Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller

by John Nicholas

  COLD SNOW

  by

  JOHN NICHOLAS

  This Novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by John Nicholas

  Cover and internal design © 2012 by John Nicholas

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  DEDICATION

  For mom and my wife

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Oaxaca, Mexico: 1980

  Alberto rose slowly; sitting up under his feeble covers and rubbing his eyes, he came face-to-face with a revolver pointed directly at his nose. His brain, having barely had seven years to adapt to the world, could tell him nothing about the strange device he was staring down, nor the man behind it who resembled a wolf. With no other functions for response, he collapsed back onto the pillow, hoping the two instruments of death—one barely less lethal than the other—were simply figments of his half-awake imagination.

  Almost immediately, he heard a whistling of the air; then a blunt force crashed into his skull and rent it apart. His eyes watering profusely, points of light darting in front of his face, he was forced to admit that a real wolf was aiming a real gun at him. He hoped the man didn't think he was crying—he was, after all, already seven.

  "Maybe I should explain to you what one of these is," the wolf said, turning his weapon so that Alberto could view it in profile. "When somebody has one of these in your face, you don't go back to sleep. Now, are you planning to get up or am I going to have to kill you here?"

  Kill. Alberto had a list of strong associations with the word, not the least of which was his father, who employed it in language as his primary disciplinary method: I'm going to kill you, Alberto. One day I'll kill you, I swear. Alberto didn't understand exactly how you killed someone, or what happened to a person once they had been killed; but that news that his father had finally decided to follow through on his threat barely surprised him. However, the presence of the wolf did.

  "Why isn't my father going to kill me?" he asked, lifting his covers and clambering out of bed.

  The wolf laughed. "Between you and me, Alberto, your father is a weak, weak man. He refuses to get his hands dirty. He wants you dead, badly, but he doesn't want to see you die."

  At the sound of the words dead and die, something else roared inside Alberto: fear. This was something he was much closer to, having been told repeatedly that the reason he would never meet his mother was that she had died giving birth to him. If his mother had died, and nobody would ever see her again—Alberto was sure that he didn't want to die.

  "Why do I have to die?" he asked, quickly dressing himself and trying to hide his terror.

  "Why?" the wolf replied, his face becoming serious and stony. "Do you have any idea how it felt to lose his wife only so you could be born?"

  "But—" Alberto was stammering, "But that's not fair! I didn't want her to die!"

  "It doesn't matter! Your father was confronted, every day, with the boy that caused the death of his beloved. You were a demon to him; and not only did he have to keep you, he had to love you." The wolf pointed his gun toward the door. "Walk."

  To scared to disobey, Alberto stumbled toward the door. The wolf was still speaking.

  "For years you grew strong, in spite of his hatred. For years you stood as a symbol of his desolation. And now…well, I can hardly blame him for never wanting to look at you again."

  The house, standing at the center of an expansive ranch, was large and lavish on the inside, though fairly unimpressive from the exterior. The only indicator of the wealth of Alberto's family was a wall encircling the property, and an extravagant garden filled with flowers and herbs imported from lands Alberto could only dream of. It was into this garden, strewn with light from the emerging sun and splashed with almost unnaturally vivid color, that Alberto now stumbled, trailed by the wolf and his gun.

  "I don't want to leave a mess in the house," said the wolf, "but I'm feeling charitable. As long as it's out here, where would you like to die?"

  "I don't—" Alberto was too terrified to find the words, "I don't want to!"

  "You have to!" the wolf roared. "Now tell me where or I'll just do it where we stand!"

  Even through a haze of fear and confusion, Alberto's mind was working on a plan. All he needed to do was escape, and lose the wolf long enough to make him give up. Behind the house was a rocky slope, a geological expanse which had been his playground for years. If he could only make it there…

  "The red flowers," he said shakily. "The row by the gate." He had no idea what they were called.

  "Good choice," the wolf said, following behind.

  Alberto knelt down, slowly and carefully, and placed his hands around one of the two clay pots that stood flanking the gate, iron wrought into unfathomable and chaotic patterns. The pot was heavy, but he lifted it a few inches off the ground, just to make sure he could.

  When the wolf was standing behind him and checking the safety on his weapon, Alberto lifted the pot and swung it.

  It flew behind him of its own accord and crashed into the wolf's stomach, causing him to cry out and double over in pain. Alberto did not look but swung again, this time making contact with the wolf's head and crumpling him onto the ground. He dropped the pot, letting it shatter, and ran.

  By the time he reached the rocks, the wolf had already recovered, and was in quick pursuit despite the blood leaking slowly from the wound in his head. Alberto knew that looking back would slow him down, so he kept climbing forward, finding footholds and handholds as easily as walking. Before he knew it he was almost halfway up the slope, and the wolf had barely reached the bottom.

  Suddenly he heard a crack in the air and his right leg opened up a new world of pain. He shouted involuntarily and collapsed backwards, rolling down the hill and coming to rest sprawled on a mostly flat boulder. It was inconceivable to him that he could have been killed from this distance—but he had never been killed before. He knew that if anything was death, this—the searing fire in his leg, the feeling that one of his bones had almost disconnected, the total pain he was drifting aimlessly through—was it. He looked, with his remaining strength, toward the bottom of the hill, and saw the wolf stowing his gun, no doubt off to tell his father the good news.

  And inside the feeling of pain, Alberto felt something new—rage. What had he done to deserve this? His father was the one that should have died. Deep inside himself, he found the ability to hate the wolf, to hate his father, and to cling onto hatred as a lifeline to this world.

  He was discovered, almost half an hour later, by a passing tra
veler on the road that led through his family's ranch. The man picked him up instantly, and carried him as quickly as possible to the nearest town. Later, the traveler would report the strange emptiness behind the boy's eyes—as if he had survived the bullet, but some part of him had died on that rock.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Toy Chest

  Alexander Matthew Orson grew up on February 21, 2005, at a little after one in the morning.

  Frost had covered the plants that morning, and snow had begun to drift in barely noticable patterns by the time Alex, stony-faced, had entered his French class behind a group of chattering girls, hoping, as usual, not to be noticed. He wondered why it had taken him two and a half years of junior high to realize that most of the day was completely useless—but then, when there was nothing for you afterwards, you tended to let some things go unnoticed.

  Tonight, he thought, is the night that my life stops being an endless cycle of bad to worse to bad again.

  "Il neigera bientot," Mr. Dubois observed, when the entire class was seated and more or less facing him. Alex slipped into a chair in the middle of the room. He had been at Phillip Matherson Middle School long enough to note that you got noticed more in the back than in the middle. The back of the class consisted of kids who had made conscious choices to be the type who sat in the back. In the middle, you were nobody.

  "The…imperfect…subjunctive…tense," Mr. Dubois began, pausing between each word to write it on the board. Alex leaned back in his chair and prepared for another fifty minutes of pretending to be the same as everybody else—he had, in fact, finished the textbook long ago and could, if he wanted too, read French as well as Mr. Dubois, if not speak it up to par. Ignoring the lesson, he instead translated Dubois's opening remark. He came up with "it will snow soon."

  Alex sighed and wondered once again why eighty percent of things that the power of speech was used for were barely worth the breath. Maybe, he thought, there's just nothing to talk about.

  He pushed his hand through his unruly brown hair and began to play with a lock of it, tugging it with his fingers and entertaining himself with fantasies about his soon-to-be free life. That was how Alex entertained himself. Others would doodle, carry on surreptitious conversations, or watch the wind briefly rousing trees from their winter slumber—but Alex would think.

  On the other side of the room, in the row second from the back, another boy was slowly and carefully folding a piece of paper from his spiral notebook, three and then four times, until he was sure it would tear cleanly. When he finally ripped, half of the strip of hole-punched paper attaching the page came off with it, and the noise caught some attentions, which were quickly lost.

  Jake Harwell paused to look around. Although everybody but the most diehard class-toppers was looking for anything to think about besides verb conjugation, it seemed like they didn't find him an interesting enough distraction. He slid the notebook back into the backpack beside his desk.

  Using a pencil, specially blunted so that it wouldn't make noise when he wrote, he scrawled a message in all caps. When he thought it was satisfactory, he began carefully folding the sheet until it took the shape of the only paper airplane he new how to make, a rudimentary design that would fly all right if there was a fan behind it. When it was done, he held it by the bottom and drew back to throw, but then stopped himself. How could he have been so stupid? he thought. As if nobody would notice that! I've known Alex long enough to be smarter than that.

  He unfolded the airplane and crumpled it instead into a tight ball. He then reached his hand under the canopy of scratched wooden desks, into the forest of metal legs below, and slid the paper along the tiled floor toward Alex's seat.

  Alex turned his head quickly when he heard the infintesimal sound of the paper hitting the steel. Without looking at the crumpled ball, he scooped it up with his left hand.

  "Alexander!"

  He cursed when he heard Mr. Dubois's voice. He'd forgotten not to call attention to himself.

  "What are you doing?" Dubois asked, glaring at him.

  "Nothing, sir," he replied, careful to keep his voice under control. Feeling the eyes of the entire room on him, he went through the list of signs revealing a lie—lack of eye contact, fidgeting, covering the face—and made sure he wasn't doing any of them. "Just picking up some trash."

  "Well, throw it away and stop distracting us, you're holding up the lesson!" Alex was about to retort—as he had wanted to do so many times—that if Mr. Dubois didn't make such a big deal out of every transgression, the lesson wouldn't be held up so often. He decided, however, that he should seize the chance he had been given, and ducked into the hallway to use one of the outdoor trash cans. The moment he was out of the class's line of sight, he uncrumpled the note and read.

  NEED TIME AND LOCATION

  ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS

  Alex removed a ballpoint pen from his pocket, clicked it open, and, using the rough plaster wall as a surface, hastily wrote a return message.

  "Mr. Orson! Throw away your paper and get back in the classroom before I give you detention!"

  Crumpling the paper in his left hand, Alex walked purposefully back into the room and slid into his chair, letting his hand hang down behind the desk. He planned to swing his hand and slide the paper back to Jake, but he would have to do it blind—

  "Orson!"

  "Yes, sir?" Alex swore under his breath, and those who heard him laughed.

  "I want you to show me your trash," Dubois said, with the evident pleasure that some authority figures feel in finding wrongdoing. Some of the students laughed at this; the phrase, coming from the pompous and generally disliked teacher, seemed inherently funny. To Alex, however, there was nothing at all humorous about the situation. As he grudgingly uncrumpled the note and held it out, his only consolation would be that Dubois would be unable to understand it.

  Gleefully, the teacher began to read it aloud.

  YOU THINK I'D SPEND SIX MONTHS PLANNING AND THEN GIVE UP NOW

  TONIGHT 1 AM YOU KNOW WHERE

  I WANT TO BE FREE FROM THEM

  The class lit up with speculative discussion; wondering if Orson and Harwell were talking in some invented code, or planning to hold up a store.

  "I was under the impression," Dubois said, slamming the unfolded paper onto Alex's desk, "that the act of note-passing died with the fifth grade, but you have proved my wrong. You," he grinned evilly, "are getting detention for so long you will forget your name."

  It's a damn good thing I'm leaving tonight, Alex thought, as his face reddened.

  Another knock, louder and more solid this time, three distinct raps. Catherine Orson groaned and resigned herself to the fact that she had been forced to get up.

  "Kate, get the door," her husband yelled, working his fingers in a typically complex necktie knot.

  "Roland, Lauren is crying—"

  "She can wait. She's always crying. Get the damn door."

  Catherine pulled herself out of her chair, fervently wishing that Roland had not decided that he needed an entire day to stay at home and "prepare" for a meeting she saw littile meaning in. To her it was another of his very feebly disguised attempts to make her miserable, as evidenced by the fact that he treated her like his personal maid whenever they were alone in the house after 10:00. I'm just lucky, she thought, that for most of the morning and evening he has the boy to take it out on.

  Arriving at the front door, a wooden slab with six glass rectangles set into it to form two large squares, she flipped the bronze catch and turned the knob. Standing on her uncovered front porch was a small man, wearing pants and a buttoned shirt that had evidently once been part of a suit. His hair was a burnt, reddish-orange shade, carefully combed into line, and he was of small stature—Catherine's first impression was that he had probably lost a lost of fights in his youth. In her mental lineup of friends, acquaintances and necessary contacts, she found nothing matching this man, which could only mean a few things, none good.

&
nbsp; "We're not interested," she said, preparing to slam the door.

  "I'm not selling anything," the man replied.

  "I already know who I'm voting for in the council elections."

  "No, it's not about that either. I'm here about a very important matter—"

  "I'm already a Jehovah's Witness."

  "With all due respect," the man said, with a certain annoyed tone, "you're not and neither am I. May I come in?"

  "Not until you tell me who you're with."

  In lieu of an answer, the man fumbled in his wallet for a moment, bringing out a business card. Catherine, who hadn't bothered with her contact lenses that morning, had to squint to read the letters: SPCC.

  "Am I supposed to know what those letters mean?" she asked.

  "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children."