Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  “I didn’t do nothin’!” the prisoner insisted as his captor dragged him down the center aisle.

  Brandon shot a glance toward Whitestone and saw that he wasn’t buying it, either.

  “What have you got?” the chief asked.

  James clearly didn’t like the disapproving tone. “I was canvassing Snowbird Avenue and one of the shop owners turned me on to this guy. Said there was a man freezing to death in the alley. I went down there and found this guy trying to make himself invisible. The first thing he said when he saw me was, ‘I didn’t try to kill nobody.’ This before I even asked.”

  “I didn’t!” the old man insisted. From the emphasis, Brandon knew that he’d said it many times before.

  Whitestone scowled. “What’s your name?”

  “Seyford,” the man said. His fear was turning to anger. “Frederick Seyford, and you have no right to hold me here.”

  The chief smiled. On a different face, it might have looked patronizing, but on Whitestone, it just looked pleasant. “If I ask Officer Alexander here to take off your cuffs, are you going to cause a problem?”

  “I haven’t caused a problem all damn day!”

  Whitestone nodded to James Alexander, who looked none too pleased as he fished the key out of his pocket.

  “What’d you put ’em on so tight for, anyway?” Seyford growled.

  Between his addiction to cop shows and the endless hours he’d logged here at the police station, Brandon had learned enough about procedures to know that you don’t unshackle a man you believe to be a killer. Where the hell is Scott?

  “Have a seat, Mr. Seyford,” Whitestone offered, nodding to a wooden chair as he helped himself to the adjacent desk. “Tell me why your first words to Officer Alexander were about not assaulting anyone.”

  “Because I didn’t assault nobody. I saw them people coming toward me with their guns out, so I figured it musta had something to do with the president bein’ there.”

  “What made you think they were coming after you?”

  “It wasn’t like it was no secret,” the old drunk scoffed. “Everybody was lookin’ right at me.”

  “And why do you think, out of all the people in that crowd, that people would be suspecting you of something?”

  Embarrassment flashed across the old man’s eyes. “I figured it was the clothes. Too good to be true. From the very beginning I shoulda known.”

  The comment drew a look of curiosity from Whitestone, and sparked a flash of terror in Brandon. Scott had been gone too long.

  Seyford explained, “Some guy gave me them clothes, plus a hundred bucks. He said all I had to do was walk through the crowd wearing them, and I could keep everything.”

  Whitestone scowled. “Somebody just gave you clothes to wear.”

  It started to come together for Brandon. He remembered Scott on the phone. The unnerved look.

  “Tell me what this guy looked like,” Whitestone pressed.

  Ten words into it, Brandon recognized the description of the man Scott called Isaac. “Oh, shit,” he breathed. The comment brought heads around, and the abruptness of his move to the front windows made people move out of his way. Instinctively, he knew what he was going to find, and his first glance confirmed it: the Cherokee was gone.

  He whipped around to face the assembled stares. “He’s got Scott again.”

  36

  4:41.

  God help him, he was never going to make it in time. All the way up the mountain, with his headlights flashing and his horn blaring, people refused to get out of his way. One guy actually made a point of slowing down and driving in the middle of the road just to piss him off. Prick.

  Finally, he was able to get past the traffic, fishtailing his way to the mouth of the sprawling parking lot, and then on down the endless rows of cars. The thought fleetingly darted through his mind that whoever hadn’t moved their car in the past three or four days would have a hell of a time moving it at all before spring. Between what had fallen from the sky and what had been piled on by other drivers digging out, the diehards were hopelessly buried.

  The parking lot was crawling with day-trippers on their way back to their vehicles. Most walked like exhausted Frankenstein’s monsters, their gait altered by the stiffness of their leg muscles and the unyielding rigidity of their ski boots. They walked with their skis and poles slung over their shoulders, the younger set mostly with snow-boards under their arms. Their faces were flushed with exhilaration, and no doubt numb from the cold. If they didn’t heed his blaring horn and get the hell out of his way, they all stood a good chance of becoming human bowling pins.

  The architects had designed SkyTop to be the crown jewel of the Wasatch, catering to the tastes of the rich, while making them feel attached to the rugged outdoorsmen who’d built the place out of forests every bit as thick as the one Scott had survived. A grand lodge needed a grand entryway, and at SkyTop, that meant a long island of manicured landscaping, lined on either side by towering firs. They wanted visitors to be awed by the place, gazing down a half-mile-long corridor of trees, free of any vehicles, save for the occasional horse-drawn sleigh. They called it the Grand Mall. Today, for Scott, it was the SkyTop Raceway.

  To hell with the pedestrians and the wandering cars. Scott hit the curb at twenty-five-miles an hour, nearly cutting himself in half with the seatbelt before stomping on the gas and heading toward the intricate archway of antlers that marked the entrance to the main lodge. He gunned it, throwing snow everywhere as he struggled to navigate something even close to a straight line in snowpack that extended above the bottom of his doors. God only knew what lay under the snow, but whatever the objects were, they were big, heaving the vehicle on all axes at once. The floorboards vibrated and banged as the undercarriage slammed against unseen protrusions.

  Finally, he hit something particularly hard and entirely unforgiving, bringing him to an abrupt halt. He stomped on the accelerator, but it was usless; he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Dammit!” He shifted the automatic transmission into low and tried easing his way out. No chance.

  The roar of the motor nearly drowned out the chirp of the cell phone in his pocket. He felt his heart rate quadruple as he ripped the glove off his right hand with his teeth and fished through his pants pocket for the tiny sliver of phone. He nearly dropped it as he yanked it out and pulled it open. “Yeah? Hello?” As he spoke, he pulled his glove back on.

  “Scott! What the hell is going on?” It was his dad.

  If the phone is busy, she’s dead. Isaac’s warning rang clear. Scott didn’t know what to do, what to say. So he slapped the phone closed.

  The Jeep wasn’t going to move, and every second he spent there trying to make the impossible happen was a second not spent on getting his ass on up to Widow Maker. “Screw it,” he said, and he threw open the door and stepped out.

  “You there! Just what in blazes do you think you’re doing?”

  Scott turned to see a middle-aged bald guy wading through the snow toward him. Scott didn’t even bother to answer. Instead, he turned away and started his long run to the lodge.

  “Hey, you can’t park there!”

  Stop me, Scott didn’t say.

  The phone chirped again in his hand. Shit. Shit! What was he supposed to do now? If he ignored the phone, his dad would just keep calling. He knew this. Dad was like that. And as long as the phone was ringing, then no one else could get through.

  Dammit!

  Without slowing his slow-motion run through hip-deep snow, he snapped open the phone. “Hello?”

  “Dammit, Scott, talk to me,” his father said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Trust me, Dad, okay? I can’t. I have to keep the line clear.”

  “For what?”

  Okay, so what was he supposed to say now? What lie could he possibly cobble together that would make any sense at all?

  “Is something wrong with your mother? Does DeHaven h
ave her?”

  Man, talk about putting two and two together! “Dad, I’ve got to do this, and I’ve got to do it alone. He’ll kill her.”

  “Tell me where, Scott! Just tell me where you are!”

  Suddenly, the frigid air seemed too thin. Scott’s breath escaped him in a rush. He wanted to tell everything. He wanted just to stop and let everything take its course. To hell with Isaac DeHaven. To hell with his mom and everybody else in the world. Right now, he’d sell them all out just for the chance to lie down and forget. But he knew that tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow, he’d blame himself for everything that would happen and he’d never be able to live with it.

  “Dammit, Scott, talk to me! Has that bastard threatened you?”

  “He said I’ve got to come alone,” Scott confessed. “If he sees anyone else, he’ll kill her.”

  “He’ll kill her anyway, son. And you, too, if you’re there.”

  “I can think of something.”

  “What?”

  “Something. I don’t know yet.”

  The desperation in his father’s voice jumped right out of the phone. “Please, Scott. Please tell me where you’re going, and then we can figure out something on this end, too.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand, son. I don’t want to lose you. Not again. Now please tell me.”

  Up ahead, about fifty yards away, the antler arch loomed high over everything. Beyond that, Scott saw the bustling population of late-afternoon skiers. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to tell. But he owed his father something, didn’t he?

  Finally, he told him.

  “Okay, Scott,” Brandon said. “Don’t do anything, okay? We’ll be right there.”

  “And you’ve got to stay off this phone,” Scott warned. “He’ll start shooting if he gets a busy signal. I’ve only got about twenty minutes left.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Brandon repeated, and for the first time, Scott got the impression that others were listening to their conversation. “We can be there in twenty minutes.”

  No way, Scott thought. “I love you, Dad,” he said. And then he hung up.

  “ILOVE YOU, TOO,” Brandon said, but he was too late to beat the click of a dead line. He looked up at the rest of the room, the telephone receiver still clutched in his hand, and already, the assembled troops were mobilizing.

  Somehow, Whitestone seemed to know exactly what to do. In the space of ten seconds, he issued a flurry of commands. “Charlotte!” he yelled. “Take Mr. Seyford to a cell until we can get this sorted out. James, you come with me.”

  “Us,” Brandon corrected. “I’m going with you.”

  Whitestone knew better than to argue. Together, the three of them charged out of the station and on to Whitestone’s Humvee. The chief had the siren yelping before he even dropped the transmission into gear. Cranking the wheel hard, he stomped on the gas, and three seconds later, they were at the end of Main Street, on their way to the top of the mountain.

  “I don’t understand,” James said, over the cacophony of the siren and the roaring engine. “I thought you talked to Mrs. O’Toole on the phone.”

  “Doctor O’Toole,” Brandon corrected. He’d done it so many times that the rejoinder had become a reflex. “And I did. I don’t understand either. Maybe she had a gun to her head. If so, she should have taken the bullet.”

  Whitestone and James both shot glances over their shoulders.

  “What?” Brandon said. “You think he’s going to keep her alive after Scott gets up there?”

  The cops didn’t know what to say, but Brandon understood from their expressions that they knew he was right.

  “Do we have a game plan?” Brandon asked.

  “To stop him,” Whitestone said, and as the words passed his lips, he knew how empty they sounded. “To stop Scott. Before he gets in too deep.”

  “If DeHaven hears the siren, he’ll start shooting for sure,” Brandon said.

  “I don’t think that’ll be a factor for a few miles.”

  Brandon turned in his seat to see the parade of cop cars falling in line behind them, on their way up the hill. Eight, maybe ten of them, with enough fire power between them to hold off a military assault. “Do you think your buddies behind us have thought about that?”

  “They will,” James assured, and he reached for the microphone.

  The road up to SkyTop was packed with cars either on the way in or the way out, and as Brandon watched the gridlock open up under the assault of the sirens, he couldn’t help but think of Charlton Heston’s big scene parting the Red Sea.

  Still, something bugged Brandon; something about the brazenness of what Isaac had Scott doing. If this killer was as bright as everyone seemed to think he was, then he wouldn’t back himself into a corner like this. It was one thing to scare a boy into coming alone, but it was another thing entirely for DeHaven to put his future in a boy’s hands. What made him think that he could trust Scott with such a secret? And what was his way out if things went south?

  He thought about mentioning these concerns to Chief Whitestone, but then decided against it. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was get Whitestone and James thinking too much.

  SCOTT FOUND THE SKIS exactly where Isaac had promised, near the ski school bell. His orange and green Rossignol parabolics rested against the wooden rack, clipped together by their brakes, standing straight as an exclamation point. His poles drooped over the shovels, and on the ground, propped in the snow, lay his Technica boots, still in their carrying tree. He felt oddly indignant that his killer hadn’t even bothered to throw on a lock.

  He propped himself against the rack as he yanked off his gloves and dropped them in the snow, freeing his fingers to work on his shoelaces. Every muscle, every appendage felt swollen and beaten from the travails of the last week. With the added adrenaline rush, he could barely get his fingers to negotiate the knots. With one shoe off, he planted his sock-clad foot into the snow to hold his weight while he worked on the other boot. Did Isaac know how much this would hurt? Did he know how raw the skin of Scott’s feet were, and plant the skis out here on purpose, just to be cruel?

  But the worst was yet to come. His ski boots were stiff from the cold, and that meant pushing hard. He bit on his lower lip to keep from yelling out as his socks pulled tight against his ravaged toes and heels. It seemed to take forever, but once his feet were set in their vices, it was just a matter of stepping into his bindings and his boards were on. He had no idea what time it was as he pulled on his gloves, but he decided that it didn’t matter. It was late; balls-out, God-help-anyone-who-got-in-his-way late.

  The sun had begun to sink toward the treetops as Scott pushed off and headed down Prospector. Below him, hundreds of beginners crisscrossed the gentle slope, their legs locked in petrified snow-plow positions, taking up nearly the entire width of the slope with each traverse. Scott dug his poles into the snow to push off, and skated from one ski to the other to build speed. It was time to show these jerk-offs how it was done.

  He was doing an easy twenty, twenty-five miles an hour when he passed his first cluster of beginners poised at the top of the only remotely challenging section that Prospector offered. They stood in a line at the top, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for one of them to grow the first set of testicles. Ahead and below, the snow was littered with panicky novices who had gone before them.

  “Coming through!” Scott yelled at the line as he approached, and in the time it took them to turn around to see, he’d already blasted through the logjam, taking air as he sailed down the little ridge, heading for the carnage field. As people screamed at him to slow down, he found himself amused by the threats to report him to the ski patrol. Let them come, he thought.

  As long as none of the fallen skiers moved, no one would get hurt. Scott had already plotted his course, knowing instinctively which was the best compromise for speed and safety; but if someone stood up, or even moved, the resulting collision
would be fierce. Maybe deadly.

  Up ahead on the right, maybe seventy yards away, he saw the crossover trail to Widow Maker. He swung wide to the left, then oh-so-slightly edged the inside of his left ski to make the sweeping right-hand loop that would allow him to speed onto the trail without slowing.

  Barely wide enough to accommodate three abreast, the tiny trail afforded a breathtaking view. With the view, though, came a precipitous drop. If you didn’t know what you were doing, and went a little too far left, you could very easily end up leaving a face-print in a tree. On a busy day, the crossover could be a train wreck of scattered skiers.

  But today, thank God, the trail was clear for as far as Scott could see. He dared a look at his watch. 4:48.

  “Shit!” That asshole had to be kidding. There was no way he could make this trip in the allotted time. It was impossible.

  The crossover would dump him into the middle of Bald Eagle Glade. An ass-kicker in its own right, the trail served as the primary link between some of the less expensive condos and the Widow Maker lift. Last time he did this slope, he was with Cody Jamieson. It had been dark then, except for the moon, and he’d had a few beers on board.

  Scott shot out of the crossover chute like a bullet, again taking air, but this time nearly overbalancing backward as he caught a glimpse of somebody else barreling down the hill, showing at least as much skill as he. They missed each other by inches, triggering a guffaw and an obscene gesture from the other guy. After Scott recovered his balance, he lowered himself into a tuck. Down below, the area around the lift line looked like Disney World on a holiday. People swarmed everywhere—sixty, eighty of them in the line ahead of him.