Tough Cookie

across the valley? A half-mile? A mile? Jack would have to stop; he would have to remove his skis and boots. No one could run in that clunky footwear. You can beat him, I told myself. All you have to do is run.

I looked over my shoulder. Scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch. Jack was gaining on me. I even thought I saw him smiling at me.

“Goldy!” he called placatingly. “Stop! Let’s talk!”

Yeah, sure. I ran up the track. A sudden pool of darkness swallowed me and I slowed. Tall pines loomed on the right side of the construction fence, casting black, swaying shadows on the road. Run, I ordered myself. But whatever you do, don’t fall. If you do, you’ll die.

Behind me, the sounds of Jack removing his ski equipment were barely audible. Damn it. I couldn’t believe he would still follow me. He couldn’t be tried again for Fiona’s murder. Why not run away, rather than risk exposure? Because he’d told me he had killed Doug Portman. Because he desperately wanted Eileen’s money. The tape would show Eileen and the world that Jack had murdered his first wife to get her fortune. Eileen would dump him; he would go to prison for murdering Portman and the truck driver he’d killed on Interstate 70, when he’d been trying to nail me.

I came to the spot in the road where it veered upward and became the old hiking trail. I did not know how far the trail went before it diverged—a high side leading to Elk Ridge, the low, level side heading through the valley. As I ran, I peered into the darkness. Was the faint light I saw the guard’s cabin far, far up the hill? Or were my eyes playing tricks?

The wind whispered in the pines. In the moonlight, I could make out lodgepole pine branches littering the slick, snow-hard road. The branches had been blown down by the wind. I would have to be careful; stepping on them would alert Jack to my location. Had he found the road yet? How fast could he go in stocking feet? He was almost ten years younger than I was, and an athlete. Grimly, I quickened my pace.

Minutes later, winded and puffing, I was wondering if, in the dark, I had missed the turnoff to Elk Valley. Then, as I fought down panic, it suddenly appeared on the left, and stopped me in my tracks. The left-hand split to the old hiking path was completely blocked with a gigantic pile of dead trees. The sign posted on the trees saying Warning——Avalanche Area——Do Not Enter! filled me with alarm. I couldn’t climb over the pile of trees … it was eight or nine feet high. But going through the valley was the fastest way to the expansion area—and the security guard’s cabin.

To my consternation, I suddenly realized the construction road ran over Elk Ridge. For a moment, the wind ceased shuffling through the trees. Behind me, the faint huffing noise drew nearer. Jack was coming.

I whispered a prayer. Then I headed up the hill.

How far to the cabin now? Twenty minutes? I tried not to think. Just head upward. Up, up, up, no time for rest, despite the fact that my sides were screaming with pain.

Ten minutes later, the wide, shimmering expanse where Cinda had started her fatal run in Nate’s film opened up on my left. It was startlingly beautiful, like a giant’s sugar bowl, steeply tipped, frozen hard, glittering in the moonlight. And—people will never learn—running straight across the steep, concave space were the unmistakable paths of half a dozen ski tracks. At the other end of the ski tracks, set perhaps twenty feet into the pines, the lights of the security guard’s cabin glowed yellow in the shadows. I could just make out the path of the construction road. It ran across the treed top of the ridge, then curved right down to a parking lot surrounding the cabin.

I looked behind me. Jack was about a hundred feet back, running methodically, despite socks, despite ice and snow.

Think. The fastest way to the cabin was straight across the steep bowl, the way the ski tracks ran. But I could never go that way. It was too dangerous, especially after all the new snow we’d had. Still, I didn’t have time to go over the forested ridge and make it to the cabin. Even if I could run straight on the road the whole way over, Jack would come straight across and cut me off.

Stay in the trees, I decided. Above the bowl, but below the road. It’s the only safe way. Hug the shadows, stay off the moonlit side of the road. When you get near the cabin, call for help. I ran.

At the top of the ridge, I dared another glance down. Jack had left the road and was running through the bowl, in the skiers’ tracks, about a hundred feet back. He knew where I was headed, and he intended to get there first. Worse, he was wearing shoes. He must have brought them in his ski jacket pockets, along with his pistol. The man was not going to be deterred.

Well, neither was I. “Help!” I screeched as I pelted down the center of the road. A third of a mile left. “Help! Security! Come out of the cabin! Help! On the road, above you! Help!” Despite the fact that wood smoke whipped out of the metal-pipe chimney, no face came to the window, no door opened. My heart pounded madly. Dammit! Was the guy deaf?

Jack was two-thirds of the way across the tracks. He ran as nimbly as Mercury, as Pan, as every Greek god who’d ever been known for speed. Badly winded, I continued my bumbling pace. A quarter-mile to the cabin. The wind had picked up again. There was no use yelling for someone to rescue me, because it wasn’t going to happen. I was going to die on this mountain. Just like Nate and Fiona and Doug.

Pow. Jack, only forty feet away, both hands gripping the pistol straight in front of him, had fired at me. I tried to zigzag as I ran, but each step brought me closer to him. We were both racing down the sides of a triangle; the cabin was where we would intersect.

Thirty feet from the cabin, totally out of breath, I hugged a tree and stopped, bent over and wheezing.

“You’re not going to make it, Goldy,” he called fiercely as he kept advancing toward me, aiming the gun. Fifteen feet away. He was almost to the edge of the bowl. I clung helplessly to my tree. “Good-bye!” he screamed as he fired again.

The frigid air boomed and reverberated with the explosion. I squeezed my eyes shut as terror closed my throat.

An image of church school with Rorry floated into my mind. Our teaching: the fall of Jericho. Joshua. I looked up: The moon skidded drunkenly between the branches. Had I been hit? Jack’s shot echoed and reechoed in my head. After the Hebrews blew their horns. The earth was moving, the moon was wobbling in the sky. The walls came tumbling down. I gripped the tree and turned my head to the groaning, trembling slope. A mammoth slab of ice and snow had dislodged from the mountain. Joshua’s troops made the noise. The monumental size of the slide, like a skyscraper imploding, was beyond belief. The avalanche’s deafening rumble pained my ears. A mist of snow burned my eyes. The walls came tumbling down. My knees gave out beneath me as I held onto the tree. A fifty-foot vertical wave of snow was roaring downward, toward us.

A vast cloud of mist exploded upward. Darkness flashed inside it. Jack Gilkey screamed and fell. Then he was sucked into the killer white tide of the avalanche that rushed past me and swept him away.

CHAPTER 23

A helo carried me out. At the roar of the avalanche, the guard in the cabin, who’d been listening to a football game on the radio and was therefore deaf to my cries and the sound of gunfire, came bursting outside. He phoned for help.

On the way to Denver, I told two Sheriff’s deputies all I knew about Jack Gilkey and his deadly, double- dealing relationships with Fiona Wakefield, Doug Portman, and Barton Reed. The paramedics insisted I go to the hospital to be checked for frostbite, injuries, and shock. I kept assuring them that I was fine. But they did not believe a wildly shivering woman whose face and clothes were covered with blood and garbage.

“Lady,” one of them said, “at this point you couldn’t buy a ticket straight home. That ankle looks badly bruised. Did you fall on it when you were holding on to the tree?”

I nodded numbly and looked down at the snow-covered Continental Divide far below, the sparkling rows of tiny cars going east and west, ruby lights one way, diamonds the other.

You can’t buy a ticket home. That was really the problem, wasn’t it? Trying to buy your way into anything. Jack had tried to buy his way out of a prison term by bribing Doug Portman; like Fiona Wakefield, Eileen Druckman had thought her money could bring her a handsome young husband who would really