Free Red Snow by Michael Slade Page A

below, Will felt he just might salvage the day. The benefit of having a physique like his was having a physique like his. He had the stamina to rock the sexual fantasies of any snow bunny he considered worth his down time.
    Show yourself, lady.
    The chairlift scooped them off the ground and carried them up into the blinding snowfall. The only sound was the bending and flexing of the cable as it circled the bullwheel and slipped over the support towers. The mountain air smelled crystalline and misted from their lungs. Reaching up behind their heads, Will grasped the restraining bar and pulled it down so they could support their skis on the footrest.
    “You’re Will Finch!” the woman said, pushing the goggles up on her brow.
    Her features did complement her figure.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Scarlett.”
    “In from where?”
    “Vegas.”
    “Sin City.”
    “So they say.”
    “What do you do?”
    “Showgirl.”
    “I should have guessed.” He looked her up and down. “Too bad I missed the show.”
    “You can still catch it.”
    “How?”
    “By a command performance.”
    “You move fast.”
    The femme fatale pouted. “I’ve only got this ride.”
    “Is the show worth it?”
    “You decide. I once worked as a stripper.”
    Like fish in a barrel, thought Will.
    Flakes tumbled around them like dandruff off the scalp of God. They seemed to be the only skiers in this frozen Garden of Eden, and Will had no doubt they’d soon be as naked as Adam and Eve. The snake was stirring.
    The sudden yelp of pain from Scarlett took him by surprise. One of her legs jerked like a frog hit by electric current in a school biology lab.
    “Charley horse!” she gasped through gritted teeth.
    “Stretch it out,” said Will.
    “I can’t! The footrest’s in the way.”
    Here was an opportunity for Will to play Galahad. The surest cure for a muscle cramp was to extend the leg, pushing down with the heel and pointing the toes toward the face. Slipping a hand under her thigh to lift the troublesome limb, Will grabbed the restraining bar and released it.
    Bending forward, he reached down to massage her calf, and that’s when Scarlett looped the metal dog collar about his neck. Hooking one end of the leash around the chairlift frame, the Ice Pick Killer pushed him as hard as she could. Will was propelled from the seat high above the slope and dropped like a prisoner through the trapdoor of a gallows.
    Zzhhhh …
    His weight cinched the noose tight, while the razor blade inside the collar sliced into his flesh and didn’t stop constricting until it had sundered one vertebra from another.
    Scarlett gripped Will’s head by the hair as his decapitated body plunged in a geyser of blood that reddened the snow.
    The siren swapped the head for the trophy she carried in her backpack and tied it to the chairlift frame. Just short of the bullwheel at the top of the run, she skied off on her escape route.
    A voice from the chair behind was in hysterics.
    *     *     *
     
    At the foot of the chairlift, an Austrian couple sidestepped onto the marks to wait for the next carrier. The seat spun around the bullwheel and scooped the lovebirds up. As the newlyweds leaned together to snuggle for the ride, they found themselves confronting a grisly chaperone.
    A shrunken human head hung from the chairlift frame.

Gilded Man
     
    Robert’s first thought on seeing the body was that he was back in Egypt. When the archeologist Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922, he found the boy pharaoh’s mummy encased in three coffins, one within another in the oblong sarcophagus. Each coffin was molded in the king’s image. The innermost was made of solid gold.
    The view from the door of room 807 transported the Mountie back to the Cairo museum he and Katt had visited a few years earlier. Gilded gold from head to foot, the body on the bed reminded Robert of the innermost coffin, except that the image was a likeness of Nick Craven,