Snow Blind by Archer Mayor Page B

his eyes feverish with intensity. “I didn’t do anything. But that won’t matter. My ass is grass anyway. I might just as well have killed her.”
     
    “Who?” I asked quietly.
     
    His shoulders slumped and he stared into the darkness beyond the windshield. “It doesn’t matter.”
     
    I could have snatched the gun from him, the way he was holding it–or I could have tried. But the risks of tussling over a loaded weapon in such tight quarters were looking far worse than just maintaining the status quo. I’d spent my entire adult life dealing with people like Roger Blake, many of them innocents, guilty or not. True victims of circumstance, they tended to live their lives by reaction alone, either making or avoiding decisions without thought of consequence. I didn’t know what he had or hadn’t done–I was pretty sure he was at a loss for what to do now.
     
    Which is where I thought I could help us both.
     
    “Roger, first rule of survival in something like this is to stay with the car, clear the tailpipe, and run the heater every quarter hour or so to keep from freezing.”
     
    “Okay.” It was pitched halfway between a statement and a question.
     
    “Can I see if the motor’ll turn over?”
     
    His face cleared slightly at the possibility of at least one certitude. “Sure.”
     
    Unfortunately, it didn’t last. The starter cranked several times, but it was obviously without hope.
     
    “I shoulda known,” he said mournfully. “Now what?”
     
    I shrugged. “It’s a bad storm–could last a while. Long enough to kill us if we stay here. I’d sooner risk walking back up the road. We might lose a few body parts to frostbite, but I think we’d make it. It’s only about ten miles to town.”
     
    He sighed and rubbed his forehead as if fighting a migraine. “We don’t have to do that,” he admitted.
     
    I sensed what he meant. “You know somewhere closer?”
     
    He spoke as if the words caused him pain. “There’s a place near here, about a mile.”
     
    “You didn’t put your car in a ditch?”
     
    “At the foot of the driveway.” He seemed ready to say more, but then closed his mouth.
     
    It was starting to get cold in the car, but I wanted to take advantage of the almost confessional setting to pry him further open.
     
    “You must’ve been pushing it hard.”
     
    “No shit,” he said, more to himself than to me.
     
    “What happened, Roger?”
     
    He brought his eyes reluctantly to mine. “What do you care? You’re not taking me in. We’ll go back there to survive this,” he waved his hand at the storm, “but then you’re getting hog tied and I’m disappearing.”
     
    “Why, if you didn’t do it?”
     
    He stared at me, startled. On one level, it was just an old cop trick–making the suspect think you believe him. But there was that nagging something about this man that made me think I might be right, too.
     
    “Who’s the woman we’ll think you killed?” I asked.
     
    “Jenny Mayhew, my ex-girlfriend. And I didn’t do it.”
     
    “Who did?”
     
    He was back to staring out into space. “I don’t know.”
     
    Now, I thought, was the time. “Take me there,” I told him.
     
    His voice regained some of its artificial strength and he waved the gun again. “Okay, but I’ll shoot you if you try anything. I’m not kidding around.”
     
    “I know,” I reassured him, content that he had no idea who was out to control whom.
     
    It took some doing to open the doors against the piled-up snow outside, and even more to get back up to the deserted roadway. I’d taken a flashlight from the back seat, but its effect was little better than my headlights had been earlier. Still, it did pick out the trees by the roadside, and thereby the direction we had to follow.
     
    That we did largely in silence, since the snow’s depth made for hard going. Also, the cold was intense, and although there was no measurable wind, the bite of frigid air in the nostrils