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four-seater. It was time to land.
    In his headset, through the unwavering rasp of static, he could hear his wife’s voice—high, fragmented, concerned—and though certain she couldn’t hear him, he spoke to her in calming tones, telling her everything was fine, she was right, he’d put down on a lake and sit this sucker out.
    He descended to three hundred feet and banked into a tight turn, deciding the lake he’d just flown over was his best bet. Leveling out, he came in low over the treetops, into the wind, watching for the shoreline through the frosted side window. A gust hammered him as he spotted the demarcation between rock and lake and the Cessna dropped sharply, the crown of a giant pine bumping the fuselage beneath his feet.
    Then he was out over a formless plain of white with no visible horizon, barely able to see the whirring prop in front of him. The rocky shore was to his right and he angled toward it, squinting out the side window, trying to keep about three wing spans between himself and the ghostly blur of rock and trees. He was coming in too fast but he was committed now.
    The skis touched down hard, snow coming up in twin rooster tails, jarring things loose in the cockpit. Tom throttled back, his ground speed dangerously fast, and the Cessna struck a drift, going airborne again. The plane tilted shoreward as gravity reclaimed it, the starboard ski slamming down first. Then the port ski pounded the ice and Tom’s left temple struck the door frame, the impact dazing him. Through watery eyes he saw the shoreline sweep around in front of him as a narrow peninsula materialized in the windscreen. There was no time to do anything but kill the engine.
    The glare ice propelled him to a patch of shoreline cleared of rock, a beachfront, Tom realized, and now he was plowing up the smooth embankment toward a building looming into view, a cottage with a huge picture window, a neat black hole dead ahead in the amorphous swirl of the storm.
    He looked at the photo of his wife and son clipped to the visor as the prop shredded the plate glass and the stout window frame sheered off the wings and skis, reducing the aircraft to a screeching torpedo.
    He thought of his unborn child and something came through the windscreen and struck him a glancing blow on the forehead, and for a few blessed moments the shattered world went dark around him.

14
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    The slam of the front door startled Dale, Ronnie’s rant up to that point little more than a distant irritation, a ticking mechanical clock in a room in which sleep seems so inviting. He opened his eyes to red slits, the abrupt noise killing his buzz.
    Bitch , he thought, and glanced down at the engagement diamond sending dull sparkles into the deep pool of bathwater that was just beginning to chill. He wanted to feel righteous about it, but all he felt was afraid. How was he going to get out of this? Short of suicide, he could imagine no other way. And until that thought—a grim alternative, but at least one he could control—broke bright and fully formed in his awakening consciousness, the despair he felt was nigh on overwhelming.
    He glanced at the gun on the tray next to the tub and thought, Too nasty. No way he could put that sucker in his mouth and squeeze the trigger. Must be like being hit by a semi. It would be the way Copeland’s guys would do him. Or his brother’s. And it occurred to him then that it would probably go down that way, Copeland telling Ed to do it himself or Copeland would handle it personally. Dale had heard some of the stories—the heinous shit Copeland would do to a guy who’d pissed him off before letting him die—and knew that Ed would feel obliged to arrange it himself.
    Jesus, his own brother. That was how far over the line he’d crossed.
    And that meant those two goons Ed kept around like trained apes would probably already be hunting him. Those guys were eerie, the way they could find a man no matter how deep he