Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(92)

35

I never even heard the gunshot.

The impact of our collision knocked the wind from Mink and the back of his head hit the floorboards hard. I rolled off him and looked up to see the laser sight of a rifle moving like a jittery insect around the room. Dyer was trying to find one of us in his scope again.

“It’s him,” I said. “He’s out there.”

Mink moaned.

The shot had come from the front of the cabin. The bullet had shattered the same window Mink had peeked through. I propped myself up against a wall and pumped a shotshell into the chamber of my Mossberg.

Dyer had a high-powered rifle with a laser sight. He had the darkness to hide in and could circle the building, waiting for another shot. He had fired only once, which meant he was patient, not prone to getting overexcited. There was no way for us to contact the outside world for help. And for all I knew, Pulsifer had never even received my message telling him where I was headed.

To put it mildly, I was having trouble identifying a single advantage we might have.

“Is there a back door?”

“There’s a window,” Mink gasped, still out of breath.

I glanced at the cast-iron stove in the kitchen. Behind it was a large rectangular window. It had hinges on the top, so that it could be lifted inward. Lots of old logging cabins had these setups in their kitchens. A man could stand outside and pass logs for the stove through the open window to someone inside the kitchen.

Mink had rolled over onto his stomach. His big eyes were following the laser sight around the room as if hypnotized by it, the way a cat might be.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to provide some covering fire while you go out that back window. Here are the keys to my truck. It’s a hundred yards up the road from the end of your drive. I want you to take it and get the hell to the nearest house with a phone. Dial 911 and tell them there’s an officer who needs assistance at your address. Tell him Logan Dyer is shooting at me. That should get their attention.”

His lipstick was smeared. His body was pressed so tightly against the floorboards, it looked like he had been squashed by a giant foot.

I kicked him in the arm. “You’re not a coward.”

He nodded.

I shimmied on my elbows and knees through the shattered glass toward one of the unbroken windows. Carefully, I raised the edge of the curtain. I brought my head up, hoping to obtain a target rather than just firing blindly, but as soon as I did, the glass above me exploded.

I rolled to the other window, raised myself onto my knees behind the cover of the wall, then swung out into the open and fired a shot at the trees. I pumped another shell into the chamber and fired again.

I ducked behind the wall just in time to see Mink’s legs as he went tumbling through the kitchen window.

The little man could move pretty fast if he needed to.

The laser dot reappeared against the far wall of the cabin. I watched the quivering red light search the room. Now with two windows broken and two curtains torn, Dyer was going to have multiple angles, multiple lines of sight into the building.

The red dot winked off.

Maybe he was waiting for me to show myself again.

I tried to regain control of my breathing. My ears ached from firing the shotgun.

The laser appeared again, zipped back and forth against the opposite wall, and then vanished.

Dyer hadn’t seen Mink go through the window or run off down the hill. This might just work, I thought.

I moved to the other window and fired a random shot into the trees. The percussive boom of the Mossberg left my ears ringing. It took a solid minute for them to return to normal.

In the distance, I heard an engine turn over. Mink had made it to my truck. Now he just needed to turn around and get the hell out of there.

But if I could hear the engine, so could Dyer. He would know that I had stayed in the house to provide cover for Mink’s escape.

I took a chance, rose to my feet, and went running across the room and into the kitchen. I threw myself through the open window and landed face-first in a pile of snow. I blinked my eyes to clear them and then grabbed the side of the building to help regain my footing. I must have knocked my knee on the sill, because a shooting pain went through it as I straightened up.

I heard another engine off in the woods. The noise it made was almost a high-pitched whine: Dyer’s snowmobile.

I hadn’t considered the possibility that he might give chase.

I stumbled around the front of the cabin and looked down the steep hill. The holes my legs had left in the snow, climbing up from the road, made a zigzagging path. I took another step, felt my knee buckle, and grabbed at the woodpile for support. Birch logs rolled down, one after the other. Something else fell to the ground. It was the plastic sled Mink used to haul wood.

I glanced at it, glanced at the hill beneath me. I let my shotgun drop; the Mossberg swung on its sling against my side. I bent over, took hold of the sled by the edges, tried to get whatever momentum I could, and then belly flopped on top of it.

Headfirst, I went flying down the hill.

Then my shotgun slipped over the edge and began to drag against the surface. The sled turned sideways, and I flipped over. I had a glimpse of the sled continuing on without me. And then I began rolling over and over on my side, the way kids do when they’re playing, only with less control. The sling came loose from my shoulder, and I continued down the slope, my shotgun now lost.