Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

But what if they weren’t?

  For the first time since last night, Scott felt the claws of real fear kneading his insides. Would he freeze before he starved, or vice versa? And after he was dead, was there even a remote chance that someone might find his body and give it a decent burial?

  He wondered what it would feel like in that last moment. Did you really understand that you were dying, or did it sort of sneak up on you and sucker punch you into the Great Beyond? Would he go to heaven, or had all that cussing and talking back and jerking off sentenced him to hell instead?

  “All right, stop it!” he commanded aloud. “Just stop it.” He gave his head a hard shake and punched himself in the chest. Sven had warned the class about panic. It was the first session, as Scott recalled, and the grizzled Scandinavian was addressing the psychology of the stranded victim. And Scott had taken notes.

  “You are scared,” he’d said, through whatever accent that was. “You are all alone in a strange environment, and you are scared to death. What is going to happen? Will you survive? If you don’t, what will it feel like to die? Will it hurt? Will you know when that last minute arrives?” As he’d asked these questions, he’d paced slowly around the room, making eye contact with each of the dozen or so students, of which Scott had been the youngest by at least five years. Sven had zeroed in on the boy, his piercing eyes blasting all the way through to the back of his head.

  “Well, it’s natural to be scared,” he went on, as if addressing Scott individually. “It’s good to be scared. Healthy, even, because fear makes us all more aware. It sharpens our senses and makes us better survivors. But…”

  Sven paused here and leaned in very close to Scott and he’d lowered his voice nearly to a whisper.

  “But panic kills. This is when the fear switches from its rightful place in your gut and spreads like a cancer to your brain. Panic comes when fear is all that’s left in here.” He’d poked Scott in the chest…

  “And here.”…another poke, between his eyes. “You worry only about death—not how to live, mind you, but about when you’ll die. You visualize death, and when you do, you give up on life. That, young man, is the moment when your fate is sealed.”

  Jesus Christ, it’s like he’d had a crystal ball tuned to Scott’s future. How had he known so precisely? Scott trembled from the chill these memories triggered. As creepy as Sven had seemed, he clearly knew his stuff. When you’re cold and wet, and the snow falls without end, and you realize that the odds are bad at best, it’s so easy just to give up, to stop fighting. And when that happens, what’s left? It’s not like you could just sit down and take a break; you couldn’t hit the Pause button and go get a snack or switch game cartridges.

  Scott understood now what Sven had been trying to say: Unless you plan to live, and work on the assumption that you’re going to come out of the experience alive, then you might as well kill yourself early and get it over with.

  “There’s a way to do this,” Scott said, and hearing the words, he actually believed them. “There’s always a way.” All he had to do was figure out what it was.

  So, what was first?

  He needed a better shelter, for sure. Last night’s hole in the ground had kept him alive, but not much more.

  What about food? Scott was a decent fisherman from a rowboat on a calm lake, and he’d read the stuff in Sven’s handbook about setting traps for small animals, but who was he kidding? He didn’t know jack about baiting traps, even if he’d had the tools and materials to build one.

  So, what about food? He couldn’t go without forever, and he was already pretty damned hungry. Yesterday at SkyTop, he’d barely taken time to scarf down a quick burger before heading back out to the slopes. He hadn’t come to SkyTop to eat, he’d come to ski. Since then, dinner and breakfast had passed him by, and as lunchtime loomed, his belly was aching pretty badly.

  Out of nowhere, Scott remembered his seventh grade history teacher, Mrs. Fesson, with her turkey neck and her yellow eyes, reveling in her macabre stories of cannibalism at the hands of the Donner party and the soccer team that crashed in South America.

  “Would you?” she’d asked. “If it were the only means to survive, would you eat the flesh of another human being?”

  As an academic exercise, it had seemed so simple. Of course he would. Humans were animals just like everyone else. Why shouldn’t their bodies be put to good use? Not every day, of course—not in a supermarket, for crying out loud—but in an emergency, for the good of everyone else, what would be wrong with consuming their flesh? Scott had gotten an A that day for his classroom participation, and a comment after class from Mrs. Fesson that it was nice to have him contributing constructively for a change.

  Yeah, well, what seemed so obvious and easy in the classroom was way far out of the question in the real world, when a friend lay dead over by the wreckage. He’d never be that hungry. Ever. No matter what.

  He didn’t have a fire to cook it on anyway.

  Fire! God, would that solve a thousand problems or what? He’d have warmth, a place to cook and a signal for his rescuers, all in one package. The survival trifecta. All he needed was a dry place in the middle of the snow, an ax to cut wood and something to light it with. More likely than encountering flying pigs, he supposed, but just barely.

  There was just so much to do! Sure, a signal of some sort was important—probably more important than food, despite his rumbling gut—but all of it would have to wait for the shelter. As if to drive the point home, God launched a blast of wind through the trees that cut through him like a scythe, and turned the crash site into a swirling white cloud.

  This time, he’d build the shelter the way Sven had taught him, but first he needed some decent tools. Digging with that stupid chunk of metal had left him exhausted, with precious little to show for the effort.

  His eyes turned to the plane. When you fly in the winter, in a place like Utah, wouldn’t you need a shovel on board?

  Sure you would. All Scott had to do was go back to the wreckage and find it.

  Past Cody Jamieson’s body.

  It lay just where he’d left it, though not as thoroughly covered as he had hoped. He could still make out the human form under the snow frosting, and his nose still poked through the surface, dark gray against the stark white. There he was, just so much frozen meat. The thought made Scott feel ill.

  Take a look, he told himself. Screw up one time and that’ll be you. So much meat for the freezer.

  God had brought him this far. Scott was personally responsible for the rest.

  8

  BACK EAST, when Barry Whitestone was first earning his chops as a Maryland State Police officer, it had always been the full moon that brought out the crazies. Call it superstition if you want, but when he looked back on his first twenty-five years of police work—and even as far back as ’Nam—when you stacked up all the bizarre incidents he’d been involved with, most of them happened when the man in the moon was smiling brightest.

  Out here in God’s country, it was a snowfall. The harder it blew, the wilder the calls became. Domestic battery, drunk skiers, suicides, you name it. The chances of something deeply weird happening were directly proportional to the speed of the wind and the depth of the snow. Last night it was a private plane dropping out of the sky, this morning it was a dead trucker at the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge.

  Not any trucker, mind you. Oh, no, that would be too easy. This was a five-hundred-pounder. Died in the bathtub. James Alexander was already there when Whitestone arrived, standing with his fists on his hips in the doorway to the bathroom, watching the paramedics do their thing.

  “How dead is he?” Whitestone asked.

  Deputy Alexander stepped aside to let his boss have a peek. “Why don’t the big ones ever die in bed?”

  Whitestone stepped halfway into the white tile room to behold a very large naked man stuffed into a very small bathtub. And to answer his own question, the man was very dead.

  “Does he have a nam
e?”

  James looked at a wallet he’d forgotten he was holding. “This is Maurice Hertzberger. Independent trucker, lives—lived—in Concordia, Kansas. The maid found him this morning. She doesn’t know whether to seek counseling or turn him into a lamp. Either way, you’re gonna need dynamite to get him outta that tub.”

  Whitestone laughed. “Aren’t you in rare form this morning.”

  “It’s the blizzard, man. I got too much Jamaican blood in my veins for this winter shit.”

  Barry took the wallet with him as he wandered back into the main room. “Rather be hangin’ back in the ’hood, Deputy?”

  It was Alexander’s turn to laugh. His “hood” was a twelve-acre tract of family-owned land in the Hamptons—unless you counted their eighteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan’s west fifties or the four-acre spread in West Palm. “I just don’t like it this cold,” he said.

  “Well, James, you should have studied the map more carefully when you moved out here. The mountains and the altitude should have been a clue. You know, you being a cop and all.”

  As Barry spoke, he helped himself to Maurice Hertzberger’s personal effects, rummaging for nothing in particular. “Do you have any reason to suspect that this visitor to our fair county died of anything unnatural?”

  “I think he was murdered,” James replied, and the comment drew a startled response. “I mean, look at the guy. Young, the picture of health, obviously worked out regularly. Does he look like somebody who might, oh, I don’t know, drop dead from a stroke?”

  Whitestone made a clucking noise and shook his head. “Such cynicism from such a young man. Makes me worry for your soul, James. Makes me worry for your soul.”

  Chief Whitestone liked James Alexander. Of all the cops he’d hired over the years—and that was a lot of cops—James was one of the most promising. In a county that tended to attract two personality types—dimmer bulbs who weren’t good enough to get on the force in Denver or Salt Lake, or power-mad fascists who saw the uniform as an excuse to play with guns—James Alexander was one of the rare breed of sharp-witted Gen-Xers who took the job for all the right reasons. If he had a fault, it was his directness, but only because it was interpreted by many of his coworkers as a chip on his shoulder.

  “What’s this over here?” James asked, pointing to a pint bottle on the nightstand, three-quarters filled with clear liquid.

  Barry was closest. “I know what it looks like,” he said, picking it up and unscrewing the cap. He took a sniff and recoiled. “Yep, that’s what I thought. This, young deputy, is moonshine. Just like my dear departed granddaddy used to make.”

  Alexander cocked his head, took it from him. “You’re serious?”

  “About it being shine, or about my granddaddy making it?”

  James shrugged. “Okay.” He took a whiff. “God, that’s awful.”

  “I’m serious on both counts. I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A little town called Easton. There were only two kinds of people there, ones who built stills and ones who busted them up. Let’s just say there’s apt to be more lawmen among my successors than there are among my ancestors.” He watched with amusement as James struggled with his curiosity.

  “Before you take a sip, you might want to look at Maurice again.”

  James looked surprised. “You think he was poisoned?”

  “No, I think he stroked out, just like you said. On the other hand…” He decided to let James draw his own conclusion.

  “Maybe I’ll send this to the state police lab for testing,” James said.

  “I think maybe that’s a good idea.”

  BRANDON O’TOOLE HAD BEEN expecting a bigger show. In his mind, he’d built this picture of a hundred men, most in military uniforms, swarming around wall-size maps, coordinating the search efforts over field phones and walkie-talkies. The movie in his mind was a big-budget thriller, with a makeshift command center set up on the tarmac of the local airport, or maybe the National Guard Armory.

  What he found instead was the Arapaho County Police Department, located in the center of the ten blocks that defined Eagle Feather, Utah. A cross between a West Virginia mining town and a dilapidated set for cheesy westerns, Eagle Feather showed all the life signs of a corpse. What few trucks remained on the streets—there were no sedans or compact cars—were buried under four feet of snow. All but Brandon’s rental Cherokee, that is, and the massive Humvee sporting a blue-and-red light bar on the roof and a badge decal on the door.

  He did his best to park legally, and hovered his hand over the ignition for a moment, wondering whether or not he should keep it running, if only for the heater. Doubt disappeared, however, the instant he considered how few gas stations were likely to be open in the middle of a storm such as this.

  Opening the door and sliding out into the snow, he was reminded for the thousandth time how foolish he’d been to dress for a Virginia winter while traveling to Utah. Blue jeans and a zippered jacket just didn’t cut it out here, and neither did the ankle-high Rockports that he wore on his feet. A hat wouldn’t have been a bad idea, either. His bald spot had never felt so huge.

  As Brandon walked over the buried parking blocks toward the elevated sidewalk, he noted how different the snow was out here. Back east, snow was so heavy that a waist-deep accumulation would have been virtually impossible to walk through. Here, though, the dry flakes just breezed out of his way.

  With a different sign on the door, the police station might just as easily have been a barber shop or an insurance office. It sat adjacent to a Gallagher’s Shoe Repair, in the corner spot. Just another store-front among storefronts, occupying three demised spaces. Glass windows in the front gave it away as not the first occupant the developer had in mind when he built the place—back in, say, 1945.

  Someone had obviously made a valiant effort to scrape the sidewalks clean, but as the wind blew yet another snow devil down the street, Brandon understood why the job had been abandoned.

  A little bell pinged as Brandon pulled on the glass door and stepped into the foyer. It pinged again as the door closed behind him. From the inside, the place looked every bit the police station that it was. Opposite the front door, running parallel to the window, a concrete-block wall spanned the entire width of the place, with a steel door in the center and a teller window of sorts on the far left, where someone clearly was supposed to be stationed behind the bulletproof glass, but was AWOL for the time being. They’d made an effort to fancy the place up with fake flowers on veneered tables next to Western-style plastic furniture, but at the end of the day, it still looked like a police station, and no amount of paint-by-numbers pictures of boots and spurs could change that.

  Brandon made his way to the teller window and thumbed the silver Ring Bell For Service button. Somewhere beyond the concrete and Lexan, he heard an electronic buzz, and thirty seconds later, a tall, scrawny guy in his twenties appeared in the window carrying a steaming cup. He wore a black wool sweater with padded shoulders and elbows, a silver badge over his left breast and a name tag over his right, which read Tingle.

  “Howdy,” the man said, displaying a grin full of perfectly aligned teeth. “What can I do for you?”

  As much out of habit as anything else, Brandon produced a business card from his pants pocket and slid it through the slot in the window. “My name is Brandon O’Toole. Are you the man in charge here?”

  Tingle scowled as he read the card and shook his head. “No, sir, that’d be Chief Whitestone, and he’s not here right now. You a salesman or something?”

  Brandon felt his ears flush. That had been a test, and this goober had failed. “No, my son was on that airplane that crashed yesterday.”

  Jesse Tingle’s face lit up instantly with recognition. “Oh, shit” slipped out before he had a chance to stop it, and he became instantly apologetic. “I’m so sorry, sir. I should have recognized the name. Please, step on inside and I’ll see if I can get the chief on the radio.” He reached under the counter and the
lock on the steel door buzzed. The regulars, Brandon saw, could use the glowing keypad next to the door to let themselves in.

  Brandon pulled on the handle and stepped into a clutter of desks and filing cabinets, on which every possible surface was concealed by stacks of paper. Of the eight desks he could see, only three were occupied, and each occupant watched their visitor with combined suspicion and curiosity while Tingle scurried toward a glass-walled office in the rear corner. Before he got there, though, the door pinged again, and a few seconds later, in walked the man who had to be the boss.

  Whitestone doffed his jacket, a curious expression on his face. He wore the same black sweater and shiny badge, only where Tingle’s badge was silver, the chief’s was gold. Pushing fifty, this new man carried himself with athletic grace as he strode toward Brandon. Of average height and weight, he’d seen more sun than his dermatologist would approve of, but on him, the leathery skin gave him a cowboy ruggedness. He had the look of a man who could be intimidating as hell when he wanted to be.

  Jesse made his pitch from across the room. “Chief Whitestone, this man is Bradley O’Toole. He’s—”

  “It’s Brandon,” he corrected. “And I’m—”

  “You’ve come a long way, Mr. O’Toole,” Whitestone said. As he closed to within ten feet, he led with his outstretched hand. “I’m Barry Whitestone, police chief around here. Welcome to Eagle Feather.” It was like shaking hands with stone. “You must be worried sick.” He ushered Brandon toward his office with a sweep of his arm.

  “Please, come on back and I’ll catch you up on what we know.”

  Brandon made no secret about watching the people who watched him, returning their curious glances with hard stares. If his gaze made them uncomfortable, so much the better. What the hell were they doing in the office anyway, when his son was freezing out there somewhere?

  Whitestone paused at the door and allowed Brandon to enter the tiny office first.

  From behind, Jesse Tingle asked, “Can I get you something to drink? Hawaiian Punch?”