by Jeff Carson
The man picked up the revolver and pointed it at her face.
“Oh, God!” She twisted and grabbed for the handle, and then put her hands up in front of her face and shut her eyes. “Please. Please. Don’t hurt me. What are you doing?”
“You know you killed her, right?”
“What?” she said, still cowering against the door. “What?”
Every muscle in his body tensed as rage overtook him.
“Unzip your coat,” he said, flipping on the cab light.
Her eyes were wild and wide, pupils tiny and mascara ran down her cheeks. She nodded profusely, “Yeah, okay,” she said, fumbling to take off her gloves. At first, she moved quickly to unzip her jacket. Then, she looked up at him as if a sudden brainstorm had given her an idea, and she slowed down, arching her back a little and taking a calming breath. “Yeah. Let’s get comfortable.”
He set his jaw and inhaled deeply to contain his rage. It figures this whore would think if she does a little pickup put-out, I’ll happily punch her ticket out of this, he thought. He kept his aim steady and pulled up on the emergency brake, shifted into neutral, and let up his feet from the clutch and brake.
“Now pull open your jacket with both hands, and pull it down your back, and push out your boobs again.”
She smiled and gave him a wink, and then slowly did as she was told.
He unbuckled his seatbelt and scooted his chair all the way back, watching her closely. She was now sitting with her hands effectively wrapped against her sides, but he would need to make sure she couldn’t fight back, so he put the gun to her head and climbed on top of her, and then put his knees on her arms.
She gave him a smile and closed her eyes, trying to look like she was enjoying it, unconvincingly so.
He dropped the gun on the driver’s side seat and grasped her neck. First, he just gripped her and started squeezing. And then she started to squirm.
There was no preparing for this moment, and her fierce counterattack startled him. She thrashed and twisted underneath him, and he tightened his grip until his muscles shook, and then he gripped harder still.
She sagged down in the seat, like she was trying to escape by sliding underneath his legs, but he just leaned on her harder and a gurgling sound spouted from her lips. Even through the leather gloves, he could feel the pounding of her blood in her neck, and then, after what seemed like an eternity, she went still, and the pounding stopped.
He gripped her for a while longer, knowing she was already dead, but just wanting to make sure. He finally eased his grip, the leather of his gloves peeling off her skin as he pulled away.
He had almost forgotten. With a quick movement, he opened the center console again and pulled out the tube of Ruby Fire lipstick. He removed the cap, carefully twisted the tube’s base to expose the right height of color, and then applied the mark to her forehead. He leaned back and assessed his work. Maybe not exactly like the original, he thought, but close enough.
He wiped a tear from his cheek before it dropped onto the warm lifeless body. It was strange. As the seconds ticked by and he replayed images of the past few minutes, a persisting adrenaline spike spawned an airy sense of wonder. I did it. I strangled her. I killed this pathetic excuse for a human being. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, he thought. Maybe I am out cold, lying on a dead woman in a running vehicle on a deserted road in the middle of the night.
He slowed his breathing and looked around, watching the flying flakes and listening to the windshield wipers squeal behind him. Then he felt the warmth on his knee and jumped over onto the driver’s side. She had pissed herself, and it was all over the seat.
He reached over and pulled on the door handle, and then shoved her out. She ended up hanging out the door with her legs still jammed inside on the floorboard, so he crawled onto the passenger seat, feeling the warm liquid soak through his jeans, and then rolled her out into the deep snow.
For a few seconds he stared, watching the snow cover her body like a fine lace sheet, and he again wondered if this surreal scene was a dream. The bitter-cold wind and his sticky wet jeans reeking of urine convinced him otherwise. It seemed real because it was real.
He climbed back in the driver’s seat and decided that even if it were a dream, the prudent thing would be to dream about getting the hell out of there. So, he turned the truck around and he did just that.
Chapter 2
The anticipation on the pass was electric. If Wolf was not cocooned in his winter duty gear—hat, gloves, fully zipped coat, pants, boots—he was sure his body hair would have been standing on end.
“Waiting on you, Sheriff,” the distant sounding voice crackled through everyone’s radios.
Wolf looked at the other bundled faces and wide eyes of the people around him, and then shifted his gaze up the snow-blanketed highway that bent out of sight behind the pillowed pines. It was the day after a huge dump of snow, and a beautiful morning on a bluebird day, as skiers called it—a cloudless, radiant sky. Despite the crowd surrounding him, Wolf regarded the scene as desolate and peaceful. For the moment.
He turned to look past the congregation of official personnel. A few hundred yards down, a line of vehicles puffed in a motionless line behind a closed orange-striped gate arm. For five minutes now, people had been abandoning their vehicles and huddling on the roadside next to the fresh wall of plowed snow, now they were swiveling their heads and cell phones between the bright mountaintop and the officers, Rocky Points Rescue volunteers, and Colorado Department of Transportation workers milling in the cold shade below. An RKPT-News 8 crew had set up next to the gate, with a camera aimed high up the mountain.
“Stand by!” Wolf shouted, a puff of cloud jetting from his mouth. He thumbed the radio button and brought it to his lips. “All clear.”
The crowd surrounding Wolf seemed to swivel in unison to look up, and he gave a final glance to the line of vehicles down the road. They reacted to the synchronized commotion and stared up. He watched as motorists nearest the front shouted down the line and people began sprinting toward the gate for a better view.
Wolf felt like he had just opened a cage containing a wild beast.
“Fire in the hole,” Bob Duke, longtime director of the resort’s ski patrol, said through the radio.
Even through the tiny speaker, Wolf could hear Bob’s high-pitched excitement, and it coaxed Wolf’s body to tense and tingle. He resigned himself to the moment, and assured himself all responders had taken every precaution so that no one would be in harm’s path. Wolf had taken CDOT’s recommended perimeter around the slide zone and doubled it. He had discussed the terrain above the motorists in detail with the avalanche specialists. There was nothing more to do but…
Two sharp-edged blasts thumped the air, and Wolf looked up.
The officers began whooping as a white cloud began billowing from the bowl high above.
On a normal blast day, when the conditions on the resort’s southernmost bowl were just right to slide, a triggered avalanche would make its way down a third of the mountain, and stop in the relatively flat zone at the bottom of Brecker Bowl along the southern boundary of the resort.
But if snow conditions were just right (or just wrong) and an especially deep layer of powder lay over a weak layer of sugar snow, the slide could ride through the flat zone and spill into the treeless chute that had been gouged out over the millennia by other slides. An especially big avalanche could get as far as the highway. That specific zone was a safe distance up the road, clearly marked by smaller, younger trees and an open glade.
According to Duke’s earlier assessment, backed by over thirty years of experience with the Rocky Points Resort ski patrol, there was a small chance they were going to see a slide reach the road, or even something bigger. The official accumulation from last night’s storm was twenty-seven inches at the peak, and conditions had conspired to prevent CDOT and ski patrol personnel from preemptively blasting the bowl. Topping that, the wind had shifted and c
ome strong out of the north all night, loading at least nine feet of wind-deposited snow underneath a freshly sculpted cornice, all on top of a layer of depth hoar crystals, or sugar snow, resulted from the resort’s dry and sunny conditions over the past month.
For ski conditions on the rest of the mountain, and the skiers who would be enjoying them all day, the new snow was a godsend. But as Wolf watched the white cloud explode from the bowl above, he wondered if this wasn’t something sent from hell.
The officers surrounding Wolf began to shift at the sight of the pyroclastic flow-like explosion traveling down the mountain, and everyone, including Wolf, let out a gasp of amazement.
The billowing mass rumbled, and hundred-year-old trees cracking into millions of pieces inside the torrent were muffled pops.
At the front of the cloud, a white streak shot forward at startling speed, then another, and another, reminding Wolf of streamers coming out of a napalm explosion. They were snow and ice covered rocks ejected at hundreds of miles per hour, and they were a definite surprise to Wolf.
Wolf watched as one of the streamers struck a tree a third of the way up the mountain, wrenching it out of sight in a twist of green branches and a puff of powder.
“Heads up!” Wolf yelled, though certain every spectator had seen the new danger and was acting accordingly.
Wolf looked up, wondering if rocks that had shed their visible ice and rock streamers were headed right for them. He couldn’t see any, so he looked back to the front of the rolling monster.
The mammoth barrage seemed to be gaining speed, which was hard to believe since it was moving so fast and now so low on the mountain. It was going to hit the road with full force, Wolf thought. As quickly as the thought came, the thundering mass shot across the road. Trees cart-wheeled out of the cloud and crashed into the trees on the far side of the road, and the monster just kept going.
“Holy mother of…” Wolf heard Rachette say somewhere nearby.
The trees to the immediate left blocked everyone’s view as the slide reached the flat valley below, but the roar and snapping and cracking was still there. Then the white steam came back into sight, climbing up the other side of the valley, as if it were a huge bucket of water splashing from one side of a tub to the other.
The spectacle was short lived, however, because a cloud of powder was descending on them, traveling down the highway at more than a few over the speed limit.
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