Deadfall Read online

  At that moment, Hutch thought that it didn’t. Out of the context of their lives, out of time, this was pretty good.

  12

  Dillon had finally stopped crying. He had fallen asleep with his head on Laura’s lap.

  She sat cross-legged on the concrete floor in a storage room. Anything she could have used to escape or attack her captors had been removed. The metal shelves bolted to three walls around her now contained only boxes of envelopes and reams of paper that, judging by the quantity, the town of Fiddler Falls obviously felt were of vital importance. Most were blank sheets preprinted with holiday borders—Christmas, Easter, Halloween, one with trees and deer for the start of hunting season, and another with rolled diplomas and mortarboards for sixth grade and senior graduations. Roughly once a month, the town manager paid kids two cents a pop to deliver to every home in town notices of community events, printed on these festive flyers. Laura had never considered that somewhere thousands of handbills awaited printing and distribution. By her estimation, she was surrounded by a ten-year supply. A paper-jacketed ream of any design was hard enough and heavy enough to cause a severe headache to anyone clobbered with it. But a headache was insignificant compared to what her captives deserved, and it would not help her and Dillon escape that room.

  Had there been a window or big air vent, as rooms like this always seemed to have in movies, she would stack the reams to reach it, but this room had neither. Nor did it possess a working light, through no fault of the architect’s. When they had brought her and Dillon in, she had put up so much of a fight, kicking her legs and flailing her arms, that in order to throw her down and make his exit, her captor had lifted her high. She had broken the bulb with her head.Their only light came from the crack under the door. At first it had been the yellowwhite radiance of the sun through a window in the office beyond. Now it was the sterile whiteness of fluorescents. By it, she could make out the room’s dimensions, roughly eight feet by twelve. She could see the room’s absence of anything that would assist an escape.

  And she could see the dried tracks of Dillon’s tears on his face. She slid her fingers into his hair, over his scalp. She prayed that he was finding peace in sleep.

  “Shhhh,” she soothed, believing her voice would reach his dreams. She brushed the hair off his forehead and smoothed an eyebrow with her finger.

  His anguish had broken her heart even more than what she suspected had happened to Tom. She knew the feeling was only temporary, a coping mechanism; focusing on someone else’s grief helped you avoid your own. She had never before seen Dillon—or for that matter, anyone else—weep as wretchedly or for as long as he had done.

  She wondered if it had been an intuition that was more attuned or a logic that was more developed than she had previously given him credit for that had given him the conviction that his father had been murdered.True, the men who had seized them from home that morning had displayed all the characteristics of bad men as Dillon would have learned from television shows and his own parents’ stern warnings. True, when Dillon and Laura had seen Tom in the street, the girl had told the man named Declan “not in front of them.” And true, after they had been dragged inside and thrown into this room, a loud explosion had shaken the floor.

  But could a nine-year-old boy put all that together to become absolutely convinced of his father’s death?

  Despite Laura’s attempts to console him, he had cried and wailed ceaselessly.

  She had been reminded of too many funerals for children she had seen on the news. A parent—either the mother or the father, but for some reason never both—hysterical in grief, lamenting to God, pleading to the child, tearing at his hair and clothes. Without question, she would have acted similarly had she lost Dillon, and probably had she witnessed Tom’s death. But not having witnessed it, she held on to a thread of hope as thin and fragile as a spider’s silk.

  Dillon’s instant and certain grief made her believe that a bond between father and son had been violently broken, and that unlike the mere emotional bonds of psychiatric journals or the metaphoric bonds of poets, this one had been somehow as tangible as the umbilical cord that had once connected mother and child. The boy had cried and moaned until she was sure no more tears could possibly come, but they did. He had fallen into fits of ragged, desperate breathing. She had thought he would hyperventilate and pass out.

  The room’s darkness seemed to have added to his panic, but Laura had thought it was appropriate, a representation of the evil that had invaded the town and the bleakness of losing Tom.

  Laura would have liked to check her watch by the light slipping under the door. But with Dillon finally in the slumber of exhaustion, she dared not move. When she last checked, it had been 4:12 p.m., six hours since they had last seen Tom. Six hours in the storage room. She guessed it was now somewhere around seven o’clock, but it could be much earlier or much later.Time flowed differently in moments of terror and grief.Watching her son sleep, the rise and fall of his chest, the barely discernible movements of his eyes under his lids, she tried to imagine his life without Tom. She couldn’t. He had always been as much a friend as a father.Teaching Dillon how to fish, camp, work on the car, build a birdhouse,Tom had been as entertained as Dillon had been. She touched her son’s chin and ran her finger along his jaw. She brushed the hair back from his temple.

  “I’ll try to fill his shoes,” she whispered. “I’ll try to be what he would have been for you.”

  A tear landed on his forehead. His eyes fluttered; then he was back in his dreams.

  She pulled in a deep breath and raised her head. She wiped the unfallen tears from her eyes. She had not realized she was so close to giving in to the grief. She looked into the gloom and thought about being strong. Her fingers again pushed into Dillon’s hair and lifted. She felt the fine strands brushing her palm.

  “I’ll still be me . . . and I’ll be him too. But right now I have to get you out of here. I have to make you safe.That’s what he would have—” Shadows moved under the door. The lock rattled, and blinding light burst in. She blinked against it as hazy silhouettes filled the doorway.

  Someone walked around her and stood at the back wall, in the dark. Two others entered. They remained in the light. One was the older teenaged boy. The other was Declan. He looked down at her. Half his face was awash in bright light, the other in shadow. His cool indifference did not so much radiate from him as it clung to him like a cowled robe. He squatted to be level with her, casually draping his arms across his legs.

  “Do we have a problem?” he asked.

  She glared. A dozen responses, from the shrill to the sarcastic, flashed through her mind.

  Dillon stirred, groaning quietly. He adjusted his head on her lap.

  Finally she said, “Where’s my husband?”

  He closed his eyes, appearing exasperated. “So we do have a problem.”

  “Only if I can’t see my husband. Where is Tom?”

  “Sweetheart, I’m afraid you’re going to have to join Matchmaker. com. If you have that up here in Hicksville.”

  Every muscle in Laura’s body tensed; she wanted to scream, to cry, to fight, to do so many things.This man had provided confirmation of Dillon’s conviction and her fears. Keeping them all in her head would drive her crazy, so she pushed them all aside, except one: fight. She felt as though she could fly at him—just fly without benefit of using her legs to spring—and crush him by the sheer power of her hatred. But she sat, her sleeping son’s head in her lap, unable to do anything.

  The right side of Declan’s mouth edged up, but his eyes remained black and cold, reflecting, she was certain, the state of his soul.

  “Now here’s the problem,” he said. “I killed your husband, nice guy that he was.You’re the wife of a cop.” He caught himself. “Excuse me, you’re the wife of a dead cop. Probably pretty tough yourself. Know a thing or two about weapons. And I’m hearing from these good folks”—he pointed a thumb out the door toward the large community roo
m beyond the offices, where he was holding many of her friends and neighbors against their wills—“that you’re a feisty one.” His smile grew broader. “Now, don’t get me wrong, I like my ladies feisty. But there’s a time and a place for everything, and this ain’t it for any heroics from you.”

  She stared and conjured the image of breaking his arms and legs. She didn’t know how she’d do it. She surprised herself even thinking it, but it had come to her, the way an appetite suddenly does when you smell fresh-baked cookies.

  “Nothing personal against your hubby. Like I said, he seemed like a nice guy. But I needed to squash any thoughts of resistance in these folks before they thought them. I explained it all to Tom, and he was down with it.” He winked. “We don’t need anyone trying to fill his shoes.”

  The man behind her laughed at that.The teen snorted, suppressing the laughter inside. Declan glanced over her head and then at the teen.

  “Inside joke,” he explained. “I hope you can appreciate the difficult situation I’m in. How much show of force does one need to control a town of two hundred and forty-two people?”

  The man behind her corrected him, “Two hundred forty.” He snickered.

  “Oh yeah.Two-forty. How much power to break their fighting spirit but not drive them to rebellion? See, there’s a fine line between scaring people and making them angry. You’re more angry than scared, and that can mean trouble. So what do I do to change the equation? I can kill you next . . . or your son.”

  She put her hand over Dillon’s chest.

  Declan shook his head dismissively. “People tend to get weird when whole families are murdered, and I don’t want anyone getting weird . . . yet. Besides, as a lifelong resident of this fine town and wife of the sheriff, you probably know things I might find useful. So I’d rather keep you around.” He paused. “I could take your son, hold him somewhere. Keep you in line. But that could get messy and more work than I want to put into this.We might forget to feed him . . . and we’d be right back at your breaking point between scared and angry.”

  He stood and nodded at the man standing in the shadows. She felt hands on her arms, yanking her up. Before Dillon’s head hit the ground, the teen stepped forward and grabbed him with both hands by the shirt. He pulled the boy to his feet.

  “What?” Laura said. She twisted her shoulders, pumped her arms. The man’s grip was solid. She tried to kick him, but he was fast as well. He dragged her several steps backward.

  Dillon was instantly awake. Confusion etched his face. His sore eyes blinked. “Mom?” he said.

  She stopped fighting. “It’s okay, honey.”

  Declan reached behind him and came back with a long knife. It was thick and heavy looking. A military weapon or something hunters were getting into nowadays. He turned it in the air, letting light glint off it. He stepped closer to Dillon.

  “No!” She wanted to scream, but it came out a hoarse whisper.

  “You can keep your boy,” Declan said. “But I want you to know something.”

  He brought the knife to Dillon’s face, pressing the tip to his cheekbone. Dillon’s eyes flared wide. He sucked in a sharp breath, as he had in September when he got his Hep B immunization.

  “Don’t,” Laura said, straining against the powerful hands.

  Declan drew the blade down, leaving a thin red line, then he pulled it away. The cut on Dillon’s face grew thick with blood. It stretched to his jaw as a rivulet leaked out.

  Laura hissed.

  “I want you to know that I’m not above hurting a child. So be quiet. Be good. Don’t cause trouble, and we’ll get along. Understand?”

  Her eyes flashed at him. She showed her teeth, thinking she would say something. Nothing came out. She hoped her expression was enough. Enough to let him know that he would pay for harming her son. Enough to warn him against trying it again.

  “I’ll take that as an agreement,” Declan said. He pursed his lips and kissed her through the air. He left, followed by the teen.The man holding her turned her around, walked backward to the door. She knew he would shove her hard into the room. By the time she recovered, the door would be shut and locked again. Instead, his hands came off her like a vise coming undone. She stepped away and glared back. It was the black man, Bad. She gave him the same fierce expression she had given Declan.

  He returned it and growled.Then he laughed, stepped through the doorway, and locked them in.

  She dropped to her knees before Dillon. She hugged him tightly. Whenever Tom had approached Dillon to hug him, he’d say he was going to squeeze him like a Go-Gurt, a yogurt treat that you had to squeeze out of its packaging. She tried to hug him that way now.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She leaned back to examine the long vertical line on his face, black now in the dim light. Gently, she wiped at it. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. “Are you?”

  She laughed, relieved. At least for now he seemed himself, always so concerned about other people.

  He said, “They want us to obey them.”

  She braced him between her hands, looked into his eyes. “Well, they don’t know us very well, do they?”

  13

  Hutch woke to the gentle but insistent chime of his watch. Quietly, he unzipped his sleeping bag to retrieve the clothes he’d put inside it the evening before. He maneuvered past Phil. The man had taken up snoring since their last camping trip, probably the result of his weight gain. He emerged from the tent into the cold, dark morning. Plumes of breath formed in front of his face as goose bumps popped up on his arms and thighs under his long johns. His muscles contracted in an effort to fend off the cold. It was four o’clock, still three hours before dawn.

  He set his clothes on a rucksack near the tent. Standing outside the shelter in only his skivvies, he surveyed the campsite by the light of a quarter moon; the campfire had gone out hours before. He saw no evidence that animals had come to inspect their presence, that humans had made a covert visit, or that anything unsavory had fallen or blown, slithered or crawled into camp.

  Fog filled the ravine, at the bottom of which the river gurgled and sluiced out of sight. Moonlight illuminated the gently swirling mist, reminding Hutch of the dry-ice fog that churns from the witches’ cauldron in stage productions of Macbeth. It climbed the banks and sent tendrils snaking into the campsite and surrounding forest. It billowed away from him as he made his way down to the bank of the river. He dipped his hands into the freezing water and splashed his face.The cold wetness shocked him into a higher level of wakefulness. His heart raced.

  Returning to his clothes, he used a towel to dry off. He shook out a pair of camouflage pants and slipped into them, instantly appreciating the extra layer of material—the extra-warm layer, thanks to sleeping with the clothes; he’d forgotten to do it plenty of times. He tugged on a shirt and jacket, then pushed into his boots. He donned a camouflage baseball hat and applied streaks of black, olive, and beige makeup to his face and neck. Since he would track his prey through the woods, his clothes and the pattern of his camouflage makeup resembled trees and leaves—not so much to look like foliage but to break up the pattern of his body.

  He pulled a spray bottle from the sack and misted a few areas on his torso and legs. It was the fragrance of earth, which would mask his own scent. Many deer and elk hunters preferred to spray themselves with the urine of a doe in heat. It was a product available at retail, though not usually at the same counter as Old Spice. In Hutch’s experience, earth was equally effective, less expensive, and possessed none of the eeewww factor, should he share his escapades with nonhunters. His clothes had been washed with a scentless detergent. Even his deodorant was specially formulated to keep big game from catching a whiff of Bambi’s mortal enemy.

  He snapped on a utility belt and attached a small flashlight, a canteen, and a hip pack loaded with energy bars, spare bowstrings, and other things he might find useful in a pinch. He slipped into a binocular harness, which held the glasses firmly over his s
ternum until needed. Kneeling beside the tent, he opened his bow case and lifted his recurve bow, to which he had already mounted a quiver of arrows. Leaning the bow against the tent door, he reached again into the sack. He withdrew the topo map he had consulted in the helicopter, folded it, and inserted it into an inside pocket of his jacket. The map had been printed on vinyl, making it waterproof and silent. He stood with his bow and slung it onto his shoulder, letting the bowstring’s tension hold it in place.

  He checked his bearings on the Suunto watch/compass he’d bought for this trip. (Suunto called it a “wristop computer,” but Hutch thought that exaggerated its features and sounded way too nerdy) He took a moment to gaze at the river of mist, at the trees, at the distant hills as if committing them to memory for the purpose of reeling back to that spot when his day of hunting was over. He filled his lungs with cool air.

  It tastes better up here, the air, he thought.The ashy smell coming from the fire pit, the tang of pines, the crisp fragrance of the water—individually and combined, these were olfactory pleasantries matched by few things back home.Two popped into his head: fresh-brewed coffee and newborn babies. He could brew coffee up here, and would have done so this morning had he not been so excited about the hunt, and the baby smell was rare no matter where you were. So olfactory-wise, as in other subjects, northern Saskatchewan won again.

  He climbed a small embankment and entered the woods. Kicking away the thin covering of mist, he began looking for the game trail that would, if Artemis, Greek goddess of hunting, favored him, lead him to a great bull caribou. Over the next hour Hutch located two trails, neither with fresh tracks. He identified a high ridge that promised an excellent vantage point of the entire valley and headed for it.

  The sun was scalding the horizon by the time he stood on that ridge, an outcropping of rock that did indeed overlook the broad valley. Through his binoculars he panned the terrain, gliding his glass over streams and marshes, trees and meadows. After fifteen minutes of methodical sweeps, he saw them: five brown-and-beige animals grazing in a field beyond a thick patch of forest. He made note of their compass bearings and map location.