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Chapter Thirteen: Little Annie

I looked to Tug, who shrugged. "What he said."

"Oh, shit," I said. "You guys killed Marco."

"Out," said Bester. He stood far enough from the truck that I wouldn't be able to hit him with the opening door. And he made to move to step forward and open it for me.

"Well, hell, you're not going to shoot me right here in a sheriff's vehicle."

"Get out of the truck, wiseass," said Bester. He took a step forward, reacing with his free hand for the door handle. I pulled the inside latch and threw my weight on the door. At the same moment, something hit me hard in the small of the back and I sprawled face down in the snow. Bester's foot came down solidly between my shoulder blades, and I was pinned.

"Sorry, Rucksack," said Tug's voice. "Just cooperate, okay?" The son of a bitch had just booted me clean out of the truck.

I spit out snow and relaxed. It wasn't that I was getting used to waiting helplessly, but I was getting philosophical about it. Bester's ski boot pressed sharp and unyielding against my spine, but otherwise nothing hurt.

The ski boots told me who had been up on the mountain, shooting at me.

"Cuff him," he told Tug.

Tug jerked my arms back. The cuffs were warm from riding in the heated truck, but hard and painfully tight.

"Up," said Bester. Each of them grabbed me under an arm and hoisted.

"You guys are some kind of anti-drug death squad? Look, I never dealt anything. I didn't know what Marco was doing. I was his friend, not his partner."

"Let's get rid of this turd and go get dinner," said Bester. "I want our tracks snowed over by morning." They dragged me through the snow toward the hoist tower.

They were going to drop me down the mine shaft.

I yelled and kicked. I swung my heavy ski boots out wide, trying to catch a leg. It didn't help. Each of these guys outweighed me by twenty pounds, and between them they could just about lift me clear of the snow. Dragging me through the snow was heavy work, and they grunted a bit, but didn't stop to rest.

It was like going to the guillotine.

Nature, implacable as can be, is blind. When an avalanche sweeps you up, you're on your own. If you can get out, you're free -- the slide isn't going to come back for you. No hard feelings, no vengeance.

But Bester and Moran were implacable, malicious and single-minded. They had tried to kill me on the mountain and missed. They were going to make that good, and right now. I was more scared than I though possible. I screamed into the thick storm. I whipped and kicked and spun.

"This is stupid," said Bester. "Quiet him. It doesn't matter what he looks like."

Moran pulled out a heavy aluminum flashlight. I saw it coming in the snowflake light, reflected from the truck's headlamps. He swung the black rod like a truncheon and I pivoted my head to soften the blow. It crunched on my left ear and a red flash of pain bounced through my head. The backswing caught my right temple and I went blind for a second. He hit me in the solar plexus and my breath went out. I was on my knees, face in the snow, gasping and puking in dry racking spasms.

The spun me over and dragged me backward and I didn't resist. The headlamps dimmed in the snowcloud behind us and then everything turned black as they bumped me over a drift and into the hoist tower. The snow inside seemed as deep as that outside; I could feel it, the way you recognize an odd fact in a dream. The glow of the headlamps made a haze of the falling snow -- the tower had no roof. Silhouetted faintly against the dull silver glow were the old crossbeams of the hoist mechanism, rising three gloomy stories.

They whipped me around and dropped me on my face in the snow. Someone pulled at my arms and the handcuffs came loose. I swung my arms forward to push up out of the snow but they caught me in the crotch and pitched me forward.

And I fell.

It was a dream fall, a death fall, tumbling slowly into blackness. I was going to fall a long, long way and wouldn't see the end . . .

But the fall was short.

It took a moment to register that I had weight, that I rested softly in a deep snowdrift. Wide-eyed and crazy scared, I had landed on my back after half a somersault, whumping silently into the forgiving snow. I cleared the stuff off my face and looked straight up through the crossbeams toward the glowing blizzard at the top of the tower.

Alive, I lay on my back on top of the old lift cage, stuck forty feet down the shaft. I had probably been rusting here for sixty years.

Bester and Moran might be listening for a liquid thud some several seconds and thousand feet down. Had I made any noise in landing? Did they know I wasn't dead? I turned on my belly and once again burrowed into the snow for safety.

I peeked upward, watching the glowing sky, waiting for the headlights to dim. Instead I saw shadows moving and then long shapes plummeting down the shaft toward me. A collection of objects, heavy and hard, rained into the snow near my head. Marco's skis. My poles. My shovel and avvy pack.

I lay quietly, waiting to see what else would be pitched. My head throbbed on both sides; I pressed cold snow against the wounds. My gut still ached and it hurt to breathe. I tried not to gasp. After a few minutes the shaft glowed in a flashlight beam.

"Shit, he's not dead," said Tug. "Hey, Dick, the shaft's blocked. He can climb out."

I knew what was coming. I also knew there had to be a steel crossbeam over the top of the cage, hidden somewhere under the snow, and I'd have to be under it before they started shooting. I burrowed, found the beam, and frantically cleared snow from underneath. It felt about a foot wide, with just enough clearance underneath.

The shotgun, amplified by the walls of the shaft, was deafening. It went off just as I squirmed under the beam. Nothing hit me, but I screamed involuntarily. Just as well. I screamed again, simulating great pain.

With the second blast I had to simulate nothing. The pain splashed hot and furious across my left hip and thigh, burning deep into the buttock.

My butt felt as if I'd sat on a hot stovetop. I couldn't catch my breath. From knee to coccyx I felt raw and damaged, open, scalded. Light-headed, I sensed the lampglow fade and rise, deep distant voices echoing down the shaft. I couldn't make out the words and didn't try. I was going to sleep now. Maybe I passed out.

When I could think again, the dark was a solid wall, the silence thicker still, save for my own shuddering breath.

I wasn't dead, but I wasn't alive yet. No one would look for me, at least not here. Tug would direct any search elsewhere. If I couldn't get out by myself, I would die here, of blood loss or hypothermia.

I wanted to rest, to let the pain in my butt and head and gut subside. I forced myself to move. The leg throbbed, but it worked. No sharp pain from the joints, none of that vague immobility signalling splintered bones. I had been peppered with shotgun pellets, perhaps only lightly.

The stuff I needed was in the avvy pack. I hoped Bester had been thourough, that he'd cleaned up the mess in Keno Gulch and brought everything down. If anyone ever did find my body, all my belongings would be there, too -- it would look as if I'd simply tumbled into the mine shaft on my own initiative.

Finding the pack meant rolling out from under the beam. When I knelt to sift through the snow, and each time I moved, the muscles of left leg burned, and where I'd been gut-punched it felt as if someone had inflated a football under my diaphragm. I couldn't take a full breath. I stopped to puke again, but then found the pack quickly.

Inside was the headlamp. I used it for just a moment.

One of the pack pockets held some small first aid items. I swallowed a handful of aspirin, eating a little snow to lubricate my throat. The last of the cookies I would keep until my bruised gut could hold it.

I felt my damaged thigh. Several layers of tough cloth were riddled with buckshot. Underneath, my shredded long johns were soaking up the blood that oozed from the wounds. I couldn't count the punctures, and didn't try. They stung, sharply, with each movement, but it was too wet and slippery in there to do much. I'd rely on my clothes to be the bandage.

The pack also held my coil of cord, 120 feet of nine millimeter climbing rope. I might yet get out of here.

Could I climb the walls of the shaft, or the lift rails? To the touch, the shaft walls felt rough, but icy and slick -- not a promising climb without crampons and ice screws. I tied a bowline around the cage crossbeam, gave myself about forty feet of slack, and tied another bowline around my waist. It hurt just to cinch the loop tight. Then I felt around one end of the crossbeam for one of the vertical steel rails I knew had to be there to guide the cage within the shaft.

The rail felt solid. It was roughly rusted, of course, but seemed to be bolted to the shaft walls with brackets located about three feet apart -- at least, I could feel a support near my feet, one at waist level, and one at head height. One end of each strut was bolted to the rocky wall, the other to the vertical rail. The struts, though, were thickly caked with verglass, and I chipped away at the ice on the first one with a ski pole before swinging up to stand on it. With my right foot, of course.

The vertical rail was notched on the side facing out into the shaft -- notched, I realized, to accept the cage safety brake. I found I could put the toe of my left ski boot into those notches, shortening the distance I had to step up to the next strut. If I didn't bend the left leg at the hip, it didn't hurt too much. The problem was that every horizontal surface was heavily iced.

I backed off, untied the rope from the cage crossbeam, and fixed it so I could throw a belay loop around the rail as I moved upward. It meant that at each support strut I'd have to untie and loop it up again, but at least if I slipped on the ice I could only fall as far as the last strut. Failing that, I'd land back in the deep snow on top of the cage.

Now I made good progress -- for twenty feet. There, the vertical rail ended. I turned on the headlamp. In its dim glow it appeared that the entire structure from here on up had been torn out. No rails, no struts, no cables. Just ice-slick rock for twenty feet to the shaft mouth.

Just to be sure, I climbed down and went up the rail on the other side of the shaft. Again, it ended twenty feet short of the top. Maybe someone had wanted the scrap. Maybe someone wanted to be sure that kids couldn't climb down the rails.

Once again I looked upward. In the black, the tower crossbeams were invisible. They were at least sixty feet above the top of the cage, but my rope was just 120 feet long -- there was a chance that from the top of a rail I might be able to toss it over so that it looped back to me. I had nothing to aim at in the dark, but it was worth a try.

So I went back up a rail and tied the rope off to the topmost strut. Then I looped my good leg over that strut, leaving both hands free to coil the rope and throw the coil up into the darkness. With my right side against the shaft wall, I had to toss with my left arm, and when I threw the rope, my whole body ached. Aspirin can only do so much, and my head rang with pain.

On the first few tosses, the rope hit the walls of the shaft and came slithering down. I retrieved it each time, coiling it neatlyu for the next toss, twelve or thirteen long loops in the coil. Then I found a groove that sent the coild up out of the shaft, and could hope it would arc over a beam. But each time, the rope came back down the saft, falling light and swift through the black air. Sometimes a loop brushed my shoulder as it fell; more often, I had only the weight of the slack rope in my hand to tell me that the whole length lay once more on the roof of the cage.

A minute to coil and throw the rope -- I may have thrown it sixty times. My right leg, hooked over the strut, went to sleep. My left leg burned. When I could no longer loft the rope even a few feet with my tiring left arm, I climbed down for a rest. I could wait through the night in hope that dawn would show me what to throw at, but the notches in the side rail gave me another idea.

If I couldn't go up, maybe I could go down.