“I . . . I’ll need my jacket . . . and my glas­ses. . .”

  “Okay.”

  “My jacket’s in the front closet, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “My glasses are . . . are . . . in with Harry.”

  “I’ll get them for you.”

  And I did, and we got our jackets from the front closet and went outside.

  27

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  IT WAS STILL cold, but the wind had died. Now, instead of pushing you around, the cold air was settling for cutting through you. Still, it was not an entirely unpleasant sensation, not unlike a splash of water in the face in the morning, waking you up, getting you alert; giving clarity to things.

  The sky was clear, now, and stars were out, and the moon, illuminating the white landscape, mak­ing the snow glitter in places where the light reflected, giving the grounds of the lodge an aura of peaceful unreality, which was a little discon­certing, at the moment.

  Janet huddled close to me, hanging onto my arm like she expected the law of gravity to be revoked any time now. She’d apparently forgot­ten about being pissed off at me and was concentrating on being scared. She’d glance up at me every few seconds, her eyes somewhat vague behind fogged-up glasses, but there was affection and something resembling trust in the looks she gave me, and I found that oddly reassuring. I liked her. Everybody else around here was weird or dead or both. She was just a little crazy, and pleasantly so. She didn’t belong here.

  Me either, but that was beside the point. I was here, and Janet too, and so, it would seem, was Turner. I could only think of two possible scenarios for what had been going on here. First, as I’d suggested to Castile, Turner might’ve come in to talk to Harry, his partner, about the final details of the coming hit, and instead had found Waddsworth dead and possibly his partner the same way, and Turner, like any pro who wandered into a situation like that, would have turned tail and run, which is precisely what he seemed to have done, according to Castile. Or second, perhaps Turner had in fact killed Harry, out of displeasure over Harry getting involved in that Gay Lib love triangle and killing Waddsworth and messing up the contracted-for job; and this made a kind of sense, because once Waddsworth had died, a sheriff’s investigation was a foregone conclusion, and Turner might not have wanted to leave a live partner behind, to talk to the authorities and play plea-bargaining games and eventually involve Turner himself.

  While the latter explanation was marginally possible, I just couldn’t see Turner using a knife or razor or whatever and cutting somebody’s throat. Too messy. Just not professional at all. I’d seen the tool of Turner’s trade back in his room at Wilma’s: that Browning automatic with the si­lencer built in by a gunsmith. And I was not entirely satisfied with the first scenario, either, as it seemed unlikely to me Turner would come into the house prior to actually making the hit. His telephone communications cut off, Turner would signal his partner somehow and then meet him outside for a talk . . . but inside the lodge? Didn’t make sense.

  Neither did the tracks in the snow.

  The snow had drifted and in places didn’t come up over my shoes and in other places was up to my waist and to Janet’s boobs. Over in the parking lot the snow-heavy cars were strange shapes amidst rolling drifts of white, while the stretch of ground between the lodge and its tool shed was barely a foot deep. And that was where the set of tracks was visible, two pairs of overlapping footprints leading away from the lodge, another set, a single pair of footprints, leading back. The tracks headed toward the shed but stopped about half­way, where someone had apparently fallen; then a smooth path had been made from that point on, as if by a sled, right up to the double doors of the shed.

  Janet and I studied the tracks in silence for a while, then exchanged puzzled looks, and I said, “I’m going in there and have a look.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Wait here.”

  “What . . . what if somebody’s in there?”

  “Then somebody besides me may come out.”

  “What do I do then?”

  “Make a run for it, wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Yeah. Right. Me and Waddsworth and Har­ry’ll all have a laugh about it in the showers after the game.”

  “Where . . . where would I run to?”

  “I don’t know. Improvise. Down into the woods would be best. You’re just going to have to fend for yourself.”

  “You’re a real comfort.”

  “I’m going to work hard at not getting killed in there. That’s the best I got to offer you.”

  “Jack . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m just scared, that’s all. Shook up, is all. Jack.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Go ahead. Go in your goddamn shed, will you?”

  I walked toward the shed. The panel truck parked against it was engulfed in a drift and any thought I might’ve had about somebody hiding in the truck was immediately discarded. As I walked I checked my pockets for possible weapons. At one point I’d had wire cutters, but I’d tossed them away, after snipping the phone wires; I’d had a screwdriver, too, which I left in the shed. Ter­rific. Well, I had my car keys, and I slid each of three keys between my knuckles so that the jagged-edged little pieces of metal extended from the fist that seemed to be the only weapon I had on me.

  I kicked the door open. Why fuck around. And I threw myself in, like you’d throw something down off a truck you were helping unload. The snowmobile stopped me. It’s what I knocked into, and bounced off of, rolling over against the wall and by that time I’d seen that Turner wasn’t in there, and neither was anybody else.

  I put my car keys away.

  Someone had been in here: apparently who­ever it was had tried to start the snowmobile, because the tarp was off and lay bubbled over against the far wall.

  I bent over the trunk-like tool chest and opened it and dug down, looking for the nine-millimeter. I came up immediately with the silencer, which I had detached and hidden in there separately, and kept digging and came rapidly to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to find it.

  The nine-millimeter was gone.

  I stood and indulged in a long sigh and went over and checked the other tool chest, the one with the garden tools, where I’d hidden the rotors from the cars, and checked the jar of nails, where I’d put the sparkplugs from the snowmobile and snowplow and everything was where I put it.

  Just that one thing missing: the gun.

  Like I told Janet, sometimes you have to impro­vise, so I dug back around in the tool chest and found a small crow bar, which was certainly a better makeshift weapon than my fist and some car keys, and as I was doing that, I noticed a red puddle over by the canvas tarp that had been flung against the wall, by whoever tried to start the snowmobile.

  So I went over and lifted the tarp off the floor to see where the red puddle had come from and found the answer.

  Richie.

  28

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  CASTILE MET US at the door.

  “Where’s your wife?” I said, stepping inside.

  “She was tired, “ he said. “Had a headache, wanted to be by herself a while.”

  “I told you to stay together.”

  “You didn’t say that.”

  “I said it.”

  “We just searched the lodge, remember? There’s nobody in here but us.”

  Janet was huddling behind me. Shivering.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Castile said.

  “She didn’t like what I just told her,” I said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That I saw Richie in the shed.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Not much. He’s under a tarp with his throat cut. Ear to ear. Like a great big smile.”

  “Jesus,” Castile said.

  “Take me up to your wife.”

  “She’s resting, I said.”

  “Take me up there. Now.”

  “Okay,” he said, and turned to lead the way. I hit him in the back with the crow bar.

  29

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  A FEW MINUTES shy of two hours later, Castile woke up. He was sitting, tied to a straight-back chair, in the sunken living room in front of the fireplace, on the fake fur rug where, not so long ago, his wife and Frankie Waddsworth had humped for the cameras. Even now the massive black camera, a boom mike, the lights on tripods, looked silently on.

  “What . . . Jesus . . . what’s going . . .”

  He tried to move and couldn’t and looked down at himself and saw the thick rubberized cable I’d used to tie him to the chair and when he saw it, going around his chest perhaps twenty times, and then down around his legs and through the rungs of the chairs, he knew there was no reason to try to budge.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “What the fuck are you doing to me?”

  “It’s almost dawn.”

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “You know where you wife is. She’s upstairs with her throat slashed. Where you left her.”

  “This is a mistake . . .”

  “Right. Anyway, we’re alone in the place, Castile. I sent Janet away. Of course we’re not exactly alone . . . there’s Waddsworth over there, and Harry’s upstairs, and Richie’s outside . . . and then there’s your wife . . .”

  His face became slack. His body too. It was like he was a figure molded in clay that was starting to lose shape. His red hair, once so care­fully groomed by his ex-hairdresser wife to dis­guise that it was thinning, looked wilted now.

  “I . . . I guess there isn’t much point in . . . pretending I don’t understand what you’re saying. . .”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  He could see the nine-millimeter in my gloved hand. I’d found the gun upstairs, in one of the built-in bureaus in one of the unused bedrooms on the fourth floor.

  He got a weary smile going. “And now what . . . you kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Then, what? Oh. You . . . you figure to . . . leave me here, and this Turner will come along and finish his job.”

  “Turner’s not going to kill you. He’s going to come in here in a while and take one look at any one of the dead bodies you’ve accumulated and he’s going to get his ass out. First rule of the profession is if anything’s out of whack, if things aren’t going exactly according to plan, then fuck it. Get out. And he will. So you aren’t in any danger from him, if I should decide to just leave you here.”

  “You . . . you’d do that? Just leave me here, and go?”

  “I might.”

  “What do you want for it . . . money? I told you before . . . I can get you money. Eight thousand, we were talking . . . I could get you that, I could get you more . . .”

  “That’s not what I want from you.”

  “Then what . . . what do you want?”

  “I want what happened . . . and I want it here.” And I tapped the big tape recorder I’d brought over from the table by the wail, where Janet had sat and done the sound on the film.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re going to tell the whole story. Begin­ning with the phone call you got from that guy whose daughter starred in the snuff flick. I want it all . . . everything . . . with one exception. You’re going to leave me out of it. And Janet too. I was never here. And Janet left here, before the storm set in . . . well before the shit started hitting the fan.”

  “And you want this . . . on tape?” He was looking at me like he thought I was crazy. It didn’t bother me. His opinion didn’t mean a whole lot to me.

  “I want it on tape,” I said “I know your intention was to throw the blame for what you did my way . . . you figured, and rightly, that if I was around for an investigation to focus on, you’d be in the clear. Once they had hold of me and dug into who I am and what I’ve done, I’d be a natural for the leading role in this little horror movie you’ve been stage-managing. So my way around that is simple: I was never here. When they find you here, you can tell any story you like . . . any­thing you can come up with that’ll save your ass . . . but just make sure I’m not a part of that story, and that Janet has a bit part. Because I’m going to have your story on tape . . . the story of what really happened here . . . to use against you if you ever try to implicate me. So I won’t have to worry. Janet, either.”

  He considered that for a moment, and then he tried out a small smile. “If I don’t make your tape . . . if I tell you to go fuck yourself . . . what then?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said, and I got the straight razor out of my pocket. I’d found it on him, when I patted him down after knocking him out with the crow bar. I flipped it open, the razor swinging out of its white plastic handle. The edge caught some light and winked. The surface of it wasn’t entirely clean, however: there were still flecks of something on it, brown flecks that had been red.

  “All right,” he said. “And if I do make the tape . . . ?”

  I tucked the razor back in its plastic handle and put it in my pocket. “I’ll leave you here.”

  “Tied up like this?”

  “Yes. That’s to your benefit. If you’re tied up and everybody else in the house is dead, when you’re found, then obviously somebody else was here. So you can pin the blame on that imaginary somebody.”

  “Why would a killer kill everybody else in the house, and leave me alive?”

  “I’ll toss you behind that couch over there. You can say the killer forgot about you. Lost count.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Not really. When Richard Speck killed those nurses in Chicago, he lost count. One of them hid under the bed and got out alive. They’ll buy it. Leave it to them to come up with the explanation.”

  “Maybe it would work . . .”

  “It will. Now. I’m going to turn on the tape recorder, and once it’s going, I won’t be talking any more. This is your show. Make it good.”

  And I hit the switch.

  30

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  HE BEGAN WHERE I told him to, with the midnight phone call and snuff flicks and how he’d been living in fear for the past six months, getting little sleep that whole time, and when he did sleep he had cold-sweat variety nightmares, and when he was awake he thought about the nightmares he’d been having, and took to carrying a gun with him and just generally jumping every time he heard a noise and sometimes when he didn’t.

  He described briefly the filming of the porno flick here at the lodge, how the first fleet of actors had left the day before, and how Janet Stein had left in the afternoon, just before the rest of them got snowed in, and then he went into Waddsworth’s fall, and how he, Castile, had reacted to it.

  “I was sure he’d been murdered,” Castile said, “by whoever it was that’d been hired to murder me. I just . . . knew . . . that the paid killer that Meyers had hired was in this lodge . . . to kill me . . . maybe to kill everyone in the lodge, now that we were snowbound . . . and my wife, when I went back to my room and told her, about Waddsworth’s death, and what I thought it could mean, she tried to con­vince me it could’ve been an accident, or the result of an argument between those three faggots upstairs . . . but I couldn’t buy it. I knew . . . after all those paranoid months . . . that this was it . . . that the attempt would be made tonight.

  “Of the four of us left in the lodge . . .” And here he paused to give me a look, emphasizing that he had left Janet and me out, in his tally of the number of people present. “ . . . my wife and I made two, and that left only Harry Belcher, a cameraman from Chicago, and his young ‘friend’ Richie Hudson. Harry was the older man, the more physically tough of the two, Richie being an ineffectual type . . . so obviously Harry seemed the more likely of the two, to make a living by violence. Another possibility was that the two men were in on it together . . . they lived togeth­er, lovers is what they were . . . perhaps they were in business, too, or at least knew each other’s business.

  “So I made an excuse to my wife, about hearing a noise in the hall, and I took my gun and went to Harry’s room. He was in bed . . . Richie wasn’t there . . . Richie had his own room, but that had been for appearance’s sake, and I’d ex­pected them to be together . . . had been ready to confront the both of them, threaten them with the gun, make them tell me, make them admit who they really were . . . or anyway who Harry was . . . I wasn’t completely convinced that little fag Richie was a part of it, though I couldn’t risk taking a chance he wasn’t.

  “He . . . Harry . . . was sitting on the side of his bed . . . lights on . . . he was holding his head in, his hands. He looked up at me, and I showed him the gun, and didn’t have a word out before he’d jumped at me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go like that . . . I was to supposed to hold the gun on him and he would tell what I needed to hear and then . . . I don’t know what . . . then, maybe, I would have killed him. I hadn’t thought it through that far . . . I was just acting out of reflex, doing what I thought I needed to survive.

  “And now, Jesus! I was fighting. A man so much stronger than me it was ridiculous . . . if he’d thought to hit me, just use his fist on me, he’d have had me. But he didn’t. We just sort of wrestled. He was concentrating on the gun I had . . . trying to twist it out my hand . . . so we wrestled, rolled around on the floor like a couple of kids roughhousing.

  “That’s when Richie came in. He must’ve been next door, or maybe he was off alone someplace pouting about what happened to Wadds­worth . . . but anyway he came in, and made a sound, like he’d been hit in the stomach, air rushing out . . . I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing there waving his arms in the air, like he’d spotted somebody drowning and he didn’t know how to swim and couldn’t do any­thing about it . . . and then he sort of ran off, toward the bathroom and he came back with the straight razor.

 

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