Chapter 15: Seventeen Miles

The snowmobile coughed twice and caught.

Ray laid his bleeding wrists along the handlebars and opened the throttle.

The road down from the lodge was a white tunnel between black pines, and the van's tracks ran straight down the middle of it.

Seventeen miles to the county highway.

There was one road, and the bridge on the other side of the ridge had been out since the summer.

He knew that because he had read the caretaker's notice on the door.

Whoever drove the van had to come this way, and the snow was fresh enough that every turn had left a mark.

The cold hit his face.

He leaned into the curves and did not feel his hands.

At mile five the tracks wavered, and at mile eight they ran wide.

He saw where the van had slowed for a fallen branch and gone on.

At mile eleven he saw the red lights.

They were the van's tail lights, low in a ditch, with the back doors open and one wheel spinning in the air.

He killed the engine and went the last hundred yards on foot, crouched low, bleeding through the gauze he had wrapped in the kitchen.

A man in a dark parka was standing in the road with a flashlight, swearing at the sky.

He was the driver, Ray realized.

Not one of Vera's men, a stranger.

Kroll's man.

The driver held one hand against his eye, and blood ran between the fingers.

Ray came up behind him and took him by the collar and the belt, and threw him face first into the snow.

"Where is he?"

"Don't," the driver said into the snow. "I'm hurt."

"Where is he?"

"He ran. Into the trees, on the left. I couldn't see."

The boy had been taped at the wrists in the back, under a blanket.

He had been quiet the whole way, the driver said.

Then, at the sharp bend, he had slid forward between the seats and stuck something into the driver's face.

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