. As far as he knew, the Hoffmans didn’t even know they were being staked out, and that was ridiculous. Also, the decision not to involve the local police was wrong, especially when the reason given was to protect the secret status of a piece of equipment that belonged in the garbage. The whole plan was borderline incompetent.
Flynn’s worry was that the perp was already in the Hoffman’s lives, someone they had come to trust. Was that how he worked—he was the grocery clerk, the night man at the convenience store, getting under the skin of the vic so skillfully that there was never a flicker of suspicion?
He shook the snow off and started toward the house, but there was motion to his right, at about one o’clock. Something low and big. A car? No, impossible off the road in this snow. Anyway, it was living movement, stealthy and low to the ground.
Almost on its own, his gun came out. He stayed where he was, though. Don’t move until you understand.
A minute passed, then another.
This perp had once taken a forty-year-old woman who’d weighed two hundred pounds out of a farmhouse in Oregon on a rain-soaked night and left not even a footprint. He had taken mothers from shopping mall parking lots, fathers from backyard barbecues, nurses from their rounds, priests from their rectories.
He had killed them all, Flynn believed. Of course he had, killed them without remorse, lost as he was in whatever fantasy drove him.
Now there was another sound. What the hell was that? Something tinkling.
No, it was music. It floated like a spirit on the storm. There were windows downstairs with drawn curtains, and he thought that was where the music was coming from. It stopped, then started again. Soaring out above the roar of the storm, the hiss of the snow. Dear God, she could play that piano. What was it? Beethoven, maybe? Beautiful, anyway.
Rocking from side to side, checking his feet, blowing into his hands, Flynn began pressing forward again.
Another sound came, this time to his left. This was a very strange sound, a muffled sort of whistling. It went on and on, this sound, a kind of noiseless screaming.
Finally, it ended and did not repeat. The music swelled and the wind moaned in the eaves of the old house. Low clouds plunged out of the north. The only light was from the house and the glowing snow.
He was going down to that house and he was going to announce himself to t
hose people. He was well under way, slogging through drifts as deep as six feet, when he observed the moving shape again. It came from the right this time, and therefore had crossed his field of vision without him seeing it. So there must be a low area between him and the house, probably the snow-covered road. But it wouldn’t offer more than a couple of feet of protection, so whatever that was out there, it wasn’t a man.
He called on the reserves of inner silence that twenty years of intensive martial arts training had given him. “All things come to him who waits.” The defender has the advantage, always.
He watched as the wind picked up a long stream of snow and blew it off into the darkness. The eaves of the house wailed, the music swelled, and bright scars of moonlight whipped across the desert of snow. Behind the storm would come brutal cold and behind that, they said, another storm.
The moonlight revealed a low form with a long back and tail—an animal. The instant the light hit it, it became so still that many people wouldn’t have noticed it. A moment later, though, darkness engulfed the shaft of moonlight, and the animal with it. He fought to control his breathing, fought to stay where he was and not follow the flight-or-fight instinct, which was telling him to get the hell out of here.
He tried the night vision goggles. They hadn’t been adjusted to work in snow.
Activate the radio, then? No. The others were all armed professionals, too, and a single spatter of communication could cause the perp to pull out—assuming, of course, that he was here.
The house was still dark. When the moon broke out of the clouds, it stood still and silent. Were they asleep? Could they sleep? He could see an LED in there, glowing red in the downstairs hall. They had an alarm system. Certainly guns, too. So they probably felt safe.
The snow was now coming down in long, howling flurries punctuated by periods of driving wind. He waited, his hands clutching his gun. He’d stuffed the MindRay into his backpack. The equally useless night vision binoculars hung around his neck.
He was peering into the dark and thinking about trying them again when the moon appeared and he found himself looking into the face of a goddamn puma, which was not ten feet in front of him.
He gasped, choking back a shout of alarm.
How in the world had it gotten this close this fast? A certainty: it was the master of conditions like this. A possibility: it saw him as prey.
The eyes were steady. They were careful. To his amazement, they followed his stealthy movement to his pistol. Since when did pumas understand pistols? But this one sure did.
He wished that he had an Anaconda or a Model 29, because it was going to take some accurate shooting with the Glock to stop this creature if it charged from this close. Worse, it was a Glock Nineteen and not an Eighteen with its greater capacity and automatic fire option. He needed a perfect head shot or the animal would still be very much alive when it connected with him.
Carefully, he tightened his hand around the pistol and began to pull it up into firing position. If the animal leaped before the gun was aimed, he was going to be torn to pieces.
Its eyes shifted to his face, then back to the rising pistol, which was uncanny. How smart could it be?
It pulled its shoulders forward. It was about to leap. But then there was a slight hesitancy.
The eyes—so steady, so alien—returned to his face. In the stare Flynn could see a raw lust to kill. But then they flickered again, and in the next instant the animal was gone. He had gotten the gun into position just in time, and it had clearly understood that it had been outmaneuvered.
Amazing. He’d never seen anything like it. No animal was that smart.
The puma’s tracks faded into the snow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Louie was approximately two hundred yards to his right, covering the house from an angle that gave him a different view. Flynn wanted to warn him on the radio, but he didn’t want to be the one to blow this mission, misconceived though it was. He had to warn the guy, though, so he’d go over there. This would leave the house uncovered from this angle for a few minutes, but it had to be done. It was one damn smart cat, and the guy needed to know this.
The piano had started again, the music slipping and sliding in the wind. Abby, also, had played. His dad had played. He’d tried to learn, but he hadn’t inherited that gene. What he could do well with his hands was shoot. He could turn even an old snub-nosed Police Special into a useful weapon. A good pistol felt like an extension of his hand. Any pistol, for that matter.
Pushing through the snow, he was tempted to call Louie’s name, but even that might destroy the stakeout. Many a cop had wrecked a good collar with an ill-timed whisper.
He was sweating under his layers of clothing when he began to ask himself if he’d gone in the right direction. But he had, no question. So where was Louie?
The snow seemed less, so he tried the night vision goggles again. He could see a little better, but they didn’t reveal Louie ahead. Instead, what Flynn saw was a strange, formless shape in the snow.
Was that a rock? A gnarled bush?
He tried working with the goggles, increasing the magnification.
The material was jagged, gleaming darkly. He still couldn’t tell what it was.
Another patch of moon glow sped by. In it, he could make out a pale ripped edge protruding from the shape. Bone, maybe? If so, then that was a chunk of something the lion had just killed—a deer, hopefully.
As a precaution, he got his pistol back out and held it alongside his parka. If that was a kill, then the lion was protecting it, and that’s why it was hanging around.
As he crunched along, he stepped on something just beneath the frozen surface. It was hard and irregular and it shifted under his foot.
He bent down and pushed away the snow.
What first appeared was a pallid slickness. He kept brushing. Something just below it, hard tufts of material. Frozen hair, he thought. So this was a kill and that was why the puma had menaced him. It had been worried about having its food stolen.
It took all of his training not to cry out when he found the staring eyes and gaping mouth of Louis Hancock looking back at him. The eyes flashed with moonlight when there were rips in the clouds.
The guy had been taken down by the mountain lion, which was about the damnedest thing Flynn could imagine happening. As he pushed more snow away, he discovered that Louie had been hit from behind and thrown forward, then—incredibly—ripped in half.
The legs and abdomen were nearby, a knee and booted foot jutting up from the snow. So the lion must be big. Huge.
This stakeout was over. He reached up and pressed the call button on his radio. “There’s been an accident. Detective Hancock is dead. Come in, please.”
Silence.
“I repeat, Louis Hancock has been killed, apparently by a mountain lion. We need to close this thing down, we have a dead officer here.”
Silence.
He was coming to really not like these people. “You can’t continue the stakeout, you have a dead officer! I repeat, dead officer!”
The hell with it, he’d go in himself. He’d been on his way anyway, interrupted by this horror show. He went plunging toward the house.
The going was extremely hard, and he had to fight his way through some flurries so high that he was forced to lie forward and push himself ahead.
Every time he was forced to do this, he was very, very aware that he was entirely helpless.
He moved slowly, guided by the music. There were no lights showing in the house. When he finally stumbled out into the road, the going was a little easier, but not much. The house loomed ahead of him, tall and completely dark except for a single strip of light leaking from around the curtains of the room where Gail Hoffman was playing.
He was going up the snow-choked front walk when he saw the lion again. It was standing on the porch, back around the far edge, where it curved around under the living room windows. It was absolutely still, and it was watching him.
/> Once again, it had maneuvered brilliantly. He thought to back off, but any movement whatsoever was going to be a major risk. The animal could react a whole lot faster than he could. Certainly, trying to turn around and run would get it on him in an instant.
The puma was not protecting its kill. It was still hunting, and he was its quarry.
He calculated its distance from him at fifteen feet.
Its eyes were as still as glass. If the nostrils hadn’t dilated slightly as it breathed, it would have appeared frozen. The jaw hung slightly open, the enormous incisors visible.
Was that the face of a mountain lion? He didn’t know enough about big cats to tell, but it seemed somewhat longer and narrower. He decided that his best move was to edge in close enough to guarantee a fatal head shot. With luck, it wouldn’t react in time.
Another step, then another, as he slowly came up out of the snow and into the compact front garden. Gail played on. The lion watched him.
He saw its eyes close for a moment, then come open again. The message conveyed was clear and it was shocking: the animal was so sure of itself that it was bored.
Again he stopped, because he had understood why. The game was already over. It had been since before he’d started his maneuver. The animal was waiting for him to realize that he was caught. No matter what he did, it was going to make its move while he was still too far away for a reliable shot.
Bored did not mean careless. The face remained a picture of attentive patience.
He noticed a flickering light in the sky. Lightning, he thought, which would mean that the blizzard was about to intensify. Could that help him? Would a really powerful flurry give him a chance to return to the road, perhaps to make his escape?
Then he heard a noise even more inexplicable than the earlier one, which had obviously been Louie’s death whistle. This was a whispering sound overhead, a big, rhythmic whisper of wind, too regular to be part of the storm. As he listened, it slowed and then settled, dropping down behind the house.