Crazy for You (31 page)

That’s what I felt like now. Instant dunk tank. All this time I’d been picturing the three ghouls creeping through the woods on foot, hampered by the same rough footing we ourselves faced. But snowmobiles could go where cars couldn’t, and they could move at seventy miles an hour. Tracking us through the snow would have been as easy as following a trail of gumdrops. It sounded as though they were coming directly toward us, the snarl of the machines louder by the second.

But maybe it wasn’t the bad guys. Maybe it was law officers, a snowmobile rescue team. Maybe we should—

A branch just above Labeck’s head exploded. We hit the ground as the rifle clap echoed. Checking each other to make sure neither of us had been hit, we began crawling on hands and knees, Labeck leading. When we reached a thicker patch of woods we jumped to our feet and began zigzagging from tree to tree. The snowmobiles were louder now, their engines producing a distinctive rising and falling noise that sounded like a malfunctioning Mixmaster. Stopping to catch my breath, I risked a look behind. Kennison burst out of a cluster of pines on a black snowmobile, with Gozzy and Petrov close behind, riding double on a battered Arctic Cat. Kennison braked, brought his machine to a sharp stop, stood up, and got off a shot. A moment later, Gozzy’s shotgun boomed. Branches exploded; jagged splinters of wood sprayed like shrapnel; pine needles rained down.

We ran again, but the snowmobiles were closing in on us. My back itched in the exact spot where the bullet would smash into me. My breath was coming in painful, choppy gasps, my ribs seemed to be jabbing into my lungs, and I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace much longer. Labeck was in superb physical condition and wasn’t flagging, but his wound had reopened and he was dribbling blood.

The shotgun boomed again. Something punched hard into my right side and I thought I’d been hit, then saw that my purse, strapped across my chest, had been shot to shreds. Coins dribbled out. Lifesavers, lipsticks, aspirin, hairbrush—everything tumbled to the ground—including my cellphone, shaken out of some mysterious hiding place. Great—
now
it showed up; now, when it was too late!

We punched through a head-high tangle of blackberry bushes, hoping the snowmobiles couldn’t get through, and emerged, thorn-raked, on the other side of the thicket into a stand of huge old oaks and hickories. A yard or two ahead, Labeck suddenly dropped to the ground and rolled behind a tree. Oh God—he’d been hit! I staggered toward him, but he urgently motioned me toward a nearby tree, a shagbark hickory directly across from his oak tree. I collapsed at the foot of the hickory, clutching my aching sides, gasping for breath. Did Labeck really think we wouldn’t be spotted here? Our tracks in the snow would give away our location. The snowmobiles filled my head with an earsplitting roar, the sound of our doom bearing down upon us.

A jumper cable snaked through the air and slapped my thigh. Confused, I stared at Labeck. He pointed and slashed his hand across his throat.

Then I understood.

The Arctic Cat exploded out of the blackberry thicket and zoomed toward us, aiming straight for the gap between our trees. They were twenty feet away … ten … they were almost on us—

“Now!” Labeck yelled.

Jumping up, I gripped my end of the cable and hauled back with all my strength. Labeck yanked from the other side, pulling the cable taut between the trees. Hurtling along at fifty miles an hour, Gozzy didn’t see the cable until the instant he drove into it, hitting it at neck level, smashing into it so hard that the cable seared through my gloves and snapped out of my grip. If the cable had been wire, Gozzy’s bloody head would have
bounced into the branches like a home-run baseball, but the jumper wires were sheathed in rubber and merely clotheslined him, sending his whole body slamming backward, knocking into Petrov behind him. Both men were flung violently off the snowmobile, while the machine careened on riderless until it hit a giant upraised tree root, overturned, and stalled out.

We ran to the men, who lay sprawled on the ground a few feet apart. Gozzy was on his back, semiconscious and moaning hoarsely, while Petrov lay crumpled at the base of a tree, unconscious, his left arm and leg splayed at odd angles.

“Get their guns,” Labeck said.

The force of the impact had spun Gozzy’s shotgun out of his hands and sent it sailing into the blackberry brambles. Thrusting through snags and thorns, I retrieved the weapon, handling it gingerly as though it were an angry scorpion.

For a moment we’d forgotten Kennison, but now an engine howled and he rocketed into view on his snowmobile. He slewed to a sudden, violent stop, obviously shocked to see his crew out of the game. But he recovered quickly, rose to a shooting stance on the snowmobile’s struts, raised his rifle, and sighted on Labeck.

Not on your Botox-peddling life, you sack of weasel shit! I didn’t think; I simply hiked the shotgun to my shoulder, swung it around, and without bothering to aim, jerked the trigger.

The rifle and the shotgun roared simultaneously. I found myself on my back in the snow, stunned, my ears ringing and static-filled. Then Labeck was leaning over me, looking pale and frantic. “Mazie?”

“What’d you say?”

“Are you hurt?” His voice was a deep baritone, and I was having trouble picking up the lower registers, but my hearing came back by fits and starts.

“I’m okay—just recoil.” I sat up, ears still full of static, and scrutinized Labeck.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine. His shot went wild. He took off after you hit him.”

“I didn’t kill him?”

“No, but he’s going to be picking out buckshot for a while.”

“Good!” I said viciously.

Labeck’s eyebrows rose. “I thought you hated guns.”

“I do. But I love you more than I hate guns.”

I was dazed, nearly deaf, and too deliriously happy that we were both alive to control what came out of my mouth.

“Mazie?”

“Yes?” I held my breath. Ben was going to say I love you back. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear it or not.

“Would you please, very carefully, hand me that shotgun?”

Handing over the gun, I felt a dizzying mixture of relief and disappointment. Had Labeck heard what I’d said? Maybe it was just that he was too intent on cracking open the shotgun and examined its innards. “How did you know it was loaded?” he asked.

“You have to load those things?”

He shook his head and looked at me. “Unbelievable.”

Behind us, Alex Petrov groaned. He was trying to struggle upright, but his body wasn’t cooperating. His face was white and drawn with pain. One eye was swollen and still speckled with red dye where Labeck had paintballed him yesterday. Gozzy was coming around, too, sitting up and blinking like a dinosaur who’s time-traveled to the future.

“Grrrk,” he said, clutching his throat, which had a livid purple slash across it the diameter of a jumper cable. “Ummma ulll ooo,” he growled, sounding like an ex-smoker with an artificial larynx. He didn’t seem to have any other serious injuries, living proof that God looks after drunks and drug addicts. He used a tree branch to haul himself to his feet, gazed malevolently at Labeck and lurched toward us. “Gummeee umm guhhn, yooo fuggng prrsy!”

Labeck casually swung the gun around and pointed it toward Gozzy’s chest. “That’s far enough. Sit down.”

Labeck’s default mode is polite, laid-back Canadian. But now he was in hockey warrior mode: eyes hard, mouth tight. He looked like the kind of person who would do bad things to you if you crossed him.

Gozzy wasn’t reading the signals correctly. He halted, but he wore a you-wouldn’t-dare sneer on his face. “Goh kill ooo,” he rasped.

“Now what?” I whispered.

“Tie them up, haul their sled off that tree, and ride out of here,” Labeck muttered.

I could see lots of things wrong with this plan. We weren’t out of the woods yet, in any sense of the word. Tying up Gozzy meant getting close to him. If I did, he’d grab me and turn me into a hostage. And Kennison was still out there somewhere. Wounded or not, he was dangerous. Mr. Thin-the-weaklings-out-of-the-herd could still find a place where he could snipe at us from a safe distance.

Worse, I realized, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, Labeck’s Last Marine Standing act was using up every last ounce of his strength. He’d lost buckets of blood, he was hobbling, and he was operating on a thin reservoir of guts and grit. He was macho to the core, but no way was he going to haul that wrecked Arctic Cat off the tree roots.

Gozzy took a step forward. He was smirking.

“Get on the ground,” Labeck ordered. He racked the shotgun.

“Huh?” Gozzy cupped a hand to his ear and took another step.

Labeck slapped the shotgun’s trigger. Another deafening boom. When I dared look, Gozzy was sitting cross-legged in the snow, hands clasped over his head, looking terrified. One of the flaps of his sheep’s-ear cap had been blown clean off. Apparently, in addition to all his other talents, Labeck was a marksman.

“Can you hear me
now
?” he said.

Gozzy nodded vigorously. The smirk was gone.

Can you hear me now? I remembered the TV commercial from a few years ago, the one with the geek wandering around the country talking into his cellphone. “My cell,” I whispered to Labeck. “I forgot—it dropped out of my purse when we were running.”

He looked at me, grinned. “What are you waiting for—go get it.”

He grabbed my arm before I could take off. “Wait. Kennison is out there somewhere. Be careful, keep low. If you spot him, forget the phone, get back here as fast as you can.”

“Right.”

He didn’t release my arm. He turned back to Gozzy. “Take off your boots.”

“Wha duh fuh, man?”

“Want me to shoot them off?”

Gozzy pulled off his boots, and even in the pine-scented air of the great outdoors, the foot fumes carried like plague spores; a smell like rotting limburger cheese filled the air.

“Socks.”

A knife fell out of Gozzy’s sock. It had a wicked-looking six-inch blade.

“You know what to do with it,” Labeck said coldly, raising the shotgun.

Sullenly Gozzy tossed the knife toward us. I snatched it up, because if Ben bent over for it, I was afraid he’d pass out. I washed the Gozzy germs off in the snow, then took off running, retracing the path we’d taken through the woods, getting scratched by the blackberry brambles but barely noticing, punching my way through until I was in the willow and alder thicket on the other side.

There was my lipstick! There was a five-dollar bill fluttering from a low-lying branch, my spare pair of pantyhose dangling from another. How had we managed to run so far in such a short time? Backtracking the trail of junk, I moved steadily downhill.

Eye liner, grocery coupons, flip-flops, sun visor, checkbook, bug spray, ketchup packets—

There it was! My little GoMo, lying at the base of a sumac bush. I snatched it up, brushed it off, and beseeched the god of batteries—a small white bunny banging a drum—for it to be powered up.

“Please work,” I prayed.

It would be dead; it hadn’t been charged in ages; we were too far out in the sticks for reception.

I pressed the power button, held my breath. The jaunty GoMo anthem announced that I had service. Two bars’ worth. My fingers shook as I jabbed in the emergency number. The dispatcher came on instantly, a pleasant, businesslike woman who said she knew who Labeck and I were because we’d been reported missing and a search had been underway for us since daybreak. She told me to stay on the line, that our location could be traced through the phone’s signals, and that a search-and-rescue helicopter was only a few miles away and would head toward us as soon as my phone signal was triangulated and confirmed.

“We’ll need medical assistance,” I said. “We have some injured people.”

That was when I heard the voice behind me.

“Mazie.”

Jared Kennison’s voice.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Waterboarding is immoral, but Chinese water torture is simple, cheap, and gets fast results.
*

—Maguire’s Maxims

*
although it does leave you thirsty again an hour later

I whipped around, knife thrust out—which was idiotic, since a knife would be useless against a rifle—and then I saw him.

Jared Kennnison was wedged at the bottom of a steep drop-off, dangling upside down from his demolished snowmobile. The tracks and the smashed underbrush told the story: he must have been speeding as he crested a small rise, failing to notice that the ground overhung a gully. Braking at the last moment, he’d been thrown into a violent skid that sent him plunging down into the ravine. He’d landed badly, one leg jammed into the machine’s track, while his torso had been crunched into the crotch of a tree, his arms awkwardly pinned. The machine had landed rear end first, crashing through the icy surface of the stream that ran along the bottom of the ravine. The only thing preventing the snowmobile from sinking all the way into the water was a tree branch that had snagged one of the skis.

Trying to free himself, Kennison was thrashing like a speared fish, cursing and flailing his free leg around, forced to crane his neck at an awkward angle to keep his head out of the water gushing up through the splintered ice. The more he struggled, the faster the snowmobile sank into the creek. At this rate, he was going to drown in about five minutes.

“Mazie,” he called again, his voice hoarse. “I need help.”

I approached cautiously, thinking it might be a trick, but no—Dr. Dreamboat was really up the metaphorical creek without a paddle.

“Hoist with thy own petard,” I said.

He wasn’t in any condition to appreciate the Hamlet quote. “Hurry up,” he said, his voice high-pitched and panicky. “Get Labeck over here. Get this thing off me.”

“What happened?”

“The ground dropped off. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Tsk-tsk. How careless of you.”

“I was shot, damn it! I’m bleeding. You
shot
me!”