Cold Around the Heart
He was a bow hunter, and he’d been stalking deer until she began stalking him. On this snowy weekday, the Barrens were empty; she had seen no other hunters, had seen no one at all. She and her prey were alone in a chalk-white forest, watched only by the trees.
He couldn’t help leaving tracks, of course— deep ragged pockmarks in the hills of snow where his boots clomped down. But the scarlet thread of blood was easier to see in the failing daylight. She only hoped she finished things before dark. Using a flashlight would make her an easy target. Really, the job should have been over by now. Had it gone as planned, she would be back in town, sipping cocoa at the Main Street Diner and thawing out after her exposure to the January chill. But because he had the bow, she hadn’t wanted to get too close. She’d tried a kill shot from a distance, crouching in a blind, her target hovering over the gun sight. With a long gun, she would have made the shot, but with the pistol, it proved too great a challenge. She nicked him in the shoulder on her first try, got him in the leg as he was scrambling away.
She wouldn’t have thought a man with two slugs in him could get very far, especially when one of the rounds had lamed him. But the will to survive was a remarkable thing. For more than an hour, she’d chased him through the Barrens as the winter sun became a pale smear of saffron in the western sky. She had seen him raise a cell phone to his ear a couple of times, but she couldn’t get a signal out here and she was betting he couldn’t, either. He was slowing now, his reserves of energy giving out. She wondered if he’d gone bow hunting often. She wondered if he had killed many deer and if so, if he had tracked the wounded animals, following their blood spoor.
Probably. Karma was a stone-cold bitch sometimes. The sun was a blister on the horizon when she found him in a clearing. He lay on his back in the deep powder like a man trying to make a snow angel.
The crossbow was by his side, but his hand wasn’t on it. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. She approached slowly. She put her foot on the bow and eased it sidewise, out of his reach. Then she just stood there, looking down. She knew he was seeing her only in silhouette, a wild-haired apparition limned by the dying sun.
“Help me,”
he said in a sandpaper rasp. She shook her head. “Sorry.” It was a lie. She wasn’t sorry. He tried to make sense of what was happening to him.
he asked at last. “My name’s Parker. Jacob Hart hired me.” That ought to make things reasonably clear. She watched as comprehension widened his eyes. “I’ll pay you more,”
he said.
“I’ll pay double. I’ll pay for anything.”
CHAPITRE 1
On Tuesday, August 21, Bonnie Parker hung a sign on her office door that read GONE FISHING. It was no joke. She had a rod and reel in her car, a beat-up but still serviceable Jeep Wrangler she’d purchased secondhand six years ago at the start of her career. She drove the Jeep to a lake on the edge of town and sat on the grass in the shadow of a looming radio tower that broadcast death metal music to the greater Millstone County listening public. For five uninterrupted hours, she lounged with her back against the tree, the pole in her hands and a line in the water. She got no bites. It didn’t matter. She hated cleaning fish. If she’d caught one, she would have thrown it back. People who didn’t know her sometimes asked why she lived in a small town on the Jersey shore, where the only action after midnight was the checkout counter at the twenty-four-hour A& P.
They pegged her as a city gal, but the truth was, she’d spent enough time in cities during her teenage years, crawling like a flea in the mangy underbelly of urban life. But didn’t she miss the excitement? She told them she got enough excitement in her job. I’m a PI, she would add, invariably clarifying, a private investigator. If necessary she could supply them with edited and sanitized anecdotes, complete with funny endings. The truth was, not all her cases had funny endings, and not all of them could be sanitized. And she was much more than an ordinary PI. But people didn’t need to know about that.
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