Running Blind

by Linda Howard

  “Yeah, sure.” His easy reassurance would have been, well, reassuring, if he hadn’t immediately followed it with, “I hope.” That was Spencer, both optimistic and honest.

  But he knew how to drive in this kind of weather, and she sure as hell didn’t, so she had to trust the first part of his statement.

  The other times it had snowed, she’d been safely at the ranch. This was the first time she’d been on the road when the weather turned nasty, though she supposed to a seasoned Wyomingite this didn’t really qualify as nasty. It was pretty much weather as usual … she hoped. Now she knew why Spencer had added that qualifier.

  The roads seemed to be fine—at least for now—so she relaxed and watched the scenery. She never got tired of the mountains. The views still took her breath away, in all seasons and all weather. The mountaintops had stayed white for a few weeks now, but watching the snow begin to cover all the slopes was almost hypnotic. The interior of the truck was nice and warm, and the rhythmic sound of the windshield wipers made her sleepy, but in a good kind of way. Looking out at the snow and knowing how cold it was, while she was dry and warm in the truck, gave her the same kind of cozy feeling being curled up in front of the fireplace provided.

  They left the paved road and for the first time they hit some ice; the tires spun a little, but Spencer held the truck steady and they regained traction. He slowed some, so he wouldn’t have to use the brake as much.

  Huh. That wasn’t good. They were still a good distance from the ranch, and the road would only get worse as it climbed in altitude. No longer sleepy, Carlin sat up and paid attention, though there was nothing she could do to aid Spencer’s driving other than silently willing the tires not to spin.

  They started up an incline that had never seemed treacherously steep before, but today Spencer slowed down to almost a crawl, and still the tires spun and grabbed, every inch a victory. Carlin gripped the armrest. “Ruh roh.”

  Spencer grinned at her Scooby imitation, though the grin was short-lived. “We’ll be okay,” he said, just as the truck bounced in a rut, then slid sideways on the icy road. “Maybe.”

  He had to cut that out. It worried her when he cut the legs out from under his reassuring statements. “Take it easy,” she said, though of course the admonition was useless. “We have precious cargo.”

  “We do?” he asked in surprise, blinking at her.

  “Watch the road!” she yelped. “The eggs.” She peered through the window at the narrow road ahead. “I’ve got six dozen eggs in the backseat.” She couldn’t seem to buy enough eggs to keep Zeke and his men happy. Eggs, bread, and milk: those were the staples she went through the fastest.

  Spencer gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward, intently watching the road. He looked a little worried, a totally new expression for him. Seeing anything other than happy optimism on his face was such a departure, Carlin decided she should be concerned, too.

  “Do we need to go back?”

  He gave her an appalled look, and she got the feeling she’d somehow challenged his manhood. “No, we can make it. But I should’ve put the spikes in the truck this morning, before we left.”

  Vintage Spencer: optimism, honesty. “Spikes?” What did they need spikes for? She had a vision of long spearlike things to drive into the ice as they climbed sheer frozen walls, or something like that. There was a lot to this Wyoming-winter stuff that a warm-weather person like her didn’t know.

  “For the tires,” he clarified. “Can’t drive with them on dry roads, but when there’s ice it makes for a good grip. Don’t usually need them this early, and I figured we’d be home before the roads got bad. This looks awfully icy.” The worried expression came back. “The boss is going to kill me for forgetting the spikes …”

  “We’ll get home fine,” she said, borrowing his optimism, as if saying the words would make it so. But she didn’t want him to think she doubted him. She didn’t doubt him, but ice was dangerous. Snow … meh. She’d already become blasé about snow. Ice was in a different category. The inherent danger of driving on ice made every muscle in her tighten in preparation for whatever might happen.

  She didn’t need bad weather to make her tense, these days. She stayed on edge, wound tight, and when she felt as if she were jumping out of her skin it wasn’t because she was afraid of Brad, it was because being close to Zeke had every cell in her body on alert. She wanted him. She couldn’t have him. God knew she was in too deep as it was! In the beginning she’d looked at this job as a way to hide through the winter, a chance to sock away some money for the next time she ran. And now here she was with friends, and a place that felt like home, and a man who teased her and taught her to defend herself and looked at her as if he wanted the same things she did.

  And Zeke was a man who went after what he wanted. Carlin hadn’t needed Kat’s warning to make her wary of him, because any woman with one working brain cell would have been able to tell that he wasn’t someone who accepted defeat, he took a situation and shook it, mauled it around, until it suited him. Funny—Brad hadn’t accepted “no” for an answer, either, and yet the two men couldn’t be more different. Brad couldn’t conceive of any woman not wanting him. Zeke looked beneath the surface and somehow saw her potent reaction to him. He knew somehow, damn it, that what she said and what she felt were two completely different things. Brad was a danger to her life. Zeke was a danger to her emotions.

  The road climbed around a curve, and the tires spun again, jerking her attention back to the present. Spencer let off on the gas, let the tires do their job, and they regained their momentum again. Carlin looked around, trying to figure out where they were. She’d been this route often enough that in good weather she could look around and have a good idea how far she was from the ranch, but the snow changed everything. She didn’t recognize any landmarks; one snow-covered mountain or ravine looked pretty much like the next one, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the passage of time. The truck’s digital clock told her they’d been on the road almost an hour. In normal weather, they’d already have been back at the ranch.

  Spencer slowed down more and more as the road wound up and down through the mountains, eventually going more down than up. The weather didn’t get any better, though. Visibility decreased by the moment, until they could barely see a few feet in front of the truck. Carlin found herself leaning forward, as far as the confines of the seat belt would let her, as if by going on point she could somehow extend her vision and see through the thick, wind-swirled snowfall.

  The sound of the tires changed, and looking out the side window Carlin saw they were crawling across a bridge, and suddenly she knew where they were, but wished she didn’t. Even in good weather, this section of the road gave her an uneasy feeling. Immediately after crossing the bridge the road took a sharp left turn, and to the right was a steep ravine, the land falling away for a long, long drop to where a pencil-thin creek wound its way down the mountain. Because the snow was so heavy she couldn’t see the drop, much less the creek, but she knew it was there and her heart began racing, her right hand tightened on the armrest and her left one on the edge of the seat.

  Right at the end of the bridge the tires began spinning again, and the rear end of the truck began swinging to the right, toward the ravine. Spencer reacted swiftly, taking his foot off the gas, gently steering to the right to get in front of the spin, but he didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver and as they bumped off the bridge the two right tires were on the shoulder. Carlin’s heart jumped into her mouth and she closed her eyes.

  “We’re good,” Spencer said, his voice a little higher than usual. He blew out a breath as he feathered the gas and his steering, trying to ease them back onto the road.

  He might have made it, if it hadn’t been for the deer. It came bounding out of the snow so suddenly that one second it wasn’t there and the next second it was. Instinctively Spencer hit his brakes; the deer was right there, in front of the truck. The brakes locked, the tires lost tracti
on, and the truck began sliding back and to the right, toward the ravine—and then they went over.

  Carlin screamed, seeing nothing but the ghostly deer as it seemed to turn in mid-bound and disappear back into the snow. Time turned into molasses, every second stretching out unbearably. She saw Spencer’s ashen face, his eyes wide, and she felt a deep ache that he was going to die so young, without having the chance to get married, have kids, have a life. She saw the snow swirling, silent and beautiful. She saw the limbs of an evergreen drooping under the white weight. She saw her own hand, reaching out, as if she could claw the air and hold them in place.

  Then there was an impact that jerked her forward against the seat belt, which instantly jerked back and pinned her against the seat, and the truck crashed to a stop, hood pointed in the air.

  For a moment Carlin could do nothing except stare up at the silent white bombardment of snow, coming down on the windshield.

  “Are you okay?” Spencer asked breathlessly, his own hands clenched around the steering wheel.

  “Ah … yeah. You?”

  “Fine.” His voice cracked on the word. He was looking at the windshield, too.

  Strange thought, but all of a sudden it was loud and urgent. “My eggs!” She started to turn toward the backseat, but at her movement there was a sort of groaning sound, and it came from the metal of the truck.

  “Don’t move, Miss Carly!” Spencer was whispering now, and if he’d been ashen before, his face was now bloodless. “We … we’re kind of balanced.”

  Balanced. Balanced?

  “How? On what?”

  “A tree,” he said, visibly swallowing, and she realized he hadn’t been looking out the windshield, he’d been looking in the rearview mirror.

  A tree. That was good. Except … a tree. Plural, trees, would have been much better. “How big a tree?”

  “Um … not big.”

  She glanced out the side window, and nearly passed out from sheer terror. There was nothing there, just more white flakes, dropping down, down, down, to some resting place she couldn’t see. And all that was keeping them from plummeting down with the snowflakes was a not-big tree.

  “Exactly how big is not-big?”

  “Just don’t move.”

  “Not that big of a not-big tree, then.”

  He swallowed again. “It’s holding. It’s just that we’re kind of off-center.”

  Panic tightened her chest, making it impossible to take anything other than shallow, rapid breaths. A small tree. Off-center. The least move could send them tilting off their precarious perch. The tree could snap under the weight of the truck. The roots might tear loose. They were basically suspended in midair by nothing more than unbelievable luck and angels’ breath.

  Slowly Spencer reached for the console and the radio there, moving only his arm, holding his torso rigidly still. He turned it on, pushed a button, and spoke into the microphone. “Boss, you there?”

  Zeke’s deep voice answered so quickly Carlin wondered if he’d been waiting by the radio. “Where the hell are you?” The reception wasn’t great; it broke up a time or two, but it was easy enough to get what Zeke was saying, and to hear the force in his tone.

  “We slid off the road,” Spencer said. “We’re just past the bridge on the loop road, right before you get to the turnoff.”

  “Is Carlin okay?” The words were hard and sharp.

  Carlin, not Carly. She caught her breath at the slip, the first time he’d done that. She wondered if Spencer would notice the hard end to her name, or just write it off to bad reception.

  “Miss Carly’s fine. But get here fast, boss. A tree is all that’s holding us, and we can’t move to get out of the truck.”

  “I’ll be right there. Just don’t move, and everything will be okay.”

  That authoritative tone was both reassuring and maddening. He said it would be okay with all the confidence that his orders could countermand both weight and gravity; part of her was reassured simply because he was so confident, and the more sane part of her was infuriated by his arrogance.

  Please, please, God, she prayed, overlook his arrogance this once and let him be right.

  She and Spencer sat frozen in their seats. There was nothing they could do except wait—wait for Zeke or Death, whoever got there first.

  ZEKE SPOTTED THE bumper of the truck peeking over the shoulder of the road. The snow was coming down so hard that it had partially covered the truck; if he hadn’t known almost exactly where they were, if he hadn’t been looking, he might have driven on by.

  The sight of the truck’s position made his heart thump heavily, but he grimly pushed the surge of panic away; now wasn’t the time to lose it over what might happen, but to deal with what had happened—and what had happened was enough to turn his blood as icy as the road. It was a miracle the pickup wasn’t at the bottom of the ravine right now.

  He shoved the gear lever into Park and had the door open and was out of his truck before it had rocked back on the springs. The shoulder of the road was pure ice; his boots slipped beneath him as he eased up to the edge of the road and assessed the situation. His back teeth clenched; the situation wasn’t good.

  Through the snow that half-covered the windshield, melting from the truck’s heat, he could see Carlin and Spencer motionless in their seats, their white faces frozen and blank, as if they were afraid even to blink their eyes.

  He could see the thin tree that had caught the truck’s back bumper off-center, on Spencer’s side of the truck, bending under the massive weight. It could break at any time, sending them to their deaths.

  No, by God. No. Not while he had breath in his body. Carlin—

  He cut the thought off before it could form, and scrambled back into the four-wheel-drive dual-axle diesel pickup he’d driven because it had a winch on the front. Walt, who had been following, drove up and stopped at a safe distance as Zeke turned the dually around so he was facing Walt. This wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, he wasn’t at all certain he could get the truck out.

  Walt met him at the winch, surveyed the situation, and said, “Holy shit,” his tone quiet so Spencer and Carlin couldn’t hear him.

  The rest of the hands were on the way, but Zeke estimated Micah was at least ten minutes away, and Kenneth was about five minutes behind them. He didn’t dare wait for any of them.

  “We’ll use the snatch block,” Zeke said. They had to winch the truck up from an angle, which the snatch block made possible. The road wasn’t wide enough for him to line up bumper to bumper and pull the other truck up. The winch was rated for ten thousand pounds, so it would handle the weight; the treacherous footing was a problem, and the position of the other truck was a bigger one. He couldn’t hook the steel cable to the bumper, because bumpers weren’t secure; it would pull right off. He had to attach it to the frame or axle. The shoulder of the road was pure ice; getting down to the truck and working his way under it was going to be a bitch. If he slipped and went into the ravine, he would die. If he bumped the truck and tilted it off its delicate balance, all three of them would die.

  He had to get the cable around a sturdy part of the truck, ideally the K frame of the engine cradle, as close to center as possible so the truck wouldn’t tilt over on its side. If he couldn’t reach the K frame, he’d go for the axle or any other part he could reach, as long as it would prevent the truck from toppling down the ravine. He didn’t care if the steel cable ruined the axle. Trucks were replaceable; people weren’t.

  Walt eased close to the edge of the shoulder to make his own assessment; he began slipping on the ice, too, waving his arms to regain his balance. “Careful,” Zeke said, grabbing the back of Walt’s jacket and hauling him back to secure footing. But Walt had seen the same thing that Zeke had, and his lined face was worried. Where the truck had gone off wasn’t a straight drop; they were on a sharp slope that became almost vertical a few yards behind the back bumper. Maybe there was a dip in the terrain, but for whatever reason, the front
bumper was almost touching the ground. There was no way he could wiggle under from the front. He’d have to go down and work his way in from the side, without being able to hold to the steel cable, which he’d have to feed under the bumper first to get the hook in the correct position. Then he’d have to get under the truck and secure the cable.

  And he had to do it fast, before a gust of wind blew the truck off its precarious balance, or the spindly looking tree gave out and splintered.

  “I’ll do it,” Walt volunteered. “I’m skinnier than you.”

  That was true. Zeke was taller and heavier than the older man, deeper in the chest, wider in the shoulders. And Walt was as tough as shoe leather, but it wasn’t a question of toughness, or even of size. “Doesn’t matter,” Zeke replied. “It’s my job.” He simply wasn’t going to risk anyone else’s life. He wasn’t going to let Carlin’s life rest in anyone else’s hands.

  “But boss—”

  “My responsibility. My job.”

  Walt knew that tone of voice and didn’t waste any more time arguing; instead he set about getting the snatch block ready. Zeke removed his hat and put it inside the cab, and pulled the hood of his coat up over his head. Then, free-spooling the cable, he pulled it to the edge of the shoulder of the road and got down on his stomach in the snow so he could see the best place to feed the hook and cable under the truck. The falling snow had already covered the bumper, and gently Zeke began wiping the snow away with his gloved hand, a little bit at a time, not wanting to hit the bumper. Finally he could see a gap, and he eased the hook and cable through it under the truck.

  “Ready?” he called over his shoulder to Walt.

  “Ready.”

  Zeke didn’t bother getting to his feet. Still on his stomach, he slithered headfirst over the edge of the ravine, sliding on the ice but able to dig in the toes of his heavy boots enough to maintain some control. The slope was steep, littered with rocks and half-buried boulders. The rocks gave him some traction, something rough to grab on to as he clawed his way down. He didn’t have far to go, maybe five or six feet, but he had to control his motion to a maddeningly slow pace or he’d gain too much momentum and go sliding off the bluff. The cold seeped through his jeans and thermal underwear, even through the thick coat he was wearing, snow and ice sticking to his garments and then melting, making him even colder.