Snowman Read Online Free PDF Page A

foreboding governed Cathy's actions. She spent the next few hours going through the lodge with several instructors, searching for Janice. They checked the bar, and had Janice paged at fifteen-minute intervals. The local taxi-service dispatcher sent messages to his drivers, giving Janice's description; the car-rental agencies and the airport were also questioned. In desperation, Cathy decided to visit the condominiums to see if Janice had by some chance run into a friend and was having an innocent drink. All the while Cathy greeted new check-ins, was battered by tiresome questions about linen, firewood, and mealtimes. Dozens of times she passed the lines outside the main warming hut, where people waited to get their boots and be fitted with skis. Occasionally a smart-ass would shout out to her—"Did you find him yet?"—which heightened her tension and became a jangled refrain.
    By ten that night her nerves were gone. A desolate, unremitting voice within her insisted that Janice was out there, buried under the lashing gale of snow which had begun to fall that afternoon. Heavy gusts of wind thrashed the loose drifts.
    In a daze she accompanied Monte to the airport.
    The snow came down in blinding, torrential sheets.
    The chains on the tires of the jeep made a ratcheting sound, carving through the high drifts which had accumulated on the road since that afternoon. She lighted a cigarette for Monte and passed it to him. Sudden wind gusts forced the jeep into dangerous slews. Cathy was strapped in by the seat belt, but she held on to the roll bar.
    The temperature had dropped sharply to fifteen below zero, and the heater droned, fighting a losing battle with the condensation that fogged the windshield. Cathy wiped it with a sodden chamois cloth.
    "Christ, it's horrible to think of her on the mountain. But where else could she be?" Cathy said.
    They parked in front of the air traffic control building and made a dash from the jeep. The building shuddered from the impact of the wind through the open door. Monte's pilot was huddled in a corner of the room, sipping black coffee out of a plastic cup. He had a disgruntled look on his face.
    "Is there a chance that the airport'll open up?" Monte asked.
    Stan, the traffic controller, a pudgy middle-aged man who looked as though he was merely in attendance until the fishing season began, yawned and said:
    "What kind of a fuckhead are you, Monte? Didn't you hear that the Japs disbanded the kamikazes? You hate Chuck or something? We'll be lucky to open the airport by tomorrow morning. There's a sixty-mile-an-hour wind from the southeast and visibility is zero. If you could take off, where would you land, in Acapulco?"
    "I wanted Chuck to take the chopper up."
    "Mr. Dale," Chuck protested, "we'd be blown apart. There's an ice storm at five thousand feet with slabs the size of barn walls."
    "Ice sheets, Monte. Just as a matter of curiosity, where were you planning on going at twelve o'clock in a copter?"
    "To the advanced slope."
    "Cathy, who's been spiking his drinks?" Stan asked.
    "The advanced slope of Sierra!" Chuck repeated, as though to confirm that he was in the employ of a sadistic lunatic.
    "Monte, what is it with you? You been pissing and moaning that you haven't got enough snow and that the resort's going to die stillborn. Now that you've got more snow than the whole state of Colorado, you become suicidal," Stan said.
    "Why up there?" Chuck asked.
    "There might be a girl up there," Cathy said.
    "Did you do a bed check?" Stan asked skeptically.
    Chuck nodded. "Mr. Dale, even if we could get a copter up there, how'd we cover the mountain? The lights we've got aren't high-intensity. It'd be like using a flashlight."
    "Monte, there's been eighteen inches of snow down here since this afternoon. Multiply that by five and you got seven and a half feet of snow at the summit. If she's up there, it doesn't matter now. She'll be buried."
    The ugly reality of that possibility gnawed Cathy all