AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But the red wine wasn't really the problem. Yes, Danny would occasionally drink more than a glass or two--and it did make him sleepy. Still, the wine was no more than a contributing factor, and the restaurant's new name wasn't part of what went wrong at all. The problem was that after all their efforts to elude the cowboy--and the dubious name changes, which would prove to be pointless--Ketchum had simply been followed.
THE COWBOY HAD FOLLOWED Ketchum before, but Carl was none the wiser for it. The retired deputy had twice trailed the logger on his hunting trips to Quebec; Carl had even tracked Ketchum all the way to Pointe au Baril Station one winter, only to assume that the younger man the old woodsman was camping with was just some Ontario hick. The cowboy had no idea who Danny was, or what Danny did; Carl had wildly concluded that possibly Ketchum was "queer," and that the younger man was the old logger's lover! No little fella with a limp had materialized on these adventures, and Carl had essentially given up on following Ketchum.
One word would change everything--the word and the fact that both Ketchum and the cowboy did their tire business at the same establishment in Milan. Tires, especially winter tires, were important in northern New Hampshire. Twitchell's was the name of the tire place that Ketchum and the cowboy frequented, though the grease monkey who did the important talking was a young Canuck named Croteau.
"That looks like Ketchum's rig," Carl had said to the French Canadian--this was a week or more before Christmas, and the cowboy had noticed Ketchum's truck on the hoist in the garage at Twitchell's. Croteau was changing all four tires.
"Yup," Croteau said. The retired deputy observed that the Canuck was removing Ketchum's studded tires and replacing them with un-studded snow tires.
"Does Ketchum have an inside tip that it's gonna be a mild winter?" Carl asked Croteau.
"Nope," Croteau said. "He just don't like the sound of the studs on the interstate, and it's mostly interstates between here and Toronto."
"Toronto," the cowboy repeated, but that wasn't the word that would change everything.
"Ketchum puts the studded tires back on when he comes home after Christmas," Croteau explained to the deputy, "but you don't need studs for highway drivin'--out on the interstates, regular snow tires will do."
"Ketchum goes to Toronto for Christmas?" Carl asked the Canuck.
"For as long as I can remember," Croteau said, which wasn't very long--not in the cowboy's estimation. Croteau was in his early twenties; he'd been changing tires only since he got out of high school.
"Does Ketchum have some lady friend in Toronto?" Carl asked. "Or a boyfriend, maybe?"
"Nope," Croteau replied. "Ketchum said he's got family there."
It was the family word that would change everything. The deputy sheriff knew that Ketchum didn't have a family--not in Canada, anyway. And what family he'd had, the old logger had lost; everyone knew that Ketchum was estranged from his children. Ketchum's kids were still living in New Hampshire, Carl knew. Ketchum's children were grown up now, with kids of their own, but they had never moved away from Coos County; they'd just cut their ties to Ketchum.
"Ketchum can't have any family in Toronto," the cowboy told the dumb Canuck.
"Well, that's what Ketchum said--he's got family there, in Toronto," Croteau insisted stubbornly.
Later, Danny would be touched that the old logger thought of him and his dad as family; yet that was what gave them away to Carl. The cowboy couldn't think of anyone whom Ketchum had absolutely taken to--or had seemed at all close to, in the manner of family--except the cook. Nor had it been hard for the ex-cop to follow Ketchum's truck, unnoticed. That truck burned a lot of oil; a black cloud of exhaust enveloped following vehicles, and Carl had wisely rented an anonymous-looking SUV with snow tires. That December, on the interstate highways of the northeastern United States--they would cross into Canada from Buffalo, over the Peace Bridge--the cowboy's car was as nondescript as they come. After all, Carl had been a cop; he knew how to tail people.
The cowboy knew how to stake out the house on Cluny Drive, too. It wasn't long before he was familiar with all of their comings and goings, including Ketchum's. Of course the cowboy was aware that Ketchum was just visiting. While Carl must have been tempted to kill all three of them, the deputy probably didn't want to risk going up against the old logger; Carl knew that Ketchum was armed. The house on Cluny Drive was never locked during the day, or at night, either--not until after the last of them, usually the cook, had limped home to go to bed.
It had been easy for the cowboy to get inside and have a good look at the house; that way, Carl knew who was sleeping in each room. But there was more that he didn't know.
The only gun in the house was the one in the guest bedroom, where it was clear to Carl that Ketchum was staying. The cowboy thought it was an odd gun, or at least an unsophisticated weapon, for Ketchum to be carrying--a youth-model Winchester 20-gauge. (A friggin' kid's shotgun, Carl was thinking.)
How could the deputy have known that the Winchester Ranger was Ketchum's Christmas present for Danny? The old logger didn't believe in wrapping paper, and the 20-gauge, pump-action shotgun was loaded and stashed under Ketchum's bed--exactly where the cowboy would have hidden a weapon. It never occurred to Carl that the 20-gauge wouldn't be going back to New Hampshire with the veteran river driver, whenever it was that Ketchum eventually returned to Coos County. The cowboy would just wait and see when that would be--then make his move.
Carl thought he had several options. He'd unlocked the door to the fire escape in Danny's third-floor writing room; if the writer didn't notice that the door was unlocked, the cowboy could enter the house that way. But if Danny saw that the door was unlocked, and re-locked it, Carl could come into the house through the unlocked front door--at any time of the evening, when the cook and his son were out. The cowboy had observed that Danny didn't go back to his third-floor writing room after he'd had dinner. (This was because of the beer and the red wine; when the writer had been drinking, he didn't even want to be in the same room with his writing.)
Whether Carl entered the property via the third-floor fire escape or walked in the front door, he would be safe hiding out in that third-floor room; the cowboy only had to be careful not to move around too much, not until the cook and his son were asleep. The floor creaked, Carl had noticed; so did the stairs leading down to the second-floor hall. But the cowboy would be wearing just socks on his feet. He would kill the cook first, Carl was thinking--then the son. Carl had seen the eight-inch cast-iron skillet hanging in the cook's bedroom; of course the cowboy knew the Injun-killing history of that skillet, because Six-Pack had told him. Carl had amused himself by thinking how funny it would be to be standing in the cook's bedroom, after he'd shot the little fucker, just waiting for the kid to come to his dad's rescue with the stupid skillet! Well, if that was how it worked out, that would be okay with the cowboy. What was important to Carl was that he kill them both, and that he drive across the U. S. border before the bodies were discovered. (With any luck, the cowboy could be back in Coos County before then.)
The old sheriff was a little worried about encountering the Mexican cleaning woman, whose comings and goings weren't as predictable as the cook's--or the no-less-observable habits of his writer son. Compared to Lupita suddenly showing up to do a load or two of laundry, or compulsively attacking the kitchen, even Ketchum's routine was reasonably consistent. The logger went to a Tae Kwon Do gym on Yonge Street for a couple of hours every day. The gym was called Champion Centre, and Ketchum had found the place by accident a few years ago; the master instructor was a former Iranian wrestler, now a boxer and a kickboxer. Ketchum said he was working on his "kicking skills."
"Dear God," the cook had complained. "Why would an eighty-three-year-old man have an interest in learning a martial art?"
"It's more mixed martial arts, Cookie," Ketchum explained. "It's boxing and kickboxing--and grappling, too. I'm just interested in finding new ways to get a fella down to the ground. Once I get a guy on the ground, I know what to do with him."
"But why, Ketchum?" the cook cried. "How many more fights are you planning to be in?"
"That's just it, Cookie--no one can plan on being in a fight. You just have to be ready!"
"Dear God," Dominic said again.
To Danny it seemed that Ketchum had always been getting ready for a war. Ketchum's Christmas present to the writer, the Winchester Ranger, with which Danny had killed three deer, appeared to emphasize this point.
