Snowbound (11 page)

When Kalyn woke, the truck was still and silent. She hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but the boredom and emotional heft of recent days had overtaken her again. She had no idea how long she’d been inside the trailer, though it felt like weeks. She sat up from the thick yellow foam, stared at the shiny metal ceiling, the two remaining jugs of water, the dwindling box of food. The metal pail in the farthest corner reeked of her piss and shit.

Strangely enough, she felt closer to her sister than she had in years, just knowing Lucy had spent time cramped in this little space.

Lucy was four years younger, and Kalyn had often lied to herself, insisted her sister was a brave, fearless person, that whatever had happened to her, she’d handled it with grace and courage. But locked in the trailer of this eighteen-wheeler, Kalyn knew that wasn’t the case. Lucy had awakened here confused, disoriented, and more terrified than she’d ever been in her life.

Kalyn heard something beyond the walls—impossible to tell what through the soundproofing.

A piece of yellow foam turned back, the door to her cage opening. She stood up, her feet bare, the rest of the trailer dark and the flickering lightbulb above her head doing nothing to illuminate whoever was out there.

A pair of handcuffs flew through the door and dropped on the yellow foam.

“Put ’em on.”

Flat voice, white male, no accent.

She picked up the handcuffs and closed them around her wrists.

“Come on out.”

Cold air swept through the trailer.

“Where am—”

Someone reached in, dragged her out, and then she was being lifted, hands gripping her arms above the elbows. She smelled day-old cologne and remnants of cigarette smoke.

They came to the end of the trailer and she was lowered into the arms of a tall man with blond hair, eyes the color of sea ice, but with less warmth.

In the late afternoon, Will pulled the Land Rover onto the shoulder at the junction of Alaska 1 and Alaska 4, yet another split in the highway.

Devlin read the mileage sign: “Anchorage, one eighty-seven. Valdez, one seventeen.”

Will let out a deep sigh, his head resting on the steering wheel. “We’ve lost her,” he said.

“Maybe the truck’s up ahead.”

He couldn’t bear the hope in his daughter’s voice. “I’ve been doing ninety for the last hour and a half. If he’d come this way, we would’ve caught up to him by now.”

“Where else could the truck have gone?”

“Where? Maybe he stopped in Tok and we didn’t see him. Probably he went on to Fairbanks.” He lifted what was left of the computer out of the front passenger seat and stared at the destroyed screen.

“Is Kalyn going to die?”

“I don’t know, Devi.”

“But probably she is?” Will punched the gas, spun the car around. “What are you doing, Dad?”

“Only thing left to do.”

They were passing through a city big enough to boast a pathetic skyline—meager collection of ten- and twelve-story buildings—the tall blond driving, a man on either side of Kalyn in the backseat of the new Suburban. The man to her right was young, twenty at most, and he kept eyeing her, fidgeting with his hands, his hair long and black, drawn back into a greasy ponytail.
He’s nervous
. The man to her left was perhaps ten years older—buzz cut, light brown hair, heavily freckled. They both wore black jeans and long-sleeved button-ups with down vests over the top, fat with pocket bulges—knives perhaps, or cell phones. She fought the urge to glance back, dying to know if the Land Rover was tailing them.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

The driver turned up the radio—NPR, “Talk of the Nation.”

It was 2:46
P.M.
, and they soon left the city, passing now along quiet residential streets, then stretches of forest, the houses more scattered, only a few per mile, then no homes or power lines and the road gone to gravel, narrowed into one lane, with tall spruce trees on either side. The Suburban was kicking up substantial clouds of dust, so she couldn’t see in the side mirrors if Will was following them.

Another five miles and the dirt road ended on the shore of a long, skinny lake.

The tall blond turned off the car. They waited, parked parallel to the lakeshore, affording Kalyn a view of the road as it disappeared into the trees. The dust of their passage had settled.
Something’s happened. He isn’t coming
.

“Would you please tell me where I am?” Kalyn asked.

The man behind the wheel looked in the rearview mirror, said, “Shut up.”

“I have to pee.”

“Hold it.”

“Seriously, my bladder’s about to rupture. I don’t know if I can hold it much longer, and I don’t want to pee all over your seat.”

The blond said, “Take her, Marcus.” She hoped he meant the younger of the two, but the freckled man opened his door instead and helped her out of the car.

He walked her twenty feet from the Suburban to a cluster of saplings, and Kalyn pulled her panties down, lifted her skirt, and squatted.

As her piss hit the ground and steamed, Marcus did exactly what she’d hoped for—looked away.

Kalyn came quietly to her feet, stepped out of her panties, and slipped her hands over Marcus’s head, squeezing them back into his neck for all she was worth. He was a few inches taller, much stronger, but that didn’t matter, because Kalyn had the edge of the metal cuff digging into his carotid artery, the bone of her forearm crushing his windpipe, and it only took five seconds for his knees to go.

She dragged him behind the saplings, ripped open his vest, calculating that she had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the other men started to wonder where they were.

She found a .357, broke open the cylinder—six rounds—snapped it closed and started toward the Suburban, her bare feet freezing as she moved low and fast across the grass and rocks. She crouched behind the Suburban and peeked around the left rear taillight, spotted the side mirror on the driver’s side, the tall blond in the reflection, his head turned, talking.

She glanced back toward the cluster of saplings, Marcus already sitting up, trying to climb to his feet.

Kalyn crawled past the gas tank, the rear passenger door, stopping finally at the driver’s door.

You can do this. You
have
to do this. For Lucy.

She thumbed back the hammer, stood up, Marcus shouting in the distance, the whine of another car coming up the road.

Will?

Though the side window was deeply tinted, she could see the profile of the man’s head.

Glass shattered. Blood sprayed.

She jerked open the door behind the driver’s seat, the young man wide-eyed, shaking his head and mouthing “No” as he reached into his vest.

Two squeezes, center mass, gurgling, pieces of down floating between them.

The sound of the engine getting louder.

Three bullets left. Be judicious.

Marcus was coming toward the Suburban now, knife in hand, moving awkwardly, zombielike, his brain still reeling after the lapse in blood flow.

Kalyn ran toward him, ears ringing, stopped ten feet away, feeling comfortable enough with the .357 to draw a bead on the man’s face, yelled, “Drop the knife and stop right there!”

But he didn’t do either, just kept staggering toward her.

“I’ve shot your friends. I will shoot you. Do you want to die today, Marcus?”

He kept coming, Kalyn thinking,
Maybe he doesn’t believe he’s capable of dying at the hands of a woman.

The shot took the top of his head off and he collapsed to his knees, toppled over in the moist, spongy soil.

Two bullets left. Not enough.

Kalyn ran back to the Suburban, opened the driver’s door. Sea Ice Eyes had slumped over into the passenger seat, and she hauled him out of the car, searched him, found the handcuff key and a handgun—.45 Smith.

The car engine had become deafening, and then she realized it couldn’t be a car, because the sound was coming from the lake.

A single-prop floatplane had just landed, its engine screaming as it sped shoreward.

Kalyn unlocked the handcuffs and crawled behind the Suburban, ducked down, watching through the rear tinted glass as the plane sidled up to the pier. The propeller had stopped. She heard the pontoons bump into the wooden posts. The plane’s door swung open, and a man climbed out. Impossible to see any detail in his face or even determine his height, since he was still thirty yards away and dimmed by the smoked glass.

As he walked down the pier, the Suburban’s rear passenger door opened.
Shit
. The young man with the ponytail fell out, struggled to his feet, and stumbled toward the plane, Kalyn watching him go.

Now the pilot had stopped. He stared at the injured man coming toward him, yelled something Kalyn couldn’t understand, then ran back toward the plane, scrambling up into the cockpit, the propeller sputtering to life.

She stepped out from behind the Suburban as the plane pulled away from the dock, saw the young man lying facedown in the grass. She sprinted the length of the pier as the engine roared, the plane gliding away from her, skimming the surface of the lake with increasing speed. It was already a hundred yards away. Two hundred.

The high-pitched whine sounded like a buzz saw as the plane lifted from the lake, climbing into the sky. It banked left and screamed west over the forest, disappearing after ten seconds, its engine no louder than the mosquito behind Kalyn’s ear.

She ran back to the young man and rolled him over. Lines of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth into the grass, his glassy eyes reduced to slits. She propped him up against a spruce tree, slapped his face.

“Where’s that plane going?”

He shook his head and ripped open his vest, looked down at the two dark stains on his shirt merging and spreading across his stomach. He began to cry.

“I can help you,” Kalyn told him, lying. “Get you to a hospital. You could survive this. But I need to know where that plane’s heading.”

His voice came ragged and wet: “I’m cold.”

“You wanna live?”

He nodded.

“Then tell me.”

He whispered something.

“What?”

“Hills.”

“What does that mean?”

“—ine Hills.”

“The ing hills?”

“Wolverine Hills.”

“Wolverine Hills?”

He nodded.

“Where’s that?”

The young man coughed up a mouthful of blood, moaned, “Please.”

“What’s his name? The guy who got out of the plane.”

His eyes grew more distant, like someone had pulled down the shades.

“Was this the last exchange, or was that man going to deliver me to someone else? I need to—”

He let out a long exhalation and the muscles in his neck and back relaxed. He drooped forward. Kalyn touched the side of his neck. She came to her feet, surveyed the scene—three bodies in the wilderness and darkness falling.

Will and Devlin walked into the rich-smelling coffee shop that doubled as an Internet café, waited impatiently for a computer, staring at the bizarre series of photographs that adorned the walls—black-and-white images of mating caribou. A college kid was setting up on the stage against the back wall, adjusting the levels on his amp and tuning an acoustic guitar. It was already dark outside, and Will was on the verge of ordering someone off a computer when one opened up.

He and Devlin shared a chair at one of the Macs. The connection was maddeningly slow, and it took five minutes for SoniyaMobile’s Web site to load. It had been three days since Kalyn had made him memorize her log-in ID and password. He remembered her ID immediately, but her password was alphanumeric, and it took him five tries to get it right.

When the Google map finally loaded, he said “Fuck” loudly enough for the patrons seated at adjacent computers and nearby tables to glance over and shoot him dirty stares.

Devlin said, “Oh no.”

The little icon representing Jonathan’s truck was already in northern British Columbia.

“He’s going home,” Will said. “Already delivered her to the buyer.”

“Is she dead?” Devlin whispered.

“Stop asking me that,” he replied, his words sharper than he intended.

The acoustic guitarist was now crowding a mic stand, strumming his guitar, and introducing what he described as experimental-hip-hop-folk.

“Trace it, Dad.”

“What?”

“You can see where all Jonathan’s truck has been. Here, I’ll do it.” She grabbed the mouse and moved the cursor up to the command menu. As she clicked on
VIEW TRACKING HISTORY
, Will’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, stared incredulously at the display screen.

“Who is it?” Devlin asked.

“I don’t recognize the number.”

He hit TALK. “Hello?”

“Will?”

“Shit, Kalyn, are you okay?”

“Where are you?”

“Fairbanks, Alaska.”

“Where in Fairbanks?”

“This coffee shop near the university. The Last Drop.”

“I’m ten minutes away. Stay put.”

Will closed the phone and stared at his daughter in disbelief.

Devlin began to cry.