Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
Among Scott Kincaid’s many peccadilloes, lying was hardly one of the most severe, but he had just told Zack Hightower an outright lie.
At this moment he did not have Andie Delaney. He had his eyes on her, but they were through binoculars, and she was several hundred yards away, high above him on the ledge of a snowy mountain.
No, he didn’t have her, but she’d be down here soon enough, one way or another, and he was determined to get her when she came to him.
His men—Bennett, Maybus, and Winter—had followed her from the bakery at ten thirty, when her mother picked her up, all the way to Eldora Mountain, twenty minutes west. Here her mom had left her with her snowboard and her gear, she’d met up with some other kids, and they immediately headed for the Corona chairlift.
Andie wore a distinctive yellow coat with a red helmet and black pants with white kneepads, making her easy to spot from a distance.
Winter and Maybus stayed down at the base while Bennett followed her up, watched her separate from her friends and then go solo to the far-right side of West Ridge, a double-black-diamond slope that ran along and then through a thick wood of pine trees.
Winter had a set of binoculars in the Bronco, and he watched her descend. She wiped out a couple of times; he saw her spend a couple of minutes halfway down recovering from a particularly bad spill, but she seemed determined, and eventually she got back on her board and continued on.
Scott Kincaid had called with the news about the Voorhies brothers, and then he arrived alone in the Wagoneer a few minutes later.
He kept Bennett at the top of the hill but sent Winter and Maybus up the mountainside through a foot trail in the trees, told them to snatch the girl when she was alone on the slopes, put a gun in her ribs, and tell her they’d shoot her if they all didn’t walk down through the thick woods together.
Scott Kincaid remained in the Jeep Wagoneer.
Just as he doubted his men would get Hightower in the MRI center, he also doubted his men trudging up the mountain would capture the girl.
It was possible, of course, but if she came back down with a story of dangerous men in camouflage on the hill, he’d be here to throw her in the SUV at gunpoint before she alerted the authorities.
—
Andie Delaney took a deep breath, looked through the heavy snowfall, down the double-black-diamond course in front of her, and prepared herself for another run.
There was almost no one on the right side of West Ridge right now; even her friends had left her for some easier slopes. The freezing rain hardening under the fresh snow here had made this run almost impossible, but Andie loved a good challenge.
Her backside and right arm still ached from her last run, but she was indomitable, and she was determined to give it another go.
She’d started well on the first run of the day but acknowledged now that she had grown a little overconfident in the top half, and when she hit the full shade between two banks of trees, she’d shifted her weight wrong on her board, lost her balance, and tumbled off, slammed chest first into hard-packed snow.
Another wipeout just forty yards down the slope, still in the trees, just pissed her off; she’d sat there on her butt, her board still on her feet out in front of her, for nearly a minute, slapping the hard-packed snow in frustration with a gloved hand.
She told herself to shake it off, just like her dad always told her to do, and finally she did, recovered from a brief bout of doubt and self-pity, then got back up and finished the run beautifully.
Now her goal was to do the whole thing without landing on her chest or on her ass. She took a couple more slow breaths, closed her eyes to mentally visualize the toughest part of the entire course, and then dropped her snowboard over the ledge and took off.
Just like the first run, the top half felt great. Even more snow had fallen in the thirty minutes since her last try; she had the friction she needed on the turns, even when she felt rock and ice below the packed precipitation.
She made it down to the chutes between the trees; the gray day and heavy snow building on her goggles made the visibility poor, but she knew the line, and she stuck to it.
Her speed was good, her knees and low back working as shock absorbers, her mind still visualizing what was just ahead.
The pines around her were heavy with fresh snow; this track of the slope felt narrower than it had when she shot by a half hour earlier, but she concentrated on the icy patch just ahead, the area that had been her undoing on her first run.
Squinting through her goggles, she was surprised to see a pair of men in camouflage, directly ahead, standing between trees.
It was weird to be dressed for hunting here on Eldora; she’d been coming here since she was four and couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone halfway up the slope who wasn’t a skier, a snowboarder, or a member of the ski patrol, and the ski patrol always wore easily identifiable jackets.
These men in front of her were right at the icy patch; they held their hands out like they wanted her to stop, and she thought they must have been with Eldora Mountain Resort, trying to stop her for her own safety.
This was dumb of them, she was fine, but she slowed up anyway.
She came to a stop just ten feet away from the men, immediately knelt and flipped the levers on the bindings holding her boots onto the board. She kicked out, hefted the big board, and leaned against it.
“Hi,” she said.
One of the men spoke to her, “You’re the Delaney kid?”
Her guard went up instantly. “Who are you?”
She noticed that these guys didn’t have any skis, and there was no tracked vehicle in sight. They must have walked up through the trees all the way from the parking lot, and she couldn’t understand why.
The other man said, “We’re friends of your dad. He wanted us to come get you. There’s been an emergency. We’ll explain in the car.”
She cocked her head. “How come I don’t know you?”
“We work with him. Don’t think we’ve met.”
She looked back and forth between the two men. “What…what emergency?”
“Nothing to worry about. Look, we have to hurry.”
She took off her left mitten and reached into her jacket, pulling out her cell.
This was a bluff; she was never able to get cell service on the mountain unless she was at the very top or the very bottom, but she wanted to see how these guys would react, because she suspected they were full of shit. She said, “I’m gonna call him and—”
“He’s in the hospital,” the guy on the left blurted out. “We have to take you to—”
“What hospital?”
The two men glanced at each other; now she was sure they were full of shit.
“What’s my first name?”
“Your name? It’s Andrea,” one said.
“Yeah, right.” Everyone called her Andie.
Immediately, she realized she’d made a mistake. She’d proved the men weren’t who they said they were, but that only forced their hand in this.
They had no choice now but to come after her.
The closest of the two reached into his coat, and she just saw the butt of a pistol when she swung her snowboard at them. They both lurched back, and the man with the gun slipped on the ice and fell back into the snow, hitting his head in the process.
Andie used the momentum of swinging the board to thrust it out in front of her; she let go and it hit the snow about ten feet down, just at the far edge of the icy patch. She ducked under the standing man’s arms as she ran for it, then she leapt into the air.
Her boots landed perfectly in the bindings; with a pair of loud clicks they snapped tight to the board, and she took off, streaking towards heavier pines and thicker snow below.
As the two men behind her struggled to find their footing, she weaved through trees, heading down the mountain.
They wouldn’t catch her in a million years, this she knew with certainty, and once she made it to the base of the mountain, she’d alert the ski patrol that a couple of creeps in the trees had just tried to accost her.
But how the hell did they know her name?
—
Five minutes later, she ran through the parking lot, her phone in one hand and her board in the other. She hadn’t seen anyone with the resort standing nearby, so she concentrated on trying to get bars on her phone.
She’d been so deep in concentration doing this that she missed the Jeep Wagoneer that was following just behind.
Finally, she had a signal. She thought of calling her mom, then her dad, but then she landed on calling 911, because she knew her dad was twenty-five miles away at work and her mom wasn’t supposed to pick her up till five, and she’d said something about taking her little sister for a haircut and then going by Costco.
Just as Andie started to dial 911, she sensed motion right in front of her, and then she felt an arm wrap around her neck and she was lifted into the air.
The cell phone fell to the ground; someone knocked her big board from her hands and then dragged her backwards, onto her heels. She tried kicking and screaming, but a gloved hand went over her mouth, and she bit down hard but caught nothing but quilted insulated fabric between her teeth.
Another set of hands lifted her legs and she was thrown into the backseat of an SUV; the vehicle launched forward soon after, and a big man pushed her down to the floorboard, his feet on top of her.
The man behind the wheel spoke for the first time, shouting over the young girl’s screams. “Calm down! Nobody’s going to hurt you!
” He then chuckled. “Although my associates up on the mountain would probably like to.” She looked up and saw that the man looking down at her had a beard, like the others.
“Her phone?” the man behind the wheel asked.
“It’s in the parking lot.”
“Check her for anything else.”