Читать книгу Snow - Mike Bond - Страница 13

NOT TO WORRY

HE WAS SHAKING so hard he could barely hold, realized he was biting a branch but didn’t dare let go, hugged the tree to his chest till the teetering slowed. He could hear Steve’s yells but couldn’t tell from where, could see only this cage of boughs encasing him in howling snow, realized he was in the top of a fir tree that stood on a tiny ledge with a cliff beneath it.

“Steve!” he screamed, “Help!”

“Zack!” Steve’s voice wavered. “Zack! Zack!”

He tried to climb higher but the tree grew thin and tipped him out over the cliff. The snowstorm cleared for an instant and he could see gut-wrenching black rock and vertical ice below the tree. Somehow he had to climb down the tree then up the cliff. And not slip and fall into the dark emptiness below.

The terror was like a deer’s in a tiger’s jaws. When there’s no hope.

You will do this. One step at a time.

And if a step seems dangerous you pull back, find another way.

Till you get to the top.

It wasn’t so bad going down the fir tree, stepping from limb to limb, sometimes slipping on icy bark but always able to hold on to the limbs above.

“Zack!” Steve’s voice, tiny on the wind.

“I’m coming!” Zack yelled, but Steve kept calling.

The rock face he had to climb was vertical and icy. Black granite ribs stuck from it, too slick to grip.

He’d always hated heights. Since he was a kid stuck on a ladder and his Dad called, “You big sissy get down from there.”

It was Death, this aching vertical rock. This fir tree like a monastic companion, saving your soul. But you can’t leave it: there’s no way up or down this cliff.

Maybe there was. One point at a time.

One point was ice that he hammered from the rock with his fist, another a slim frozen ledge his foot kept skidding off, then a vertical slit he could jam his fingers into. Once he looked down, the trunk of the fir tree descending below him into darkness, into death, and the looking down nearly made him slip off the cliff.

Twenty feet from the top there was no way to climb further. A pure sheet of black rock, tilted past vertical.

A headlamp flashed down. “Zack!” Steve shouted over the wind, “Hold tight.”

He held on, fingers quivering, breathing fast, shuddering with cold and fear.

The headlamp came back. “I’m sending down a pole. I’ll hold it. You grab it and climb.”

Steve slid a slender spruce trunk down over the cliff. It was just long enough, sticky with resin where Steve had cut off the branches. It was impossibly hard to climb. With each lunge he feared pulling Steve off the cliff.

When he slithered over the top to safety he lay breathing hard into the snow, unable to speak. Steve sat beside him saying nothing, his hand on Zack’s shoulder.

STUMBLING BLINDLY downhill through the new drifts and dark timber Zack tripped over a low branch and fell face-first into something soft and snow-covered. He couldn’t believe it, didn’t dare. His tent. In the flailing snow he’d walked into camp and tripped over a guy line.

They were home.

He brushed ice from his face and clothes and crawled into his sleeping bag and slept.

He woke. For a few seconds he wasn’t sure where he was, what he was. Coffee odor on the biting cold air, the tang of bacon and scrub oak smoke. There’d be pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs, and Jack Daniels for the coffee.

What life had been like just a few hours ago, before he’d learned his money was gone and they’d stolen the coke. Then he remembered the cliff, the wandering in the snowstorm, the wicked cold, the burning plane, the cocaine hidden where it could be easily found.

His stomach clenched. How did this happen so fast?

He crawled out of his bag and unzipped his tent and a wall of snow fell in on him.

“You should whack the tent wall first.” Curt called from the fire pit, laying bacon on a cast iron griddle on the coals.

Zack felt an instant of anger, dismissed it. He stretched to full height, arcing his back. Felt all the muscles pull, tired but lithe.

“Where were you two?” Curt said.

Zack stretched more, tightened his coat round his shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep. When the moon came out I decided to hike up the ridge, see the view. Then Steve got up to piss, saw my tracks and followed them, make sure I was okay. We’ve always been like that, watching each other’s backs.”

“Is that so?”

“It was beautiful, till it started snowing. Then we heard a shot so we came back. Was that you?”

“Your damn grizzly got in the horses. I shot to scare him, lost my gun in the snow.”

“He’s gone?”

“He’ll be back. So one of us has to stay here. With the horses.”

“After yesterday and last night,” Zack said, “I don’t need to go anywhere.”

“Yep,” Curt said, “you had quite a time.”

“You can’t imagine.”

Curt smiled. “Maybe I can.”

Zack woke Steve, told him what he’d said to Curt about last night.

“Good, that was smart.” Steve rubbed his face, his words muffled.

“And when we heard his shot we started back, but got lost in the snowstorm.”

“Why’d he shoot?”

“Grizzly.”

“He’s back?”

“He’s back. Curt wants us to stay with the horses. He’s leaving after breakfast to go down and call about the plane. He’ll wait for the cops to come, then show them the way to the plane. They’ll be on snowmobiles …”

Steve slid into his trousers. “Fuck.”

“If they trace it to the cave –”

“YOU COULD’VE DIED up there,” Curt snapped as they wolfed down bacon, eggs, coffee and Jack Daniels. “What the Hell got into you guys?”

“Nah,” Zack smiled. “It was beautiful.”

Curt stared at him. “This isn’t New York City.” He turned to Zack. “This isn’t Lost Angeles. You guys can’t wander off at two a.m. and thirty below and expect to live.”

“It’s probably safer here,” Steve chuckled, “than New York.”

“You ever been to LA at two a.m.?” Zack said, backing him up.

“No and I don’t want to. But if you boys want to hunt with me you got to be reasonable. If you die it’s bad for my reputation.”

Zack laughed, stood and slapped Curt’s shoulder, tossed his coffee dregs on the snow. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

“Not to worry,” Steve added. “We won’t die on you.”

“WE HAVE TO MOVE FAST!” Steve said to Zack when Curt had saddled Kiwa and started down the mountain.

“Let’s find that Ruger.” Zack started tromping the snow on the way to the corral.

“Fuck the Ruger! Once Curt calls this in, it’s on the cop radio, and the folks who owned that plane will come after us. The cops’ll come too, they’ll be all over the place.” Steve made a helpless gesture with his hands. “They’re not going to be fooled by a burned plane.”

“You said they would.”

“I said it was the best option. At the time. Now we got to move it.”

“Move what?”

“The coke, you idiot.”

Zack felt a hard shape in the snow underfoot. Reached down. The Ruger.

He wiped snow from the barrel and grip. It felt cold and solid in his palm. He looked up at Steve. “Did you really call me an idiot?”

“Sometimes you are.” Steve smiled grandly. “Me too. But you’re still my friend.” He shrugged, raised his hands: maybe.

Zack slipped the Ruger into his coat pocket. “You said the burnt plane would stop them.”

“So should we sit on our ass hoping for the best?” Steve gave him a questioning look. “Or shall we be proactive?”

“Your being proactive is how I lost my money.”

“The Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve lost your money. Them and S&P and Moody’s – the rating agencies. They’re all bankers. They do what’s best for the banks and big bondholders. Notice how every time the Fed raises rates the bank stocks go up? With higher rates the banks make more money for doing the same thing. Their job, all these guys, is protecting the rich, not the average American.”

“I don’t care about that.” Zack took a breath, tried to think. “So you want to move the coke down the mountain then rent a truck? How we going to get to Bozeman to do that?”

“One of us will have to hitch.”

“Curt and the cops will follow our tracks –”

“Let’s worry about that when the time comes.” Steve was already walking toward the corral. “You saddle the gray, I’ll get the pinto.”

“And you think Curt’s not going to see we’ve used his horses?”

“Maybe not.”

“Steve, we’ve hunted with this guy four years now … I don’t want to screw him over.”

Steve looked at Zack, shook his head. “We won’t hurt them.”

To put a packsaddle on a horse looked easy; like a regular saddle you cinched it under the horse’s belly while the horse inhaled and bulged its belly to keep the cinch loose – but if the cinch stayed loose the load could shift and slide down under its belly.

So he let the gray exhale then cinched him tight while the horse groaned in response, then tightened the straps around his chest and rump. Towing him at a half run he followed Steve and the pinto horse up the ridge and along it eastward, above the crashed plane and up to the Paleolithic cave that now held their worldly goods.

FROM HIGHWAY 191 Curt called his wife’s cousin, Kenny Stauffenberg, the Gallatin County Sheriff. Even here the reception was bad and Kenny had a hard time understanding.

“I been hunting with two dudes up by the Buffalo Horns, that valley that peters out in the cliffs, about fifteen miles in, going east?”

“Where you got that seven-pointer.”

“Exactly. Well, a plane’s gone down, just north of there. In that next valley.”

“What kind of plane?”

“Single engine, apparently. You had any news?”

“About it? Not a damn thing.” Kenny cleared his throat. “You see bodies?”

“I didn’t see the plane. One of my dudes did. You know, that football guy, played for the Broncos?”

“Zack Wilson? The one who’s now a sports announcer?”

“He found the plane, the valley going north toward Goose Creek. North of Lone Indian Peak, about fourteen miles in. Says there were no bodies, just the track of one guy walking out, who seemed okay.”

“We’ll get on it. When’d he find it?”

“Late yesterday. He told me last night. I got out soon’s I could.”

“I know that, Curt.”

“I’ll wait down here for your guys. Who you sending?”

Kenny busied himself for a moment, a clicking keyboard and rustle of paper. “We’re gonna put four Arctic Cats on a trailer. Three guys plus me. Be there fast as we can, hopefully an hour. I’ll have Myrtle check the Hospital, see if the pilot’s come in.”

“Zack said the guy was walking fine.”

“You’ve talked to Diana?”

“That’s my next call. Why?”

“No reason. What’s the latest on that windmill company?”

“The industrial wind bastards? It’ll take two hundred grand to get rid of them.”

“They got you sewed up, huh?”

“They bought my loan, found a way to foreclose.”

“They’re all over the country, putting up these hideous turbines that do no good, just make them rich on taxpayer money.”

“They kill birds, millions of them. Bats too. Destroy property values, drive people crazy …”

“You know the family’s going to pitch in.”

“That’s real kind, Kenny, but it wouldn’t be right. And nowhere near enough.”

“We’ll find a way. We always do.”