Winter of the Wolf Moon by Steve Hamilton Page B

rumbled past him and all the way down to the end of the road, plowing as I went. I saw lights in most of the cabins, the snowmobilers either in for the night or recharging for one more run. When I got back to my place, I cleared my driveway and got out of the truck. And then I stopped.
    My front door was open.
    I stood there, waiting, listening for any sound inside the cabin. A snowmobile whined in the distance and then stopped. Then there was silence again.
    I crunched through the snow to my door and gently pushed the door all the way open. I owned a gun, but it was hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of my closet. So it wasn’t going to do me any good at the moment.
    I saw a single light in the back of the cabin. It was the lamp on my bedstand. The shade was angled down over the bulb, giving the whole place an eerie glow. There was smoke coming from where the shade was burning against the heat of the bulb.
    I stepped into the cabin and looked around the place. I looked at the wreckage of what had once been my home. I couldn’t touch anything yet. I just walked from one end to the other. The only sound was my own breath, and my own heartbeat. In the kitchen every drawer had been pulled out and upended. The refrigerator was open. Food, milk, eggs—everything was all on the floor mixed in with the contents of the drawers. The cushions of the couch had been pulled off and slashed. The mattress was pulled off the bed. It was slashed as well. The burning lampshade wokeme out of the trance long enough to take the shade off the bulb and put it upright again. I went into the bathroom. Everything that had once been in the medicine cabinet was now floating in the toilet. The shower curtain was pulled off its rings and torn in two.
    The closet was on the other side of the bathroom wall, next to the front door. I went to it and sorted through all of the clothes that had been thrown onto the floor. At the bottom of the closet I found the shoe-box open. The gun was still there, the cylinder open and empty. I picked it up and put bullets in it, one by one. Somehow it made me feel better.
    I looked at the door. The molding was in splinters. Somebody had just kicked it in. I always knew it wasn’t a good door. I always figured that way out here in the middle of the woods where nobody could see the place, if somebody really wanted to break into the place, they’d find a way no matter what I did. I was apparently right.
    “Bruckman,” I said aloud. He did this. But why didn’t he take the gun? I went back through the place and looked everything over as well as I could. There was nothing missing. Unless …
    Unless whatever it was he was looking for wasn’t here for him to find. With that thought, I reached into the pocket of my coat. The compact weight had been there all along, on the edge of awareness. Now I remembered the hockey puck and held it up in the dim light to read the inscription once again. Gordie Howe, Number 9.
    Could it mean that much to him? An autographed hockey puck?
    Or did he break in just to trash the place? Just to get back at me for trying to help Dorothy get away from him?
    I stood there for a long time, looking at the puck. I felt the anger building. And along with the anger, there was a sick sort of fascination with just how crazy this man could be to do this. Or how stupid. Or both. He should be far away from here by now. But instead he decides to stay around just so he can do this to me.
    With that anger and that fascination, there was something else. A little burning spark of anticipation, something almost like gladness. Because now I knew that he was close. And if he was close, then I had more than an even chance of finding him.

CHAPTER NINE
     
     
    When I woke up the next morning, I saw the underside of the bunk bed above. For a moment, I forgot where I was. Then it all came back to me.
    My cabin. I couldn’t imagine one man doing so much damage. He probably had his whole hockey team with him.
    I had