“I will stick around a little while, maybe head over to the tunnels and see what I can see.” Without waiting for a response, he turned, the duster trailing after him like monstrous bat wings as he walked past the cruiser and down the road toward the cavelike entrance. “Hang on to that silver dollar—it might be good luck.”
“Two times over.” I looked back and could see that Rosey, listening to the invisible river, had stepped across the guardrail and was sitting on the cold metal. “Hey, you’re going to freeze your ass off.” I crossed and sat beside her, facing the other way with my hat in my hands. “So, what do you want to do?”
She kept watching the fogged-over landscape. “I want to keep being a highway patrolman.”
“Who says you can’t?”
“Oh, Walt. They don’t like crazy people with guns.”
“You’re not crazy.”
She smiled a sad smile. “I used to think I wasn’t, too.” She stood and took a few steps onto the worn rock of the promontory that jutted out into the void. “You know, I’ve been an HP my whole life—I don’t think I know how to be anything else.”
“Nobody says you’re going to have to.”
Her back was still to me when she spoke again. “What would you do if they told you that you couldn’t be a sheriff anymore?”
“Probably dance a jig.” I stepped forward, pressing my legs against the guardrail and holding out a hand. “Hey, it’s getting really cold out here. Why don’t we climb back in that snazzy car of yours and drink the rest of my coffee and talk things over?”
Her head turned just a bit, and her perfect Nordic profile was set off by the whiteness of the fog, her flat-brimmed hat dipping at a dangerous angle. “You’ve been a good friend, Walt, and so has Henry.”
I started to climb over the guardrail. “Rosey . . .”
And then she stepped off the edge.
7
I stumbled forward, fell over the guardrail, and landed on my hands. I scrambled to my feet and looked into the impenetrable mist. My first thought was to jump after her, but the Bear was a far better swimmer than I was. “Henry!”
No answer. I stood there for a second more and then shucked off my jacket and tossed my hat, sidearm, and pocket watch along with it. Taking one step forward, I shook my head at the absolute insanity of what I was about to do—and leaped.
There was a brief moment of weightlessness, but then all 250 pounds brought their weight to bear and down I went. Heck, for all I knew, there wasn’t any water below me, and I was just jumping onto the rocks along with an already-dead trooper. I didn’t have to wonder long, however, as I plunged into the Wind River and it seemed as though the 640 muscles in my body contracted to the point of breaking all 206 bones.
The shock of the cold paralyzed me for a moment, and there was an explosion in my chest that caused every bit of air to go out of my lungs, and all I could think was that I had made a very bad decision.
I broke the surface and gasped my way free. The current was unlike anything I’d ever felt, and I’d no sooner gathered a couple of lungfuls of air when the flat of my back struck a boulder and pushed all of it out.
Sputtering, I tried to grab hold of the rock, but its wet surface slipped through my hands and I was shot through a funnel and submerged again. This time my leg struck something solid as the current plowed me forward. I’d heard Henry say that you always wanted to keep your feet up and pointed toward the current so that they wouldn’t get caught and you wouldn’t drown.
Lifting them, I bobbed to the surface just in time to strike another boulder, but not hard enough to completely disorient me. It was black dark, and the only thing that showed was the phosphorescence of the wave tops being cut by the wind.
Something loomed just to my left that I kept my boots aimed toward, but try as I might, my legs collapsed under me as I struck a much larger rock. I pivoted to the right and again tried to grab onto the thing, but everything was so wet and my hands so frozen that I might as well have been trying to grab hold with flippers.
Another swell caught me, and I rode it forward with a few seconds of visibility, thinking I might’ve seen something to my right. I reached out and made a grab for whatever it was.
A log.
Great, I was going to drown like a waterlogged rat.
Its benefit, though, was that it gave me a little buoyancy, and I was able to see where I was going. It slapped into another boulder and I almost lost my grip, but I held on as the damn thing pivoted, swinging me around and rolling over my head like a giant baseball bat.
I was beginning to question its advantages just as I started short breathing. As near as I could tell, my lungs were seizing up with the rest of me as my core temperature plummeted. I figured I had another couple of minutes before I would become so immobile that I would likely sink.