"A gentleman is simply a patient wolf." - Lana Turner
"Homo homini lupus" ("Man is wolf to man") - Roman proverb
He knew who was chasing him and he knew why, but by that point his hindbrain had taken over. When it came down to brass tacks, he was half a percent fight at most. The rest was flight. Cowardice, he rationalized, was the trade-off for a splendid intellect.
It was something he would resent when looking back, when he conducted a self-analysis that wasn't actually analysis at all but a superficial indulgence in blaming circumstance.
Whether or not it reflected on his practice, Frederick Chilton sucked at introspection.
That there might not be time for looking back, of course, didn't occur to him at that point. Not with the deafening neurochemical shout: Run run run run run run…
His dragging footsteps were muffled by the heavy snow. So, he had to assume, were Jack Crawford's.
This isn't fair, he thought, skidding down a short embankment on the heels of his Napa leather Tod's driving loafers. I'm a cripple. The coherent thought stopped him in his tracks, quite literally.
Ah, so he didn't even have to wait until the aftermath for the blame to start. Funny the things the brain conjures when you're about to die. The senses go into overdrive, which is good.
Their evil cousin, imagination, also turns up the heat. That wasn't nearly as great. Every naked tree branch against his face was a bullet whizzing by. Every burning faceful of snow was the splash of blood from his blown-out skull. With an entry wound to the back of the head, would the exit pop his eyes whole from their sockets? The last things he'd see would be snow and roots and pieces of his own face. Like looking at a mirror turned into a kaleidoscope. The sudden and vivid image made him gag.
Instead of doubling over and vomiting, Frederick started running again. He had zero doubt that, given the chance, Crawford would shoot him down like a dog.
That was a painful cliché, but it had probably occurred to him because of the dog. A real dog. A big, gray one, standing off to the side between two tree trunks like it was just popping its head out the door to watch this staggering, panting wreck of a man go by. Voyeur. Frederick didn't trust animals because he couldn't tell exactly how much they saw.
He didn't trust people for the same reason.
Though Frederick had other things on his mind while scrambling up the far side of the embankment-namely the smell of blood that still hung on him even after scrubbing himself raw in Will Graham's shower-he couldn't remember seeing this particular brute among Graham's pack. For one thing, it was huge, with the rangy, long-legged appearance of a wild dog. Maybe it was one of those wolf half-breeds, though Frederick couldn't imagine even Graham would be stupid enough to take in something so volatile. To be fair, though, Will had flirted with sheer idiocy in letting Hannibal Lecter into close confidence. But the fact of it made Frederick an idiot by association and that wasn't something he wanted to dwell on.
Maybe it was part coyote. Were there coyotes in Virginia?
The dog-coyote-wolf-thing cocked its head, its ears swiveling in Frederick's direction. Its pale blue marble eyes, set in a mask of lighter gray fur, projected a semblance of unsettling self-awareness. Once again, Frederick felt sure he would have seen such a singular animal back at the house. Yet it must have been there, sniffing at him in a predator's ecstasy but too tame to act on its instinct.
Frederick would never discount instinct again.
The dog opened its mouth in a canine grin, huffing out a cloud of steam into the frigid air. Tongue lolling, it started padding out of the thicket on huge paws. It got bigger every time Frederick looked at it. Seemed it wasn't content with only watching.
Frederick's already overtaxed adrenal glands managed to double the output when the dog stopped abruptly in its tracks then drew back its lips and snarled. With his panic-heightened eyesight, he could see its throat vibrating.
Running past it was the only option, because Frederick couldn't head back toward the house. Toward Jack Crawford. Or, rather, the eerie snowbound silence where he knew Crawford waited.
The dog watched him, still growling, swiveling its head as he changed direction and skirted the thicket to his right. His toe caught in a snarl of fallen branches and he went down hard on one knee, losing a loafer in the process of extricating himself.
At that moment it occurred to him that the last thing he might think in his life was: Damn you and your dogs, Will Graham. It sounded like something a comic book supervillain would say while shaking a fist at the sky. For the time being, though, Frederick Chilton was a supervillain. At least according to the FBI. How much more depraved could one get than the Chesapeake Ripper?
For the first and arguably the stupidest time since the frame job went down, Frederick laughed. He laughed about it all, wheezing and weeping and stumbling to the point that he couldn't run anymore.
Unfortunately, the whole display seemed to wind the dog up even more. Every time it took a breath, the growl came in with a high-pitched whine at the top. Its lips rose and fell like malfunctioning stage curtains over its huge fence-picket teeth. Some part of Frederick thought it might be better if Jack came along and shot him. It was preferable to being gutted (or to witnessing the ugly demise of his Burberry peacoat).
The dog crouched, its haunches quivering, preparing to leap.
Frederick stopped laughing and stared, drawing freezing sips of air into his lungs.
Come on, hindbrain, don't fail me now.
It didn't. He fainted into the snow.
For the third time in a year, Frederick woke up smelling blood. Congratulations, Dr. Chilton. You have won the Triple Crown of Mutilation. You get a wreath of entrails.
Because of the smell, he expected pain, but there was none. He tried to open his eyes and failed for a panicked second before he realized that his eyelids were frozen shut. The frosty trails that wound through the miniature forest of his five o'clock shadow were old tears. New ones-not of fear but of relief-flooded in and thawed his stuck lids.
The cold let him know that he was alive. Either that or it had literally snowed in Hell, but at that moment Frederick chose the most orthodox atheism possible to reassure himself he was still breathing. A second later, there it came: the breath that stung his ravaged throat and made his teeth ache.
He let go and sobbed like a child-just a couple of hiccuping convulsions and plenty of fresh, hot tears before humiliation crept up on him. He sniffled hard and pulled a sizable quantity of snot back into his sinuses. Cold air came with it, and he started tearing up again.
Finally, he was able to open his eyes and got a couple of blinks in the white, waning afternoon before something frigid and rubbery thumped down on his forehead. He tried to move his hand to lift the offending object, then it dawned on him that it was his hand, stiff and numb with cold.
His coat sleeve was missing, his entire forearm bare and bluish. At least he wasn't so rusty in his diagnostic skills that he didn't think to check for frostbite. A couple of fingertips looked white, but there was no blackening yet. Frederick sighed his relief. He would rather not lose yet another body part. Strangely, there didn't appear to be any bite marks or scratches. The skin was unblemished.
But the blood had to have come from somewhere. It was all over his coat front, and freezing in cubist rock-candy crystals on the tatters of his shirt sleeve. The dog might have been injured. Maybe it thought he was trying to harm it, that the defensive growls had been the last resort of a dying animal.
Or maybe he'd killed the dog himself. Why not? There were stories of mothers in extremis lifting two-ton cars to reach trapped children. Frederick could have gone berserk in a self-preserving rage and torn out the beast's throat. He clung hard to the idea because it meant he'd done something exceptional, even if he didn't remember it.
The warm little kernel began to flower inside him, raising hesitant tendrils. Frederick would rather be publicly flogged than admit to the fact that, deep down, he was a bit of a fantasist. While he loathed the lies that people told themselves, he had a soft spot for the lies people told each other: fables, myths, tales, outlandish explanations straddling the line between feasible and ridiculous. He'd spent many a frigid winter evening during his medical residency sneaking looks at his volume of Bulfinch's Greek Mythology or the Prose Edda or the Táin Bó Cúailnge behind his clipboard.
Frederick, a small and weak child who'd grown into a small and weak man, nevertheless let his mind thrill to the exploits of Beowulf or Cú Chulainn. Anger, pain, fear: they all did things to men, transformed them. Frederick wanted to believe this time that for an instant he'd tapped into a vein of rage deep inside himself-if not godlike then at least elevated-and saved his own life.
But wouldn't the dog's mangled body be lying somewhere close? Frederick frowned. Maybe it had gone after Jack Crawford instead. The man had been only a few paces behind him, gaining all the while on Frederick's limping run. Maybe it was the dog that had saved his life. If so, he owed thanks, if indirectly, to Will Graham, though he didn't savor the idea of having to say it out loud.
Fighting the vertiginous lurch his brain gave in his skull, Frederick sat up and looked at the deep red puddle that had spread into the snow. The blood had already re-frozen on the ground, but it beaded and ran on his rapidly warming flesh. Outside of that, everything else was white. White and silent.
He took a breath, then another, trying to put off the embarrassing moment when he'd try to stand up. Here's your wolf-pelted warrior, Odin. A gimp on a cane.
Frederick looked around for said cane. Silly, considering he'd left it in Graham's parlor (or what passed for one in that rustic hellhole). The painful tingling in his limbs reinforced the fact that he couldn't just sit there mired in blood and disappointment. Hands braced on the ground behind his back, he pushed his weight forward, but his feet were still too anesthetized from the cold to bear weight and he thumped back hard on his ass, cursing.
A branch snapped nearby with a brittle click and Frederick went still, holding his breath.
"Dr. Chilton!"
It was Will Graham's voice. The panic engine inside Frederick's chest thrummed to life again. "No," he said, softly but firmly.
"Dr. Chilton!"
Frederick struggled to find the balance to get to his feet, confused for only a moment before realizing he was already standing. His legs were tensed, his abdomen pain-free thanks to renewed adrenaline. He was ready to run.
Graham's head in a foolish-looking hunter's cap crested the snowbank.
Hesitating a second too long while deciding if his insides could take another dash, Frederick finally just put his hands up, fighting back tears as Graham approached. "Please," he breathed, the self-disgust manifest in a cloud on the freezing air. "Please."
"I'm not going to hurt you," Graham said, mirroring Frederick and raising his own gloved hands.
"Where's Crawford?" Frederick asked him.
"Gone," said Graham. "I promise."
"You'll have to forgive me if I don't trust your promises, Mr. Graham," said Frederick, his heartbeat still loud in his ears. He sniffed. "Jack Crawford doesn't just give up."
"He didn't give up. I persuaded him to stop," Graham said. "For the moment."
"You...wait-" Frederick said. "You sent one of your dogs after me. I'm sure it knew my scent. Did it bring part of my coat back as a souvenir?" He flapped his naked arm as punctuation.
Graham stepped closer. He looked confused. "All of my dogs are at the house."
"Well, there was a dog here," Frederick said, feeling a little like a child trying to will an imaginary friend into existence. "A gray one. Huge."
"Then it wasn't one of mine," Graham said.
"Oh, great," said Frederick, mostly to himself, thinking about the painful series of rabies shots. Then again, it didn't even seem like any damage was done. He examined his arm again, smeared with whorls of bloody snow. Nothing.
"Are you hurt?"
"I-I don't know," Frederick said, blinking.
Graham took a step toward him. "Why don't you come back to the house?"
Frederick huffed out a brief, swirling cloud. "You must think I'm a moron," he said. "For all I know, Crawford is there waiting for me."
Graham's expression was patient, not at all telegraphing-as expected-that he, indeed, thought Frederick was a moron. "He's not." Graham took a breath. "Dr. Chilton, Jack broke his ankle. I heard it go. He wanted to keep chasing you but I made him stop. I practically had to drag him out of a gully. I would have been back here sooner but I had to wait for the ambulance."
Relief flooded Frederick's body in a wash from his scalp downward. The spike of adrenaline spooled into a giddy euphoria. He raised watering eyes to the dull, gray sky, then let them fall closed.
"If they bring a team of bloodhounds back here, they'll find your scent," Graham said. "So I suggest you come with me."
Frederick wiped his streaming eyes, ran the back of his hand under his nose. "Why do you care what happens to me? You were the one who called Jack in the first place."
Graham paused, his brow furrowed. "I had a change of heart. At first I thought you'd be safer in prison, but I realized he can get in almost anywhere he wants."
"Lecter," said Frederick.
"Yes," said Graham. "The Chesapeake Ripper."
"Thank God," Frederick said.
"I know it wasn't you," said Graham. "Even though you thought it was me. I don't hold unproductive grudges, Dr. Chilton."
"I do," Frederick said. "I'm going to see that son-of-a-bitch go down."
Graham raised his eyebrows, as if impressed by the sentiment. "I want the same thing you do," he told Frederick, "but don't let Hannibal in your mind. That's why I decided to help you hide." Graham tapped his temple twice with his forefinger. "This is the only place he can't go. Not anymore."
Frederick nodded and sniffed, drawing the back of his hand under his nose. It came away unpleasantly sticky.
"Are you going to come with me?" Graham extended one hand. "Hypothermia will set in soon, if it hasn't already."
"I know," Frederick said. "Once again, I'm not an idiot." He brushed snow from his clothes, trying and failing to hide his sudden exasperation. "I had to know it was safe."
To his surprise, Will Graham smiled. "If you're waiting for safety, Dr. Chilton, you're going to freeze to death."
Frederick clenched his teeth but said nothing.
Graham turned to head back to the cabin, but stopped and looked back. "You should probably leave your coat," he said. "To throw them off."
"Apparently you do want me to freeze to death," said Frederick.
"It won't be long," said Graham. "You didn't get as far as you think you did."
Frederick ground his teeth. "I'm not sure I got anywhere at all."
Graham turned fully around to face him. "Out of the frying pan, into the fire," he said, without a trace of irony. Then he grinned. "You could always leave your pants."
Frederick gave an indignant huff, but peeled off the bloody coat and dropped it where he had lain. Clutching himself, he followed Graham back in the direction of his cabin. He was shivering so hard he could barely see when he reached the front porch, and the exertion melted the ice down the back of his trouser legs, where the biting wind promptly re-froze it to his skin. Graham's dogs spilled out in a warm tide of swishing tails and snuffling noses. They poked their snouts up into his crotch, where his balls were drawn in so tight against the cold that it hurt.
There on the threshold, assaulted by indecorous mutts, Frederick figured that it couldn't get much worse.
As it turned out, it could.