White: “Straight. She has to get off this highway.”
Lucas: “Okay, straight.”
“I hope this doesn’t fuck up my truck,” Penny said, as he braked to take the side road. “It’s only got sixty thousand on it.”
“The government will cover any damage,” Lucas said. “We commandeered it. Don’t run over any small children. They’d sue all our asses. But…”
“I know. Drive faster,” Penny said. “What kind of guns does this chick have?”
“Pistol,” White said. “She wasn’t carrying anything when she grabbed the Bronco.”
“If we get in a fight, I’ve got an AR in a scabbard back in the truck bed,” Penny said. “Wouldn’t want to get in the fight myself, I’m not a law-enforcement personnel.”
“I call dibs,” Sherwood said.
• • •
They went upthe side road, up a hill, saw a driveway to the left, but it was raw dirt and looked like a dead end and Lucas said, “Keepgoing.” Farther up, another driveway, but this one had a gate with a layer of snow in front of it, with no tracks. Penny kept going.
They passed turns to the right but Penny said they were hunting trails, and there was no sign of tracked snow: “Deer season ended back months ago,” he said.
They went past a closed gate to the right as the road turned sharply to the left, and the driveway showed multiple tracks in the snow, and Penny slowed and Lucas said, “I don’t know.”
“We can come back,” Sherwood said. “The nav shows a straight road ahead, if we keep going and see her…”
They went ahead, rattling along the gravel road, over a couple hills and then a long straightaway, with no sign of the Bronco; but another pickup was coming straight at them and Lucas said, “Doug, block the road.”
Penny turned half sideways across the road and Lucas jumped out of the truck and ran toward the oncoming pickup, waving his arms, badge in his hand. The truck slowed, stopped, and the driver dropped the window. Lucas ran up and said, “U.S. Marshal. Did a tan Bronco go past you, running fast?”
“Nope, we ain’t seen nothing,” the driver said. The woman sitting next to him said, “Nobody’s passed us, going a mile or two back.”
“Okay: listen, if a woman in a red parka tries to flag you down, don’t stop. She shot somebody in Hayward, and we’re trying to chase her down. If you stop, she’ll kill you.”
Lucas ran back to Penny’s truck, got in, said, “Turn around. Take us back to the gate with the tracks.”
They drove back a half mile to the gate. Penny said, “Fire Sign 928. Want me to call it in to the cops?”
“Do that,” Lucas said, as he and White and Sherwood climbed outof the truck. “As you’re doing that, drive back to the highway and send the cop cars in here when they show up. And send one in to that farm to look around. Tell him to be careful.”
Sherwood walked around back of the pickup, dropped the tailgate, and found a leather-and-plastic scabbard fastened to the side of the truck. He pulled out an AR-15 and took a thirty-shot magazine from a side pocket, slapped it home and yanked the charging handle and let it go, loading the rifle. He shut the tailgate and said, “Get it on.”
He and Lucas pushed back the gate and Sherwood said, “Lucas, stay way over to the left side of the driveway, and lead us in. I’ll be back five yards on the right, Shelly, trail us by twenty yards. If she’s in here, we don’t want her to shoot us all at once. We need to stay spread out. We need to shut up and be as quiet as we can, so she can’t pinpoint us, if she’s in here.”
“Got it,” White said, and Lucas nodded, and they started down the driveway, guns in hand, well separated. The driveway ran downhill through a forest of small barren aspen trees, probably three- or four-year-old regrowth covering a clear-cut.
• • •
Abramova had knownthat she’d have to get off the road as soon as she could, especially if the pickup was still trailing her. When she saw the closed, rusty steel gate, standing open a foot or so—not locked—she pulled up, dragged the gate open, drove through, dragged the gate fully closed, hurriedly got back in the Bronco and drove it down the hill. At the bottom, she found a two-story dark-wood cabin on a small pothole lake with a garage to one side.
There was no smoke coming from the two chimneys she couldsee, no vehicles in sight: the place appeared to be closed for the winter, although there’d been car tracks in the snow. The snow was crusty, probably three or four days old. She pulled the Bronco into the yard, but behind the garage where it couldn’t be seen from the driveway.
Nothing was moving. She walked around to the front stoop, which had been cleared of snow, but the snow piled off to the side appeared to have crusted over, so it hadn’t been cleared that day and probably not the previous day. She was tempted to kick the door, but after a moment’s consideration, decided that it might be alarmed, and turned away.
Back at the Bronco, she went through it quickly, found a pair of cross-country skis, poles, a boot bag, and a sack of Cheetos, partly eaten. She had no use for the skis, but opened the Cheetos and gobbled the rest of them, then walked around to a deck that looked over the lake, planning to look in the lakeside windows for an alarm.
As she did that, she heard a truck go by on the road above the cabin; she couldn’t see it, but it sounded as though it was moving fast. She still had pursuers.
From the deck, peering through the windows, she saw nothing on the walls near the doors that might be an alarm pad. She hesitated, then went to the door and kicked it. Inside, the cabin was as cold as it was outside.
