Scott Free (10 page)

He only needed one good glimpse of the airplane; good enough that they'd be able to see a flare if he fired it. Correction:
the
flare, his only one. “One shot only, Mr. O'Toole,” Scott said to himself in his best Sean Connery from
The Hunt for Red October
. Assuming the flare worked, and that the pilots were watching, and they'd know what it meant when they saw it—hell, assuming Scott knew how to fire the damn thing—then this nightmare could end. He could already feel the flannel sheets against his skin. The food in his belly. Three days of nonstop sleep.

So, where was the plane?

The sound shifted to his right, and he turned his head to follow it. The aircraft refused to show itself through the fog, choosing instead to tease him from someplace just beyond his sight.

Then he saw it. Just a flicker, really; a shutter-flash peek at a black silhouette just visible through a hole in the overcast, gone as quickly as it appeared. But it seemed so far away. It might as well have been on the other side of the world. And now it was gone completely.

Shit.

He waited another two minutes before his next snapshot of the faraway craft, and then three more for the next one after that. It was orbiting a pattern that was every bit of five miles away. Maybe even more.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

Then he got it. In a burst of clear vision, he knew exactly what had happened, and the realization took his breath away. Dropping back a few yards to get himself out of the wind, Scott dug through his coat pocket for the topographical map, which he spread out on the snow, anchoring the edges with snowballs.

“SkyTop,” he whispered. “SkyTop, SkyTop. Where the hell are you?” There, he found it, nearly in the middle of the map, where someone had circled it with a yellow highlighter. Cody, he supposed. His hands trembled in his gloves as he traced a line across the map from the ski resort to Salt Lake City.

Wherever he was, he figured he had to be somewhere near that line. No! That's where the plane would think he was. In reality, he should be a couple of miles to the east of that. But where? Reading the contour lines, he saw countless peaks and valleys along the eighty-mile route, but nothing that matched the gorge that he'd just seen with his eyes. With a twenty-foot contour interval—one rust-colored line on the map for every twenty-foot change in elevation—the gorge should register as a solid brown ribbon on the map, but nothing he saw even came close.

“Look for a river,” he told himself. This kind of canyon could only be carved by a river.

But there
was
no river. What was he doing wrong? It shouldn't be this difficult. You had green for land, blue for water, and a smattering of other colors for everything else. Where the hell was the river?

Then, he saw it. “Oh, shit,” he breathed. “Oh, no, no, no, it can't be…”

He snatched the map up into his fist and crawled back, until his head and shoulders cleared the ridge and he could see down into the gorge again. He found the spot on the map where the blue line of the river was flanked by his heavy contour line, and then traced that to the small section of the ribbon that ran north and south, just as this gorge did.

Scott tilted his head up and squinted through the haze. According to the map, the opposite side of the gorge should be flanked by two big peaks, the one on the right significantly taller than the one on the left. It seemed like five minutes passed before the wind cleared away enough of the fog for him to see, but when it did, and he saw that he was right, an icy fist twisted a handful of guts.

He ducked quickly back down to look at the map one more time, and then again to verify his findings with his eyes.

“Oh, my God, we're thirty miles off course.” Thirty
miles!
Jesus.

Think, Scott, think.
There had to be a way. The day never dawned when there wasn't hope. He could do this. He
had
to do this.

Otherwise, he was sure to die.

S
COTT STAYED THERE
on the slope longer than he should have, triple-checking his calculations, praying that he'd screwed them up. But dammit, he never screwed up in math. How could they have wandered so far?

He tried telling himself that none of that mattered now, but the sentiment seemed hollow. Seeing that airplane so far away served to emphasize the hopelessness. And as far away as it was, its pilots probably thought they were buzzing the outermost reaches of their search area. So much for ending it all with a flare.

Scott sat there in the snow long beyond the time when his butt had grown numb from the cold. With the map put away, he turned the flare gun over in his hands. He'd been stupid to think it would be so simple.

Maybe he should shoot anyway. Shoot now and take a chance. What did he have to lose? For all he knew, this was the closest he'd ever be to rescue. What the hell? He had no food, no reasonable prospects to find any, certainly not in this weather. If he didn't take his shot now, how did he know he'd even be alive to try again tomorrow?

He had to try. Now.

But where was the plane? Where was the constant hum of its engines? Where the hell did they go?

“Scott, you're an idiot,” he moaned. He'd hesitated and now he'd lost. Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply. The freezing air hurt his sinuses.

The wave of despair blindsided him. He'd never felt so insignificant. So what if he died? Who would even know? Who would care? Oh, sure, his dad would mourn him, and his closest friends, but after a few days, what difference would it make? What difference did Scott make?

These thoughts terrified him. When the time came, he wanted his death to be a momentous event—the stuff of headlines all around the world.
Rock Star Scott O'Toole Dies in Plane Crash
. Rock stars always died in plane crashes. Well, at least he got that part right.

A crippling sadness overtook him without warning, taking his breath along with it—a great puff of white vapor lost in a white world. Who did he think he was kidding? How did he ever allow himself to believe that he could make it through this thing? Christ, he didn't even belong on the trip that stranded him here in the first place.

He never should have accepted her invitation, her gigantic
up yours
to his father. Skiing was a Team Bachelor thing; Mom had nothing to do with it. Looking back on it, Scott wondered how he could have been such a shit to a man who always treated him like a prince. If this was God's way of paying him back for hurting his dad, then the Big Guy won big time. Score it 21-zip at the half with things looking bad for the O'Toole team.

Recognizing the dark thoughts for what they were—the leading edge of panic—Scott swiped the crystallized tears from his eyes and struggled back to his feet. It was time to go back. He'd already wasted too much daylight. Night was coming and he dreaded it more profoundly than death itself. The night would bring endless hours of frigid darkness where his mind would occupy itself with terrifying thoughts of God only knew what, too numb to stay awake, but too frightened to go to sleep.

The blazes, it turned out, were a wasted effort. His outbound journey had cut a deep trench through the snow. A blind man could have found the way back. He rationalized that the way his luck was running, if he hadn't carved the blazes, then sure as hell, there'd have been some huge tornado of wind to obliterate his tracks.

Nothing had changed at the crash site. As the light began to fade, all that remained for today was to build a fire. For that, he turned to the wreckage itself. If he couldn't start a fire with gasoline, then shame on him. He could drain fuel from the tanks into a container of some sort and then light it with a fusee at just the right moment, and the column of greasy black smoke would be visible for miles.

But the timing would be important. With darkness approaching, it would be stupid to light it tonight. And having seen and smelled gasoline fires before, he knew that the smoke that made it such a great signaling device would make it impractical for any other use—like, say, keeping warm. No, he'd have to wait till he heard the approach of the engines and light it then. In a perfect world, the search planes would be attracted to the smoke, and then when they were directly overhead, he could fire his flare. Call it a plan.

His dad used to tell him that God never closes a door without opening a window. Yeah, well, the windows were a hell of a lot smaller than the doors.

Still, at the end of the millionth mood change of the day, Scott once again felt that he possessed some measure of control over his future. But he had to move quickly. Dusk approached, and he wanted to be ready the instant he heard the first sound of engines in the morning.

With just a little luck, come noon tomorrow, he'd be out of here, tucked under an electric blanket with the thermostat set to nuclear. After that, his face would be all over
Good Morning America
and
People
magazine. Maybe they'd even give him a chance to play one of his songs on the air. Would that be cool, or what? The beginning of his real career. Maybe God's window was bigger than he'd thought. All he had to do was make it through one more night.

Noon tomorrow. Nineteen hours, half of them in the freezing night—the hours when sanity and survival were their most fragile.

And the sun was falling fast. He had maybe an hour to get his signal fires set up, before he needed to be inside the shelter.

Only an hour.

•  •  •

B
Y THE TIME
B
RANDON RETURNED
to Eagle Feather around five, patches of blue had begun to invade the matte gray sky.

Road crews had been busy. Plows had created great mountains of filthy snow on both sides of Main Street, all but obliterating the view of or from any of the storefronts. All the way down the mountain, he'd tried to get through to the chief's office on his cell phone, but with all the switchbacks, his phone couldn't hold a signal.

The slick street made him walk like an old man as he approached the elevated sidewalk, but once under the cover of the overhang, things got easier. He reached for the glass door, then deferred to a young man on his way out, clearly a local, just from the way he was dressed. “Thank you,” the man said as he sidestepped quickly to free the door up for Brandon.

Brandon nodded and smiled.

“Are you Mr. O'Toole?” the stranger asked. “Scott O'Toole's father?”

Curiosity formed an uneasy mix with dread in Brandon's gut. “I am.”

The man stripped the glove off his right hand and reached out. “Tommy Paul,” he said. “I worked with Cody Jamieson up at SkyTop. Him and Scott hung around a lot together this past week and I got to know him. I'm really sorry to hear about all this.”

Brandon shook Tommy's hand gratefully. “Thank you very much.”

“He really was a good kid. Both of them were. I'll miss them.”

“They're still alive,” Brandon said. He tried to keep his tone easy, confident.

“Oh, yeah. Right. Well, they've certainly still got a chance, don't they?”

“A good chance. So, when did you last see Scott?”

Something changed in Tommy's demeanor—nothing huge, but Brandon suddenly had the feeling that the conversation was stretching longer than the stranger had expected. “Um, let's see. Night before last, maybe? The night before the crash.”

“Tell me about it.”

A switch flipped somewhere, and right away, Tommy looked uneasy as hell. “It was just, you know. Some of us were hanging around the patrol shack. Nothing big.” He made a show of checking his watch. “Look, I really should be running…”

Brandon stepped closer and purposely softened his stance, his expression. “Tommy, relax, okay? I'm not looking for trouble—not for you or anybody else. I know that Scott likes to down a few beers when he gets a chance, and I know that he's always on the prowl for a good time. I don't approve, exactly, but I'm a realist. What we say stays between us, I promise. I'm just grateful to have some insight into his trip here.”

Tommy relaxed and in time he smiled. “Then you know what we did. No drugs, I promise you that, but we did down a few brews.” He started to laugh. “Cody was one crazy dude, and Scott just seemed to make him crazier. When they got jammin' on the guitars, man, it was something.”

Brandon beamed.

“Knew his way around the slopes, too. Scott, I mean.”

“I'm on the patrol back home,” Brandon explained. “Nothing like the stuff you do up here, I'm sure, but Scott spent just about every cold weekend of his life on the slopes somewhere.”

Tommy nodded. “Yeah, he mentioned something about that. Talked about you a lot, in fact. We have a tradition here called midnight snowmobiles. It's a race up Widow Maker. After he damn near ran me off the trail, he told me that you taught him that every race has only one winner. Despite the fact he nearly killed me, I had to admire the spirit.”

“So he won?”

Tommy scoffed, “Hell no, he didn't win, but he didn't get hurt, either, when I rammed him into the hay bales.” Brandon must have looked shocked, because Tommy quickly added, “It was all in good fun. But like he said, there's only one winner.”

Brandon understood perfectly, and again, his emotions felt frazzled. He needed to break this off before he lost it. He forced a smile and shook Tommy's hand again. “Thank you very much for sharing that,” he said. “It means a lot to me.”

The sadness made Tommy uncomfortable. “My pleasure. Listen, if you're still in town tomorrow, we're having a little prayer service in the chapel for Cody. And Scott, too. If you want to stop by…”

Brandon considered that. “Let's see how the day plays itself out, okay?”

Tommy nodded. “Sure, it's your call. I just wanted you to know. Five-thirty tomorrow afternoon, after the slopes close.” He tossed off a wave and was on his way.

Brandon stepped inside the station and pressed the buzzer. Jesse Tingle let him in. “Welcome back, sir. No news yet, I'm afraid.”

“The place looks busy.”

“Yes, sir. Now that the weather's calmed down a bit, we're beginning to get the flood of calls. Burst pipes, medical assistance, auto damage, that sort of thing. The nonemergency stuff that I guess people thought could wait for a while. All that and the president of the United States. I voted for him and now I can't wait for him to leave.” He stopped, suddenly aware of how little Brandon cared about any of this. “I'm sure the chief can give you better details on your son than I can.”

“Is he in?”

“Not just now. He had to run out for a few minutes, but I expect him right back. Just make yourself at home.”

“Think the boss would mind if I helped myself to his coffee pot?”

Jesse winced. “I suppose it's okay if you're current on all your vaccinations.”

Brandon smiled and headed for Whitestone's office. The squad room had taken on the feel of a beehive. Staffing appeared to have doubled from the morning's skeleton crew, and all of them seemed sharply focused on whatever they were doing.

In the chief's office now, he navigated his way to Mr. Coffee, found himself a clean-looking cup and helped himself to the dregs in the pot. It looked more like the tail end of an oil change than coffee, and loading it with creamer and sugar only made it taste like creamier, sweeter waste oil. He chugged the whole thing and stepped back into the squad room. All around him, deputies wandered in and out, phones rang without pause, and through it all, the air vibrated with the staccato scratching sounds of radio transmissions, most of which, to Brandon's ear, were just so much garbled static.

With all battle stations manned, Brandon found himself with nowhere to sit, until one of the friendlier faces from the morning—Charlotte Eberly, he remembered—offered him a chair in front of her desk.

“I took the last of the chief's coffee,” he said. “I'll make more if you point me in the right direction.”

Charlotte gave a disapproving wave. “I don't have anything to do with his sinful ways. I do my best not to pay attention.”

Okaay.
“Might I ask where the chief went?” Brandon asked, anxious to change the subject.

Officer Eberly had returned to whatever document she had up on her computer screen and spoke without looking. “He's on a tour of the square with the mayor.”

Brandon scowled. “A tour?”

Charlotte looked up. “The Founder's Day speech,” she said, but it clearly meant nothing to Brandon. “You know that the president grew up in this county, right? Well, he's the keynote at the hundredth anniversary of Founder's Day. I understand there'll be a big announce—Oh, here he is!”

Brandon turned to see Barry Whitestone striding down the center aisle between desks and he rose to intercept. “Nice tour?”

Whitestone didn't know how to interpret the question. “Let's talk in my office.”