and the wind pushing me around had teeth in it. But I had on a quilted thermal jacket and an arm to put in front of my face and was protected, though it would’ve taken an Eskimo suit to really do the job. The nine-millimeter, with its silencer, was stuck down in my belt; the thermal jacket was short-waisted and if I wanted to I could slip a hand easily up onto the butt of the gun. I wanted to, and did. There was a possibility I might find Turner’s blue-gray Chevy parked inside the barn, and if so, I might be needing the gun. Soon.
The barn was unlocked. I took a look around, and found it warm, comparatively speaking, and obviously still in use: no expensive equipment in view, but plenty of hay. I would’ve been surprised had the barn not been in use: a farmhouse might logically be deserted, but the adjacent land wouldn’t be. Not in this part of the country. This was apparently one of the many small farms that have been swallowed up by larger ones, leaving the farmhouses vacant, although considering the nearness of the Lake Geneva and Twin Lakes vacation centers, the house was probably rented out in summer.
And possibly in winter, but not now. Not in the off season, in the spring, if this was spring: any robins in the neighborhood when the storm hit were frozen dinners by now.
Turner’s Chevy wasn’t in the barn. And there wasn’t any indication any other vehicle had been, either, with the possible exception of a tractor or something. I would still need to check inside the house itself, I supposed, but the likelihood of Turner being in there, without his car in here, was slight.
But he would be holed up in one of the farmhouses nearby, that I felt sure of. He wasn’t smart enough to scratch the hit, to get the hell out, which he should’ve realized was necessary last night, the moment I showed up at Wilma’s to hold a gun on him and get him talking. And now that he’d had a fatal confrontation with Wilma, the hit would seem out of the question; but then he should’ve been gone before the scene with Wilma had a chance to happen, but he hadn’t. The fucking jerk.
I knew how he was thinking. His reasoning would be that neither my showing up, nor the unpleasantness with Wilma, had anything directly to do with the hit, so why not go on as planned? All that would be needed was for him to relocate. He had probably already been using a farmhouse around here as a stakeout point; he’d only been using the room at Wilma’s to sleep and bang the niece.
So he’d be around.
Me too.
But I did have one nagging thought: suppose Turner was smarter than I gave him credit for. Or somebody in back of Turner was directing his actions and anticipating mine. I’d become convinced that Turner really was in the area to hit Castile, thanks largely to that magazine he’d left behind, with its conveniently dog-eared page cueing me to the Castile interview, which had seemed to confirm the story Turner told me, under the gun.
It had been that article that led me here: the octagonal ski lodge mentioned in the interview as the location of Castile’s new film was obviously Mountain Lodge, a resort that had gone bankrupt before it opened, just a year or so ago. There had been a lot in the press about the place, and anyone living in the area would have to know about it. Of course Turner had given me one misleading piece of information-saying the lodge was “back deep in a wooded place,” which wasn’t entirely accurate-but otherwise I had to ask: had I found my way here, or been led? What if this entire series of events had been planned, and set in motion? What if I were still Turner’s target, as I’d originally thought, and this was some screwball, elaborate way of getting me in the sights of somebody’s sniperscope?
At any rate, here I was: ready to scale the Mountain and make contact with Jerry Castile.
13
The driveway, after making its forty-five degree angle up the tree-studded incline, opened out onto a wide, flat area at the top of the hill, so that when I emerged I was over on the right-hand side of the plateau. So was the lodge, rising in front of me, out of the blinding snow, like a mysterious modernistic silo.
The closer I got, however, the less mysterious the lodge looked, though it was unusual: the vertical barnwood siding, which made the four-story building seem taller, gave it a rustic quality; its eight geometric sides gave it a modern look. The result was an ungainly compromise, at best: a pioneer’s vision of a skyscraper; a barn designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
It had taken me fifteen minutes to get to this point, fifteen slow, cold minutes, walking into snow that was travelling much faster than I was, as I followed the steep, slick pathway the driveway provided, picking myself up after falling on the cement, and then picking myself up again, and finally deciding to walk on the ground alongside, between driveway and trees, instead.
And now I was at the crest of the hill, and seemed to be in a parking lot, the general shape of which was apparent, despite the snow-obscured landscape, thanks to the two sets of half a dozen streetlights that faced each other on either side of an area in front of the lodge, where three cars, their backs humped with snow, were parked. The lot could’ve handled perhaps several hundred cars, and these three made a small, strange assembly: an ash- gray Plymouth, a yellow Maverick and a silver-gray Mercedes.
Off to the far right of the parking lot was a small building, sort of a shed with aspirations (it too had vertical barnwood siding). A panel truck was parked alongside the shed. The panel truck was an indecisive blue-green color, with a splotch of red on the side where some lettering had been painted out.
No one in the lodge seemed to have noticed me approaching. Even if they’d been watching for me, I’d have been hard to make out in the heavy, blowing snow. All eight sides of the lodge had, on each floor, large quadruple windows, the center pair apparently sliding glass doors, opening onto shallow, unobtrusive balconies; this gave each room an attractive view, what with trees to the rear and ski slope to the fore, and that much anyway had been intelligent planning on the part of the architect. And right now all of those windows, at least those facing me, which was three and a half walls worth, had curtains closed. There was no reason to think anybody knew I was here.
Which was good, because I had some things to do.
I found the shed unlocked, and inside I found, covered by khaki canvas tarps, a snowmobile and a snow plow, the latter no larger than the former, being basically a little garden tractor with a plow stuck on the front. You’ve probably seen a snowmobile before, but if not, it’s a small open scooter, treads in back, skis in front. Both vehicles had pull starts, plastic handles on ropes, just like a power mower; and with both vehicles the motor could be reached by lifting the seat. I did, and used a small wrench I found in the shed, among various other tools in a trunk- like chest, and removed a pair of sparkplugs from both motors. That made four sparkplugs in all, and these I hid in a jar full of nails sitting high on a shelf in the shed. I put the tarps back over the snowmobile and plow. I hid my nine-millimeter and silencer down deep among the tools in the chest. As I did that, I noticed some wire-cutters and took them out. I looked on the several shelves in the shed and found a healthy roll of electrical tape. I dropped the roll of tape and the wire-cutters into a jacket pocket, where I’d already stowed a screwdriver.
It was warm in the shed, or anyway warmer than outside. Back at the A-frame, when I had dressed for the occasion, it had still been April, remember. The thermal jacket was doing a good job, but I hadn’t expected the storm to increase in intensity this way, nor for the temperature to have this nervous breakdown. The cold had been beginning to get to me; my hands were getting numb, and my face was starting to get that weird, hot feeling that precedes frostbite, my earlobes especially. I had some other things to do, out in the cold, so I looked around and came onto a second, smaller chest of tools, garden tools; down among them were some gardening gloves. I put them on.
I left the shed, and headed out into the parking lot. The streetlights were unlit, and the curtains in the lodge windows remained closed, and I felt invisible. I had about fifteen or twenty minutes of work to do; perhaps a little less, if I hurried, and didn’t let the snow slow me. One by one I lifted the hoods of the cars. Under each hood I used the screwdriver to undo the clip latches on the distributer cap and pull the rotor off the distributer. It’s a small thing, a rotor, a few inches long. But it’s a good trick to make a car run without one; and, once removed, it’s a good trick to figure out that that’s why a car isn’t working… that is, if the distributer cap has been put back in place, which of course I did in each instance.
I did the same thing on the panel truck, and slipped back in the shed and hid the rotors in the chest of garden tools.
It took me five minutes to find where the phone line went into the lodge. I went all around the building looking for the thing, and then ended up about where I began, near the parking lot, not far from the shed. Coaxial cable rose from the ground and entered a wall of the lodge, just above the cement of the foundation, into a little
