Chapter 4
David Blackburn let out a sigh, the air turning into a white puffy cloud in front of his face. He absolutely, one hundred percent did not want to be here. He had never liked cold weather, had wanted to open an insurance agency in Florida.
But his wife had had other plans. He had been young and stupid and when she’d cried about leaving her family …
and home behind, he’d caved. Now he was stuck in a place that not only had snow on the ground almost all winter but celebrated it by inviting tourists to come slide down the mountains on it.
Big chunks of snow were falling from the sky now, momentarily obscuring the lift chair in front of him. With the snow swirling all around him, above and below, he felt like he was in one of those idiot Currier and Ives snow globes after some kid shook it.
He shivered. Everything in life was a trade-off, though.
And he’d trade off being here for remaining in the pandemonium at the bottom of the slope.
All those people who not only didn’t know how to ski but had never been anywhere near a ski lift.
It would have been funny if he’d been in the mood, but he hadn’t been.
He had waaaaay better places to be than freezing his ass off on a ski lift chair, riding slowly up to the top of the mountain.
The rumble of the snow machines below grew louder as he passed over them, but the roar never abated, a steady rumbling background that made his sinuses throb.
He was a little embarrassed to be like the Amish, to ride the ski lift up to the top and then right back down again.
But all the guests were being good sports about it, participating to be polite, and he went along.
Everybody knew he didn’t know how to ski.
He had blamed his lack of devotion to the county sport on a bad knee he got “jumping out of perfectly good airplanes” at Ft.
Campbell, Kentucky, when he was stationed there with the 101st Airborne Division.
The truth was he’d been a supply clerk for two years, and his only interaction with airplanes was when he helped to load or unload one.
He did know how to ski, water ski, which you could do in Florida.
If you lived in Florida. Which he didn’t.
Not now, anyway. But maybe … the past few months had opened up all sorts of delicious alternatives to life as he was living it.
That thought warmed him like sinking down into the steaming water of a hot tub … with a hot babe.
Crack.
He looked up, his eyes scanning the surroundings, trying to figure out what had made the cracking sound. A little like a gunshot, but muffled. Couldn’t be a gunshot though. It wasn’t deer season.
But it did sound an awful lot like a gunshot.
That was the lone saving grace of living here in the Laurel Highlands of western Pennsylvania—hunting.
He’d much rather have been fishing or skiing in Florida, but he did enjoy hunting.
Had big, framed pictures on the walls in his office of him holding a rifle, standing with his boot on a dead deer carcass.
He liked those pictures. In them, he looked like a man who in another era would have gone on safari and bagged a lion or a white rhino.
And some people found the pictures sexy and sensual. He grinned at that thought.
The pictures gave him credibility with his customers, too, of course.
That’s what they were for, made him seem like one of them.
Just like being here today was all for show.
He was here because his customers would be here, and he wanted to see and be seen, smile, shake hands, appear to be just one of the guys.
He looked down and saw the first of the sledding Amish pass by beneath him. No squeals of delight like you usually heard from people riding a sled down a mountain. But it had been his experience with the Amish that they didn’t squeal for delight at anything.
David had gotten on one of the first lift chairs so he’d be down early …
and could fade into the crowd and disappear.
Nobody’d miss him, nobody’d know when he left.
He could reasonably stay out another two or three hours.
Not that his wife would ask, of course, but he could claim he’d been chatting with folks in the crowd …
who, if asked, would say sure, they’d seen David Blackburn here …
he’d ridden up and back down like the Amish, couldn’t ski because of the bad knee he’d gotten as a paratrooper.
He smiled broadly then. He was cold now, but it wouldn’t be long before he’d be hot—smokin’ hot.
David felt a sudden, horrible pain in his chest, like nothing he’d ever felt before. Heart attack. Had to be. But as he tipped over and slid out from under the bar on the ski lift chair, he had a single thought—he had heard a gunshot—before the world went black.