“Parker?” said the would-be passenger. “He’s that tall guy from the sheriff’s office, was in the paper the other day?”
The attendant nodded. “That’s right. If you want to complain to someone, go see him. ” He grinned slightly, sensing that the situation was calming down a little. “Sorry I grabbed you like I did but it was the only way I could stop you. The doors were about to close. You came out of nowhere. I didn’t even know you were here until you were trying to get your skis in the rack. ”
“Yeah. Fine. No trouble,” the skier replied. He realized he was spending too much time here, giving the lift attendant time and opportunity to get a good look at him. “Just I’m in a bit of a rush, is all. ”
He turned away, looking for another cabin. There were plenty to choose from. Most of the skiers coming in now had opted for a few drinks in the Thunderhead bars before heading down the mountain. Cabin after cabin was swinging out into the gathering night, empty.
The attendant took his skis from him and led the way to the nearest cabin. Deftly, he speared them into the rack and stood aside as the skier boarded the cabin, stooping as he went through the low sill of the doorway.
The cabin passed the automatic trip set above the cable. The doors sighed shut on their pneumatic pistons and he swung out into the dark. Two hundred yards below him, Julia Dietrich was humming an old Eagles song to herself. One day, thirty years in the future, she’d hum that same song to her twin granddaughters. And neither she, nor they, would have the slightest idea that the song was being performed courtesy of a big, athletic-looking lift attendant in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
J
esse tilted the straight-back chair onto its back legs. The papers
spread out on the table before him were blurring into one inchoate mass. He pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes and rubbed. He groaned softly to himself. This was the part of a case that he hated. It was boring, unrewarding and soul destroying. It made digging ditches seem fascinating by comparison.
He’d tramped the length and breadth of the mountain, stopping in at the ski school, ski patrol and the seemingly hundreds of bars, ski shops, restaurants, hire shops and ski tuning establishments with his list of names. Asking the same questions over and over again, trying to piece together some picture of the men who’d been fired from the resort over the past few years. Looking for that one, casually mentioned piece of information that might just make one name stand out from the others. “Oh sure, Deputy I remember him. He used to say that one day he’d come back here and stick a sharpened steel spike into people. That’s the guy for certain.” He shook his head to clear it a little, reached for the cup of coffee he’d poured a few minutes ago, took a sip and pursed his lips in displeasure. The coffee was stone, motherless cold. Those few minutes, he realized now, were closer to half an hour.
He picked up the sheaf of notes he’d been compiling and began to check them again. There was pitifully little to go on. The former ski instructor fired by Ben Fuller was a standout so far. But instinctively, Jesse distrusted the lead. It had come too easily. It was the first name thrown up. He glanced at the name again.
“Michael Miller, Michael Miller,” he muttered softly to himself. “Where are you tonight, Michael?”
“You gonna start talking to yourself, it’s time you went home,” said a soft voice behind him. He turned, wincing slightly as his stiff shoulders protested against the move. Lee was standing inside the door of the conference room, leaning on the jamb and regarding him with a small frown.
“Working late?” she asked unnecessarily. He glanced at his old Seiko and noticed, with mild surprise, that it was after eleven.
“Just going through these names, sorting the possibles from the unlikelys,” he replied.
Lee shoved herself off the doorframe and moved closer to the table, looking over his shoulder at the notes he’d been scrawling on pages from a yellow legal pad.
“Possibles and unlikelys?” she repeated. “That means there are no probables as yet?”
He gave her a tired grin. “There never are,” he said, yawning involuntarily.
“Go on home, Jesse,” said Lee, in a softer tone. “I don’t want you falling asleep at the wheel halfway up Rabbit Ear Pass.”
He gathered his papers together and stood, moving stiffly as he headed for the door.
“Never been known to happen,” he said. She followed him out, hitting the light switch as she went and leaving the conference room in darkness.
The building was on minimum lighting at this late hour, with maybe one light in five lit. There was an eerie, forlorn quality to the dim light and the deep patches of shadow that alternated along the corridor as they headed for the stairs.
It was snowing again as they came out into the parking lot. The black tarmac was almost hidden by a fresh, thick carpet of snow. Jesse took a deep breath of the cold night air.
“Great ski season,” he said softly almost to himself.
“Except for one little problem,” Lee replied, and he nodded seriously.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Apart from that.”
Lee dropped a hand onto his shoulder and he looked at her, a little surprised at the contact.
“Take care driving, Jess,” she said, and turned quickly away to her Renegade.
He thought that maybe her voice sounded a little thick, a little husky. He wondered why that might be.
TWENTY-SIX
T
here was a noise on the porch. A noise that had no place in the normal spectrum of night sounds outside Jesse’s cabin. It was that fact that brought him instantly awake from the deep sleep that claimed him almost as soon as his head had hit the pillow.
He lay there now, trying to re-create the noise in his mind. He’d heard it in his sleep. Now, fully awake, it was like trying to reach back into another dimension.
He tossed back the covers, shivering in the night cold, and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. He cocked his head to one side and listened, waiting to see if the noise would come again. It didn’t. Something far more prosaic came instead—a gentle tapping on the wooden panels of the door. He reached for the lamp beside his bed and flicked the switch. Soft, yellow light flooded the interior of the cabin.
He padded to the door and threw back the solid iron bolt that secured it from the inside. Jesse was no nervous sleeper. But all cops gather enemies in the course of the job and only a fool would sleep behind an unsecured door. For the same reason, the door itself was thick, solid timber. He laid his hand on the door handle, then caution made him pause.
“Who’s out there?” he asked, glancing back to the Colt where it lay on the bedside table.
“It’s me, Jess,” said Lee. “Open up. It’s damn cold out here with no shoes on.”
He frowned at the thought of it, wondering why she was in bare feet at … he paused, realizing that the one thing he hadn’t done so far was check to see what time it was. He did so now. He always slept wearing his watch.
“Jesus, Lee,” he said, opening the door. “It’s after one o’clock. What are you doing out here at this hour?”
He hesitated as the door came fully open and the spill of light from inside the room illuminated the porch. The sheriff of Routt County was standing, her hair lightly dusted with snow, and her handmade high heel boots in her hand. He noticed idly that she was wearing thick white socks. She shuffled her feet awkwardly.
“You going to let me in?” she asked, with just a tad of asperity in her voice. Jesse stood back and gestured to the interior of the cabin. Lee brushed past him, shivering slightly, and dropped the boots on the bare, board floor. That was when Jesse identified the noise that had first woken him. It had been the sound of a boot being dropped onto the boards of the porch outside his front door. He looked at Lee curiously. There was a spot of color in each of her cheeks that he didn’t think was due to the cold. He shut the front door, leaned on it and regarded her wordlessly for a few seconds.
“Well?” she said, finally breaking the silence. There was a note of challenge in her voice, daring him to comment on her arrival out here, boots in hand, in the middle of the night. In addition to everything else, Jesse was a cautious man.
He shrugged again. “Fine.” The color flared in Lee’s cheeks again.
“Fine?” she mimicked him, on a rising note. “Fine? I arrive out here near two in the morning—”
“Closer to one,” Jesse put in mildly. She brushed the interjection away, irritably.
“Be nearly two before you get around to saying anything sensible,” she told him. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but figured “fine” might not be the best thing to repeat. He settled for another shrug. Lee continued, a little breathlessly.
“So do you normally have ladies arrive here at this time of night and drop their boot on your front porch? This is just another night like Wednesday for you, is it?”
This time another shrug wasn’t going to do it. He just knew that. Carefully, he replied, “No. I guess it’s not.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, standing feet apart, a bare two yards from him. He had the distinct impression that every inch of her body was as taut as a fiddle string. He thought if he touched her, if anything touched her, she’d twang an E above high C.
“I wouldn’t like to think that women just came out here any time at all, dropping their boots on your porch like they felt they had a right to,” she said.
He frowned now. The dropping of the boot seemed to have some kind of significance for her. He was damned if he could figure what it might be. He thought about not asking her, decided, on balance, that might be even more risky than asking.
“So, Lee,” he said carefully. “How come you dropped that boot, anyway?” She nodded several times before she answered him. Finally he thought, he’d got something right. He’d asked the right question. The one she wanted asked.
Then she replied. “Well now, Jess, seems I dropped that boot ’cause I sort of let go of it when I lost my balance taking it off.”
He thought he’d been too hasty with his self-congratulation. Maybe that wasn’t the question she wanted after all. She looked at him now, head cocked slightly to one side, still nodding a little, her eyes wide and maybe just a little crazy he thought. He tried again, feeling his way. There seemed to be a pattern developing here and it seemed to have something to do with the boots. He thought he’d stay with that subject.
“Um … Lee? Why … were you taking your boots off in the first place?” he asked her. And finally, she heaved a great sigh of relief and he knew he’d got it right.
“Well now, Jess, do you have any idea—” she stopped, held a finger in the air. The phrasing wasn’t emphatic enough for her yet. She tried another way, seemed satisfied with it and went on, “Do you have the slightest idea how foolish a girl can look trying to get her jeans off over a pair of boots like these?”
He shook his head, repeated one word. “Jeans?” he said and then realized that she’d tossed her sheriff’s department parka to the floor and her hands were flying over the buttons of her uniform shirt, ripping them open as she continued talking, with that strange, slightly crazy note in her voice.
“That’s right, Jesse,” she said. “A girl can look downright ridiculous hopping around a room like this with her jeans snagged on her boot heels. Nothing like that to ruin the moment.”
He knew he was gaping, could do nothing to stop himself. She flung the shirt back and off her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor behind her. She wore nothing underneath it and he felt the breath catch in his throat at the sight of her magnificent bare breasts, swinging slightly with the violent movements she was making as she undid the waistband of her Levis, unzipped the front, then shucked them down to knee level, finally stepping clear of them and leaving them discarded on the floor with the shirt. She wore nothing underneath the jeans, either. She stood before him now, statuesque, long-legged, lean-hipped. A seemingly remote part of his brain registered the fact that her breasts looked softer and fuller than he remembered, but still firm and very inviting, with the nipples aroused and flaring. Jesse felt himself hardening inside the hastily donned jeans. This definitely wasn’t the sort of situation he’d had a lot of experience with. It wasn’t a situation he’d had any experience with, come to think of it.
“Jesus, Lee?” he said, more as a question than a statement. His voice cracked slightly as he spoke and he realized he sounded vaguely absurd.
Lee made a gesture that mixed equal parts annoyance and resignation. “Hell, Jesse,” she said. “I’ve tried to be subtle. I’ve tried to hint at it. I’ve asked you to stay the night. I guess I’m just no damn good at any of those things. So here I am.”
She hesitated, then added, with an overtone of uncertainty and even a slight edge of fear, “Just, for Christ’s sake, don’t tell me to get dressed and go.”
“Go?” he said, feeling strangely short of breath. “Why the hell would I want you to go?”
She smiled at that, a smile that was nine parts relief. She glanced down at the bulge in his jeans, now well and truly prominent.