The Cold Road by Rick Wilber

Author:Rick Wilber [Rick Wilber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Thriller
ISBN: 9781640190856
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2017-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

The world was melting.

Another cold front from Alberta was on the way, but before it could get there it sucked up warm air in front of it, sending the temperature climbing - from twenty below to zero and then to twenty above and then, remarkably for January, above freezing. Warm clouds filled with moisture all the way up from the Caribbean were shooting by overhead.

Dan Finnegan walked down Main Street in Mankato on this warm, breezy Saturday in the dead of winter wearing nothing more than a sweater and marveling that he felt hot with just that on. When you’re used to forty below zero, forty above feels pretty damn warm. Incredibly, it even felt like it might rain, of all things.

In his left hand, he held a list of things to get, including new light switches for the recently repainted living and dining rooms, a can of paint to finish the job on the basement rec room, some weather-stripping for the bay window that looked out on the cottonwoods of the Minnesota River but faced north and always seemed to let through those Alberta Clipper winter winds, and a new snow shovel to replace the one he’d ruined this morning when he’d tried to take advantage of the thaw to clear the driveway’s piles of slush but instead just wound up bending the metal scoop back hopelessly with the wet, heavy slush he’d been plowing through.

He’d been working on the house a lot lately. Something about that dunking in Lake Minnetoksak a couple of weeks ago had reminded him that he had a life and he ought to spend a little time living it. Every now and then you had to put away your worries and think about something else. Like weather-stripping.

He sighed. A beautiful, warm day and he was going to be spending it at the hardware store and then back inside the house working away to finish the paint job. Could be worse, though; could be a lot worse.

It would be worse, actually, come tomorrow when that Alberta Clipper arrived. The weatherman was predicting a chance of rain for today - imagine chat, rain in January - and then that would slowly get colder and eventually turn into six to ten inches or more of snow from the front’s passage before the weather cleared and the temperature fell back to thirty below or so behind the front. Might even get colder than that. He sighed again. What a frozen mess it would be. And only two or three more months of winter to go, too.

It was times like this, with bad weather on the way, that he starred thinking about Melissa, down there on that tropical island enjoying herself. Here he was, celebrating a day that reached forty degrees, and down there it was eighty-five every day, year-round. He wondered if it rained much there at all.

He hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks. They weren’t staying in touch as often as they used to, but that was inevitable, he guessed.

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