Moran grinned crookedly and huffed a smoky laugh and looked back toward the road. No lights. No one coming or going. Nothing but the trees and the moon.
And then he stepped up over the bank of snow and he was coming for her. “We’re done talking. Let’s go.”
She backstepped, keeping the distance between them, the river at her back—the bank how many steps away? She would not turn to look. Would not take her eyes off him.
He stopped and stared at her. “Where do you think you’re going?” He reached behind him and there was a flash of moonlight on chrome and a rattle like dog tags. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, honey.” He swung the cuffs as if to dazzle her with them, their shininess, as you would a child. If he got them on her that was it, it was all over.
“Is that what you told Holly Burke?” she said, and the cuffs stopped swinging. Moran watching her, dark-eyed under the hatbrim. The breaths pulsing from his nostrils.
“You have no idea how crazy you sound,” he said, and stepped forward again, and again she backstepped. The bank was there . . . so close. He took another step and she backstepped, and her boot fell through space and she followed it down—stumbling backwards, arms rowing in the air and both legs going out from under her. She landed on her back and went sliding down the short ramp of the riverbank and she knew what was next and raised her head so that she struck the ice with her shoulders, then watched as her legs, following some instinct of their own, carried on overhead, her boots swinging through the stars and landing toe-first in two heavy chops behind her, ice chips flying, so that when she looked up again she was on her hands and knees on the ice and facing the bank she’d come down backwards.
Moran stepped to the edge of the bank and stood looking down on her.
“Come up off of there,” he said.
She shuffled backwards on her hands and knees, then got to her feet. She stood listening, feeling—her heart pounding, remembering the water when she first went in, the shock of it, how the entire body jolted in amazement, in disbelief. At the same time, standing there, she knew she would not fall through again, and it was silly, it was irrational, but she believed that the ice knew her. Or the feel of her, her particular weight and stance. She and the ice had a history, and after all it was the same river here as it was across the state line . . .
Moran took a small, careful step down the bank, his hand held out to her, and she turned then and walked out onto the ice.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said. “That ice ain’t as thick as it used to be.”
She continued on, putting distance between herself and the bank. When he shut up she could hear the thin dunes of snow compressing under her boots, could hear the blood beating in her ears and nothing more—no cracks, no pops. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty steps before she stopped and looked back. He wasn’t following. She’d had her hands out for balance and now she slipped them back into the jacket pockets. She stood facing him. The ice would be thinnest in the middle of the river but she would go there if she had to, and beyond, all the way across and into the nameless woods on the far bank.
“Just gonna stand there all night, is that the idea?” He didn’t have to shout; his voice carried easily over the hard, flat surface.
She said nothing. The river made no sound—not the ice, not the water flowing beneath it, although it did flow; she could feel it, like her own blood. So fast and silent in its dark rushing and so cold.
Moran folded the cuffs and returned them to their place on his belt. He watched her. Then he took another sideways step down the bank, took one more and then onto the ice, one boot only, but that was enough—she felt the change before it reached her: a shift, a shooting nerve that ran through the ice and expressed itself, finally, in the smallest pop, just beneath her boots.
She took her hands from her pockets.
The ice sighed, it took a breath—then pitched beneath her. A sharp