Hard Cold Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

was as close as I was going to get.
    Through the plastic of the trash bag I popped the cap off the signal flare. Got the cap turned around, and struck the sandpapery end.
    A flame bloomed instantly inside the bag, and without stopping to check it—the thing would work, or it wouldn’t—I stepped out from behind the tree and threw the flare and the already swelling balloon of the trash bag toward the cabin. The bear saw me and rose up on its hind legs with a heavy grunt.
    Both of us watched the trash bag as it landed and gently bounced. Its plastic stretched and strained rapidly.
    It exploded. A shockingly loud bang that rang my eardrums and shook a torrent of needles off the nearest trees.
    The bear wheeled and ran in the opposite direction, blowing a deep groan of what I guessed was fear. It crashed through the brush. In seconds the sound of its panicked flight faded into the distance.
    I rushed forward, stomping on the flare and crushing the flame into the earth.
    “Elana,” I yelled at the dark cabin door.
    There was nothing I could do for the man. I ran for the silent cabin. If Elana was in there, hiding, she’d be terrified. Maybe in shock.
    But even before I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE SUDDEN REEK OF death at the cabin door made my throat close up in protest. Inside, I could feel the smell seep into my skin and clothes like water from a fog.
    Her body was seated at a small rough pinewood table. She had fallen forward, facedown on the table, long, brown hair draped over the unfinished planks. The back of her head was misshapen and clotted with gore. The body had bloated at some point during the past day or two. Now it was deflated again, and the skin I could see was gray, like the remains of the man outside. Blowflies buzzed into tiny cyclones as I stepped closer.
    On the drywall behind her, two wide splashes of black blood, like spread wings reaching almost to the ceiling.
    I couldn’t see her face under the shroud of hair. From the exit wounds on the back of her head, I knew I didn’t want to. But her body was long and lean. Familiar.
    The cabin was crowded with fake-rustic furniture, a table and chairs, and two double beds and a single dresser. All expensively designed to appear as though some hillbilly had chopped the pieces fromraw trees, and joined them together with crude dovetails and dowels instead of hidden screws. Only a potbellied stove and battered pine cabinets looked authentic.
    A woman’s shoulder bag was on top of the dresser. In the bag was a green bandanna. I fished it out and used it to keep from leaving fingerprints as I went through the bag’s contents.
    I found a pocketbook, opened it, and saw Elana’s face, smiling up from a driver’s license photo under a clear plastic window. It wasn’t quite the face of my memory. The girlish softness had been sculpted in the past dozen years into something more defined, more striking. Strong Eastern European cheekbones framing bottle-green eyes. And vibrant. That indefinable something that makes one girl hold your eye among a hundred others just as beautiful.
    Elana Michelle Coll. Twenty-seven years old. Five foot nine inches, 130 pounds, brown over green. And gone.
    God damn it, Elana.
    I edged my way around the table. Her suede blouse was heavy with crusted blood, but intact. There were two crude holes in the painted pink drywall four feet behind her chair. More blood on the chair, and the floor.
    Two shots, straight and close. A high enough caliber to go through her head and take most of it along.
    I suddenly needed to be out of the cabin. Away from the charnel-house smell.
    At the instant my boot was about to cross the threshold, I saw a spattered purple line crossing the grain of the oak floor. I stopped so abruptly to keep from stepping on it that I had to catch my fall on the doorjamb.
    It was just a thin dappling, as if from a flicked paintbrush. Blood, but not Elana’s. She was on the other side of