“I know.”
Dross pulled onto a side road even smaller and rougher than the one they’d just followed, and they slipped into the blue shadow of a high ridge where a cool darkness had settled among the pine trees. The red-orange rays of the setting sun fell across the birches that crowned the hilltops, and the white trunks seemed consumed by a raging fire.
“I wish you had let me take the call alone,” Dross said.
“As soon as you hit that skunk, so did I.” He smiled briefly. “You know my policy.”
“I responded to a lot of calls on the rez when Wally was sheriff, and Soderberg.”
“I’m sheriff now. Domestic disturbances can turn ugly, even between people as harmless as Eli and Lucy.”
“Then send another deputy with me. You don’t always have to go on the rez calls.”
“When you’re sheriff, you can do things your way.”
Life, Cork knew, was odder than a paisley duck. Three months before he’d been a private citizen, proud proprietor of Sam’s Place, a small burger joint on a lovely spot along the shore of Iron Lake. Flipping burgers was a vocation many people probably considered only slightly less humble than, say, rounding up shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but Cork had grown fond of his independence. When a scandal forced the duly elected sheriff, a man named Arne Soderberg, from office, the Board of County Commissioners had offered Cork the job. He had the experience; he had the trust of the people of Tamarack County; and the commissioners happened to catch him in a weak moment.
Dross slowed the Land Cruiser. “The truth is, you love going out like this.”
The truth was, he did.
“There,” Cork said.
It was a small, shabby cabin set against the base of the ridge, with a horseshoe of poplar trees around the back and sides. There was an old shed to the right, just large enough for a pickup truck, but Cork knew it was so full of junk there was no way a pickup could fit. A metal washtub sat in the yard, full of potting soil and the browning stalks of mums that had frozen days before. A big propane tank lay like a fat, white hyphen between the cabin and the shed. Behind the shed stood an old outhouse.
Dross parked off the road in the dirt of what passed for a drive. “Looks deserted,” she said.
The curtains were open and behind each window was deep black.
“Eli’s pickup’s gone,” she noted. “Maybe they patched things up and went off to celebrate.”
The call had come from Lucy Tibodeau who lived with her husband Eli in the little cabin. These two had a long history of domestic disputes that, more often than not, arose from the fact that Eli liked to drink and Lucy liked to bully. When Eli drank, he tended to forget that he weighed 140 pounds compared to Lucy’s 200-plus. In their altercations, it was generally Eli who took it on the chin. They always made up and never actually brought a formal complaint against one another. Patsy, the dispatcher, had taken the call and reported that Lucy was threatening to beat the crap out of Eli if someone didn’t get out there to stop her. Which was a little odd. Generally, it was Eli who called asking for protection.
Cork looked at the cabin a moment, and listened to the stillness in the hollow.
“Where are the dogs?” he said.
“Dogs?” Dross replied. Then she understood. “Yeah.”
Everybody on the rez had dogs. Eli and Lucy had two. They were an early-warning system of sorts, barking up a storm when visitors came. At the moment, however, everything around the Tibodeau cabin was deathly still.
“Maybe they took the dogs with them.”
“Maybe,” Cork said. “I’m going to see if Patsy’s heard anything more.”
Dross put on her cap and opened her door. She stepped out, slid her baton into her belt.
Cork reached for the radio mike. “Unit Three to Dispatch. Over.”
“This is Dispatch. Go ahead, Cork.”
“Patsy, we’re at the Tibodeau place. Looks like nobody’s home. Have you had any additional word from Lucy?”
“That’s a negative, Cork. Nothing since her initial call.”
“And you’re sure it came from her?”
“She ID’d herself as Lucy Tibodeau. Things have been quiet out there lately, so I figured we were due for a call.”
Marsha Dross circled around the front of the vehicle and took a few steps toward the cabin. In the shadow cast by the ridge, everything had taken on a somber look. She stopped, glanced at the ground near her feet, bent down, and put a finger in the dirt.
“There’s blood here,” she called out to Cork. “A lot of it.”
She stood up, turned to the cabin again, her hand moving toward her holster. Then she stumbled, as if she’d been shoved from behind, and collapsed facedown. In the same instant, Cork heard the report from a rifle.
“Shots fired!” he screamed into the microphone. “Officer down!”
The windshield popped and a small hole surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks appeared like magic in front of Cork. The bullet chunked into the padding on the door an inch from his arm. Cork scrambled from the Land Cruiser and crouched low against the vehicle.
Dross wasn’t moving. He could see a dark red patch that looked like a maple leaf spread over the khaki blouse of her uniform.
The reports had come from the other side of the road, from the hill to the east. Where Cork hunkered, the Land Cruiser acted as a shield and protected him, but Dross was still vulnerable. He sprinted to her, hooked his hands under her arms, and dug his heels into the dirt, preparing to drag her to safety. As he rocked his weight back, something stung his left ear. A fraction of a second later another report came from the hill. Cork kept moving, his hands never losing their grip as he hauled his fallen deputy to the cover of the Land Cruiser.
A shot slammed through the hood, clanged off the engine block, and thudded into the dirt next to the left front tire.
Cork drew his revolver and tried to think. The shots had hit an instant before he’d heard the sound of them being fired, so the shooter was at some distance. But was there only one? Or were others moving in, positioning themselves for the kill?
He could hear the traffic on the radio, Patsy communicating with the other units, the units responding. He tried to remember how many cruisers were out, where they were patrolling, and how long it would take them to reach that cabin in the middle of nowhere, but he couldn’t quite put it all together.
Dross lay on her back staring up with dazed eyes. The front of her blouse was soaked nearly black. Cork undid the buttons and looked at the exit wound in her abdomen. A lot of blood had leaked out, but the wound wasn’t as large as he’d feared. It was a single neat hole, which probably meant that the bullet had maintained its shape, hadn’t mushroomed as it passed through her body. A round with a full metal jacket, Cork guessed. Jacketed rounds were generally used in order to penetrate body armor, which Dross wasn’t wearing.
Cork had choices to make and he had to make them quickly. If he tended to Dross’s wounds, he ignored the threat of an advance from the shooter—or shooters—and risked both their lives. But if he spent time securing their position, the delay could mean his deputy’s life.
He weighed the possibility of more than one assailant. The shots had come one at a time, from a distance. When he considered how Dross had fallen, the trajectory of the bullet that had pierced the windshield, and where the final round had hit the engine, he calculated they’d all come from approximately the same direction: from somewhere high on the hill across the road. The shooter was above them and a little forward of their position, with a good view of the driver’s side but blind to where Cork crouched. If there’d been more than one assailant involved, a crossfire would have made the most sense, but so far that hadn’t happened.
So many elements to consider. So little time. So much at stake.
He chose.
He holstered his revolver and leaned toward the deputy. “Marsha, can you hear me?”
Her eyes drifted to his face, but she didn’t answer.
“Hang on, kiddo, I’ll be right back.”
In the back of the Land Cruiser was a medical kit that contained, among other things, rolls of gauze, sterile pads, and adhesive tape. Cork crept toward the rear of the vehicle. If he was right about the shooter’s location, he should be able to grab the medical kit without exposing himself significantly to gunfire. If he was right. It was a big gamble. Dross gave a low moan. The blood had spread across the whole of her uniform, seeped below the belt line of her trousers. Still she looked at him and shook her head, trying to warn him against anything rash. Cork drew a breath and moved.
He reached around the back end of the Land Cruiser, grasped the handle, and swung the rear door open. He stood exposed for only a moment as he snatched the medical kit and the blanket, then he spun away and fell to the ground just as another round punched a hole in the vehicle and drilled through the spare tire, which deflated with a prolonged hiss. He rolled into the cover of the Land Cruiser.
While he put a compress over Dross’s wounds, the radio crackled again.
“Dispatch to Unit Three. Over.”
Cork glanced up from the bloody work of his hands. At the moment, there was no way to reach the mike. He tore another strip of tape with his teeth.
“Unit Three, do you copy?”
He finished tending to both wounds, then turned Marsha gently and tucked the blanket underneath her along the length of her body. He crawled to the other side, pulled the blanket under her, and wrapped her in it tightly like a cocoon.
“Unit Three, backup is on the way. ETA is twenty minutes. Are you still taking fire?”
Despite the blanket, Dross was shivering. Cork knew that shock could be as deadly as the bullet itself. In addition to keeping her warm, he had to elevate her feet. He opened the front passenger door and wormed his arm along the floor until his hand touched a fat thermos full of coffee he’d brought along. He hauled the thermos out and put it under the deputy’s ankles. It elevated her feet only a few inches, but he hoped that would be enough.
Then he turned his attention to the son of a bitch on the hill.
He drew again his .38, a Smith & Wesson Police Special that had been his father’s. It was chrome-plated with a six-inch barrel and a walnut grip. The familiar heft of it, and even the history of the weapon itself, gave him a measure of confidence. He crawled under the Land Cruiser, grateful for the high clearance of the undercarriage, inching his way to the front tire on the driver’s side. From the shadow there, he peered up at the wooded hill across the road. The crown still caught the last direct rays of the sun and the birch trees dripped with a color like melting brass. After a moment, he saw a flash of reflected sunlight that could have come off the high polish of a rifle stock plate or perhaps the glass of a scope. If it was indeed from the shooter, Cork’s target was 250, maybe 300 yards away, uphill. He thought about the twelve-gauge Remington cradled on the rack inside the Land Cruiser. Should he make an attempt, risk getting himself killed in the process? No, at that distance, the shotgun would be useless, and if he were hit trying for it, there’d be nothing to prevent the goddamn bastard from coming down the hill and finishing the job he’d begun. Better to stay put and wait for backup.
But his backup, too, would come under fire. Cork knew he had to advise them of the situation. And that meant exposing himself one more time to the sniper.
He took aim at the place where he’d seen the flash of sunlight, which was far beyond the effective range of his .38, but he squeezed off a couple of rounds anyway to encourage the sniper to reconsider, should he be thinking about coming down.
He shoved himself backward over the cold earth and came up on all fours beside the front passenger door. He gripped the handle and tried to take a breath, but he was so tense that he could only manage a quick, shallow gasp. He willed himself to move and flung the door open. Lunging toward the radio unit attached to the dash, he wrapped his fingers around the mike dangling on the accordion cord and fell back just as a sniper round slammed through the passenger seat back.
“Unit Three to Unit One. Over.”
“Unit One. Go ahead, Sheriff.”
“We’re still taking fire, Duane. A single shooter, I think, up on a hill due east of our position, directly in front of the cabin. Which way you coming from?”
“South,” Deputy Duane Pender said.
“Approach with extreme caution.”
“Ten-four, Cork.”
“Unit Two to Unit Three. Over.”
“I read you, Cy.”
“I’m coming in from the north. I’ll be a couple of minutes behind Pender.”
“Ten-four. Listen, I want you guys coming with your sirens blasting. Maybe we can scare this guy.”
“We might lose him, Sheriff,” Pender said.
“Right now our job is to get an ambulance in here for Marsha.”
“Dispatch to Unit Three.”
“Go ahead, Patsy.”
“Ambulance estimates another twelve to fifteen minutes, Sheriff. They want to know Marsha’s situation.”
“Single bullet, entry and exit wounds. I’ve got compresses on both. I’ve put a blanket around her and elevated her feet. She’s still losing blood.”
“Ten-four. Also, State Patrol’s responding. They’ve got two cruisers dispatched to assist.”
“I copy that. Out.”
Cork crawled toward Dross. Her face was pale, bloodless.
“A few more minutes, Marsha. Help’s on the way.”
She seemed focused on the sky above them both. She whispered something.
“What?” Cork leaned close.
“Star light, star bright…”
Cork lifted his eyes. The sun had finally set and the eastern sky was turning inky. He saw the evening star, a glowing ember caught against the rising wall of night.
From a distance came the thin, welcome howl of a siren.
Cork looked down at his deputy and remembered what she’d said: that he loved this work. At the moment, she couldn’t have been more wrong. Her eyes had closed. He felt at her neck and found the pulse so faint he could barely detect it.
Then her eyes opened slowly. Her lips moved. Cork bent to her again.
“Next time,” she whispered, “you drive.”
2
“HE MUST’VE SPLIT when he heard the sirens.”
Cy Borkmann looked across the road at the hill, which was a dark giant at the threshold of night. Cork, Deputy Duane Pender, and a state trooper named Fitzhugh had just come down from reconnoitering the top. They hadn’t encountered the shooter, but they had found a couple of shell casings in a jumble of rocks overlooking the road and the Tibodeau cabin, in the area where Cork had seen the flash of reflected light off the sniper’s rifle.
“Got word from the ambulance,” Borkmann went on. They were standing beside his cruiser, a Crown Victoria parked a few yards back of the shot-up vehicle Cork had come in. At sixty, Borkmann was the oldest member of the Sheriff’s Department. He was also the most overweight. He’d offered to climb the hill with the others, but Cork had left him behind to monitor the radio transmissions. “Marsha was rushed into surgery as soon as they wheeled her into the hospital.”
“How’s she doing?” Cork asked.
“She was still alive, that’s all they said.”
“Keep on top of it, Cy. Let me know when you hear anything.”
Pender walked over from where he’d been conversing with the state troopers. He was young and brash, and Cork suspected not even experience would moderate his more irksome tendencies. “Christ, what’s that smell? Skunk?”
Cork noticed it again, too, and realized that during the sniper’s attack, he’d forgotten the odor entirely. “It’s from the Land Cruiser,” he said. “Marsha hit it on the way out.”
Pender opened his mouth, probably to make a crack about women drivers, but wisely thought better of it.
Borkmann said to Cork, “I looked around while you were up on the hill. The two dogs you were wondering
about? Dead, both of ’em. Rifle shot, looks like. They were carted around back and dumped out of sight. I’m thinking it’s their blood Marsha was looking at.”
“You check the cabin?”
“Quick look.”
“Any sign of Eli or Lucy?”
“No.”
“Let’s hope that blood is from the dogs.”
“Patsy located Larson. He was having dinner with Alice at the Broiler. He’s on his way.”
Borkmann was speaking of Captain Ed Larson, who headed the major-crimes investigations for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department.
“I want to keep the scene clean until he gets here.”
“You going to call BCA?” Borkmann asked.
“Soon as I’m back at the office.”
It had been an assault on officers. Bringing in the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was standard procedure, not only because of the organization’s expertise and superior resources, but also to ensure that no local prejudice might warp the investigation.
Pender eyed the empty cabin. “Eli can get mean when he’s drunk. Maybe that was him up there on the hill.”
Cork had already considered that possibility. The call that had brought him and Marsha Dross out there had been made by Lucy to keep her from beating Eli ragged. Maybe Eli had retaliated in a big way. Anything was possible when love and hate became a heated jumble. But if Eli had been up there, if he had lashed out at his wife in a deadly way, where was Lucy?
Night was falling fast, flooding into the hollow from a sky salted with stars. Two more cruisers from the Sheriff’s Department pulled up and several deputies got out wearing Kevlar vests and carrying assault rifles. The emergency response team. It had been fifty minutes since Cork’s call for help had first gone out.
“Got here as quick as we could, Sheriff,” Deputy John Singer said. “Took a few minutes to assemble the whole team.” He was apologizing for what probably seemed to him like an inexcusable delay.
“That’s okay, John. I think we’re secure now, but why don’t you post a couple people on the crown of that hill.” Cork pointed toward the rocks where the sniper had taken his position. “I’d hate to have somebody start shooting at us again from up there.”