“Force it,” she whispers. “You need to keep your gun hand warm.”
She’s right, and he manages to get it most of the way on. It’s too short to get over all of his hand, but his fingers are covered, and that’s all that matters.
They crawl, Hodges slightly in the lead. The pain is still bad, but now that he’s off his feet, the arrow in his guts is smoldering rather than burning.
Got to save some energy, though, he thinks. Just enough.
It’s forty or fifty feet from the edge of the woods to the window with the chandelier hanging in it, and his uncovered hand has lost all feeling by the time they’re halfway there. He can’t believe he’s brought his best friend to this place and this moment, crawling through the snow like children playing a war game, miles from any help. He had his reasons, and they made sense back in that Airport Hilton. Now, not so much.
He looks left, at the silent hulk of Library Al’s Malibu. He looks right, and sees a snow-covered woodpile. He starts to look ahead again, at the living room window, then snaps his head back to the woodpile, alarm bells ringing just a little too late.
There are tracks in the snow. The angle was wrong to see them from the edge of the woods, but he can see them clearly now. They lead from the back of the house to that stack of fireplace fuel. He came outside through the kitchen door, Hodges thinks. That’s why the light was on in there. I should have guessed. I would have, if I hadn’t been so sick.
He scrabbles for the Glock, but the too-small glove slows his grip, and when he finally gets hold of it and tries to pull it out, the gun snags in the pocket. Meanwhile, a dark shape has risen from behind the woodpile. The shape covers the fifteen feet between it and them in four great looping strides. The face is that of an alien in a horror movie, featureless except for the round, projecting eyes.
“Holly, look out!”
She lifts her head just as the butt of the Scar comes down to meet it. There’s a sickening crack and she drops face-first into the snow with her arms thrown out to either side: a puppet with its strings cut. Hodges frees the Glock from his coat pocket just as the butt comes down again. Hodges both feels and hears his wrist break; he sees the Glock land in the snow and almost disappear.
Still on his knees, Hodges looks up and sees a tall man—much taller than Brady Hartsfield—standing in front of -Holly’s motionless form. He’s wearing a balaclava and night-vision goggles.
He saw us as soon as we came out of the trees, Hodges thinks dully. For all I know, he saw us in the trees, while I was pulling on Holly’s glove.
“Hello, Detective Hodges.”
Hodges doesn’t reply. He wonders if Holly is still alive, and if she’ll ever recover from the blow she’s just been dealt, if she is. But of course, that’s stupid. Brady isn’t going to give her any chance to recover.
“You’re coming inside with me,” Brady says. “The question is whether or not we bring her, or leave her out here, to turn into a Popsicle.” And, as if he’s read Hodges’s mind (for all Hodges knows, he can do that): “Oh, she’s still alive, at least for now. I can see her back going up and down. Although after a hit that hard, and with her face in the snow, who knows for how long?”
“I’ll carry her,” Hodges says, and he will. No matter how much it hurts.
“Okay.” No pause to think it over, and Hodges knows it’s what Brady expected and what Brady wanted. He’s one step ahead. Has been all along. And whose fault is that?
Mine. Entirely mine. It’s what I get for playing the Lone Ranger yet again . . . but what else could I do? Who would ever have believed it?
“Pick her up,” Brady says. “Let’s see if you really can. Because, tell you what, you look mighty shaky to me.”
Hodges gets his arms under Holly. In the woods, he couldn’t make it to his feet after he fell, but now he gathers everything he has left and does a clean-and-jerk with her limp body. He staggers, almost goes down, and finds his balance again. The burning arrow is gone, incinerated in the forest fire it has touched off inside him. But he hugs her to his chest.
“That’s good.” Brady sounds genuinely admiring. “Now let’s see if you can make it to the house.”
Somehow, Hodges does.
31
The wood in the fireplace is burning well and throwing a stuporous heat. Gasping for breath, the snow on his borrowed hat melting and running down his face in slushy streams, Hodges gets to the middle of the room and then goes to his knees, having to cradle Holly’s neck in the crook of his elbow because of his broken wrist, which is swelling up like a sausage. He manages to keep her head from banging on the hardwood floor, and that’s good. Her head has taken enough abuse tonight.
Brady has removed his coat, the night-vision goggles, and the balaclava. It’s Babineau’s face and Babineau’s silvery hair (now in unaccustomed disarray), but it’s Brady Hartsfield, all right. Hodges’s last doubts have departed.
“Has she got a gun?”