Moving fast, she checked closets on both floors, looking for weapons, preferably a scoped deer rifle; she found nothing useful. The only food in the cupboards was sealed in cannisters or unopened bags. The refrigerator was empty, except for five cans of PBR.
She did find heavy ski gloves, and she took them. Back outside, onthe deck, she looked over the lake, and far away, on the western horizon, she saw a trace of smoke above the trees. The smoke seemed to dissipate, then came back. There was another house out there.
She walked off the deck, saw trails through the woods both left and right, took the one on the left and started jogging.
• • •
Lucas, Sherwood, andWhite moved carefully toward the house, then Sherwood waved them farther off, until White was fifty yards to his right, and Lucas twenty-five. As they closed in, Sherwood said, quietly, “Guns up, guns up.”
Sherwood spotted the car, and pointed, and said, “The car,” and then, “She’s here, you two, hold where you are. Get behind some cover.”
He moved slowly up to the Bronco, then looked at the side of the house, and eased around to the deck, before backing away. “She’s gone, on foot. She kicked in the door on the deck, and it appears that she’s running up a trail, there are fresh footprints in the snow.”
Lucas and White came to look, one at a time, then White and Lucas cleared the house, came back out, and found Sherwood fifty feet up the left-hand trail.
“She’s headed toward that smoke. She hopes to get a car,” Sherwood said, pointing at the wisp of smoke beyond the trees above the lake. “Lucas, you stay back a bit, but on the trail, following the footprints. Yell if they swerve off. Shelly, you work your way along the lakeside, look for other prints. I’m going farther up to the left…She may expect us to be back here somewhere, so if you need to shout, do it.”
“I’m good with that,” Lucas said.
“But stay back. You’ll be more in the open than Shelly and me, so…we’ll probably see her first.”
• • •
They began movingalong the trail, more widely separated than they had been, and sometimes, for a minute or more at a time, lost sight of one another in the oaks and aspens.
Sherwood got out fifty yards, then seventy, and when he topped a ridge running in the same direction as the trail below him, where Lucas was, he moved slightly off the far side of the ridgetop, so Lucas couldn’t see him, and began running through the snow, brambles and small saplings tearing at his coat.
He was wearing leather oxfords, to go with his woolen pants and coat, but he ran hard for five minutes, leaving the other two behind. About the time he began worrying that they might be on a wild-goose chase, he saw Abramova.
And Abramova saw him.
• • •
Abramova saw theman closing on her. He was oddly dressed for the wilderness, in what appeared to be a camel-colored dress coat that dropped to his knees. She’d been walking as quickly as she could, but now broke into a run. She needed to get to the house putting out the chimney smoke: if they had cars there, she could disable all but one, and run in that one, until she found another target.
She still couldn’t see the house, and after two or three minutes, running with the heavy coat, through the crusty snow, she wasbreathing hard, snot running down her face and across her lips and chin, until she wiped it off with the ski glove.
She slowed to look back: the man was measurably closer, and still running hard, despite the long coat flapping around his legs. She came to a three-wire barbed-wire fence, climbed through it, and kept running, but the man was only seventy or eighty yards away, coming up to the fence. The house was down a gentle slope, but across an open field. She ran as hard as she could for a hundred yards, looked back, dropped the heavy ski gloves and pulled her pistol. There was nobody behind the man, backing him up.
• • •
Sherwood stopped atthe fence, looking down the hill at the woman who’d turned on him. She had a pistol in her hand, and she was a trained professional shooter, so he had no time: he braced the rifle on the fence post, but had no idea where the gun might be sighted-in at—it had the simple original iron sights.
She fired at him: a bullet flicked past his head, but he ignored it, and the one that followed.
He’d always been good with an AR-16, and this was essentially the same thing. He put the sights on the middle of her chest, pulled the trigger three times, letting the light recoil make his aim adjustments for him.
His second shot hit her, knocked her down, the third shot, he thought, missed. He crossed the fence, turned around and shouted, “She’s here, she’s here.” She was down, but was she silenced?
He ran through the snow, coming up on Abramova as she struggled to sit up. She must have had a gun in her hand when she was hit,because it was lying in the snow two feet away from her. She looked up at Sherwood and said, “I am done. I’m…”
She didn’t get to finish, because after a quick look around, Sherwood shot her in the heart.
Then she was silenced, as she needed to be.
• • •
Sherwood scratched hisnose and again looked back up the hill. Still couldn’t see Lucas or White, so he shouted: “Got her! Got her!” Then he stepped over to the pistol in the snow, picked it up, scuffed over the mark it had made, and shoved the pistol under the cuff of her coat, at the end of an outflung arm.
