The town I was living in may be small, but it still had a police force. And that police force was all over being a huge pain in the ass when they wanted to be.
“My deal is that that was my spot, and you stole it. Do you know how fucking hard it is to clear snow off a parking spot when you have a broken hand?”
I made it inside where, thankfully, I could no longer hear any of the argument going on at the hotel that was across the street.
Sawtooth may not be huge, but it had a hell of a ski slope, and it drew people from all over. Some local. Some not local. It was the biggest small town I’d ever seen for three months of the year. Though, I didn’t know that it would only be for three months from personal experience. A lot of the crew had explained just how many tourists came knocking on Sawtooth’s door during the months that there was enough snow on the ground to ski down the mountain.
And we were small enough that everything hadn’t gotten insanely expensive due to the number of tourists that visited it a year.
“What can I get you?”
I walked to the far side of the bar and answered the bartender, “Beer. Whatever you have on tap that’s dark.”
He pulled a beer and set it in front of me, and I nursed it for a few minutes before my friends showed up.
I was halfway through before Gentry, Weaver, and Court showed up.
“You didn’t wait?” Court asked as he took the seat closest to me.
“You’re late.” I shrugged.
“Snow’s fuckin’ awful right now,” Gentry grumbled. “I’m hoping it gets bad enough overnight that people stay the fuck home.”
Funny enough, in his second lease on life, Gentry had decided to do the exact opposite of what most of us had done. He’d gone ahead and applied at the police department in Sawtooth. With his new identity, that would be the last place that anyone ever thought to look for him.
Courtland decided to go the trucker route and worked at the mill with me. In the winter months, he became the ice road trucker you saw on the TV doing those dangerous jobs. When that road wasn’t frozen over, he drove regular roads.
“Where are King, Creed, and Odin?” Weaver asked.
“Not coming,” I answered. “They said they were too busy with work.”
We met up like this once a month to get the lay of the land.
We hadn’t been friends in prison. Several of us had been at different prisons across the country and hadn’t met before we’d all ended up here.
The first time we’d been introduced was when Apollo chose this city as our meeting place and gave us all of our new life details.
I pretty much liked everyone except for Odin, though not because he was a bad person. He just didn’t care enough about anyone or anything to make any friends. Neither did he go out of his way to make any meetups, so I hadn’t had the chance to get to know him all that well.
“Understandable.” Court took a healthy swallow of the beer the bartender had just placed in front of him. “What do you think’s going to happen tonight?”
“I think it’s going to snow like a motherfucker and close all the roads,” I admitted. “Some of the guys that’ve been doing this for their entire lives swear that they can tell when it’s going to be a bad one. And every last one of them said that it was going to knock us on our ass.”
“Should’ve gotten groceries,” Court muttered.
“Too late now.” I laughed.
“You’re not lying.” He shook his head. “That’s why I was late. I tried to hit up a few of the grocery stores, but they were all closed. It’s only seven o’clock.”
One thing we’d found out about in this small-ass town was that everything closed down around six. The only thing that stayed open past that time was Hopps—because they lived within a couple hundred feet of their restaurant, and the bar we were currently in.
“Wonder why they all close down so early?” Gentry wondered. “Hell, even the crime seems to shut down.”
“No one out there wants to go involve themselves in a crime when it’s this cold outside.” Weaver chuckled.
Agreed.
It was fucking cold.
