Saved By the Mountain Man Ranger (Cold Mountain Nights 2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

WESTON

Nobody calls the backcountry station this late in October unless someone's dying or about to be. I set down the topographic map I've been marking, reach across the desk, and grab the handset.

"McCall."

"Weston, it's Briggs." The dispatcher's voice has that particular tightness I've learned to read the way other people read facial expressions. "Got a vehicle report on the upper switchback. Silver rental sedan, hazards on, no movement. Plate comes back to a Denver agency."

"How long?"

"Hiker called it in twenty minutes ago. Said it was already there when he passed on his way down."

Twenty minutes. Plus however long the car sat before someone noticed. In late October, at this elevation, with the front moving in from the northwest, twenty minutes is a generous head start on hypothermia.

"Copy. I'm heading up."

I pull on my pack without thinking about it. Fifteen years of backcountry rescue have turned preparation into muscle memory. Every strap sits where it should. Every pocket holds exactly what I need. The weight settles across my shoulders like something that belongs there.

Outside, the sky has that bruised look that means the storm is closer than the forecast promised.

Wind cuts through the trees at an angle, bending the lodgepoles south.

Temperature's dropped six degrees since noon.

The air tastes like metal, and the pressure behind my eyes says snow within the hour.

My truck fires on the first turn. I pull onto the fire road and start climbing.

This is the part most people don't understand about the backcountry.

They see the postcards. The calendar photos.

Snow on peaks and golden aspens and a sky so blue it looks painted.

What they don't see is the math. The relentless, patient calculation the mountain runs every single day.

Wind speed times exposure time. Altitude divided by clothing adequacy. Body mass minus caloric deficit.

The mountain always does the math. The mountain always collects.

I've carried out fourteen bodies in fifteen years. Some of them hikers who just missed a turn. Some of them experienced climbers who got unlucky with the weather. One of them a sixteen year old kid on a dare who slipped off a ledge and landed wrong on a rock forty feet below.

That one I don't think about.

The switchback road narrows as I climb, gravel giving way to packed dirt. Around the third bend, I spot the sedan. Silver Nissan Altima, rental sticker on the bumper, parked half on the shoulder with hazards blinking orange against the gray sky. The driver's door is closed. No one inside.

I pull up behind it and kill the engine.

Fresh tracks lead away from the car toward the trailhead. Women's boots, maybe a size eight, sinking deep in the soft ground. The stride pattern says she wasn't running. Wasn't limping. Just walking, steady, into terrain she has no business entering this time of year.

I follow.

The trail forks a quarter mile in. Left goes to Crystal Lake, maintained and marked. Right goes deeper, toward the old mining road and the drainage below Kincaid Ridge. Her tracks go right. Of course they do.

The wind picks up. First flakes start falling, fat and lazy, the kind that come before the real snow hits. My radio hisses with static. Reception gets spotty this deep in the drainage. Another ten minutes and I'll lose it entirely.

"Briggs, I've got tracks heading northeast on the old mining spur. Single female, on foot. Losing signal. Switching to sat phone if needed."

"Copy. Storm's accelerating, Weston. NWS just bumped the warning up. You've got maybe ninety minutes before the pass closes."

Ninety minutes. And she's walking deeper.

I move faster. The tracks are getting harder to read as snow covers them. But the bootprint pattern hasn't changed. Still steady. Still deliberate. She's not lost. She's going somewhere specific, which means she planned this, which means she's the most dangerous kind of reckless.

The ones who plan it.

Around a bend in the old mining road, I find her.

She's standing at the edge of a clearing, back to me, looking down at something in her hands.

Dark skin, natural hair in twists pulled back from her face.

Puffy jacket that's good for a Denver sidewalk and worthless above nine thousand feet.

A messenger bag across her body, bulging with what looks like files and notebooks.

She's shivering. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind.

The kind that means the cold has settled into the bones and the body's stopped fighting it.

"Ma'am."

She spins. Dark brown eyes, wide with surprise, then narrowing with something that looks a lot like irritation.

"You can't be out here," I say.

"Excuse me?"

"There's a blizzard warning. This trail isn't maintained past the fork. You're two miles from your vehicle in boots that aren't rated for snow, and your jacket's going to be useless in about forty minutes." I nod toward the sky. "You need to come with me. Now."

She stares at me like I just spoke a different language. Then she looks back down at whatever's in her hands. A map. Not a trail map. Something older, hand drawn, with markings I can't read from this distance.

"I'm looking for a specific location," she says. Her voice is steady despite the shivering. "A cabin that should be about a half mile northeast of here, near the old Silver Queen Mine. There was a disappearance in 2004, and the search reports reference a structure that—"

"You're researching a cold case."

Her chin lifts. "I'm writing a book about Marcus Farrell. He went missing twenty years ago on this mountain, and the investigation was—"

"I know who Marcus Farrell is." Everybody who's worked this range knows. The hiker who walked into the backcountry in November of 2004 and never walked out. No body recovered. Case went cold in six months. "And the cabin you're looking for collapsed in a rockslide in 2011. There's nothing left."

Something shifts behind her eyes. Disappointment, maybe. Frustration. But she doesn't fold. She squares her shoulders and opens her mouth to argue.

The wind hits us both sideways. Hard enough that she stumbles a half step. The snow thickens from scattered flakes to a white curtain in under a minute. Visibility drops to forty yards. Thirty.

"We're out of time," I tell her. "My ranger station is a mile and a half northwest. Your car isn't going to make it down the switchback in this. We go to the station now, or we don't go anywhere."

She looks at the trail behind her. At the snow filling her tracks. At the sky that's turned the color of concrete.

"My laptop's in the car."

"I'll get it tomorrow."

"My research—"

"Won't matter much if you're dead."

The word lands the way I meant it to. Blunt. Final. She flinches, and for half a second I feel something twist in my chest. Some reflex I thought I'd burned out of myself years ago.

"Fine," she says. "Lead the way, Ranger."

She falls in behind me without another word. Her stride shortens to match the terrain, and she doesn't complain when the trail dips into a creek bed that soaks her boots to the ankles. She's cold and she's underprepared and she's got no business being on this mountain.

But she keeps up.

The wind carries her scent back to me as we climb. Something warm underneath the cold. Cocoa butter, maybe. And something else I can't name that makes my jaw tighten for reasons I refuse to examine.

A mile and a half. My cabin. One night, maybe two until the storm passes.

I've done this a hundred times. Brought reckless people in from the cold, fed them, warmed them up, and sent them on their way without remembering their names.

This one's going to be different.

I can feel it the way I feel a storm coming. Pressure behind the eyes. A shift in the air that hasn't happened yet but will.

I walk faster. She matches my pace without being asked.

We don't speak again until the cabin comes into view through the snow, warm light already glowing in the windows from the generator I left running.

"That's it?" she asks.

"That's it."

"You live here?"

"Yes."

She looks at the cabin. Looks at me. Something passes across her face that I can't read, and that bothers me more than the storm.

"Eliza Hart," she says, and holds out her hand.

Her grip is strong. Her fingers are freezing. My hand swallows hers completely.

"Weston McCall."

And I don't let go fast enough.