Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

from the lake carried his small noises into the woods above him. Falling snow muffled the rest. He steadied the glasses on a chest-high branch and examined the back of the cabin. The curtains behind the sliding glass doors were drawn and the room behind them was dark. A group of does browsed the yew hedge near the deck, grabbing an easy last meal before the snow covered everything. Nothing else moved. No lights showed.

He retraced his steps until he was opposite the windowless north side of the cabin. Deer browsed the bushes nearest the deck and snorted when he broke the tree line. A pair of motion activated cameras under the eaves followed him as he approached. White tails lifted and hooves stomped, but they did not retreat.

Boot tracks in the snow against the cabin had only a light dusting of flakes in the tread. The tracks led to the deck and from there to the sliding glass doors. The security pad next to the door was dark. Beside it, warm air leaked into the great outdoors. He reached to his waistband for a handgun that wasn’t there because they made him send it home from the hospital. Curtains rustled a warning. He slid the glass door open and entered the room.

Three thousand square feet of open space lay in front of him, surrounded by a perimeter of peeled log wall. Not by accident, there was no place to hide. Joe stood with his back to the wall, motionless and alert. If someone was here, he would soon know. If it was his security-disarming, door-left-ajar, wet-behind-the-ears brother, the sanctimonious brainiac would be moving out in the morning. This wasn’t a drill he cared to put his family through more than once.

Minutes passed in quiet the opposite of tranquil. Falling snow muffled the ordinary sounds of outdoor evening and amplified the tics and hums of the living house: appliance clocks, ventilation fans, contracting timbers and soft, regular billows of the listener’s breath. He looked at his watch. He’d known professionals who could keep still for hours. But anyone else would have made a sound by now. Moving quietly along the interior walls and up the split log stairs to the loft took only seconds. The cabin was empty.

A trail of wet led from the deck to the couch opposite the fireplace. A puddle fronted the wing back chair beside it. Booting the computer, Joe logged onto the security system where digital flickering showed the date and time the alarms were triggered and when they were shut off. He downloaded images from the security cameras and screened them twice.

Tommy was one brave comedian.

The images from the outdoor cameras showed him stepping onto the deck, hands in his front trouser pockets, turning to face the camera and then slowly pulling his pockets inside out. A tall figure in a hooded parka pressed a gun to Tommy’s face. Tommy arched his back, moved his hands to his rear pockets and calmly pulled them out as well. The camera followed him and the hooded figure across the deck and down the steps until they disappeared around the edge of the cabin. A few frames later there was a flash of black monster truck racing down the driveway. Before he was out of range, Tommy had managed to turn out the pockets of his jacket as well.

“I got it the first time, brother. Pockets. Pocket Island.” He had to admire Tommy’s perseverance. And his courage.

Grabbing a 12 gauge from the gun locker, Joe ran to the patrol car and fish-tailed down the driveway and the mountain to Skippers Marina. On the way he thought briefly about his promise to Bonnie to call for help. There was enough of it around now. But the more people you add, the more ways there were for things to go badly. And each one of them ended with Tommy dead.

Joe followed the double line of tire tracks across Skippers’ unplowed parking lot to where they ended beneath his truck abandoned at the edge of the seawall. The patrol car headlights held the truck and the two-foot swells that lifted the empty wooden docks beyond it, like a scene in a winter snow globe.

He’d left the Coldwater patrol boat tied to the inside of the T at the end of the dock where it would be protected from waves and easier to get in and out of the marina. But the police slip was as empty now as the rest of the marina, and the islands beyond Wilson Cove had already disappeared behind a thick curtain of windblown snow.

* * *

Gusts of northwest wind pressed clouds of swirling snowflakes into horizontal sheets. White capped swells pushed the bow of the Coldwater patrol boat twenty degrees above the horizon and then dropped it stern-first into the trough that followed. Visibility was fifty feet. Tom did not try to keep the boat inside the channel. A low speed collision in the surrounding rock garden wouldn’t put a hole through the hull. But a propeller might sheer off, and that would be just fine. Disabling, but not hypothermic.

Avoiding the visible rocks, he maneuvered the boat through places where they waited just below the surface. The hull scraped some and the skeg caught more. But the boat remained stubbornly intact and the engine undamaged. When the hull ground over a particularly lengthy patch of submerged rock, Hassad lifted his gun and aimed it at Tom’s chest. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Steering,” Tom answered, waving a hand at the curtain of falling snow. “There’s channel stakes somewhere, but I don’t see them. Do you?”

Hassad moved closer and pressed the gun to the back of Tom’s head. “Maybe this will improve your vision. If we hit anything more, it goes off.”

Tom lifted the skeg until the prop rode just below the water’s surface and they hit nothing else. Once outside the cove, he checked the compass mounted above the wheel. Hassad clung to the