Archer Mayor - The Marble Mask

“Joe. You still there? Talk to me, buddy.”

I didn’t open my eyes. It was so dark I felt if I did, more light might fall out than enter, sapping what little energy I had left. I remembered having the same sensation once as a kid, when my brother Leo and I had hidden in one of our father’s grain boxes in the barn, closed the cover over us, and shut out all light and air. Lack of oxygen hadn’t been the issue, though-we were out of there, pale and laughing too loudly, long before suffocation became a threat.

It was darkness that had defeated us-invasive, all-absorbing, reaching in through our wide-open eyes to extract whatever was keeping us alive. Squeezing my lids shut had been like hanging on to a cliff edge with my fingertips.

Which made me wonder if suffocation could be a problem here, entombed as I was. Certainly I felt sleepy, which I’d heard was one of the signs, but then that counted for cold, too, and God knows I was cold.

“Joe? We need to know if you’re still okay. Give us an indicator at least-hit the transmit button a couple of times if you don’t feel like talking.”

I really didn’t. I was talked out-talking to them, talking to myself. I wasn’t even sure where the radio was anymore. I’d shoved it under my coat when I’d pulled my arms out of the sleeves to turn my parka into a thermal straitjacket and better preserve my body heat.

Besides, assuming I could find it, I doubted my fingers could operate the damn thing. That was probably why they’d told me to just hit the transmit button-they were guessing I was almost gone.

I thought about that for a moment, which was no mean feat in itself. My mind had been wandering for hours, easily bringing up images of my parents, life on the farm, Leo, times during combat I’d thought were the coldest a man could endure.

Until tonight.

But pondering the here and now was both a challenge and a bore-an impediment to more pleasant things. The vague memory that I hadn’t lost the radio at all, but was still holding it in a numb and useless hand, barely caused a flicker of concern. I was far too busy leafing through my life’s album, evoking sunny, hot, open places.

And pictures of Gail.

I saw her above me, straddling my hips as I lay on the floor, her eyes narrowed, her mouth open just slightly. There was a faint shimmer of sweat on her upper lip as she raised her arms slowly, smoothly, and stripped off her T-shirt.

“Joe? It’s Willy. Hang in there, pal. You croak, they’ll nail me for sure. Don’t be so goddamned self-centered.”

What a guy, I thought-always the right word at the right time. What must his parents have been like?

I tried retrieving that last image of just seconds ago, remembering only that it had been of something pleasant and warm. I was beginning to feel warm again myself, in fact. At long last.

“Won’t be too much longer,” Willy resumed. “They say the storm’s almost over-at least enough to try another sortie. Give us some kind of signal, though, will you? This playing coy shit is driving me nuts.”

He’d always been an impatient man-always in a hurry and with nowhere to go. Not like Sammie, for example, equally driven but headed straight up the professional ladder.

Gail was ambitious, too, although a lot more complicated-one of the reasons we no longer lived together. Not that the love could be diminished-no matter the test.

I furrowed my brow, or thought I did. Sam and Willy and Gail and I were becoming blurred in my mind. Maybe there were similarities I’d never glimpsed before-he and I sort of stuck in our ways, the two women either using us as anchors, or fighting the pull of our inertia.

Surely there had to be more to it than that.

The radio spoke again, sounding like the last man to enter a noisy, crowded room-too far off to be understood. And I had too much to ponder anyway.

Let it go, I thought. Let me be.

THREE DAYS EARLIER…

“Vermont Bureau of Investigation-Joe Gunther.”

“It’s Bill. You’re sounding very official.”

I looked across my small sunlit living room at the snow-covered trees outside, feeling more unemployed than official. “Try hopeful. This is the first time I’ve used this phone since you guys put it in last month. Is this a good-news call?”

“Good and bad-we’ve got a job, but you’re going to be flying damn near solo.”

Bill Allard was the chief of the newly formed VBI. Supposedly an exclusively major crimes unit with statewide jurisdiction, but as yet nonexistent except on paper, it had become a victim of the Department of Public Safety’s face-saving “analysis paralysis.”

“What’ve you got?” I asked him.

“You hear about the hiker who froze to death on Mount Mansfield?”

“Vaguely. There was something about it on the radio yesterday.”

“The Stowe PD was trying to keep it under wraps, making it sound like an accident, but the medical examiner just ruled it a homicide. Anyhow, someone must’ve leaked it, because at the governor’s weekly news conference this morning, a reporter asked if VBI was going to be called in. He didn’t turn a hair, said, ‘They’re on it as we speak,’ and went on to the next question. I scrambled to have the AG call Stowe’s chief and offer him our services before the press told him he’d already accepted.”

“The state police’ll love that.”

“Love it or not, it looks like we’re out of the closet.”

I was a little less sanguine. “Or Doctor Frankenstein’s lab.”

Sammie Martens took her eyes off the road to stare at me. “What the hell was he thinking?”

I shrugged and pulled out into the fast lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler slowly grinding its way uphill. We were shouldered in between Vermont’s Green Mountains on one side and a serpentine river on the other, heading west on the interstate toward Burlington and the chief medical examiner’s office.

“He was being governor,” I explained. “Someone popped him a question and he answered accordingly. He didn’t have to be thinking of anything so long as someone made it look like he was. Not that I’d complain,” I added. “Without this, God knows when we might’ve been activated.”

“What do we know about the dead guy?” Sammie asked.

“Not much that makes sense. He was found frozen stiff high on the mountain, presumed to be a lost hiker with a Canadian ID, but missing a few body parts and according to Allard not looking at all like your run-of-the-mill tourist-whatever that means. Bill only said there was something about him that had everybody wondering. So now it’s up to Vermont’s version of The Untouchables to fill in the blanks, with or without resources, manpower, infrastructure, or equipment.”

“Untouchables, hell,” she said half to herself. “Unheard of is more likely.”

I didn’t agree with her there. Even if nonfunctional, we were almost as well known as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, at least locally-and as popular as the plague with every cop in the state.

The Vermont Bureau of Investigation had been the Legislature’s reaction to a hot-button killing the year before, in which a communications breakdown among several police departments had led to a known criminal’s remaining free until after he’d killed two kids. The original pipe dream-pushed by the same man who’d been elected governor on the strength of it-had been to replace the state’s sixty-eight separate law enforcement agencies with a single coherent force. Instead, hounded by a lobbyist free-for-all, the Legislature had compromised by creating a face-saving sixty-ninth-a small, elite unit which, unlike the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation-BCI-whose ranks were filled only by state troopers, would be staffed by the cream of the crop from all departments.