"Anybody who travels in this weather just to get a sub is out of his friggin' mind," Billy responded.
"Just mind the store, kid."
"Onen, Uncle. Good luck," said Billy
"Onen and Nia-wen, Nephew." Moonblanket took Peggy by the elbow. "We'll take the Rover. You ride shotgun, sweetheart. Nothing like a pretty girl beside you for good luck." They headed out the door.
"Where are we going?" Peggy asked.
"To a place where the streets are paved with gold, my dear-twenty-four carat."
23
Seated at the counter in Gorman's Restaurant, Chief Randy Lockwood bit into his Denver sandwich. It was way past lunchtime but there'd been a minor drug bust at the high school that morning and the paperwork had taken him well into the afternoon.
An occasional dime bag of weed trickling down from the Quebec side of the border was one thing-he'd smoked and inhaled more than his share back in the sixties-but cocaine was something else again.
The locker bust had come on an anonymous tip, which meant it was one student ratting out another. By the time he'd gotten around to it, Tommy Horrigan, the owner of the locker in question, was in the wind. Making it worse was the fact that the kid had turned eighteen the week before, putting him in adult court whenever they managed to track him down.
Complicating matters for Lockwood was the fact that Mark Horrigan, the kid's old man, was chairman of the Wolf Run Golf and Country Club and the owner of Wolf Run Retirement Estates, an adult living development on the northern edge of town. A local bigwig. Going up against Mark Horrigan was not going to be pleasant. Horrigan was a shrimp with a severe case of short-man syndrome and far too much money. He'd been an obnoxious little bastard since grade school and nothing much had changed since.
Lockwood glanced out the big, half-steamed-over window and out onto Main Street. Anything moving by necessity had four-wheel drive. It was another one of those hell-born blizzards birthed somewhere in arctic Quebec for no good reason. Maybe it was one of the old Indian gods getting revenge for the arrival of the French in the 1500s. What had one of those early explorers called it? The Land God Gave to Cain. No kidding.
"Why does everybody in this town have to know everyone else?" said Lockwood. He put down the sandwich half and picked up his cup of coffee.
"That's what small towns are all about," said Reggie Waterman, wiping his steel hook on his apron. "Everybody knows how much money you've got in the bank, everyone is screwing or has screwed your wife at one time or another and everyone knows if you're using Viagra or not."
"Small towns suck," said Lockwood on the other side of the counter.
"Amen," said Waterman. "Speaking of which, Terry Jones over at the feed store says someone came in yesterday and bought eight hundred pounds of that Incitec fertilizer. Terry'd never seen the guy."
"Who needs eight hundred pounds of fertilizer in the middle of winter?" Lockwood asked, suddenly interested. The Oklahoma City bombing had used a ton of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel to take out the Murrah Building, yet more than fifteen years later there were still no federal regulations about buying the stuff. A couple of states required identification to be shown but that was about it.
"He get any ID?"
"Maine driver's license."
Which didn't mean a damn thing. "He say why he wanted it?"
"Said he was from a big greenhouse operation in Brunswick. They got caught short, he said."
The Falls were a long way from Brunswick. Sixty miles or so. Surely there was some place closer to buy fertilizer.
"Which greenhouse?"
"He didn't say," answered Waterman. A group of kids from the Abbey School with skates slung over their shoulders swept in on a blast of frigid air. Reggie came out from behind the counter, took their orders for French fries with gravy and cheeseburgers, then came back and went to work at the grill. Streak Lockwood took another bite of his sandwich. Bad weather or not he was going to have to take a trip out to Terry Jones's place when he was done eating. Just in case.
They stepped inside a tumbledown boathouse, but instead of boats there were two canvas-covered lumps on the frozen surface of the water. Someone was already waiting for them, an alien figure taller than Moonblanket and wearing what appeared to be a space helmet and a suit made out of dangling white strips of fabric.
"I don't see any twenty-four-carat gold," said Peggy. "Just the Abominable Snowman here."
"Brandon Redboots-a friend of mine," explained the Mohawk.
The figure in the white gillie camouflage suit nodded silently.
The blizzard wind outside was rattling the walls and roof like the Big Bad Wolf. Moonblanket went to a locker and took out three sets of loose, drooping gillie suits in pure white.
"Put these on," the Mohawk said.
"I've never dressed up as a yeti," said Peggy, slipping her legs into the one-piece suit.
"When I was a kid there was a book called The Disappearing Bag," said Moonblanket. "That's exactly what these are."
"Hot," said Peggy, her voice muffled inside the suit.
"Not for long," said the Mohawk. He went back to the locker and brought out three full-face GMAX snowmobile helmets, once again in pure white. Holliday and Peggy jammed theirs on. Moonblanket stepped down onto the ice and pulled the canvas covers off the two lumps, revealing a pair of white snowmobiles.
"Arctic Cat Z1 Turbos," said Moonblanket. "Just about the fastest you can get."
"How fast?" Peggy asked.
"About a hundred and ten or so on a good ice surface."
"You're kidding, right?"
"We're usually going a little slower than that because we're towing cargo pods. Maybe sixty or seventy."
"Cargo pods?"
"Ask me no questions, I tell you no lies," said Moonblanket. "Peggy, you ride with me. Doc, you go with Brandon." Peggy dropped down onto the slick ice and climbed on behind Harry, who was straddling the front seat. Brandon Redboots got into the driver's position on the second machine. When they started up Peggy was surprised at how quiet they were and said so.
"Double mufflers on the engines. Polaris silent running chains and gears," answered Moonblanket.
"How long is this going to take?" Holliday asked.
"On a good day, maybe three minutes," said the Mohawk. "It's about a mile and a half all told. Five hundred yards to the island, which is still on the Canadian side, then a little less than a mile to Raquette Point on the U.S. side. The only danger is in the first minute-from here to the island. From the island to Raquette Point it's Akwesasne land. The Feds can't touch us."
"Don't they have tribal police?" Peggy asked, her voice blurred by the helmet but still understandable.
Harry Moonblanket pointed at the silent man sitting directly in front of Holliday. "Meet Chief Brandon Redboots of the Akwesasne Tribal Police." He laughed, gunned the engine and burst out through the open front of the old boathouse. Without a word Redboots followed them out into the whirling snow.
The wind roared all around them as they raced across the frozen river channel, the cold steadily leaking through the suit and then Peggy's ski jacket. Within thirty seconds she was freezing, teeth chattering inside the helmet. Suddenly, out of the corner of her vision she saw a shadow racing beside them, perhaps fifty yards away. She wouldn't have seen anything if the other snowmobile hadn't been bright yellow with a pulsing blue-and-red light on a short mast. It was slowly sliding in their direction. In front of her Harry Moonblanket let out a high-pitched yell and then a string of incomprehensible words that Peggy assumed were the Mohawk equivalent of swearing. She turned her head and saw a second blue-and-red light on their right.
"Who are they?" Peggy asked, yelling into the side of the Mohawk's helmet.
"Mounties!" Harry yelled back. "The river's federal property! Hang on!" The Mohawk twisted the throttle and they surged forward, almost tipping Peggy off the back of the racing machine. The pulsing lights were getting closer. She had a flashing memory of some old movie with a Mountie singing on a horse and knew there'd be no singing cops out here. Directly ahead of them an angled ramp of packed snow appeared.