In the Barren Ground Page 31

  Crash rolled onto his side, and kicked at her. But she caught his boot, twisted hard, and he felt something pop in his knee. A tide of blackness and pain took him. Soft, rolling, cold, warm … he was sucked down. Was he bleeding out? Was it a concussion? He could no longer see. He fought to stay up on top of the black tide. Time stretched as he went in and out. Somewhere he heard a snowmobile starting up.

  He felt his body being rolled, dragged, moved, and another wave of pain consumed him.

  Hang on, O’Halloran, hang the fuck on. You have two things left to do in your life and that’s save Mindy, if it’s not too late. And save Tana and her baby. If you do that, then you can let the universe take you … then maybe you’ll be forgiven and can die in peace …

  But the black tide took him into its sea.

  CHAPTER 42

  Tana bombed her sled over hard-packed snow and ice along the track to Crow TwoDove’s ranch, rifle and shotgun slung across her back. Fog roiled up from the river. Flecks of snow dotted her visor. She slowed to a crawl as she neared the entrance to the TwoDove property. A snowmobile was parked under the pine arch. Her throat turned dry—it was Crash’s machine. She drew up to it, killed her engine.

  The ranch was in darkness. All she could make out in the mist were the black shapes of the buildings. Even the dog had gone silent. A pervading sense of evil seemed to breathe out of the place with the mist.

  Hair pricked up the back of her neck.

  Crash was on the ranch somewhere, yet there was no sign of life. Why had he left his sled out here and gone in on foot? Nerves rustled through her.

  Tana tried his satellite phone number again. It rang, then went straight to voice mail. She sat a moment, just listening, watching. No sound came out over the snow, either. Something was wrong.

  Every instinct in her soul screamed to go in there and find out. Yet every nerve in her body also screeched her to a halt—don’t be a fool. Don’t be the asshole who goes into the basement when all the lights have gone out. Protect your baby. Be smart. Conflict roiled inside her. She had to act, but in a way that mitigated danger, even if it cost a little time, because going in there alone and getting shot dead wasn’t going to help Crash and Mindy, either. They had more chance if she moved carefully. She was learning this about life the hard way.

  Tana gunned her machine and spun around in the road. She gave it juice and raced back into town. Fog thickened as she went. Snow was coming in heavily now, plastering her visor. Wind was kicking up.

  She put on her siren as she entered Twin Rivers and made for the band office and community hall. It was Saturday night. There was always a potluck and bingo at the hall on Saturdays. The chief, council, all the elders would be there. She drew up outside the entrance, sirens still wailing, the lights flashing on her snowmobile. People came up to the lighted windows to see what was happening. Tana yanked off her helmet and ran up the stairs.

  She bashed through the double doors into the hall. Heads turned. People stood up from their seats at the bingo tables. Marcie, dishing up food from a station at the back, stopped, stared. Tana scanned their faces, heart hammering. She saw Rosalie among them. Viktor was here, too. And old Bob Swiftriver, the maintenance guy. Chief Dupp Peters came forward.

  “Tana? What’s going on?”

  “It’s Heather MacAllistair,” she said, breathing hard. “I think she did it—she killed Regan Novak, Dakota Smithers, Selena Apodaca, Raj Sanjit, and who knows who else. And I think she’s got Mindy and Crash on TwoDove’s ranch.”

  As she spoke, the community gathered closer around her, eyes wide.

  “This woman is armed and dangerous, and she has killed one of your own daughters,” Tana said. “She has destroyed lives in this town—”

  “Heather? How can that be?” Marcie said. “She flies everyone so safely.”

  Murmurs started. Voices began to rise. “It was the wolves,” said someone. “It wasn’t a person who killed those kids.”

  “Elliot Novak started thinking like this,” said another. “And look what happened to him. Look what happened to Crow, and Jennie Smithers and her marriage, because of this kind of thinking.”

  “It’s the way of the wild,” said another. “It’s the animals’ territory.”

  Tana held up her hands. “One step at a time. I believe Mindy and Crash are in trouble. I can’t get the kind of backup I need from Yellowknife until I’m certain that Heather has them. I need help to find out, now.”

  She’d done it.

  She’d asked for help.

  And her career could be over for involving innocent civilians in an operation, but fuck the rule keepers, fuck Keelan and Cutter, because if being a cop meant playing by rules that didn’t apply out in the remote field, and that could cost lives, she didn’t want to be a cop any longer.

  “There are risks,” she said. “I need you to understand that. Whoever offers to help me has to obey my orders at all times, because I don’t want anyone to get hurt. If we find out that Heather has Crash and Mindy at the ranch, we back out of there, and I call for an ERT team from Yellowknife. If I’m wrong, if Crash and Mindy are not in trouble, we can all go home.”

  “What if you can’t get a call to Yellowknife?” said Chief Dupp Peters. “Fog and snow are getting thick as concrete out there right now. And even if you can get a signal out, how long would it take for an ERT team to get here?”

  Maybe too long.

  “One step at a time,” said Tana, because she had no idea herself. “Is there anyone here who wants to help find out if Mindy and Crash are on that ranch?”

  “If this is true what Tana says about Heather, then Heather has hurt all of us,” Alexa Peters said to the crowd. “Mindy is one of ours. This is our community. Our problem.”

  “Agreed,” Chief Dupp Peters said. “Everyone agrees, right?” He turned to address the members of the council, the elders, everyone present in that hall. “We would go and look for Mindy ourselves if there was no outside police presence here. We would have to.”

  Murmurs of agreement rose in crescendo.

  “What do you need, Tana?” Dupp said.

  She cleared her throat, her brain racing. “I … I’m going to need a central command, and that can happen right here, in this town hall. Chief, I need you to take control of the command, and to coordinate the gathering of some volunteers—fit, able-bodied people who are familiar with weapons, and who can take orders. I want Jankoski brought in, if he’s sober. He’s ex-military. While he is a civilian, he’s contracted to the RCMP. He knows the risks. I also need those five volunteer firefighters that Twin Rivers has on standby. They’ve been trained to work as a team, and they know how to operate under a command structure. And anyone else who has had any kind of paramilitary type training—like wildfire fighting, search and rescue, emergency first aid—I need them to come in. I want Addy on call at the clinic. And snowmobiles and fuel. Bob, can you keep running the plow over the airstrip and be ready for when flights can get in again? Get some portable, generator-powered floodlight towers running out there. I saw some in the storage hangar that the ice road guys are using.” She rubbed her brow. “The first step is to put together a team to come with me to the TwoDove ranch. Armed. Experienced with guns. I’m going back to the station, and I’ll fetch whatever weapons I can find back here. Anyone else with weapons, please get them. And we could use more two-way radios, batteries. I’ll return here with the radios we have at the station.” She paused. “And no one—I mean no one—goes out to that ranch without my green light.”

  She was going overboard perhaps, preparing for the fact they would find Crash and Mindy there. Anxiety at involving civilians churned like acid through her gut. She’d try to mitigate risk. She’d call Keelan as soon as she knew …

  “Is Crow on the ranch?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said “The place is in darkness. Quiet. No dog.”

  “That dog is always there,” came another voice.

  “What about Jam
ie? Where is he?” said Marcie.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “These are things we need to find out. You guys get busy here, and I’ll be right back with guns, radios, and other equipment.”

  Tana left the hall and ran down the steps toward her idling machine, the red-and-blue lights still pulsing and bouncing off fog and snowflakes. Her heart pelted in her chest. She was terrified. She had no idea what she was doing. But she was going with her gut. Tana just prayed that the delay she was incurring while she gathered forces wasn’t going to kill Crash or Mindy. At the same time she also knew acting brashly and just barreling into the ranch alone, and getting herself killed, was not going to help them, either. It could cost their lives in the long run.

  This, Tana, this is what you came here for. A crucible. You wanted to be tested, and to rise to the challenge. Now, girl, now is the time. Someone has to do something. Someone has to take control, be a leader. And if you take the fall for your actions, if people die, you can go down knowing that you tried your damnedest, and that you tried with heart, to do the right thing. To “maintiens le droit.”

  Heather secured her prisoner sausages tightly onto her snowmobile trailer with woven nylon straps. She’d rolled the bodies up in canvas, leaving their heads sticking out the tops, and trussed them with rope—like stuffed beef rouladen. Her aunt in Minnesota used to make those. Every fortnight, on a Sunday. It was their German heritage, she’d said. Strips of beef rolled around chopped-up smoky bacon and pickles, and simmered in a pot. Served with dumplings. Heather pictured the trussed beef sausages floating in their dark stew juice, and for a moment they looked like her aunt, whom she’d drowned and left floating in the farm reservoir … no more beef rouladen on Sundays …

  Breathing hard, Heather stopped and stared suddenly at Crash’s face. His complexion was ghost-white in the stark light of her headlamp. Snow was settling on his cold, torn-up features. She pulled off a glove and placed her fingers gently at his carotid. His pulse was weak, but he was still alive. He was losing blood, though. She’d bound up his leg, and pulled a tight hat down over the wounds on the back of his head, but the gashes across his cheek were split wide, and the hat was dark and sodden with blood. What had she done? For a moment she was hit with a sharp flash of lucidity. With it came fear.

  What in the hell was she doing? What was she doing to Crash? She felt for Mindy’s pulse. There was none. Panic whipped through her and she spun around, and screamed into the fog.

  She stood there, panting, hands fisted at her sides, listening to the echo of her own scream bouncing downriver into the vast nothing. She was fighting it. It was messing with her brain. It was melding into one—Reader, Watcher, Heather, Reader. The monster inside was taking over, and she didn’t know how to stop it, or if she even wanted to, but it scared the shit out of her. It had been under control, smooth going, until the Mountie flew into town. If Heather had to pinpoint the trigger, it was when Tana had taken her arm at the WestMin camp that night, and looked into her eyes, and told her she was too drunk to go out to the site and help. And then it had all started to hum inside Heather’s brain when Tana Larsson had questioned her in the camp mess, and Heather had detected suspicion and cunning in the young cop’s face. And the monster inside had stirred, and rolled, and become uncomfortable as the cop closed in.

  What to do, what to do? She whipped around and studied Crash’s face again.

  Get rid of the cop—like a cancer, cut it out. That’s what to do. Stop the monster. Sate the Hunger. Put it back in its hole.

  It used to be okay. She could control it. She’d let it out once a year, and feed the Hunger, always around the time of her birthday during the first week of November, when her mother had died giving her life. Her first real kill had been a kid who lived on the neighboring farm in Minnesota—she’d left that young girl’s body down a deep ravine, and returned over the following days to watch scavengers feeding on the remains. It made Heather feel strong, in control—the way she’d felt watching those wolves eat her father and brother. Killing that girl killed the female weaknesses in herself. And she liked the way animals were her friends, how they destroyed evidence.

  A sharp memory, a flash of the wolf teeth ripping and tearing the wet flesh of her father, hit her. Suddenly she could hear again the sound of her dad’s screams as he flailed against the bear trap holding him while the carnivores tore him to pieces, ate him alive. While she’d watched from the trees. And when her monster-dad fell silent, she’d finally felt strong. Turned on. Empowered. So alive. Those wolves had brought her justice. At last. She was not alone. The wildness, the Hunger had entered her.

  No more visits in the night from her father …

  And then she’d followed her brother out into the storm while he was searching for their missing dad, and she’d clubbed her brother on the back of the head, right there, as he stood in shock over their father’s carcass lying bloodied in the snow. And she left him there, too, and the wolves returned to help clean her brother away.

  No more tying her down and fucking her in the shed from her brother …

  Then she’d done her aunt, whom she’d hated, and who’d whipped her with a belt.

  No more beef rouladen.

  No more dumplings.

  Heather didn’t like beef rouladen … Heather hated dumplings …

  Later she’d refined things, planning carefully, as she began to take lives more out of pleasure, to feel. The blood. The violence. To taste the flesh. As a kind of sexual release. And to punish young women for their stupid weaknesses, or promiscuity, or for looking at men that Heather liked. The annual November kill was a way for her to keep her tendency toward violence in check over the remainder of the year, until the Hunger grew again. And always, she worked in remote locations when she could, using weather, terrain, and wildlife to cover her trace.

  But it was only when she’d finally come north, and found that book, The Hunger, a story set right here in the Barrens, that things fully, beautifully, coalesced. The wolf-beast in the Story—it was her. It was as though the author was speaking directly to her. He understood her need, the art of what she did. And it gave her company, as if she had a partner. It made her feel brilliantly clever, acting out the scenes. It gave her a way to neatly compartmentalize this need in herself. And she became Reader.

  It became her Story. Nature doing its justice.

  In the Barrens of the soul, Monsters we breed … retribution our creed …

  Focus, Heather!

  She reached into her breast pocket and took out her hip flask. She swigged back half the contents. The whiskey burned on the way down, and heat branched like fire into her chest. That’s better. She felt halfway normal again. Focus. Put the Beast down. Focus. Sate the Hunger. Kill the cop.

  She hooked the trailer onto the back of her snowmobile, strapped on the cans of bear lure, rope, snowshoes, and guns, and swung her leg over the machine. She started the engine, and glanced over her shoulder. Crow was step one. Tana would find Crow. She’d come alone—because she was the only cop in town. She’d follow the blood trail from the barn down to the lure shed.

  At the shed she’d discover more blood, and Crash’s gun, and his knife. And Mindy’s fluffy pink scarf, which she’d left lying near the lure drum.

  Her snowmobile tracks would lead the Mountie on a trail across the river ice, and north toward the treeline at the badlands.

  Yesterday, while the Mountie was gone with Crash, while Mindy was tied up in the basement, Heather had gone out there and started to prepare. She always prepared. And if the Mountie did not happen to come alone, the treeline at the badlands would ensure she did. People from town didn’t cross into the badlands. It was taboo.

  Revving her engine, Heather took off for the river, dragging her sled behind her.

  CHAPTER 43

  Tana pushed through the doors and dumped the guns on the table. Another nail in her career coffin—she’d be toast when headquarters found out she’d armed civilians with police-i
ssue weapons. She shoved the thought out of her mind.

  Others had placed two-way radios, batteries, and hunting knives on the table. Someone had brought a collection of odd-looking whistles on thongs.

  “For those who don’t have radios,” a voice said behind her.

  She turned around, and surprise washed through her.

  “Jamie?”

  “I made them.” He selected a whistle, blew into it once. It produced the shrill shriek of a kestrel. He blew another. The call of a raven. “It’s a good way to communicate if you don’t want people to know you are there.”

  She met his dark gaze. “You weren’t at the ranch?”

  “I’ve been staying at Wolverine Falls,” he said. “Too many memories of Selena at the ranch right now. But tonight I’m worried about my father. He was supposed to come for supper. I was setting out to find him, then I heard about Heather, and how you wanted no one to go to the farm.” He paused. “I need to come with you.”

  Emotion surged into Tana’s eyes. She nodded. “Do you know how to use a rifle?”

  “We all do. We all hunt. I’ve used a rifle since I was three.”

  She handed him a police rifle and ammunition.

  Jankoski pushed his way through the crowd. “Tana—are you all right?”

  She studied his face. His eyes were clear. He was clean shaven. He looked better than she’d ever seen him looking. “I could use you,” she said quietly.