by Henry, Sue
“Hampton’s from Colorado. He’ll be used to driving in snow. They may get farther than you think.”
“That’s true, and his driving ability may be the only thing that saves them a lot of grief. But that Charlie is a Californian, who has probably no more than heard a rumor of snow a time or two in his whole life. He’ll think it’ll be like it was here before they left…have no idea what a real blizzard can be. I hope they don’t make it far. After they climb the first hills, for a long ways it’s pretty flat and all they could do is slide off into a drift. After that, if they get out along the ridges, it’ll turn really mean, windchill will be more than I’d want to risk.
“If Hampton’s driving, which is the only thing that makes sense, if he didn’t go willingly, as you suggested, and the city kid hijacked him and his truck, he may have the smarts to sort of accidentally-on-purpose put his rig in the ditch and wait to be found.”
“But he won’t know we’ve figured out where they are.”
“True.”
The door opening put an end to their speculations for the moment.
Jensen did not immediately recognize the woman standing just inside the door, which closed itself behind her. If it had not been for the too large, tattered, red jacket that he had seen briefly that afternoon, he might not have known it was Cherlyn Wilson, Will’s wife, from up the river. She once again clutched the jacket around her thin body, with fingers blue from the cold, cradling an arm against her body. Her ragged tennis shoes and denim pants with the hole in one knee were familiar, but her face was beyond identification without careful scrutiny. Swollen and bruised around the cheeks, her lower lip oozing a little blood from a split clearly caused by some blow, she stood looking in at the two officers through eyes puffed half shut.
“Mon Dieu,” Delafosse exclaimed, it definitely being his night for French, and Alex came swiftly to his feet at the sight of her. Drawing her quickly into the warmth of the office, they sat her down close to the light to examine her injuries. His lips tight with anger, the inspector asked her assailant’s identity. “Duck Wilson?”
She nodded wearily, tears escaping to run down her ruined face, but there was no mistaking the fury in her voice and the slits that were her eyes when she mumbled her response past the damaged lower lip. “Old bastard’s mad about Will. Took it out on me…son of a bitch.”
“How’d you get here?”
“…drank himself to sleep…took his boat…’ll miss it tomorrow.”
Motioning Jensen to care for the girl, Delafosse stepped to the phone. In quick succession he called a local doctor—“That lip’s going to need a stitch or two, I think”—and Clair McSpadden—“Please, Clair, I need your help.”
They arrived at almost the same time, no more than a quarterhour later. Clair had plainly been roused from sleep, for her tousled auburn hair was piled haphazardly atop her head, wisps and tendrils escaping a hasty pinning. Jensen caught the appreciative look on Del’s face at the sight of her, and smiled to himself, but she was all business and concern for Cherlyn, who, it seemed, she already knew.
“Men,” she stated tersely, with an arm around the younger woman’s shoulders, while the doctor examined the split lip and bruises. “Especially dirty old ones.”
“You do need some repair on your lip to avoid a scar,” the doctor acknowledged, ignoring the slur on his sex. “And I want to X-ray that arm. Let’s get you over to my office.”
Cherlyn straightened in the chair and looked up at Delafosse.
“Got to tell you first,” she said. “Something funny about Duck and Charlie.”
“Charlie? The kid that was with Will?”
“Yeah, Duck kicked him out…this afternoon…beat him up good. Duck knows all about Will getting shot. I think he did it…or Charlie.”
The doctor interrupted, frowning. “Can’t this wait? I’d like to get started on this before it swells any more. She needs some medication for pain; that’s got to hurt a lot the more it warms up.”
Delafosse started to nod, but Cherlyn shook her head stubbornly.
“No. Got to tell you. Think I’m going to be really sick and you’ve got to know…now. This time I want you to get him.”
“Okay. Okay. But make it short. Then we’ll fix you up and find you a place to stay.”
“She’s coming home with me,” Clair said, in a tone that would brook no argument, but with an anxious glance at their medical authority. “If the doc’ll let her.”
He frowned, then nodded. “Probably.”
“Good.”
Delafosse pulled another chair up close and glanced at Jensen, who was ready to take notes. “Now, tell me just what you need to, Cherlyn. We’ll take care of Duck Wilson. You don’t need to worry about that, if you’ll sign a complaint.”
She nodded slightly and told him the rest. From her sentence fragments and interpretation from the inspector, the information was quite rapidly given and recorded.
“…said if I told anybody, he’d get me. Will and Charlie…working for someone in Whitehorse…stealing trucks and campers. Someone got hurt…died. Came home to hide out.”
Del glanced again at Alex. “You were right.”
“Charlie came after you were there…afternoon. Said something about some bones…. Duck beat him up…said to get the tourist to tell where he found them. Something about the bones…made him crazy mad. Somebody stole his father’s gold and Duck wants it back….”
“Father? Whose father?” Jensen interjected a question.
“Duck’s…Ozzy…in the gold rush.”
“Oswald Wilson again,” he murmured.
“Don’t know…whole family…looking for years. Some journal…he wanted Charlie to find out about. Lot of gold…somewhere.”
“The breakin at the hotel, Del?”
“Has to be. Where’s Charlie, Cherlyn? Do you know?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “Somewhere in town, I guess. Went after the tourist…like Duck said. Mad…though. Said looking for hundred-year-old gold was nuts…he was getting out of this damn icebox…may have gone. Don’t know.”
“Do you know for sure that Duck shot Will?”
“No…Knows something about it. Charlie too.”
She was visibly slumping in the chair with exhaustion and pain.
“That’s enough. Anything else can wait till morning. Right?”
The doctor began to help her up, when Jensen stepped in and carefully lifted her. “Where’s your car, Doc? I’ll put her in it.”
“I’ll be right behind you. She can stay at my place. No one, even Duck, would think of looking there, or would get around the shotgun my father taught me to use.” Clair followed them out the door and in minutes they were gone, leaving only Delafosse and Jensen at the office to sort out the information Cherlyn Wilson had insisted on giving them.
“Nothing weak about that one, is there?” Jensen commented, as they sat back down with fresh coffee.
“Yes. She’ll use that shotgun, too, if she has to.”
“I meant Cherlyn, Del.” Alex grinned, but refrained from the obvious comment. “How did she ever wind up married to Will? And is everyone in Dawson getting beat up tonight? What is it? A full moon?”
“I don’t even want to know. I’ve no idea how Cherlyn and Will got together, but it was a distinct mistake. Clair met her a year or so ago, when she was in town for some reason, and has worried ever since about her being out there all alone with Duck and his shadow of an old woman, with Will in jail. Not that he made anything but trouble when he was at home, but the old man likes to hit on, or just hit, whoever’s handy, as you could see. I’ll send someone out to bring him in tomorrow. Like to get a whack at him myself, the old buzzard.”
“Somehow I just can’t think that Duck would shoot his grandson. Charlie may answer several questions for us, when we catch up with him.”
“Well, at least we get a break on the vehicle theft. Get Charlie and we can put some pressure on to find out who’s running th
e thing out of Whitehorse. At least we know where Charlie is, don’t we?”
“Oh, yes. Totally out of reach for the moment. I hope Hampton’s okay. It’s going to get cold up there tonight. Miserable place to be stuck, and they are surely stuck by now.”
Chapter Eighteen
HAMPTON AND CHARLIE WERE NOT STUCK, but would be in a very short time. For the moment, they were still in motion on the Top of the World Highway, headed west toward Alaska at a slow speed, in the middle of one of the worst blizzards Hampton had ever experienced.
He was driving, or attempting to. Though the windshield wipers were going full speed, they scarcely made a difference in the snow that seemed to come from every direction at once as the wind whipped across the stark, treeless hills beyond the beams of the truck’s headlights. It was growing darker, deeper, and colder by the minute. Earlier, when the storm paused now and then to draw breath, he had seen glimpses of nothing but endless white drifts in an empty landscape that sloped away from the top of the ridge the road seemed to follow and cling to.
“Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” Charlie whined, not for the first time. “We’re not hardly moving. They’ll be after us.”
“How do you expect them to come after us with the ferry on our side of the river?” Hampton asked. “You can see the road as well as I can, or rather, not see it. You want to drive?”
“No way, man. This is unreal. Just get us out of it and to somewhere I can catch a plane to anyplace warm.” He gestured with the Smith & Wesson .44 in one hand. “Get it going, man.”
“Oh, shove it, Charlie. Shoot me and you’ve got no one to drive. I’m going as fast as I can, unless you want us in the ditch.”
In fact, as Delafosse had correctly guessed, Hampton had been contemplating how to ditch the truck for quite some time. Only the fact that he had no idea what Charlie would do with the gun if he didn’t keep the truck in some kind of forward motion kept him from twisting the wheel and plunging them off the road on one side or the other. It was clear that Charlie was desperate. So he used the barely perceptible depressions of the barrow pits on each side of the road as guides and kept the truck moving between them at a snail’s pace on the snow-clogged gravel surface. He didn’t like the idea of being shot here, where medical assistance was guaranteed to be unavailable, and watched his traveling companion closely as he drove. Hampton was tired, furious, increasingly cold and worried. He resented Charlie’s having kidnapped him from the bar where he waited for Jensen, but the pressure of the .44 in his ribs had been enough to keep him still and make him go along with the kid to his own truck, where his anger was reinforced by evidence of the breakin.
Though the temperature on the pass had fallen to just above zero degrees, outside the windchill dropped it to somewhere around minus fifty. Winds above forty miles an hour have little additional effect on lowering the temperature. The temperature of that truck’s cab now hovered close to freezing as the wind found every tiny opening through which to suck out warm air the instant it escaped the heater, turned as high as it would go and still practically useless.
Moisture from the breath of the two men had frozen on the windows until the side and rear were completely frosted over and only the lower half of the windshield could be kept clear where the heater melted two spaces just large enough to peer through. Driving with his nose almost against the top of the wheel helped him see, but bent him forward in a position that made his neck and back ache as if they were broken. Anger and concern added tension to the discomfort.
His only relief was not having to worry about any other vehicle on the road. No one else would be idiot enough to use it, he thought, flexing the chilled fingers of one hand at a time. His leather driving gloves didn’t even come close to the kind of protection he needed to keep his hands warm. He longed for the pair of insulated ski gloves he had left in Denver, but said nothing, afraid his traveling companion would demand even the inadequate gloves for his own bare hands.
Charlie, mumbling to himself, put the gun between his legs and buried a hand in each armpit inside his jacket, trying to warm his stiff fingers. His feet in western boots were propped close to the laboring heater. The truck rocked as a blast of wind hit it, and a sifting of fine snow leaked in through a thin opening in the wing window to fall to the floor at his feet. He stared at it and snuffled. He was catching a cold, his nose running a stream in the icy air, so he either snuffled or wiped it on his sleeve.
“Goddammit. How much longer is this son-of-a-bitching snow going to keep up?”
“All night, I’d guess,” Hampton answered. “The weather report was for blizzard conditions till tomorrow.”
“How long till we get to Alaska?”
“Well, it’s a total of sixty-six miles from Dawson to the border and over a hundred after that to the Tetlin Junction with the Alaska Highway. We’d have to turn off and go a ways to make Eagle, so the only community on the road between here and there is Chicken, on the Alaska side.”
“Chicken? There’s a town named Chicken?” Charlie grinned in spite of himself.
“Chicken used to be a common local name for a kind of grouse called a ptarmigan. The story goes that they wanted to name the town Ptarmigan, but nobody could spell it, so they settled for Chicken.”
“What’s a…Chicken, huh? The stupes.” Charlie obviously didn’t want to admit he had no idea what a ptarmigan was, let alone how to spell it. He changed the subject. “So…a hundred and sixty miles? How fast are we going?”
“More like a hundred and seventy-five or eighty miles and, right now, we’re moving six or seven miles an hour.”
“Shit. That means we won’t get there for…for…” He paused and frowned as he tried to figure it out.
“Sometime tomorrow night, if this weather keeps up and we can’t pick up some speed. We’ve already gone almost thirty miles. It wasn’t so bad till we got up here on top. We made better time coming up from the river.”
Charlie scowled, thinking hard. “How much gas we got?”
“Pretty close to a full tank when we left and an extra ten gallons in the can in back.”
“That enough?”
“I hope it’s enough to get us somewhere and that’s the least of many worries. Shut up, Charlie, and let me concentrate. It’s getting worse.”
The truck was now almost continuously rocking in response to the gusts of wind. It was clear that the road began a series of turns through a group of barely visible small hills, where the snow had blown across it in growing drifts, obscuring any trace of the way through. Hampton took his foot off the gas and allowed the vehicle to coast to a stop, its bumper and front wheels buried in the first drift.
“What the hell’d you stop for?”
“Charlie. I’ve got to tell you. There’s no way we’re going to make it even as far as the border. What we should do, right now, is turn around and go back to Dawson while we still might make it.”
The kid jerked up straight from his slump in the passenger seat. “No way, man. Don’t even think about it.”
“Look at that.” Hampton pointed to the drifts ahead. “Just how do you expect me to find the road in that?”
Charlie peered out at what little he could see in the headlights. “Just drive. The road’s gotta be there.”
“And go right off and get stuck. It’s a series of curves, dummy.”
“Don’t call me no dummy, you bastard. You’re just try’na make me think we should go back.” He waved the gun in Hampton’s direction. “Get moving.”
“Where? You tell me exactly where you want me to drive.”
Charlie was yelling now and waving the weapon. “How should I know. I said get moving, you son of a bitch. I’m not going back and you’re not either. You know how to go in this stuff. You’re from Colorado where they got lotsa snow. Go on.”
Hampton sighed and shook his head. “Look. I’ll try it, but only when we know where the road is. One of us has got to get out and walk ahead to make sure we’re on
it.”
“Not me.”
“Okay. But if I go it’ll take longer. Since you won’t drive, I’ll have to walk ahead, come back and drive that far, walk ahead again, come back and drive again. Take twice as long and be twice as cold. If you walk, I can drive right behind you without getting in and out, opening and shutting the door, and leaving the truck to sit here while I walk.”
“No. Not a chance, man. You’d turn around and leave me.”
That thought had, of course, crossed Hampton’s mind, but he wasn’t admitting it to Charlie.
“Just how fast do you think I could turn? You could be back before I was halfway around, if I didn’t get stuck in the process.” Unfortunately, it was true, he realized, and gave up the idea of leaving Charlie and his gun.
“Yeah…well…Not me. You walk.”
“And take the extra time?”
“Yeah…No…Oh, hell.” He yanked hard on the door handle and threw his weight against it to push it open, letting in a cloud of blowing snow, letting out even the tiny bit of heat. The wind slammed the door behind him. As if it had lain in wait, it caught him as he moved forward, one hand on the fender, and threw him against the truck. When he recovered and stepped away from it into the headlight beams, it blew him to his knees. Snow packed into his clothing and hair till he looked like someone had sprayed him with flocking for a Christmas tree. Getting up carefully, he looked back and shook a fist at Hampton in the truck, but walked on into the drift, feeling with his feet for the roadway. The drift soon deepened, reaching his hips, as he struggled through it, wiping his nose.
Suddenly, with no warning, he sank farther into the snow. Waving frantically, he lost his balance and toppled over, momentarily disappearing. Wallowing his way back onto the road, blanketed with white, he shouted profanities Hampton could not hear and only saw the shape of before Charlie moved on.
