Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(91)

The door opened wide, and I saw him in his full glory. He was wearing a kimono and fuzzy slippers. His new wig was styled in a pageboy cut. I seemed to have caught him in the middle of a facial.

As I stepped forward into the light spilling through the door, the suspicion left his face. I plodded forward, kicking snow with my boots, until I reached a cleared path that ran around the woodpile. There was a big plastic sled tilted against the logs, presumably to be used to haul wood and other items up from the road.

“I get gawkers sometimes,” he said as I climbed the stairs. “Kids mostly. They come up here on a dare to see the freak show.”

“Kids can be cruel.”

“Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.” I hadn’t noticed the derringer in his hand until he tucked it into his pocket. “So on what account do I have the pleasure?”

Crossing the threshold, I felt as if I had stepped into a sauna. The room was lit entirely by kerosene lanterns, which made an audible hiss as they burned. The decor wasn’t feminine in the least. There were outdoorsy watercolors on the walls of men fishing and shotgunning ducks. A trout creel hung from a nail beside a bamboo fly rod. An ancient deer head—a ten-point buck—stared down from above the fireplace.

To my right was a kitchenette with a propane stove and a refrigerator. To my left was a big bed that had been expertly fashioned from shaved and shellacked logs. This was one of the coziest cabins I had ever seen.

I had so many questions about his unique living situation, but they would have to wait. “Mink, you need to get out of here.”

“Huh? Why?” He grabbed a cloth from the sink and began rubbing off the moisturizer or whatever it was that made his face gleam.

“Logan Dyer murdered Don Foss and all his men last night. Then he tried to kill a registered sex offender named Ducharme over in Stratton. Dyer left a note saying he was going to kill all the ‘deviants’ he could find before the police stopped him. We don’t know where he is, but we think he’s riding a snowmobile on the backcountry trails. He’s definitely armed and dangerous. I’m here to get you to safety.”

“So I’m a deviant, am I?” Finished with the facecloth, he tossed it into the sink.

“Those were his words, not mine.”

“I always knew that guy was a creep. He had a look in his eye, gave me the chills.”

“You need to get your stuff together.”

“Screw him. I ain’t going nowhere.”

“Dyer is extremely dangerous. He’s killed eleven men with an AR-15—that’s the civilian version of a military rifle. You can’t protect yourself here with just a derringer.”

“You don’t get it,” he said, his mouth tightening. “It’s the principle. I ain’t a coward.”

“Taking precautions doesn’t make you one.”

“Have you asked around about me?” He sneered. “Yeah, I bet you heard stuff. How I’m a freak for dressing the way I do. Probably a secret flamer, too. But I know one thing: No one ever called me a coward.” He touched his bent nose. “You think I got this from being a coward?” He peeled up his lip to reveal a broken tooth. “Or this?”

Perspiration had begun to slide down the side of my face from the heat of the room. “Mink,” I said.

“I live the way I want to live, and people can think whatever the freak they want, just so long as they don’t treat me like someone to push around. I ain’t afraid of no one, including that jerk straw Dyer.”

I couldn’t force the man from his home; this wasn’t a mandated evacuation.

“What if I stay here with you, then?” I said. “Will you allow me to do that?”

“You mean like as my bodyguard? Who am I, Whitney Houston? No freaking way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go tinkle.”

He opened a door at the rear of the room. I had a quick glimpse of a self-composting toilet and a copper bathtub like the ones you see in cowboy movies. Then he shut the door.

What to do? I couldn’t just sit in my truck at the end of his drive. There were too many ways Dyer could slip past me, and if he was using a noise suppressor on his AR-15, as I suspected, I might never even hear the shot that killed Mink. Plus, I had no idea what I was going to do with Shadow. I doubted the cold bothered him, under his heavy wolf’s coat, but keeping him caged up in the tight confines of that carrier was cruel.

I checked to see if I had a cell signal. No such luck.

“Do you have a phone here?” I asked through the bathroom door.

“The company won’t run the lines this far.”

The door opened and Mink emerged. He had changed out of his kimono into a fuzzy pink sweater and blue jeans. He had straightened his wig and applied a thin layer of lipstick, red-orange to match his hair.

“I think I gave you the wrong impression about what’s going on here,” I said.

“I don’t want to be impolite, but—”

“Just hear me out.”

His sweater seemed to be made out of some kind of synthetic fiber. He must have gotten lipstick on the front. There was an incandescent red spot just below his throat. Then the strangest thing happened: The spot vibrated.

I threw myself forward and knocked him to the floor just as the window behind me shattered.