Forty Words for Sorrow

55

THE PUMPHOUSE HAD BEEN out of use for five years and looked it. It was a low, squat, ugly building of grey stone, its windows boarded up and its roof piled high with an entire winter’s accumulation of snow—three feet deep despite the recent meltage. Icicles the size of organ pipes dripped from the corners. Its virtue—from a murderer’s point of view—was isolation. There was not another house for half a mile on either side, and this distance was thick with uncut brush.

Cardinal did a fast reconnoitre and established that there was no door on the lake side. A single set of stone steps rose from the lake to the side door, forming a perfectly smooth diagonal under the snow and ice. Fraser’s Windstar was parked near the lake. Footprints and drag marks led up to the pumphouse. A rusty outline showed where a padlock had hung.

Soundlessly, Cardinal moved to the door and grasped the handle. He turned it as gently as possible. It didn’t budge. He shook his head to signal the others.

McLeod opened his trunk and pulled out the “boomer,” sixty pounds of solid, door-smashing iron. Delorme and he each took a handle and prepared to ram the door. Cardinal would be first in, with gun drawn. All this they agreed on without speaking.

What happened next became a featured point in department war stories as they were told for years to come. Delorme and McLeod had backed away for their run at the door. Cardinal had his hand up to make the one-two-three signals. He had just finished “one” and was raising his hand for “two,” when Eric Fraser stepped out of the building.

He stood there, blinking in the light.

Later, there would be many theories about what made him step out just then. Going for supplies was one theory, the call of nature another. It didn’t matter—the effect was the same.

Fraser stepped out of the building in his shirt sleeves—black hair whipping in the breeze, black jeans and black shirt vivid against the snow—and stood there like an innocent man, blinking for what seemed like ten seconds but was probably less than one.

As Delorme put it later, “This pale, skinny guy with little skinny arms. I would never have called him a killer, not in a million years. That guy, he looked like a boy.”

Eric Fraser, killer of four people that they knew of, stood utterly still, his hands a little away from his sides.

Cardinal’s voice sounded tinny to his own ears. “Are you Eric Fraser?”

Fraser spun. The Beretta was in Cardinal’s hand, but Fraser was through the door before he could raise it.

Ian McLeod was first through the door after him—a bit of bravery that would put him on crutches for the next three months. The side door opened on a steep set of steel steps that led down to the pump systems. McLeod slid down it with all his weight on his ankles.

Keith London screamed from the darkness, “In here! In here! He’s got a—” His shouts were cut short. Cardinal and Delorme stood at the top of the stairs, listening to McLeod’s groans. Below them, the pump was a deep red collection of pipes and valves, like a colossal heart. There was a catwalk off to the right. Delorme moved along this, and Cardinal went down the steps.

“I’ll be all right,” McLeod said. “Get the bastard.”

The grey light from the half-open door barely penetrated the dark. Cardinal could see a catwalk above the pump, and below that, another set of steel steps zigzagged like steps in a dream. Cardinal was about to make a run for these stairs when the catwalk door opened and a muzzle flash spat white and blue flame, bright as a flashbulb. Delorme was hit. She staggered back, making no sound other than the clang of her Beretta hitting the catwalk. She got as far as the outside doorway, and even managed to open it a little wider. Then she sank slowly to her knees, clinging to the door on the way down, her face utterly white.

Cardinal tore up the steps three at a time, expecting at any moment another muzzle flash and a nine-millimetre hole in his skull.

He kicked open the door.

Pressed flat against the wall, Cardinal held his Beretta chest high with barrel up, as in prayer. Then he spun, crouched and sighted along the barrel. Nothing moved. There was a door on the far side of the room. Cardinal was in what appeared to be a disused kitchen, the London kid strapped to a table, blood dripping from his head. He reached out and felt the boy’s neck: the pulse was slow, and he was breathing in ragged gasps.

A rush of footsteps on metal. Cardinal crossed the room to the other door. He stepped out just in time to see Fraser—little more than a black shape—running for the door they had come in. Cardinal aimed and fired. The bullet went wide, ricocheting off the pipes with an ear-splitting whine.

Cardinal ran the length of the catwalk, hopping over the motionless Delorme, and out the door. He reached Fraser’s van just as the engine caught. Cardinal threw open the passenger door just as the van started to roll downhill toward the lake. Fraser swung his pistol toward Cardinal’s face.

The van hit a rock, sending Fraser’s shot into the roof. Cardinal fell into the passenger seat and grappled with Fraser’s gun arm as the van lumbered onto the ice.

Cardinal had Fraser’s gun arm forced nearly to the floor of the van. Fraser squeezed the trigger, and the muzzle flash burned Cardinal’s leg. Fraser continued to squeeze off wild shots, so that events seemed to unfold in lightning flashes.

Cardinal got his right hand round Fraser’s throat, his left still clutching the killer’s gun hand. Fraser’s foot crushed the gas pedal. The sensation of being yanked backward as the wheels caught. Cardinal managed to kneel on Fraser’s gun hand, pressing all his weight onto the wrist. His right fist smashed into the killer’s cheekbone, pain shooting up his arm.

And then a horrible stillness. The van had lurched to a halt. Suddenly it pitched forward, spilling the two men against the dash. One fact registered in Cardinal’s brain like a news bulletin: the right front wheel had broken through the ice.

“The ice is cracking,” Cardinal yelled. “We’re going through the ice.”

Fraser’s struggles, already frantic, became even wilder as the van canted forward, entering black water up to its wide, flat windshield.

A brief rocking. Then the front end slid downward and black water spilled through the vents, like daggers where it touched the skin.

Another cant forward. Darkness swallowed them.

Cardinal let go of Fraser and hauled himself over the back of the seat. The van was still slipping downward as he scrabbled for the handle.

Black water. Icy white froth.

Cardinal wrenched the door up and back, and clambered out on the side of the van. The whole vehicle tipped almost gracefully over on its left. Fraser was screaming.

Cardinal balanced on the edge of the sinking vehicle. Shouts assailed him from the shore.

He jumped free, keeping arms outflung even as his legs plunged through the ice. Cold sucked the breath out of his lungs.

Then Fraser’s face at the van’s door, his mouth a black O as the ice gave way under the last wheel, the water crashed in on him, and the rest of the van slipped into the black hole.