The Old Man(67)
He would look for a vehicle parked along the narrow winding road, or maybe moving toward the cabin from below. Then he would go across the hall to the guest room with the best view of the hill and look up toward the crest. He knew that a sniper would prefer to fire into the window from above, where he would have a good view of the rooms and a superior firing position. When Hank felt particularly uneasy, he would use the night-vision binoculars to search the forest trails. Then he would pad back into the bedroom and slide under the covers into the space where Marcia’s body kept the bed warm. He would remind himself that there had been no car, there had been no men, and in time he would sleep.
The morning after the big snowstorm, the air was cold but the sun was bright, obscured only for seconds at a time by passing clouds blown by winds at high altitudes. Whenever the sun broke through the clouds, the glare of the snow brightened enough to hurt the eye.
Hank stood in the living room and saw an oversized black pickup truck with a snowplow blade mounted on the front. The truck had big tires with chains, and what looked like sandbags piled in the bed.
He watched the truck move up the right side of the road, its plow shouldering the snow to the edge of the pavement in a long, serpentine ridge. When the truck came to a cabin’s driveway it swept the snow across the front, blocking it. The truck wasn’t a municipal vehicle.
It had been snowing at Big Bear since the end of October, and he’d never seen this black truck come up the road before. He supposed that the owners of the other cabins in this section might have hired a local entrepreneur to plow their road and driveways to open them after the storm.
Hank went away from the window to get a cup of coffee. As he poured it in a mug, he considered it likely that one of the owners had hired the plow. But he decided to keep an eye on the truck. He had learned over the years that things that didn’t seem right often weren’t. He could hear Marcia playing a few bars from the Chopin sonata she had been learning. She stopped, then played the same passage again.
He returned to the front window and saw the truck moving on the far side of the road, heading downward again, leaving the same winding ridge of snow all the way along. The driver never stopped to clear any of the driveways. Odd. Hank sipped his coffee and looked out at the roads below in the village while he listened to Marcia play. There were few cars out after the big snowfall. He stood for a few minutes, set his coffee on the table, and went out to the mudroom. He put on his quilted jacket, found his gloves in the pockets and his knitted cap in a sleeve. He picked up his sunglasses and opened the door to grasp the shovel and bring it inside.
He stood in the entrance to the living room and held up the shovel so Marcia would look up from the piano to see.
She stopped playing.
“I’m just going to dig us out,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
“My hero,” she said, and went back to playing.
He went out and began to shovel. He had picked out the shovel himself, and he respected it. It was a black steel scoop shovel on a thick ash shaft, which he thought of as a coal shovel. It was heavier than a flat snow shovel and nearly as broad, but it didn’t bend and would slice under ice instead of bouncing over it.
As he worked, his breaths were thick white puffs in the crisp air. He cleared the barrier of snow at the bottom of the driveway and looked down on the village and the lake. He was concentrating on the shoveling, but part of his mind was still thinking about the truck. The only two cabins beyond theirs on this road were unoccupied. He hadn’t seen anybody, or even a parked car, in a month or more. He decided to watch for cars coming up the road toward the other cabins. Maybe one of the neighbors had seen the weather reports and had the plow come because he was on his way up here to ski the fresh snow.
Julian Carson walked quickly through the pinewoods above the three cabins that sat along the newly plowed road near the top of the mountain. He saw the target Henry Dixon standing on the driveway in front of the big cabin with a shovel. Julian recognized him immediately. Some part of Julian’s mind had kept alive the hope that Goddard had made a mistake, but it was the same man. Dixon looked as though he was clearing the way to drive the car out. Julian couldn’t let him do that. Julian sped up, walking only under the pine trees above the deep snowdrifts. He couldn’t afford to make noise or leave clear tracks, so he stayed in the woods. The pine branches formed such a thick thatch of needles under the trunks the forest ground was only dusted with thin powdery snow that would be difficult to read for tracks.
He came to a fallen pine tree and walked atop the trunk, moving quickly but keeping his balance, until he could step off into the path already pressed into the snow. The path led him to the back porch, a concrete block with three steps leading up to it. He went low and peered in the window. He could see the kitchen was empty. He knelt on the porch, took off his gloves, and reached into his pocket for his pick and tension wrench, then went to work on the bolt. The hardware on the door was practically new and very sturdy, and had a wide steel overlap to prevent anyone fitting a knife or screwdriver into the crack to jimmy the lock. Everything about the mechanism was big and thick, but the size of the keyway made the lock easier to pick. He lined up the pins quickly and opened the door. He heard classical music. A piano.
He moved swiftly through the kitchen into the living room, using the music to cover the sounds his feet made on the floor. There was the woman he had seen the old man carrying out of the apartment in Chicago. He came up behind her. He put his forearm around her neck and stifled her first jerk of surprise, holding her tightly as he said softly, “Stay still, Zoe. Stay quiet.”