Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

Dave spoke. “Edith says you’d like to learn to drive the Challenger.”

“Um, well… yes.”

“Then it’s a date.”

For the space of several heartbeats, the only sounds in the room were the slithering of fabric being shoved into duffels and zippers being zipped. She heard his footsteps as he crossed the floor. The door opened, flooding the room with light.

The door closed again. She was alone.

She realized that she was perspiring.

VALENA MANAGED TO CORNER SHEILA IN THE STORE-room while everyone else was outside lashing down the return load. “I need more information,” she said.

“I don’t know what I can add,” Sheila replied, appearing to focus her attention on which can of tomatoes to remove from the shelves.

“Anything. Any arguments you overheard. Anything that suggests that anyone other than Emmett had a gripe with the man who died.”

Sheila rubbed a corner of her apron around the top of the can she had selected to remove a nonexistent coating of dust. “Well, I heard one…” she said, concentrating on a number 10 can of applesauce.

“Come on! Any moment, Edith’s going to step through the doorway and tell me it’s time to go.”

“I only heard one side of the discussion. Though it appeared to have but the one side.”

“Who’s side? What was said?”

“It was the journalist. He kept his voice low, but I could tell that he was very, very angry.”

“At who?”

“It was outside the tent the first day he was there. I was inside, cooking. So I don’t know which of the men he was talking to, but he said, ‘We meet at last,’ and then, ‘Yeah, you,’ or words to that effect, and then, ‘I’ve come a long way to find you, asshole,’ and then I couldn’t hear any more, because there were footsteps—you know how they squeak in that cold, dry snow—and Mr. Sweeny was following the other bloke away, nattering at him. At the time I didn’t think much of it.”

“Wow. Did you tell the feds about this?”

“Nay. They didn’t ask, now, did they?”

The airlock door opened, and Edith stepped inside. “Valena!” she called. “Come on! We’re waiting on you!”

BY LATE MORNING, THEY HAD SET ANOTHER SEVEN MILES of flags along the route, picking up where they had started setting them the day before and progressing back toward McMurdo. Valena fell again into the rhythm of the work, engrossing herself this time in the art of pitching flags off the top of the load while Hilario drove the Delta. The task required that she closely monitor the bundles of poles. There was an abstract pleasure to pitching the poles just right so that they stabbed into the snow but hung at a slightly drunken angle, so that Dave and Willy, who were again riding the snow machines, would know which ones had been rammed into the snow at the proper depth and which ones still awaited their attentions.

As she watched the two men work, she noticed that Willy kept to odd numbered holes and left the evens to Dave, regardless of whether or not Dave was delayed drilling with the augur. In places where the wind had eroded the snow down to the ice, it was necessary to use the auger to get a hole deep enough to hold up the flag. This was harder work and took two to three times as long per flag as using the pike on soft snow, but while Dave moved from an even to an odd when Willy was delayed rather than moving ahead of him, Willy did not return the favor. At one point, Dave hit a long cluster of icy positions and fell far behind. Seeing this, Hilario stopped the Delta and waited for him to catch up. Wee Willy pulled his snow machine up beside the Delta and waited for his next flag.

Hilario leaned out of the cab. “Hey, Willy! Where you get off letting Dave do more than half the work?”

Willy stared at him, letting the blankness of his goggles speak for his mood.

Hilario growled, “I’ll bet you were the pendejo that turned off the dish last night! Yeah, I saw the little wheels turning in your brain when the techs showed us which buttons to push on that computer!”

Wee Willy fussed with his neck gaiter, clumsily letting it slip low enough to reveal his smirk.

I’ll be damned , thought Valena. He’s smarter than he looks. Either that, or a whole lot stupider.

Half an hour later, they stopped for lunch. As they stood around in the lee of the Delta, they discussed the weather, the ice, and their position on the trail. Willy stood with them this time, closer to Valena than she liked.

“This is my point farthest south,” said Edith. “We’re at the southernmost point of this traverse. Seventy-eight degrees, eighteen minutes south. Not as good as Shackleton, but I ride in relative comfort.”

“Yeah,” said Hilario. “They didn’t have ChapStick in his day.”

Edith said, “So, Valena, how do you like driving the equipment?”

“I love it.”

Willy stopped chewing and stared at her. “But you don’t have to do this stuff,” he said. “You’re not even getting paid for it.”

Valena realized that he had just given her an opening from which to ask questions while in the protection of the group. Starting with pleasant chitchat, she said, “You love it, don’t you?” knowing that he didn’t. Love and Willy were two things that didn’t seem to connect.

Willy drew his eyebrows together in confusion. “It’s work.”

“Well then, let’s put it this way: what brought you here?”

“I was looking for a job.”

“Where?” she asked.

“On the computer.”

“I mean, where were you when you logged onto the computer? In Kansas, New York…”

“Oh. Massachusetts. I was looking on the Internet for a job, and they said they had this job.”

Dave said, “You didn’t like it much last year, as I recall. So why did you come back?”

Willy shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno. It’s a job.”

Edith rolled her eyes.

Hilario said, “Well, let’s get it moving, muchachos. We got miles to cover. Valena, you want another turn at the wheel?”

They continued setting flags through the first part of the afternoon. Finally, they saw the KOA ahead of them, a tiny box of cover in a wilderness of ice. Edith made her check-in call to Mac Ops and then announced over the intercom, “We’ll pull up at the KOA and make a final shuffling of the vehicles, then head for the barn.”

Hilario climbed down off the back of the Delta. “Edith says you’re gonna ride with Dave this last pitch,” he said. “He’ll teach you good. That’s the Cadillac of all Antarctic treads, and Dave’s got a hand like velvet on those controls.” He gave her a wink. “He don’t bite.”

Valena tried to force a casual smile but failed miserably.

Hilario threw back his head and laughed. “ O cariño!” He chortled. “Dave is as gentle as a dove!”

So that was it, she was going to ride for two hours or more in that tiny cab with this man who made her that nervous. This man who might be a killer. And somehow, the nervousness and the possibility that he was a killer were two separate things. She pulled the Delta up next to the Challenger and climbed out. She walked across the open snow that separated the two vehicles. She climbed the steps up the fender.

Dave was waiting for her with the door open.

Edith roared past on a snow machine, gunning it for a fast return to town. Willy followed in hot pursuit. Hilario had moved into the driver’s seat of the Delta. He lifted one hand from the steering wheel and made a little scoot-scoot-scoot gesture, urging her into the cab.

Infor a penny, in for a pound , Valena told herself, and she stepped inside.

Dave moved to the jump seat and showed Valena how to adjust the driver’s seat to her size. He reached in front of her to put his hand on the first of two levers to the right of the wheel. “Now, here’s the transmission,” he said. “You’ve got ten forward gears and two in reverse.” He moved his hand to the second lever. “This one’s the throttle.” He pointed next to the floor. “The pedal on the left is the clutch. You can take off and shift through the gears without using it, but you’d need it for things like hooking up the goose, where you have to ease it back slowly and stop when the hole in the tongue is in line with the hole in the drawbar so you can drop in the pull pin. The next pedal is the brake, no different than a car. The third pedal is the decelerator, not the accelerator. It works just the opposite of the accelerator on a car. Pushing down on that pedal slows the engine.”