A Curvy Widow Dragged 2 Pups and a Stranger From Black Ice — Unaware He Ruled the Mafia World

Chapter 5

Vance raised Albany at nine o’clock.

The conversation was short and mostly in numbers. A team could reach the trailhead by dawn, weather permitting. If the weather didn’t permit — and Vance’s jaw tightened as he said it — then tomorrow night at the earliest.

“Until then, we are on our own,” he said, hanging up the receiver.

“Then we hold the camp,” Ramona said.

They divided the watches. Vance first, her second, Luca third. She woke in the dark with the fire burned down to coals and a cold that walked right through the log walls, and she took her turn at the window with the shotgun across her knees and the two puppies curled in the crook of her arm. The snow had stopped falling and the world had gone still and blue, the way winter gets when it’s making up its mind.

She did not wake Luca for his watch. He was sleeping the deep, dreamless sleep of a man whose body had been pulled apart and roughly sewn back together, and she told herself it was a matter of economy — a man who couldn’t hold a gun straight was no good at a window anyway.

The truth was simpler. She had been alone for eighteen months, and she was not alone, and some part of her did not want to waste a single minute of it on a shivering watch in the dark.

They came at four in the morning.

She heard the first one before she saw him — a soft, deliberate crunch of a boot on crusted snow beyond the woodpile. Not a deer, not a fox. A man trying very hard to be quiet and failing the way city men always failed out here.

She did not move. She did not breathe. She counted the way Neil had taught her to count deer through cover.

One at the woodpile. Two by the outhouse. A third behind the cabin, moving slow, circling.

A scout party. Matteo was smarter than his brother had given him credit for.

She reached out and touched Vance’s shoulder. He came awake without a sound — no flinch, no gasp, just a hand closing over the rifle that lay beside him. She held up three fingers. She pointed at the window, at the door, at the back wall. He nodded once and rolled off the bench and was at the door in two silent steps, the deer rifle already up.

She woke Luca the same way, a hand on his arm, her lips at his ear.

“Your brother’s men. Three, outside now. Matteo won’t be with them — he never comes in the first wave.”

“Then we deal with the wave,” Luca said, and the strangest thing about it was that he did not sound afraid. He sounded relieved. “And we wait for him.”

What happened in the twelve minutes that followed, Ramona would remember later in fragments, the way she remembered bad storms and good calves.

The door tried very softly from outside.

Vance stepped back into the shadow of the wood stove and went still as stone. Luca was barefoot on the cold plank floor, sliding along the wall toward the shuttered back window with a fireplace poker in his hand, because they had no third gun, and he was the only one of the three of them who had not pulled a trigger all night.

The moment the door came in — kicked hard off its top hinge, a man’s shape silhouetted against the blue of the snow — Vance’s voice cut the dark like a blade.

“Federal agent. On the floor. Now.”

The man in the doorway did not go to the floor. He raised a pistol.

Ramona, braced with the shotgun already at her shoulder, fired once, and the man went backward into the snow and did not get up.

The puppies began to shriek.

A crash from the back wall as the shutter came in, and something heavy hit the floor — the sound of a body landing and a poker following it down, and Luca’s breath coming out in a long hard rush.

From the woodpile side came a burst of pistol fire, three shots, fast and wild, and one of them punched through the log wall two inches above Vance’s head. Vance did not flinch. He pivoted on one knee and fired the deer rifle once through the doorway at a shape moving between the trees, and the shape dropped and did not move.

Then there was silence — the kind that follows a gunshot in a small room and rings in the bones of your ears.

Ramona did not lower the shotgun. She could smell powder smoke and pine pitch and the wet copper smell of blood.

“Dante,” she said without turning. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “Luca. Here.”

“I’m here.” His voice was rough, coming from the floor by the shuttered window. “He’s down. He won’t get up.”

“Vance. Here. I’m all right.” A pause. “Yours?”

“One at the woodpile. Down. That’s three.”

“That’s three,” Vance said. “And there will be more.”

There were.

They heard the engines twenty minutes later, coming up the trail slow and heavy in the deep snow. Not snowmobiles. Snowcats — tracked machines, diesel and steel, grinding through drifts that would have swallowed anything smaller.

Ramona had not thought of snowcats. Matteo had.

From the sound she guessed two, and that meant six to nine more men. The camp had one door and two windows, and it would not hold against that many for long.

She looked at Luca. He was leaning against the wall with the poker still in his hand, his breath coming hard, a smear of dark blood at his temple where the shutter had clipped him.

“There’s a thing my grandfather used to say about bears,” she said. “The only way to beat a bear on its own ground is to not be on its ground. You make it come to you somewhere the bear doesn’t know.”

“What are you thinking?” Luca said.

She was thinking about the ice. About Black Spruce, four miles downhill. About the deep hole where the spring came up warm, still open under a skin of new ice. About how a snowcat weighed nine thousand pounds.

“I’m thinking we don’t hold the camp,” she said. “I’m thinking we run. And I’m thinking we run in a very particular direction.”

Vance understood before she finished the sentence. His pale eyes went wide, then narrow, and something that might have been respect crossed his face.

“Miss Halstead, you are proposing to draw them across the lake.”

“I’m proposing to draw them across the thin part. The part where a man went through yesterday — on foot, in daylight. In a snowcat, in the dark, in a snowstorm, they will not see it coming. And if they don’t follow, they’ll follow.” She looked at Luca. “That part’s on you. If they see you, they will follow.”

“My brother has offered a bounty on my head.” Luca’s voice was quiet. “No man in his crew will let another man collect it. They will follow. I promise you that.”

“Then you have to be visible. You have to be the one they see. And I know you’re still half dead from yesterday. I know that too.”

She held his eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded once, and she began to move.