Брайан Фриман: Alter Ego

The man in the Australian oilskin coat and black cowboy hat didn’t realize it yet, but fate already had dealt him the thirteenth tarot card. A skeleton on a white horse rode his way, bringing death. He had ninety seconds to live.

He struggled through knee-deep snow past skeletal birches and evergreens that shook their hunched shoulders at him. The bitter, driving wind in his face was so cold, it actually burned. Under the clouds, the night was black, with no moon or stars. He used a flashlight to make his way back to the lonely highway. When he looked behind him, he saw wind and snow filling in his footsteps. Soon there would be no evidence that he’d been here at all.

An owl hooted above him. The bird was close by, but then it lifted invisibly over the high trees as if alarmed by his arrival. Its mournful calls got farther away. Owls were another harbinger of coming death, but he didn’t think about that.

He was a summer man in a winter place. It was January in the empty lands northwest of Duluth. The coat he wore would have been fine for a Florida cold front but not for the subzero temperatures here. His leather gloves were unlined. His feet inside his boots were wet from the deep snow. The cowboy hat left his ears exposed, and he wore no scarf over his face.

He’d been outside for half an hour. Skin froze in ten minutes.

The trail back to the road felt endless. He didn’t recall traveling so far on his way in, but if you were hiding something you didn’t want anyone to find, you had to look for the most remote section of the forest. Adrenaline had propelled him at first, but now he was simply numb. He was ready to get away and go back home to the South. In his imagination, warm sunshine glowed on a long stretch of sand by the still waters of the Gulf.

Sixty seconds remained.

The light of his flashlight finally glinted on his rented Chevy Impala on the shoulder of Highway 48. Its windshield was already dusted over with fresh snow. He trudged the last few steps and climbed inside. He switched on the engine and waited for warm air to blast through the vents. In the mirror, he saw his face, which was mottled white. He left his hat on. He peeled off his gloves, threw them on the seat, and struggled to bend his fingers. He kicked off his boots and rolled off his wet socks. He’d drive barefoot.

The windshield wipers pushed away the snow that had gathered while he was gone. He glanced at the woods from where he’d come and couldn’t see his trail in the darkness. A few more minutes, another inch of snow, and the white bed would look virginal again. He drove away fast, kicking up a white cloud behind him. His speed was reckless. The pavement was almost invisible in the blizzard, and the plows wouldn’t be out until morning. Even so, he wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the place where he’d stopped.

He grabbed his phone from the inside pocket of his coat. The signal was weak here, but he punched a single speed-dial number with his thumb. He’d used the phone only to call that one number. When he got to Minneapolis, he’d find a place to ditch the phone for good. No one would ever find it.

He heard a ringing on the other end. It was the middle of the night, but his contact was waiting for the call.

“It’s me,” he said. His numb lips slurred the words.

“Any problems?” the person on the other end asked.

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m leaving town.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

That was all. He hung up the phone.

If he’d glanced out the window next to him, he might have seen the skeleton keeping pace with his car and counting off the last few seconds with the bones of its hand. Ten, nine, eight—

Headlights shone in the opposite lane. There were only two vehicles out on the snow-swept road: his Impala and a truck roaring northward toward him.

He leaned forward, squinting.

Something strange was happening. The truck’s lights blinked at him. A shadow came and went in front of them. He heard a bass horn, a thud, and a quick screech of tires. His heart pounded, but the truck passed him safely with a shudder of wind. For a millisecond, the deserted highway stretched out in front of him, just wilderness on both sides and snow swirling in his lights like thousands of flies.

He remembered that he was going home.

That was the last conscious thought of his life. In the next instant, his neck snapped and he was dead.

Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police zipped her down coat to her chin as she hopped from the driver’s seat of her beat-up yellow Avalanche. The jacket draped to her knees. It was bright red, making her body look like a tube of lipstick. She pulled the fleece hood over her head, but the wind chill hit her like a shovel to the face. The air temperature was twelve degrees below zero. In the wind, it felt like forty below.

“Why the hell do we live here?” she asked Sergeant Max Guppo, not hiding her crabbiness.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Guppo replied cheerfully. “A little nippy maybe.”

Guppo was as round as he was short, and he had the advantage of 250 pounds of padding on his frame. He seemed blissfully unaware of the cold, although the bulbs on his cheeks looked extra rosy tonight.

The highway around them was closed. Clouds of snow blew past the lights of the emergency vehicles. A trailer truck was parked safely on the shoulder a hundred yards to the north. The Impala, which had spun when the driver lost control, was lodged tail first in the drifts at the base of the highway shoulder. Its windshield was completely shattered.

Maggie could see the forlorn brown carcass of the deer where the first responders had dumped it in the snow after prying it from the front seat of the Impala.

“Tell me again what happened here,” she said.

“Freak accident,” Guppo replied. “The truck back there hit a deer, and the thing went airborne. Must have been like a missile. The deer landed on the Impala, went through the windshield, and took out the driver. Broke his neck, practically decapitated him. Talk about your bad luck.”

Maggie shook her head. “Yikes. Killed by a flying deer two weeks after Christmas. What do you think? Dancer? Prancer? Vixen?”

Guppo choked back a laugh. “I heard the EMTs saying they should stick a red nose on the deer before you got here.”

Maggie grinned. She had a well-earned reputation for sarcasm. When you’re a forty-year-old detective small enough to buy your clothes in the teen section — and you have to boss around twenty-something Minnesota cops who look like Paul Bunyan — you learn pretty fast to develop a smart mouth.

“Who called in the accident?” she asked.

“The truck driver. He saw the car go off the road in his mirror.”

“Is he okay?”

“Fine. The deer barely dented his truck.”

“Was he drunk?”

“The deer? I don’t think so.” Guppo laughed as Maggie’s bloodshot eyes narrowed into annoyed little slits. “No, the truck driver was sober.”

“Okay, you want to tell me why we’re here?” Maggie asked. “This looks like nothing more than a weird traffic accident. I’m guessing there must be some other reason the highway cops called us in.”

Guppo nodded. He hoisted a hard-shell plastic case in his gloved hand and set it on the hood of Maggie’s Avalanche. “The cops found this case in the snow a few feet from the wreck of the Impala. It must have been ejected through the window when the car went off the shoulder. As soon as they saw what was inside, they called me.”