Forty Words for Sorrow

The gray 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-millimeter 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 earsplitting 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.

56

THE Algonquin Bay Police Department had never had so much publicity. The arrest of Dyson was still on the front page of the Lode, and now it was side by side with the death of the Windigo Killer and a photo of the jagged hole where the van had plunged through the ice.

Cardinal and Delorme and McLeod had all been treated in Emergency the night before. McLeod was in the worst shape. He was on the third floor of City Hospital with both feet up in the air, one ankle broken, the other badly sprained. The Kevlar body armor had saved both Delorme and Cardinal. "Those kinds of temperatures," the physician had told Cardinal, "you'd normally be dead. That vest conserved body heat, and you're damn lucky it did." Delorme got off with a nasty crease in her left arm. Blood loss left her feeling dizzy and weak, but a transfusion had been deemed unnecessary and she was sent home.