The Big Thaw - Donald Harstad [105]
Between the office and home, a distance of six blocks, I decided to go take a peek at the Grossman place.
It was about eight miles out. Dispatch thought I was going home. If anything happened, I didn’t want any sort of mix-up.
“Comm, Three, on INFO?”
“Three,” the dispatcher crackled back on the INFO channel, where she could hear me, but other cars couldn’t.
“Comm, I’ll be in the car in the central part of the county for a while.”
“Ten-four, Three, ten-six at 2044.” Just in case.
Every limestone rock quarry has two “roads” that lead to it. The main one, and the one that everybody sees is the ground level entrance the trucks use. But the second one runs to the top of the quarry, and is used by workers who want to drill and blast. They aren’t used all that often, and are sometimes very difficult to find. This particular one had come to my attention during a raid on a beer party more than ten years back. It entered the quarry area from nearly a quarter of a mile back down the road, and twisted through a stand of trees on it’s way to the top of the quarry hill. No snow plow would ever go here, but since nobody else had, either, it wasn’t particularly slippery. Road ice usually comes from traffic on snow, compressing it, and making the ice. Snow, if you’re careful, isn’t all that slippery. Especially in below zero temperatures. I crept up the back slope at about five miles per hour, lights off. It took me a good five minutes, but at the top I was rewarded with a passable view of Grossman’s house, and the broad valley leading to the Borglan farm.
I picked up my binoculars, and cranked down my side window. Cold, but much clearer than looking through the glass. The vibrations of the engine prevented me from resting my arm on the window edge, but I needed that heater on. I looked over the area. Lights, and two pickup trucks in the yard. Unremarkable.
I put the binoculars down, and waited about five minutes. I looked around my perch, able to see more since I was beginning to dark adapt. Trees. Rocks jutting up out of the snow along the edge of the man-made bluff, to keep trucks from slipping over the edge. I looked to be about 50 or 60 feet above the quarry floor. The more I looked about, the more it appeared that I might not have enough room to turn my car around on top of the quarry. Shit. Was I going to have to back down?
I decided to give it a while longer. If I crunched the car up backing down that access road, I wanted to have something to show for it.
My radio crackled to life. “Comm, Nation County Cars, radio check…”
Every hour, on the hour, after 9 P.M., they checked. The patrol units gave their current location as a response. On the OPS channel, where all ears could hear them. When she called my number, I responded with a simple “Three, ten-four …” on Info. The other cars couldn’t hear me, but they would know I was still out.
I looked at the house again. Nothing. Now, that was weird. I mean, it wasn’t that big a house, and with two pickups in the yard, that meant that they had company. It was likely that they would all be on the ground floor, with the possible exception of little Carrie. But there was no movement, and most of the lights were on in the kitchen, which I could see pretty clearly.
I put the binoculars down again, and sat. What were they doing? Watching TV as a group? I rolled up my window. If I didn’t, I was going to start to shiver, and shivering makes it impossible to use binoculars.
I unrolled the window after a few minutes, and thought I heard a popping sound. I switched off the ignition, and in the silence, could hear a roaring that seemed to be coming from near the farm.
Suddenly, two farm tractors emerged from Grossman’s backyard, and began heading up the valley toward Borglan’s. Neither had their headlights on, and both seemed to be pulling something. In the dark it was very hard to tell, but it looked like they each had a large, flat object behind them. About the size of a barn door, but it looked like they had stuff piled on