Snow Blind (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  Introduction:

  I used to contend that I was no more a short story writer than a writer of movie scripts, plays, or poetry. My expertise was long prose, as certainly a present string of some twenty-four history books and novels might attest.

  But the question nagged at me, as did the professional challenge.

  I had enormous respect for the form. One of my best friends, also a writer, excelled at short stories, and I admired how he could compress so much information and feeling into so few words, sometimes approaching a kind of poetry in the process. And so, finally I took advantage of an offer by Mysterious Press to contribute to their 40th anniversary compendium of original short stories.

  I loved it. I focused on Vermont, on its famous snowy weather, and on my favorite topic of human interaction. Two strangers meet; a crisis immediately develops; and the instincts of one of them come to the aid of the other. In fact, the story’s original title was “Instinct.”

  I’ve since returned to my comfort zone – writing novels. But I think only fondly of this experiment, and of what it taught me about the elegance of sparseness, the value of choice words, and that the reader’s imagination should be stimulated and engaged in all successful story-telling.

  I hope you enjoy it.

  Archer Mayor

  Snow Blind

  by

  Archer Mayor

  The snow hitting the windshield reminded me of an old movie, as if two guys on ladders were just off camera, pouring confetti out of barrels onto the hood of my car. Except that the effect in real life was more stressful than in a theater. The snow was heavy and thick, dry enough that I didn’t need the wipers, but so incessant, I was starting to think it might never stop. My eyes strained to see into the black night beyond the dizzying white vortex until they felt ready to fall out of my head.

  Despite the warnings on the radio earlier, I’d decided to drive home, and compounded the folly by taking the back way through heavily forested hills–ensuring that if I had a wreck, no one would find me until next spring.

  Now, one hour and a mere ten miles into the trip, I had doggedly reached the point where continuing would cost me no more than turning back, which, the way my hands and shoulders were aching, was a definite mixed blessing.

  All the more so because one irony of my position was that despite its peril, it was also curiously sedating. The car’s heater belied the freezing cold outside, the snow had a created a carpet beneath so thick and sound-absorbent as to make the trip virtually silent, and the serried trees, flickering by in the dim half-arc of my headlights, enhanced the sensation of being encased in a protective cocoon. It was hard to fight the feeling that if I just stayed put for another hour or two, this insulated capsule would deliver me home entirely on its own.

  It led to a temptation, lulled as I was by the mesmerizing wash of white static against the windshield, to simply let my hands drop from the steering wheel.

  Until I saw a man–young, pale faced, eyes wide with fright–loom up out the darkness like an onrushing meteor, and flash by in an instant mere inches from the car.

  With a surprised shout, I hit the brakes, fought the resulting skid, struggling to stay on the road, and ended up with my headlights staring at a tree trunk not three feet away.

  “Jesus,” I said to myself, craning over my shoulder to confirm what I’d seen. For a moment, there was nothing besides darkness and snow. Then, emerging into the harsh red glow of my brake lights, a thin figure shimmered into view like a blood-soaked ghost.

  In the decades I’d been a cop, facing hazards large and small, I’d rarely experienced the irrational fear I felt right then–a visceral, heart-stopping, utter conviction that my life was about to end.

  And then the man passed out of the red light, came up alongside the car’s passenger side, and rapped on the window with his gloved hand like any other pedestrian in need of help. He looked to be in his mid-twenties.

  “Hello?”

  I leaned over and opened the door, trying not to show my relief. “Get in. What the hell’re you doing out here?”

  “My car’s in the ditch about a mile back,” he said, half falling into the seat in a small flurry of snow and a gust of frigid air. He slammed the door and banged his hands together between his knees. “God almighty. I thought I’d had it.” His voice was high and nervous.

  I began straightening the car in the road. “You need to go back to your vehicle for anything? Were you alone?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I just want to get somewhere warm. I can find the car in the morning.”

  I hit the mileage counter button on the dash and started rolling again. “When we reach the next town, you can use a pay phone and tell the police how many miles back you went off the road. Might be hard to find otherwise.”

  “I don’t care.”

  The sudden flatness in his tone made me glance at him–and see the black hole of a gun barrel pointed at me.

  I kept driving, knowing that was my best defense, and stifled the urge to tell him I was a cop, figuring that might get me killed even sooner. “What is this?” I asked instead.

  “I want your car. Pull over.”

  His voice had now graduated to trembling.

  I gave him another quick look. In the anemic green glow from the dash lights, he looked gaunt and sickly, his eyes hollow with fear, his lips pressed tight. Despite the cold he’d just left, a sheen of sweat glimmered on his forehead, just under his wool watch cap.

  I picked up speed slightly. “Throw the gun out the window first.”

  He was plainly bewildered by this. “What? You’re crazy. Stop the car or I’ll kill you.”

  There was no certainty I was right. This was purely a gut reaction. But his panic encouraged me to keep pushing. I just hoped I wouldn’t betray my own fear. “You mean you’ll kill us both. I am driving this thing. Figure it out.”

  In my peripheral vision, I saw him work his mouth soundlessly a couple of times. Since keeping on the road hadn’t gotten any easier, I decided to try ending the debate quickly by rethinking my initial strategy.

  “Not only that, but you’d be killing a cop–Brattleboro PD–Lieutenant Joe Gunther.”

  I’d anticipated a couple of possibilities, only one of them good, but not what he did next.

  He hit me on the side of the head with his gun barrel, and grabbed the steering wheel.

  The results were predictable, although I was surprised to see them unfold in slow motion, just as in the cliché. As I watched in a dizzying haze of pain, the view before the windshield flashed between darkness and the nearby trees as we spun around in circles, until there was a solid thump from beneath us, a brief sensation of weightlessness, and our entire world pitched forward. Just before the lights went out completely, I felt the other side of my head smack sharply against the door post.

  I woke up to his slapping me, and anxiously muttering, “Come on, mister. Wake up. Jesus. Come on, come on, come on.”

  I raised a hand to protect my cheek from further abuse. So much for wanting me dead.

  The young man’s face was inches from my own, peering at me as if searching for enlightenment. “You okay?”

  I closed my eyes, dizzy enough already, and took mental stock of my body parts. “I guess.”

  “We crashed.”

  That brought me completely back. I opened my eyes. “No kidding.”

  He pulled away, apparently satisfied I’d recovered. “I got your gun, so don’t try anything.”

  I resisted pointing out the idiocy of that statement, choosing instead to control my inner fury at ending up in this situation–which was only exacerbated by not knowing how I could have avoided it.

  I
looked around. The dash lights were still burning feebly, giving the car’s interior a sub-aquatic appearance. Encouraging this image, all the windows were inky-black, we were pitched nose down as in a sinking submarine, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard outside.

  “How long have I been out?” I asked him.

  “A few seconds. Your head hurt?”

  Like the straight man in a comedy team, I thought. I didn’t play along, sensing in him someone seriously out of his depths–almost in need of help. “I’ll live,” I told him. “What’s your next move? Shoot me and turn the car into a bobsled?”

  He looked pained by that, and glanced down at the gun still in his hand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I extended an open palm to him. “Then give me the hardware and let’s see if we can sort this out.”

  Wrong move. He withdrew until his back was pressed against the passenger side door, the gun held higher, if no more steadily. “No way. My only chance is to get the hell out of here.”

  “And you’re going to do that … how?”

  He smacked the back of his head twice against the window, and howled at the roof again, “Shit,” his body trembling in frustration.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him suddenly.

  He stared at me for a moment. “Roger Blake.”

  “What did you do, Roger? Why the gun?”

  He leaned forward, his eyes feverish with intensity. “I didn’t do anything. But that won’t matter. My ass is grass anyway. I might just as well have killed her.”

  “Who?” I asked quietly.

  His shoulders slumped and he stared into the darkness beyond the windshield. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I could have snatched the gun from him, the way he was holding it–or I could have tried. But the risks of tussling over a loaded weapon in such tight quarters were looking far worse than just maintaining the status quo. I’d spent my entire adult life dealing with people like Roger Blake, many of them innocents, guilty or not. True victims of circumstance, they tended to live their lives by reaction alone, either making or avoiding decisions without thought of consequence. I didn’t know what he had or hadn’t done–I was pretty sure he was at a loss for what to do now.

  Which is where I thought I could help us both.

  “Roger, first rule of survival in something like this is to stay with the car, clear the tailpipe, and run the heater every quarter hour or so to keep from freezing.”

  “Okay.” It was pitched halfway between a statement and a question.

  “Can I see if the motor’ll turn over?”

  His face cleared slightly at the possibility of at least one certitude. “Sure.”

  Unfortunately, it didn’t last. The starter cranked several times, but it was obviously without hope.

  “I shoulda known,” he said mournfully. “Now what?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a bad storm–could last a while. Long enough to kill us if we stay here. I’d sooner risk walking back up the road. We might lose a few body parts to frostbite, but I think we’d make it. It’s only about ten miles to town.”

  He sighed and rubbed his forehead as if fighting a migraine. “We don’t have to do that,” he admitted.

  I sensed what he meant. “You know somewhere closer?”

  He spoke as if the words caused him pain. “There’s a place near here, about a mile.”

  “You didn’t put your car in a ditch?”

  “At the foot of the driveway.” He seemed ready to say more, but then closed his mouth.

  It was starting to get cold in the car, but I wanted to take advantage of the almost confessional setting to pry him further open.

  “You must’ve been pushing it hard.”

  “No shit,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  “What happened, Roger?”

  He brought his eyes reluctantly to mine. “What do you care? You’re not taking me in. We’ll go back there to survive this,” he waved his hand at the storm, “but then you’re getting hog tied and I’m disappearing.”

  “Why, if you didn’t do it?”

  He stared at me, startled. On one level, it was just an old cop trick–making the suspect think you believe him. But there was that nagging something about this man that made me think I might be right, too.

  “Who’s the woman we’ll think you killed?” I asked.

  “Jenny Mayhew, my ex-girlfriend. And I didn’t do it.”

  “Who did?”

  He was back to staring out into space. “I don’t know.”

  Now, I thought, was the time. “Take me there,” I told him.

  His voice regained some of its artificial strength and he waved the gun again. “Okay, but I’ll shoot you if you try anything. I’m not kidding around.”

  “I know,” I reassured him, content that he had no idea who was out to control whom.

  It took some doing to open the doors against the piled-up snow outside, and even more to get back up to the deserted roadway. I’d taken a flashlight from the back seat, but its effect was little better than my headlights had been earlier. Still, it did pick out the trees by the roadside, and thereby the direction we had to follow.

  That we did largely in silence, since the snow’s depth made for hard going. Also, the cold was intense, and although there was no measurable wind, the bite of frigid air in the nostrils and lungs had a numbing effect. Heavy, quiet snowfalls worked like incubators anyway, muffling enough of the surrounding world to where one’s breathing and heartbeat were finally the only life signs left. You ended up staring at your shadowy, blurred feet, watching their endlessly repetitive movement without any sense of progress. I had no trouble believing that soldiers could sleep on the march in similar circumstances–they simply yielded to the same intoxicants they’d been exposed to as sleepy infants–their own regular, rhythmic, biological patterns combined with the metronome of a parent’s steady gait, walking in circles in the middle of the night, trying to soothe a fussy babe in arms.

  Roger Blake was behind me through all this–his gun trained on me as I kept the light on the snow ahead–out of sight and eventually out of mind. I was startled when his voice suddenly intruded like a slamming door in the middle of a dream. “Here it is. Turn right.”

  There was a subtle break in the wall of silent, white-shrouded trees–a driveway barely wider than a track. Once along it about fifteen feet, we came across a heavily blanketed pickup truck, tilted drunkenly to one side as if taking a nap.

  “Up ahead,” Blake informed me dully. “About a hundred yards.”

  I saw the lights first, hovering like two dim fireflies beside one another. I was very cold by now, and tired, and chose to see in those small blotches of yellow the warmth and comfort I was seeking, regardless of what else it offered. Slowly, I was rewarded with the emergence of a small, one story cabin, two lighted windows bracketing a front door, accompanied by the scent of wood smoke in the air.

  There was also something else. The building looked vaguely familiar, its image scratching feebly at some memory long buried. I just couldn’t bring it back fully to mind.

  I stumbled up the narrow front steps and paused with my hand on the doorknob. “Okay?”

  Despite his effort to get here, Blake was hesitant, reminding me of the same effort he’d made to get away. I could appreciate the irony, but I sensed all he felt was dread.

  “I suppose.”

  For no reason I could immediately grasp, I responded to what I felt he wasn’t saying. “It’s okay. You’re not alone this time.”

  He didn’t answer. I opened the door and stepped into the light.

  The cabin’s embrace was such a relief from what we’d been slogging through for the past hour, that all we did initially was stand there, the door closed behind us, and let the heat from the wood stove soak through our snow-covered clothing. Finally, as if the same process were thawing my brain, I began to consider my predicament.

  So, apparently, did Blake.

  He prodded
me in the back with his gun. “Go sit in that armchair over there so I can tie you up.”

  We were standing in a small, square living room with a kitchenette lining its far wall, next to a door I assumed led to a back bedroom. The place didn’t smell too clean, was roughly furnished, and looked like a sampler for a building supplies outlet, its walls composed of an impressive and mismatched assortment of either unfinished sheet rock or wood panels ranging from fake mahogany to plastic-coated bamboo. The lamps on the walls were all kerosene fueled, and I recognized that both the slightly rusty fridge and the countertop cooking unit were gas fired. A wood stove squatted in the middle of the plywood floor, and now that I’d been here for a few minutes, I realized it was all but out.