David Wolf series Box Set

by Jeff Carson

  There was no preparing for this moment, and her fierce counter-attack startled him. She thrashed and twisted underneath him, and he tightened his grip until his muscles shook, and then he gripped harder still.

  She sagged down in the seat, like she was trying to escape by sliding underneath his legs, but he just leaned on her harder and a gurgling sound bubbled from her lips. Even through the leather gloves, he could feel the pounding of the blood in her neck. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, she went still, and the pounding stopped.

  He gripped her for a while longer, knowing she was already dead, but just wanting to make sure. He finally eased his grip, the leather of his gloves peeling off her skin as he pulled away.

  He had almost forgotten. With a quick movement, he opened the center console again and pulled out the tube of Ruby Fire lipstick. He removed the cap, carefully twisted the tube’s base to expose the right height of color, and then applied the mark to her forehead. He leaned back and assessed his work. Maybe not exactly like the original, he thought, but close enough.

  He wiped a tear from his cheek before it dropped onto the warm lifeless body. It was strange. As the seconds ticked by and he replayed images of the past few minutes, a persisting adrenaline spike spawned an airy sense of wonder. I did it. I strangled her. I killed this pathetic excuse for a human being. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, he thought. Maybe I am out cold, lying on a dead woman in a running vehicle on a deserted road in the middle of the night.

  He slowed his breathing and looked around, watching the flying flakes and listening to the windshield wipers squeal behind him. Then he felt the warmth on his knee and jumped over onto the driver’s side. She had pissed herself, and it was all over the seat.

  He reached over, pulled on the door handle, and then shoved her out. She ended up hanging out the door with her legs still jammed inside on the floor, so he crawled onto the passenger seat, feeling the warm liquid soak through his jeans, and then rolled her out into the deep snow.

  For a few seconds he stared, watching the snow cover her body like a lace veil, and he again wondered if this surreal scene was a dream. The bitter-cold wind and his sticky wet jeans reeking of urine convinced him otherwise. It seemed real because it was real.

  He climbed back in the driver’s seat and decided that even if it were a dream, the prudent thing would be to dream about getting the hell out of there. So, he turned the truck around and did just that.

  Chapter 2

  The anticipation on the pass was electric. If Wolf had not been cocooned in his winter duty gear—hat, gloves, fully zipped coat, pants, boots—he was sure his body hair would have been standing on end.

  “Waiting on you, Sheriff,” the distant-sounding voice crackled through everyone’s radios.

  Wolf looked at the other bundled faces and wide eyes of the people around him, and then shifted his gaze up the snow-blanketed highway that bent out of sight behind the pillowed pines. It was the day after a huge dump of snow, and a beautiful morning on a bluebird day, as skiers called it—a cloudless, radiant sky. Despite the crowd surrounding him, Wolf regarded the scene as desolate and peaceful. For the moment.

  He turned to look past the congregation of official personnel that surrounded him. A few hundred yards down the highway, a line of still vehicles puffed exhaust behind a closed gate arm. For five minutes now, people had been abandoning their vehicles and huddling on the roadside next to the fresh wall of plowed snow, jockeying for position to see, cell-phone cameras swinging between the bright mountaintop and the congregation of Sluice County sheriff’s deputies, Rocky Points Rescue volunteers, and Colorado Department of Transportation workers milling in the cold shaded road above them.

  An RKPT-News 8 crew had set up next to the road gate, with an expensive camera mounted on a tripod, lens aimed high up the mountain.

  “Stand by!” Wolf shouted, a puff of cloud jetting from his mouth. He thumbed the radio button and brought it to his lips. “All clear.”

  The uniformed men and women surrounding Wolf swiveled in unison to look up, and he gave a final glance to the line of vehicles down the road. They reacted to the synchronized commotion and stared up. He watched as motorists nearest the front shouted down the line and people began sprinting toward the gate for a better view.

  Wolf felt like he had just opened a cage containing a wild beast.

  “Fire in the hole,” Bob Duke, longtime director of the resort’s ski patrol, said through the radio.

  Even through the tiny speaker, Wolf could hear Bob’s high-pitched excitement, and it coaxed Wolf’s body to tense and tingle. He resigned himself to the moment, and assured himself that they’d taken every precaution so that no one would be in harm’s path. Wolf had taken CDOT’s recommended perimeter around the slide zone and doubled it. He had discussed the terrain above the motorists in detail with the avalanche specialists. There was nothing more to do but …

  Two sharp-edged blasts thumped the air, and Wolf looked up.

  The deputies nearby started to whoop as a white cloud began billowing from the bowl high above.

  On a normal blast day, when the conditions on the resort’s southernmost bowl were just right to slide, a triggered avalanche would make its way down a third of the mountain, and stop in the relatively flat zone at the bottom of Brecker Bowl along the southern boundary of the resort.

  But if snow conditions were just right (or just wrong) and an especially deep layer of powder lay over a weak layer of sugar snow, the slide could ride through the flat zone and spill into the treeless chute that had been gouged out over the millennia by other slides. An especially big avalanche could get as far as the highway. That specific zone was a safe distance up the road, clearly discernable by smaller, younger trees and an open glade.

  According to Duke’s earlier assessment, backed by over thirty years of experience with the Rocky Points Resort ski patrol, there was a small chance they were going to see a slide reach the road, or something even bigger. The official accumulation from last night’s storm was twenty-seven inches at the peak, and conditions had conspired to prevent CDOT and ski patrol from preemptively blasting the bowl. Topping that, the wind had shifted and come strong out of the north all night, loading at least nine feet of wind-deposited snow underneath a freshly sculpted cornice, all on top of a layer of depth-hoar crystals, or sugar snow, a result of the resort’s dry and sunny conditions over the past month.

  For ski conditions on the rest of the mountain, and the skiers who would be enjoying them all day, the new snow was a godsend. But as Wolf watched the white cloud explode from the bowl above, he wondered if this wasn’t something sent from hell.

  The deputies and personnel surrounding Wolf began to shift at the sight of the pyroclastic flow-like explosion traveling down the mountain, and everyone, including Wolf, let out a gasp of amazement.

  The billowing mass rumbled, and the hundred-year-old trees cracking into millions of pieces inside the torrent were muffled pops.

  At the front of the cloud, a white streak shot forward at startling speed, then another, and another, reminding Wolf of streamers coming out of a napalm explosion. They were snow and ice-covered rocks, ejected at hundreds of miles per hour, and they were a definite surprise to Wolf.

  Wolf watched as one of the streamers struck a tree a third of the way up the mountain, wrenching it out of sight in a twist of green branches and a puff of powder.

  “Heads up!” Wolf yelled, certain, though, that every spectator had seen the new danger and was acting accordingly.

  Wolf looked up, wondering whether any invisible rocks were headed right for them. He couldn’t see any, so he looked back to the front of the rolling monster.

  The barrage seemed to be gaining speed, which was hard to believe since it was moving so fast and now so low on the mountain. It was going to hit the road with full force, Wolf thought. As quickly as the thought came, the thundering mass shot across the road. Trees cart-wheeled out of the cloud and crashed into
others on the far side of the road, and the mayhem continued onward.

  “Holy mother of …” Wolf heard Rachette say somewhere nearby.

  The trees to the immediate left blocked everyone’s view as the slide reached the flat valley below, but the roar and snapping and cracking were still there. Then the white steam came back into sight, climbing up the other side of the valley, as if it were a huge bucket of water splashing from one side of a bathtub to the other.

  The spectacle was short-lived, however, because a cloud of powder was descending on them, traveling down the highway at more than a few over the speed limit.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  Wolf turned his back and jumped as the cloud hit, half expecting to be knocked into oblivion by a wall of snow, rocks, and trees. But the feared deadly impact never came, and Wolf fell onto his butt, jarring his spine, as the millions of hissing ice crystals collided with his back and then invaded every crack in his winter armor. Shutting his eyes and holding his breath, he shoved his face inside his coat and waited for the tempest to pass.

  When the air stilled, he popped his face out and watched the others around him do the same. The air was sweet with the stench of pinesap. Rachette had huddled into the airplane-crash position and was now uncoiling himself from the ground. Wolf stood up and scanned the group through the still swirling air.

  “Everyone all right?” Wolf yelled.

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  Expletives flew from everyone’s mouths, and there was a faint cheer from the crowd below gathered on the road.

  Wolf started accounting for every person that had been there before. Eleven … twelve … thirteen bodies, all moving and talking excitedly to one another.

  “Oh. My. God,” Rachette said. “Did you see that?”

  Wolf blinked in response, and then took a glove off and began wiping the fine powder from his upper and lower lashes. His skin was beading with moisture, and he palmed his entire face and pulled down, raking the melting snow off his beard with his shaking hands. Yes, he’d seen that, and for a second, he’d thought that he’d killed thirteen people.

  …

  It took a full five minutes for the cloud of ice crystals to fully dissipate, drifting on a small breath of wind that came in striking contrast to the howling blizzard from the previous night.

  Thirty minutes later, after three more charges had failed to slide any more snow high above on the bowl, officials deemed the slide zone safe for CDOT workers to clear the road.

  Wolf looked up as a growling front-end loader crunched its way through the snow toward the wall that now blocked the pass. Another tractor rattled to life and beeped, and the deputies made way for the awakening machines.

  “… I gave him a roadside last night.” Deputy Baine was giving Rachette an earful about something.

  “Did he pass?” Rachette asked.

  Baine looked up at Wolf and nodded, as if including him on the conversation. “Yep. Passed with flying colors.”

  Taylor Hunt, a burly man who had seen real napalm streamers in Vietnam, drove by in a lurching yellow Volvo tractor. He wore a wide smile with a cigarette between his teeth, and he waved at the crowd of men and women from behind the glass. Just like everyone else who had witnessed the avalanche, he looked excited to be alive, and excited about the stories he’d be able to tell over a beer that night.

  “That’s not a normal-sized slide, right? That was, like, a hundred-year slide, right?” Rachette was grilling Patterson.

  Patterson avoided eye contact and responded with a shrug. For the first time, Wolf noticed that she seemed shaken up.

  Rachette detected it, too. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just don’t like avalanches.”

  Rachette gave Wolf a quick glance. “What, you have history with avalanches or something?”

  Patterson looked at Rachette and then to the ground. “Yeah.” Her tone said, Let’s drop it.

  “All right, everyone,” Wolf said. “Let’s huddle up. We have a lot of work to do, and now that we have three of our snow movers stuck on the pass for”—Wolf turned around and looked at the tractors who were picking away at the wall of snow. At one point, it was taller than two of the big machines stacked one on another—“most of the day at least. That means driving conditions are going to be more hazardous. Get started on the patrols we talked about this morning. You know your assignments. And keep an eye on all our plowing friends.”

  Wolf looked at Deputy Yates, who nodded back. Wolf had given Yates the task of keeping an eye on the Hosfeld twins, brothers who loved to rage through town with their plow-wielding four-by-fours each and every snowstorm, providing more community terror than service.

  “And, again,”—Wolf took a deep breath—“the funeral service starts at two-thirty. Get there early, or just do not get there. Stay out in the parking lot if you can’t make it on time. Am I clear?”

  Wolf moved his gaze from one deputy to the next, and each nodded in turn.

  Wolf smacked his gloved hands together. “All right, let’s get out and help our community today, people.”

  The uniformed crowd scattered and walked back down the road to their waiting vehicles.

  “Rachette, Patterson,” Wolf said.

  “Yeah?” Rachette turned and stopped. Patterson did the same.

  “First thing: go to Edna Yerton’s place and check on her. Her wood pile is going to be buried, I doubt she’ll have a fire lit, and she probably won’t have enough groceries to make dinner tonight.” He took off his glove, pulled out his wallet, and gave Rachette a twenty. “Get some food and take it up to her, get a fire going and plenty of wood inside to dry, and make sure she’s got what she needs for the next few days. Be careful on the way up—the plows probably haven’t done her road—and don’t try pulling into her drive. Park on 15 and shoe the hundred yards or so to her house.”

  Rachette pulled the edges of his mouth down and nodded. “All right.” He glanced at Patterson and then back at Wolf. “So, not that I’m against this, but doesn’t she have a neighbor who could help her out?”

  “No,” Wolf said. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh,” Rachette said. “Wait, dead? Who was that? When was that?”

  “I’m glad you keep up on town current events.” Wolf started walking down the road.

  There was a bright piercing light near the gate, and they all slowed when they saw a television camera and a reporter speaking into a microphone and gesturing toward them.

  “Rachette, you up for doing an interview with Renee Moore?” Wolf asked.

  Rachette stopped in his tracks. He went pale, almost green, and by his shifting body language looked like he might vomit, lose control of his bladder, or both.

  “What?” he said, staring into the distance.

  “Mitch Casper,” Wolf said.

  “What? Mitch Camper?” Rachette looked at Wolf. “What?”

  “Mitch Casper died. He was the neighbor. Who died?”

  “Oh. Yeah …”

  Patterson looked at Wolf and smiled for the first time of the day. “I never heard about that either. Never knew the guy.”

  Wolf nodded. “His family found him this fall. Ninety years old. Natural causes. Was dead for a week. I don’t think he left his house much for the past ten years. Not a social guy at all.” They started walking. “Sarah has the listing. She can’t sell the house apparently. Is having trouble getting the banks to lower the price or something like that. Hey, Rachette, you ready?”

  “What?” Rachette looked at Wolf in horror.

  Wolf slapped him on the shoulder. “Rachette, under no circumstances, ever, would I allow you to be the spokesman for the Sluice County Sheriff’s Department on television.”

  Rachette almost collapsed from relief. “Oh, good. Thank God.”

  Chapter 3

  “The road is covered by at least ten feet of snow, trees and rocks, and it’s going to take some time to clear the pass to the so
uth,” Wolf said, feeling the heat coming off the light panel mounted on the expensive-looking camera.

  Renee Moore was confident and pretty, and smelled like expensive perfume. Her face was perfect, made up with the lavish precision only seen on television stars, or so Wolf assumed, since he’d never seen a television star this close. Her thick red lips sucked in the light, her face was tanned with rosy cheeks, her eyes giant blue orbs surrounded by thick eyelashes so long she could have used a curling iron on them. Her shoulder-length blonde hair peeked out beneath her hat and framed her face just so. She was downright attractive, holding a look of attentive interest for Wolf’s words. With the reflecting camera lens two feet from his face, he had to concentrate to control what was coming out of his mouth. Since this was his first television interview, he had no clue how it was going—no other moment to compare with.

  “… on the pass?” she asked.

  Wolf realized he’d been zoning out and felt his face flush. His five-day beard itched like hell, but at least the dark hair obscured the lower half of his reddening face. “I’m sorry, pardon me?”

  She flashed a facetious smile and pulled the microphone back to her mouth. “I was asking, have you ever seen an avalanche like that before on this pass? It was amazing-looking from where we were standing.”

  Wolf shook his head. “No, I haven’t seen one that big. We had some conditions come together that were pretty rare, resulting in quite a lot of snow coming down the mountain.”

  “And how long will it take to clear that snow off the pass?” she asked.

  “I would say Williams Pass will be closed for at least the day, even with crews working from both sides of the slide zone.”

  “And surely a great thing for the ski resort, which is reporting twenty-seven inches of powder at the top. Do you get to make a few turns up there yourself, Sheriff?” She gave a little wink, which made Wolf’s lips curl. She was good.