Tahoe Avalanche Read online

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Over morning coffee I looked up the address for March’s friend Paul Riceman.

  There was a listing for Paul Riceman Construction & Painting at the top of Kingsbury Grade. I dialed the number and got his voice on a machine. I left a short message.

  With that task done, I’d finished the only item on my list for the day and I hadn’t even poured my second cup of coffee. Everything else I could think of was busy work and unlikely to be fruitful.

  I decided to repeat my stakeout of Uncle Bill and see if he would follow any more young women.

  I found a parking place with a good view of the intersection of Venice and Tahoe Keys Boulevard. I turned on the radio, poured a cup of coffee and opened my art book on the passenger seat. I’d barely taken a sip when Bill came along in his Escalade. I set my coffee in the cup holder and pulled out to follow. As we approached Highway 50, I started to move toward the left turn lane, anticipating another stop at the trailer where the Asian girl lived. But Bill turned right. He drove a block and turned left on Third, heading toward the hospital. He made two more turns and parked on the street in front of a dilapidated house.

  I stopped far enough back that he couldn’t see me. I couldn’t see what he was doing, so I got out, walked forward slowly and stopped behind a young fir that was encroaching on the sidewalk.

  Bill got out of his SUV, gathered his crutches and hobbled off across the sidewalk. He went down a narrow shoveled path to the house, turned and followed another path to the back of the house. As he moved out of my sight, I ran into the lot where I was standing, past a small 4-plex surrounded by a wooden fence on the sides and in back.

  I boosted myself up on the fence trying to see across to the house where Bill had gone. Similar fences enclosed the nearby yards. With all the fences, I couldn’t be sure how far down Bill was. I vaulted the fence, ran across the next yard and vaulted its fence. A dog erupted in one of the yards. Fortunately, he wasn’t sharing the yard with me.

  At the next fence I paused and looked over. It looked like the house that Bill had gone to was now two houses away. The fence I was leaning on was wobbly, and it felt like it would break if I put much weight on it.

  Twenty feet away was a wine barrel planter near the fence. I took an awkward run through the deep snow, made a running leap up onto the planter and pushed off like a gymnast doing a vault.

  My pacing was off and my hand hit the top rail at a bad angle. My other foot caught as I went over. I didn’t break the fence, but I sprawled into the snow on the other side, going down on a knee as I twisted and then crashing down on my side. If it weren’t for the cushion of the snow I would have been dazed and maybe injured. As it was, I got up slowly, worrying that the noise I made had alerted Bill to my presence.

  I stepped through the yard as quietly as possible. I still wasn’t certain if Bill was in the next yard or the one after that. I kept my head low, approached the back corner of the yard and slowly raised up to peek over.

  Bill was bending down at the back door of the next house, his crutches dangling. He leaned against the doorjamb with his left hand and slid an envelope under the door with his right hand. It didn’t want to go in. He worked it back and forth until it disappeared.

  Bill straightened up, slid his hands onto his crutch handles and hobbled back up the narrow shoveled path that led along the side of the house. With his crutches, he was barely able to fit along the path.

  I stayed put. In time, I heard the big engine of the Escalade come to life. Leaning over the fence, I saw Bill cruise down the street and drive away.

  This time I carefully vaulted the fence and walked through the deep snow toward the house. It was a small house, not much bigger than my cabin. The front portion had a second floor with a low, gabled roofline. The back part was single story. I guessed that the back was a mother-in-law apartment.

  I walked up to the door and bent down. I could see light through the space between the door and the doorsill. Whatever Bill had put in the envelope must have been relatively thick to make it hard to slide under the door. I walked down the narrow little sidewalk the way Bill had come and gone. With Bill gone, the Jeep was farther away than it needed to be for surveillance of the house, so I drove forward a half block.

  From where I sat I could see if anyone approached the house. The coffee in my cup was cold. I dumped it out the window and poured another cup, then started on my lunch. I ate leisurely, making it last, while I ruminated on what Bill was up to. After lunch I listened to the radio, aware that if I got entranced in my book I might notice an Escalade in my peripheral vision, but not a person, especially if it was a small person.

  Eventually, I tired of NPR’s too-thorough report of all the terrible things in the news, and I started scanning music stations. I found pop rock, oldies rock, punk rock, classic rock, seventies rock, new age rock, top 40 rock, hard rock, country rock and eighties rock. There was one classical station and one that played Mexican ballads. But no jazz. No reggae. No polka. No Asian music. No blues. No bluegrass. No Cuban. No Indian. No Zydeco. Such is the depth and breadth of mainstream culture.

  I stopped my music tour when my scan came back to the classical station, and I listened to the London Philharmonic working over Gershwin while I stared at the house before me.

  An old Honda with a drooping bumper slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. The passenger door opened and a girl got out. She reached in and pulled forward on the back of the passenger seat. Another girl got out carrying a child of maybe one or two, an age about which I’m not expert. There was no car seat. Neither the child nor the child’s young mother had winter jackets or footwear appropriate for snow.

  The first girl handed the mother an old backpack that was stuffed full. As the first girl got back into the car, the mother swung the strap over one shoulder and hoisted the child up onto her hip. She said something in Spanish to the first girl and the boy who was driving. The boy shouted, “Be cool, girl,” and they left.

  The girl walked over to the house and down the narrow path on the side, the backpack dragging into the deep snow on the side of the path. She disappeared around the back.

  I gave her a minute, then went around to the back and knocked.

  The girl was exclaiming at high volume as she opened the door. When she saw me instead of the friends she’d obviously expected, she held the envelope behind her back, went silent and frowned. She looked afraid of me.

  “Hola,” I said in a cheery voice. “A man was here. He put an envelope under your door.”

  The girl shook her head, her eyes showing fright.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I just had a question. Have you seen the man before? Do you know him?”

  The girl stared at me. I couldn’t tell if she comprehended what I was saying, even though I was certain that, like all the other immigrants in Tahoe, she knew at least a basic amount of English.

  “Has he ever bothered you?”

  She started to close the door, no doubt worried that I might stop her.

  “I’m not going to make trouble,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. Can you tell me what was in the envelope?”

  She shut the door. I heard a bolt slide.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The girl lived in the city limits of South Lake Tahoe, so I called Mallory.

  “Commander, it’s McKenna,” I said when he answered.

  “I heard you’re on the avalanche thing,” he said, brusque as usual. “And someone tried to blow you up.”

  “They were only trying to scare me off.”

  “Good,” he said.

  I was grateful that Mallory didn’t wrap his thoughts in carefully padded statements designed to cushion the impact. The memory of the inaccurate search warrant and no-knock entry I sent him on last fall would last for a long time.

  “Got a situation you should know about. It doesn’t require you to act on anything.”

  “I’m listening.”

  I told him about Esteban and
the young mothers. I also gave him the addresses.

  “You got a reason to think this guy is off?” Mallory said.

  “No. But I don’t understand his behavior. I’ll let you know as I learn more.”

  “Right,” Mallory said. “Hey, McKenna.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful of that bomber.”

  When I got back home, I let Spot out to charge around while I tried Paul Riceman Construction again. Still no answer. I still had half the afternoon left, so I thought I’d check it out.

  Spot and I drove through snow flurries on the way up the Grade. Near the top of the pass, I turned off Kingsbury and drove slowly, then turned when I saw the street name I found in the phone book. A hundred yards down was a long, concrete block building, built decades ago with no detail designed to make it more attractive.

  There were six narrow units, each with a human door, a garage door and a small window. I found Riceman’s number. The door said Paul Riceman Construction in red vinyl letters. Someone had tried to peel the letters off, but the letters had torn into vinyl slivers. I tried the door. It was locked.

  I knocked. Waited. Knocked again. I looked in the window. There was a lighted clock on a desk and light coming out of an open bathroom door, but otherwise it was dark.

  The door on the next unit said Angie’s Shape and Style. No one had tried to peel her letters. I opened the door. The woman closest to me had her head in a big bubble dryer. She was reading a magazine with close-up pictures of celebrity cellulite on the cover. At the far end of the room, a thick woman who chewed gum as if she were auditioning for a gum-chewing movie role was teasing the platinum hair of a tall skinny woman. The woman in the chair wore a frilly blouse that was tucked into tight jeans. The chair had been lowered, but still the skinny woman was tall enough that the hairdresser had a hard time reaching the top of her client’s head.

  “Yeah?” the gum-chewer said.

  “I’m looking for Paul Riceman next door. His office is closed. Any idea when he’s usually in?”

  The hairdresser looked puzzled. She smacked her gum and then stopped. Too hard to think and chew at the same time.

  When the tall skinny woman answered in a voice nearly as deep as mine, I thought maybe she was a drag queen.

  “Moved out,” she said. “He told me it was the bureaucrats and all the rules that did him in. He used to have two employees. A secretary and a helper. But the government made it impossible to have employees any longer. I remember what he used to say. ‘Ridiculous rules, prodigious paperwork, terrible taxes and friggin’ forms.’ So now he’s running solo.”

  “Are you a friend?” I said.

  “Sweetheart, I’m a friend of anyone who’ll have me. I used to swing a hammer for Paul. Are you lonely? I could swing a hammer for you.”

  “Any idea where to find him?”

  “Sure, he offices out of his house, now. The A-frame at the end of the road. I know he’s there ‘cuz I saw his big truck down there when I pulled up. The red Ford. You should sit in it. The seats feel so good on your thighs.”

  “I’ll bet they do,” I said and left.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I parked next to the Ford pickup. It loomed over my Jeep as if I’d parked next to a small building. It was the perfect vehicle for hauling commercial air-conditioning units or jet engines for medium-sized planes. Anything smaller, and it was an absurd waste of equipment and gas.

  I left Spot in the Jeep, walked past an old single-car garage that wouldn’t even shelter the back end of the pickup, and headed across a walkway that had been shoveled in the last couple hours. The walkway had two or three inches of fresh snow that showed several sets of tracks. Although the walkway was elevated above the surrounding ground, the piles of snow left by shoveling came up to my chin on either side of the walk.

  The A-frame house sat at an angle to me. I walked under the deep roof overhang at the end of the house and knocked on the door.

  In time, I knocked again. “Hello? Paul Riceman?”

  I tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it a few inches and called out again.

  Still no answer.

  I went back outside and looked around. The layer of snow on his truck was thin. He’d driven it recently. The tire tracks from his truck paralleled the tracks from my Jeep. There were no other tracks nearby.

  I studied the foot tracks on the walkway. They were hard to decipher and my own tracks had made it more difficult. In time I decided that Paul had driven home and walked from his truck to the house through the fresh snow. After that, someone else had walked in from the street and then back out. Those tracks were smaller than Paul’s large boots. The fresh snow was dry enough that it didn’t take a good impression of either person’s boots. There were other tracks near the house that didn’t show purpose, as if Paul and his visitor had milled about on the walkway.

  I found a cigarette butt in the snow. Maybe they’d just shared a smoke, talked about the weather, remarked about the never-ending snow. Some of the heaviest concentration of tracks were at a place on the walkway that faced the side of the house. I looked up at the house.

  The peak of the roof was thirty or more feet tall. Huge wind-sculpted cornices of snow curled off the back side of the roof. The side that faced me was barren on the top, as the snow had slid to the ground in a pile that rose in a steep slope fifteen feet up the roof. I looked at the slide residue. There was almost no fresh snow on it. It had happened within the last half hour or so.

  I noticed that some foot tracks went off the walkway, through the snow and disappeared where the snow had slid off the roof. My breath caught, and I ran, slipping, back down the walkway and out to the Jeep.

  I jerked open the back door.

  “Spot, come!”

  He jumped out and raced past me as I ran back up the walk and off into the snow toward the roof slide. I grabbed Spot, pointed his head toward the small slide and gave him a concentrated shake.

  “Find the victim, Spot! Find!”

  Spot’s eyes got intense as he pulled away from me, leaping through the deep snow. His paws hit the firm snow where it had slid down onto the lower part of the roof. He jumped forward up onto the steep slide, climbing up the roof. He spun around, nose in the air, then scrambled toward the far end of the house. He went down the short slope, turned again and ran toward me. Then stopped.

  He stuck his nose on the snow and without pause started digging.

  I remembered my shovel back in the Jeep and sprinted back down the walkway.

  When I came back with the shovel, Spot had dug down a foot. I moved to his side and shoveled at a furious pace. What had Ellie said? That most avalanche victims only survive fifteen minutes before the oxygen in the surrounding snow is exhausted and the victim’s warm breath glazes the snow around their head and prevents more oxygen from permeating the snow.

  In my rush, I made the mistake of shoveling too hard, too fast. I felt that mix of rapid pulse and rapid respiration and darkening vision that can combine to knock one unconscious. I slowed, gasping for air, then pulled out my cell and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Paul Riceman’s house!” I shouted when the 9-1-1 call center answered. I gave them the address. “Send an ambulance for an avalanche victim!”

  I hung up and went back to shoveling at a more sustainable rate.

  Spot found him first. He made a sound like a grunt and a whine, and I moved to where he was digging.

  “Let me in there, boy,” I said. Spot moved and I got my shovel into his hole and widened it. Spot had dug directly to Riceman’s head, at least one toenail scrape visible across the man’s temple.

  “Paul!” I yelled. “Can you hear me?”

  There was no response. It appeared that he wasn’t breathing. But I had a lot more digging to do before I could get him uncovered enough to give him CPR.

  I worked hard with the shovel. But the snow had already set up like cement. My shovel cracked as I tried to lever snow up and out of the hole. I eased off
, but there was another crack and the entire blade broke off.

  I dropped down on my knees and used the blade with my hands. Without the handle there was no leverage. It was excruciating work, swinging the broken blade with my hands, chipping away at the icy snow, scooping it out of the hole. I grabbed the broken handle and stabbed it into the snow, levering it around to break it up into chunks. Then I switched back to the blade to scoop it up.

  In the distance grew the keening wail of a siren and then a second siren.

  I kept stabbing and levering and scooping. I had Paul’s head and shoulders exposed.

  A Douglas County Sheriff’s SUV was the first to arrive. Diamond jumped out, pulled a shovel out of the back and ran down the walkway as a fire department rescue ambulance pulled up after him. Two men got out of the ambulance.

  “Over here!” I shouted at them. “I’ve got a buried victim. I don’t think he is breathing.”

  I kept digging.

  Diamond joined me in shoveling. We spoke no words, just worked as fast as we could. When the paramedics ran up, we had enough snow cleared away. They intubated him and started CPR.

  Diamond and I kept digging. We got Paul’s body free and the paramedics lifted him onto their stretcher and ran with him to the ambulance.

  They slid the stretcher in the back and shut the rear door as Diamond and I came up behind the ambulance. The big van started to back up. The wheels spun on ice and the van stopped moving. The driver was a woman, and she glanced at me in her side mirror, her eyes wide with that universal look of fear that the tragedy that was about to unfold would be partly caused by her. She put it into drive, gave it gas, then put it into reverse, rocking the van back and forth. She got the van moving, but it would only shift five feet before the wheels dropped into a frozen depression and it got stuck again.

  I saw the medics through the back window as the van went forward.

  The van lurched back. When it lurched forward again, I got another view into the rear window. They had Riceman’s shirt cut away, his pink chest bared. The medic had the defibrillator on his chest. Riceman jerked. The van came back. The driver did not shift, but kept trying to go backward, burning the wheels down through the ice in an effort to reach pavement. The spinning tires hummed at high pitch, grinding away at the ice.