Killer View Read Free

He’d spent too much time in the clinic. He rocked forward and back on the snowshoes, wasting energy. But Walt knew better than to try to tell him anything. Mark was a doctor, after all.
    “You’re thinking it was a gunshot,” Walt said. “A rifle. Light gauge: twenty-two-power load or an AR-15.”
    “It didn’t sound like a tree branch to me. Too far away,” Aker said breathlessly, winded by the climb. “But you’re the expert.”
    A few nearby branches snapped, surrendering to the snow load.
    Hearing this, both men turned their attention uphill. Then Aker trained his headlight directly on Walt, blinding him.
    “You’re right,” Walt said, raising his glove to shield his eyes. “That was a gunshot.”
    Walt reached for his radio.

3
    TANGO BOUNDED TOWARD HIM, THROWING UP THE SNOW all around her.
    Mark Aker praised the dog and signaled Walt to stop and be still. In the shifting light from their headlamps, Tango circled Aker, tripping over the rear spines of his snowshoes, and sat down excitedly on his left side. Soaking wet and panting, she sank into the snowdrift up to her chest, her whole attention fixed on Aker.
    She’d returned only once, forty minutes earlier. On that visit, she had circled Aker twice and then charged back into the dark, following the dull impressions of prior skiers and her own fresh tracks. This was her message to her handler that she’d found nothing.
    At that time, Aker had made a point of asking Walt to bump the location into his GPS, knowing it might prove useful later.
    But now, with Tango’s second return, Mark stood perfectly still, waiting to see what the dog had in mind. Tango stabbed her wet nose into his left glove. She sat back down, then stood up and stabbed his glove again.
    “She’s found someone,” Aker said, rewarding the dog with a treat from his pocket and lavishing praise on her. Tango immediately ran out ahead of them, stirring up her own tracks. She glanced back, her eyes a luminescent green in the lights, and was gone.
    The two men trudged off, impeded by the cumbersome snowshoes and limited by their own exhaustion. Walt reported the news and their position to the others but did not call them back. It was critical they find the missing skier, and, until he had more than a dog’s excitement, he wanted the search continued.
    “No word from Randy,” Walt called back to Aker.
    “Fucking radios,” said Aker, huffing so hard he could barely get a word out.
    Walt pulled ahead of Aker as he followed Tango’s path through the snow. He snaked his way through a copse of aspen, the barren limbs, gray-white tree trunks, and shifting shadows unusually beautiful in the constantly moving light from his headlamp. His breath formed gray funnels. His thighs ached from dragging the sled, from lifting and planting the snowshoes, the effort clumsy.
    Tango’s time between her returns warned of a long hike. She would head directly to the target, then return to her handler, before repeating the circuit as often as necessary. She would not stop until her arrival back at the target; then, missing her handler, she would return the full distance, give the hard indicator again, and take off once more. The process, known as yo-yoing, would continue until she led her handler directly to the hard target. Walt calculated that the missing skier was somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes away for her. For a man hiking in snowshoes, it could be double or triple that—an hour or more. He paced himself. Endurance was everything now. Walt was already conserving energy in order to get the missing skier back out of the wilderness.
    He came by his wilderness skills honestly, not through textbooks or seminars. He’d grown up in these mountains. With a dad who worked for the FBI and moved the family every two to four years, the Wood River Valley had been his real home. He’d seen it change from a sleepy little destination ski resort into the fashionable, celebrity enclave it had become. And