Snowbound

FIFTY-TWO

Twenty minutes had passed since he’d thrown the teenager out into the storm, and in the dining room, the oblivious Texans were still playing Hold ’Em for foolish stakes, trashed beyond all reason.

He’d lived in this lodge and run its business going on ten years, with nothing approaching this level of catastrophe—Gerald dead, now Paul, and that woman, Kalyn, still unaccounted for, though Donald, that imminently capable sociopath, would surely find her before dawn, as he had so many others.

Ethan reclined in one of the brown leather chairs in the vicinity of the library’s hearth, his legs stretched across the matching ottoman. He’d left his brother in his bedroom in that chair by the fireplace, Gerald in the south-wing alcove, where Kalyn had slit his throat. He’d deal with it all in the morning—the cleanup, public relations with the Texans, if they even remembered—and think of nothing more tonight but how monumentally fucked up he was about to get.

He filled his lungs with a hefty intake of smoke.

When it finally hit him, Ethan let the long bamboo pipe slip from his fingers and eased back into the chair, grinning stupidly at the ceiling, blowing smoke rings at the fire.

Through the opium fog, he heard a banging sound, thought for a moment it was his heart, since frequently, after a big hit, it raced and thumped in his chest like a blacksmith shaping out a piece of iron. But this wasn’t that. He could feel his heartbeat, which was soft and slow; there was something comforting about its methodically steady pace.

He rarely hauled himself out of the chair on nights he smoked, preferring to pass out before the warmth of the fire, letting the twisting flames and the coals and the sounds they made occupy his mind.

It took considerable effort to maneuver out of the chair. At last, he did, looked down at his feet when finally standing, puzzled at the strange sensation, as if he was watching appendages that didn’t belong to him. He certainly couldn’t feel them, even as he walked onto the freezing stone of the lobby, where Donald was already waiting in the vicinity of the door with his shotgun.

Ethan said, “Tenacious little thing, isn’t she? Give me that.” He swiped the shotgun out of Donald’s hand. “Wanna watch her go airborne?” he asked.

The guard chuckled as Ethan slid back the three iron bolts and pulled open the doors.

From Don’s perspective, it appeared as if the back of Ethan’s head exploded, his knees buckling, his body dropping like an inanimate sack of bones to the stone, a razor shard of Ethan’s skull lodged in Don’s eye.

A figure stood in the threshold, shadowy and formless in the candlelight. Don was backpedaling, reaching for the Glock in his jacket as a second muzzle flash blinded him, followed by a fragment of white-hot pain that was the end.