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  Oh, no, not him, Watkins thought. He was afraid to ask, but did so anyway, hoping the answer was negative, “You don’t mean Oritz, do you?”

  “Yes, Oritz! I’m going to call him right away to get his ass up here. I’ll arrange a charter to fly him into Castlegar if the friggin’ airport there is open. Hopefully, he should be here by tomorrow afternoon. If he makes it, at least I know he won’t screw me over.” Chance was pleased to see the mention of Oritz’s name was enough to make the other man’s eyes widen substantially. Watkins sat there for a moment longer, looking like he wanted to say something else. “Yes, Watkins, was there anything more?”

  “Do you want me to get some other people to do more digging for you in the meantime?”

  “No, I’ll have Oritz handle that once he gets up here. That’s everything, for now, so get going!”

  His toque still clenched in a one-handed death grip, Watkins stood, moving toward the door. He placed his other hand was on the doorknob when Chance spoke again.

  “One other thing, Watkins.” Chance was pleased to see the other man’s shoulders tense as he called out his name.

  “Yessir?” He turned reluctantly to face his employer once more.

  “I’d better not find out you were in any way involved in whatever happened up there,” Chance said this in a low, cold, voice, with any hint of intoxication now gone.

  “What? Of course not! Absolutely not!” Watkins said vociferously, shaking his head rapidly back and forth.

  “That’s good. Because you’d better think twice about screwing me over, or you’ll have to deal with Oritz when he gets here.

  “I only have your best interests in mind, sir.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  As Watkins turned, Chance said, “And one more thing!”

  Watkin’s look back over his shoulder. “Yes, sir?”

  “I also want you to clean all the shit off of my SUV from that goddamned raccoon that I hit before you’re done for the day!”

  Watkins sighed and nodded. He turned back to the door and exited the office, pulling the door shut quietly behind himself. As he closed the door, he heard Chance pick up his phone and begin dialling -- no doubt calling Oritz. Bill breathed deeply once back in the reception area, trying to get the smell of brandy out of his nasal passages only to have it replaced by the sharp scent of fresh nail polish.

  Roxanne Rooney looked up from repainting her long, cherry-red fingernails, saying, “Is everything okay, Mr. Watkins?”

  Shuffling through the glass outer door into the hallway beyond, his back to her, Watkins muttered, “Yes, ma’am, things are just golden.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The green and white Lawless City Works truck pulled to a halt in front of a large mound of snow blocking the road. Lookout Road was not plowed all the way up during winter, and any further progress up the mountainside toward the forest observation tower would be by snowmobile. Trip leaned forward on the steering wheel and looked out the windshield at the shifting grey miasma before them. “Well, Boss, that looks just dandy,” he commented with a sigh.

  Trying to work up his own enthusiasm, Austin bumped his fist gently into Trip’s shoulder, saying, “Another day in paradise, my friend! Let’s get this thing done!”

  Austin backed the snowmobiles down the angled ramp at the back sled deck onto the snow-covered road. Trip topped them off with fuel from the large, red auxiliary tank situated behind the truck’s cab. When they were ready to go, Austin took the lead with Trip following, and they began their climb into the thick mist.

  The fire lookout was approximately fifteen kilometres from town on the eastern side of the valley, almost directly across from the Kootenay Glacier. Austin noted that avalanche advisory he’d put into effect in this section of the valley seemed to be working as the narrow, winding road leading up to the lookout appeared to be untouched by any sledders or cross-country skiers.

  The pair of Arctic Cats cut through the heavy snow with ease, powering them effortlessly around the numerous switchbacks snaking up the mountainside. If the weather cooperated, Austin hoped to finally see something at the lookout, other than thick, grey fog. He was still concerned that they might have another down day and be unable to see anything.

  His trepidation was misplaced, he discovered, as they neared the final leg of their ascent. The mist grew thinner and thinner until, finally, beautiful blue skies broke above their heads and rich, morning sunlight washed over them as they neared the apex of the mountain. Austin slowed his snowmobile down for a moment to enjoy the view. Finally, a break! He grinned and gunned the engine. Half a kilometre later, he and Trip pulled up near the base of the lookout tower.

  Austin surveyed the relatively fresh layer of fluffy white goodness that lay atop the previous accumulations. It would be treacherous to navigate on foot since the snow was over four metres deep in places. Austin strapped the snowshoes he’d brought along for this leg of the journey onto the soles of his boots. Without the pair of webbed-wonders, he would have sunk into snow well over his head. With the snowshoes firmly attached, before plodding up the slight incline to the base of the tower, he paused for a moment, turning to his friend. “Alrighty then, Trip,” Austin’s breath plumed in the frigid air. “I’m ready for a little climb to see what we shall see.” He tightened the straps of the pack on his shoulders in preparation for his ascent. “Are you sure you don’t want to tag along?”

  Looking up at the snow-covered, wooden monolith, Trip said, “I think I should keep an eye on things down here, maybe.”

  “A little too much verticality for you, Trip?”

  “Course not! But I thought you might need me down here to keep an eye on the sleds, just in case?”

  “Just in case an elk or coyote comes along with thoughts of grand theft snowmobile on their minds?”

  “Yeah, sure, something like that,” Trip agreed with a slight nod.

  Austin sighed and smiled, saying “I suppose I’ll be fine on my own. Shouldn’t be more than half an hour or so.”

  “Sounds good, Boss.” Trip replied, relief evident in his voice. “I’ll keep the engines warm.”

  Austin flopped his feet up the slope to the tower. Arriving at the ladder, he brushed the snow from the first exposed rung and sat down, removing his oversized footwear. He placed the snowshoes flat on top of the snow next to the ladder in anticipation of his return journey. Swinging around, he started to cautiously climb the ladder, knocking the accumulated snow off the rungs with his thick-gloved hands as he went. Feeling a bit of a chill in his legs, he suddenly realised he wasn’t wearing his ski pants. With the mild weather and lack of snow back in town, it was easy to forget how bitterly cold it was at the top of these mountains.

  Using the widely accepted average of about three-and-a-third degrees per thousand metres, Austin figured it was easily ten degrees cooler here at the top of the mountain than it was down in Lawless. As usual, when he froze his ass off, he marvelled at the extremes of temperature measurement between the Celsius and Fahrenheit systems. In Celsius, a separation of fifteen degrees could mean the difference between going somewhere in a light spring jacket or bundling up in a parka and long underwear. Whereas in Fahrenheit, fifteen degrees was only the difference between the daytime high and the nighttime low. As the wind gusted around his legs, He was thankful that he had at least worn his heaviest work pants as they offered him some protection from the elements.

  Several long minutes of climbing later, Austin arrived at the top of the tower. It was the tallest one in the Kootenays, rising to over fifty metres with a magnificent view when the weather cooperated. Luckily, today was one of those days. He looked around and surveyed the fluffy, cotton batten-like consistency of the valley cloud below. Lawless was socked in from one side of the valley floor to the other -- the temperature inversion was in full effect.

  Above the valley cloud was a different story. It was a brilliant, blue day, with visibility that stretched for what seemed like hundreds of kilom
etres in every direction. Austin just stood there and soaked it in. It had been so long since he’d seen the sun. That was one of the unfortunate things about living in a valley in winter, he reflected, you can enjoy the scenery only about nine months of the year. That was especially true now, with the change in the local climate over the past few decades.

  Austin pulled a pair of Sunagor binoculars from his backpack and removed the lens caps. With the extreme magnification the binoculars provided, it was easy to see almost every detail up close, almost like he was there, even from dozens of kilometres away. He surveyed the mountain peaks, paying particular attention to the ones that loomed over the backcountry near the resort. The seismic event had brought down a lot of the old snow, clearing most of the buildup when it shook the area just after the new year, but there were still a couple of areas that needed to be looked at once again.

  Before the most recent inversion socked them in, two new systems had blown through, creating new trouble spots toward the southern side of the valley, where Highway #4 climbed over the Golden Mile pass into Lawless. They needed to bring down the heavier-looking parts of those peaks as well before any more snow fell. If those came down in an uncontrolled avalanche, the entire town would be cut off once more until the pass could be cleared. The weather was working in his favour somewhat for the moment at least, as there was no new precipitation forecast for the immediate future. Sometimes, Austin thought, it seemed you only had to wait twenty minutes or so, and a different weather front would blow through the valley.

  Pulling a portable handheld laser sensor from his pack, he made a note of the precise coordinates to hit with the howitzer in his logbook. With everything written down for future reference, he could hopefully aim the gun from down below and still have some hope of clearing some of the heavier sections, even if the fog was still impeding visibility slightly. The danger wasn’t too serious at the moment, but it was something that he and Trip needed to address over the next few days.

  Austin gave the valley one last scan before packing everything away. He stopped when he got to Gold Ridge above the resort. Something seemed to stand out against the blinding white of the snow, catching his attention. He zoomed the binoculars into their full one-hundred-and-sixty times magnification. “What the hell…” He suddenly wished he had another thirty or forty times magnification as he squinted through the lenses.

  There looked to be a campsite situated near the top of the ridge, close to where the glacier rested. It was just past the point where the valley cloud washed up against the rock-face, like an ocean of cotton-batten lapping against a barren, rocky shore. The cloud kept interfering with Austin’s view, blowing past the site and obscuring it, causing him to zoom back out and then have to locate it once more.

  His brow knitted in concentration as he peered through the binoculars, trying to dial in their focus just a little bit more. There seemed to be something seriously wrong at the camp. He couldn’t be entirely sure, but it looked like a large tent was partially collapsed, its fly flapping in the icy breeze. The ground around and under the tent seemed to be packed down by a group of snowmobiles parked there. Austin could clearly see the trail they’d made in the snow to get to the camp. What intrigued Austin even more, was the snow around the campsite, especially near the cold campfire. It looked red — very, very red. “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened there?” He quickly jotted down the coordinates of the camp on his map and returned the binoculars and laser sensor to his pack.

  Ten minutes later, Austin was almost back on the ground. He mused how climbing a ladder was almost like going somewhere in the car -- it always seemed longer to get there than it did to come back. Despite his concern about the campsite, he moved carefully down the icy rungs. He didn’t want to take gravity’s express elevator back down to the bottom. Once back at snow level, he reattached his snowshoes for the short slog back to Trip and the snowmobiles.

  Trip took one final, lingering bite of the Snickers bar he held in one gloved hand, savouring the milk chocolate, peanuts and caramel. He was stretched out on the seat of his sled, feet resting on the handlebars, enjoying the sunshine like an orange sea lion basking on a rock.

  Austin called over to him as he approached, “Hey there, Nancy Greene! How’d you like to take a trip?”

  Crumpling the candy bar wrapper up and stuffing it into his pocket, he said, “Sure, where to, Boss?”

  “Gold Ridge. It looks like something might have happened to a campful of sledders.”

  “Do you think we’ll have enough daylight left?”

  “I’m hoping there should be a couple of hours of light left by the time we get there to at least check it out. That said, we’d better get going before the ice-fog rolls back in there for the evening.”

  “Should we call search and rescue?”

  “No, don’t bother Jake at his day job quite yet. We don’t know what’s happening up there at the moment. It could be just a group of hunters gutting their kill and making a mess, but it looks like it might be something far worse. We’ll check things out first and then make a determination.” With a grin, Austin concluded, “Remember, you’re with a professional helper-outer now!”

  “Right,” Trip recalled, “I keep forgetting you joined Lawless Search and Rescue last month. I guess that makes us more than qualified then.”

  “Once again, Trip, you’ve crystallised my thoughts!” Austin said, revving his Cat. He popped it in gear and hollered, “Wagons ho!”

  Happy to be returning to the warmer temperatures at the valley bottom, Trip turned his sled’s engine over and started to follow Austin down the mountain, shouting “Yee-haw! You’re the boss, Boss!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mayor Bob Nichols briefly massaged his temples, then ran his fingers through his thinning white mane. He'd just gotten off the phone with Ray Chance informing him what had happened up at the cavern. As usual, whenever he talked to the man, he felt like he was getting another migraine.

  And thinking of headaches, he suddenly recalled a similar phone call with Chance about a month before, just after the earthquake. Nichols had been in the middle of surreptitiously appropriating more funds from the town's meagre budget when his private line began to ring incessantly. It had been Chance, full to bursting with excitement about the discovery of the gold.

  Today, Chance sounded almost as excited as he had been that day, but in a different way. Chance’s excitement today was not about finding gold, but rather because he thought he was missing some. Ray had been livid about the loss of gold up at the cavern, supposedly stolen by Watkin’s brother-in-law. Yes, it sounded like everything was going according to plan. Turning his chair back to face the man sitting on the other side of his desk, he frowned slightly, saying, “All right, Reggie, please bring me up to speed about our little operation on the hill so far, if you will.”

  Chief Reggie VanDusen of the Lawless Police Department sat across the large teak desk from the mayor. He shifted uncomfortably, the straight-backed wooden chair in which he sat creaking in distress under his ponderous weight. The chief grunted before he spoke, trying to find a more forgiving position in the small chair’s seat with little success. He sighed briefly, then said, “Okay, Olsen and I arrived at the cavern yesterday afternoon. We were going to rough-up and run off the lackeys Chance had hired to do the digging and steal whatever they’d mined, just like you wanted. Except when we got up there, nobody was around. But just to make it look good, we tore the tent to shit and threw their camping gear around the entrance like some animal had been through it. But all of the gold that they’d mined was still there at that time.”

  “Did you check the entire cavern out? Just to make sure they weren’t down at the back?”

  “We checked pretty thoroughly. Some of their tools were scattered all over the ground farther back, almost like they’d just dropped them where they were standing and beat their feet the hell out of there for some reason.”

  “You checked ‘pretty thoroughly’? Eithe
r you did, or you didn’t, Reggie! What about the gold? Do you think they might have blown town with some and left what you found to make us believe something had happened to them?”

  “We liberated the two dozen sacks we found that they’d mined to make it look like they’d bugged out for Chance’s man, Watkins. According to him, the pair was as honest as the day is long. But you never can put too much stock in what some people say under duress.”

  “What do you mean, duress?”

  “I mean that lately I’ve been leaning on Watkins pretty heavily for information about the operation up there, and he’s kept me right up to date so far. That boy sings like a canary in a coal mine.”

  “Perfect.” Nichols smiled at this news.

  VanDusen continued, “It didn’t look like his brother-in-law was working too hard, though, that being said. But then again, they didn’t have to. The gold in that cavern runs all the way through to the back and into other tunnels and sub-caverns we never even got a chance to explore. So, in answer to your question, Mr.Mayor, no, I don’t think they absconded with any gold. Plus, I think the two of them were too goddamned lazy to have worked any harder than they did.”