Dead of Winter

by Gerri Brightwell

  Dead of Winter

  A fast-paced, darkly funny crime novel set in Interior Alaska that follows down-on-his-luck cabbie, Mike Fisher, as he searches for his daughter.

  Her step-father has been shot in her bathroom, and Fisher thinks she killed him and fled. In a panic he tries to hide the body, but that’s not easy when it’s fifty-below outside.

  Things get dangerously complicated when it turns out step-dad was part of a local militia, and now they’re on Fisher’s tail.

  Dead of Winter evokes the harshness of winter in the ­­­sub-arctic and the intrigue fostered in a bored, trapped and socially circumscribed small-town community.

  Praise for Gerri Brightwell’s Cold Country

  ‘An uncanny thriller.’ —Publishers Weekly

  ‘Extremely atmospheric.’ —Janet Gleeson, author of The Thief Taker

  ‘A hypnotic spell of a novel.’ —Laura Dietz, author of In the Tenth House

  Dead of Winter

  Gerri Brightwell was brought up in South Devon. After deciding a degree in zoology was not for her, she took up literature and art history, and lived on a narrow boat in Bristol. Since then she has roamed more widely, working in Spain, Thailand, Canada and the United States. She has worked as a cleaner, ice-cream seller, sandwich-maker, pottery sponger, editor and nanny, and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She is married to fantasy writer, Ian C. Esslemont.

  Also by Gerri Brightwell

  NOVELS

  Cold Country (2003)

  The Dark Lantern (2008)

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Gerri Brightwell, 2016

  The right of Gerri Brightwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2016

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-054-6 electronic

  For Cam and my boys, Conor, Ross and Callum. Thank you for making life so much fun.

  1

  FISHER STOPS At the lights. It’s going on four p.m. and the town’s got that deep undersea feel he hates. Beyond the windshield, shapes swim out of the darkness: a lit-up city bus heaving itself through the intersection, a busted-up Chevy bouncing in slo-mo over a snow berm, a cop car trailing it silent as a shark. Headlights catch frost clinging thick as algae to a fence. Across the road a row of buildings squats against the cold. Neon flashes red and pink and green. Hot girls. Cold beer. Small splashes of color against the sub-arctic night.

  Fifty-seven below when Fisher reached the airport to drop off his fare and the ice fog’s settling in. Already the streetlights are blurred and past the intersection it’s real bad, like a stirred-up sea. Here traffic making the turn vanishes: red taillights hang for a moment, then shrink and wink out like they’ve gone forever.

  It gets you, that kind of cold. It seeps into your soul. It doesn’t help that the news is on and Fisher has it turned way up over the rush of warm air from the vents. A suicide bombing in Iraq, the cops here in town looking for a missing state trooper, a pile-up on this very road a few miles away where it leads to the army base and the ground’s low and the fog can get real bad. Two people dead, three injured. Fisher’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. He thinks of twisted metal and severed limbs, of heads dented and broken. He wonders, when will it be my turn to be snuffed out? Those people, minding their own business, driving to the store or to pick up the kids, and now they’re dead. No warning, just gone.

  He thinks what he’d leave behind. Not much: a dingy trailer beside his hardly-built house, a sulky, troubled teenage daughter, an ex-wife who’s reinvented herself right out of remembering she loved him once upon a time. I’m not a has-been, he thinks, I’m a never-was, a two-hundred-and-forty-pound sad sack, a Class A freaking loser.

  He takes a breath and lets his eyes close. Now that he’s wrapped in his own darkness, the ache in his head swells and its echo starts up in his cheeks, only that pain’s sharper and more insistent. This is the root of his misery. The cold’s squeezed all the moisture out of the air, and it’s so dry it’s making his sinuses smart, as though the front of his head has been scraped out with a knife. He needs something to dull it: Christ, maybe he should call Grisby, get himself some Vicodin, because the pain’s bad enough to leave him swimming inside himself, to make the day feel cursed, to make him wish he’d called in sick and watched TV until it was time to go to bed again.

  Two hours left of his shift, unless he quits early. Two hours of driving through ice fog and the ache in his head. But hell, the cold means money. People stranded by dead batteries. People who won’t be waiting for the bus. Fuck, he can do it.

  Staring out the windshield, he can’t remember who his fare is. He stops himself glancing in the mirror. A game he has: who’s he driving now? He pictures himself pulling up at the airport, the surly guy he was dropping off shoving a twenty at him. Someone coming across the sidewalk, a spidery silhouette, and now he’s got it: a lanky woman in a long coat and skirt pulling a small case on wheels. Longish hair. A thin, sour face, a beaky nose. Now he looks in the mirror: her face’s bonier than he remembered, her eyes deeper set, but that sour expression’s there all right, as though she can’t believe her stinking luck at finding herself in Alaska, and not in one of the beautiful parts but the undramatic, deep-frozen Interior, and to cap it all, she’s being driven to her hotel in a turd-brown Bear Cab with a cartoon grizzly painted on the side, for fuck’s sake. Who came up with that? Maybe she thinks Fisher did.

  No hat, a thin scarf, her wool coat some Lower Forty-Eight designer’s idea of winter wear. She must have thought January in Alaska wasn’t anything to bother herself about because, hell, she’s from Minnesota or Michigan where their winters beat all. Fifty-fucking-seven below. No wonder she looks pissed and closed in on herself as she stares out the window. She has her case perched beside her like it’s a pet. No other luggage—Fisher’d have pegged her as being in town for a conference or a job interview, except she’s headed to the Valu-Inn. A dump of a place. Maybe she doesn’t know that. Or perhaps by now she’s decided the whole town’s a dump. One time he drove a young Scottish woman from the university to a hotel downtown. It was summer and he asked what she thought of the place. She said she’d expected it to be like Sweden, but instead it looked junky and half-derelict, and he’d laughed and said she was seeing it on a good day, too, then had driven fast because he wanted to be shut of her.

  Fisher drives this route so often he can pretty much guess how much longer the red will last: long enough for him to reach into the glove compartment, snatch out his bottle of ibuprofen, snap off the lid with his teeth—not enough time to take off his gloves, he thinks—and tip two onto his tongue and wash them down with his half-cold coffee. He’s almost right, but the light changes as he’s lifting the cup. The pickup to his left surges into the intersection on a cloud of exhaust and he can’t see a damned thing, but he fi
nishes the motion of bringing the cup to his lips—the coffee’s colder than he thought, disgusting, in fact—and he tips the cup too far. Coffee dribbles around his mouth and he swallows quickly, wipes his chin with his glove. From his pocket his phone rings. He ignores it and steps too hard on the gas. Over the bleat of the phone comes the rush of tires spinning and the slight slip of the cab’s rear shimmying.

  “Fuck it,” he says under his breath and eases up until the tires grip and the gleaming road hauls itself beneath them. The cab bounces over the bumps of ice and its frozen metal groans like a ship going down: at least, like a ship going down in the movies. Then there’s a flash of headlights from vehicles waiting at the intersection, the blankness of the fog closing in, and his phone stops ringing.

  2

  HOW OFTEN DOES Fisher’s phone ring in the next two hours? Later, when he counts, he’ll come up with four times: he’ll remember that it rang in the supermarket parking lot as he was helping a skinny old guy into the backseat and settling his groceries beside him; that it rang as he was nosing the cab through the fog downtown with a smug, overweight teenager in the back ferociously chewing gum until he let out a stiff laugh and caught Fisher’s eye in the mirror and said, “Bear Cabs—dude, how the hell did you come up with that? You should dress up in a bear suit. Wouldn’t that be crazy?”; that it rang again while he was on the expressway getting a lecture from a bland-faced, bristle-haired old woman about not wearing his seatbelt, and trying to tell her no cab driver does, it’s too risky, and that it rang again while he was trying to pull out from a stop sign into the thick of the five-thirty traffic by Fat Al’s Pizza.

  All those times his phone rings, and he doesn’t pull it out and check his messages. There’s something about the cold air peeling in off the cab’s windows and the raw pain pulsing through his head that makes him think, Fuck you all, fucking leave me alone, because, really, who could be calling? Someone he gave his card to, someone wanting a ride when he hasn’t had any dead time all afternoon. Could be Sally wanting to talk, but that thing they had is over because who needs a girlfriend who’s got a husband she forgot to mention on the first few dates? Could be his step-mother wanting something—she always wants something—or Grisby saying let’s meet at the Klondike for a drink, when all Fisher wants is to go home and sit in front of the TV with his dog. Maybe it’s his daughter: but no, Bree’s off to Anchorage with her mom for a couple of days, or should be unless she’s fucked things up again. She has a way of doing that.

  It’s close to six before the idea of all those missed calls needles him and he pulls over outside the Gas-N-Go. Over the radio comes Reggie’s scratchy voice telling him he’s got a fare wants a no-smoking cab over at the movie theater. Fisher tells Reggie he needs to look at a clock because his shift’s about over, but Reggie barks back that he’s not far away, is he? And hell, doesn’t he want the money?

  Reggie’s always seething, like it’s the only way he knows how to be. Two new cab companies have started up and all he could think to do was paint that ridiculous smiling bear logo on all the Bear Cab vehicles. Who wants a beaten-up taxi with a smiling bear on the door when they can take a sleek white City Cab? Reggie calls them Shitty Cabs, but hell, even their drivers look sleek, not fat-butted men wearied by life, or hard-bitten women with hard-set mouths, or ex-cons who can’t do much except drive, and who’ve been known to take a fare to the airport then come back and rob their house. At least, that’s how it was before the cops wised up and now the cabbie’s the first person they suspect.

  The movie theater’s only a few minutes away, and this far up Airport Road the fog’s cleared a little. Still, the streetlights have a grimy halo around them, and the blacktop a sleek crystalline look. The cab lurches over the lip of snow into the movie-theater parking lot with its dying-ship groan and Fisher pulls up close to the row of glass doors. Someone hurries out. A man in a green parka and a fur hat, with squarish glasses too big for his thin face, and a peering, mousy look about him. Grisby, like a freaking vision summoned up by the gnawing ache in Fisher’s head.

  He stoops to look through the window and Fisher lowers the glass a little. He calls out, “It’s OK, it’s me. Get in.”

  Grisby gets in beside Fisher and taps him on the knee. “Hey man, I called you, I dunno, a hundred times. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Been busy,” he says. “Fuck, busy like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What’s the point in having a freaking phone if you don’t use it? I mean, that’s the whole idea, right? You have it with you so if someone needs you, they can call and there you’ll be. Like the freaking cavalry. Had to call Bear Cabs and ask for a no-smoking and hope it’d be you. Fuck it.”

  “What happened to your car? You lose it again?”

  Grisby pushes back his hat a little. The bulk of the fur makes his face look small and pale beneath it, as though he’s hiding. And maybe he is. He says, “No, I didn’t lose it. Shit, it won’t start.”

  “You turned it off when it’s fifty-seven below and went to watch a movie?”

  “Christ no—something wrong with the starter. Either that, or the spark plugs. Fuck, I dunno.” He sniffs and wipes away the moisture the cold’s left beaded on the stubble beneath his nose. His glasses have misted up from the sudden heat and he pulls them off and rubs the lenses with the fingers of his glove. “Just get me out of here.”

  Fisher swings the cab round and the headlights slip over the exhaust blooming from parked cars. Just before the access road he slows. “Where to?”

  “How about that place does the Hawaiian burgers?”

  “That’s right here.” Fisher nods out the window at the bright lights of the restaurant just ahead on the corner. It’s always like this. There’s something not right with the way Grisby’s wired, like he’s permanently lost and always will be.

  Grisby pushes his glasses back on and stares about him. He rubs his chin and his glove grates over his stubble. It looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few days, and that means trouble. “Well shit,” he says, “someplace else then. Wherever.”

  “C’mon, Grisby.”

  “I’ve just spent the whole freaking afternoon watching dumb-ass movies. Give me a break.”

  “Tessa mad at you again, is that it? You worried she’s going to come find you? Shit, who needs a girlfriend he’s scared of?”

  “Shut it, Fisher. I just need a place to hole up for a day or two, that’s all.”

  At first Fisher doesn’t say a word. Grisby’s going to leave the shower running and the water tank’ll run dry, or so well-and-fucking-truly lose the TV remote that they’ll never find it, or spill his beer on the sofa and not say a word until Fisher’s sat down in it, or forget to let the dog out while Fisher’s working and poor Pax’ll piss all over the carpet. That’s what he did over Thanksgiving when Tessa threw him out of her place, then came looking for him and tried to kick in the door. But what can you do? Grisby showed up with all the fixings for dinner—for the Thanksgiving dinner he was supposed to be sharing with Tessa—plus Vicodin in one pocket and Percocet in the other, and a bottle of bourbon to wash it all down. Man, oh man.

  Fisher lets his breath out between his teeth then steers the cab onto the access road. “OK, but I don’t want Tessa coming round looking for you again. She’s a piece of work. And you still haven’t fixed the dent in my door.”

  “Don’t be like that, man. Your trailer’s a piece of crap and you’re worrying about a dent in your door? Besides, who the hell helped you get the foundation in for your house? Who you going to call to help you unload lumber this summer? Hey?”

  Fisher slows for a stop sign then glances over his shoulder as he changes lane. A gas station across the way, a small Mexican restaurant, a hair salon, and it might just as well be two in the morning for the whole strip looks deserted. He pulls up at the lights with the turn signal clicking away and his hands off the wheel. He picks up the ra
dio and tells Reggie, “Nine. Fare to Safeway on Airport and Dawson. Then I’m coming in.”

  Reggie’s voice crackles back at him, “Switch to channel two, Fisher.”

  Fisher jabs the button, says, “What the hell?”

  “Better not be one of your flaky friends you’re giving a ride to who’s gonna light up in the cab, Fisher, or puke on the seats, or sell painkillers to a real-life goddamn paying fare. You got that?”

  On the palm of Fisher’s glove the handset looks small, a shrunken head with hard slits across its surface. He says, “What is it with you, Reggie? You wanted me to take this fare.” Then he jams the thing back into its holder.

  Beside him Grisby’s tapping his glove against his knee and his knee’s jerking to a crazy beat that’s got nothing to do with the Eagles’ number coming through the radio. Then he bursts out with, “You’re like Captain freaking Kirk in this thing, cruising along nice and warm. But just look out the window—it’s some blasted alien planet, and you’re the hero, man, carrying me away.”

  “Why’s she mad at you this time?” He glances at Grisby, and Grisby drops his smile.

  “Nah,” he says, “we’re cool. I’ve got some guy says I owe him for the Vicodin he bought off me. Says it was Tylenol and now he wants his money back. Three hundred bucks.”

  “That’s a lot for Tylenol.”

  “Wasn’t Tylenol, man. I know the difference. He even has the freaking nerve to show me the bottle and tip out these freaking Tylenols like it’s proof or something, and he tells me he wants his three hundred bucks back. Can you believe it? He’s switched them out then he shows up at my place and ­threatens me with a crowbar. How the hell did he find out where I live?”