01 Storm Peak by John Flanagan

wait and picked up the receiver.
    “This is Sheriff Torrens,” she said. Then, after a pause, “No, we’ve just sent John home. He’s not feeling too good.” Another pause, then, “That’s right. We’ve had a little problem down here and we’ve had to shut the gondola down for a while. We’re waiting on your maintenance staff now.” She listened for a few seconds as the voice in her ear complained. “Well, we’ll get it back online as soon as we can. For the meantime, I suggest you take your customers back into the restaurants up there, out of the cold, and buy them a drink.”
    She waited, then finally, losing it, she snapped, “Then sell them a goddamn drink! Just don’t hassle me with it!”
    She slammed the receiver back into its cradle and glared at the phone for a few seconds.
    Jesse grinned. “I take it they’re getting restless up on Thunderhead?” he asked mildly.
    Lee shook her head in exasperation. “They’ve got a backlog of people waiting to come down—plus God knows how many who are stuck halfway down already.”
    “Another body in the trash?” Jesse ventured. She shook her head.
    “Sitting up in one of the cars itself this time,” she said. Jesse looked up quickly.
    “He put a body in one of the cars? How did he manage that?”
    Lee shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t put it there. Maybe he killed him in there. Either way, we’ve got to get that car disconnected before we can start the gondola running again.”
    The door flew open. More wind blew in and two men entered with it.
    “Where’s John?” asked the first one through the door. “Heard you need maintenance here?”
    “At last,” Lee said with some feeling. “We need a car taken off the cable. Can you take care of that?”
    The man who’d spoken pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Can,” he agreed, at length. “But ain’t gonna without authorization from the lift manager and that’s John Hostetler.”
    Lee took a deep breath, and said in a very reasonable tone, “Well, as you can see Hostetler isn’t here. But I am. And as sheriff of this county, I am requesting that you remove one of those cars from the cable. How’s that?”
    “Like I said, we need authorization. And the way I—” the maintenance man stopped mid-thought. He’d noticed the steely look in Lee’s eyes and the way she had turned to face him full on. “Which I guess you can give us,” he completed hurriedly. His partner saw the look too. Around Steamboat, Lee had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly.
    “Just tell us which car you want taken off, Sheriff,” he said.
    Lee smiled at him. It was a smile that never quite reached those gray, uptilted eyes.
    “You might start with the one that’s got the dead body sitting in it.”

TEN
    T he body wasn’t sitting in the cabin. It had fallen off the bench seat when John Hostetler had gone to shake it by the shoulder. It sprawled now on the floor of the cabin, head and shoulders out of the open doors.
    The maintenance men looked at it nervously as they worked to detach the cabin from the drive cable. This done, Jesse and Lee helped them manhandle it to one side. Then, and only then, were they able to hit the restart button and let the gondola begin to run again.
    With Tom Legros taking care of old Hostetler, Lee had requested the town police send a cop to look after crowd control. It was as well she had. Frozen, angry passengers began to disembark from the cabins as they slid in out of the cold night. Lee couldn’t blame them for their anger. There was no way of communicating with the cabins. Once the gondolas stopped moving, there was no way for the passengers already on board to know if it was a short delay or an extended one. In some cases, nervous passengers had begun to fear that the gondola had shut down for the night and that they might be trapped until morning.
    Once those passengers had dispersed, there was a new wave of rubberneckers. This time it was the group who’d been left at the