Read Ice for Free Online Page B

and the other had been so neglected the county had condemned it and had it torn down.
    One way or another, he didn’t want to waste even an extra minute of time on this assignment. He was going to do as he’d been told, then get his ass off the mountain while he could. He missed Sam every day,but at the base he could bury himself in work. Now, with the kid so close, being away from him was an almost physical pain.
    The road took a sharp curve, and curled upward in a steep grade. His tires skidded on the pavement and he took his foot off the gas pedal, letting the truck slow to a crawl. Was the road icy already, or had he skidded simply because of the steepness of the wet pavement? His snow tires weren’t worth a damn on ice; nothing was, except chains, but even here in Maine not many people had chains. If the weather was that bad, the smart thing to do was park your ass and wait it out, not go out for a Sunday drive.
    Damn her, why couldn’t she stay in a house that was more accessible? This damn road wasn’t much wider than his truck, and trees overhung the pavement in a way that made him wary as he eyed them. Not only would they be deadly if the ice got bad, but they made the road even darker by blocking out whatever light was left.
    The temperature gauge on his truck said the outside temp was thirty-two degrees now. Great. Just fucking great. Even as he watched, the digital readout changed to thirty-one. As the road climbed higher, the temp was dropping like a rock. That was ice on the road, all right. He slowed down even more, letting the weight of the truck provide what traction it could.
    Turning around wasn’t even an option; his truck was too big, the road was too narrow, and the left side was nothing but a steep drop-off. The first place wherehe’d be able to turn around was at Lolly’s house. He was as stuck as a rat on a treadmill, with no way to get off.
    His frustration and temper ratcheted up a few notches. If he got up there and no one was home, if Lolly had left town that afternoon and the sheriff just hadn’t realized it, Gabriel was going to be royally pissed. He couldn’t be mad at his dad, but Lolly was another matter. He might even make a point of hunting her down to tell her what a thoughtless bitch she was.
    Odds were he’d find her right where she was supposed to be, though, as cool and detached as always, surprised that he’d show up at her door in the middle of a fucking ice storm when he could be sitting at home with his kid. Hell, he was risking his life to get to her, and that made him even angrier, because he had to stay alive for Sam; his little boy had already lost his mother, and that had been a lot for a four-year-old to get through. Thank God they’d had each other when Mariane died; he couldn’t imagine how he’d have made it without Sam. What would Sam do if something happened to him, now? Gabriel couldn’t make his mind go there.
    The truck powered slowly up the hilly road, but he could feel the tires spinning some, feel the truck sliding to the right as the surface became slicker. The higher he got, the worse it was going to be.
    That thought had just formed when he eased into a right-hand curve and suddenly the truck began slidingto the right. This wasn’t just the tires skidding; the entire truck moved sideways, the banking in the road, as slight as it was, taking him toward the inside of the curve. As soon as his right tires left the asphalt and hit the shoulder they grabbed traction and began slewing him around, throwing him toward the outside edge where there was nothing but a long drop.
    Gabriel shoved the gear into neutral, stopping the tires from grabbing, and let the truck slide back toward the inside. He had no traction, so braking wasn’t an option; instead he worked with the truck’s momentum and steered away from the edge, toward the mountain side. With a thump, the right front tire crossed the shallow ditch that ran along the inside of the road and his