He opened a door at the rear of the room. I had a quick glimpse of a self-composting toilet and a copper bathtub like the ones you see in cowboy movies. Then he shut the door.
What to do? I couldn’t just sit in my truck at the end of his drive. There were too many ways Dyer could slip past me, and if he was using a noise suppressor on his AR-15, as I suspected, I might never even hear the shot that killed Mink. Plus, I had no idea what I was going to do with Shadow. I doubted the cold bothered him, under his heavy wolf’s coat, but keeping him caged up in the tight confines of that carrier was cruel.
I checked to see if I had a cell signal. No such luck.
“Do you have a phone here?” I asked through the bathroom door.
“The company won’t run the lines this far.”
The door opened and Mink emerged. He had changed out of his kimono into a fuzzy pink sweater and blue jeans. He had straightened his wig and applied a thin layer of lipstick, red-orange to match his hair.
“I think I gave you the wrong impression about what’s going on here,” I said.
“I don’t want to be impolite, but—”
“Just hear me out.”
His sweater seemed to be made out of some kind of synthetic fiber. He must have gotten lipstick on the front. There was an incandescent red spot just below his throat. Then the strangest thing happened: The spot vibrated.
I threw myself forward and knocked him to the floor just as the window behind me shattered.
35
I never even heard the gunshot.
The impact of our collision knocked the wind from Mink and the back of his head hit the floorboards hard. I rolled off him and looked up to see the laser sight of a rifle moving like a jittery insect around the room. Dyer was trying to find one of us in his scope again.
“It’s him,” I said. “He’s out there.”
Mink moaned.
The shot had come from the front of the cabin. The bullet had shattered the same window Mink had peeked through. I propped myself up against a wall and pumped a shotshell into the chamber of my Mossberg.
Dyer had a high-powered rifle with a laser sight. He had the darkness to hide in and could circle the building, waiting for another shot. He had fired only once, which meant he was patient, not prone to getting overexcited. There was no way for us to contact the outside world for help. And for all I knew, Pulsifer had never even received my message telling him where I was headed.
To put it mildly, I was having trouble identifying a single advantage we might have.
“Is there a back door?”
“There’s a window,” Mink gasped, still out of breath.
I glanced at the cast-iron stove in the kitchen. Behind it was a large rectangular window. It had hinges on the top, so that it could be lifted inward. Lots of old logging cabins had these setups in their kitchens. A man could stand outside and pass logs for the stove through the open window to someone inside the kitchen.
Mink had rolled over onto his stomach. His big eyes were following the laser sight around the room as if hypnotized by it, the way a cat might be.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to provide some covering fire while you go out that back window. Here are the keys to my truck. It’s a hundred yards up the road from the end of your drive. I want you to take it and get the hell to the nearest house with a phone. Dial 911 and tell them there’s an officer who needs assistance at your address. Tell him Logan Dyer is shooting at me. That should get their attention.”
His lipstick was smeared. His body was pressed so tightly against the floorboards, it looked like he had been squashed by a giant foot.
I kicked him in the arm. “You’re not a coward.”
He nodded.
I shimmied on my elbows and knees through the shattered glass toward one of the unbroken windows. Carefully, I raised the edge of the curtain. I brought my head up, hoping to obtain a target rather than just firing blindly, but as soon as I did, the glass above me exploded.
I rolled to the other window, raised myself onto my knees behind the cover of the wall, then swung out into the open and fired a shot at the trees. I pumped another shell into the chamber and fired again.
I ducked behind the wall just in time to see Mink’s legs as he went tumbling through the kitchen window.
The little man could move pretty fast if he needed to.
The laser dot reappeared against the far wall of the cabin. I watched the quivering red light search the room. Now with two windows broken and two curtains torn, Dyer was going to have multiple angles, multiple lines of sight into the building.
The red dot winked off.
Maybe he was waiting for me to show myself again.
I tried to regain control of my breathing. My ears ached from firing the shotgun.
The laser appeared again, zipped back and forth against the opposite wall, and then vanished.
Dyer hadn’t seen Mink go through the window or run off down the hill. This might just work, I thought.