Читать книгу Snow - Mike Bond - Страница 12

THE CAVE

THE MOON was crystal, the wind like dry ice in his lungs. Steve’s tracks were following the same trail he and Zack had made coming back from the plane, now just a trace under the new-fallen snow. Steve was moving fast, sure of being alone.

When Zack followed him to the ridge above the plane he could see the dark thread of Steve’s tracks but no sign of the plane, realized it was now nearly buried in snow. From it another set of tracks climbed the far side of the valley, a tiny figure toiling up it, bent under something on his back.

Zack reached the plane as Steve came running downhill, an empty pack frame slung over one shoulder. The plane’s door was open, in the light of his headlamp Zack could see that one coffin was empty, the other half-gone.

Steve came up panting, bent over to catch his breath. “Too high up here. Can’t breathe.”

“What are you doing?”

Steve huffed a laugh. “Moving our coke. You can help with what’s left.”

“Our coke?” Zack sat down in the snow. “You are nuts!”

“I hid it in that cave up there we found last year.” Steve sucked in a breath. “Now it’s ours. All ours.”

Zack remembered the cave, undiscovered, a few arrowheads on a stone ledge, blackened earth from ancient fires. It had seemed sacred, and they had touched nothing. “We have to put it back!”

“Are you totally crazy?” Steve shook him. “We’re going to be rich!”

“I already am rich, soon as I cash out. I don’t need your stolen drugs.”

“Yes you do.” Steve clapped him on the shoulder. “Look, man, it’s hard to tell you, but I’ve just learned your money isn’t available right now.”

Zack felt his muscles tighten. “Isn’t available?”

“We put it in auction rate securities, remember? Citigroup? Now they’re saying they won’t release it.”

“You said it was cash equivalent! You promised me! Buy however many millions you want, they give us one-fifty over Libor and a seven-day redeem.” Zack held himself back from hitting Steve, smashing him down. “That’s what you said!”

“That’s what they said. It’s in the prospectus. The SEC backed it. S&P and Moody’s rated it Triple A, no risk. But now with other values going south there’s been a run on them. Merrill Lynch, UBS, Citigroup, they’re all getting hit. Trouble is, the cover’s only eight percent, and they’ve already blown past it. So it’s sucking money, money they don’t have.”

Zack nearly fell to his knees. All his years, all the work, all the pain and the freedom it had bought, gone. “You’re saying they’re worthless?”

“For the moment.” Steve waved a hand at the plane, uphill toward the cave. “So this coke, it can make us whole again.”

“You,” Zack tried to hold down the wrath rising inside him, “you’re saying you’ve lost my money?”

“Mine too. I’m in as deep as you. I’m suing them, but …” he waved a hand uselessly, “you know …”

Zack looked away, head spinning, the night black and ominous. At the future with no money. The job he was losing.

At Haney the Rat and the Vegas guys who wanted their two million bucks.

He glanced at Steve, this guy he’d trusted absolutely. Wanted to smash him down. Wanted to understand what is it I’m not understanding? Maybe it isn’t Steve’s fault?

“Give me time,” Steve said. “I’ll figure a way.”

Zack realized he wasn’t breathing, inhaled. Already the shock was wearing down: This is the new reality. Deal with it. “Who’s this lawyer?”

“He’s a securities specialist. Used to work for the SEC. Says we have a chance of getting some of it back.”

“Some of it?”

“Thirty cents on the dollar. Maybe. And I’m pushing the New York and Massachusetts DA’s to look into it. They don’t like it either, it drives up their muni rates.” Steve crawled into the plane. “Here,” he called, voice muffled, “take these bricks as I hand them out and stack them on that tarp. When we get thirty we’ll tie them on the pack frame and carry it up the mountain.”

“Curt’s going down to the cops, remember?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t tell him about the coke.” Steve’s head popped out of the plane. “Though you were going to, you idiot.”

“They’re gonna know, soon as they look in those coffins. You can’t get all that powder out.”

“No they won’t.” Steve glanced around, spoke low as if it were a secret. “Gasoline on hot metal, eventually, guess what?”

“Fuck you, you are crazy –”

“It’s the only solution, man. That way the cops don’t know about the coke, and even the owners, if they come back, they might think it all burned … with six feet of snow on it, it’ll be hard to tell …”

“Your tracks,” Zack nodded uphill, toward the cave, “they’re visible to anyone.”

Steve pointed up. “You been watching this snow? More’s coming. Lots more. There won’t be a trace of our tracks by morning.”

“And you think you can sell it? What are you going to do, run ads in the papers?”

“Wall Street folks are always buying … And you, with all your friends in Vegas, what are you worried about? Coke is Vegas and Vegas is coke. All you have to do is ask around.”

All I have to do, Zack thought, is hike down to the highway and call the cops. But then Steve and I get arrested for trying to steal the coke, or I get accessory because I didn’t tell Curt about the coke, I lose my job, and never get back my portfolio Steve invested for me.

And the coke’s owners will know who we are and come after us.

And Haney the Rat and his Vegas guys want theirs now.

THE INSTANT he heard it Curt knew. Grizzly in the horses. He tore from his sleeping bag, grabbed his flashlight and Ruger and sprinted barefoot through the snow for the corral, the horses stamping, neighing and kicking, a deep growl.

He fired a shot in the air as he ran, hoping to scare the griz but it kept snarling like it had a horse down, killing it.

Curt leaped the corral into the mix of swirling kicking horses, the griz twenty yards away, red-eyed, jaws wide as it swung its massive head from side to side, ready to charge. Curt fired a shot past its head, worrying as he fired again that the shots would just madden it, and even if he hit it between the eyes a .357 slug would just piss it off. He fired again, just past its ear, yelling as he ran toward it, and with a strange hiss the griz turned and shambled into the night.

“YOU HEAR THAT?” Zack cupped his ear with a frozen glove. They were taking turns with the pack frame, each carrying it a few hundred yards uphill, then the other. “Maybe Curt sees we’re missing, wants us back?”

“Why?”

“Worries we’re out here, that’s all.”

“Snowing harder.” Steve held out a palmful. “Maybe he’s worried about that.”

Zack halted, pack frame on one shoulder. “Our doing this could screw Curt up, somehow.”

“No way he’ll ever know.”

“In the morning he’s going to want us all to go down.”

“All the more reason to move this stuff now.”

Zack followed him uphill. He thought of going down the mountain also, to call Monica. But it was too late now, unless she was on late shift … He imagined pretending he’d just wanted to call her to say hi and how much he missed her. Not mentioning this weird and deadly scene he had somehow stumbled into.

BY THE TIME Curt had calmed the horses and got back to his tent his bare feet were blue and numb. He pulled on socks and boots and stumbled to the fire but it was out.

He waded into the forest snatching low dead branches then remembered he’d already stacked the morning’s kindling under a tarp, went to it and shoved some into the fire pit, ran feet aching to the slit trench and grabbed toilet paper and pushed it under the kindling, tugged a box of matches from his pocket and struck one on the box.

It dragged a damp furrow in the tinder strip, snapped.

Damnation, the kicking horses had dumped snow on him, soaked his pocket. He ran back to the cook tent and snatched a lighter, lit the toilet paper but a gust knocked snow from a bough on it. He dashed back to the slit trench, grabbed more toilet paper and lit it under the sticks again but now they were wet from the fallen snow.

Damn again. He stood, took a breath, stumbling on numb feet. He was going to have bad frostbite. “Zack! Steve! Come give me a hand!”

Silence of new snow sifting down through the boughs and piling on the ground. “Where are you?”

He waded through the snow to Steve’s tent. Empty. Zack’s too.

“Steve! Zack!” His voice echoed through the hills and in its echo he recognized fear. You’re being stupid, he told himself. You could die. He ran back to the cook tent, lit the propane cooktop and put his bare numb feet on its edge.

Where were Steve and Zack, the damn fools?

Then he smelled it. Upwind. Rank, rotten meat, thick hot damp fur.

The griz was back.

He yanked on his boots, snatched the flashlight and scrambled out the cook tent grabbing at his hip holster but the Ruger was gone.

He checked his pockets, the cook tent floor.

The Ruger was truly gone.

Maybe he’d lost it in the corral, trying to quiet the horses.

Head down, ears back, with a deep grunting growl the grizzly shuffled toward him out of the forest.

THE PLANE BLEW in a tall orange ball turning the night incandescent and driving them back with its heat. Snow swirled down on it in great hissing clouds that the flames steamed and drove upwards. They watched till the coffins were cinders at the bottom of the bare black fuselage. The snow fell harder, dampening the blaze, obscuring it as they trudged away, till the plane was a glimmer on the horizon, then gone.

The blizzard wailed across the valley, erased the line between earth and sky and hid the tracks they’d made coming from camp. They could see nothing but stinging snow in their eyes, snow and ice packed to their bodies and swirling past their feet. Zack went first, probing with his boots for their old tracks under the new drifts, a gloved hand like a visor over his eyes to keep them from freezing.

Soon he could no longer find their tracks under the snow. He wandered side to side, feeling with his toes, finding nothing. The blizzard hailing down had hidden Steve; Zack yelled for him but the answer seemed to come from everywhere.

“I am not going to lose you,” Zack said aloud, crawling through the snow looking for his back tracks till there was a fudge of gray in the whiteness ahead, a blur that became Steve bent over, hiding his face from the wind. “Where the fuck were you?” he yelled.

They wandered on, in circles, lost before the beginning of time, in howling snow and deadly cold. Zack imagined them dying here, to be found in the spring, half-gnawed by animals. He thought of all the people down through time who’d died in frozen wildernesses.

He thought of his sleeping bag, the Jack Daniels in his morning coffee. Live for that.

Behind him Steve followed with the dumb obedience of the dying. One foot in front of the other, in the same holes. Easy, humans had been doing it for millions of years.

WHEN THE GRIZ kept coming Curt had grabbed a plastic tarp, twisted it round a pole, lit it on the propane cooktop and run yelling at him. Surprised, the great bear had risen up on rear legs, taller than the low trees, monstrous in the dark. Expecting to be slapped dead Curt shoved the blazing tarp against the grizzly’s chest and the bear gave a high grunt and scrambled into the woods.

Curt still couldn’t find the Ruger. He kicked at the snow leading to the corral, then in the corral among the nervous agitated horses, but it had vanished.

He heard a distant thud, straightened up to listen but it didn’t come again. From up where the dudes had said the plane was. Maybe he’d imagined it.

Didn’t matter. Whatever those two idiots were doing out there in this frigid night he would find them. Because if they died he’d never get another guide job. Blacklisted.

Nobody hired guys who let their clients die.

Unless the griz got them. Even then.

But when he tried to follow Steve’s and Zack’s tracks uphill they vanished under the blinding new snow, and finally he turned back.

“Steve!” he yelled till he couldn’t yell any longer, “Zack! Where are you?”

When he got back to camp his watch said 02:41. Five hours till dawn.

THE SNOW CAME AT THEM horizontally, then down, then sideways. It ate into their iced-up faces, froze their eyes shut and their ears numb. Each breath was a knife down the throat.

“Maybe here,” Steve called, his words snatched by the wind.

“This ridge, has to be the one above camp.”

“If he’d only shoot again –”

So much seemed familiar, the sloping snow, the firs nestled close, a tall pine, the tinkle of a stream under its ice. “Here,” Zack called. “We’ve found it.”

But it led to a waterfall off a cliff that would have killed them had they gone five more steps.

Snowing so hard Zack couldn’t tell up or down, wished he’d brought a compass, realized he could use his phone, stepped back to reach in his pocket and slipped off the cliff down into the crown of a tree and grabbed a bough that snapped but slowed him enough to grab another and clamp his legs around the tree’s trunk as it teetered over the void.