Chill Factor

But there were his boots, standing in small puddles of water formed on his bedroom floor as the snow melted off them. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask him when he had gone out, but she’d stopped herself.

She’d decided she should be armed with some kind of backup evidence before accusing him of sneaking out. The power outage had provided her with an opportunity to investigate.

However, now that she could confront him with the disabled alarm system, she was reluctant—or too cowardly—to do so. He was certainly old enough to come and go as he pleased. Wes imposed a curfew on him, but if Scott wanted to leave the house, there was little Wes could do to stop him short of physically restraining him.

So why didn’t he defy Wes and simply walk out the door? Why was he sneaking out? It was symptomatic of other changes in him. Her sweet, considerate, and easygoing Scott had turned sullen, even prone to outbursts of temper. He was withdrawn, hostile, and unpredictable.

Because of the unrelenting pressure Wes placed on him, performance anxiety must be partially responsible. But knowing her son as she did, Dora feared that these personality changes were being caused by something even more consequential than Wes’s badgering. Scott was no longer himself, and she wanted to know why.

Mentally she traced back over the past year, trying to determine when she began noticing these changes.

Last spring.

About the time—

Everything inside Dora went terribly still.

Scott began to change about the time he and Millicent Gunn stopped seeing each other.

When the telephone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

“I’ll get it,” Scott said. “It’s probably Gary.” He had just come in from the garage. Setting the Coleman lantern on the kitchen table, he reached for the phone. It was the old-fashioned kind of wall phone, without caller ID or anything else that required electricity to be operable.

“Oh, hi, Dad.” Scott listened for several seconds, then said, “How come? Okay, she’s right here.” He passed the phone to Dora. “He’s calling from the hospital.”

• • •

Begley wasn’t feeling too kindly toward Dutch Burton. In fact, he would have liked to plant his size eleven foot in Burton’s anus. He settled for speaking candidly. “Your face looks like raw hamburger.”

“They’re only superficial cuts.” The police chief was sitting on the end of the examination table, his posture that of a fifty-pound potato sack that was only three quarters full. “The doc picked out the glass slivers. I’m waiting for the nurse to come back with some antiseptic stuff to put on them. It may not be pretty, but I’ll be okay.”

“Better than Hawkins. He’s got a broken arm, which is a clean break. They popped his dislocated shoulder back in. But his anklebones are going to take some work. Both are splintered all to hell.”

“Wish it was his skull,” Burton muttered.

“Mr. Hawkins was intoxicated,” Hoot said from where he stood just inside the privacy curtain that divided the treatment areas in the community hospital’s ER. From the other side of the yellow fabric, they could hear Cal Hawkins moaning. “His blood-alcohol ratio was well over the legal limit.”

“Then he lied to me,” Burton said defensively. “I asked him if he’d been drinking, but he said—”

Begley cut him off. “I think you hear only what you want to hear.”

Burton glared at him.

“Reconstructing his ankles is going to require delicate surgery,” Hoot said. “They can’t do it here. Because of the weather, it could be several days before he can be transported to a hospital that has an orthopedic surgical team. In the meantime, he’s in misery.”

“Look,” Burton said angrily, “it’s not my fault the guy’s a drunk.”

“He couldn’t have driven up that road stone fucking sober,” Begley roared. “Thanks to you, the whole damn countryside is without electricity. You’re lucky this hospital’s got an emergency generator or you’d be sitting here in the cold and dark, looking like a freak show with hunks of glass sticking out of your face.”

Hawkins’s rig had collided with one of the tower’s four supports. In ordinary circumstances, it probably could have withstood the damage. But with the weight of the ice and snow making it top-heavy, it had toppled, taking dozens of ageless trees and a network of power lines with it. Worse, it had fallen across the mountain road, blocking access to the peak.

Dutch Burton had let his emotions outweigh his judgment. Unacceptable behavior for any man, but unforgivable for a public servant. His jealousy-inspired determination to get up the mountain road today had been irrational and dangerous, and had resulted in numerous casualties: Hawkins was probably crippled for life; the sanding truck was out of commission during one of the worst storms in decades; and the power outage extended into several surrounding counties.

All that was catastrophic.

But what really chapped Begley was that Burton’s idiocy had eliminated any possibility of going after Tierney. He couldn’t even attempt it again until the mess on that road was cleared, which could take weeks, or until the weather broke enough for a chopper to take him to the summit. Either way, valuable time had been squandered. Wasted time was not just one of Begley’s pet peeves; he considered it a sin.

His consolation was that he wasn’t the only one hamstrung by the situation. Ben Tierney couldn’t go anywhere, either.