in the main marina area, the snowmobile’s belt churning away at the snow and ice. Her feet on the running board and Drew’s arms on either side of her were all that kept her from falling off.
Drew sped up as they approached the opening to the larger area within the break wall. Jumping would not be an option.
Okay, she thought. The ice is not opening up and the snowmobile is not sinking into the frigid depths, pulling you down like an anchor. Frank and the others must have heard the plan about Burke Lakefront Airport. They will be waiting for you there. Stay calm and keep Cara warm and you can get away from Drew then. As soon as you get off this bloody ice.
He kept the gun pressed into her left side, driving with one hand. She elbowed the barrel away from her, so that if his hand clenched, the bullet would not shatter her abdomen. With careful concentration, she pulled one leg up and over the seat so she could clench it between her knees and hold herself in place.
The wind drove into her face like straight pins. She would have spoken, tried to keep the listening cops-were they still listening?-apprised of their position, but her jaw had frozen shut.
She looked down at Cara, her tiny face barely visible through the petals of blanket. The baby had quieted, apparently fascinated by the gray clouds passing overhead.
They passed completely out of the marina. Through eyes closed to slits she scanned the shoreline; they raced past a set of red and blue flashing lights along Lake Road, but the lights fell behind when they rounded Whiskey Island. Then Drew turned the snowmobile a bit too sharply and they spun in a 360-degree circle. Three times.
When her stomach returned to its original orientation, she nestled her face as far into the collar of her coat as she could and thawed her jaw out enough to protest: “Drew! What are you doing?”
“Sorry.”
“Slow down!”
“It’ll be okay. I rode this thing before, once.”
Once?
Then the mouth of the Cuyahoga River came into view and she forgot all about pursuing cop cars and Drew’s lack of experience with wintertime vehicles and returned to the pressing need to get off this ice
The ice ahead became roughened, rocky. Then it stopped altogether.
The river had been opened for the cargo ships. The Coast Guard had cut up the ice, churned it out so that the water had become a pool of slush instead of a solid surface.
“Drew! The river!
Her hysterical plea prompted both Drew and Cara to action. The baby burst out with a startled yell, and Drew cut back on the throttle.
Theresa took one arm from the child and put her fingers over Drew’s, trying to twist the handle toward them and lower the speed even further. “The river is broken up! We’re going to go into the water! Turn!”
Slowing or even stopping would not be enough, she knew. Several winters previously she had helped piece a man back together after he had not left himself sufficient clearance to stop before the shoreline. A snowmobile on ice was not the same as a car on asphalt. It had no brakes.
She pulled at the left handle to turn them toward the break wall. That direction took them farther from land, but better that than crashing into the rocky edge of Whiskey Island.
With both hands on the handlebars, Drew corrected their course, heading straight for the river opening to the north of the abandoned Coast Guard station. Only two hundred feet remained between them and the cold water.
“Stop! We’ll drown!”
“It’s frozen!”
Forty feet.
“The Coast Guard broke it up!” She found herself stretching out her foot, as if she could somehow create some resistance to their forward motion, anything to slow that inexorable headlong rush to death. “Stopstop
“We’ll make it!”
The river drew closer.
Twenty feet.
Theresa yanked the key from its slot and dropped the curled, brightly colored cord on the ice. Then she balled up her right fist and knocked Drew’s arm away from the throttle, cutting it back and changing their direction at the same time. The engine died, and silence roared in her ears, with only the swishing sound of the snowmobile against the ice as it spun out of control.
But it kept spinning toward the river.
“Theresa! No! We have to go!” Drew protested.
She could see it now, a deceptively white expanse, lumpy underneath the latest dusting of snow. It could not have refrozen in only one day. Not solid.
“It’s water, Drew. It can’t hold us.” Now she did put her foot down on the sliding surface, checking for traction, something to support her leap from the snowmobile.
“It’s frozen, look at it.”
“They broke it up the other day.” The snowmobile continued to spin, albeit more slowly. Stop, she begged it. Just
He continued to protest. “It was ten degrees last night.”
Cara screamed. Theresa felt like joining her.
“We can make it.”
She could not wait for the snowmobile to come to rest. As soon as it straightened out, Drew might propel them across the lumpy area at the edge of the river. She braced her right foot on the running board, knocked Drew’s arm away from the throttle, and pitched herself and the baby into space.
She landed on her feet, for a brief instant; then her slick shoes slid out from beneath her and the spinning vehicle smacked into her right hip. This threw her to her knees. Shock reverberated through all her bones as her kneecaps smashed into concrete-hard ice. She clutched Cara tighter as her body continued in motion, falling forward until she had to use her elbows to keep the infant from slamming onto the hard surface beneath them. She heard a loud snap and hoped it wasn’t one of her bones, but it must have been her forehead striking the ice.
Drew had finally come to a stop, at the edge of the river, still straddling the snowmobile. “Come on,” he shouted, as if she had fallen off accidentally instead of run for her life.
She struggled to her feet, pulling the blanket closed over Cara’s delicate face. Whiskey Island sat at least six hundred feet away, but the old Coast Guard station protruded from it like a lollipop on a stick of seawall. Only two hundred feet of ice separated her from the historic buildings. “Drew-”
Another crack split the air. Were the cops shooting at them? She looked toward the Coast Guard station but saw no one, though of course snipers wouldn’t stand out in the open-
Another, softer sound. At her feet.
She looked down. A dark line had formed in the ice, running in a jagged sweep from the river back toward the land.
The world, it seemed, grew very still.
“Come on,” Drew repeated.
She looked at him. “The ice is cracking.”
“What?”
Another split branched off from the first, making a snapping sound. “Listen to me. The ice is cracking. Get off that thing and come with me. Quickly.”
“But we can make it,” he insisted. His hands moved in a sort of end-over-end fashion, and feeling a new chill she saw why. The key she had ripped out of the ignition had a tether; he must have attached the other end of it to his coat or the vehicle and had now reeled it back in.
She stepped backward and turned, gingerly placing each foot flat on the surface to distribute the weight. The snapping continued, all around her.
“Theresa!”
She tried once more, pausing to look back at him. “Get to the Coast Guard station. Now!”
