Chapter 33 #2
“I hope this doesn’t fuck up my truck,” Penny said, as he braked to take the side road. “It’s only got sixty thousand on it.”
“The government will cover any damage,” Lucas said. “We commandeered it. Don’t run over any small children. They’d sue all our asses. But…”
“I know. Drive faster,” Penny said. “What kind of guns does this chick have?”
“Pistol,” White said. “She wasn’t carrying anything when she grabbed the Bronco.”
“If we get in a fight, I’ve got an AR in a scabbard back in the truck bed,” Penny said. “Wouldn’t want to get in the fight myself, I’m not a law-enforcement personnel.”
“I call dibs,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
They went up the side road, up a hill, saw a driveway to the left, but it was raw dirt and looked like a dead end and Lucas said, “Keep going.” Farther up, another driveway, but this one had a gate with a layer of snow in front of it, with no tracks. Penny kept going.
They passed turns to the right but Penny said they were hunting trails, and there was no sign of tracked snow: “Deer season ended back months ago,” he said.
They went past a closed gate to the right as the road turned sharply to the left, and the driveway showed multiple tracks in the snow, and Penny slowed and Lucas said, “I don’t know.”
“We can come back,” Sherwood said. “The nav shows a straight road ahead, if we keep going and see her…”
They went ahead, rattling along the gravel road, over a couple hills and then a long straightaway, with no sign of the Bronco; but another pickup was coming straight at them and Lucas said, “Doug, block the road.”
Penny turned half sideways across the road and Lucas jumped out of the truck and ran toward the oncoming pickup, waving his arms, badge in his hand. The truck slowed, stopped, and the driver dropped the window. Lucas ran up and said, “U.S. Marshal. Did a tan Bronco go past you, running fast?”
“Nope, we ain’t seen nothing,” the driver said. The woman sitting next to him said, “Nobody’s passed us, going a mile or two back.”
“Okay: listen, if a woman in a red parka tries to flag you down, don’t stop. She shot somebody in Hayward, and we’re trying to chase her down. If you stop, she’ll kill you.”
Lucas ran back to Penny’s truck, got in, said, “Turn around. Take us back to the gate with the tracks.”
They drove back a half mile to the gate. Penny said, “Fire Sign 928. Want me to call it in to the cops?”
“Do that,” Lucas said, as he and White and Sherwood climbed out of the truck. “As you’re doing that, drive back to the highway and send the cop cars in here when they show up. And send one in to that farm to look around. Tell him to be careful.”
Sherwood walked around back of the pickup, dropped the tailgate, and found a leather-and-plastic scabbard fastened to the side of the truck.
He pulled out an AR-15 and took a thirty-shot magazine from a side pocket, slapped it home and yanked the charging handle and let it go, loading the rifle.
He shut the tailgate and said, “Get it on.”
He and Lucas pushed back the gate and Sherwood said, “Lucas, stay way over to the left side of the driveway, and lead us in. I’ll be back five yards on the right, Shelly, trail us by twenty yards.
If she’s in here, we don’t want her to shoot us all at once.
We need to stay spread out. We need to shut up and be as quiet as we can, so she can’t pinpoint us, if she’s in here. ”
“Got it,” White said, and Lucas nodded, and they started down the driveway, guns in hand, well separated. The driveway ran downhill through a forest of small barren aspen trees, probably three- or four-year-old regrowth covering a clear-cut.
· · ·
Abramova had known that she’d have to get off the road as soon as she could, especially if the pickup was still trailing her.
When she saw the closed, rusty steel gate, standing open a foot or so—not locked—she pulled up, dragged the gate open, drove through, dragged the gate fully closed, hurriedly got back in the Bronco and drove it down the hill.
At the bottom, she found a two-story dark-wood cabin on a small pothole lake with a garage to one side.
There was no smoke coming from the two chimneys she could see, no vehicles in sight: the place appeared to be closed for the winter, although there’d been car tracks in the snow.
The snow was crusty, probably three or four days old.
She pulled the Bronco into the yard, but behind the garage where it couldn’t be seen from the driveway.
Nothing was moving. She walked around to the front stoop, which had been cleared of snow, but the snow piled off to the side appeared to have crusted over, so it hadn’t been cleared that day and probably not the previous day.
She was tempted to kick the door, but after a moment’s consideration, decided that it might be alarmed, and turned away.
Back at the Bronco, she went through it quickly, found a pair of cross-country skis, poles, a boot bag, and a sack of Cheetos, partly eaten.
She had no use for the skis, but opened the Cheetos and gobbled the rest of them, then walked around to a deck that looked over the lake, planning to look in the lakeside windows for an alarm.
As she did that, she heard a truck go by on the road above the cabin; she couldn’t see it, but it sounded as though it was moving fast. She still had pursuers.
From the deck, peering through the windows, she saw nothing on the walls near the doors that might be an alarm pad. She hesitated, then went to the door and kicked it. Inside, the cabin was as cold as it was outside.
Moving fast, she checked closets on both floors, looking for weapons, preferably a scoped deer rifle; she found nothing useful. The only food in the cupboards was sealed in cannisters or unopened bags. The refrigerator was empty, except for five cans of Pbr.
She did find heavy ski gloves, and she took them. Back outside, on the deck, she looked over the lake, and far away, on the western horizon, she saw a trace of smoke above the trees. The smoke seemed to dissipate, then came back. There was another house out there.
She walked off the deck, saw trails through the woods both left and right, took the one on the left and started jogging.
· · ·
Lucas, Sherwood, and White moved carefully toward the house, then Sherwood waved them farther off, until White was fifty yards to his right, and Lucas twenty-five. As they closed in, Sherwood said, quietly, “Guns up, guns up.”
Sherwood spotted the car, and pointed, and said, “The car,” and then, “She’s here, you two, hold where you are. Get behind some cover.”
He moved slowly up to the Bronco, then looked at the side of the house, and eased around to the deck, before backing away. “She’s gone, on foot. She kicked in the door on the deck, and it appears that she’s running up a trail, there are fresh footprints in the snow.”
Lucas and White came to look, one at a time, then White and Lucas cleared the house, came back out, and found Sherwood fifty feet up the left-hand trail.
“She’s headed toward that smoke. She hopes to get a car,” Sherwood said, pointing at the wisp of smoke beyond the trees above the lake.
“Lucas, you stay back a bit, but on the trail, following the footprints. Yell if they swerve off. Shelly, you work your way along the lakeside, look for other prints. I’m going farther up to the left…
She may expect us to be back here somewhere, so if you need to shout, do it. ”
“I’m good with that,” Lucas said.
“But stay back. You’ll be more in the open than Shelly and me, so…we’ll probably see her first.”
· · ·
They began moving along the trail, more widely separated than they had been, and sometimes, for a minute or more at a time, lost sight of one another in the oaks and aspens.
Sherwood got out fifty yards, then seventy, and when he topped a ridge running in the same direction as the trail below him, where Lucas was, he moved slightly off the far side of the ridgetop, so Lucas couldn’t see him, and began running through the snow, brambles and small saplings tearing at his coat.
He was wearing leather oxfords, to go with his woolen pants and coat, but he ran hard for five minutes, leaving the other two behind. About the time he began worrying that they might be on a wild-goose chase, he saw Abramova.
And Abramova saw him.
· · ·
Abramova saw the man closing on her. He was oddly dressed for the wilderness, in what appeared to be a camel-colored dress coat that dropped to his knees.
She’d been walking as quickly as she could, but now broke into a run.
She needed to get to the house putting out the chimney smoke: if they had cars there, she could disable all but one, and run in that one, until she found another target.
She still couldn’t see the house, and after two or three minutes, running with the heavy coat, through the crusty snow, she was breathing hard, snot running down her face and across her lips and chin, until she wiped it off with the ski glove.
She slowed to look back: the man was measurably closer, and still running hard, despite the long coat flapping around his legs.
She came to a three-wire barbed-wire fence, climbed through it, and kept running, but the man was only seventy or eighty yards away, coming up to the fence.
The house was down a gentle slope, but across an open field.
She ran as hard as she could for a hundred yards, looked back, dropped the heavy ski gloves and pulled her pistol.
There was nobody behind the man, backing him up.
· · ·
Sherwood stopped at the fence, looking down the hill at the woman who’d turned on him.
She had a pistol in her hand, and she was a trained professional shooter, so he had no time: he braced the rifle on the fence post, but had no idea where the gun might be sighted-in at—it had the simple original iron sights.
She fired at him: a bullet flicked past his head, but he ignored it, and the one that followed.
He’d always been good with an AR-16, and this was essentially the same thing. He put the sights on the middle of her chest, pulled the trigger three times, letting the light recoil make his aim adjustments for him.
His second shot hit her, knocked her down, the third shot, he thought, missed. He crossed the fence, turned around and shouted, “She’s here, she’s here.” She was down, but was she silenced?
He ran through the snow, coming up on Abramova as she struggled to sit up. She must have had a gun in her hand when she was hit, because it was lying in the snow two feet away from her. She looked up at Sherwood and said, “I am done. I’m…”
She didn’t get to finish, because after a quick look around, Sherwood shot her in the heart.
Then she was silenced, as she needed to be.
· · ·
Sherwood scratched his nose and again looked back up the hill.
Still couldn’t see Lucas or White, so he shouted: “Got her! Got her!” Then he stepped over to the pistol in the snow, picked it up, scuffed over the mark it had made, and shoved the pistol under the cuff of her coat, at the end of an outflung arm.
It was a full two minutes more before Lucas ran up to the fence, and another minute before White showed up.
They could see the red coat on the ground, unmoving, and they walked down the slope toward Sherwood and the body.
Abramova was twisted on one side, a dimple in her coat where the last rifle shot went through, but no sign of blood.
White said, “Jesus.”
Lucas asked Sherwood, “You okay?”
“I am, but it was damn close,” Sherwood said. “She shot at me twice, I knocked her down, but when I came up, she pulled her gun again. I don’t know what she was thinking, I was right there.”
“You sure about that?” White asked.
“Absolutely,” Sherwood said.
Lucas looked from the body, to White, to Sherwood, then said to Sherwood, “Shelly’s saying you’re a lying sack of shit, you lying sack of shit.”
“Yeah, well.” Sherwood said. “Prove it.”
White shrugged: “I wouldn’t want to go that far. Just sayin’.”
“We can’t screw around here,” Sherwood said. “We’ve got to get a press release out, we gotta talk to the local law. We’re almost done, but we have to figure out a way to explain why you guys were here. We’ve got to erase you.”