Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller

by John Nicholas

  "Such as what?"

  "Such as not dying! Such as eating, and sleeping, and wearing clothes, and having money!"

  Sarah sighed. "This is ridiculous. Who do you think you are? Some kind of rebel? I'll tell you who you are. You're a kid. You're a jerk. You're arrogant and worthless. You have three lives riding on you, and no idea what to do with any of them. You nearly got three dozen people shot. You make me sick."

  "That makes two of us. Go away, please."

  It was another half-hour before Jake decided to abandon his crowd-control efforts. A boat appeared to be preparing to leave on the other side of the river, and he assumed there would be several policemen on board. He clambered down from the tree and walked over to where Alex and Anthony appeared to be engaged in a very vehement debate.

  "I don't care!" Alex was shouting. "It'll waste our money, it'll waste our time, it's going to kill you, and to top it off, it smells really bad!"

  Jake almost had to smile at the last comment. Anthony must have asked Alex about cigarettes.

  "It's chemical," Anthony replied, with the air of somebody explaining prepositions to a kindergartener. "You smoke once, you get hooked. After a while it becomes a necessity of survival."

  "Please. That's your fault, isn't it? Besides, I don't think going cold turkey will be that painful. You might get a headache or two. Deal with it." Alex turned after finishing the sentence and spotted Jake. "Oh, hi, Jake. Hey, could you go find Sarah? She's off sulking someplace. I need to talk to everyone."

  It was a subdued trio that Alex stood before. The ferry incident seemed to have significantly dampened everybody's spirits, and Sarah was still angry with him.

  "Okay, people, I have good news and bad news. Which one do you want first?"

  "Bad news first," Jake said. "It's easier to handle if you know that good news is coming."

  "Good choice," Alex replied. "Okay, the bad news is that the cop boat is going to be here inside of fifteen minutes."

  "God damn it…" Anthony muttered.

  "Okay, fearless leader," Sarah said angrily, "how do you plan to get us out of this one?"

  "I'm getting to that! The good news is that the cops, desperate as they are to catch us, probably won't check the crowd for us until they're back on the other side of the river. They'll put everyone in custody, just to make sure we didn't escape."

  "You've got a point," Jake said. "If we leave now, we could get as much as," he did some quick math on his fingers, "forty-five minutes' head start."

  "Congratulations on figuring it out, Jake, but it means we have to go right now. Problem is, they have cars, and we don't. So, even if we were hours ahead, they could easily catch us."

  "Yeah," Anthony cut in. "I was meaning to ask about that…"

  "That, Anthony, is where you come in."

  "Why me?"

  "I know your type," Alex said. "Delinquents. Petty criminals. You probably know more about this kind of thing than the three of us combined. Do you know how to drive?"

  "Sort of." Anthony was quickly starting to believe that he was in way over his head.

  "Great," Alex said, smiling. "You're in charge of getting us wheels."

  "It occurs to me," Anthony retorted, "to wonder why I'm helping you at all."

  "Because," Alex smiled even wider, "you are an accessory. Also, you are already on the wrong side of the law, so the cops won't think twice about tossing you in jail. It's your choice. Get us a car, or go to juvie."

  Anthony swore and ground his teeth, then began to lead them along the side of the highway.

  The gas station was an old place. The pumps were all rusty, and the letters on the sign, which had evidently once read "Transit Quality Fuel" had fallen and been vandalized beyond recognition. The convenience store, in a small building beside the station, looked fairly modern, but was deserted. The only sign of life was a man on the edge of the lot, wiping down the windshield of his car. This, however, didn't do much to relieve the cloud of decay that hung over the area. The owner probably spent a lot of time cursing the corporations for ruining his business.

  All of them wondered why Anthony had suggested they come here. The one car was occupied, there were no real foods for sale in the store, and they didn't exactly need gas. Sarah was starting to believe that Anthony was leading them to a shady deal with one of his criminal friends. After his backpack-swapping trick, she didn't trust him in the least.

  The center of attention for the group as they entered was none of these things, but a much stranger discovery. There was a spit of grass on the left side of the lot, separating the station from the road. There were no pumps on this side, probably as a safety measure. About halfway up, Alex noticed something odd: the remnants of what looked like police tape. Near the tape, a chalk marking had been made on the asphalt. It didn't take them long to know that it was the outline of a body.

  Alex knelt to examine the marking, noting as he did that it appeared to be fairly old—the police must have visited a while ago. The man had been of average height, and slightly overweight, but other than that Alex could see nothing special.

  "Jesus…" Jake said. "What a place to die, huh?"

  "Who do you think it was?" Sarah asked.

  "I don't know!" Alex said. "How should any of us know? It could have been anybody."

  Anthony was not looking at the outline. He had seen them before, and it brought back bad memories. In fact, it brought things to the surface of his mind that he hadn't seen in years: the sound of a gunshot, the shout of a dying man. He walked away from the others to clear his head.

  Alex, deciding that nothing more could be learned from studying the former crime scene, began to wander the lot, his eyes resting on the car on the far side. He loitered by the pumps, watching the owner. He had finished wiping the windshield, and was now working on the driver's side window. It was pointless work, as the car was covered in dirt, and no amount of wiping could get it clean.

  "Anthony," he called.

  When they were close enough to speak confidentially, Alex whispered, "That's our car."

  Anthony was understandably surprised. "That piece of crap? That won't get us to Ottawa. I bet we could walk faster."

  "Yes, but you realize that would require us to walk. More than a thousand miles."

  "Whoa! Whoa! I never said I'd come with you for the whole trip."

  "Listen. We've been over this. When you got on that boat, you signed on for the long haul. Any questions?"

  "God damn you…I'll get the car."

  "Good." Alex turned to face Sarah and Jake, still knelt over the death site. "Hey, if you two are finished gawking, we have a job to do."

  The man who owned the car, Wayne Eidson, owner and operator, Transit Quality Fuel, was watching the kids with unease. Sure, they were only kids, but he had a bad feeling about them. Two of them were talking by pump seven, and the shorter one appeared to be the leader. Possibly because of his overall possessiveness of the car, or because of his general paranoia, but he thought they had designs on his vehicle. The way they were talking, as if scheming. He supposed he was just still jumpy, as he had been ever since that guy got shot in his parking lot. The police had thought it was a bunch of kids who killed a lady in Quebec City, although he was at a loss as to how they did it.

  They did, eventually, come to talk with him. Two of them, the leader and the girl, told them they wanted to buy something from the store, and they followed him inside. Indoors, he remembered that he had left his car door open to wash the interior window. This didn't help his premonitions.

  Alex and Sarah immediately saw that they were going to have some problems. The selection of goods inside the store was meager, so they could only buy five minutes, at most, for Anthony to work on the car.

  Alex perused the food aisle, looking up and down, not moving toward making a decision. If Eidson got impatient he would have to make a choice—and then they would lose their decoy. Sarah was looking at a rack of batteries. Good call, Alex thought. There are
a million different kinds of those.

  Anthony was outside. The car's hood was open, but only slightly, and Jake was standing in front of the crack to hide it from the owner. Anthony was muttering to himself, trying to remember how to hotwire an engine.

  "Let's see," he said. "It's a Ford, so the starter's going to be on the left…or the right. And the coil is probably this one at front. So here goes nothing…" He reached for the wires.

  Inside, Alex had picked up a loaf of bread, and was moving toward the next aisle.

  "Say, if you don't mind me asking," Eidson began, "where are your folks?"

  Sarah was at a loss, but Alex quickly spun a lie. "We live a couple of miles up the Transit," he said. "The store where we live is closed, so we figured we'd walk up the road and see what we found."

  Jake could bear the sight of Anthony's misguided car-theft attempts no longer. "Dammit!" he shouted. "How could you not know how to do this!?"

  He forced Anthony out of the way. "The coil is at the back! You have to find where these red wires come from. The starter is at the left, but you're looking for the solenoid. Cross these two," he said, picking up the coil wire and running it to a wire on the starter. Instantly, the engine sputtered to life.

  Inside, Eidson thought he heard his engine running. Alex could se him growing nervous and impatient, so he decided to play his trump card.

  "We saw the chalk marking outside. Who got killed?" Sarah, meanwhile, looking out the window, saw Jake waving and making thumbs-up gestures. She tugged Alex's arm.

  "Just a second!" Alex told her.

  "Nobody got killed," Eidson said, remembering what the police had told him to say. They didn't want the public to get scared, so they didn't want their story out, and Eidson couldn't blame them. "A guy got punched and knocked out by some other crazy guy, and it was assault, so they wanted a crime scene."

  Alex suspected that this guy wasn't giving him the whole story, but Sarah kept pulling him toward the door, so he had to leave before he could find out more. Immediately, he dropped the loaf of bread, and ran.

  "Hey!" Eidson yelled, following them outside. Immediately, he saw, with a sickening feeling, that he had been right; his car was running, and the kids were getting inside. They must have hotwired it. Quickly, he ran back inside. How did they know how to do that?

  When the first shouts came, it alarmed everyone except Alex, who calmly climbed into the passenger's seat beside Anthony.

  "Alex!" Jake yelled. "He's chasing us!" Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been much to worry about—however, Eidson was carrying a knife.

  "Let him!" Alex called, and there was definitely a streak of wild exhilaration in his voice. "Let's go! Be glad he's not using a gun—I've dodged so many bullets tonight, I'm sick of it."

  All three of them looked at Alex oddly. There was something in his eyes, in his voice…it was as if he had suddenly transformed into an adventurer.

  Anthony may not have been good at hotwiring a car, but he was good at driving one. The car swerved: right, left, right again, but Anthony got it under control faster than most would have. They escaped the parking lot soon enough, leaving the death site, Wayne Eidson, and his knife behind.

  They held their breaths for a while after leaving, but soon relaxed again. The driving was a nice break. The movement of the car was something sure and slow, a good break from the hectic action of an hour ago.

  "Do you think they've called off the search by now?" Jake asked.

  "Possibly," Alex said. "I guess they think we can't get far. They might go in the morning. Also, they need to alert Canada about us."

  "Why would they do that?" Sarah asked. "International police alerts for accessory to larceny?"

  "I'm still wondering about that," Jake said.

  "That's a fair point," Anthony said. They were all amazed at how relaxed he was behind the wheel. He appeared to be alright, an hour after his last cigarette, but Alex was sure he would break down, and then they would have to find somewhere to get some—a large waste of time. "We're probably safe. No point wasting the time, manpower…"

  "Money," Alex cut in.

  "Listen, Jake, I want to ask you something. How did you know how to hotwire the engine?"

  Sarah looked very surprised at this. Even Alex (and this was a very rare occurrence) looked visibly unseated. "You did it?" he asked.

  "I've, um…I've read some books." Jake, oddly enough, seemed both embarrassed and scared. Not scared in the way the boy is when he thinks there is a monster under his bed…but the way a man is when he has something to hide.

  For a while they drove in silence.

  Jake could drive too, it turned out. It being midnight, Sarah and Anthony were very tired. The time came when Anthony's eyelids began to drop, and they decided it wasn't safe for him to drive anymore. So they pulled over, and he got out, sat in the back, and immediately fell asleep. Jake took the wheel, and Sarah fell asleep after another half-hour.

  Alex and Jake stayed up, possibly out of apprehension or fear, or possibly out of excitement. Alex, certainly, was very happy—for the first time since Niagara, he had made a plan that had worked.

  "Why do you do things like this?" Jake asked suddenly.

  Alex was caught off guard. "Huh?"

  "Why do you act like you do to Sarah? To Anthony? Why do you see them like you do?"

  "Because…" Alex hesitated. Obviously, what was about to come out of his mouth was something he didn't want to say. "Because…I'm scared."

  "You're what?"

  "I'm scared. Ever since we left Woodsbrook, I've been thinking—what have I gotten myself into? This plan…the food will be eaten here, we'll sleep here, spend money here…it's a way to know what's going to happen. If I know how everything is going to work, I'm not scared."

  "Makes sense…but what's there to be so scared of?"

  "I don't know," Alex said, sarcastically. "Starving? Dying of hypothermia? Getting shot? It's a fact we're all going to have to accept, and it's better if you learn it now. We are going to die."

  "What? How can you say that?" Jake was getting scared himself. It was not like Alex to be so pessimistic. He could be sarcastic, cynical, at times annoying…but never pessimistic.

  "Maybe not soon. One or two of us might make it to Manitoba. But we will die. One way or another."

  "Why did you start this, then, if you were sure we were going to die?"

  "Remember, at the beginning…it was just going to be me. I thought I could do it. In Woodsbrook, in the park, I tried to bail out. I'd realized, then, just for a moment. But the two of you wouldn't let me go."

  "No, Alex!" Jake said. It came out more forcefully than he had intended. "Sarah and I were trying to give you a chance to be someone. You act like a cynic, you act like a skeptic, and you look down on people to shield yourself from yourself. If you just looked up for a moment, you'd realize who you are! You are our leader!"

  "I don't know, Jake. I don't know," Alex said, quietly. "I'm too tired for this." He rolled on his side, and was asleep in seconds.

  They lay there, hurtling into the night.

  CHAPTER 9

  Into Canada

  For the next day, time seemed to have no meaning. They drove, and it would appear that they were flying at great speed, or that they had been in the same stretch of forest or mountain forever. Jake and Anthony took turns driving, Jake still refusing to divulge how he could. February wasn't tourist season, so the Transit was fairly deserted. Whenever a car did go by, those of them not driving hid, and whoever was driving would shoulder the task of making himself look older. They stopped for two meals, breakfast and lunch, and were served without incident—even if the Canadian police had been mobilized, there were no "wanted" posters up yet. In short, everything, for once, was going fine.

  That all changed soon enough. The first trouble occurred about three miles after the place where they had eaten lunch. They had stopped in a town called Maple Crossing, and used the last of their money. Many of the shops thi
s far south would accept US dollars, because of tourism, so they had no trouble as far as currency went. Alex had wanted to try and get some more money, but Sarah said she wouldn't let him. They argued for a while before Alex gave it up.

  Once out of town, though, the car started to run more slowly. Anthony, who was driving, pushed the pedal harder, and eventually the car simply ceased to run.

  "For crying out loud…" he said, slamming his fist on the dashboard.

  "What happened?" Sarah asked.

  "Engine problem, maybe? It could be due for an oil change," Jake volunteered.