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

Chapter 6

They went out the back window, all three of them, into the blue-black dark of the four a.m. snow. The puppies went zipped inside the front of Ramona’s coat, warm against her body, one under each arm. The shotgun rode her shoulder. Vance carried the deer rifle. And Luca carried nothing but a headlamp she made him wear on his forehead, so that anyone looking up from the trail would see the light bobbing between the trees and know exactly who was running, and exactly where.

It was a cruel thing to ask of a man who had nearly died eighteen hours ago.

He did it without a word.

They cut down the ridge on foot, angling east, staying off the trail where the snow was deep enough to swallow their tracks. Ramona knew this ground the way she knew her own body. She had walked it in every season since she was nine years old — had followed her uncle Emory’s trapping line through these same hemlocks, had learned where the deer yarded and where the ice ran thin and which rocks would hold a man’s foot in a blizzard.

She brought them out on the north shore of Black Spruce at the exact place where the ice was thinnest.

She turned to Luca.

“You go first. Straight out fifty yards, along the line I’m about to show you. Then you stop, you turn on the second headlamp in your pocket, and you wave it — high, slow, three times. Then you come back to me at a dead run along the same line. Do not step off the line. Everywhere else will not hold you. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you.”

She showed him the line. It ran from a lightning-split birch on the shore to a dark rock outcrop on the far side, following a submerged ledge — a fold of rock and frozen mud just below the surface, the same ledge Neil had shown her fifteen years ago, the winter he caught her stealing curs out on the ice to see if she could ski. It would hold a man. It would not hold a snowcat.

Luca went.

She watched the bob of his headlamp move out across the black-and-white expanse of the lake — small, and brave, and terribly alone. The wind had died at last, and the only sound in the world was the creak of the ice and the dry hiss of the snow under his boots.

At fifty yards he stopped. For one sickening moment she thought the ice had him — he swayed, he held his arms out for balance — and then he straightened, turned on the second light, and waved it high and slow, three times, like a man signing his own name.

Then he ran back along the line.

She was counting his strides when she heard it: from up the ridge, engines changing pitch. The snowcats had seen him. They were turning. They were coming.

Luca hit the reeds ten feet from shore, and she grabbed his arm and pulled him down behind the fallen log she had chosen for cover an hour ago in her head — a great old pine that had come down in a storm three autumns past, its roots a wall of frozen earth, its trunk a snowbank. Vance was already there, prone, the deer rifle steady across the log.

They lay in the snow and they waited.

Four minutes. The longest four minutes of Ramona’s life, and she had sat at a funeral in April and watched the world go on without her husband.

Then the first snowcat broke out of the timber. Its headlights swept across the lake once — a long white arm of light — and then, without hesitation, it swung toward the line of tracks Luca had left and started out across the ice.

It made it forty yards.

The sound the ice made when it gave way under nine thousand pounds of steel was not a crack. It was a long, low, tearing groan — the sound of the earth itself making up its mind — and it went on longer than seemed possible, longer than her lungs could hold air. The snowcat’s front end pitched down. Its headlights swung crazily up at the sky, a drowning man’s eyes. Men shouted, small and far away, across the ice.

The second snowcat, coming behind the first, tried to stop and could not. It slid onto the ice at an angle, and the ice under it — already broken, already exhausted — opened like a door.

The second cat went in almost gently. Nose first. And the black water closed over its headlights, and the lake was dark again.

There were men in the water. Ramona could hear one screaming.

She did not move.

Luca did not move. Vance did not move. They lay in the snow and they watched, because there was nothing else in the world to do, and any movement now would mean the whole night had been for nothing.

And after a long time, the screaming stopped, and the only sound left was the wind across the new hole in the ice, and the small, frightened whimper she could feel against her chest where the puppies huddled inside her coat.

“How many?” Vance said.

“Six in the first,” Luca said. His voice was flat as the lake. “Four in the second. Maybe two got out. Maybe none.”

“Matteo.”

“Matteo was not in either cat.” Luca’s voice tightened. “He is watching this happen right now, from the ridge. He always watches.”

Ramona lifted her head and scanned the tree line at the far shore.

And there, for one clean second, she saw it.

A single figure standing at the edge of the timber — tall, and still, and wearing a long dark coat. Looking down at the lake. At the hole where his men had died. At the place where his brother’s decoy had walked out and back, out and back, like a lure.

She could not see his face. She did not need to.

“He’ll run,” Vance said. “He knows the case is over. He’s got a bag already packed, and a man on the border, and he’ll run.”

“No.” Luca’s voice was certain, like a man reading his own name. “Not yet. He has to see me dead first. He’ll come down to the ice to look. He’ll want to see the body with his own eyes before he pulls the trigger on everything else.”

Ramona said, “Then let him come.”

She turned to Luca, and she put her hand on the side of his face. It was the first time she had touched him without a reason, without a task, without a drag and a pull — and she felt him go still under her palm, the way a horse goes still when it decides to trust you.

“You stay here behind this log. You do not stand up until Agent Vance tells you to. Do you understand me?”

“Ramona —”

“Do you understand me.”

“Yes.”

She looked at Vance. “You have a clear line from here to the north shore?”

“I have a clear line.”

“Then you take it when he walks down to the ice to look at his brother. Not before, not after.”

“Miss Halstead, that is not how a federal agent is supposed to end a case.”

“I know. But you’re the one who told me the case dies without Luca. And Luca dies if that man walks out of these woods. So you do what you have to do.” She took a breath that felt like the first one she’d taken in years. “I’m going out onto the ice.”

“Why?”

She unzipped her coat and began, very carefully, to hand him the puppies.

“Because he needs to see a body. And I’m going to give him one to look at.”