The robe was getting heavier with snow melting into the wool. It made her arms feel like lead. She wanted to take the robe off. She knew that was wrong. Daddy told her once, when the weather got colder than she was ever used to down in Alabama, that wool will keep you warm even when it’s wet.
“That’s why sheep don’t stand under trees when it rains like cows do,” he told her.
She told him that was funny.
“Then you’ll remember it. Gunny always says that if something is funny you’ll always remember it,” Daddy said.
Daddy also told her once about the Wall of Pain. It was something athletes and soldiers faced. It was your body telling you to quit. Your brain telling you that you were pushing too hard. Your muscles screaming for you to stop. He told her that the wall wasn’t really a wall. It was a gateway. And once you were through it the pain melted away and your muscles flooded with blood and your brain with a chemical that made you feel like it was your birthday and Christmas all in one. All you had to do was push for that gate to a world of euphoria on the other side.
Merry dug and pushed for the wall. She only hoped it came soon. She only hoped she reached it before the woman behind her could.
The gradual curve bottomed out into the long flat stretch of road she recalled. Maybe it was the knowledge that her goal was close or maybe she passed through the gateway of pain, her legs and arms felt lighter. Merry dropped into an easy rhythm, making good time through the trees that were sending sprays of mist down on her from branches whipped by the high gusts howling above.
Beyond enclosing ramparts of pine and elder ahead there was a glow. A dawn light that grew in intensity as she pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled. It was the pole lights outside the market. As she poled along the glow turned the branches and boles of the trees black before her.
Merry turned her head to look back the way she’d come. A tiny shape was visible against the white surface of the roadway. The woman was just coming off the apron of the curve onto the straight run. She had either fallen behind or Merry was the better on skis or, perhaps, the Wall of Pain was too much for her pursuer to get over.
Merry kicked a leg out at the end of the straight run and made the herringbone turn onto the broader span of the county road. Violent gusts tore down the north-south run of the road making snow devils over the washboard surface carved out by the wind.
The going was tougher here out of the cover of the trees. She bent into the squall, lifting her feet so the skis could clear the marching drifts. Merry leaned on the poles for support. The wind was racing down the county road like it was fed into a funnel and she fighting her way up in the barrel. Icy pellets the size of BBs slapped her cheeks raw. She turned her face away.
Her pace slowed to a crawl. Head lowered, she looked up from under her brows. The pole lamps shuddered and waggled in the wind. Their twin glows were cast through the loops of hanging electrical wires throwing a quivering lace of shadows over the road.
Merry bent to undo the latches on the skis and pull her boots free. As she hoped and prayed, the snow on the road was a layer of soft powder over hard pack. She could make better time at an open run, hopping the high drifts. She was soon under the joined pools of light from the lamps dancing atop the swaying poles. Merry raced past the gas pump for the front door of the market. She turned as she did so to see a dark shape against the greater gloom out on the roadway.
The woman was moments from reaching her. She saw the shape seem to shrink. The woman was crouching, undoing her skis the way Merry had.
The sign hanging inside the thick glass of the doorway read: CLOSED UNTIL. Below the block letters was a picture of a clock. The hands were broken off.
Merry pounded on the glass and called out.
“Cecile! Cecile!”
She kicked the bottom door panel with her boots.
“Cecile! Let me in! Please!”
No sound, no lights from inside the dark store. Merry thought about running around the rear of the store. There was a door to Cecile’s apartment back there. She turned her head. The woman was crossing the road toward her, stamping over the snow and into the shifting cones of light cast from the poles at the ends of the store lot.
Merry backed against the door. She held a ski pole in her hand like a spear. She wasn’t at all sure of what she meant to do with it. All she knew was that she would not let this person lay a hand on her.
The woman stopped just past the gas pump. She reached up a mittened hand to pull the goggled mask from her face. The hood fell back with it, freeing a wild spray of ginger hair.
“Thank God I reached you!” Lily said, breathless with exertion. A smile of relief creased her face, now more red than her hair after the ordeal of the ten mile race.
Merry lowered the ski pole, her own face crimson. Her stiffened muscles relaxed and tears welled in her eyes once more.
33
* * *
Levon waited.
The bar of muted light coming in under the bedroom door was broken by a shadow on the other side.
His full weight was behind his shoulder when he struck the door, crashing it open. The combined force threw the man in the hallway hard against a wall.
Levon drove the rifle in his fists, stabbing forward. The extended bayonet pierced the man’s forearm. The wicked triangular blade scraped bone on its way through the flesh and into the drywall, pinning the arm like a specimen.
The hand of the impaled arm went nerveless. The pistol fell from open fingers. Gobbets of blood were flung from the gloved fingertips.
The man’s mouth opened in an exaggerated ‘O’. A howl of pain and rage was welling up from his gut.
Levon drove an elbow into the man’s temple, cutting the sound off before it could build.
“You speak English?” Levon said.
The man glared at him through red-rimmed eyes. A big man with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. A dark goatee on his chin, a length of hair braided into a single bead of gold. On his neck a tattoo of a Maltese cross wound in barbed wire. Professional ink. Not a prison tat like the man in the lake.
His eyes narrowed. The man was tensing to make a play.
“You speak English?” Levon said again, twisting the rifle to make the bayonet grind against the bone.
The man gasped and stiffened. The threat melted out of his eyes.
“You aren’t worth shit to me unless we can talk,” Levon said.
“English. A little.” The voice was strangled with pain. Each word bitten off.
“How many men? What number of men are with you?” Levon’s grip creaked on the wood of the rifle’s stock, ready to make another quarter turn of the bayonet in the man’s flesh.
“Eight. Eight there are.”
Seven now, by Levon’s math.
“Where are they?”
“Big house. All at big house.”
“Why?”
The man’s eyes took on a lost look.
“Pourqua? Warum?” Levon tried.
“Beroven. Stelen. To rob.”
“Hostages? You have hostages.”
The man nodded. He knew that word.
“How many?” Levon said.
“Three. Is three.”
“Children? Kindern?”
“A boy and een miesje. Girl. A girl. And a woman. De moeder.” The mother. Danielle Fenton.
“How old is the girl? How many years?”
“Tiener. Teen. You know teen?”
Giselle. Levon’s fists tightened their grip on the rifle.
“No other girl? A younger girl? Kein jüngeres Mädchen?” Levon’s eyes bored into the other man’s, looking for truth.
“Neen. No jonger meisje.” The man lowered his head and hissed the words between teeth clenched to hold down the growing torment from his stuck arm.
They didn’t find Merry.
“I can’t think of anything else to ask you,” Levon said.
The man raised his face. Relief in his eyes turning to a feral gl
are.
Levon yanked the blade from the wall and the pinned limb. The man began a cry of pain that was cut off when Levon drove the bayonet deep into the man’s throat. With a single jerking movement Levon ripped the blade to one side and stepped away from the spray of arterial blood that erupted from the man’s torn carotid. The bayonet was a stabbing weapon not a cutting blade. The wound was a ragged mess. The man raised a palsied hand to stem the shower. He was dead before he could complete the futile gesture. He lay twitching in a wallow of his life’s blood spreading over the floor.
Levon picked up the fallen pistol. A Sig Sauer. Extended magazine holding twenty rounds of 9mm. Another mag in the pouch pocket of the dead man’s snowsuit. Levon wiped the blood from the pistol with a hand towel from the bathroom. He worked the slide to chamber a round. The gun was new. Probably purchased or stolen for this one job to be discarded afterwards. More confirmation that these were professionals.
And now there were six.
34
* * *
“It’s going to be all right, baby. This will be over soon. We’ll get you to a hospital,” Danielle Fenton said like a mantra.
Carl sat mewling in his chair. His right hand was bundled in a bloody towel secured in place with duct tape. Blood gathered around the leg of the chair by his right foot. In the sticky mess lay his pinky and ring finger, severed at the base where they once joined his hand. Carl’s skin was pale with shock. His eyes stared forward, dark rimmed and running with tears.
Giselle was catatonic. She drew in breath through her mouth, jaw slack and eyes closed. She wanted nothing more than to hold her trapped hands over her ears. She wanted to vanish. Her mind fled from this place to someplace warm and dark and quiet. Her little brother’s screams still echoed in her head.
“It’s going to be all right, baby. This will be over soon. Just a little bit longer,” Danni said again. Lies were the only comfort she could offer her children.
The men wore gloves on their hands and paper booties on their feet. They didn’t smoke or eat or drink anything. They were taking every measure to be positive they left no evidence behind.
They wore no masks. Witnesses did not concern them because they were not going to leave anyone behind.
She was alone with her children now. The men were all away somewhere else in the house. She could hear their voices and the sounds of tools.
Danni pressed her eyes closed and prayed. She prayed for herself and her children and for Nate. She asked God to save them. And if He didn’t have it in His plan to save them all then could He save her children? And, if the worst was to happen, let the suffering be short, let it end quickly.
The prayers led to fantasy scenarios. Little Moira was able to escape and soon an army of state police would storm in to rescue them all. Or Nate would return to free them and they would all escape together. Or maybe Moira’s father, Mitch. Danni saw a strength in that man. His reticence to talk about himself or to brag. His easy masculinity hid a deep pain. Her sense of him was that he was a man whose anger, once roused, would be terrible.
She felt a chill gust of cold air wash over the room and opened her eyes. The sliding door that led to the outside deck was sliding open. A bundled figure entered the room ahead of a swirl of snow. A man. He closed the sliding door and removed a knit cap and scarf from around his head.
The artist. She’d only met him once briefly when she stopped by to introduce herself back in the fall. What was his name?
“Sascha?” she said in a hush.
He removed his fogged glasses to regard her.
“Help us. Get us away from here. There are men here who—”
“Stupid bitch,” he said and turned to go deeper into the house to where the men were working with tools and fire to open the vault.
Danielle shrieked then. With rage. With fear. With the certain knowledge that her husband was dead and she and the children would follow.
35
* * *
Merry dropped the ski pole to the snow and started across the market lot to where Lily approached from the gas pump island.
Lily raised her arms. Merry thought it was to offer her shelter. Instead, Lily held one arm bent before her face. The other came up to point at Merry.
In that pointing hand was the ugly snout of a handgun. The bent arm was to protect Lily’s face from the blowback of blood and bone fragments resulting from the point blank fire to come. Behind her glasses, Lily’s eyes loomed large and fiery.
A sudden puff of white down appeared on the front of Lily’s snow suit. A ragged hole was torn in the silken fabric over her right breast. Low thunder cracked, shattering the silence. The woman stumbled back, feet slipping, eyes growing wide. Lily fell hard on her back. She wriggled and flopped, trying to get purchase on the slick surface to rise again. Her gun hand wagged in the air, aiming at everything and nothing.
A second peal of thunder and Lily’s head vanished in a crimson bloom. Wisps of ginger hair joined feathery fragments of down whipping away on the wind.
Merry turned to see Cecile standing in the open door of store. A haze of gun smoke was shredding away on a gust. The old woman wore a white flannel nightgown over a red union suit. On her feet were carpet slippers and wool socks with tassels. In her hands was a double-barrel shotgun, the breech open and bleeding smoke. Cecile was feeding two fresh rounds into the barrels. Two spent rounds steamed on the hard pack snow at her feet.
“There any more of them?” Cecile said, snapping the barrels up and closed.
“Back at the lake. Men. They took the Fentons. I don’t know where my daddy is,” Merry said. It came out a quavering squeak from her constricted throat.
“Come inside, child. You’re scared witless. I’ll call Deke Bishop in Merton,” Cecile said and held the door for Merry to hurry into the warm haven of the grocery market.
“Is he the police?”
“He drives a plow. The troopers will follow him down.”
Merry was in the store and out of the cold but still shivering. Deep, painful tremors made her jaw hurt and eyesight jiggle.
“Never did like that bitch,” the old woman said, casting a glance back at the still form even now being covered over with blowing snow.
36
* * *
Smets came into the master bedroom off the bath, pulling off a heavy Nomex hood and face mask. He was greasy with sweat and hurriedly stripped off the two-piece protective suit. Flecks of molten metal smoked where it was lodged in the fabric.
“Are you inside?” Avi asked from where he sat on the edge of the king-size bed.
“Give it a moment to clear. Jesus, I need a cigarette,” Smets said coughing.
“After breathing in all this shit?” Avi said, waving a hand before his face.
Thick white smoke rolled from the bathroom. The cloud rose to the coffered ceiling of the master bedroom. There was a cloying chemical tang to it that burned the throat.
“No cigarettes,” Avi reminded them with a wry smile. No smoking, no eating, no drinking. No trace of their DNA would be left behind. They even brought along plastic jugs to piss and spit in and bottles of chlorine bleach to splash over anywhere they might accidently leave traces of any kind of effluvia.
Simon, known as Sascha to his neighbors, entered the room.
“You left the woman and children alone?” he said.
“We’re waiting for the room to clear. I turned the fan on. It will take a moment,” Smets said.
Simon snorted and charged into the bathroom. He picked up a sledge hammer as he did so. They could hear glass shattering within. An icy draft swirled through the haze, drawing it from the bedroom. Simon returned, hacking into his cupped hand. He dropped the sledge to the carpet.
“You are in a hurry?” Smets said with a smirk.
“You missed someone. A girl. She went for help or ran away or whatever. Vida went to follow her.” Simon was agitated, thrumming with nervous energy.
“Where can a little girl go in
this weather?” Avi shrugged.
“Visser and Loman were supposed to find everyone. We took care of the handyman. They should do their jobs. Where are they?” Simon said.
“Visser has radio problems. Loman went to find him,” Koning said from the doorway. His good eye narrowed at Simon.
“It will be dawn in only a few hours,” Simon said, voice quieter now, his hectoring tone muted in the presence of Koning.
“We will have the vault open soon. Go watch the woman and children,” Koning said.
Simon left the room without further remark.
The remaining three men entered the master bath, the room still awash in a noxious fog. A stand lamp’s beam was aimed down at the hole broken in the tile floor. Smoke swirled lazily where it crossed under the cone of light.
Smets took the tartan cap from his back pocket and replaced it on his head before he dropped to the floor to examine the scorched front of the safe lying in the recess in the floor. He brushed ash and beads of melted steel away from the neat hole burned into the door at the center of the grease pencil oval he’d drawn earlier.
He snapped his fingers toward Avi who rooted around in a canvas tool bag and came up with a scope with a flexible probe. He handed it to Smets who clicked it on. An LED shone at the end of the probe with a diamond bright light. Smets snaked the probe into the hole and fitted the rubber cup to his eye.
“How long?” Koning said, standing with a towel held to his mouth.
“Ten pins. I can see where the locks tie together. A coordinating mechanism with a flex bar. A shared tumbler with ten, no, twelve teeth. The box is custom but I have seen this setup before,” Smets said, drawling out a description of his view through the scope.
“How long?” Koning repeated.