It scared me, and being scared pissed me off. The freezing mud soaking into my clothes pissed me off. Somebody was going to have something unpleasant happen because of this.
For now, though, I put that out of my mind. I heard a thin screen door smack shut and the squish of approaching footsteps. I held my breath and kept still. Through my half-closed eyes, I could see the trailer. A figure with a white ski mask and a white sleeve peeked around the front of the RV and aimed a rifle at me. My arm was curled and ready to throw the ghost knife, but the gunman was twenty-five or thirty yards away. By the time the spell reached him, he’d have put two or three bullets into my brain.
After a few seconds, the figure decided I was dead and aimed at the car. I hoped Catherine was still keeping low.
The sniper stepped out from behind the truck. Despite the ski mask, I recognized her. It was Ursula. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she held a gun on me in the guesthouse behind the Wilbur estate. I could even see the cuts the ghost knife had made in her white jacket.
I’d been thinking of the shooter as “he”; I should have learned better by now.
She walked directly toward the car, rifle to her shoulder like a soldier. She stepped around my feet and out of my line of sight. I counted four squishy, muddy steps after she’d passed, then a fifth and a sixth before I decided I was being a coward. I rolled over and threw the ghost knife.
She turned toward me, swinging the rifle around. The ghost knife cut through it, and the weapon came apart in her hands.
She gaped at the broken rifle for a few precious seconds while I rolled to my feet. Then she threw the halves aside and reached into her waistband.
There was no time to be gentle. I charged her and hit her once in the same spot I’d hit Esteban. She staggered but didn’t go down. I did it again.
She fell into the mud, arms waving vaguely in the air, still trying to defend herself even though she was out. I pulled her handgun out of her belt and dropped it into my pocket.
She also had a knife, which I threw onto the top of the nearest trailer. Then I took her wallet and keys, just because she was annoying. In her inside jacket pocket, I found three pairs of handcuffs with keys.
I dragged her by the heel to the nearest trailer, wrapped her arms around a tire below the axle, and cuffed her.
I pressed my ear against the wet, freezing shell of the trailer. Someone had shouted a warning to me, and it sure hadn’t been Ursula. I didn’t hear anything, so I circled around to the door. One of the tires was flat. I knelt and saw a bullet hole in the rim. It was almost the same spot as the one on the tire of the overturned delivery truck on the estate. Ursula was quite a shot.
The trailer door was wide open. I reached in and felt for the light switch, flicked it on, and stepped back.
No gunshots zipped by me. I looked in, leaning farther into the doorway until I saw a woman’s fur-trimmed leather boot and the leg that went with it.
I went inside. The boot belonged to Professor Solorov; she was slumped against the wall in the little booth that served as a dining area. Her eyes were half closed and her mouth was hanging open. Blood had soaked through her blouse on the lower left side. She did not look like the same woman who had taken Kripke at gunpoint, or who had threatened to kill his whole family if he didn’t turn over his spell book.
The window above her had a bullet hole in it. I was standing where Ursula had stood when she shot at me. Solorov must have shouted the warning, although I doubted she knew who she was shouting at.
She looked at me, blinking sleepily as she tried to focus. “Did you kill her?”
“No. I’m going to call an ambulance, okay? Where’s the phone?”
“Right there.” She didn’t have the energy to point, but I did follow her gaze to the cell on the floor. It had been smashed.
“Hold on,” I said. I went outside and knelt beside the nearest corpse. It was Horace Alex; I took his cellphone again. The campground got one bar, but that was enough. I dialed 911. My headache flared and I said what I needed to say. I didn’t give my name, but I didn’t kid myself that it would be a secret for long. My headache faded as I went back inside. “Someone will be here soon.”
“Let me out,” a new voice said. “I don’t want to be found here.” It came from the back of the trailer. Through a tiny hallway I saw Stuart Kripke handcuffed to a narrow bed.
“Yes,” Solorov said. “Get out. Both of you get out.”
I went into the back. His cuffs matched the ones I’d taken off Ursula. I took the keys from my pocket and freed him. He rolled over onto his wide ass and sat rubbing his wrists. He looked me up and down. “You look like crap.”
Charming. I went back into the other room and leaned close to Solorov. She had ordered Biker killed and tried to do the same to me, but I still felt sorry for her. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” she answered weakly. “Go fuck yourself. I don’t need your pity. Wait! Wait.” She worked her carefully painted mouth, trying to call up enough spit to keep talking. “If you kill that Norwegian cow, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”
“Why did she do all this?”
“Why do you think? That tattooed bastard told her we had the package. Of course it was a lie, but she didn’t want to hear it.” Solorov raised her other hand from beneath the table. Her fingers had been smashed crooked. “On second thought, don’t kill her. I want to do it myself.”
Kripke squeezed through the narrow hall. “I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you can get me out of town before the police arrive.” His voice was too loud and too blunt. “Everyone else here is dead.”
I didn’t have time to deal with him. “Just a minute,” I said.
He leaned over Solorov and flipped open her sport jacket. The professor didn’t like that but couldn’t do anything about it. “You keep your hands off, you fat creep.”
