Disclaimer: Disney owns these characters. I'm just messin' with 'em.
The small wood cabin stood alone at the top of the rutted dirt road, resting on half-acre or so of cleared land, surrounded by thick woods. The remnants of what once may have been a stable squatted at the edge of the property. The road itself was little more than a trail, trees crowded against its shoulders, low-hanging branches threatening the finish on any car that dared navigate it.
For most of the last several decades, the cabin had sat unoccupied, except for the occasional hikers who wandered too far from the established trails, or teenagers looking for a place to get high and hook up. It had once been a trading post, a place where ice harvesters and reindeer herders stocked up on supplies during their travels. But the main roads had bypassed it more than fifty years ago, and it had fallen into disuse. The nearest town was five miles away by car, but less than half that if one was willing take on a steep hike through the dense forest.
There was one person taking that challenge tonight.
In the forest a half-mile behind the cabin, Anna Aarndahl splashed through a shallow creek, hissing as the icy water soaked through her cargo pants. Normally she would have just hurdled the creek, but tonight, with her boots slipping over the wet leaves and pine needles, such a jump would most likely end with a face-plant in the mud.
Brown mud splattered her pants legs as she clambered up the creek bank, grabbing onto a branch for support. She leaned against the tree to catch her breath. A few sweaty strands of copper-colored hair had escaped her braids to cling to her cheeks, and Anna pushed them behind her ears.
Anna thought she was in good shape, but her pinched shoulders and aching quads screamed otherwise. Apparently her workout routine fell a bit short in preparing her to navigate the wooded mountainsides outside Arendelle City in the middle of the night.
I should really increase my fee for this one. It's a helluva hike out here, and I swear it's uphill both ways.
At least she didn't get lost this time. Who knew that topographic navigation would be such a challenge? And she'd finally found a use for that compass app on her smartphone.
Anna pulled a water bottle from the mesh pouch at the side of her pack and took several large gulps. She could think of several reasons for upping her daily fee for this job, and some were actually related to the job. The cost of gas to drive out this far. New boots to replace the ones that had made this trek several times already.
Yes, legitimate reasons that had nothing to do with a cheating boyfriend, a blown security deposit, and several months' rent on storage space that she no longer needed.
She hadn't even been all the way moved out.
He has to be the dumbest thing I've ever done. And that was saying something.
Focus, Anna. Cabin. Job. She put her water bottle away, adjusted her pack and set off again, slapping at a mosquito that buzzed around her ear.
Yep, she was definitely increasing her daily fee for this job.
Despite her repeated trips, the punishing trek hadn't gotten much easier. Tonight's full moon helped, but upped the creepiness factor, casting eerie shadows in the spaces between the trees. The only sounds she heard were her own breathing and the rustling movements of unseen wildlife. Rabbits, squirrels and deer were still plentiful this far out of the city, and a distant howl reminded Anna that wolves still roamed the forests of Arendelle.
Anna slowed as she approached the edge of the woods behind the cabin. When it came to tracking and tailing and watching people and their activities, she had learned from painful experience that being deliberate and systematic was usually the best approach.
You just always had to be ready to improvise.
She figured she could run pretty fast if she needed to, but just in case, she took a minute to chamber a round in her 9mm and put the safety on. The touch of the cool metal settled her nerves. She had never fired the Walther anywhere but at the practice range, but the weight of it against her hip was reassuring. You never really needed a gun until you really needed a gun.
Crouching next to a tree, Anna cocked her head and listened for a few minutes. The only sounds were those that belonged – the breeze blowing through the trees, the chirp of insects, and the movements of varmints in the underbrush.
Satisfied that she was the only human present for the time being, Anna reached into her pack and pulled out her digital SLR camera. She adjusted the settings, attached a telephoto lens and brought the camera to her eye, making a slow sweep across the property. Then she flipped down the lens' attached tripod, steadying it on the ground, and took several shots of the back of the cabin.
Squatting back on her heels, she studied the cabin. When she accepted this job from an anonymous client, she figured she'd be spying on a love affair. That impression seemed to be confirmed the first evening she went to the cabin. A nondescript car arrived, and a large, attractive blond man got out with an even more attractive, even more blonde woman, and they disappeared inside for a few hours.
But a couple of things niggled at Anna about that scenario. For one, the pair didn't act like lovers. She'd never seen them kiss, or hold hands, or even touch at all. No shared smiles or easy conversation. Maybe they were playing it cool, but why? No need for that out here. They could have freaky sex on the porch and only the wildlife would see them. If they were screwing, it seemed to be strictly business.
And if it was strictly business, why come all the way out here? This wasn't an easy place to get to, even by road, and there were plenty of places in the city to meet for a quick lay, wasn't that what pay-by-hour rooms were for? Unless this place was a lot nicer on the inside than the outside, a no-tell motel probably had better amenities.
Or, Anna thought sourly, you can always take her to your apartment and fuck her in the bed you share with your girlfriend.
God, she hated men. Well, no, not really, but she seemed to have the world's worst judgment when it came to picking them. Or maybe they were all impossible.
Or maybe it's just me who's impossible.
Anna shook her head and brought her attention back to the cabin. She'd made some discreet inquiries about the owner and found him legit. He'd inherited the cabin over a decade ago and had never been able to do anything with it. He was probably happy as hell that he had been able to get someone to sign a full year lease on the dump, with all the rent paid up front, in cash.
The renter was another story. After several days of digging, she had yet to pin that one down. Dead ends on every path.
There was enough weird about this whole setup that Anna's natural curiosity had kicked into high gear. She wanted to get inside. She wanted to figure this place out.
Her problem right now was that she couldn't tell if anyone was in the cabin. She couldn't see a light on, but that didn't mean that there wasn't an interior room that she couldn't see from out here. She needed to check the front of the house to see if there might be a car parked there. The traffic had been pretty sparse during her previous trips out here. No joggers or hikers, and no bike or motorcycle riders. The couple of cars that had come up the dirt road had all turned around, obviously lost. All but the one with the woman and the man, who stayed to get to up to…whatever.
Anna put the camera away and slung her pack onto her shoulder. She skirted quietly along the edge of the trees, taking care to stay back in the shadows. No cars at the front of the cabin, and no lights inside. Fishing in her pack, she pulled out a lock pick set in a zippered pouch. Feeling around it, her experienced fingers quickly located the tools she wanted.
Anna had already checked out the locks during one of her daylight trips, using her telephoto lens as a spotting scope. That had really piqued her curiosity. Both the front and back doors had high-quality deadbolts. Sash locks on all the windows. All the hardware was shiny and new. All on a piece-of-crap rental in the middle of nowhere.
To top it all off, the cabin also had a security system, which came as both a thrill and an unpleasant surprise.
If she were really smart, Anna thought, she would pack up her felonious tools, head home, and report failure to her client. Because as soon as she got the door open, she would be guilty of breaking and entering. If caught this time, she would be dealt with a bit more harshly than she had been as a teenager.
But she was curious. And stubborn. And prided herself on doing the job right. Her anonymous client was paying her a lot, and she wanted to deliver. Word of mouth went a long way in her business, and she could always use a couple of deep-pocketed clients.
And she was unlikely to get caught.
Besides, when's the last time I did the smart thing?
Getting into the house wouldn't be too hard, especially since Anna already had the code for the alarm. Well, at least she was pretty sure she did. The keypad for the security system was mounted right inside the back door. Once she had confirmed that the house was indeed wired, she had beaten the couple out to the cabin one evening and positioned herself as close to the back door as she could without being seen. Her nifty new sweeper had plucked the electronic code right out of the air as the man punched it in.
That gadget was definitely worth the time and money she had put into it. It had taken some playing around with the decryption coding to make sure she matched the keypunches correctly, but Anna figured she'd get at least three tries to disarm the system.
And if she screwed it up, well, she could run really fast if she needed to.
Anna held the tools in her mouth while she pulled on a pair of latex gloves with textured fingertips – her hands were already sweating and she didn't need to drop the pick tools in the mud. And leaving fingerprints behind would be a bad idea.
The breeze had moved the scattered clouds to partially cover the moon, and Anna took advantage of the lower light to slide out of the tree line and make it quietly to the back door. She slipped off her muddy boots, dropping them on the scraggly grass next to the back porch. It wouldn't do to announce her presence by leaving dirty boot prints all over the inside of the cabin. A good PI stayed as invisible as possible.
She took out a thin flashlight, holding it between her teeth while she inserted the tension wrench and pick into the door lock. Her cousin Eugene swore by pick guns, but Anna had found that her deft touch with the tools was quicker. And she didn't leave tell-tale scratch marks all over the lock.
Applying a bit of torque to the tension wrench, she began to feel her way along with the pick, her fingers sensitive to the dancing of the pins, the subtle descent of the tension wrench. A few seconds later there was a quiet snick, and she felt the bolt slide back.
A pick gun is faster, my ass. Eugene can bite me.
Anna eased the door open and slipped inside.
The alarm panel's beep broke the silence, its LED casting a rhythmic red pulse across the dark hallway. She looked at the backlit keypad for a moment, biting her lip, then took a deep breath and punched in a six-digit code. The panel beeped again, louder than she expected, making her jump, but the LED turned green and Anna exhaled in relief.
"Yes!" she hissed quietly, giving herself a mental fist bump. She stuffed the pick tools into her cargo pocket and closed the door, her excitement at her success making her forget that she was now officially a grown-up criminal, and a felon to boot.
Anna wasn't the only one in the woods surrounding the cabin that night. On the side of the house farthest from where Anna had come through the forest, Fritz Schlager pulled his rifle back, and the red dot of the weapon's laser scope disappeared from between the young woman's unsuspecting shoulder blades as she slipped through the back door of the cabin.
Schlager, a powerfully built man with thick muttonchop whiskers, didn't know who the woman was, and didn't know what she was doing there. He hadn't even seen her until she made her break from the tree line. He guessed the wind had covered the sounds of her movement.
He shifted in his firing position next to a stump and checked his watch. The targets would be arriving soon, but he didn't know how the red-haired woman in the cabin fit into the plan. She wasn't one of his targets, and she obviously wasn't with the police; police officers didn't sneak through the forest in the middle of the night, or pick locks to break into people's houses. Cops rolled up with lights and sirens and massive shows of force.
But since his boss had not told him beforehand that there would be a third person, the woman was not part of the plan. She was a wildcard. The question now was how to deal with her.
He shifted again and worked out a kink in his neck. He'd been out here since dusk, taking time to plot out his firing position and make his escape plan. But he was a patient man, able to tolerate lengthy waits without losing his vigilance. Waiting to take life had a way of keeping one alert. Killing wasn't something his employer frequently required of him, but he had done it often enough to appreciate that being so close to death made him feel that much more alive.
His hand ran up along the barrel of his rifle, checking the security of the suppressor at the muzzle. It was one of the better suppressors he'd used, affecting neither the balance of the weapon nor the velocity of the round. The velocity was the most important – one or both of his targets could be wearing vests, but his jacketed rounds should take care of that possibility. More velocity also ensured more damage to the body, thus increasing the probability of a kill.
Schlager was confident he could take down a bull reindeer with his rounds.
His firing position was only about forty yards from the house, just inside the tree line, close enough that with the moonlight, he didn't really need the expensive scope. He was tempted to remove it just to test his skill, but smooth completion of the job was his boss's priority. Despite the leaves and branches, he had a clear field of fire – after all, a bullet only needed an inch of space to do its job. He'd been told that the targets would enter the cabin through the back door, but they would never make it that far.
Making a kill out here was almost too easy. The isolation, the distances between dwellings, the cover of the forest – all of it made for a simple shoot-and-scoot scenario. Unlike the city, where everything was complicated by buildings and crowds, where it was more difficult to find a place to set up a shot and get away cleanly, and both cops and potential witnesses could be only yards away. Out here, whatever target he put the red dot on would go down with one shot, and he would be gone as soon the bodies hit the ground.
His escape route through the woods would bring him to an abandoned barn where he had stashed a car. A few hours after the job was done, he would be back in the city, the car in a chop shop, and his weapon at the bottom of the fjord.
Schlager's eyes flicked back to the cabin, where the red-haired woman was still inside. He decided that if she stayed inside when the shooting started, then he would go with his original plan and escape through the woods. If she came outside or otherwise got in the way…well, ammunition was cheap and therefore, so were humans. The only difference would be that there would be three bodies rather than two.
A/N: I'm going to try to keep up with a weekly posting schedule. I have a 5-chapter cushion at this point, but the World Cup is proving to be a distraction.
Hope you enjoy! If you like it, hit the review box! If you don't like it, hit the review box and let me know why. I'm always up for some constructive feedback.