Tahoe Avalanche

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE HEAT

  “WILL KEEP READERS TURNING THE PAGES AS OWEN RACES TO CATCH A VICIOUS KILLER...”

  - Booklist

  “A RIVETING THRILLER... HARD TO PUT DOWN”

  - Midwest Book Review

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE NIGHT

  “BORG HAS WRITTEN ANOTHER WHITE-KNUCKLE THRILLER...A sure bet for mystery buffs waiting for the next Robert B. Parker and Lee Child novels”

  - Library Journal

  “AN ACTION-PACKED THRILLER WITH A NICE-GUY HERO, AN EVEN NICER DOG...”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE AVALANCHE

  “BORG IS A SUPERB STORYTELLER...A MASTER OF THE GENRE”

  - Midwest Book Review

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE SILENCE

  WINNER BEN FRANKLIN AWARD

  BEST MYSTERY OF THE YEAR!

  ONE OF THE FIVE BEST MYSTERIES OF THE YEAR!

  - Library Journal

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE KILLSHOT

  “A WONDERFUL BOOK...FASCINATING CHARACTERS, HARD-HITTING ACTION”

  Mystery News

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE ICE GRAVE

  “BAFFLING CLUES... CONSISTENTLY ENTERTAINS”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “A CLEVER PLOT... RECOMMEND THIS MYSTERY”

  Booklist

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE BLOWUP

  “RIVETING... A MUST READ FOR MYSTERY FANS!”

  Addison, Illinois Public Library

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE DEATHFALL

  “THRILLING, EXTENDED RESCUE/CHASE”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “HIGHLY LIKABLE CHARACTERS”

  - San Jose Mercury News

  TAHOE AVALANCHE

  By

  Todd Borg

  Published by Thriller Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2008 Todd Borg

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Thriller Press, a division of WRST, Inc. www.thrillerpress.com

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real locales, establishments, organizations or events are intended only to give the fiction a sense of verisimilitude. All other names, places, characters and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Thriller Press, P.O. Box 551110, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96155.

  Library of Congress Card Number: 2008901410

  ISBN: 1-931296-16-8

  Cover design by Keith Carlson.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  TAHOE

  AVALANCHE

  PROLOGUE

  March Carrera was twenty yards from his pickup, leaning into the wind of the blizzard, when he heard a deep bass rumble that seemed to come from the earth and sky at once.

  The sound grew like rolling thunder, and he suddenly remembered the spring storms that terrorized the tiny trailer town on the bluff where he was raised in Texas.

  Two or three times every spring during his childhood, the cry shot through the neighborhoods.

  Muerte Cielo!

  Death Sky.

  It was a phrase the town paper once used after a thunderstorm killed March’s friend Peter Dunnel and Peter’s dog. When the cry echoed through the village, the residents who weren’t at work in the meat packing plant ran to the edge of the bluff and scrambled like ants in a disturbed nest down into the cracks and gulches where the bluff had been eroding for eons toward the plain below. Women clutched their babies and dogs ran with the older children as they filed deep enough into the earth’s wrinkles to be safe from the tornadoes, but not so deep that the flash floods would sweep them away.

  March Carrera glanced at the sky as he scrambled up the frozen highway toward his truck, shielding his eyes against the driving snow. But there was only swirling gray clouds.

  Just minutes before, March had been driving at a crawl, sipping his latte, listening to his favorite rap group as he inched his way north around Emerald Bay. It was 5:00 p.m. on the second Thursday in January and already dark.

  The wind and the blinding snow in his headlights let up for a moment. March thought he saw a light just ahead in the blizzard. But then the wind came back, stronger than before, and the light disappeared. He touched his brakes as gently as if an egg were taped to the pedal. Despite his care, the old Toyota truck swerved to the left, wheels skidding on the buildup of freezing slush. He let up on the brakes, corrected to the right, then eased down onto the pedal again as his pickup straightened out and the tires found some purchase on an area of rough ice.

  The highway pitched down at a steep angle as it descended toward the head of Emerald Bay. Again it seemed that a light appeared in the driving snow, yellow and dim, and again it vanished. It looked like a vehicle was stuck in the road, its hazard lights caked with snow. The driver would need help.

  March worried that he’d have trouble stopping in time as gravity and the weather worked against him. But he managed to slow to a stop. The light didn’t reappear, but the blowing snow was so thick, it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.

  March eased his front wheel into the edge of the snowbank to help prevent a runaway and set his parking brake. He left the engine running so the defrost blower could keep a steady stream of heat on the windshield and got out of his truck.

  The storm raged. March pulled his cap down and his hood up and turned his head against a wind that was so filled with ice flakes it would abrade exposed skin. He hurried down the steep road, careful not to slip.

  Once more, he thought he saw a light, but the blowing snow blotted it out as a deep rumbling sound seemed to grow from within the earth.

  March stopped for a moment and listened. Then came a roar of wind that accelerated to a gale. The wind increased exponentially until it became hard for March to stand up.

  He realized in a moment what was happening, and the sudden adrenaline rush made it hard to breathe. March burst into a run. If he could make it back to his truck, he’d have some protection. Muerte cielo.

  He’d taken only three running steps when the gale seemed to explode. A shockwave of wind as hard as a board swatted March off the highway and into the air. He was blown over the guardrail and out over the drop-off above Emerald Bay. The wind, squeezed before the avalanche and suddenly expanding at 200 miles per hour, blew March’s pickup into the guardrail, breaking it off.

  The frozen slab pushing the wind was the size of a large office building, and it moved at 80 miles per hour. The avalanche hit the truck, flipped it end over end into the air. The truck slammed into a Ponderosa pine, breaking the top off and leaving the trunk standing, a bare wooden column fifty feet high and three feet in diameter.

  March was blown into a red fir, twenty yards out from where the land dropped away from the highway. The wind wrapped his body around the tree trunk like a limp leaf. When the avalanche hit the tree, it snapped the tree off at its base and sent March and the tree through the air toward Emerald Bay.

  With a huge whumping thud, the roaring avalanche suddenly stopped. The only sound that remained was the howl of the blizzard and the metallic clinking of a million twigs and branches that came from the sky, shrapnel from trees that were destroyed by the explosive avalanche.

  Fifty yards down the
highway, safely out of the avalanche path, sat a vehicle. After the avalanche subsided, the driver turned off the emergency flashers, pocketed the small transmitter and drove away.

  ONE

  I was up Friday at dawn. My morning paper wasn’t at my door. My intrepid paper girl, a grizzled, rough-talking, sixty-something mountain woman named Maureen, was reliable enough. But her antique International Harvester four-wheel-drive might not have been up to climbing my neighbors’ road with two feet of fresh snow on it.

  The latest storm of a record season was just giving up its assault, and only a few light flakes drifted down from the purple morning sky. After coffee and a toasted bagel with cream cheese, Spot and I got in my Jeep and headed down the unplowed river of white. It is a wondrous whooshing sound a vehicle makes floating through deep powder, road noise absent, engine sounds muffled, wheels silent as they make a futile attempt to grab at the road beneath the thick, cottony blanket of snow.

  I picked up a paper at the shopping center in Roundhill and scanned it as I walked back to the Jeep.

  MASSIVE AVALANCHE AT EMERALD BAY

  Vehicle Found In Tree

  A Caltrans employee found a huge snowslide at Emerald Bay yesterday evening. The worker, Greg Zendal, had closed the highway gate near Camp Richardson and was making his check run up to the north gate near Bliss State Park. Zendal turned back when he encountered an avalanche that had buried the road.

  When the blizzard let up for a moment, Zendal spotted something dark down below the highway. “It looked like a strange tree with a bare trunk leading up to a big chunk of metal, all caked with snow and frozen solid,” Zendal said.

  The Caltrans worker got out and hiked up onto the frozen slide debris that buried the highway. As he got closer to the tree with the strange crown he discovered that it was a pickup truck. The truck had apparently left the highway at high speed, flown through the air and hit the tree. The impact was so forceful that the rest of the tree was broken off and the truck was impaled on the remaining tree trunk.

  Another Caltrans truck responded to the scene with a powerful searchlight, which they trained down through the blowing snow onto the truck. Although uncertain, both men thought it appeared that the pickup in the tree had no occupants in it. By late in the evening, enough snow had fallen that Caltrans vehicles could no longer get out to Emerald Bay. Authorities called off further searching until daylight when snowmobiles could be used to access the site.

  The article concluded by saying that the authorities would not speculate as to whether the truck’s driver had lost control, or if the avalanche itself could have hurled the truck onto the tree. At press time there was no news of the driver.

  I remembered that I needed a few groceries, so I tossed the paper in the Jeep. Spot still had his head out the window despite the snowfall that had resumed. His only acknowledgment of the snow was his regular head shaking to get the tickle out of his ears. I gave him a vigorous head rub and headed to the store.

  “Owen McKenna?” The voice sounded muffled and distant through the heavy snowfall, but still I could hear its deep and raspy resonance. The man needed to clear his throat.

  I turned and scanned the parking lot, but saw nothing except white mounds of snow that indicated parked vehicles.

  “Owen McKenna?” the voice said again. This time it was closer, behind me to my right.

  I turned.

  A big man with a complexion like a rusted fender was coming toward me on metal crutches, his fingers clutching the handgrips. The leather sleeves of his expensive coat were gathered in wrinkles where the metal rings of the crutches encircled his lower arms. He shifted his weight to his left and held out his right hand, the crutch hanging from his arm.

  “Bill Esteban,” he said. “Sorry to chase you down like this.” Behind him was the open door of a pearlescent Escalade, its engine running, wipers sweeping the huge windshield. The sweet happy rhythms of the Buena Vista Social Club harmonized from the speakers hidden among the tucks and folds of the leather interior. On the roof was a scant two inches of white stuff. Unlike me, he must have had a garage at home or office or both.

  I shook Esteban’s outstretched hand. He hung onto my hand a full five seconds too long, one of those awkward people who never figured out personal boundaries.

  “I went to your office but you weren’t there. I was going up to visit a friend in Zephyr Cove and saw you just as you were pulling into this center. One of the cops I talked to this morning said you had a Harlequin Great Dane. When I saw your giant dog hanging its head out the window I figured it had to be you. Am I right?” He turned and looked at Spot. “He’s a big fella. Probably takes up the whole back of your car, huh? Steams up the windows in this weather, I bet?” He stared at me through thick glasses with circular metallic rims the color of dull steel. His eyes were black and hard-looking and set close together. Rimmed by the dark metal they reminded me of the business end of the antique double-barreled shotgun that my friend Diamond owned. The gun’s firing pins had been removed, but the sight of those barrels made me aware of the power it once possessed.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Esteban said. “I’ll park my truck and come with you inside. Just give me a sec?”

  Before I could answer, he turned back to his Cadillac SUV and shoved his crutches across to the passenger seat. Teetering on unstable legs, he propped the heel of his left hand on the armrest of the door, grabbed the steering wheel with his right hand and boosted himself up into his luxury boat-on-wheels. Esteban gunned the engine and slid into a spot halfway down the row. I waited and he hobbled up a minute later. We walked at a slow pace toward the supermarket entrance, his crutches making creaking sounds as he shifted his substantial weight from side to side.

  “Sorry to intrude on your shopping like this,” he said. When we got to the entrance, he stamped his feet to try to shake off the snow. There were metal bars that rose from the soles of his shoes, past his ankles, and up alongside his legs under his slacks. In spite of the metal bracing, his shoes looked sophisticated and expensive. In such weather, they indicated tourist or wealthy vacation homeowner.

  “What can I help you with, Bill?” I stopped near the racks of real estate booklets and turned to face him.

  “Don’t let me stop your shopping,” he said. “I’ll just tag along.”

  “We can talk here.”

  He stood three inches shorter than my six-six, and when he looked up at me, his eyes searching my face, I thought that in spite of his hard countenance, he looked like he was about to cry.

  “It’s about my nephew. March Carrera. He’s gone missing. I think he died in that big avalanche last night.”

  TWO

  “I didn’t hear that any victims were found,” I said.

  “They haven’t really looked,” Esteban said with a rising voice.

  “Yet.”

  “Right. But I don’t see why not. The weather eased off hours ago. I stopped at the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department and made a missing persons report. I asked if there was a way to speed up a search and they told me I could try you. Then I called the U.S. Forest Service and the CDF and Caltrans.” Bill was cranked up, emotion in his words. “All they said was that they’re using those big rotary plows to dig their way down the road. They said there’s been no indication that anyone had been buried in the slide. But they found a truck in a tree. What more do they want? March drove a truck. I wanted to go out there. See if it was his. But they wouldn’t let me. So I gave them my number and told them...”

  “Easy, Bill,” I interrupted. His rough face was red with stress. “They’ll eventually figure out whose truck is in the tree and then you’ll know one way or the other.”

  “How hard can that be? All you have to do is take a look to know the model and the license plate.”

  “Maybe it’s covered in snow.”

  Bill thought about it. “Anyway, March left me a note, yesterday. I brought it with me.” He leaned against the wall to stabilize himself.
With both crutches swinging from his lower arms, he pulled out his wallet and removed a small piece of white paper and unfolded it. It was about 4 x 6 and was ripped along the top edge where it had been torn off of a tablet. He handed it to me.

  The lettering was scrawled in blue ballpoint pen.

  ‘Uncle, heading out to Tahoe City. The Guru of the Sierra is going to be at a little group there. I’ll stay overnight. Back tomorrow early, weather permitting. March’

  I refolded the paper and handed it back to him. “This seems a weak reason to think your nephew was in the slide.”

  Bill swallowed and said, “That and the fact that he didn’t call and didn’t answer his cell.”

  “It’s still early in the day.”

  “Yeah. But I know my nephew. He would have called first thing this morning.”

  Maybe I gave him a look.

  “I’m not saying he’s some kind of perfect kid. But he wouldn’t make me wonder. He’d call.” Then, after a pause, Bill said, “I’d like to hire you.”

  “Hire me to do what?”

  “Look into it. Find out if he died.”

  “Bill, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? A nephew gone missing for a day does not necessarily mean he died. Even if he did die in an avalanche, it would be an accident. What would I do?”