Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  She turned to him quickly. There was something in his voice.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “You know him?”

  “Well, sure,” said the cop. “We used to drink some together. I did a bit of instructing myself a few years back. Didn’t get too friendly with him though. He had one hell of a temper to him when he had a mind. I wondered what he was doing back in town,” he added, and Lee couldn’t help herself. She grabbed his arm in a grip that made a vice seem gentle.

  “You’ve seen him?” she said urgently, and the cop nodded confirmation.

  “Ran into him in the Minute Mart across from the Harbor day before yesterday. Said hey and what was he up to. He said he was staying out past Beaver Creek Road on Highway 129. Got an old hunter’s shack there.”

  “Damn!” said Lee. “I must have just driven past the place on my way in here. Can’t remember seeing any shack.”

  Felix rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Could be the cabin that Lou Pickens owns out that way. He lets it out from time to time. You can’t see it from the road. There’s a lightning blasted pine marks the turnoff from 129.”

  Lee nodded. “I know it.”

  “The cabin’s maybe two hundred yards in from there,” Felix told her. “There’s a dirt track leads in.”

  “Well, that’s just fine,” said Lee slowly. A smile spread across her face but there was no humor in it at all. She turned abruptly and headed for the stairway. Felix hurried after her.

  “You going out there now, Lee?” he asked her. She paused at the top of the stairs. Her gray eyes were the color of steel.

  “Can you think of a better idea, Felix?” she asked him softly.

  “No. No. You want I should come with you?”

  “Not your jurisdiction, Felix. Thanks anyway.”

  Opie stepped forward, looking at her doubtfully. “Maybe you should take some help, Lee,” he said.

  “I don’t think so, Opie,” she replied. Without her realizing it, her right hand dropped to the curved butt of her Blackhawk Magnum.

  THIRTY-TWO

  On Mount Werner, the last ski lifts had closed down for the day. The shuttle buses had brought people back in from the mountain and now the sidewalks on Lincoln Avenue were crowded with people—strolling, shopping, looking for a drink before finding a place to eat or simply rubbernecking in the windows of the shops and restaurants that lined the main street of Steamboat Springs.

  Without fail, they all turned to gape at the sight of Lee’s navy blue Renegade with the blue dome light strobing and the siren letting out a banshee wail as it fishtailed around the right-angle turn from 7th onto the main street.

  Once she had the 4x4 aiming in vaguely the right direction, Lee mashed the gas pedal to the floor and the big six-cylinder engine roared as she left a rooster tail of ice and melting snow in the air behind her.

  Fortunately, traffic had yet to build up. What cars and pickups were on the road pulled over quickly to make a path for the careering sheriff’s car.

  Candy Oresto and Liddy Yale left their counter in the F.M. Light Clothing Emporium and hurried out onto the sidewalk to watch the Jeep hurtle past them. Lee’s car was well-known to the locals.

  “Sheriff Torrens is in one big hurry,” Candy observed. Her friend shifted a slab of bubblegum from one cheek to the other and nodded agreement. She didn’t say anything. Candy seemed to have covered the subject pretty thoroughly, she thought.

  Behind the wheel, Lee steered left-handed while she unhitched the radio mike with her right. She thumbed the talk button.

  “This is Sheriff Torrens, come in,” she said crisply.

  The speaker hissed and Denise’s voice was back on the air. Lee made a mental note that the controller was taking one hell of a long coffee break. She’d have to look into that.

  “Come in, Sheriff,” Denise said. Lee raised the mike to her lips again, sawing violently at the wheel as the tail of the Renegade tried to swap ends with the hood.

  “Denise, you raise Jesse yet?” she asked.

  “No luck, Sheriff,” Denise told her. “He’d left Breckenridge when I rang, and he’s on the road back here. Still out of radio range when I tried ten minutes ago.”

  “Try him again now,” said Lee. “Tell him I’m on my way out to collect Mike Miller. Looks like he’s the man we’ve been looking for.”

  She could hear the excitement in Denise’s voice as the other woman came back on the air. “You serious, Sheriff? You’ve really broken it?” she said.

  “Looks like it, Denise. Tell Jess that this guy has a shack out on 129, past Beaver Creek Road. There’s a turnoff marked by a lightning blasted pine.” She hesitated. “You getting this all, Denise?”

  There was a moment’s silence, then Denise’s voice came back, slightly deliberate now. Lee could almost see her writing the details as she repeated them over the radio link.

  “Lightning … blasted pine … yeah, got it, Sheriff.”

  “Okay, there’s a shack about two hundred yards in from the turnoff. That’s where Miller is and that’s where I’m headed. If Jess wants any further details, tell him to talk to Felix Obermeyer.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.” There was another pause. “Sheriff Torrens?”

  “Yeah, Denise, what is it?” Lee winced as a minibus from one of the resort hotels shoved its nose out of a side street in front of her, then registered the siren and the strobe light and locked its wheels, skidding in the slush and gravel to a stop. She jerked the wheel a little to the right to veer around the eight-seater, then straightened up again. In the process, she missed Denise’s message. She thumbed the mike again.

  “Sorry, Denise. Say what?”

  “I said,” Denise repeated, enunciating very clearly, “are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?”

  “Yeah, Denise, I’m a big girl now. I’ll be just fine,” Lee said, then mentally added, As long as I get there without rear-ending an eighteen-wheeler. The silence over the radio seemed to accuse her of being foolhardy. Maybe she was, she thought, but the hell with it. She thumbed the button again, said briefly, “Sheriff Torrens, out,” and replaced the mike in its bracket.

  Both hands back on the wheel, she took note of her own mental reservation. There was no real need to go careering out there at top speed. Miller was either there or he wasn’t. There was no reason why he might expect her to be on her way to collect him. In fact, the siren might well alert him to her approach.

  She killed the siren and the strobe. Leaning out the driver’s side window, she retrieved the magnetic dome light from its position on the hood of the Renegade. At the same time, she let the pedal up a little and the speed dropped to a more reasonable fifty-five miles an hour.

  With the same thinking in mind, when she reached the blackened, shattered pine tree, she didn’t turn off into the side track there but allowed the Renegade to roll past some fifty yards, easing up on the gas until the car crunched to a stop in the loose gravel on the shoulder of the highway.

  She stepped down from the Jeep, stopped to listen.

  A long way off, she could hear the moan of a train horn as a mile-long freight ground its way through Steamboat, heading for Denver. There was a gentle susurration from the pines around her as the light breeze muttered quietly in the tops. Apart from that, and the occasional cracking sound of hot metal cooling in the Jeep’s engine, there was an uneasy stillness.

  She shrugged to herself. Her imagination was getting out of hand. The stillness wasn’t uneasy, she was. She unsnapped the restraining strap on her open holster and slid the long-barreled Blackhawk out. Flipping the loading gate open, she eased the hammer back a half inch and slowly rotated the cylinder against the light restraint of the ratchet.

  The deliberate click-click-click as the cylinder turned hung in the afternoon air. She checked the big brass cartridge cases in five of the cylinders. The sixth she kept empty as a matter of course. It was only good sense to carry a single-action pistol with an empty chamber under the hammer.

/>   She fished in the breast pocket of her shirt and retrieved the sixth slug she always carried there. She slid it into the waiting chamber and flicked the loading gate closed.

  “Ready for bear,” she muttered to herself, and allowed the .44 to slide back into the leather holster.

  This time she left the restraining strap unclipped.

  She reached into the Renegade, pulled the keys from the ignition and locked the door. Then, dropping the keys into her shirt pocket, she crunched through the gravel back toward the blasted pine.

  Michael Miller paced the bare, board floor of the hunter’s cabin, his boots thudding a hollow rhythm as he went five paces up, five paces back.

  This last one had been too close. He knew that now. He’d taken an unnecessary risk by breaking from his previous pattern. And, he admitted, he’d been careless.

  Just because all the others had gone off without a hitch, he’d assumed that this one would too. He’d gotten cocky. And he’d left the unforeseeable out of the equation. He’d been so busy concentrating on how the sheriff and her slow-thinking deputy would react that he’d neglected to think that maybe one day, one of his victims might take a hand in matters as well.

  That’s the way it had gone today. And he’d damn near got caught.

  He opened the door of the cabin, supporting it against its sagging hinges, and walked out onto the small porch. There was a cardboard case of Bud cans against the wall. He reached in for one, popped the ring pull and drank deeply. His nerves were tightly strung. He could feel it, and he understood that this was a reaction to the close shave he’d had today.

  It had all happened so fast. The sound of the gun still rang in his ears. He hadn’t expected it to be so loud.

  He began pacing again, up and down the porch. The beer tasted sour and he tossed the half-empty can into the pine trees.

  Maybe, he thought, he’d been wrong to come back here. Then he cursed violently, kicking at the small pile of firewood he’d assembled that morning, scattering the split pine logs into the snow. Steamboat owed him! His luck had been right out ever since they’d fired him. Since then, nothing had gone right for him.

  Angrily, he grabbed another can. To hell with it! He had plenty. He could take one mouthful from each one if he wanted to and he’d still have plenty.

  He ripped the top open, drank deeply, then hurled the can into the trees. It bounced off one of the thicker trunks, cascading white foam into the snow.

  “Fuck it!” he yelled, but the sound was strangely dampened by the snow-laden trees that surrounded him. He looked around them. They seemed to bear down on him. The clearing around the old cabin seemed to be growing smaller by the second. He knew it was his nerves playing tricks on him. Knew it was a reaction to the close call he’d had earlier. But the knowledge did nothing to ease the sudden feeling of entrapment.

  The trees hid him from sight, sure. But they also concealed the fact that the woods could be full of cops right now … moving in on him. He shouldn’t have talked to that asshole in the Minute Mart the other night. At the time it seemed unimportant. But the asshole hadn’t mentioned he was a cop these days. Miller had only learned that fact when he’d seen him in uniform the following day. How much had he told him? He tried to remember. He seemed to recall that he’d mentioned this cabin.

  Jesus! What could have possessed him? He’d stayed in town for the first few days. Then, as he was constantly running into people who might recognize him, he’d moved out here. So why the fuck had he blurted it out to a cop of all people! But then, he didn’t know that he was a cop. And he sure as hell didn’t foresee being eyeballed by one of his victims.

  His mouth was dry. His heart was still pumping. He grabbed another can, ripped it open, drank deeply, then hurled it into the trees after the other two.

  “Fuck it!” he yelled to nobody. “You stay out there! You stay away!”

  There was no answer from the pines. He grabbed another can. This time he didn’t bother opening it. He hurled the full can of Bud into the trees, then grabbed another and sent that spinning after the others. He dived both hands into the carton, scrabbling among the cans that were now rolling loosely around. Two more went sailing off into the bushes. So what? He had plenty!

  He threw an eighth can, stumbling with the effort and falling in the snow in front of the porch. He pulled himself to his feet, yelling incoherently at the trees around him.

  “I see you! I know you’re there!” he yelled, his voice cracking into an impossibly high register and then he knew he had to get out of here, had to break out of the cordon of trees and cops that had surrounded him.

  Staggering, he turned and blundered through the knee-deep snow to the rear of the cabin.

  Fifty yards from the cabin, Lee heard the first of the salvo of beer cans come hurtling through the pines. Instantly, she froze. She heard a voice yelling, although it was difficult to make out exactly what it was saying, and then more cans crashed through the pine branches. One of them landed not twenty yards from where she stood, behind one of the larger trees.

  She could catch glimpses of the cabin from where she stood, and an occasional flash of movement as Miller staggered and fell and hurled cans at the woods around him.

  She didn’t need to make out the words to know that he sounded A-1 strung out. She waited where she was for something to develop. Now that she knew Miller was there-at least, she assumed it was Miller—she was in no hurry to be seen. She didn’t think he’d spotted her so far but it didn’t make any sense to let him get a look at her before she was ready.

  The .44 had come out of its holster almost of its own volition. She couldn’t remember drawing it but now its familiar shape and comforting weight were there, ready in her right hand. Her thumb coiled around the hammer spur but, for the moment, she left the gun uncocked. In this still air, you could never be sure how far the slightest sound might carry, and the double snick of a gun being cocked was pretty well unmistakable.

  More shouting. More cans crashing and spinning through the trees.

  Then she heard the words, “I see you! I know you’re there!” from the deranged man at the cabin. She started forward, convinced for a second that, somehow, he had actually seen her. Then common sense prevailed and she froze in her tracks. There was no way he could have seen her. Maybe he suspected the presence of someone and was bluffing. Or maybe he was just plain crazy as a June bug.

  Then she heard another sound, a familiar sound, from a little farther away and suddenly she was running.

  THIRTY-THREE

  She broke clear of the trees fringing the cabin and stopped, for a moment uncertain of her next move. There was nobody in sight. Then she heard the sound again, realized it was coming from behind the cabin.

  It was the brief coughing explosion of a two-stroke motor as someone yanked on the starter cord. The cough now swelled into a continuous roar, revved three times, then settled.

  It could have been a generator. Or a chain saw. But she knew it wasn’t either of those things.

  It was a snowmobile starting up.

  Even as she thought it, the black Polaris broke from behind the cabin with a figure hunched over the handlebars, driving the little snow bike through the deep drifts and toward the far edge of the clearing.

  A tail of thrown snow hung in the air behind the drive track as Miller gunned the engine. He saw her and yelled something she couldn’t make out above the noise of the engine.

  She threw up the Blackhawk at arm’s length, her thumb snagging the hammer back to full cock, called a warning.

  “Miller! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  She never knew if he heard her or not, and it was that uncertainty that made her hesitate a fraction of a second too long. She wasn’t absolutely positive that this was her man. The hunched figure was sitting just above the thick blade of her foresight as she sighted, both eyes open. Then, at the last moment, she raised the sight and fired above him, the heavy Magnum load kicking her arm up to an almost vertical pos
ition. Her thumb worked the hammer again on the way back down. There was an explosion of snow and wood splinters in the pines eight feet above Miller’s head, then he kicked the little snowmobile into a skidding turn and disappeared from sight among the trees.

  “Shit!” said Lee, cursing herself for firing a warning shot. She blundered awkwardly through the snow to the edge of the trees.

  There was a trail inside the tree line, winding down to the right, following the slope of the land. She ran a few yards farther, the sound of the engine fading among the trees, then came to a clear stretch.

  Below her, down a steep, uneven slope, the trail doubled back, emerging maybe two hundred yards away. She’d never run the distance in the thick snow before the Polaris made it back to the point below her. She thought of the carbine she’d left in the gun rack in the Renegade, cursed herself for not bringing it.

  The buzz of the two-stroke was getting louder now and she realized that Miller had made the turn and was heading back to the point below her. Thick scrubby bushes and deep snow separated the two sections of the trail, with an occasional full-grown pine. Beyond that, she could see what was obviously the snow-covered surface of a frozen lake. The vegetation stopped where the trail emerged from the trees and the smooth, even snow stretched away for at least a mile. At the far bank, there were more trees and she knew if Miller got that far, she’d never see him again.

  She caught an occasional glimpse of the black Polaris as he threaded his way back down the trail. She guessed he’d be directly below her in a few minutes.

  Lee looked around, saw what she wanted in a fallen pine—a massive mound in the snow. Climbing over it, she checked she had a clear view of the trail below, and sat back, leaning her shoulders and back against the snow-covered wood. She stretched her left leg out in the snow, bent her right knee and rested her forearm on it. Now, shoulders and back supported by the tree trunk, hand supported by her bent right knee, she had a steady platform for shooting.