Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  “I only hope that it’s for a long string of clichéd openings like, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted you here.’ Want to know my sign?”

  Sherry made a face that looked like a snarl. She leaned into the table and Larry joined her. “Have you been to the phone booth that they have the nerve to call a bookstore?” she asked.

  “Actually, no. And given the fact that we’re at one of the top five ski resorts in North America, with some of the finest powder I’ve ever seen, I can’t imagine why.”

  Sherry was in no mood for irony. “They only have three of my books,” she said. “Actually, to be more precise, they only have three copies of one book—Mirror—and that’s only in paperback. There’s not a single copy of Mirror II. Do you know how embarrassing that is? My seminar is in two days, and they’ve only laid in three paperbacks.”

  Larry looked at her like she’d sprouted leaves. “Sherry, do they carry any hardcovers?”

  Sherry took a sip of her cosmo. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, if the store is as small as you say, they probably don’t.”

  “What about It’s All in Your Smile or The Microwave Mom?” Sherry protested. “They’re both in paperback, and neither of them are in the store.”

  Larry sighed deeply and looked over his shoulder to check on the progress of his drink. “Have you thought about taking a skiing lesson? I mean, my God, Sherry, you need a little life here.”

  “I don’t participate in sports where gravity and trees combine as mortal enemies.”

  Larry laughed. “Why are you here? Why take a seminar gig at a ski resort if you hate skiing?”

  “You know damn well why.”

  Larry rolled his eyes. “Right. Brandon and Scott. God forbid they have fun together. You know, there’s something really twisted in all that.”

  “What’s twisted,” she said, “is that ‘Team Bachelor’ crap. Makes me sick.”

  Sherry tried her best to show a flash of anger, but she knew Larry wouldn’t buy it. They’d known each other too long, gone through too many adventures together. No one fully understood her relationship with Larry—Sherry wasn’t entirely sure she understood it herself—but he was the one person who understood her. She called him her assistant mostly because the world frowned on the notion of paid companions. Half of the professional publishing world assumed that they were lovers, and the other half assumed that they were both gay. Sherry honestly didn’t give a shit.

  “Well, it’d be one thing if you trumped Brandon in doing something you actually enjoyed, but as it is now, who’s laughing harder, know what I mean?”

  Sherry sighed. “I know exactly what you mean.” She took another sip of her drink, just as the White Russian arrived for Larry. “I’m not a total bitch, you know. I did actually hope that maybe Scotty and I could get to know each other a little better. But I never see him.”

  “That’s because he’s skiing, Sherry. Ski resort. Skiing. Do you see the link?”

  Sherry laughed in spite of herself. “Well, during the day, sure. But I don’t even see him in the evenings. God knows what he’s been eating.”

  “He’s sixteen. He hates the world.”

  Sherry thought about that. Adolescence was defined all over the world by rebellion. It was the same in every culture, every race, every religion. She’d heard some interesting theories that it was true in every species. Sometimes she wondered if teenagers didn’t in fact become a different species for a while.

  She checked her watch. “Tonight, for example,” she said. “The last thing we said to each other as he was on his way out to the slopes was, let’s meet for dinner. He was supposed to call me, or at least leave a message at the chalet, but no. Not a word.” She saw Larry’s eyes shift. “What?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know something.”

  He made a face like she was crazy, but he squirmed in his chair. “I know a lot of things.”

  Sherry wasn’t buying it. “You wear a guilty conscience like a badge, Larry. Let me hear it.”

  “I told Scott I wouldn’t say anything,” he hedged. Way to hold out till the end.

  “Larry.”

  He sighed. “He went to Salt Lake City.”

  Sherry’s jaw dropped. “He what?”

  Larry squirmed some more. “There’s a concert there. He went with some ski patrol guy he met. Nice guy. I did a couple of runs with both of them.”

  Sherry couldn’t believe she was hearing this. “Have you looked at the weather out there? How on earth are they going to drive to Salt Lake City?”

  More squirming. “They’re, um, not driving, actually. His friend is a private pilot. He owns his own plane.”

  This time, Sherry’s rage was real. “Jesus, Larry, how long have you known about this?”

  Her anger surprised him. “Since this morning.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “What was I going to say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, something like, ‘Hey, Sherry, your son has lost his mind.’ My God, they’re flying in this weather?”

  Larry dismissed her with a wave as he took another sip of his drink. “Will you relax? If it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let them take off in the first place.”

  2

  THE SENSATION OF PAIN was unlike anything that Scott had ever felt. His whole body seemed to vibrate with a sharp, bright-white agony that made him feel as if he were ready to explode. A full-body toothache. It was that sharp. That hot.

  It was so quiet. After the horrific noise of the crash, the grinding and twisting of metal and the screams that might have been his own, the silence terrified him.

  “Cody?” He could barely hear himself. “Cody?” He said it louder this time, but the night still returned only silence.

  The feeling of disorientation was overwhelming—huge pressure in his head and his belly, yet the unmistakable sensation that he was floating. He had no idea how long he’d been here. His mind played an image of him climbing out of a hole in his brain. As he pulled himself closer to the rim, the pain blossomed. Bitter cold pressed in around him, explaining the sensation of a million needles in his skin.

  Hypothermia!

  His mind fired the thought like a rifle bullet, launching him to a new level of alertness. These temperatures played for keeps; on a night like this, a few hours could mean eternity in a box.

  Scott O’Toole had no intention of dying tonight.

  Why couldn’t he move? He considered for a moment that he might be paralyzed, but the pain and the cold ruled that out. He wasn’t breathing right, either. The pressure in his head. The pain in his belly.

  Oh, my God, I’m upside down.

  “You there, Scott?” The voice came from so close by that Scott wondered for a second if he wasn’t just thinking out loud.

  He jerked his head to the left to see Cody Jamieson’s silhouette hovering just inches from his own. A jet black splotch against the lighter black background, the pilot’s hair stood straight on end.

  “Dude, I’m fucked, man,” Cody said.

  Scott didn’t like the fatalistic tone. “Hey, we’re alive, right? That’s a good first step.”

  “No, dude, I mean I’m really fucked up. I can’t feel anything below like my chest.”

  Scott’s gut tightened at the thought, but he sensed that this was a time to keep things light. “Count your blessings. I can feel every damn thing, and it all hurts. What the hell happened?”

  “You’ve heard of flying at treetop level, haven’t you?” Cody forced a chuckle, which became a wheezing, gagging cough. “I taste blood, dude.”

  “Probably just cut your lip.”

  Cody coughed again, and as he did, the whole world seemed to move around Scott. It was a swaying motion, back and forth. And then everything shifted. For a second, he thought they were falling, but then it all settled down again. The movement caused a new sound to gurgle out of Cody, half moan and half wail.

  “What? What is it?�
� Scott yelled.

  “Oh, man, I am so righteously fucked.”

  “We need a light,” Scott said. “I can’t see a thing.”

  Cody’s shadow moved in the darkness. A hand motioned lazily toward the bulkhead behind Scott and to the right. “Check the wall there. There should be a flashlight mounted to a charger there.”

  Scott strained to turn, but this disorientation was killing him. Left, right, up, down, none of them had any meaning. And why couldn’t he move?

  The seat belt.

  Of course! He was still strapped into his seat! That explained the pressure and the biting pain in his gut, too. The seat belt was cutting him in half. Until he got that undone, he wasn’t moving anywhere to recover anything.

  But first, it was time to do an inventory. Maybe he was hurt, too, but just hadn’t figured it out yet. His head felt fuzzy, and he was almost certain it was bleeding, but as he gingerly explored his scalp with his fingertips, it seemed that his brains were all tucked in where they belonged. There on his forehead, though, right at his widow’s peak, a nasty gash flashed a jolt of pain when he touched it. Yeah, he was bleeding, all right. He moved his shoulders next, and then his back, as best as he could in his current position. Everything felt stiff, but nothing felt terribly wrong until he worked his way down to his right ankle. He moved it, and the joint screamed. It felt as if his foot were jammed into something—or better yet, between two somethings.

  Shit, that’s what I need. A broken ankle out in the middle of nowhere.

  Actually, he’d broken his ankle before—last year, in fact, during the final soccer tournament against the Madison Warhawks—and this didn’t feel as bad as that. His toes wiggled inside his boot without pain, and when he moved his knee, it didn’t feel like the top of his head was coming off. That was what a broken ankle felt like. This just felt like a pinned ankle. In his mind, he re-created the look of the cockpit’s floorboards and determined that he must somehow have gotten himself tangled up in the rudder pedals. If he could just ease his foot a little to the left…

  There! He felt it move. It hurt like hell, but what did he expect, leveraging bone against steel? The more he pulled, the more he felt his boot move. Okay, at least it was definitely not broken. Let’s hear a hip-hip-hurrah for that little blessing.

  Finally, his leg was free; but as his boot pulled away from its restraint, Scott dropped completely away from his seat, the strap across his lap now bearing his full weight. The pressure drove the air from his lungs and squished his guts. It was choking him. Didn’t he read somewhere that you could die simply by the act of hanging upside down for too long? Something about blood pressure in the brain.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, some of the shadows began to make sense to him. Through the puffs of gray that were his breath, he could make out the outline of the windshield, and the post where it joined the side of the fuselage, but the rest was all forest and snow. And Cody Jamieson’s dangling head.

  “You still awake, Cody?”

  The pilot groaned again. His breathing had become juicy—a sound like the last pull through a straw.

  “You’ll be okay,” Scott said. “You just watch. We’ll be out of here in no time.” Even if we don’t know where here is, he didn’t say. A thousand things needed to be done, and first on the list was getting himself out of his seat. Once he had his feet on the ground, he could start thinking through everything else. But he was upside down! The instant he unlatched the belt, he was going to drop on his head, which was already throbbing quite nicely, thank you very much. He used his gloved hands to explore the area over (under?) his head and found that he could just barely reach the top of the cockpit—maybe a two-foot drop. Not so bad.

  Okay, this was it. Holding his left arm over his head to absorb the impact, he found the seat belt buckle with his right. One…Two…Three! He lifted the clasp with his fingertips, and instantly, he dropped like an anvil, catching most of the impact on his neck and shoulders.

  Cody Jamieson howled as the aircraft trembled under the impact. The howl became a scream as the plane shifted again, this time taking on a bizarre yawing motion that Scott might have written off to dizziness from his head injury. Outside, a gust of wind pelted them, and the yawing and the screaming got even worse.

  Scott needed that flashlight. Sprawled flat on the ceiling now, he could just make out a blinking red light, barely bigger than a pinhead, but bright as a lighthouse in the near total darkness. The flashlight on his Uncle Jim’s boat had a beacon just like it, working all the time, with or without power, always visible in an emergency.

  The plane shifted again, and he froze. Something about this wasn’t right. And when he put the pieces of the puzzle together, his heart nearly froze in his chest. “No, it can’t be,” he told himself aloud. “Tell me we’re not.”

  Suddenly petrified to move at all, Scott stretched out as far as his arms would allow to pull the light from its charger. It came free with a click. The dim beam might as well have been a klieg light, instantly transforming pitch black to blinding white. It took Scott all of three seconds to assess the severity of his nightmare, and one more to wish he’d never found the light.

  He’d never seen so much snow. It swirled everywhere, inside the aircraft and out, driven by winds that somehow grew colder as Scott could see them blow. The windows on the Cessna were all gone now, and beyond them, the snow fell in thick clouds among the twisted and broken limbs of trees.

  Wincing against his fear of what he might find, Scott inched toward the opening and dared a peek down at the ground, which was every inch of fifty feet below.

  BACK IN THE CHALET, Sherry worked one phone while Larry worked the other.

  “I understand that the airport is closed,” she said to somebody named Angela at the airport in Salt Lake City. “You’ve already told me that. What I want to know is, whether a plane has landed there.”

  “No, ma’am, there have been no landings,” Angela said. “No takeoffs, either. That’s what happens when you close an airport.”

  Sherry wanted to smack her. “Are there other airports, then? Municipal fields where someone might land a small private plane?”

  “Dozens of them, but they’re all closed, too. Is someone overdue? Is that why you’re so distraught?”

  Interesting question, Sherry thought. “Can you hang on just one second?” She covered the mouthpiece and turned to Larry. “What have you found out?”

  Larry hung up his receiver. “Not a thing. Apparently, the airfield here is unmanned. People can take off and land as they please. There’s no radio communication, nothing.”

  Sherry sighed. “So, what do I tell these people? Is he missing, or isn’t he?”

  “It gets worse. I haven’t even been able to find anybody to verify that this Cody guy’s plane is missing. Maybe he keeps it someplace else.”

  Anger was beginning to trump Sherry’s fear. “So, for all we know, Scotty’s really at somebody’s room, getting laid or drinking beer.” She turned back to Angela. “Listen, thanks for your help,” she said, and then she hung up. She headed toward the wet bar that separated the enormous living room from the enormous kitchen. “You want a drink?”

  “Sherry, you have to do something, here,” Larry said, moving to block her passage. “You can’t just assume that he’s out getting his rocks off, if in fact he’s out there lost in a snowstorm.”

  She faked left, then moved right to get around him. It was time to switch to scotch. “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “Scott is lazy and he’s full of attitude, but he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t take off in a little airplane in this weather.”

  “For Metallica? Who are you kidding?”

  Sherry poured three fingers and downed half of it on the first gulp. “I just don’t want to press the panic button.”

  Larry saw something in her expression that caused him to scowl. Suddenly, he sensed that they weren’t talking only about Scott anymore. “Say what’s on your mind, Sher.
”

  Sherry inhaled loudly and let it go as a sigh. How could she put this and not seem harsh? “If Sherry Carrigan O’Toole goes shouting from the rooftops that her son is missing, and then he turns up drunk somewhere, the tabloids will eat it up. I’ll look like a fool.”

  Larry looked at her like she was crazy. “The tabloids? Jesus, Sherry, you’ve never been in a tabloid. You’re an author, for chris-sakes, not a movie star.”

  “I’m a television personality, too.”

  Larry threw his hands in the air. “I don’t believe we’re talking about this. He’s your son. Want to see yourself get torn apart by the press? Let the word leak out that you knew there was a chance he went missing but refused to say anything. They’ll hang you in effigy, and I’ll carry the rope!”

  Sherry clasped the sides of her head with her open palms. She hated stress, and she hated making decisions quickly. “You know who’s going to have a field day with this, don’t you? Brandon. God, I can hear him now.”

  “Sherry!”

  Larry couldn’t possibly see the world through her eyes. This whole thing was Brandon’s fault to begin with. If he hadn’t made the divorce such a damn war, then she wouldn’t have to constantly up the ante. How else could she hope to overcome the lock those two had on each other? Team Bachelor. Why not just settle for Super Dad and Scott the Wonder Boy? Brandon had always resented her career and her money, always looked down his nose at her because she didn’t have time for Little League and soccer and brownie-making. She could already hear his condescending tone and see his supercilious sneer as he confronted her on this one, as if it were her fault that Scotty had wandered off.

  “I know you think I’m crazy, Larry, but I really think we need some data before we mobilize the cavalry.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?” Larry checked his watch. “It’s almost seven o’clock.”

  Sherry thought about it, and the more she turned it over in her mind, the less she believed that Scott was really in any jeopardy. “Let’s first verify that the plane is missing.”