David Wolf series Box Set

by Jeff Carson

  The rotors were twisting lazily as if it was powering down.

  “When does he do the first flights of the day?” Wolf asked.

  “On a busy day, he’ll start flying at about nine a.m., get done in the early afternoon before the light gets too bad,” Duke said.

  Wolf leaned forward and peered out the window. “Stop the cat!”

  Scott twisted. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Stop!”

  Scott stopped the cat on a dime, and Patterson slid into her side on the bench, catching herself before toppling onto the floor.

  “What’s up?” Duke asked.

  Wolf looked at Patterson and Rachette and then leaned up between Scott and Duke. “Stay here.”

  Wolf stepped out of the snow cat; his boot sank up to his knee in the wind-crusted powder. He stepped back up onto the hardened snow and looked around.

  “What the hell?” Rachette whispered, now seeing what Wolf had a few seconds ago.

  The rotor blades whipped by overhead and the engine whined at a steady low pitch. If it idled any slower, Wolf thought, it would have been shut off.

  They faced east, and the morning sun blazed through the glass-enclosed cockpit of the whirring aircraft, illuminating it like a light bulb. On the window nearest them, a splash of glowing crimson painted the window, and a red X had been scrawled through it.

  Wolf took out his pistol and walked to the aircraft, peering through the red-tainted glass at the figure inside. A man was slumped motionless in between the two cockpit seats.

  The whooshing rotor overhead stirred the air, but otherwise the wind on top of the mountain was dead calm, and it smelled like jet fuel and the faintest hint of gunpowder.

  Beyond the helicopter, there was a drop-off into Brecker Bowl, the terrain that had been bombed yesterday morning, sending a mountain of snow down onto the highway far below.

  To the south—their right—was Williams Pass, and to the north the ridgeline they stood on continued all the way to Antler Creek Lodge, which sat in the distance reflecting the sun off its windows. Below was Rocky Points, the vast open valley beyond it to the north, and Cave Creek Canyon over thirty miles away. It was all a majestic view, but the grisly sight on the window hooked their eyeballs and reeled them closer.

  Wolf noticed that the blood spatter was on the inside of the window, and the red X was scrawled on the outside. It was drawn with an oily red paint, or lipstick, just like the mark on Stephanie Lang’s forehead.

  The movement of the rotor blades gave Wolf the sense that the shooting had happened mere seconds ago. Of course, the engine could have been idling for quite a while.

  He stepped up next to the window and looked in at the slumped body, and then looked down at the snow. There were two sets of prints.

  “That Cooper?” Rachette asked, coming up behind Wolf.

  “I don’t know,” Wolf admitted.

  Wolf popped open the door and studied the man. He was wearing lace-up hiking boots and ski pants. Wolf looked back down at the prints. One set matched the man’s boots; the other appeared to have been made by ski boots, presumably the killer’s.

  A wallet bulged inside the man’s ski pants. Wolf dug inside and pulled it out. His action moved the body just that little bit, which unleashed a fecal smell that was stirred by the rotor wash.

  “Oh,” Rachette said covering his nose.

  Wolf opened the wallet and looked inside. The ID said Matthew Cooper. The picture showed Cooper tanned with a shaved head, smiling wide with a malicious looking grin.

  Wolf handed it to Rachette. “Looks like it’s Cooper.”

  Wolf looked down and traced the ski-boot prints to the front of the helicopter and then over to a spot where someone had clearly put on a pair of skis.

  Wolf tracked the path of the twin ski tracks from where he was standing—over the edge, down to the left, and then off to the right to a ridge that ran away from them and down. Along the ridge was an orange rope marking the ski-area boundary—out of bounds to the right—and the ski tracks slalomed next to it and went out of sight over a small rise.

  “He’s dead,” Patterson said, walking up behind Wolf. “He’s still warm.”

  Wolf looked at her, then walked over to the ski cat and stopped.

  Scott turned off the engine and opened the door. “Is that Cooper’s blood?” he asked with wide eyes.

  Wolf nodded. “Afraid so,” he said, looking into the vehicle at Duke’s feet, and then to the pair of skis in one of the slots on the side of the cat. “Duke, what size feet are you?”

  Duke looked down and then up at Wolf. “Ten and a half? Eleven?”

  Wolf cringed, and then climbed into the back of the cat. “I need to borrow your boots and skis … and poles and goggles.”

  Duke nodded and climbed into the back of the cat, sat down and took off his boots.

  Wolf took off his Sorels and scooted them to Duke. “Trade ya.”

  It took a few seconds and a lot of toe cramming, but Wolf packed his feet into Bob Duke’s warm, sweaty ski boots. Then he put on the mirrored-lens ski goggles; the terrain outside darkened and popped—the optics making it much easier to see gradation and depressions in the otherwise blazing white snow.

  “Good thing you have fat feet, Bob,” Wolf said.

  Bob didn’t respond. He was staring out, probably at the red smear on the helicopter window.

  Wolf buckled the boots on as loose as he could and stepped outside. His feet mashed painfully into the front of the boots, the nails breaking the skin on their neighboring toes. He pulled out the Rossignol skis and clicked into the bindings, strapped on the poles, and skated over to the front of the helicopter.

  Rachette held up his hands. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Secure the scene,” Wolf said. “Call Lorber and get him up here.”

  Wolf skied up to the edge of the cirque and looked down. He saw a tiny car driving on the highway far below; then he focused closer and back to the fresh ski tracks that disappeared over the rise.

  “What if the tracks go out of bounds?” Patterson asked.

  Wolf thought about it. “Get someone to drive up the pass right now—whoever’s closest—and tell them to wait for me. If they see a skier, make sure they know he’s armed and dangerous. Tell them to not engage until backup arrives.”

  “Where do they wait?” Patterson asked.

  “At the slide zone,” Wolf said.

  “Okay.”

  Wolf let go of a pole and let it dangle from his wrist, and then took off his glove. He pulled off his radio and twisted the dial, then pushed the button and held it to his lips. “Check,” he said, his voice was clearly audible from Patterson and Rachette’s radios. He put the radio into his jacket pocket and then felt the pistol on his holster underneath. While mentally rehearsing how he might pull the gun out to use it—drop pole, glove off, jacket up, pistol out—he jumped over the edge and landed on the steep snow with chattering skis.

  Chapter 19

  In spite of how much snow the resort had gotten over the past forty-eight hours, the terrain under Wolf was hard and unforgiving because most of the powder from the bowl had slid to the bottom of the valley the day before.

  The skis scraped on the ice as he cut to his right. When he reached the rope, he slowed to a stop and looked up. Rachette and Patterson were watching him. They waved, and Wolf raised a pole in return. Then he turned to look down the slope.

  There was a clear crack where the snow had slid yesterday. To the left it was ice; to the right, fluffy powder with one set of tracks down it. He looked left across the expanse of the bowl and up to Antler Creek Lodge on the ridge, and marveled at the huge amount of snow that had to have cleaved and dropped.

  Wolf studied the tracks. When he had been in his mid-twenties, Wolf and this skier would have been good companions on the mountain. The tracks were long and symmetrical, turning the same arc on the left as the right, with a lot of distance in between. They were the tracks of a
n expert skier flying down the mountain at speeds most people weren’t comfortable with—speed Wolf was no longer comfortable with now that he was pushing forty.

  Wolf pointed Duke’s skis down and entered into the powder. It came up to his knees, and the deep snow helped him check his speed with each turn. The wind blew on his face and was loud in his ears. He bounced up in between turns and sank deep as the wide skis carved through the snow.

  He continued down with a steady rhythm, still marveling at the aggressive distance between the turn tracks he followed. The man he followed was competent on skis for sure, but Wolf thought that they were the tracks of someone running with nothing to lose. Maybe death didn’t even matter to this person. If Wolf caught up with him, he had no doubt the man would be dangerous.

  The rope ahead turned to the left, steering skiers back toward the flat zone at the base of the bowl, and then onward to the left and to the rest of the Rocky Points Ski Resort beyond. The tracks, however, ducked the rope and veered right.

  Wolf stopped at the point where the tracks went under. His breathing was labored; his legs ached, already a little wobbly and slow. The helicopter was gone, out of view beyond the tracks he and his prey had left.

  He stood sucking wind and following the tracks below with his eyes. They continued for another five or so turns, then abruptly turned right and then straightened, into a swath of dense forest, then they came out the other side into a powder field.

  Wolf sucked in a breath and squinted. In the middle of the powder field the tracks led to a dark figure huddled in the snow. It was clearly a man, but any more detail than that was impossible to discern.

  He pointed his skis down, gathered some speed, and then cut right. When he reached the tracks of the other skier, his velocity increased once more.

  Had Wolf been seen?

  The person was out of sight now, and all Wolf could see were the tracks that led into the dense copse of trees ahead.

  As he entered the forest, he swerved back and forth, keeping on the narrow snake of depressed snow, not daring to deviate from the tracks an inch and risk slamming into a tree or stopping altogether.

  He was going fast on the tracks, much faster than the man in front of him had gone, having less friction underneath him, and a few times he crashed through small branches, narrowly avoiding smashing straight into thick trunks by fabric-ripping margins.

  The tracks were crazy lines, snaking downhill and gaining speed where Wolf would have chosen to keep skating across. Just when the trees got so tight that Wolf was certain a collision was imminent, they abruptly thinned out, and Wolf could see the man no more than a hundred yards ahead of him.

  As Wolf came out into the open, he kept his eyes glued ahead and began the process of pulling his gun as fast as he could. He took his right pole and tucked it under his other arm, then yanked his glove off and shoved it into his jacket pocket, pulled up the bottom edge of his jacket and lifted the pistol out of its holster. All this he did in the span of a few seconds, and all of it, along with his approach, had still gone unnoticed by the figure in front of him.

  The person was either unaware of Wolf’s presence, or waiting for Wolf to get nearer for an easier shot. There was no telling from this distance, but Wolf wouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out.

  A downed tree that had been uncovered lay just ahead, and Wolf realized at the last second that he needed to jump to get up on top of it, or risk putting the skis under it and clothes-lining himself in the shins. So he jumped, and when he came down his skis thwacked on the log, and the noise startled the man ahead into motion.

  And it was impressive motion.

  Immediately he was up and charging straight down the steep glade to the left, this time not turning at all.

  Wolf watched him go, trying to take in some of his characteristics. All that stood out for Wolf was the red hat. It was bright red, the red of the helicopter that sat on top of the mountain. Otherwise, the man was a blurry cloud of powder flying down the mountain at high speed.

  Wolf turned his skis down and cut over. He was traveling painfully slow, the distance between them spreading by the second. But then Wolf realized exactly where they were, and knew things might turn in his favor in a matter of seconds because the man was headed straight for a line of cliffs.

  The slope seemed to disappear ahead, like they were skiing on the side of a massive barrel, and the edge kept rolling under. Wolf knew that when the edge finally did come, it was a fifty-foot drop at the lowest point, and upwards of eighty feet at the highest. The man looked like he knew this terrain, and if he didn’t want to plummet off the edge of the world he would have to turn one way or the other soon, losing valuable speed.

  Wolf let the ski pole that was tucked under his arm drop, and he made some long turns, still grasping his pistol in his now numb right hand.

  As the terrain steepened, his turns did little to check his speed. More disturbing still, the man ahead was gaining speed.

  Options raced through Wolf’s mind. He knew that young crazy people jumped off these cliffs all the time, given the right conditions and enough cameras to capture it. These were definitely the right conditions. But he also knew that young crazy people jumped with the aid of spotters, making sure their lines were right so they didn’t land in trees or on rocks and die.

  The man in front of him was gone. No more cloud of powder. Nothing.

  Wolf’s final thought was of the long, kamikaze tracks higher up the mountain, and then he balked. He dropped the gun, turned ninety degrees to his right, and slid on his side, digging the edges of his skis in, and his right hand into the powder. The terrain steepened, and then steepened some more, and then all he could see was the tops of trees on the distant valley floor below, and a gentle slope to the highway, where an impossibly tiny car drove on the curvy road.

  Wolf slid down, all his efforts to halt his progress for nothing, and just when he thought he was going over the edge, he stopped in the thick snow. Before he’d finished taking a breath of relief, the entire mountain started moving downward.

  His stomach lurched as he slid, and then he twisted to his belly and swam with his arms, and when that didn’t stop him he dug his hands down as hard as he could. His gloveless right hand was a numb stump, his left catching no purchase on anything. Everything was sliding down, him with it, and it was futile, like a man trying to swim up a waterfall.

  Just as he was about to turn back around and make a leap for it so he might clear any rocks jutting from the cliffs below, his hands gripped a jagged outcrop beneath the snow. He grabbed with all his might, hugging the hook of a rock, and felt the snow slough over his head and back, burrowing deep into his jacket, pulling him like a fat man hanging onto his shoulders, suffocating him. And then just as quickly as it had started, the slide passed and his body was light again.

  Wolf flexed his arms and shoulders and shook his head back and forth, flinging the cold snow off his skin. His goggles were caked with powder so he stared at pure darkness, but there was no way he was going to let go of the rock with either arm to wipe them off.

  He needed a foothold. He picked up his right leg and felt the ski flop around, heard it scraping against bare rock. With a grunt, he kicked his rear binding and heard the released ski tumble down the rocks for a long time and then a whack as it landed far below. Then he kicked the other ski off and jabbed the toe of his right boot into solid rock, and realized he had no foothold.

  After what seemed like a minute of grunting, staring at a sliver of light that seeped through his blocked goggles, his legs floundering beneath him, he found purchase and stood on the tiptoes of the boots. Only then did he dare take a second to reach up and rip off his goggles with one hand.

  A wave of dread hit him when he looked up and saw near vertical rock and dirt for at least twenty feet above him. There were few depressions to dig his hands into, and with clunky ski boots, footholds would be wobbly and tentative at best.

  He looked down. His feet
appeared to be standing on air. Then he scanned right and left, and knew he was clinging to one of the highest points in the line of cliffs.

  Movement below caught his eye and he did a double take.

  Red Hat was skiing slowly toward the road, looking up at Wolf with interest as he took wide turns. The man was moving fine. Not injured in the least, or hiding it well if he was.

  “Yee-haw!” the man yelled from below, waving a pole. Then he gained some speed, slalomed through the forest, and stopped at the side of the highway.

  Wolf’s foot slipped an inch, so he pulled himself up into a bent-elbow position and felt around for new, more stable footholds. For agonizing seconds there was nothing. He was scraping on a sheer, almost-vertical rock face.

  He pulled his right leg up and pressed a knee into the rock under his belly, and then wondered just what the hell he was doing as he felt even less stable than before.

  As he lowered his body back down to the original precarious position he’d been in, he studied the ground above him and picked the line he was going to climb. It was going to happen. He was going to make it. And …

  The rock underneath his hands let out a sickening crack and shifted down, and then the chunk of granite dropped toward his legs.

  He pushed off his toes and kicked his legs back in time to avoid the crushing force of the rock, which would have certainly shattered his leg bones to splinters. As he brought his legs back in, the toes of his boots smacked against the cliff and bounced; now he was dropping.

  With all his might, he twisted his body around, pushing his hands against the rock to help him. Then he brought his legs up in a squat, bent forward, and kicked into the side of the cliff as hard as he could. The boots slapped and gripped for an instant, and then he jumped out head first and looked down.

  “Oh sh …” Wolf whispered as the air rushed against his face, building to a deafening roar.