“North.”
The compress was cooling. My muscles began a light, internal tremble and the pain high up on my back grew, sending out shoots, twining like a liana down my left side, up my shoulder and down my arm. I backed away, looked around in the dark for a cow with a white coat. Found it. Lovely, lovely almost dry silk. “Tell me where you got the car.” Cautiously, I reached around my ribs with my right hand and touched my waist with my fingertips. Dried blood but whole skin. I worked my way up slowly, had to fight to silence a hiss when my fingers met the ragged furrow along my shoulder blade.
“Gothenburg,” the man said, and it took me a moment to remember what I’d asked him.
“Who told you to get the car in Sweden?” I felt along the bony top of my shoulder, nothing; around the back of the top of my arm. Ah. So the bullet had hit the bone at just the right angle and ploughed along skin and bone and along the top of my arm as I dived. Felt as though it had chipped the elbow. The nerves would be damaged, but perhaps not irreparably. Lucky. But I had lost blood, and the pain was going to get worse. “John, who told you to get the car in Sweden?” I plunked my left hand like a piece of meat on the cuff of one sleeve and used my right to wind the other sleeve over the first into a knot. I had to use my teeth to pull the knot tight. As soon as I dropped the improvised sling over my head I realized my mistake and took it off again.
“John?” No sound. No movement. He had passed out. I hurried.
My sweater was still damp but it was warm, and warmth was more important now than avoiding pain. I rested my left arm on my left thigh, spread the sweater over my right thigh, then threaded my left arm through the sleeve as though it were a stick, nothing to do with me. Pain is just a message. It was easy to get my right arm in the sleeve. I felt the wool dragging over the open furrow, sticking to clotting blood. Deep breath, just a message, pull sweater over head and down. Breathe. Just breathe. I didn’t even pause with the sling: over my head, pick up left arm, shove it through. Pants next; socks, boots; check car keys and clip in pocket, tuck compresses inside waistband. Good for another few minutes. Moonlight seeped from behind heavy cloud.
Back to John. His cheek felt cool and solid, like clay. I slapped it. He whimpered. I slapped him again. Faint glimmer as he opened his eyes.
“You’re not shivering anymore. You’ve entered the next stage of hypothermia. Unless you get warm very soon, John, you’ll die. I’m all that stands between you and death. Tell me what I need to know. Who sent you?”
“Man.” He looked surprised: talking was easier without the shivering. “Man in Atlanta.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. Really don’t. Just sent us money, wired it to the bank.”
“Us? How many?”
“Three.”
Julia. I had to get to Oslo. But even if I could protect her there, what then? I needed information to stop this at the source. “How did you find me here?”
“Edvard Borlaug. Called him from Gothenburg. He said other woman, Julia? Julia.” The sound of her name in his mouth made my fingers stiffen with the need to punch through his eye to his brain. “Said that Julia was coming in. That you probably coming too, but not sure. So. I drove here. Asked at…at farm. They drove…Oslo. Kill her.”
Three. “What do they look like?”
“Ugly.” He thought that was funny and laughed, hoarse and high.
“Describe them. Tell me their names.” Hurting him would not help at this point.
“McCall’s tall. McCall’s tall.” He seemed quite taken with his little rhyme. Typical hypothermia confusion.
“How old?”
“Forty?”
“Tell me about the other one.”
“Ginger. Because of his hair. Don’t know his real name. Medium. Thin. Young.” Not the ones from Honeycutt’s house.
According to his license, John Turkel was thirty-two.
“Early twenties?”
“Younger.”
“Tell me again who sent you.”
“Don’t know. Man. From Atlanta.”
“How do you know he was from Atlanta?”
“I feel real bad.”
“How did you know?”
“Asked him…how know where to find you. He said. Call us from here, from where he was. Then he yelled…someone. In his office. ‘What’s time difference between Atlanta and Sweden.’ Something like that. Atlanta.”
“What did he say? What did he sound like?”
“Said: kill art bitch. Julia. Kill her. Kill you.”
“Did he want it to look like an accident?”
“Didn’t care. Just make them dead. That’s what he said. I feel real bad. Weird.”
“And that’s all? Do McCall and Ginger know where Julia is staying in Oslo?”
“Didn’t. Might now. Help me.” He tried to lift his hand but the hypothermia had him now and only a couple of fingers twitched. The air smelt like rain.
“Help me,” he said again.
I ran through events in my head: all my possessions, anything to link me to a body, were in my pack, and the bootprints would wash away in the rain. Just my prints on the rifle, then.
“I’ll need your jacket.”
It was sodden, and he couldn’t even move an arm to help me. In the end, I just tore off the collar and took that over to my pack. I had to grope around for the rifle. I wiped it free of prints and used the collar to carry it to the water. It made a thin, flat splash.
“What?” he said.
The clip followed. I knelt by John Turkel and put the torn collar in his hand. I don’t think he even felt it.
“Please. Help me.” Barely a whisper.
I picked up my pack. “There isn’t time.”
The clouds parted and I stood up into a suddenly monochrome world: water sleek and black; sedge leached lithium grey; moonlight lying like pools of mercury on the upturned faces of graphite flowers. Nature, thinking there was no one to observe, was letting slide the greens and blues, the honey yellows, and showing her other face: flat, indifferent, anonymous.
Only trolls, fools and desperate people walk the fjell at night when all is shadow and deeper shadow. I knew that I could not walk down a mountain along a trail I didn’t know with muscles already cold and screaming with toxins and fatigue after the icewater of the lake, expecting my foot to twist on an unseen stone or skitter down scree, to any minute tumble into a gully or thump into a tree; knew I could not carefully place one foot in front of another for three or four miles with a hole punched in my back and a slow leak. So I ran.
Cloud closed over the moon and the rain came down, gentle and light, almost like mist. I ran like a deer, snuffing the scents lifted by the rain, veering away from the pine or wet stone that warned of danger and towards the safety of wet grass and opening flowers, relying on the tiny sound of a pebble rattling under my boot and tumbling away down to my left to warn me of a gully, ran like a deer that ignores a bullet through the shoulder because the wound is not the urgent thing, the urgent thing is the adrenalin stride, the run, covering the ground, the need to keep going, to never stop, to leap brooks and low-lying branches, to crash through brush, to weave through trees and skitter and fall on loose stone and get up without pausing, without thinking, without missing a beat. The branch whipping across the face, the slow hot leak of blood down the back and deeper tear of skin where the pack pulled open the wound, did not matter, because pain is just a message. I ignored it, washed it away with adrenalin and endorphins and the rhythm of breath and blood and bone.
Three miles, Turkel had said, but that was in daylight with map in hand, when you could plot the perfect diagonal. I was going to have to run farther; to get down into the valley, then run north. Five miles, perhaps. More. The rain came down harder, the underbrush thickened. My boots began to slide in mud. I shortened my stride a little and ran on.