Both pulled off their goggles.
“Nice, Kerri, nice. Not since you were a kid, huh?”
Kerri modestly shrugged. “We did it more than once; I used to love it.”
“I can tell. Ready for a hot buttered rum?”
Kerri thought about it, adrenaline still pumping through her from the run. “That does sound pretty tempting. But I kind of feel like another run at the mountain. And once we’re by the fire, all cozy and cuddly…”
“Yeah, that sounds nice. All right, let’s go one more.”
“Hey, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You don’t—? No, Harden, I’m not gonna drag you around for the rest of our marriage.”
“I’m not saying that you’re—”
“Go have a hot buttered rum in the lodge; I’ll go back up and meet you in about twenty.”
Harden scratched his chin, but she said, “What, don’t you think I can handle it?”
“Of course you can, Kerri, but, y’know, it’s like diving—the buddy system.”
Kerri chuckled, “Okay, buddy, you go have a hot buttered rum, and you’ll buy me one when I get back.” With that, she shook her head and glided toward the ski lift.
Kerri never could get used to riding the ski lift up the slope. No seatbelt held her in place, hundreds of feet in spots, gaping beneath her, skiers small and colorful as they sped down the mountain.
I wish there were some safer way up the hill, she thought every time she had to make that treacherous ascent. A gust of wind blew across the side of the mountain, the ski lift rocking beneath her, hands gripping the steel rods for dear life.
Gotta be careful, Kerri reminded herself. Can’t lose it all now, when I’ve got everything in the world spread out in front of me.
But Kerri couldn’t ignore the irony of it—the inherent danger of rising above, of living an elevated, rarified life. And she knew this was only one of them, even perhaps the most minor, even if it was the most vibrant illustration of what was happening on every level of her life.
Poor Mark’s fame drove him to his excesses—Kerri had to recall—his addictions, and they wound up driving him over a cliff and to his death; Carl Huntington suffered a similar fate for similar reasons.
Kerri slipped off the lift and glided into place in line. She waited for the next few skiers to start their run, looking around at the crowd, a plethora of brightly colored outfits. For some reason, Kerri’s attention was drawn to two men on a ski lift approaching the top of the mountain. She seemed humorless, staring straight at Kerri with flat frowns and mirrored goggles.
Probably just recognize me, like Harden might say. Gotta let go of all that crap. Now that I’m off that lift, I’m as safe as anybody on this mountain.
Kerri waited for the skier in front of her to get a good distance ahead, and it was finally Kerri’s turn for her final run of the day.
The run started very smoothly, Kerri picking up speed fast as she began her descent. She weaved left and right, careful not to pick up too much speed too quickly. That mistake had cost better skier than her their lives, and Kerri cherished her own more than ever before.
Her legs were still strong, tucking her poles under her arms as Harden had. She veered right, wider than she had before, following it with a wider left, which put her dangerously close to a grove of pine trees.
Kerri leaned to swerve away from the trees, but her speed picked up a little too much and the pines got a bit too close on her left. But as worrisome as that was, what struck Kerri with confusion and fear was the low-hanging branch of a pine tree, which broke in half and fell to the snow a few yards in front of her. She passed it quickly, but the image stayed with her as she raced down that hill.
How did that branch just break on its own?
There was a large boulder protruding up out of the snow, about a hundred feet in front of Kerri and getting bigger fast. And though she was looking to make sure she didn’t hit it, she couldn’t help but notice two sharp strikes of the boulder—chips of rock jumping up from nick marks which seemed to appear out of nowhere.
The branch, the rock? Is somebody shooting a gun at me?
But Kerri didn’t dare stop to turn, knowing it was her downward momentum which was the only thing keeping her alive. She couldn’t forgo the lifesaving advantage of being a fast-moving target. In fact, her only real chance was to go even faster.
Who is it? Big Pharma? That damn cabal? What the hell does Harden really know anyway?
But there was no time to think about it. She had to keep weaving, but in an irregular pattern so the gunmen couldn’t predict where she’d be from moment to moment. Not only was she going to have to out-ski them, she’d have to out-think them too.
As usual, she couldn’t help but think, perhaps for the last time.
Kerri sped faster but also weaved more chaotically, convinced this dangerous and difficult combination was her only key to survival until she could get down that hill. Her knees trembled, weight leaning hazardously to one side, gravity’s invisible fingers reaching up to pull her down to her death. If she fell, she’d never have the time get up and start skiing again before the gunmen reached her and finished her off.
The lodge got bigger as she raced toward the bottom of the hill, carving a straight trench through the snow toward the crowd. Kerri was afraid to stop, and soon enough she felt unable to. The shocked and frightened faces of the crowd turned to her, mouths open, hands outstretched.
A collision was inevitable and everybody involved seemed to know it.
Chapter 14
Kerri hit the crowd with a burst of screams, her weight and remaining momentum knocking several innocent onlookers back off their feet. Legs flew up in a tangle of skis and boots, Kerri rolling to a stop.
She scrambled to her feet and looked around in a panic, eyes locked on the slope but unable to find any sign of her two mirrored-goggled pursuers.
“Hey,” one guy asked Kerri, “what’s the matter with you? What’s going on?”
“Um, I-I…”
“Lady, are you drunk?”
“No, I…”
“She’s stoned, obviously.”
“Hey, isn’t this that actress, from Turnstiles?”
“Excuse me,” Kerri said, pushing away from the crowd as they laughed and shook their heads. “Thanks, but I’ve really gotta go.”
“What a nut,” one person said, others chuckling before the crowd dispersed behind Kerri.
Zurich’s Kriminalpolizei, the Swiss criminal police, were ready to hear Kerri’s story, but the tall, blond investigating officer, Jan Figl, leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers in front of his bony frown. His little office was cluttered with spiral binders, paperwork on the desk, and family photos on the walls.
“Gunshots,” Officer Figl said.
“That’s right,” Kerri said, her hand in Harden’s.
“With silencers,” Figl went on.
“They would have to be,” Kerri said. “I mean, nobody heard anything. And there wasn’t an avalanche, right?”
“Precisely.” the officer asked Harden, “What do you know of it?”
“I know what my wife tells me, and I believe she’s telling the truth.”
Figl looked from Kerri to Harden and then back again, sighing through his long, bony fingers.
“And then these gunmen just disappeared?”
Kerri could sense her impatience grow with her outrage, struggling to use some of that newfound discipline to manipulate the officer instead of being manipulated by him.
And reading his wife’s upset, Harden explained to the officer, “It really wouldn’t have been that hard for two skiers to just fade to each side, disappear into the crowd.”
“But for nobody else to see them shooting?”
Kerri said too quickly, “Who’d be looking for such a thing? People skiing face forward, so the most anybody would have seen of them would have been their backs anyw
ay. But again, who was paying any notice?”
“That’s true,” Figl said, standing up. “You two have a very…troubled past, do you not? Murder conspiracies, a career in ruin. A person in Miss Abernathy’s position—”
“Missus Steele,” Kerri corrected with her hand and Harden’s clasping even tighter.
Figl nodded with a slow blink before correcting himself with, “A person in Mrs. Steele’s position might find it advantageous to drum up a little sympathy, to be seen as a victim instead of a villain.”
Kerri said, “You’re calling me a liar?”
“I’m calling you a storyteller,” Figl said, “and I doubt you could contradict me. So perhaps you’re simply…relying on your natural abilities. And that story includes perpetrators who cannot possibly be found or proven not to exist, gunshots that conveniently disappeared into the woods or bounced off rocks.”
“You can search the trees in that area,” Kerri said.
“And that would be searching for a needle in a haystack, as you Americans say.” After a polite pause, he added, “If I thought there was any needle there at all.”
Kerri asked him, “You think this is a publicity stunt?”
“I’m afraid I do, Mrs. Steele.”
“So you’re going to do nothing,” Harden presumed.
“Quite so,” Figl said. “I will not share this with the news media, and I won’t charge you with filing a false police report. In the meantime, I hope not to see you again.”
Kerri looked around Figl’s little office. “It’s not the most pleasant of circumstances.”
“Not under any circumstances,” Figl said in a voice both low and sharp.
The same independent panel show was taking a keen interest in Kerri’s exploits, and they took endless joy in replaying and then discussing the phone video of Kerri crashing into the crowd of skiers outside the lodge on that ill-fated ski trip. Watching it replay, Kerri had to admit that she looked ridiculous: crashing into a crowd, looking around in a panic, and then running or muttering like a nutcase.
But what bothered her a lot more was the conversation between the little blond woman she knew only as Jen by the references of the other two—African American Albert and sweating Stewart.
“I mean, c’mon,” Jen said, “Steele was obviously dazed and confused. I mean, if she wasn’t drunk or stoned, you gotta wonder if she doesn’t have some kind of mental problem.”
“Sources with the Swiss Police are leaking that she claims to have been chased down the mountain by gunmen,” Albert said. “Honestly.”
Stewart nodded, thinning brown hair long and straight. “You look back now at the ranting about Big Pharma. Those were never sensible allegations, and in retrospect they seem like the rantings of a paranoid, if not a drunk or an out-and-out lunatic.”
“Okay,” Albert said, “let’s be fair, okay? Relax. Lunatic isn’t a word we should just scoff at, all right? People suffer terribly from mental diseases of all sorts.”
“Yeah, there’s also a question of those murder allegations,” Jen said.
“No official allegations have been officially recorded,” Stewart said.
Jen held up her little, white finger. “Not officially, but everybody’s talking about it, and it won’t be long until there are official charges, believe me. A woman with a mind like that; she could easily be a serial killer.”
“Think about her history,” Stewart said. “She’s got a history of b-movie roles, right? Then she marries Mark McCall, and his career goes up while hers takes a dive. And then something in her snaps—something in her mind. She kills her husband and convinces herself it’s part of some plot, then that she’s a victim of it too—some crazy conspiracy—murderers around every corner. I hear somebody said that she was running through a mall just a few months ago.”
Jen nodded. “Then she burns her own set; maybe she was the one who killed Carl Harrington.”
“It’s possible,” the sweaty pundit said. “She’d have his trust, access to his house; she could have sneaked in once he was out and then jammed those pills down his throat.”
Jen said, “Right, and then she shows up the next day and is totally surprised. But I don’t buy the theory that she’s some split-personality without any real personal awareness. I think she’s just some spoiled woman raised on horror movies and decided to use them in her favor, to commit several murders and a litany of other crimes and get away with it.”
The three nodded, though Albert said, “Of course, we’re not reporting this as having actually happened, it’s just…conjecture.”
“Right,” Jen said, “just conjecture, that’s all. We’re not saying it’s true. But we can’t say with any certainty that it’s not true either.”
Kerri sighed and dropped the phone down onto the bed, then lay back, arms splayed. She looked and felt like Jesus crucified.
Chapter 15
Kerri and Harden were on his private jet, heading east toward London on a stretch across the Atlantic Ocean, a glowing moon and a smattering of stars scarring the inky dark of the endless sky.
But Kerri couldn’t enjoy the beautiful view, her loving company, her new and fabulous wealth. And Harden knew she was troubled—the bond of their sympathy, their empathy, was that strong. He smiled, but it failed to catch on.
“Don’t worry about it, Kerri.”
“About which part of it?”
“About any of it.”
“Harden, I know I was being shot at!”
“And I don’t doubt it.”
Kerri was almost stumped into silence by his self-possessed demeanor. “Then that means somebody still wants to kill me, Harden—maybe you too!”
Harden sighed. “It’s not any billionaire cabal, I can tell you that.”
“How? How can you be so certain? I mean, surely they could have known we were there; Switzerland isn’t far from Germany; Zurich is even a German-speaking canton! And you said those bankers were all German—”
“I didn’t say they all were, Kerri; some are, I believe. But again, imagining that there could be such a cabal, and that they got together with the notion of shutting down your movie to protect their sacrosanct practices—”
“Don’t make fun of me, Harden.”
“I’m not, Ker, really I’m not. But your movie’s already shut down, and they’ve got to know that nobody else is going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. So why would they risk undoing their whole goal, which was to remain secret, just to engage in an international murder plot which is no longer necessary? They’ve got what they want, in your scenario. They wouldn’t have sent gunmen down the slope of a mountain.”
Kerri thought about it, and she couldn’t disagree. But her list was a long one, and there were other good suspects. “Big Pharma then. They’d have the reach, the resources—”
“But again, you’re talking about a…a star chamber of elitists, perhaps the most powerful people in the world. There’s nothing we can do against them.”
“You can,” Kerri said, “you can do anything! Call your mafia guy—have him pull some strings.”
“Don Paulie Santori?”
“Sure, I know what he’s willing to do for you.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly true.”
“But didn’t you reveal that his thugs were betraying him, that they stole the money you tried to pay him? That’s you saving his ass.”
“I wouldn’t put it to him that way.”
“Put it to him any way you like.”
“Ker, Don Paulie isn’t a guy you wanna ask too may favors of, right? I cost him too good men, after all.”
“They came at us, and stole his money!”
“Even so.” Harden gave it some thought. “And if what you’re suggesting is true—this Big Pharma conclave—Don Paulie wouldn’t have much pull. And I don’t feel like recruiting his family in a bloodbath war of assassination against every pharmaceutical CEO in America.”
“Well no, Harden, of course not; I’m not sugg
esting that.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
Kerri’s head began to hurt and she pressed her hand to her forehead. “I-I just don’t know what I’m suggesting, Harden. But I know someone was trying to kill me! And it was after the movie shut down, so that doesn’t have anything to do with it. Now you’re saying if Big Pharma really is trying to kill me, that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we just have to sit there and wait to be killed?”
Harden scratched his chin. “There could be one thing you could do.”
Kerri gave it some thought, but it didn’t take her long to come to the obvious conclusion. “Oh, c’mon, not the billboards—”
“It’s your theory, Kerri. And if you’re right, what other reason would they have to be hounding you?”
“But that means I should ramp things up, not back down!”
“Maybe just change your tactic.”
Despite Kerri’s reflection, there was nothing obvious about that inference. “Like what?”
“Well look, you’ve done the billboards and you’ve made your point; you’ve certainly made your point with them. So if you take them down, it’ll feel to them like a victory, they’ll back down. But you remember when we talked about what you might want to do with your future, now that the movies aren’t such an option?”
Kerri nodded, needing to say nothing.
“Maybe we set up some kind of corporation of our own, including a private charity, that promotes holistic treatments, non-pharmaceutical, healthier, alternative treatments for depression and things that shouldn’t necessarily require pharmaceuticals—things like that.”
“You’d back that?”
“Sure I would. I’d back you on anything, Kerri, you know that. You’d have to do some fundraising though, get out there and mingle, strut your stuff.”
“I think I might still be able to do that.”
Billionaire Bash: The Complete Steele Series Page 15