NAPLES HAD never been much more than a scant collection of battered buildings along the railroad tracks and the creek but now it was full dark and in the blizzard it seemed as if the entire town had simply blown away. Everything black. No power anywhere he could see. Even the bar had gone dark. He parked the truck at a gravel lot near the school, a place he parked each winter during the heaviest snowfall, and pulled the ramps down and started the snowmobile, jerking the cable repeatedly until the engine caught and started running, and then backed down the ramps onto the snow. It felt solid and substantial under him, a heavy machine set upon tracks and ready to scream out into the snow like a banshee. He lifted the ramps and returned them to the bed and closed the tailgate. Then he opened the cab once more to look in at the interior. The rifle and the dart gun were both in their single case under the bench seat, and he thought that he should probably bring the case with him but there were only three or four rounds in total for the rifle and he did not know what he would do with it were something to happen, the thought of which sent a long shiver through him. In the end he left the case behind.
A car fled past him on the plowed highway. Then another. He sat upon the snowmobile, straddling it, the machine humming under his body, the truck behind him already disappearing from view. Then he pulled out into the road at last. The vehicles that had passed before him dissolved now into the blur of snowfall and no headlights appeared behind. Ice crystals stung his face, his beard and mustache already frozen, the snow a fleeting field of sparks that seemed to run out before the faint glow of the machine.
He turned off the highway onto the spur and turned again into the mile-long road that led to the rescue, following the path of a dark flat creek for a quarter mile, its edge rimed with ice and its surface a perfect unmoving black plate bordered by white, and finally turned up the draw toward the top of the ridge, a curl into darkness, the sled below him whining and growling, the throttle held nearly wide open. The snow was smooth here, although he sometimes thought he could see the faint trough of old footprints illuminated in the headlights, but if so the image was too faint to be sure of and seemed to materialize and fade each time he looked at it, like an illusion visible only in the peripheries. He thought of Grace and of Jude, riding south on the highway toward Coeur d’Alene, hoped they were safe, wondered then why he had not climbed into the truck with them. But he could not leave the animals. He could not leave without checking on them, without ensuring that they were all safe. It was simply something he had to do, every night, without fail.
When he saw the footprints in the lit swath of the storm, he thought at first that the track must have indicated the path of an animal, but the path was like a trough, not like the careful prints of elk or deer or even coyote but the slogging boot prints of a man. He turned the sled to the side, slowing, peering down as they approached and then seeing the trail where it came down the mountain and then moved into the forested darkness beside the road.
His body seemed to burst all at once into gooseflesh, his hand off the throttle now so that the machine stood idling at the side of the road, and the feeling that ran through him was pure terror, his eyes peering into the black trees where the boot prints disappeared as if some huge beast might emerge, something out of story, out of myth. He knew he was being watched but in that moment it felt like he was being watched not by a man, not by Rick, but by something else entirely. The darkness. The forest. The black trees all around.
He looked up the road to where the footprints disappeared beyond the glow of his headlights. The disappearing path he had seen earlier was someone coming up the road in the heavy snow and this deep trough of dragging footprints was made by someone descending.
And then he knew what he should have known already. That Rick had not gone after Grace or Jude at all. He had not even left Naples. Instead, he had only waited for Bill to drive away and then had come up the path, on foot, to where the animals were all held captive in their cages in the snow.
14
HE WATCHED FOR MIKE EVERYWHERE, RETURNING HOME with Rick only past midnight to grab a few scant hours of shallow, fitful sleep, all the while expecting to hear Mike’s thudding hammer-like fist on the door. He had brought his meager paycheck to the cashier window at the Peppermill and had managed, somehow, not to spend it that first night, returning to the café to wait for Rick to appear from the kitchen at the end of his shift, wondering if Susan would arrive as well and hoping, more than anything else, that Mike would not. Even with cash in his pocket he was terrified that it would not be enough or that Mike, at Johnny Aguirre’s instructions, would break his arm or leg or more of his fingers. When he looked at the aluminum splint, its bright blue foam now stained with grease after eight hours of oil changes and lube jobs, the sight of it produced a thread of panic he could barely contain.