Gino sputtered, but apparently couldn’t manage to eke out a G-rated word.
‘They haven’t really said anything we haven’t been thinking ourselves, Gino.’
‘It isn’t what they said; it’s the way they said it. Bunch of bullshit scaremongering. Kids are going to be afraid of snowmen. They’ll stop building them. Then they’ll grow up and won’t let their kids build snowmen. The networks will never show the Frosty the Snowman cartoon again, and all the radio stations’ll pull the song off their playlists. Gene Autry’s family will never see another residual check again. This could change the winter landscape of the whole country just because Kristin Keller’s got a hard-on for a network slot.’ He finally wound down his rant and signed off, leaving Magozzi with a warm beer and a mountain of paperwork.
8
Kurt Weinbeck blinked himself awake, then jerked upright in the seat and looked around in a panic, wondering how the hell he’d managed to fall asleep in the first place, and what had awakened him. The cold, probably. Or maybe it was a gust of wind, rocking the little car. No, that couldn’t be it. This piece-of-crap tin was locked so tight in the holes that four bald tires had dug, it would have taken a hurricane to move it a fraction of an inch.
The ditch was ridiculously deep, and any Minnesota boy knew what that meant. They’d built the damn road right through the middle of a swamp, hauling in enough fill to raise it above the water line, and not a crumb more. So all through the state you had these roads towering above the surrounding land with ditches so deep, you could drown in them during the spring. Driving on them in winter was like an Olympic automobile balance-beam competition. One tire one inch too far one way or the other, and you were toast.
He’d known it the minute he’d felt the car skid and go airborne. If there hadn’t been two feet of fresh snow waiting at the bottom, he would have busted an axle when it finally smacked down. No way he was going to get it out, but still he tried, rocking back and forth as long as the tires grabbed snow, digging himself in another few inches when they spun, until the friction of the tires finally froze the snow around them into ice and they locked up tight. Worse yet, he’d dug himself in so far that the snow had packed around the doors and there was no way he could push them open.
Goddamned snow coffin, is what it was. Ol’ Cameron Weinbeck just dug himself in so deep, the snow packed the doors shut and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to get out. ’Course he was pretty well pickled like always, so maybe it wasn’t so bad, sitting there waitin’ for his eyelids to freeze open and his fingers break and fall off. Probably had himself a high old time until he emptied the last bottle, then I suspect things went downhill from there.
It wasn’t your standard run-of-the-mill eulogy, but it was the story he’d heard most, standing around his dad’s coffin as an eight-year-old. And here he was, twenty-four years later, about to relive a family legacy.
He’d almost wet his pants right then, until he remembered to roll down the window and squeeze out that way.
It had been snowing hard by the time he crawled out of the car and got to the top of the ditch, and the temperature was dropping way too fast for his thin coat and tennis shoes. He looked around at the snowy woods, empty land, and deserted road and thought, Middle of nowhere, which was an overused phrase in this state until you realized it was the place you got to whenever you turned a corner this far north of the Cities.
The newscasters started hammering viewers over the head with the winter driving rules sometime in mid- November. You had to have a kit in the trunk: candles, matches, canned soup, blankets, and a bunch of other stuff that was supposed to save your life if you were ever stupid enough to do what he and his father and scores of other Minnesotans did every winter. Trouble was, people who were stupid enough to get stuck in a ditch in the middle of a snowstorm were apparently too stupid to carry a kit, because there sure as hell wasn’t one in this car. Damn hatchback didn’t even have a trunk.
So on to the second rule, and this was the big one: Stay with the car. Someone will find you. He looked around and thought that was pretty unlikely. Besides, being found wasn’t exactly first on his list. He knew then that he’d have to walk out, he’d have to find himself another car, and then he’d have to get out of this damn state, and, by God, he was never coming back.
But first he had one last piece of business to take care of, and he hadn’t for one second considered leaving it undone. He’d spent the last three years stewing in a cell, thinking about it, waiting for the day, and now the day was here.
So he’d cleared the snow away from the exhaust pipe, then crawled back into the car to warm up a little before his trek; see if he couldn’t dry out his shoes a little. He’d turned the heater on high, leaving the window open a crack so he wouldn’t gas himself to death.
A good move, he thought, because the heat had put him right to sleep for a solid two hours – it was three a.m. already – and chances were, the new snow had blocked the exhaust a while back.
He shut off the car and climbed out the window for the second and last time, and started walking. He didn’t know where the hell he was, but he knew where he had to be. Back to the lake, then just follow the shore, because if there was one place in Minnesota you’d find some kind of civilization, it was anywhere near water. Damn lakeshore property sold for a small fortune, even at the tippy-top of the tall state. The lake wasn’t that far back, and maybe slogging it wouldn’t be so bad.
You live long enough in prison where the lights are on all the time, you forget what real dark is like. Even in a landscape buried in white, you had to have a little illumination to reflect off it, or you were walking blind. The moon was ideal – lit up the world like a big strobe in the winter – but even starlight was enough when you had this much snow. But there was no moon, no stars, and he had to work at staying on the road to find his way back.
He found the lake after half an hour, but already, he couldn’t feel his feet. The snow around the lakeshore was even deeper than it had been on the road, crawling up over his knees, soaking his jeans and then freezing them solid, until they scratched his calves every time he took a step.
Another half hour, and most of his face was stiff and the nerves had shut down, and still he hadn’t seen a single house, a single structure of any kind, except the ghostly shadows of fish shacks on the ice he’d passed earlier. A lot of them had heaters, and, Lord, he’d been tempted, but he couldn’t go back there.
Fifteen minutes more and he decided that this was the biggest lake in the state, the only one without houses on it, and that he was going to die. The funny thing was that it wasn’t even that cold out; not by Minnesota standards. Ten, maybe even fifteen degrees, and freezing to death in that kind of balmy winter temperature would be just plain embarrassing.
So he pushed on for another agonizing ten minutes, veering away from the lakeshore, up a shallow hill to a flat, empty field that seemed to go on forever. The hill, shallow as it was, had damn near killed him. By the time he got to the top he’d fallen twice, his lungs were burning, and the sweat was freezing his hair to his forehead. That’s when he started counting steps instead of minutes, and he knew that was a bad sign. Bend a knee, he told himself, then let the thigh muscles scream while he lifted a foot he could no longer feel above the snow, then stop to breathe and cough and then do it all over again with the other leg. He stopped counting at five, because he couldn’t remember the number that came next. And that’s when he saw it.
Such a dim, tiny light, barely visible in the distance through the falling snow, maybe a mirage, but maybe not. He started counting steps again.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of shelter he’d been hoping for, but it was out of the wind, a few degrees warmer than the outside, and by God it was going to save his sorry life, and the truth was that for the first time in a long time, he had a lot to live for.
Payback, he thought, stumbling around on half-frozen feet, feeling his way in the darkness with half-frozen fingers until he found what he needed to survive the night.
9
Iris Rikker hadn’t been up before the sun in ten years, and she didn’t like it. By the time she stumbled her way through the dark bedroom to the wall switch, she’d cracked her elbow on the dresser and stepped in a fresh pile of
