Free Snow Blind by P.J. Tracy Page A

save your life if you were ever stupid enough to do what he and his father and scores of other Minnesotans did every winter. Trouble was, people who were stupid enough to get stuck in a ditch in the middle of a snowstorm were apparently too stupid to carry a kit, because there sure as hell wasn’t one in this car. Damn hatchback didn’t even have a trunk.
    So on to the second rule, and this was the big one: Stay with the car. Someone will find you. He looked around and thought that was pretty unlikely. Besides, being found wasn’t exactly first on his list. He knew then that he’d have to walk out, he’d have to find himself another car, and then he’d have to get out of this damn state, and, by God, he was never coming back.
    But first he had one last piece of business to take care of, and he hadn’t for one second considered leaving it undone. He’d spent the last three years stewing in a cell, thinking about it, waiting for the day, and now the day was here.
    So he’d cleared the snow away from the exhaust pipe, then crawled back into the car to warm up a little before his trek; see if he couldn’t dry out his shoes a little. He’d turned the heater on high, leaving the window open a crack so he wouldn’t gas himself to death.
    A good move, he thought, because the heat had put him right to sleep for a solid two hours—it was three a.m. already—and chances were, the new snow had blocked the exhaust a while back.
    He shut off the car and climbed out the window for the second and last time, and started walking. He didn’t know where the hell he was, but he knew where he had to be. Back to the lake, then just follow the shore, because if there was one place in Minnesota you’d find some kind of civilization, it was anywhere near water. Damn lakeshore property sold for a small fortune, even at the tippy-top of the tall state. The lake wasn’t that far back, and maybe slogging it wouldn’t be so bad.
    You live long enough in prison where the lights are on all the time, you forget what real dark is like. Even in a landscape buried in white, you had to have a little illumination to reflect off it, or you were walking blind. The moon was ideal—lit up the world like a big strobe in the winter—but even starlight was enough when you had this much snow. But there was no moon, no stars, and he had to work at staying on the road to find his way back.
    He found the lake after half an hour, but already, he couldn’t feel his feet. The snow around the lakeshore was even deeper than it had been on the road, crawling up over his knees, soaking his jeans and then freezing them solid, until they scratched his calves every time he took a step.
    Another half hour, and most of his face was stiff and the nerves had shut down, and still he hadn’t seen a single house, a single structure of any kind, except the ghostly shadows of fish shacks on the ice he’d passed earlier. A lot of them had heaters, and, Lord, he’d been tempted, but he couldn’t go back there.
    Fifteen minutes more and he decided that this was the biggest lake in the state, the only one without houses on it, and that he was going to die. The funny thing was that it wasn’t even that cold out; not by Minnesota standards. Ten, maybe even fifteen degrees, and freezing to death in that kind of balmy winter temperature would be just plain embarrassing.
    So he pushed on for another agonizing ten minutes, veering away from the lakeshore, up a shallow hill to a flat, empty field that seemed to go on forever. The hill, shallow as it was, had damn near killed him. By the time he got to the top he’d fallen twice, his lungs were burning, and the sweat was freezing his hair to his forehead. That’s when he started counting steps instead of minutes, and he knew that was a bad sign. Bend a knee, he told himself, then let the thigh muscles scream while he lifted a foot he could no