56
Billy pressed his bare hand to the grain of the door. “Caitlin?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Caitlin, my name is Billy.”
“Are you with the police?”
“My brother is the sheriff, Caitlin. Sheriff Kinney.”
“Is he with you?” These words spoken with such desperation, such
hope.
“I’m gonna get you out of there, Caitlin.”
He took the big lock in his fist and felt its heft. He doubted the nine-millimeter’s capacity to damage it; heard in his mind the shot replaying all over the mountain.
“Does he hide a key out here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is there another way in?”
She told him about the window but that it was boarded and locked from the inside, and he limped around the shack and found the small window at head height and the glowing little sparrow-hole in the batten and he thought to look in but did not. Instead he continued around the shack and on the last unseen side he came upon a scrap of blue tarpaulin, and underneath the tarp he found an ax embedded in the face of a log. The blade popped loose with a tug and was in his hands, the handle smooth from use, the head weighty. Then he saw the sled—old-fashioned wood sled propped against the wall, long enough for three, maybe four sitting children. A heavy towrope and runners of bright red. He could make no sense of it.
He carried the ax back to the door and looked slowly about the woods. “Caitlin?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I found an ax. I’m going to try it on the lock.”
She didn’t answer. Then she said, “Billy?”
“Yes?”
“There was another man. Last spring. A hiker.”
“Yeah?” he said.
“He shot him, Billy. He killed him.”
Billy held the ax. He grinned at the door, at the lock. “Thanks, darlin. Now please step back.”
He struck the padlock dead on the boltshackle with a ringing blow and the blade threw sparks and delivered a hard shock through his hands and up to his shoulders. He squared off with the door and struck again with another burst of sparks, another jolt of pain in his hands. He swung twice more and took the lock in his fist. Invisible burrs pricked his skin but the lock and the hasp were solid. He thumbed the ax blade, but he hadn’t checked before and couldn’t say how much of the nicked dullness was his own doing.
He glanced around and once again squared off, and this time he began to chop at the door itself near where the hasp was bolted. But either the blade was badly dulled or else the wood was aged and hard and thick beyond any wood he’d ever experienced, for the ax merely dented and gouged but did not sink or give any sign of splitting the wood.
He held the ax, getting his breath.
The girl made no sound. He asked if she was all right and she answered that she was.
He raised the ax and resumed his work, trying each time to strike the same spot just to the right of the hasp where a pulpy kind of cleft was forming. He learned the best stance and swing and angle, and after a dozen blows to this deepening seam there was a cry of rupture and the ax head sank into the door and stuck. Immediately after, from the trees behind him, something rustled and he turned and reached for the nine-millimeter. but all he saw was the shape of a large night bird winging through the boughs. He watched the place in the trees from which he thought the bird had launched but nothing more stirred save the snowfall. No sound but the deep, thick valving in his ears, which was his own blood.
If you’re there, what are you waiting for?
He turned back to the ax handle, and as he did so something bit deeply into his back and he pitched against the door and heard bounced back from it the small flat report of the gun. The bullet had entered him high in the ribs and to the right of his spine, punching a hole in his right lung coming and going, the lung already collapsing, but all he knew was that he’d been shot and could not get his breath.
Fallen against the door, his forehead to the wood, he heard on the other side of it the chain dragging on the floor. She said his name but he didn’t answer. He became aware of the approaching footsteps and began fumbling in his pocket for the gun but before he could get it in his grip he felt the pressure at the base of his skull, the dull cold hardness of metal.
“I know what you’re looking for and I’d leave it if I were you.”
Billy withdrew his hand and placed it flat to the door. He waited for the sound that would be the last. It didn’t come. Nothing did. Then the pistol barrel lifted from his skull and he received a blow that sent a white-hot rod coring through his brain. Wave upon wave of pain he’d never imagined and he slumped to the ground, piled against the door. He reached for his head and rolled against the door until he blindly faced the man. Nausea swept through him and he rolled again, his guts convulsing. The heaving brought fresh waves of pain, and fresh nausea followed that and he lay for some time retching up the last of it, and then he lay wheezing through his punctured chest, his body rocked by spasms.
In the midst of this the man took and pocketed the nine-millimeter and he found the whiskey bottle and took that too. Now he grabbed Billy by the shoulder and rolled him back against the door to look at him squarely. He dropped into a squat and sat regarding him, the gun hanging loose between his thighs.
“I figured it was you.”
“Did you,” Billy wheezed.
“You asked a lot of questions, bud.”
“So did you, Steve.”
“I told you my name’s not Steve. Look what you did to my door. I waited one too many to pop you.”
“What were you—” He sucked in a cold length of air. The hole in his back rattled like the strange new gill that it was. “Waiting for.”
“I wanted to see if this door would hold up.”
“It held pretty good.”
“Better than you. You don’t look so good, Billy.”
“Don’t feel so good. What’d you shoot me with?”
“Nothing but this little pop gun.”
“Tell you what, Steve.”
“What.”
“You take off now you might get away.”
“Get away from what?”
Billy spat again. “Sheriff.”
“Sheriff,” said the man. “Sheriff that’s your brother? Sheriff Joe?” He studied Billy’s face. He looked at the door, as if everything beyond it were visible to him.
He said: “If I thought Sheriff Joe was on his way up here, what chance of living would you give this girl?”
“Same chance,” Billy said.
“Thought that through, did you?”
“Wasn’t hard.”
The man smiled. “No, I bet not.”
Billy knew that the moment the man had seen him on the mountain, the girl’s fate was decided: sheriff or no sheriff, he would not remain up here and he would not let her live. Billy’s only hope was that the man would panic and run. It was not even a hope.
Thin light rippled along the man’s teeth. “You know how I know you’re full of shit, Billy? The fact of this ax stuck in my door. Why would a man do a thing like that if Sheriff Joe was on his way? Why wouldn’t he just sit tight and wait?”
“ ’Cause he’s dumb and reckless.”
They were silent. No sound on the other side of the door but the soft popping of firewood. The snow had stopped, and the clouds above the clearing were infused with light, as if beyond them lay a bright city. Billy coughed and spat and the effort raised red blots to his vision. The ground beneath him moved like a bed of rolling logs.
The man glanced up at the ax again. “Before you go, Billy, why don’t you tell me one thing.”
Billy said nothing.