A Wee Dose of Death Read Online Free PDF

lose his toes to frostbite before morning if he couldn’t keep them moving.
    And he most definitely could not. Even
thinking
about moving his toes incited the flaming agony running up his leg.
    Ahead, at the top of a small rise, the trees thinned a bit. He must be close to that vacant cabin. Maybe those two people skiing ahead of him had gone there. If so, they’d have a fire. That was better than an emergency tent any day. He could get warm. And they could call for help. Everybody carried cell phones. He yelled for help, but the snow and the surrounding trees seemed to absorb the sound. He heard a faint reverberation as his voice bounced back at him from the high rock cliff. He doubted anyone would hear him unless he could get closer to the cabin.
    Even if nobody was there, he could start a fire and maybe he could send some sort of smoke signal. He’d have to think about that one. The fire was the most important thing. It was cold enough now, maybe ten or fifteen degrees, but temps were supposed to plunge to subzero before morning. By then, he had to be out of here. The snow—forecasters said it was a blizzard moving in—would be no fun to deal with.
    Before he could move, though, he needed a splint of some sort to immobilize his leg. The only thing even vaguely straight and solid was a ski. He pulled two fat Ace bandages out of his pack. He’d almost removed them from his pack before he left. Now he was mighty glad he hadn’t. Groaningwith the effort, he removed his left ski and set to work on getting off the right one. The more it hurt, the angrier he got. The angrier he was, the less he seemed to feel the pain.
    Still, the grinding of sharp bone on the muscle tissue inside his leg came close to making him pass out. When he finally finished, his leg was bound to the ski, from his thigh all the way down as close to his ankle as he could reach. There was no way he could crawl with his leg sticking out straight like that. He’d have to pull himself along on his left side. This was going to be a long day.

7

    Cutting Up Kindling
    M arcus Wantstring had less than a week to finish this. Wrap up all the loose ends. Tweak the rough spots. Revise the computer file.
    The blizzard would keep casual skiers away for at least the next three days. He glanced up at the cloud cover. That blizzard had better hurry. There was only a foot or two of snow on the ground so far. Not nearly enough to keep him dependably isolated. Still, he was sure he wouldn’t be interrupted.
    He had no idea who owned this cabin, but found justification for using it in the tidy hand-lettered laminated sign tacked beside the door:
    Feel free to stay for a day or two
Clean up after yourself
Leave firewood for the next person
    Whoever wrote the sign should have said,
Leave some kindling, too
, he thought. He needed more than a day or two, but he doubted the owner, whoever that was, would object to even a week’s stay here in the beginning stages of a blizzard. From everything he’d heard around town, the Perth wasn’t a frequently used trail, not like the other ones, so there was a good chance nobody would come anywhere near the cabin. There hadn’t been any ski tracks ahead of his on the way up here.
    He needed solitude in a situation like this. His wife, dear as she was, could not stop talking for more than ten minutes at a time. Luckily, although she enjoyed picnics in the summer, she wasn’t one to ski.
    He and Denby had stumbled onto this—what should he call it? This project?—entirely by accident. Eight years so far. Eight pretty good years. He couldn’t drop the ball now. Not with Denby gone. He had to keep up his end. He had to complete the contract, but there was no way he could finish it at home. Not with his wife popping in and out of his office. And not at school. Not with all those people around. Even with his office door locked, people would wonder what was taking him so long in