01 Storm Peak (51 page)

Read 01 Storm Peak Online

Authors: John Flanagan

Tags: #Mystery

The phone shrilled and she grabbed it. It was Ray.
“Good day to you, Sheriff. What can I do you for?”
She skipped the pleasantries and came straight to the point. “Ray, I want you to get that Jet Ranger of yours fired up and bring it down here to town. Put her down on the sports field, the other side of the river, all right?”
“My chopper, Sheriff?” he said, a little slow on the uptake.
“Yes, damn it,” Lee answered a little more crisply than he might have deserved. “We’ve got a major manhunt going on down here and we’re going to need you and your chopper.”
“Well … I’ve got a charter in an hour’s time—” the pilot began.
“Cancel it,” she ordered. “I need you on standby right here.”
“In the town itself, Sheriff?” he queried and she sighed with exasperation.
“Yes, Ray. In the town. Not much use to me having you on standby out there, is it? Not if I need you here in a hurry.”
“Yeah, well I understand that, Sheriff. But you know, town ordinances say I can’t land my chopper in the town limits. Remember, we had those complaints about noise pollution two, three years back?”
“Ray, listen to me,” Lee said quietly. “Fuck the town ordinances and fuck the noise pollution. And fuck you if I don’t see that goddamn chopper on the sports field in the next ten minutes.”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the phone. Before the pilot could speak, Lee added, “I’m warning you, Ray. Get that chopper down here or I’ll arrest you as an accessory to murder. And Ray,” she said, “you know I’ll do it.”
“Well, okay, Sheriff, but you’d better square this with the mayor and the town council,” he said in an aggrieved tone.
“I’ll take care of them, Ray,” she promised. “You just get that chopper down here fast.”
“Well, all right. Long as you say it’s important, I guess I’m on my way.”
“Good, Ray. You just set her down there and stay right by her. Keep the engine running or whatever you do with those things. If I need you, I’m going to need you in a hurry.”
“Okay, Sheriff.”
She sensed he was going to say something more but she’d finished with the conversation. She set the phone back in the cradle and met Felix’s gaze. The town police chief was looking a little amused.
“That Ray, it’s as well he can fly one of those whirlybirds, ’cause he ain’t too quick on the uptake at much else, is he?” he said.
Lee shook her head in mock weariness and rolled her eyes. “Jesus,” she said. “Noise pollution?”
“Getting harder to be a cop every day, Lee,” Felix told her sympathetically.

 

J
esse raced the Yamaha diagonally up the ski trail, sliding and bouncing as he headed for an access trail halfway up. The ski patrol vehicle handled the slope easily. It was a three-seater, built to take a driver and two pillions, and with an engine sized up accordingly. With just one person on board, it had more than enough power to head up the slopes. He figured that with Mikkelitz and Abby riding two-up on the other snowmobile, he’d make faster time up the hill-and he could take a more direct route to the top.
Assuming they were going to the top. He still couldn’t fathom what Mikkelitz had in mind. He seemed to have cornered himself here on the mountain. There was no way out other than back down.
Beyond the ski boundary, there was nothing but the wilderness of a national park—thousands of acres of trees and unmarked trails.
And then he realized that that was where Mikkelitz was heading. He’d leave the snowmobile—it could hardly cope with the deep snow of the forest—and head out on cross-country skis. Probably take a pack with him and a tent. He could survive for days, weeks, in the wilderness.
And come out anywhere it suited him. Alone. Because somewhere on the way, Jesse knew he was going to kill Abby.
He twisted the throttle full open. Even with an edge in speed, he knew they had too much of a lead for him to catch up. But he had to keep trying, even though there was a lead ball in the pit of his stomach as he realized the effort was futile.
The Yamaha’s engine note rose to a howl and a rooster tail of thrown snow blossomed in its wake.

 

M
ikkelitz saw the log a second too late. It was freshly covered and it looked for all the world like one more soft pile of mounded snow—the kind of thing that presented no obstacle to the snowmobile.
Then, at the last moment, he saw the black shape of a branch protruding from the snow and realized they were heading for a heavy tree that had fallen across the trail and been covered by falling snow. He yanked the steering to the left to try to miss it, but the snowmobile skidded sideways, tried to mount the thick trunk, and began to topple back downhill. He yanked the steering back right again, trying at the last second to ride up and over the massive hump in the snow, gunning the last ounce of power from the engine as he did so, and for a moment the snowmobile hung there in the balance.
It was Abby who made the difference. Instinctively, as she’d felt the little vehicle sway farther and farther to the left, she’d leaned her weight uphill, to the right, to try to counter the movement. Murphy was doing the same thing in front of her. He was actually off the seat and had all his weight on the uphill footboard, leaning way out as he steered to the right and gunned the engine.
Then she realized that any chance she had of rescue depended on her ability to delay him as much as possible. And this was a perfect opportunity, because he’d never know she’d done it.
She’d seen enough of him to know that if he thought she was delaying him, he’d have no hesitation in killing her right away.
So now, as the snowmobile tottered on a knife edge of balance, and actually began to surge forward over the tree, she threw her weight to the left.
That was all it took. The delicate contest of power, momentum and gravity suddenly had a winner and it was gravity. The snowmobile seemed to rear up on its hind end. The runners actually came free of the snow and the engine raced as the little vehicle toppled back and over.
As it went, Murphy screamed his fury and jumped clear, throwing himself uphill to save himself being pinned under the vehicle. Abby, handcuffed to the pillion handgrip, had no such choice.
She lost her grip on the handle, felt the flesh on her wrist tear as the handcuff ripped into it again. The snowmobile was toppling and her throat went dry as she felt she’d be pinned under it.
Somehow, she scrambled and kicked away from the snowmobile as it plunged over on its side. If it rolled, she knew, it would go right over her. If it just kept sliding on its side, and if she could just keep scrambling to stay ahead of it, she might survive relatively intact. She felt it start to roll, felt herself being drawn by the tethered wrist under the body of the machine. Desperately, she kicked at it to try to stop the motion. She didn’t know if her actions had any effect, but the roll stopped and the snowmobile continued its slide. The drive train, free of the snow, thrashed wildly and the engine was revving like crazy. The spring return on the twist throttle must have jammed, she realized vaguely.
The sliding and bucking seemed to go on forever. She missed her footing, her leg going deep into a patch of soft snow, and felt the heavy machine start to slide over the top of her. Desperately she floundered, her mouth and nose full of snow, but she was being borne under and the hot metal of the exhaust was burning her leg. She could feel the weight of the snowmobile pinning her as it moved inexorably farther over her and finally she thought, fuck it, why bother? Why fight? And just gave in.
And the snowmobile stopped sliding.
SIXTY-FOUR
J
esse barreled the Yamaha up a steep incline at breakneck speed. The snowmobile left the ground, seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, then slammed back onto the hard-packed snow, landing unevenly, one runner hitting before the other and slewing the machine to the left. He tried to compensate, but the impact with the firm snow of the groomed ski slope had thrown him off balance and he felt himself toppling off the snowmobile.
He hit the snow with his left shoulder, tucked his head and rolled, coming to his feet ten yards down the slope. The Yamaha, with a dead man’s throttle, had returned to idle the moment he let go of the twist grip. It slid quickly to a halt, engine burbling unevenly.
He was covered in the fine, dry snow from head to foot. He brushed himself off, wincing as his shoulder sent a shaft of pain through him, then stumbled awkwardly back up the hill and threw a leg over the saddle.
“No sense killing yourself,” he muttered, and opened the throttle once more—a little more deliberately this time. The Yamaha surged away under him and he corrected the incipient skids and swings that were a fundamental part of its motion. But, he realized, he was right. Careering flat out up the hill, half out of control, wasn’t the way to travel. He was a reasonably proficient rider, but nowhere in the league of the sports riders who took jumps much higher than the one he’d just attempted as a matter of course.
It wasn’t going to do Abby the slightest bit of good if he lost it somewhere and broke his fool neck—or even an arm or a leg. He compromised, moving faster than was comfortable, but nowhere near as fast as he wanted to travel.
He cut through a patch of thick, ungroomed snow and found himself at the bottom of a steep, long mogul run. The old chairlift-abandoned and unused now since the Storm Peak chair had been built-stretched above him, the wind whistling around its thick cable, and in the taller branches of the pines that surrounded it. It wasn’t the most comfortable of terrain for a snowmobile; riding up those endless mounds of hard-packed snow would be like windsurfing across solid waves, he thought. But it was a direct route to the top. He twisted the throttle experimentally, felt and heard the reassuring note of the engine as it revved easily beneath him, then swung the snowmobile up the hill.
It jarred and thudded over the succession of moguls in the snow, nearly burying its front skids in the downhill sides of the mounds. He realized quickly that a direct approach wasn’t going to work. The moguls were too steep. He took it the way a cruising skier would negotiate the moguls downhill, threading a winding path through the small valleys carved out between the humps.
Even at that, the snowmobile was too wide for the trails he followed—carved by skis. The Yamaha continued to lurch and slam wildly into the mounds. His wrists ached from dragging it back on course as the terrain tried to shove him downhill. His shoulder, already wrenched from the heavy fall he’d just taken, was a dull pool of agony.
He skidded the tail around as he crested a mogul, letting the machine arc back through ninety degrees, tacking back and forth up the slope like a yacht on a solid frozen seascape of wild waves.
Solid frozen, he thought grimly, and tilted at a crazy forty-degree angle to the vertical.
He crested out onto one of the higher access trails. He figured he was around two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Instinctively, he was heading toward the top of the Storm Peak chair. Something inside told him that this was where Mikkelitz was heading as well. He didn’t know why he knew. He just felt it somehow.
He looked at the remaining half of the mogul field under the chairlift. He was near exhaustion, his breath coming in giant gulps, his wrists, forearms and shoulders racked with the strain of wrenching the snowmobile back on course. He wasn’t sure he had the stamina left to continue the same way. Reluctantly, he swung the Yamaha to the left and cracked the throttle wide open, sending it screaming along the access trail.
S
he was facedown in the thick, soft snow, in real danger of drowning in it. Vaguely, a long way away she could hear someone cursing—repeatedly, in a mad litany of invective. A man, she thought. Slowly, her senses were returning. Something was tugging fiercely at her left wrist, and there was a sharp stab of pain there as the tug persisted.
She remembered … the snowmobile, sliding and bumping down the mountain above her, as she’d tried desperately to scramble and claw her way ahead of it. Then, as she gave up, she remembered seeing one of the runners rearing up beside her, felt the sharp impact against her head. She was puzzled and disoriented for a moment.

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