01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  “Well, all right. Long as you say it’s important, I guess I’m on my way.”

  “Good, Ray. You just set her down there and stay right by her. Keep the engine running or whatever you do with those things. If I need you, I’m going to need you in a hurry.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.”

  She sensed he was going to say something more but she’d finished with the conversation. She set the phone back in the cradle and met Felix’s gaze. The town police chief was looking a little amused.

  “That Ray, it’s as well he can fly one of those whirlybirds, ’cause he ain’t too quick on the uptake at much else, is he?” he said.

  Lee shook her head in mock weariness and rolled her eyes. “Jesus,” she said. “Noise pollution?”

  “Getting harder to be a cop every day, Lee,” Felix told her sympathetically.

  Jesse raced the Yamaha diagonally up the ski trail, sliding and bouncing as he headed for an access trail halfway up. The ski patrol vehicle handled the slope easily. It was a three-seater, built to take a driver and two pillions, and with an engine sized up accordingly. With just one person on board, it had more than enough power to head up the slopes. He figured that with Mikkelitz and Abby riding two-up on the other snowmobile, he’d make faster time up the hill-and he could take a more direct route to the top.

  Assuming they were going to the top. He still couldn’t fathom what Mikkelitz had in mind. He seemed to have cornered himself here on the mountain. There was no way out other than back down.

  Beyond the ski boundary, there was nothing but the wilderness of a national park—thousands of acres of trees and unmarked trails.

  And then he realized that that was where Mikkelitz was heading. He’d leave the snowmobile—it could hardly cope with the deep snow of the forest—and head out on cross-country skis. Probably take a pack with him and a tent. He could survive for days, weeks, in the wilderness.

  And come out anywhere it suited him. Alone. Because somewhere on the way, Jesse knew he was going to kill Abby.

  He twisted the throttle full open. Even with an edge in speed, he knew they had too much of a lead for him to catch up. But he had to keep trying, even though there was a lead ball in the pit of his stomach as he realized the effort was futile.

  The Yamaha’s engine note rose to a howl and a rooster tail of thrown snow blossomed in its wake.

  Mikkelitz saw the log a second too late. It was freshly covered and it looked for all the world like one more soft pile of mounded snow—the kind of thing that presented no obstacle to the snowmobile.

  Then, at the last moment, he saw the black shape of a branch protruding from the snow and realized they were heading for a heavy tree that had fallen across the trail and been covered by falling snow. He yanked the steering to the left to try to miss it, but the snowmobile skidded sideways, tried to mount the thick trunk, and began to topple back downhill. He yanked the steering back right again, trying at the last second to ride up and over the massive hump in the snow, gunning the last ounce of power from the engine as he did so, and for a moment the snowmobile hung there in the balance.

  It was Abby who made the difference. Instinctively, as she’d felt the little vehicle sway farther and farther to the left, she’d leaned her weight uphill, to the right, to try to counter the movement. Murphy was doing the same thing in front of her. He was actually off the seat and had all his weight on the uphill footboard, leaning way out as he steered to the right and gunned the engine.

  Then she realized that any chance she had of rescue depended on her ability to delay him as much as possible. And this was a perfect opportunity, because he’d never know she’d done it.

  She’d seen enough of him to know that if he thought she was delaying him, he’d have no hesitation in killing her right away.

  So now, as the snowmobile tottered on a knife edge of balance, and actually began to surge forward over the tree, she threw her weight to the left.

  That was all it took. The delicate contest of power, momentum and gravity suddenly had a winner and it was gravity. The snowmobile seemed to rear up on its hind end. The runners actually came free of the snow and the engine raced as the little vehicle toppled back and over.

  As it went, Murphy screamed his fury and jumped clear, throwing himself uphill to save himself being pinned under the vehicle. Abby, handcuffed to the pillion handgrip, had no such choice.

  She lost her grip on the handle, felt the flesh on her wrist tear as the handcuff ripped into it again. The snowmobile was toppling and her throat went dry as she felt she’d be pinned under it.

  Somehow, she scrambled and kicked away from the snowmobile as it plunged over on its side. If it rolled, she knew, it would go right over her. If it just kept sliding on its side, and if she could just keep scrambling to stay ahead of it, she might survive relatively intact. She felt it start to roll, felt herself being drawn by the tethered wrist under the body of the machine. Desperately, she kicked at it to try to stop the motion. She didn’t know if her actions had any effect, but the roll stopped and the snowmobile continued its slide. The drive train, free of the snow, thrashed wildly and the engine was revving like crazy. The spring return on the twist throttle must have jammed, she realized vaguely.

  The sliding and bucking seemed to go on forever. She missed her footing, her leg going deep into a patch of soft snow, and felt the heavy machine start to slide over the top of her. Desperately she floundered, her mouth and nose full of snow, but she was being borne under and the hot metal of the exhaust was burning her leg. She could feel the weight of the snowmobile pinning her as it moved inexorably farther over her and finally she thought, fuck it, why bother? Why fight? And just gave in.

  And the snowmobile stopped sliding.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Jesse barreled the Yamaha up a steep incline at breakneck speed. The snowmobile left the ground, seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, then slammed back onto the hard-packed snow, landing unevenly, one runner hitting before the other and slewing the machine to the left. He tried to compensate, but the impact with the firm snow of the groomed ski slope had thrown him off balance and he felt himself toppling off the snowmobile.

  He hit the snow with his left shoulder, tucked his head and rolled, coming to his feet ten yards down the slope. The Yamaha, with a dead man’s throttle, had returned to idle the moment he let go of the twist grip. It slid quickly to a halt, engine burbling unevenly.

  He was covered in the fine, dry snow from head to foot. He brushed himself off, wincing as his shoulder sent a shaft of pain through him, then stumbled awkwardly back up the hill and threw a leg over the saddle.

  “No sense killing yourself,” he muttered, and opened the throttle once more—a little more deliberately this time. The Yamaha surged away under him and he corrected the incipient skids and swings that were a fundamental part of its motion. But, he realized, he was right. Careering flat out up the hill, half out of control, wasn’t the way to travel. He was a reasonably proficient rider, but nowhere in the league of the sports riders who took jumps much higher than the one he’d just attempted as a matter of course.

  It wasn’t going to do Abby the slightest bit of good if he lost it somewhere and broke his fool neck—or even an arm or a leg. He compromised, moving faster than was comfortable, but nowhere near as fast as he wanted to travel.

  He cut through a patch of thick, ungroomed snow and found himself at the bottom of a steep, long mogul run. The old chairlift-abandoned and unused now since the Storm Peak chair had been built-stretched above him, the wind whistling around its thick cable, and in the taller branches of the pines that surrounded it. It wasn’t the most comfortable of terrain for a snowmobile; riding up those endless mounds of hard-packed snow would be like windsurfing across solid waves, he thought. But it was a direct route to the top. He twisted the throttle experimentally, felt and heard the reassuring note of the engine as it revved easily beneath him, then swung the snowmobile up the hill.

  It jarred a
nd thudded over the succession of moguls in the snow, nearly burying its front skids in the downhill sides of the mounds. He realized quickly that a direct approach wasn’t going to work. The moguls were too steep. He took it the way a cruising skier would negotiate the moguls downhill, threading a winding path through the small valleys carved out between the humps.

  Even at that, the snowmobile was too wide for the trails he followed—carved by skis. The Yamaha continued to lurch and slam wildly into the mounds. His wrists ached from dragging it back on course as the terrain tried to shove him downhill. His shoulder, already wrenched from the heavy fall he’d just taken, was a dull pool of agony.

  He skidded the tail around as he crested a mogul, letting the machine arc back through ninety degrees, tacking back and forth up the slope like a yacht on a solid frozen seascape of wild waves.

  Solid frozen, he thought grimly, and tilted at a crazy forty-degree angle to the vertical.

  He crested out onto one of the higher access trails. He figured he was around two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Instinctively, he was heading toward the top of the Storm Peak chair. Something inside told him that this was where Mikkelitz was heading as well. He didn’t know why he knew. He just felt it somehow.

  He looked at the remaining half of the mogul field under the chairlift. He was near exhaustion, his breath coming in giant gulps, his wrists, forearms and shoulders racked with the strain of wrenching the snowmobile back on course. He wasn’t sure he had the stamina left to continue the same way. Reluctantly, he swung the Yamaha to the left and cracked the throttle wide open, sending it screaming along the access trail.

  She was facedown in the thick, soft snow, in real danger of drowning in it. Vaguely, a long way away she could hear someone cursing—repeatedly, in a mad litany of invective. A man, she thought. Slowly, her senses were returning. Something was tugging fiercely at her left wrist, and there was a sharp stab of pain there as the tug persisted.

  She remembered … the snowmobile, sliding and bumping down the mountain above her, as she’d tried desperately to scramble and claw her way ahead of it. Then, as she gave up, she remembered seeing one of the runners rearing up beside her, felt the sharp impact against her head. She was puzzled and disoriented for a moment.

  Then it all came back in sharp focus.

  It was the killer’s voice. The tugging at her arm was the handcuff and now, as she blinked her eyes open and raised herself painfully out of the snow, she could see his legs close beside her as he heaved and struggled with the tipped over snowmobile. And with every heave, the handcuff that still attached her to the rear pillion grip cut deeper and more painfully into the skin of her wrist.

  There was a red mist about him. It was her blood, she realized, streaming down her face from the spot above her eyebrow where the skid had hit her. She shook her head to clear it, tried to ask him to stop jerking and heaving at the snowmobile.

  The only sound that came was a strangled, choking grunt. She swallowed half-melted snow and saliva, choked slightly, coughed rackingly. Mikkelitz heard her and, thank God, stopped his insane straining at the snowmobile. His chest and shoulders heaved explosively and he staggered back a few paces.

  “Fuck!” he shouted viciously. “Fuck, fuck and fuck this fucking whore of a snowmobile!”

  She tried to stand, but her free arm went deep into the soft snow, gaining no purchase. And besides, the pillion handle to which she was handcuffed was almost at knee level. The snowmobile was tipped over almost three-quarters of the way on the downhill slope. It hadn’t quite rolled upside down, thank God. Otherwise she would have been well and truly trapped beneath it and, by now, she probably would have suffocated.

  Mad with rage and frustration, Mikkelitz had been trying to roll the little vehicle upright-against the slope of the mountain. The slope and the weight combined were simply too much for him.

  She could smell the harsh fumes of gas and saw red fuel dripping from the air vent in the gas tank cap, spurting out through the tiny hole with the pressure of a full tank behind it.

  Mikkelitz, his breathing a little more regular now, moved forward and grabbed the handlebars, straining to lift the snowmobile back upright. His feet churned in the soft snow and he was thigh deep. He could succeed in doing no more than moving the machine in small jerks—enough to lacerate her wrist again. She cried out with the pain.

  “Stop it!” she said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re breaking my wrist!” His face was close to hers as he forced his body lower, trying to gain purchase. The eyes were bulging and the effort was making his face scarlet.

  “Heave, you bitch!” he spat at her. “Help me or I’ll cut your fucking arm off?”

  And she tried. But even with both of them shoving, it was no use. To all practical purposes, they were trying to lift the machine almost vertically, and turn it over at the same time. And they were trying to do it from a base that gave them no solid footing to work on.

  “Stop it!” she gasped again. “It’s useless! Can’t you see it’s useless?”

  Whether he stopped because of what she said, or whether he was simply exhausted for the moment, she didn’t know. She was just grateful that the heaving and jerking had stopped. She slumped beside the snowmobile, one arm pinned underneath it. He dropped across it, his breath coming in huge, ragged gasps. For a minute or so, he dropped his head onto his forearms, crossed over the side of the snowmobile’s engine cover. Then he looked up at her, shaking his head in exhausted fury. She met his eyes and let her own slide away from what she saw there. He was insane with rage, almost crazy in his impotence. Her life was hanging by the slenderest of threads, she knew. In a second he would kill her, just to vent his rage and frustration. She gestured weakly at her trapped arm.

  “Undo … me,” she said haltingly. “Get … handcuff off … and”—she indicated a rolling circle downhill—“roll it right over and down.”

  He was uncomprehending for a second or two. Then he frowned as he saw the reason behind what she’d said. If she were out of the way, it would be a reasonably simple matter to roll the snowmobile completely over—lying on its side on the slope it was already two-thirds of the way there anyway-and let it come back upright after completing a full revolution. Instead of trying to lift it against its own dead weight, he’d have gravity to help with the task.

  He fumbled in his shirt pocket and she felt a sudden flush of hope through her heart as he fished out the key to the handcuffs.

  Once she was uncuffed and he was concentrating on righting the snowmobile, she’d take off like a startled deer, she decided. She’d roll, slide and tumble but she’d go.

  He was coming toward her now, sinking deep with each step. Eagerly, she clawed at the snow with her free hand, clearing a space so he could get at the handcuff around her wrist. Looking at it now, she could see the snow around her hand red with the blood she was shedding.

  He dropped to his knees on the snow beside her and bent forward, peering under the fallen snowmobile to the chrome grab handle. Her heart fell as she realized he wasn’t undoing the cuff around her wrist. He was unshackling her from the snowmobile, unlocking the cuff around the chrome bar.

  As the hardened steel cuff came loose, he grabbed it firmly and stood back, jerking her upright with him. Again pain flamed in her wrist and she gasped. He glanced around, saw what he was looking for and dragged her across the deep snow to a young aspen.

  The main trunk was about six inches in diameter. But about four feet from the surface of the snow, the tree forked. The secondary branch angled out at around twenty degrees from the vertical and was about the thickness of a man’s wrist. Wrenching her in a final spasm of pain, he clamped the empty cuff around the branch. As he let her go, her knees buckled and she hung by one arm, half sitting in the snow at the base of the tree. The branch extended another fifteen feet or so. There was no way she could slip the cuff off it. And it was too thick for her to break. She tried, in a dispirited way, seizing the short chain between the cu
ffs with her free hand and heaving at it.

  It was no use. Her legs gave way under her again and she swung by the chain and slumped to the snow.

  He backed away to the snowmobile, watching her feeble effort to break loose with a satisfied smile. He was beginning to feel on top of things again, she thought, and realized that had probably saved her life, at least for the moment.

  Rolling the snowmobile downhill was obviously an easier task. He quickly had it upside down, then over on its other side. The next step-getting it upright-was the hardest. But even that was easier than trying to lift it back against the slope of the hill. He strained and heaved at it. His feet still sank into the snow up past his knees. But now he was standing above the snowmobile and the fact actually helped rather than hindered. It brought him down closer to the level of the snowmobile, allowing him to get a more direct thrust at it, and use the strength of his back and legs to do the pushing.

  She watched him as he heaved and shoved at it, nearly having it upright, then at the last minute letting it fall back on its side. Then, with a final convulsive heave, he had it over and the snowmobile crashed over onto its runners, showering loose snow in all directions. For a moment, it looked as if it might tip all the way over again and he lunged at it, grabbing the uphill handlebar and throwing his weight back into the slope of the hill to steady it.

  He looked around at her with a fierce gleam of triumph in his eyes. Triumph and something else. She realized she was dealing with someone who was totally unstable, poised right on the brink. She shivered uncontrollably and he saw the movement and smiled. Then he jerked on the starter cord.

  The exhaust belched blue smoke. The motor tried to fire, then died. He kicked it savagely, splitting the fiberglass cowling of the engine in his fury, jerked the cord again.

  Again, blue smoke, a coughing grunt from the motor, then silence.