by Chris Rogers
“Probably stepped on a patch of black ice back there,” Dann mumbled around his hamburger.
Sure was a talkative bastard.
A shock of wind slapped the side of the car, sending it scudding across the road. Startled, Dixie clenched the wheel and took her foot off the gas until the car righted itself. It had swerved only a few inches into the other lane, but the incident left her shaken. Crosswinds could be devastating. She had battled them on Texas flatlands, usually during spring or fall, not dead of winter; never on icy pavement. She slowed to forty.
“Black ice,” Dann was saying, “dangerous stuff. Slick as oiled glass…”
At forty miles an hour, Dixie calculated, we’ll make Watertown in three hours, Sioux Falls in five.
“… builds up in thin sheets. So clear you see the pavement through it and don’t notice you’re on ice until it’s spinning you nine ways to Sunday.”
The entire sky now roiled with clouds, forward horizon as murky as the one behind. Folks at the diner hadn’t been joking when they called it a devil of a storm. Dixie nudged her speed back up to forty-five. She wanted to be clear of this mess before dark.
The buzz-saw sound of Dann’s snoring drifted from the backseat. Much better than listening to his prattle. The next twenty hours would be nerve-racking enough without his voice to grind on her. A dismal damn way to spend Christmas Eve.
At home, she could be finishing her Christmas shopping, buying batteries for Ryan’s new remote control model airplane. Recalling her nephew’s beaming face the day they’d come upon the Cessna in the hobby store, Dixie smiled.
“If I had this, Aunt Dix, we could go flying together!”
One day while exploring the attic, he’d seen Dixie’s identical model, a gift from Barney her first Christmas after the adoption. With visions of dueling Cessnas, and showing off her model-flying skills, Dixie had waited until Ryan’s interest was captured by a rack of CDs, then skulked back to have the Cessna wrapped and shipped to Amy’s. What were kids for, after all, if not a chance to relive the best parts of our own lives?
Dixie glanced at the sun visor, where she had clipped the Christmas snapshot of the Keyes girls. Dixie had been just a year older than Betsy the day her blood mother, Carla Jean, dropped her on the doorstep of Founders Home and disappeared—the best thing that could have happened. Within a month, Barney and Kathleen rescued Dixie, and a few months later, their lawyer tracked down Carla Jean to sign the adoption papers. Withdrawn at first, Dixie had soon warmed to the love that permeated her new home. Amy was fifteen, and the two girls became inseparable.
Dixie’s gaze flicked once more to the big grins in the Keyes snapshot. Living with the Flannigans had erased the horrors of her first twelve years. But Betsy’s young life had been snuffed before it had a chance.
The buzz saw in the backseat grew quiet, made a few rustling, clanking noises, and resumed snoring.
According to the dash clock, Dixie’d been driving half an hour, but had travled barely twenty miles. Maybe Omaha-by-midnight was a trifle ambitious.
A crust of ice covered the windshield outside the fan-shaped area scraped clear by the wipers. That same icy crust would be building up on the pavement. Her arms ached from fighting the crosswind. Her eyes felt grainy and raw from the tiresome whiteness.
She closed them briefly for relief….
Snapped them open again.
Damn, she needed sleep!
Jabbing the radio’s ON button, she set the scanner to search for a local station. It swept the band, found nothing but static. Dixie turned up the volume, rotated the tuning dial, and picked up a few words. They faded. Her next sweep got only dead air.
Turning it off, she listened instead to the hum of the heater fan… the scrape, scrape, scrape of the wipers…
A grunt from the backseat signaled her prisoner’s awakening. Snow fell so furiously now that Dixie could scarcely see past the hood. The Mustang’s speed had dropped to thirty, and they’d traveled fewer than fifty miles since leaving the diner.
“Look at those taillights,” Dann said suddenly. “See them up ahead there?”
Dixie could barely make out the twin red specks. Where had they come from?
“That’s a truck. A big one. Lights are too high off the ground for anything else. Probably turned in from one of the state roads.”
You mean there’s another fool on this highway? Dixie had begun to think the world ended at the Grandin Diner.
“If you catch those taillights,” Dann said, “we can travel in the truck’s wake…”
Like riding behind the windshield wipers.
“… plow right along behind him all the way to Watertown. Yep, catch those taillights, we might make it.”
The distance between the Mustang and those red lights was tantamount to leaping the Grand Canyon. The truck driver must have been going fifty, at least. Dixie nudged the Mustang to forty and instantly felt the tires lose their traction, the same way she’d lost her footing on the icy sidewalk. The brutal crosswind threatened to blow them into Iowa.
Yet those taillights were the only sign of life Dixie had seen in nearly an hour. Tightening her grip on the steering wheel, she pushed her speed past forty, past forty-five.
She’d driven through stretches of Texas as desolate as this, miles of highway without passing a car, no sign of a town, nothing to break the monotony but fence posts, road signs, and, from time to time, a cow lumbering along the road. Here, even the fence posts were buried.
A bleak white emptiness stretched all around, the delineation between highway and prairie no longer discernible. Dixie felt like an ant skating on whipped cream. Only her intuition and the occasional reflector kept the Mustang from running off the road.
A flash of movement streaked across the highway.
Dixie stomped the brake—
The steering wheel whipped through her hands.
The car spun out of control—whirling in sickening, gut-wrenching circles—skidded sideways, tires skimming the ice like new skates, gliding, sailing, sliding—and whammed bumper-deep into a snowbank.
“Dammit to hell, woman. You sure know how to make a bad day worse.”
Chapter Nine
In the rearview mirror, which had jolted sideways, Dixie’s eyes were dark pinpoints of strain, her complexion ash-gray. A tiny muscle twitched beside her mouth. Her hands were shaking. She tightened her grip on the wheel.
What a damn dumbass predicament. She knew better than to stomp the brake.
“Must’ve been a deer” Dann commented. “Lot of white-tail around these parts.”
The engine had died, and the sudden quiet stretched like a vast cotton blanket, broken only by the relentless wind whistling at the window. With the fog lights off, Dixie realized how much the sky had darkened in only an hour.
“Natural reaction, you know. Stomping the brake like that. Been a real mess if you’d hit that deer.”
Dann’s words triggered a rerun in Dixie’s mind of the sudden streak of movement across the highway. This time she felt the impact, heard the crunch of glass, saw the Mustang smashed, herself unconscious… snow, blowing through the broken window, burying her still form, while her prisoner froze to death in the backseat… the Mustang slowly disappearing into an endless white terrain.
She wiped a hand across her face to dispel the image.
“You ever hit a deer?” she asked quietly, suddenly needing to hear a voice. Dann’s voice, she’d noticed, was resonant and oddly pleasing. Most of all, it was warm and human. The only thing she could think of worse than being stuck in the middle of God knows where in a blizzard was being stuck and alone.
“Nope, not a deer. Knew a guy hit a horse, though. Bashed up the front of his rig, put himself in the hospital.”
“What about the horse?”
“Dead.”
Dixie grimaced. True, they could be in worse trouble. But the thought offered little comfort.
She turned the key to start the engine. When
it cranked right up, she heaved a sigh of relief, shifted into reverse, and stepped lightly on the gas. The Mustang kicked up a spurt of snow, started to pull out—then the tires whirled in place.
“Damn it all!” She killed the engine.
“Lady—”
Dixie opened the car door, had to shove it hard to clear the drift. The wind’s fury pushed her back, but her own fury won out. She slammed the door, sank knee-deep in snow, felt it trickle over the tops of her boots.
Sucking in a breath of frigid air, she kicked her way through the snow to the edge of the highway, almost relishing the dull ache in her lungs. Any feeling, even the worst pain, was better than the helpless reeling as the Mustang spun across the ice. Dixie closed her eyes. Instantly she was a child hugging the rail at a roller rink, small, nauseated with fear, yet determined not to let panic get the best of her. A common phobia, a doctor had assured her once, akin to one of only two fears humans are born with—fear of loud noise and fear of falling. Dixie wasn’t fond of loud noises, but she got white-knuckled terrified at losing control.
All right. So she had momentarily lost control of her car. All she had to do was put it back on the road and start driving. She was in South Dakota, after all, not the frozen tundra.
As if mocking her, the wind gusted fiercely, knocking her off balance. Dixie braced so hard against it—teeth clenched, hands fisted as if to punch the wind back in its corner—that when the gust abruptly let up, she fell forward on one knee.
“Hah! At least I didn’t fall on my Texas ass this time!” she yelled at the sky.
The wind lapped up her words and spit them into the distance.
Catching a glimpse of Dann’s face at the car window, Dixie flushed. Well, if he believes he’s traveling with a crazy woman, maybe he’ll think twice before trying anything stupid. Nevertheless, it was time to stop railing and find a way out of this mess.
A four-pronged diagonal rut marked the Mustang’s path where the tires had skidded treacherously into the drift. Snow had leveled the ditches and turned the fence rows to hills. If she was right, the car had landed on the opposite side of the road, headed in the wrong direction from where they started. The car, buried to its bumper, canted downhill.
Teeth chattering hard enough to bite off her tongue, Dixie scanned the distance for signs of life. A tow truck would sure as hell be welcome, But nothing stirred, except for the wind and snow.
Then out of the wind came a low moaning, like the bleat of a foghorn. Shielding her eyes against the flurry of snow-flakes, she peered toward the sound. At first all she saw was a frenzied blur of twisting, whirling whiteness; then a brown patch shifted into view.
When the moaning sounded again, instinctive dread pulsed at the back of her neck. Behind her, Dann rapped on the window. Dixie ignored him, trying to discern the source of the moaning. When it came again, recognition struck like a wet snowball. A cow, you ignorant city fool.
But one cow wouldn’t present such a wide mass of brown. A number of cows, then. Hadn’t she heard that sheep and cattle would bunch against a fence on the downwind side of a storm—especially a sudden and violent storm? Each animal pushed mindlessly ahead until they sometimes smothered one another in panic.
Dixie’s teeth, chattering like castanets, began to ache. The biting cold stung her face. She tugged open the car door and sank onto the seat.
“Two things” Dann said. “Here’s what’s happening under the car right now…”He paused a beat. When she didn’t respond, he continued. “Residual exhaust heat is melting the snow. As fast as it melts, the wind freezes it again while the car’s weight compresses it. Soon we’ll be stuck in ice. I’ll give you one guess which is easier to get out of.”
Maybe trying to get out wasn’t the best idea. She’d played a game once called “Lost in the Arctic.” Survival hinged on whether to stay put and wait for rescue or to start walking. Players who elected to walk died.
Watertown was a hundred miles ahead of them, hours ahead, considering driving conditions that worsened by the minute. Even if she succeeded in getting the Mustang back on the road, what made her think she could keep it there?
Parker Dann had grown up with this sort of weather in Montana. He would know a hell of a lot more than she did about surviving it.
“You said two things,” she reminded him.
“If you’re considering waiting out the storm, you may as well shoot us both and save us a lot of misery.”
She turned to look at him through the steel mesh.
“You think it’s cold now,” he said. “Wait till the sun goes down. That Levi jacket you’re wearing is better than my shirt, but not by much.”
She eyed his brown flannel shirt and the thick down-filled parka that lay beside him on the seat.
“If we sit here,” he continued, “we’ll have to run the heater to keep from freezing. We’ll be out of gas before daylight. Or dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“What about rescue trucks?”
“Sure, there’ll be a few snowmobiles out. But unless you have a CB radio hidden in the glove box, Flannigan, we’ve no way to signal for help.”
She had a CB, all right, a portable. It’d been useful during the drive up, for maintaining contact with her patrol buddies through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. But here in South Dakota, where she had no friends on a police force, and no contract to legitimize her picking up Dann, a potential kidnapping charge was a very real possibility.
“Stay here,” Dann said, “and by morning we’ll be just another snowdrift.”
The thought of being buried alive turned her bowels to water. Was Dann counting on that? She had noticed his subtle shift from “you” to “we.” Was he baiting her, betting on her inexperience for a chance to escape?
“Okay, snowbird, do you have a suggestion for getting out of this ditch?”
“Got anything in the trunk to dig with?”
“Wrenches, screwdrivers. A claw hammer, maybe. No shovel.”
“We can cut the top off this plastic water bottle. Use it as a scoop.”
Better yet, she had a gallon jug of laundry detergent in the trunk that she forgot to carry in after yesterday’s shopping trip. Since they were likely to freeze before needing clean underwear, she supposed the detergent was expendable. “Okay, so we have something to dig with. Now what?”
“Scoop the fresh snow away from the tires, then straighten the front wheels. We’ll try to take it out on the same ruts it made going in, but first we’ll have to find some gravel—or dirt, whatever—to throw under the tires for traction. Chances are they’re sitting on weeks of packed snow and ice from earlier storms.”
A light blinked on in Dixie’s mind. This was the same drill she’d use to get unstuck from Texas mud, except there she’d look for scraps of wood to wedge under the tires. She’d lived that scene often enough to know exactly what to do. If she could get out of a Texas mud hole, she could sure as hell get out of a snowdrift. Turning up her collar, she reached for the door handle.
Dann slammed his palm against the steel mesh. “Hey! Aren’t you going to let me out of here?”
And have him knock her in the head first chance he got? She might know zip about blizzards, but she knew plenty about skips. In Houston, Dann was ninety-nine percent convicted, and his running would clinch the jury’s decision. Only a fool would return willingly; Parker Dann was nobody’s fool. Either he’d leave her here to freeze, or he’d lock her in the trunk and dump her at the first town on his way to Canada.
“Dann, your part in this project is to continue offering sage advice. You might also pray a little.”
“Aw, lady…”
She pushed the door handle and felt the first blast of cold.
“Hey!” Dann held up his parka. “At least take this. If you freeze, neither one of us gets out of here.”
Dixie nodded and lowered the back driver-side window enough for him to push the coat through. It was too big, only the elastic cuffs preventing the sleeves
from hanging to her knees, but once she was zipped into it, she felt a damn sight better about digging in the snow. Turning back, she opened the door again to flip the trunk latch.
“Find some big rocks,” Dann instructed. “Pile them in the trunk for weight.”
“Right.” Dixie squinted into the wind, wondering how to tell a rock from a clump of old cow dung when everything was buried under a swirling white coat.
Twenty-two minutes later, she yanked the door open and slid across the seat, pain needling her nose and fingers, feet numb inside her boots. Dann had been right about ice forming under the car. The top layer of snow had already started to crust over. She’d dug through it, though, scraping away fresh powder until she hit the packed snow that formed solid ground. She still needed some gravel to throw under the tires, but her hands had stiffened until she could scarcely bend her fingers. They had to warm up some before she could dig again.
She skinned off her frozen gloves and jammed her fists into the pockets of Dann’s parka. Better. But she couldn’t afford the luxury of sitting still for long. She glanced in the mirror; Dann was watching her through the mesh barrier, a cynical amusement in his eyes.
“Got a pair of dry gloves back there?” She’d noticed a pair stuffed in a pocket of his coat before pushing it through the mesh opening earlier.
“Wouldn’t need the gloves if you’d let me help. Be back on the highway by now.”
“Just hand me the gloves, Dann.” She fumbled the keys from the ignition switch and opened the mesh panel.
Dann handed the gloves through, then hooked his fingers over the bottom edge of the opening. “It’s getting cold back here. How about a cup of that coffee?”
Eyeing the thermos, Dixie decided a few sips would be welcome before braving the cold again, and she supposed she owed Dann something for the use of his coat. She observed a rigid set of rules, however, when transporting skips.
“Move your hand away from the screen,” she said.
