Books by Sue Henry by Sue Henry

Author:Sue Henry [Henry, Sue]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

HAMPTON AND CHARLIE WERE NOT STUCK, but would be in a very short time. For the moment, they were still in motion on the Top of the World Highway, headed west toward Alaska at a slow speed, in the middle of one of the worst blizzards Hampton had ever experienced.

He was driving, or attempting to. Though the windshield wipers were going full speed, they scarcely made a difference in the snow that seemed to come from every direction at once as the wind whipped across the stark, treeless hills beyond the beams of the truck’s headlights. It was growing darker, deeper, and colder by the minute. Earlier, when the storm paused now and then to draw breath, he had seen glimpses of nothing but endless white drifts in an empty landscape that sloped away from the top of the ridge the road seemed to follow and cling to.

“Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” Charlie whined, not for the first time. “We’re not hardly moving. They’ll be after us.”

“How do you expect them to come after us with the ferry on our side of the river?” Hampton asked. “You can see the road as well as I can, or rather, not see it. You want to drive?”

“No way, man. This is unreal. Just get us out of it and to somewhere I can catch a plane to anyplace warm.” He gestured with the Smith & Wesson .44 in one hand. “Get it going, man.”

“Oh, shove it, Charlie. Shoot me and you’ve got no one to drive. I’m going as fast as I can, unless you want us in the ditch.”

In fact, as Delafosse had correctly guessed, Hampton had been contemplating how to ditch the truck for quite some time. Only the fact that he had no idea what Charlie would do with the gun if he didn’t keep the truck in some kind of forward motion kept him from twisting the wheel and plunging them off the road on one side or the other. It was clear that Charlie was desperate. So he used the barely perceptible depressions of the barrow pits on each side of the road as guides and kept the truck moving between them at a snail’s pace on the snow-clogged gravel surface. He didn’t like the idea of being shot here, where medical assistance was guaranteed to be unavailable, and watched his traveling companion closely as he drove. Hampton was tired, furious, increasingly cold and worried. He resented Charlie’s having kidnapped him from the bar where he waited for Jensen, but the pressure of the .44 in his ribs had been enough to keep him still and make him go along with the kid to his own truck, where his anger was reinforced by evidence of the break-in.

Though the temperature on the pass had fallen to just above zero degrees, outside the windchill dropped it to somewhere around minus fifty. Winds above forty miles an hour have little additional effect on lowering the temperature.

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