“What are you . . .” His head flops on top of his neck as he speaks.
I let him fall back into the snow, and I move to sit across his hips, yanking the drawstring from the waist of my coat, three feet of cord a quarter of an inch thick. I tie one end around the man’s right wrist, cinching it tight enough that I don’t have to worry about him slipping free. He tries to pull his hand away, but with his mind in a fog, his efforts are meaningless. When I grab his left wrist, he yelps in pain. Through the coat sleeve, I can feel that his forearm is swollen from where my ax handle connected. I’m pretty sure it’s broken, and, if it’s not, it won’t be of much use to him.
We’re in a small clearing no more than twenty feet in from the shore of a large, frozen lake. The clearing gave the deceptive appearance of a portage, which must have drawn him in like a lost man stumbling toward a mirage. But only a few feet into the clearing, he became tangled in a patch of pin-cherry scrub. Our chase had come to an end. He had no choice but to face me and turn his flight into a fight.
By the time I’d caught up to him, I was so exhausted that I could barely stay on my feet. I lumbered up the embankment, my shaky legs driven forward by a rage that had been on a slow burn for years and was now erupting—my ax handle raised and ready. I didn’t see the knife in his hand as he turned to make his stand. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had seen it. I lunged at him with the ax handle arcing down from above my head. He raised his left arm to block my attack and took the full force of the blow. I swear I heard the sound of the bone breaking.
He started to go down onto one knee, a half-assed genuflection, but caught himself and struggled to get back to his feet. I swung again. This time, just as the ax handle reached the top of its arc, I saw the glint of the blade in his hand. He fell toward me, the knife aimed at my stomach. I jerked to the right, my feet tangling in the scrub and snow as I drove the ax handle into his head. The jolt reverberated through my palm, and the man went down hard. I raised the ax handle for a third blow, the one that would end his life, but there would be no third blow.
He’s gaining strength as he resists my effort to tie him up. I grab his broken arm, and the stab of pain wakes him. He speaks with clarity, almost yelling at me, “What the fuck are you doing!”
He tries to pull his arm free, but I use my knees to push his wrists together. He bellows and curses as my leg presses against what I suspect is a broken ulna. That’s got to hurt something fierce. I bind the cord around his left wrist, then double it back again to his right wrist and tie it tight. I turn around to sit on his knees so I can untie the laces of his boots. He kicks, but his legs barely move under my weight. I pull the laces tight, knotting them so that the collar of each boot pinches into his calves. Then I tie the loose ends of the boot laces to one another, binding his feet together.
I stand up to inspect what I’ve done. Behind his back, the belt has his arms trussed at the elbows, and his wrists are tethered in front of his stomach with my drawstring, his hands far enough apart that his fingers can’t touch. I pick up his fillet knife and slide it into my boot. He is at my mercy.
Mercy. I repeat the word in my head. The irony. A wisp of a chuckle escapes my lips and dissolves into the breeze as my thoughts retreat back into darker corners.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “Who are you?”
I stand, brush the snow off my pants, and I look around, thinking maybe I can get a fix on where I’m at. Although I had done my best to commit this part of the Superior National Forest to memory, I lost track during the two-mile chase, and I’m not sure if I’m still in Minnesota or if crossing that frozen lake brought me into Canada. My mind begins calculating arguments of jurisdiction and law, and I drop my head to laugh. Still thinking like a cop. I’ll have to get over that.
I zip my coat shut, now that the cold morning air has found its bite again. The lake looks to be about half a mile across and wide enough from east to west that I cannot see those shores through the haze. A jaundiced sun seeps through low clouds, and the thin veil of falling snow obscures the southern shore, where I can barely make out the smudges of green pine mixed with streaks of white aspen and birch.
“I think you broke my arm,” he says. “It hurts.” There’s a salesman’s sincerity to his words, which fall barren upon my ears. “Why are you doing this? I don’t understand. Who are you?”
I walk down to the edge of the lake to clear my head, my gaze lost in the murky distance. We are alone. The closest semblance of civilization is the cabin where the chase began, some two miles away. He started on a snowmobile and I ran on foot. Had he not been in such a hurry, he’d have gotten a better head start. Instead, he wiped out early on a hairpin turn.
Even if he hadn’t wrecked it, his machine could only take him so far. The snowmobile trail turns into a foot portage where Superior National Forest butts up against the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, well before the Canadian border. From there, he had to run on foot. I would have followed him to the end of the earth, if I had to. He had fear to feed his effort. I had revenge. I was willing to bet that my fuel would burn hotter and longer than anything he could muster.
But what to do now? If I was back in Minneapolis, there would be procedures to follow—a step-by-step blueprint of how to treat a suspect. Suspect. That’s the wrong word. This isn’t an investigation. I’m not looking for the truth; I know the truth. I need to hear him say what he did. I want him on his knees, blubbering his confession through tears of remorse so sincere that I have no choice but to believe him. I want an act of absolute contrition from this man, and even that might not be enough.
I’m thirsty. I don’t have water, so I take off my gloves and scoop some snow into my mouth. It melts quickly on my tongue, but it does not quench my thirst. I lift another small handful of snow and for a moment allow myself to take in the beauty of the forest around me.
There is very little wind, and the man has stopped his yapping, which allows a sense of tranquility to descend on our little corner of the world. In the quiet of the woods, my thoughts turn to what I have lost—what he has taken from me. Jenni would have loved it here, sitting in the middle of nowhere, listening to the snow feather its way through the trees. She loved the woods, and she loved winter.