Deadfall Read Free Page B

kitchen.”
    “No, it’s okay. We’ll need the light. Can’t see much otherwise, and I want to see, fast.”
    As they stepped onto the porch, the motion-activated halogen floodlights on their tall pole blinked into instant brightness,casting a wide, white circle of light that illuminated both their trucks in the drive and extended far out into the lot. At a glance, there was nothing unfamiliar within the area it revealed.
    Tank, closer to the cabin than the other dogs, strained toward Jessie as they came down the steps, pacing back and forth at the end of the tether that connected him to the iron stake near his box. He did not bark again, but whined and, when they reached him, turned and trotted ahead, as far as the tether would allow, toward the rest of the lot. There he stopped, and stared intently into the dark beyond the lights.
    Several more dogs, inspiring each other, were now barking, making it impossible to hear anything else, though Jessie tried to ignore them, to identify once again the foreign sound that had brought her uneasily searching for its source.
    “Let him go,” Alex suggested. “He knows what it is, and where.”
    She unfastened her leader, but kept a tight grasp on his collar, knowing that the temptation of a moose would strain his usual disciplined behavior. Free of the line, he did not, however, hurl himself forward against her restriction, as she had half expected, but calmly, steadily drew her past the other dogs, into the dark half of the lot.
    Okay, no moose. What, then? Jessie frowned.
    “Show me, Tank. Good boy.”
    As they moved between individual straw-lined shelters for the dogs, weaving a crooked path through the lot, and left the circumference of the light, her night vision improved, but not enough. She switched on the flashlight she carried and swung its beam ahead of them. Nothing. She could hear Alex walking quietly, close and slightly to one side. In the narrow beam of his light, she caught the glint of an aluminum food pan, the gold of straw spilling out the door of a box.
    The husky pulled her forward until they reached the outer edge of the wide lot, the last row of boxes, close to a hundred yards from the cabin. A few feet from one box in particular, he halted, stared at it, and growled deep in his throat. Hacklesrose along his neck and back, bristling under her hand. Her light showed nothing but the wooden side of it.
    “Alex?”
    He stepped up beside her, the shotgun ready for instant use, should he need it.
    Then Jessie could hear it again, a muffled whining that came repeatedly, and the familiar wet sound of a dog licking something, but the sharp crack that had broken her sleep did not come a second time. She shone the light over the outside of the dog box. Alex’s light moved over the dirt that surrounded it, stopped, and returned to the ground close to the door.
    Jessie caught her breath.
    It was soaked with red—blotches of blood that continued into the box.
    “God. What the hell?”
    They stepped forward and leaned to peer cautiously in through the door. Her light found the dog that had struggled to crawl inside and lay on the straw facing them. The straw under it was also liberally stained with scarlet. The dog raised its head to look blindly into the flashlight beam, quivered, then resumed licking, but it had been enough for them to see the ugly metal trap that was clamped cruelly to the flesh of one foreleg.
    “Oh, God! She’s caught, Alex.”
    Jessie sprang up to heave the box over, off its base, frantic to get to her dog. The resulting crash startled the next husky into leaping, with a yelp, to the top of its own box.
    “It’s Nicky. Oh…dammit. Where did that thing come from?”
    She dropped to her knees beside the young female, which whined again and shivered in shock.
    “Oh, Nicky. You poor baby.”
    Alex held his light, while she raised the dog’s head so they could see the trap on the injured leg.
    It was the sort of steel trap that was still