The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  Clay continued to feed wood to the fire and the snow continued to melt, including the exhaust hole he’d made. By now it was more than a foot in diameter. At this rate, the entire left side of the plane would be wide open to the elements. The right side would also turn into a gaping hole. Clay figured when he was finished with everything that he could pile the snow back up on the outside to keep the wind out.

  After an hour the dead passengers were complete exposed. Both sides of the plane were wide open again as the snow melted. One by one Clay unbuckled them and dragged their bodies out of the plane and laid them up near the crumpled nose of the plane.

  The last body to be removed was the owner of the leather bag full of cocaine. Clay pulled it through the opening and laid it just outside the plane. “I’m going to need some help dragging him and his bag away from the plane,” Clay told Bonnie. “We need to get him and his coke far enough away so that anyone who shows up looking for him won’t know he was ever on this plane.”

  “Which direction do you want to take him?” Bonnie said, grabbing the man’s ankles.

  “The wings are back behind us,” Clay said. “Someone might want to look back there. I say we drag him off to the left of the plane at least a hundred yards. We’ll cover him with branches and snow and hope no one looks in that direction.”

  Clay grabbed under the man’s armpits, lifted and began walking backwards as Bonnie held onto the legs. After only a few yards, Bonnie dropped her end of the body and began breathing heavily. “Wouldn’t it be easier to drag him?” Bonnie said.

  “Not unless we had some sort of sled,” Clay said. “Otherwise his feet would get bogged down in all this snow.” He looked around him but couldn’t see anything that could serve as a sled. “We’ll just have to keep going like we are. It may take a while, but it may be worth it in the end.”

  Bonnie picked up the man’s ankles again and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  They stopped every fifty feet or so to rest but within twenty minutes Clay figured that they were far enough from the plane and announced, “This is good enough.”

  Bonnie dropped the ankles again and breathed deeply several times. Clay looked at her. “Why don’t you start clearing away the snow and I’ll round up some branches?” he said.

  Bonnie bent down and began brushing snow out of a two foot by six foot swatch. Clay found several pine trees with branches that reached to the forest floor and reached into the interior of the tree to snap off some of the smaller branches. He didn’t want to break them off out where it would show. He visited several trees to get interior branches and carried his haul back over to where Bonnie was still clearing snow away. Clay dropped the branches at his feet and helped Bonnie with the last of the snow clearing. He gave them both time to catch their breath before gesturing at the body and asking Bonnie if she was ready.

  “Let’s do it,” Bonnie said, grabbing the ankles for the last time.

  Clay grabbed under the man’s armpits and together he and Bonnie laid him onto the cleared spot. Clay picked up the branches and carefully laid them on top of the body, one at a time. When he had just one branch left, he began scooping snow on top of the branches. Bonnie joined in and soon the cleared snow was all put back on the pile. She looked at the last branch and said, “Did you forget that one?”

  “No,” Clay said. “I’ll use that one to sweep this area and cover our tracks on the way back. Hopefully, between this and the wind, I’m hoping it’ll look like no one’s been here.” The two of them walked back toward the plane. When they got back inside Clay said, “Try to keep this fire going until I get back.”

  “Where are you going?” Bonnie said.

  Clay grabbed the leather bag of cocaine and said, “We forgot this,” he said. “I have to get rid of it.”

  “You’re not going back to where we covered the body are you?” she said.

  “No,” Clay said. “I’ll take it in another direction and stash it out of sight somewhere.”

  “Please hurry,” Bonnie said. “This place is giving me the Willies and those five bodies outside aren’t helping things any.”

  Clay slung the bag over his shoulder and grabbed the pine branch to cover his tracks on the way back to the plane. He was only gone fifteen minutes and returned out of breath.

  “What did you do, run?” Bonnie said.

  Clay nodded and took a deep breath. He sat in the seat he had occupied during the flight.

  “What is it, Clay?” Bonnie said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I don’t know,” Clay said. “I just thought I saw something moving out there. I couldn’t make out what it was. Might have been a wolf.”

  Bonnie quickly looked around her and out through the opening. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Maybe I imagined it,” Clay said. “I hope I just imagined it.”

  *****

  The phone on my desk rang and I grabbed it before it had a chance to ring again. “Cooper,” I said.

  “Mr. Cooper,” a woman’s voice on the other end said. “This is Maxine Foster at Denver International Airport.”

  “Yes?” I said. “Have you heard anything about the missing plane?”

  “Mr. Cooper,” Maxine said, “Our sources tell us that the plane your father was on earlier was tracked as far as the southwest section of the state before it disappeared from radar. We think it went down in an area west of Crystal Creek, near Henry Mountain. That’s a heavily wooded area and it would be very difficult to land a helicopter close to them. The Forest Service is sending a team in from the east on horseback and another team from the south in Jeeps. We’ll know more in a couple of hours but it could be slow going. We had a storm last night that may have covered the plane with snow so spotting it from the air could be tricky.”

  “Wasn’t the plane equipped with a transponder?” I said. By now Gloria was sitting on the edge of my desk, leaning in, trying to hear.

  “It was, Mr. Cooper,” Maxine said, “But we’re not picking up anything from it. It could have been damaged upon landing.”

  “Thank you, Maxine,” I said. “If you need to call back, try my cell number. We won’t be in the office for the rest of the day.”

  I hung up and looked at Gloria. “I’ve got to get to Denver,” I said. “Dad’s in trouble. His plane went down in the mountains of Colorado and they’re sending out search parties in Jeeps and on horseback.”

  “You can do more good staying put right here,” Gloria said. “If you’re thinking of flying to Denver and joining in on the search, think about it for a minute. You won’t be able to get a flight out of LAX on any commercial jet. That airline is on strike. You’d end up in a small plane like Clay did and it would take you forever just to make it to Denver. And by the time you find a Jeep or a horse, they could have already found them and then I’d have to worry about them finding you. I need you here, Elliott. Matt needs you here, too. I know you must be feeling pretty helpless in this situation, but doing what you’re thinking of doing won’t help things along. It’ll just make me worry twice as much.”

  I went limp in my chair and sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “I just wish I knew if he was okay out there in the wilderness.”

  *****

  Clay instinctively reached under his arm for the .38 and checked to make sure it was fully loaded before he snapped the cylinder back into place again and slipped it back into the holster. Bonnie sat in her old seat and stared across the aisle at Clay.

  “Weren’t you going to check for the transponder?” Bonnie said.

  “Oh yeah,” Clay said. “And I’m going to have to get the pilot out of his seat, too. Man, I’m not looking forward to that task. I don’t even know where his head ended up.”

  Bonnie held her hand over her stomach. “Stop, Clay,” she complained. “Or I’m going to puke, I swear.”

  “Oh, sorry, Bonnie,” Clay said and got up out of his seat. He turned to Bonnie. “Mayb
e you’d better go back behind the blankets until I get him out of the plane.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Bonnie said, retreating to the sleeping area and pulling the hanging blankets closed.

  Clay began breaking off bits of the branches that had broken through the windshield. As he removed them, he tossed them onto the small fire. After thirty minutes of clearing branches and debris from the cockpit, Clay was able to unbuckle the pilot’s seatbelt and pull him out of the seat. The body fell to the floor with a thud and Clay dragged it out through the opening in the plane’s body and laid it next to the other five bodies.

  Behind the captain’s seat, Clay found the missing head. It was crushed into an unrecognizable pulpy mass with hair. Clay turned back toward the coach area and threw up whatever was left in his stomach. He wiped his chin and reached for the head without looking at it. He managed to grab it by the hair and lift it over the seat. Five or six steps later he was outside of the plane and laid the head onto the captain’s bloody shoulders, about where it belonged. Somehow seeing it where it belonged helped minimize the impact on Clay, at least in Clay’s mind. Now it looked like the captain had suffered fatal head trauma instead of a gruesome decapitation.

  Clay returned to the cockpit and began searching the instrument panel for anything labeled ‘transponder’. Most of the instrument dials had been smashed, their glass covers broken and jagged. The radio microphone lay on the floor, still connected to the coiled black wire. There were still a few branches obscuring some of the instruments. Clay slowly cleared a few more of the branches out of the way and finally uncovered a red light on the instrument panel. The nameplate below it identified it as the transponder, but the red light was not lit. Clay thumped the light with his finger and then with the butt of his palm. The red light still did not light up. Clay’s hopes diminished with the discovery of the broken transponder.

  From the corner of his eye, Clay caught some movement through the broken cockpit window and quickly looked up. Whatever had been moving out there was gone. He quickly returned to the coach compartment and stepped outside to grab another handful of wood for the fire. There was the movement again. Clay ducked back inside, threw the wood on the fire and pulled his .38 out from under his arm just as the gray and black head entered the plane. Clay fired twice and the wolf dropped at his feet. Clay had managed to hit the beast once in the chest and once between the eyes. It was most certainly dead.

  The blankets parted and Bonnie looked out onto the scene and gasped. “Oh gees,” she said. “Do you think there are any more of them out there?”

  “They don’t live alone,” Clay said, stepping over the wolf’s carcass to the outside. He grabbed the animal by its tail and dragged it away from the plane. “We’re going to have to get that snow piled back up in front of the opening again and quickly.”

  “Won’t it just melt again from the fire?” Bonnie said.

  Clay paused and thought for a moment. “Well then let’s just hope that those six bodies out there will keep any other wolves occupied and they won’t come in here looking for us,” Clay said.

  “Oh, Clay,” Bonnie whimpered, “I’m really scared now.”

  “Try to stay calm,” Clay told her. “We have to keep our heads if we want to get through this in one piece. Let me think for a minute.”

  Clay turned and held his hands out toward the fire. The warmth felt good and he turned away from the fire, warming his backside as well. The two of them remained silent for more than twenty minutes. Clay was all out of ideas. “I’m getting hungry,” Clay told Bonnie. “How about you break out some more of those chocolates?” They each had two more pieces and sat enjoying the fire for the next hour, occasionally checking outside for any more wolves and finding none.

  Clay’s eyes lit up and he turned to Bonnie. “What if we…” His words were cut short by another sound coming from outside. He couldn’t see anything out either side of the plane and turned toward the cockpit. There was definitely something moving out there. He waited and kept watching. After a moment he smiled and turned to Bonnie.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “It’s a man on horseback,” Clay said and he’s coming this way. “They found us.” He looked again at the figure on horseback, trying to make out any details. Bonnie took a step toward the opening before Clay stopped her. “Wait a minute, Bonnie. What if it’s not one of the rescuers but someone looking for their cocaine? We have to be careful about what we say. Let me feel him out first.”

  Bonnie nodded. “Don’t take any chances, Clay,” she said.

  A few minutes later the man and the horse stopped outside the wrecked plane. The man stepped down off the horse and began walking toward the opening in the plane’s body. Clay exited the plane and met him next to the row of dead bodies laid out next to the plane. The man looked up in surprise when he saw Clay.

  “You startled me,” the man said. “I didn’t know there were any survivors.”

  “Are you with the rescue team?” Clay said.

  “Paul Mansfield,” the man said, extending his hand.

  “Clay Cooper,” Clay said and shook Mansfield’s hand. He looked behind Mansfield’s horse and then turned back to the man. “Where are the other searchers?”

  “They’re coming from all different directions,” Mansfield said and then looked down at the row of dead bodies. “Is this everyone?”

  Clay nodded. “We skidded into that large pine tree,” he said, pointing to the tree that the plane’s nose was wrapped around. Clay pointed to the last body in the row. “This one’s the pilot. The branch that came through the windshield took his head off, poor devil.”

  Mansfield counted the six bodies and then looked at Clay. “So there were six passengers, counting you?”

  “Seven,” Clay said and turned toward the plane. “Bonnie would you come out here?”

  Bonnie emerged from the plane and looked at Mansfield and then at Clay.

  “Bonnie,” Clay said, gesturing toward Mansfield with his chin. “This is Paul Mansfield. He’s part of the search party.”

  Bonnie let out a deep breath. “Thank you, Mr. Mansfield,” Bonnie said. “We weren’t sure we’d ever be found. How did you find us?”

  “The transponder in the plane led me right to you,” Mansfield said. He pulled a small electronic device from his pocket and looked at the display screen. It was still beeping and from the look on his face he was a bit puzzled. He looked at Clay. “Is the instrument panel still intact?”

  An alarm went off in Clay’s head. He knew that the transponder had been smashed upon impact and wasn’t working. Then it dawned on him that there must have been some sort of homing device in with the cocaine and that’s what Mansfield was tracking. Clay turned to Mansfield. “Come on in here and check your device against the transponder. It’s still in the dash.”

  Paul Mansfield stepped past Clay and into the plane. Clay shot a glance at Bonnie and motioned for her to stay outside while he followed Mansfield inside. Once inside the plane, Clay pulled the .38 from under his arm and stuck it in Mansfield’s back. “Freeze right there,” Clay said, “and keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

  Mansfield stood still but said over his shoulder, “Are you crazy?” he said. “I’m here to rescue you.”

  “Turn around, slowly,” Clay told him and then backed up a step.

  Mansfield slowly turned and faced Clay. “What is this?” he said.

  “Drop that,” Clay said, gesturing toward the electronic device in Mansfield’s hand.

  Mansfield complied.

  “Now carefully peel off your coat and drop it on the floor,” Clay told him.

  Mansfield unbuttoned the four large buttons on the front of his coat and pulled it off his shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.

  “Now the jacket,” Clay said, pointing with his .38.

  Mansfield unbuttoned the single button and pulled his jacket open. Under his left armpit was a brown leather shoulder holster with a .4
5 nestled in it. Clay pointed to Mansfield’s gun with his.

  “With your thumb and index finger I want you to carefully pull that out and drop it,” Clay said.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Mansfield said.

  “Do it,” Clay almost screamed and then pointed his gun in Mansfield’s face.

  Mansfield slowly slid the .45 out of the holster and dropped it on the floor.

  “Now step back three steps,” Clay said, still pointing his gun.

  Mansfield stepped back and stood still. Clay called out to Bonnie to come inside. “Get his gun,” he told Bonnie. “I’ve got him covered.”

  Bonnie bent down, picked up the .45 and handed it to Clay, who stuffed it into his beltline. She quickly stepped behind Clay. Clay gestured toward the seat that he had occupied during the flight.

  “Sit,” he told Mansfield.

  Mansfield sat.

  Clay turned to Bonnie. “Get two of those shirts you found in the luggage and bring them here, would you, please?” he said.

  Bonnie stepped behind the blankets and returned with two white, long sleeved dress shirts and held them out to Clay.

  “Tie one sleeve around his left wrist,” Clay told Bonnie. “Make sure it’s tight and then tie the other sleeve around his other wrist behind the seat back.”

  Bonnie secured the shirt sleeves around both of Mansfield’s wrists and stepped back.

  “Now tie his legs to the legs of the seat,” Clay said, still holding his prisoner at bay with the .38.

  Once Bonnie had finished securing Mansfield to the seat, Clay holstered his revolver and sat across the aisle from him. He turned to the man. “Amateur,” he said to Mansfield.

  “What are you talking about?” Mansfield said.

  “First of all,” Clay said. “Rescuers would always search in pairs, at least. It would be foolhardy for anyone to venture out in these woods alone. “Second, you tipped your hand when you said you followed the transponder signal to us. Impossible. It’s broken. The only signal you followed probably came from the leather bag full of cocaine.”