Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  Franco had shown up ten minutes late with Baxter in the passenger seat. But now they were all here, and it felt like the beginning of something. Doug could feel the tension in the air and wasn’t sure if it was the pressure pushing ahead of the huge storm on the way or just the animosity burning off Baxter.

  Doug kept walking, leading the way along a path that vanished into the thick woods around the lake. When they plunged into the trees, the last of the daylight abandoned them, as if night had abruptly conquered the sun.

  “I asked you where we’re going,” Baxter said, an edge of danger and just a trace of nerves in his voice.

  “Take a breath, man,” Doug said. He pulled a flashlight from his coat and clicked it on, throwing a strong, bright splash of illumination onto the path ahead.

  Franco gave Doug a hard shove and he stumbled a bit, caught his toe on a rock jutting from the path, and nearly fell. Doug spun around and shone the flashlight in Franco’s face, Baxter like an angry ghost hovering just outside their pool of light.

  “What?” Franco demanded, grinning, eyes lit up with the violence that his kind of man always used to bludgeon the unknown.

  Doug knew that his growing assertiveness was making Franco nervous and didn’t give a damn.

  “You’ve got a decision to make,” Doug said, shining his light first on Franco and then on Baxter. “Are you going to shoot me? I’m not armed, boys. You want to put a bullet in me and leave me for the dogs back here, then do it.”

  Franco looked like he might.

  Doug glanced at Baxter, whose eyes were calmer. Baxter had his left hand stuffed in his jacket pocket but the right hand hung free, open but poised, ready to grab the gun that Doug had seen him jam into his rear waistband when he got out of the borrowed Audi back in the lot.

  “Ease up, D,” Baxter said. He gave a little sniff of amusement as if to suggest he was above it all. “If you’re gonna be this wound up, man, there’s no point in doing this job. Being with you is gonna be like walking through a mine field. We’re gonna be trying not to get arrested; we can’t be worrying about whether or not we put a foot wrong and you go off.”

  Doug nodded slowly, lowering the flashlight. All their faces were in shadow, now. The slivers of sky visible through the branches overhead had turned to indigo, except to the west, where striations of pink and orange were visible but fading fast.

  “Understood. But I can’t be worried about you two, either,” he said, glancing pointedly at Franco. “This is huge for me. For all of us. Huge risks along with huge rewards if we don’t fuck it up. I have a plan. I’m going to explain that plan to you. If you’re with me—”

  “With you?” Franco sneered.

  Baxter shot him a hard look. “Shut it.”

  “If you’re with me,” Doug went on, focusing on Baxter, who had been transformed by the deepening darkness into a creature of shadows, “then we do this thing together on Wednesday night. I’ve spent hours thinking about the angles of this thing, all the ways it could go wrong, and if we have the balls and a little luck, we’ll all be happy as pigs in shit come Thursday morning. On the other hand, if you don’t like my plan then you’re welcome to go your own way.”

  Baxter stepped nearer to him, close enough that the glow from the flashlight, which Doug still held pointed at the ground, gave strange contours to his face.

  “You’re saying we don’t like your plan then you’re out?”

  “That’s the way it’s gotta be.”

  “You think you know this shit better than me?” Baxter said, eyes narrowing. “You’re an amateur. You know how many houses I’ve robbed?”

  Doug did not flinch. Instead, he thought of Cherie and of Angie, and of the new life he wanted for himself. The life he deserved.

  “You know how many times I’ve been in prison?” he asked, chin high, close enough to smell the garlic on Baxter’s breath. “None.”

  Franco snorted. “Motherfucker can’t be serious.”

  Baxter tilted his head. Doug felt the violence radiating from him like body heat. The last color in the sky drained away as they stared at each other and now Franco might as well not have been there at all. In the reflected glow of the flashlight, it was just the two of them.

  “I have a plan,” Doug repeated. “Do you want to hear it?”

  Baxter gave a slow nod. “All right. Enlighten us.”

  Doug turned away, shining the flashlight on the path ahead. “Follow me.”

  He thought Franco might bitch a little more but it turned out that Baxter had the leash on his attack dog a little tighter than Doug had realized, because Franco didn’t say a word as Doug led them along the snowy path. The warmth of the day had softened the snow but as they trudged through deeper woods, following a path that branched off to the right—away from the lake—the icy crust crunched underfoot.

  After a minute or two without a word among them, Doug used the flashlight to pick out an even narrower path, again on the right. They had to duck beneath some low branches to follow it.

  “This better be good,” Franco said.

  Doug kept walking. When the path began to lighten ahead he turned off the flashlight and a moment later they emerged from the woods at the bottom of a snowy hill. An old house sprawled above them, its roofline painted darker by the light of the early-evening moon. The house was dark except for a single, small window that might have been the kitchen.

  He turned to face his companions. His fellow thieves.

  “I don’t think you knew her, Bax, but back in high school there was this girl in my class named Tallie Hawes. Short for Natalie. Cute girl who never met a douche bag she didn’t like. Married Andy Porter, who I hated back then and who lived up to all of my expectations for him. Rich, arrogant, executive for some bank or finance company or whatever.”

  Baxter smiled. “So this is, what, payback? You want to rob him because he shit on you in high school? I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  Doug returned the smile, feeling good. Feeling fine. Thinking of Angie waiting in his bed.

  “Nah. I don’t want to rob Tallie. Shitty taste in guys, but she was always kinda sweet.”

  “They’re not customers at the garage,” Franco said.

  “No. They’re not. I actually grew up in this city, man. I know a lot of people who don’t bring their cars to Timmy Harpwell.” Doug pointed off to the left, beyond the big, rambling house. “If you look, you can see the peak of another building back there. That’s the stable. The Porters don’t have horses, but the previous owners did.”

  He expected Franco to make a crack about him wanted to be Butch Cassidy or something, rob trains from horseback, but to his surprise the bastard seemed to be paying attention at last.

  Doug took a step nearer to them, boots crunching snow. “There are four snowmobiles in there and plenty of gas.” He pointed up the hill, where a tall snowbank marked the bottom of Pinewood Circle. “You go up the street, right across the road up there, and in a couple of minutes you’re in some more woods, only the paths up there bring you right up to the backyards on Winchester Street. Three of the houses on our list are on the near side of the road. If this storm knocks out the power—and from the look of it, that’s a pretty good bet—then we come in through the trees, go in through the back, and we may end up with a haul so big we don’t bother with the other two houses. But if the night’s going well and we feel safe enough, those other two are a few hundred yards down Winchester and then up Emerald Road.”

  He turned and gestured back the way they’d come. “We need a truck, something with power. Chains on the tires and plow blade on the front. We park in the lot by the lake and if anyone goes by, they’ll think it’s some driver on the city dollar taking a nap. We do the job, use the snowmobiles to get everything back to the truck, plow ourselves out if we have to, and we’re home free.”

  Baxter had a different sort of smile now, a distant expression that spoke of the future. He was already there, thinking about th
e haul.

  “What about your friends, the Porters?” Franco said. “They’re just gonna let us take their snowmobiles?”

  Doug glanced again at the dark house. “They’ll never know. They’re in Florida for the whole month.”

  “You know this?” Baxter asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Completely.”

  Franco narrowed his eyes. “How do you know?”

  “Same way I know those snowmobiles are in the stable,” Doug said, cocky now, not able to help it. “Facebook makes people very stupid.”

  Baxter actually laughed and after a second Franco did, too.

  “You know we need to confirm,” Baxter said. “Get into the stable, make sure the damn things run and that there’s enough gas.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Doug replied. He cocked his head. “Does that mean you’re in?”

  “In?” Baxter said, glancing at Franco. “Fuck, yes, we’re in.”

  “We’re in,” Franco confirmed. “If that storm hits as hard as they’re saying, the power’ll be out for days. Most of those rich pricks will do what they always do—head up to Vermont, stay in a fucking ski chalet or something until things are back to normal.”

  Baxter held out his hand. Doug didn’t like him and definitely didn’t trust him, but he couldn’t fight the sense of triumph that made his chest swell. He shook, but Baxter used the grip to yank him closer. The ex-con’s eyes blazed with flint and fire.

  “It’s a good plan, Doug,” he said, his growling. “Just don’t get ahead of yourself. We go when I say go. This is my show.”

  A tremor of fear went through Doug, but he fought it off. He had too much riding on this to be intimidated. If the night went the way he planned it, he could finally put his past to rest. His hometown had treated him like he was nobody. In his darkest hours, no one had so much as extended a hand. Coventry owed him, and as soon as he collected, he would put the whole city in his rearview.

  Except Angie, he thought. Could be she wants a fresh start somewhere, too.

  “I don’t have any interest in being the boss,” Doug said. “This is it for me. We do this and I’m gone. So, yeah, it’s your show, man. As long as you’re good with the plan, I’ll follow your lead.”

  Baxter squeezed his hand too tightly, shook, and then let go.

  “All right then,” he said, turning to glance at Franco and then looking up at the clear, moonlit sky. “Now all we need is the storm.”

  Within Coventry’s city limits there were four bridges that spanned the Merrimack River. The least traveled of these was Farmer’s Bridge, named for its original use as the primary route for local farmers to bring their goods to the downtown market in an era when a Farmer’s Market hadn’t been something middle-class suburbanites attended on leisure Sunday afternoons.

  Trees leaned out over the water on both sides of the river and covered much of the bridge with shade. Joe Keenan liked to think of it as the Forgotten Bridge, because so many people ignored it. Many people who had settled in Coventry over the past decade or so were barely aware that it existed. The two primary river crossings had been rebuilt in those years and were wide and modern and had black, wrought-iron streetlamps along their lengths. The Farmer’s Bridge seemed like a relic of the past, connecting old farm roads on either side of the river, neighborhoods whose houses dated back seventy years or more. One either had to know how to find it or stumble upon it by accident, and even then crossing the bridge seemed more quaint than practical, as it was only barely wide enough for two full-size vehicles to pass each other by.

  The Farmer’s Bridge—the Forgotten Bridge—had been Keenan’s thinking spot for his entire life. As a child he had walked here with his mother and played Pooh Sticks, the simplest game ever invented, which they had taken from the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh. They would take small sticks and drop them into the river, then rush across the street and watch to see whose stick floated out from underneath the first. Keenan cherished those memories of his mother, who’d been the most patient woman in the world. She had made the game seem both exciting and important, and they had both received a kind of sweet grace from the playing of it. A calm in their hearts.

  His mother had been dead for thirteen years. He stood on the Forgotten Bridge and looked down at the icy river and could not bring himself to throw anything into the swath of open water, not even the broken stick he held in one hand. Just the thought of doing so made him picture pale arms struggling and a small head bobbing along with chunks of ice, cheeks turning blue, fingers reaching as he went down, carried under the bridge and emerging seconds later, floating, spinning lazily on the current, dead eyes staring up eternally at the night sky.

  Headlights washed across the bridge and Keenan turned, shielding his eyes, and spotted a police cruiser rolling toward him. He’d parked his unmarked at the other end of the bridge and walked out here, needing time to himself. Time away from his phone and his radio and memories of past storms and fears of those yet to come. As he saw the cruiser, a flutter of trepidation hit him. The idea that a cop would be driving across this forgotten bridge while he was there seemed even less likely than that someone had come looking for him with news of Zachary Stroud. Could the boy have been found?

  When the car rolled to a halt and he bent to peer in at Harley Talbot, he knew from the officer’s expression that he’d been wrong to hope.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” he asked.

  Harley arched an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same.”

  “You could. How did you know to look for me here?”

  “Finch told me you used to come out here all the time back in the day.”

  Keenan knew what he meant. Back in the months—hell, the first couple of years—after the storm that had killed Gavin Wexler and Charlie Newell and so many others, he had visited Farmer’s Bridge often, tossing sticks into the water and not bothering to run across to see them float out the other side. The rushing water had brought him peace as he pondered the knowledge that all things were a river, every moment carried away from us, forever beyond reach. It had helped.

  “Finch,” Keenan said. “I wouldn’t have figured him for the observant type.”

  Only the older cops, like Finch and Lieutenant Duquette, would have remembered Keenan’s visits to the bridge. But none of them had troubled himself to come out looking for him. Harley Talbot wasn’t just a good cop. He was a good man.

  “I guess you know they’ve basically called off the search,” Harley said, pain in his eyes.

  “I heard.”

  “I tried calling you.”

  Keenan gestured toward the end of the bridge. “I left my phone. Radio, too.”

  “Needed some downtime,” Harley said, smiling sheepishly. “And here I am screwing that up for you.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  A line appeared on Harley’s forehead. In the light from his dashboard, the massive cop looked grimly unhappy.

  “Storm’s coming in day after tomorrow,” Harley said. “They’ll have a skeleton crew out searching tomorrow and then they’re done. Tomorrow the word will go out that we believe he may have drowned in the river, let the public know we’ve chalked it up as a drowning.”

  “Of course,” Keenan said bitterly.

  “Look, Detective, I figured you’d have heard already but I wanted to tell you face-to-face that I’m with you on this.”

  “What do you mean, ‘with’ me?”

  Harley smiled. “I know you don’t think this kid went into the water, so, officially or not, you’re gonna keep looking.”

  Keenan glanced out at the water for a moment, watched slabs of ice floating along the river in the moonlight.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna keep looking,” he said. “Maybe that’s because I’ve seen too many dead kids and I just can’t take another one. I get the impression that’s what Marco Torres thinks.”

  “Torres is a punk.”

  Keenan smiled. “Doesn’t make him wrong. This whole thing coul
d just be wishful thinking on my part. The kid’s probably in the river.”

  “Probably,” Harley agreed.

  Keenan shot him a hard look, eyes narrowed. “Is that what you think?”

  Engine idling, dashboard lights turning his skin indigo blue, Harley frowned.

  “I think every hour that passes it’s more likely that the Stroud boy is dead. But I saw the accident scene and I have a hard time thinking the kid just stumbled into the water. My gut says no.”

  Keenan nodded. “Exactly. If this kid’s still alive, then someone saw him. Someone knows where he is.”

  “Like I said, I’m with you.”

  “Thanks for that,” Keenan said. “Really.”

  “But you’re not going to find him tonight,” Harley added. “Get in. I’ll run you to your car.”

  Keenan hesitated, the broken stick in his hand taking on a strange new weight. He turned back to the railing, glanced at the icy water, and tossed the stick down into the churning current. He pulled open the cruiser’s passenger door and climbed in. As Harley drove him the rest of the length of the bridge, he felt a pang of regret that he had not raced across the bridge to see whether it came out the other side.

  Maybe it’s better not to know, he thought, gazing out the car window at the gauzy halo around the moon. At least then there’s still hope.

  FIFTEEN

  Miri’s flight left Seattle at quarter to seven on Tuesday morning. She was used to rising early, but the buzz of her alarm at four A.M. had left her with bleary eyes and a persistent grumble until halfway through the flight, when she managed to drift off for a couple of hours of additional sleep. There had been seats available on later flights, but they had been more expensive and, with the monster blizzard all the weather reports showed moving toward New England, she wanted to get safely on the ground as soon as possible.

  By the time she had landed and waited in line to pick up her rental car, it was a few minutes after five P.M.—the time change obliterating any hope of seeing daylight today. She had arrived at the airport in Seattle in the dark that morning, and night had already returned by the time she drove away from Logan Airport, in Boston, that afternoon. A glimpse out the window at the sky assured her that she wouldn’t have seen much sun even if she’d arrived hours earlier. The thick of the storm might not be scheduled to arrive until after midnight, but the roiling clouds hung pregnant above and occasional flurries blew around the rented Ford, as if the storm was waiting just above the clouds, so full that the small flakes kept slipping through prematurely.