Dead Level (24 page)

Scared. Like mine, I imagined. But she still wasn’t giving up. “Get me some kindling and a few sheets of newspaper,” she said through chattering teeth.

After delivering what she’d asked for, I cautiously pulled a shade aside and put my face to a window. I didn’t see anyone out there, but the darkness was so complete that an army division could’ve marched into the clearing and I might not have seen it.

Which presented me with a choice: I could leave things the way they were, no lights at all in here, hoping that in the dark our attacker really hadn’t noticed our escape from the truck.

But that was probably the worst kind of wishful thinking; the kind that could get us killed. More than likely, he was just putting another, worse plan together.

Thinking this, I checked all the solar equipment, took the lamps that had gotten broken during the shotgun attack out of the circuit, and snapped the outside light switch. In response a pale fluorescent glow lit the clearing, picking out the chopping block with an ax still stuck in it, and the toolshed.

Drat, I hadn’t meant to leave the ax out in the rain where it would get rusty. Or where Hooper would come upon it, either … but there it was.

Also, I always shut the shed door at night so wild animals wouldn’t gnaw the salty wooden handles of the implements stored inside. But now the door hung open, which answered the question of how our assailant might’ve gotten the tools he’d needed.

Among the other items out there was a small hacksaw with one of those space-age-metal blades on it, the kind that the TV ads said would slice through anything from tomatoes to concrete.

Or through the door handles of trucks. Behind me, Ellie kept feeding
small sticks and bits of bark into the stove. “Are you thinking since he probably already knows we’re still alive, we might as well have lights on?”

It wasn’t an objection, just her making sure we were on the same page. The one, I mean, where it said hiding probably wasn’t going to work.

“Yeah.” Grabbing a battery lantern, I climbed the stairs to the loft area. The stove’s concrete-block chimney ran up through the center of the big, open room; behind it I found the lockbox with my gun and the ammunition in it. Next I quickly rummaged the old thrift-shop dresser tucked in under the eaves, coming up with pairs of socks, a couple of heavy shirts, and sweatpants.

Not that it would make any difference whether we were wet or dry, cold or warm as toast, when the guy shot us. Or drowned us, or burned us up in a—

“Ellie,” I whispered down the stairs. “Find those new fire extinguishers we brought.”

The stove door closed with a faint creak. “Got them,” Ellie reported.

I hurried back downstairs, and while we pulled on as many layers of the dry clothes I’d found as we could, I told her what I’d seen just before the flood hit us. “Remember the log stuck in the stream?”

Enlightenment dawned on Ellie’s face. “So when he pulled the log out …”

“Uh-huh. It opened up the blockage. And with the stream so swollen from all the rain …”

The dry clothes felt better; too bad they didn’t include a bulletproof vest. Ellie crept to the kitchen area, where a pan of already brewed coffee still sat on the gas stove, miraculously untouched amidst the chaos created by the shotgun blasts earlier and our hasty exit afterwards.

Snapping her lighter again, she lit the burner; the sight of the low blue flame, so normal and domestic, was oddly comforting, and so was the hot coffee she handed me moments later.

“So he’s a creep, but he’s a clever, resourceful creep,” I said as I wrapped my cold hands around the mug. Ellie had the woodstove blazing, but two windows were still broken and no stove could keep up with that much chilly night air coming in.

Outside, the wind and rain were finally ceasing as the storm passed by, and when I peeked again, nothing moved. In my sweater pocket was the gun I’d brought downstairs, and more bullets.

But having them didn’t make me feel better. For one thing, the solar porch lamp only lit a small circle, fifteen or so feet from the cottage door; meanwhile, a shotgun’s range is measured in hundreds of yards. Our assailant could stand in the darkness beyond the lamplight and hit us easily.

And the thought of a direct attack was bad enough, but even worse was the mental picture I was starting to get of this guy: smart, stubborn, and for some reason, intent on killing us. What he thought he’d accomplish by that I had no idea; revenge for my testimony against him didn’t seem a good enough reason.

Right now, though, the reason didn’t matter. “We need help,” I said. “Or better yet, to get out of here, fast.”

But the cellphones were both lost, still back in the truck. Walking out wasn’t an option, either, two miles in the dark while a bad guy with a shotgun stalked us.

Worse, with the road washed out, we’d have to bushwhack around it, and in that direction lay marsh and brush so thick and thorny, it would turn our clothes to shredded fluff in minutes, then start on our skin; also, we didn’t have hiking boots, which put twisted ankles high on the list of likely events.

“So how are we going to get out of here?” I asked, thinking she’d come up with some other suggestion. Instead:

“We’re not.”

“What?” I turned, horrified; she was giving up? “Come on, Ellie, there’s got to be a way to—”

But she remained resolute. “I don’t like it any more than you do.
But the truth is that we can’t get out without exposing ourselves, if not to his shotgun then to some other, maybe even worse, mischief.”

She had a point; he might
want
all this to look accidental, but if push really came to shove, who knew what he’d do? “We’re exposed here, too,” I argued. “We’ve got to at least try. I don’t see how you can just quit.”

“Who said anything about quitting?” She turned from checking the fire in the stove again. “I’m talking about
winning
. I’m cold and I’m scared and I don’t like being
hunted
. Which we are.”

Yup: all three of those things, with emphasis on the
scared
part. Because that water trap he’d sprung on us was crazy, the kind of thing only a real whack job would not just think of but actually try. But it was also very resourceful.

Enough to have almost worked. “And
that
,” Ellie went on, “makes me mad.”

She marched to the firewood bin, then back to the stove, head high and shoulders straight even under all those clothes. “So I’m for catching him, and after that I’m for making sure he never does anything like this ever again.”

She knelt to feed more sticks into the stove’s maw, watched the fire blaze up before closing the door on it again. “So put on your thinking cap, Jake, because the fact is, we can’t get out of here, at least not tonight, and we have no way to call for help.”

She stood, her shape a slim, dark shadow etched on the larger darkness: of the room, the forest around us, and most of all the dark intentions of whoever lurked among the trees.

Not only that, but there was a part of what had happened at the beaver pond that Ellie hadn’t thought of yet, or just hadn’t mentioned:

Our attacker had gone to a lot of trouble making the truck rollover look accidental, a freak occurrence out in the woods. As Ellie had said, likely he’d meant to come back here to the cabin afterwards, to set things up so it looked as if those windows had been broken by wind,
or storm-tossed branches … anything to make it seem like Mother Nature and not some human culprit was behind our deaths.

But we knew different, and we’d lived to tell.

So now he pretty much had to kill us.

Gotcha
, he’d thought as with dark-adapted eyes he’d watched the pickup truck slide sideways, then roll over into the flooded pond. But then …

Then
she’d
had to spoil everything. The way she always had, the way she’d spoiled seven years of his life, because of course it had been her; who else could ruin a beautiful plan like that?

Now as he crouched in the clearing, staring at the cottage with its glowing porch light and the woodsmoke puffing once again from its chimney, Dewey Hooper cursed his dead wife, who’d escaped before he could finish her off. Her and that friend of hers, Jacobia Tiptree … now, he fumed into the rainy darkness, he was going to have to deal with both of them again. And that meant time and trouble he could ill afford.

Where the hell was his good luck? he wondered. Somehow it all seemed to have vanished, probably also on account of
her
. But whatever the reason, now the women knew someone was after them, and not only that, they knew
who;
in his rush to get back to the stream in time to pull the log out when they crossed the culverted part of the road, he’d accidentally allowed them to get a look at him.

So if he didn’t finish this soon, they’d tattle on him, and the next thing he knew he’d be back in prison, where for all its warmth and safety he did
not
want to go, he did
not
.

Or worse, Marianne herself would find a way to get revenge.

And what that revenge might be like, he didn’t want to imagine. For all
he
knew, she might be able to reach into his chest, grab his heart with her ice-cold hand, and
squeeze.…

So he had to get rid of her permanently, do it right so that this time
she couldn’t ever come back. Glancing around at the small, dimly lit area of rustic sheds and lean-tos ranged loosely around the cottage under the big trees, he began taking inventory of the available items that he could use for the job.

Without warning, another attack of nerves hit him; shakily he ordered himself to take deep breaths, wait it out, ignore the idea that life might be like this now, forever and ever: scared. Just … he didn’t know how people did it, all this having to make decisions. How had he made them before? He couldn’t remember.…

But in the light of the rising moon as the clouds from the departing storm began pulling aside, the lamplit area wasn’t all he could see, and soon his surroundings gave him an idea: there was a gas can in the shed. And if that failed, there was a propane tank standing on a small concrete pad at the side of the house.

At the sight of it, a smile began curving his lips. The tank was not the fat, barrel-shaped kind that fuel companies installed at in-town residences; instead it was the tall gray industrial-type cylinder used in garages and factories. Back in prison he’d moved these around on metal carts, delivering them to classrooms where inmates learned employment skills like metal cutting and welding.

But even without a cart, one man could move a tank like that fairly easily. He’d need a wrench to disconnect the tank from the gas line that led into the cabin; probably it ran the cookstove, maybe some gas lamps. But there were wrenches in the toolshed.

Then he noticed a homemade outdoor shower setup at the far edge of the clearing. In the summertime it would most likely be screened by an elderberry thicket, but now through the leafless brush he could just make out the big black rubber water bag hung from a tree branch, and a long hose with a plastic spray head at the end of it.

The water bag didn’t interest him, but the hose did; maybe his good luck hadn’t abandoned him after all. Maybe instead things were all falling together for him at last.…

Finally he spotted the pile of kindling, by a chopping block with a
long-handled ax stuck in it, and his smile widened to a grin; it was the last piece in the puzzle.

Because that propane tank resembled a bomb, and properly handled it would act like one, too, or at any rate its contents would. So with gasoline or with propane, one way or the other those women were as good as dead … but the hardest part of all this would be making sure they
stayed
dead.

Or making Marianne stay that way, anyway. And now even that knotty little problem was solved, because he’d seen enough scary movies to know that if you were having trouble getting a dead person to stay dead, you put a stake through their heart.

A wooden stake … And now, wouldn’t you know it, here he was practically within arm’s reach of a whole kindling pile of them.

Sharp ones, too, he noticed. Long, splintery, and …

Gotcha
, he thought.

Inside the cottage, Ellie and I sat together on the floor by the stove, away from the windows. I’d hurried back upstairs long enough to grab some more quilts and blankets, and we’d gotten as dry and comfortable as possible.

Considering, I mean, that there was a guy out there in the darkness who was bent on killing us. Also that we had only a single weapon, which in no way matched the firepower of the guy’s shotgun.

And of course we had no vehicle. It was quiet, too, no sound from around the cabin except for the usual nighttime-in-the-forest squeakings, rustlings, and the occasional dying shriek as some unfortunate small mammal fell prey to an owl or weasel.

Quiet, that is, until something big hit the outside wall of the cabin. A faint metallic
skreek-skreek
sound followed, then came a
clank!

Ellie crept to the window, then turned back to me, her lean, delicate face lit sideways by the moon’s glow.

I must’ve been staring. “What?” she demanded, but I couldn’t
speak, still looking at Ellie but seeing instead an old obituary photo from the
Quoddy Tides
.

I’d last seen the picture seven years earlier, when Marianne Hooper died; it had struck me hard then how much she was like my friend, and now that image rose clearly in memory again.

That face. Those eyes …
Not twins, not even close, but the same kind of wavy, pale red hair and the same delicacy of facial features, so that an imagination rubbed raw by guilt might …

“Ellie.” I found my voice. “Maybe I know why.”
Why he’s doing this
. It was crazy, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

Only I couldn’t say so because just then a bundle of flaming rags soaked in what smelled like gasoline flew in through one of the broken panes; suddenly the floor was a pool of flames.