Fade to White (21 page)

She got off at the top and came straight down without a break, skirting around the back of the Peak Lodge to pick up Finesse, cutting over to The Falls, and winding up at the bottom of the lift long before Chip got there. She didn’t take any pride in it. Hauling a loaded toboggan down any ski trail had to be tough, but taking one down a bump run must have been murder. Plus she figured he’d have to untie the other patroller once they got to the shack. Sure enough it was a few minutes before Chip and the other patroller skied up to her at the margin of the lift line, Chip pulling the toboggan and the other guy flexing his shoulders and neck from where he’d been strapped down. Chip was still red-faced from the effort.

“Nice job,” Stacey said.

“Ask
me
how nice it was,” said the other patroller, pushing at a sore spot in his neck with the heel of his hand.

“If I’d pulled those lines any less tight, you would have rolled right off,” said Chip.

“Right. Sure. Just wait till it’s
your
turn to go for a ride.”

Stacey looked at Chip. “Are you up next?”

“I wish,” said the other guy, still rubbing at his neck. “I wish he was.”

“Nah,” said Chip. “We’re done for now.” The chair came and they all got on it together, with the toboggan dangling between the two patrollers. “We get this thing back and I’m headed over to the Northside chair for a while,” he said once it had stopped rocking. “You want to come?”

Of course she did.

At the top she skied down to a flat spot just below the Peak Lodge and waited while Chip put the toboggan away. The other guy went off somewhere else, leaving the two of them alone to head for the Northside. It was even colder over there than usual, windy as anything, and pretty empty, too. They had nearly every run all to themselves, and there was never anybody else within seven or eight chairs of them on the way up. The wind cut through them once they were airborne on the chair, though, and they had to huddle together to stay warm. Neither of them minded.

“You know what you were saying about Buddy Frommer being a dealer?” she said.

“Yep.”

“It’s true. No question.”

“Right.” He gritted his teeth against the cold. “How do you know?”

“Something Guy said.”

“He came right out and—”

“Not exactly, but he let me know that he’s pretty sure.” They rode along in silence, battered by the wind, and then she said, “So why doesn’t he seem to care?”

“I don’t know.” A gust came up and they strained against it. “Could be Buddy’s
already
under investigation, right? Maybe they’ve got a big sting under way or something.”

“Maybe.”

“It might have been going on for years. With the state troopers, the FBI, the DEA, the whole nine yards. Maybe he doesn’t want to blow it.”

“I guess you could be right.”

The wind picked up again and they leaned forward against it.

“You’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

They got off the lift, hit the trail, and got down into the trees as fast as they could. It was warmer there and they stopped.

“One more thing,” she said. “Guy said I should ask Brian about something he’d seen on the coffee table in Stone’s rental. Back when he was looking for him the first time.”

“He say what it was?”

“Just something on the coffee table.”

Chip adjusted his goggles and looked out at the horizon. Mountains all the way to New Hampshire, under a low sky. “Drugs,” he said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Drugs for sure. Oh, yeah. It’s got to be drugs. Coke, I’ll bet.”

“But why would he want me to ask Brian?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to tell you himself, on account of confidentiality and all. But he wanted to let you know that he knows.”

Stacey thought for a minute. “So maybe there
is
something under way. A bust. Like you said.”

Chip shrugged and took off. She followed him, taking a straighter line, and zoomed past him in about three seconds, no problem.

THIRTY

Doc’s, the seedy bar that sat alongside one of Spruce Peak’s remote parking lots, had given up any hint of ski-town sophistication a long time ago. The truth was, it had never had any. A squat pile of crumbling bricks roofed over with tar paper, adorned with a clumsy but alarming two-story likeness of its animated Seven Dwarves namesake done in latex housepaint that had all but faded away with the years, Doc’s had occupied the same little islet of land since long before the first rope tow was ever installed at Spruce Peak. It had begun as a private residence, a bootlegger’s place in the deep woods, and when the bootlegger had passed away his widow had moved upstairs and kept on selling whiskey out of the kitchen. When every other landowner in the region had sold out to the Paxton family and moved south, that cantankerous widow had stayed put.

Her son, the original Doc, came of age under prohibition and was much benefited by it. To this day he sat in an alcove behind the bar, nursing a cirrhotic liver and inhaling bottled oxygen from a wheeled tank, remembering the old days when the front door had had a little sliding panel in it and a person had needed to know the password if he wanted to get inside. Nowadays, Doc liked to say, any damn idiot could get in. Idiots who didn’t even know that skis came in pairs.
Snowboarders.
He watched them stream in with their baggy pants and their spiked-up hair, and he cursed them furiously under what little breath he had left.

Doc Junior, his son and namesake, worked the taps and ignored the old man. Doc Junior was a giant who rubbed against the bar in front and the cash register behind as he squeezed his way from customer to customer. Summer and winter he was forever damp with an oily sweat that soaked his clothes and probably did at least a little to lubricate his passage as he surged from tap to tap like some seagoing beast, ceaselessly weary, out of breath, and overwhelmingly anxious. It was this ongoing anxiety that had made him post a notice in the Ski Patrol shack at the base of the mountain, looking for a skilled professional to oversee Rail Jam Night. (God forbid he should pay for a want ad in the
Mountain Times.
) It was that posted notice that had caused his path to cross with that of Chip Walsh.

Rail Jam Night, which took place in the cramped little yard behind the tavern, was a one-ring circus of draft beer, testosterone, and lousy judgment. It consisted of thirty or forty underage college boys with fake IDs, riding their snowboards up and down a couple of homemade ramps just as recklessly as their blood alcohol levels would allow—all of it accompanied by thudding rap music or hip-hop or whatever it was that they called it. Doc Junior didn’t know and didn’t care. Rail Jam Night started as soon as the lifts on the mountain closed, and as a rule it wasn’t over until an ambulance from the Rutland hospital showed up. This is why Doc Junior thought he could use a professional around—somebody who could keep a lid on things, and maybe take some of the liability hit if push came to shove.

So it was that Chip found himself freezing his butt off on a bar stool below a sizzling arc lamp, his back to a neon sign advertising Jenny Cream Ale, watching as a parade of tipsy college boys got loud and sloppy drunk in the great outdoors. He’d lifeguarded at Rehoboth Beach growing up in Washington, D.C., but it had done nothing to prepare him for this. There were rules on the beach. There were guidelines both posted and customary. Even though somebody out there always had a couple of beers hidden in a cooler, they were always stealthy about drinking them. Everything in moderation.

Not so at Rail Jam Night. Doc had a couple of kegs set up outdoors and he sat alongside them with a cashbox stuffed between his enormous thighs, taking in money and pouring out Long Trail in a pair of more or less coordinated streams. Some of the regulars from town were inside at the bar, coaxing boilermakers out of old Doc himself, who was up on his feet against his better judgment, dragging his oxygen tank like a penance, but everybody else was outdoors. Spilled beer had made the snow into a rusty yellowish slush under the arc lights. College boys tramped through it and slid over it and would soon enough be falling down into it. Chip watched them, wondering how low the thermometer had to sink before beer would freeze. The evening was getting colder and colder and he blew warm air down into his jacket, beginning to think that he might find out before too long.

Mainly, though, what he was thinking about was whether or not this discomfort and annoyance was worth the fifty bucks in cash that he was getting for it. Doc Junior had offered twenty-five on the sign he’d posted in the Patrol shack but there must not have been any other takers, because Chip had gotten him to double it. Chip felt the weight of that compromise every time he looked in the fat man’s direction.

The music was terrifically loud, so loud that Chip signaled to Doc Junior and went inside to jam some toilet paper from the hideous men’s room into his ears, then pulled his wool hat down over them and came outside again. He was only away from his post a minute or so, but the fat man gave him a threatening look, as if he meant to dock him a few bucks. Like a guy couldn’t even use the bathroom during his shift. What job in the world held you to that kind of standard? None that he’d ever had. None that he’d ever have again, that was for sure.

And now the college kids wanted him to judge their antics. That was always a problem at Rail Jam Night. Doc Junior never set up any kind of protocol, so the drunk college kids would always end up fighting it out among themselves. Now a bunch of them began arguing over which one had done a better pop-tart or something, and they took their disagreement to the only credible authority in sight: Chip, the lifeguard. They came at him in a torrent of slurred language that he could barely understand, and not just on account of their blood alcohol level. Boarders had words for every little variation on every little trick: They rode fakie and goofy, they got backside air and Swiss cheese air, they did flips and grabs and seat belts and ho-hos. It was ridiculous. How was Chip supposed to judge anything, when he didn’t know a Rippey flip from a roast beef?

Still, it was better than having to break up fights. So he said yes, he’d let his opinion be known, as long as everybody promised to abide by it and not give him any crap. Amazingly, they agreed and settled right down, then went back to their fun like a bunch of happy kindergartners. That kind of authority was enough to make Chip, all of twenty-seven, feel old.

*   *   *

The evening wore on and the music got louder and the boarding on display got worse. It was more daring, that was for sure, but it was also a whole lot less controlled. There were more mistakes and more crashes and more face-plants, which must have hurt like anything since the snow on the wooden ramps had been compressed until it was hard as rock. There was blood on the snow here and there, most of it left behind by scraped cheekbones and chins, but nobody much noticed. What everybody did notice was the arrival, a couple of hours into the festivities, of a certain undistinguished kid with a baggy jacket and pants in a kind of urban camo pattern that turned into skulls and crossbones when you looked at it up close, a dinky little black hat with a Grenade logo on it, and a pair of big Spy goggles levered down over his eyes in spite of the late hour. Everybody in the yard seemed to know him. They welcomed him like a king, with a roar that drowned out the rap music and nearly made Doc Junior drop his cashbox.

THIRTY-ONE

The kid’s name was Anthony, apparently pronounced without the H. He had a Long Island accent you could saw wood with, and an attitude to match. Anthony leaned his board against the fence and strode into the crowded yard with both of his fists thrown skyward in what Chip figured were supposed to be devil horns, although the kid had on a pair of big mittens so you couldn’t be sure. He might have been making peace signs. He might have been doing a Richard Nixon impersonation.

There were three reasons Anthony was a hero. First, he was clearly pretty well zonked on ganja. Second, he usually had plenty to go around. And third, a large percentage of the kids at the Rail Jam had spent a good chunk of the day thinking they’d never see him again. He was Lazarus with a backpack full of weed.

Anthony and his crowd hadn’t arrived at the mountain until eleven or so in the morning, although they’d overnighted in Bennington after a fast trip north in somebody’s dad’s BMW. (They would have to drive all the way home with the windows open to get the smell out, but so what?) Sometime shortly after lunch, Anthony had slid under the rope on the Mountain Road trail where it skirted the boundary of the Spruce Peak property, way up at the top of the North Peak, and vanished down into the trees off-piste. The going was steep and the trees were dense and none of his pals had gone with him. They didn’t think they were skilled enough, and they were right. The problem was, Anthony wasn’t skilled enough either.

He wasn’t at the bottom of the Northside lift when his friends got there. They waited for as long as college boys will, which wasn’t very long, and when he didn’t show up they took another run. He wasn’t there when they got to the bottom a second time, either. Some of them said to hell with him then, and some of them said maybe he’d changed his mind and was going to meet them at the Peak Lift, and some of them said they ought to notify the Ski Patrol, but nobody did anything of the sort. They all just rode the lift again, missing Anthony a little bit and missing his stash a little bit more. There was nothing like smoking weed in the fresh mountain air. Now
that
was living.

As the afternoon wore on the word got around the riders on the mountain: Keep an eye peeled for a dude with skull-and-crossbones camo and Spy goggles and one of those cool Burton boards with the half-naked girl on it. He’d gone out of bounds and hadn’t come back. Or maybe he had. Because as the rumor of his disappearance started picking up speed, a counter-rumor of his return got started. Somebody had seen him in the men’s room in the base lodge. Somebody else had seen him toking up behind the Patrol shack at the top of the Peak Lift. He’d hit on somebody’s girlfriend on the Northside lift. Like Bigfoot, Anthony was everywhere and nowhere.