Frozen Assets Read online

  FROZEN ASSETS By Lee Schultz

  Frozen Assets

  Copyright ©2011 by Gene S Byrge

  All rights reserved

  Published by Way Up North Enterprises, PO Box 55, Alpha MI 49902

  All characters in this novel are products of my imagination, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

  FROZEN ASSETS

  by

  Lee Schultz

  The splash of scarlet on the otherwise pristine snow was my first clue that something wasn’t right.

  I had left my cabin at around seven that morning to clear the winding quarter-mile to the highway of the six inches of snow that had fallen during the night. The morning was crisp and sunny and the snow sparkled like shattered glass. The heavy Boss plow attached to the front of my battered Ford four-wheel-drive made easy work of the task as I pushed long sweeps of snow off to the side of the narrow road.

  Some years, by February my road is down to barely enough room for one vehicle to squeeze through. This year, though, snowfall had been light, and I was still able to push the snow far enough to make room for two vehicles - well, small ones, anyway - to pass. So far we’d only had about thirty inches of snow this year, and it was considered a drought. The previous year, I’d had to rent one of those huge snow throwers that tosses the white stuff forty feet into the woods because my plow blade was totally inadequate to the task.

  I was about halfway done when I noticed the offensive red snow. I had been looking at bright white for so long the contrast was an almost physical impact. I backed away from the snowbank, shut down the truck, and got out. As I approached the bank of newly pushed snow. I figured it was probably just a dead deer. Sometimes a deer will be struck by a vehicle and make its way into the woods before it finally dies. I’ve put more than one hapless animal out of its suffering. I can’t bear to see an animal in pain, and few deer survive long who experience a close encounter with a chunk of Detroit metal going fifty miles an hour or more.

  It was no deer.

  There was a bare human hand sticking out of the pile. It was dead white and looked like it had been made from wax.

  I bent down and began scooping snow along the wrist, then the length of arm, which was clad in a red plaid wool shirt. Soon a shoulder emerged, then a neck, and finally, a face. He might have been handsome once, but now his face was battered and black with frozen blood.

  "Aww, shit," I sighed into the frigid morning, then pulled my cellphone out of my Carhartts pocket and dialed 911.

  1

  I heard Sheriff Evan Pace long before I saw him come around the curve in the narrow road. His ride needs a new muffler, but the county budget is already badly strained, and it keeps getting put off "until next year." I waved him over, pointing to the body in the snow. He parked his brown and white department Explorer next to my truck. He grunted with the strain of getting his bulk out of the vehicle and winced with what I took to be pain as he stood up straight. He put a hand to his lower back.

  "Morning, Molly. You could have let me finish breakfast," he grumped as he walked over to where to where I stood next to the body. He squatted down to peer at the man’s face. ‘Hmph. You know this guy?"

  "Nope." I shook my head. "I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. And I didn’t see him in the snow until I had rolled him up with the plow. Even then I wouldn’t have seen him if I hadn’t noticed the blood on the snow when I backed away for the next pass. Poor guy."

  Pace gestured for me to help him pull more snow away. "I’ll go get my camera, but you can start uncovering him so we can get him outta the snow, eh? I’ve called the medical examiner and the state police so they can send out a crime scene investigator." He stood up, his knees cracking loudly. He grimaced. "Old age, ain’t it wonderful?" He went back to his vehicle, reached inside, and pulled out a camera case. I dug snow away from the body, exposing the torso and legs. Pace returned, snapped half a dozen photos from different angles, then gestured for me to accompany him as he walked up the road toward my cabin. He stopped ten feet away and squatted down again, his knees sounding like cracking ice.

  "Jeezo , Sheriff, one of these days you’re not going to be able to get back up again. Aren’t you ever going to retire?"

  He snorted. "Sure, when I win the lottery."

  I laughed. "What a tightwad! You mean you can’t live on your cop’s pension and Social Security benefits?" I bent down beside him to peer at the red-brown splotch on the packed snow. My tire tracks went through the middle and I could see where the body had been pushed along by the plow blade.

  Pace started to rise, faltered, then put a hand on my shoulder to lever himself to his feet. "Goddamn joints. I couldn’t sneak up on somebody if I tried. They’d think they were being attacked by a bowl of Rice-Crispies." He clomped along the blood trail, turned, and sighted back along the streak to where I was standing. "Hey, see if you can see anything in that direction."

  I dutifully turned around, and scanned the road and snowbanks, now nearly four feet high where I had piled the snow I plowed after each snowfall. The road was gradually narrowing as I ran out of room to pile snow, and it was questionable whether two cars could pass on the road. I didn’t get much company, so it didn’t worry me much, but I had plowed two turn-outs where, if I met someone on the road, one of us could pull off the road to let the other vehicle pass without having to back up too far. Hopefully we wouldn’t get too many more feet of snow before spring.

  I walked slowly up the road, scanning from side to side, looking for - what? Anything out of the ordinary, I guess, ordinary being, in February in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, snow, snow and more snow. Which was all I saw. Any tracks, human or tire, were obliterated when my trusty blade scraped the snow off to one side. Nothing to tell me who the dead guy was, why he was on my property, why or how he ended up dead in a snowbank. I just hoped that I hadn’t killed him myself when I plowed him up.

  Several years ago a couple of guys plowing driveways had nearly the same experience as I was having - they backed away from a push, and found an elderly woman rolled up in the snowball. The investigators finally decided that she had gone out to get the mail, had slipped and fallen, or maybe had a heart attack or stroke, and became Miss Popsicle of 2004. The poor guys had nightmares for months afterward, and I understand the local psychological counselors had some long-term business out of the incident.

  I’ve had my share of head-shrinking, thank you very much. After the deranged newly-ex-husband of one of my divorce clients ambushed my client and me as we left the courthouse, slashed his wife to death with a hunting knife, and did his best to do the same to yours truly, I spent a lot of time on the couch, so to speak. My nightmares make Monsters Under the Bed dreams look like vintage Disney.

  Anyway, I wasn’t finding anything resembling a clue to my mysterious dead man, and told Sheriff Pace so. Just then a couple of vehicles came around the corner, roof lights flashing as if there were people they had to get out of the way. Typical rural area cops. They love those lights and sirens. I can’t say I blame them. I’ve worked as ambulance crew for a few years, and that adrenaline rush the sirens bring on is priceless. And legal, unlike most of the chemicals which give you the same effect. And we get paid for it.

  I greeted the State cop, Lieutenant Alexis Brower, and her partner, Big Blue, nicknamed for the fact that he was about six foot five and weighed close to 400 pounds, topped off with a shaved head the size of a bowling ball. A large one. He looks like he’s going to explode out of his clothes at any moment. How he ever passes the required physicals is beyond me, but he’s very good at intimidating rowdy suspects. He just has to stand there and look at them and they wilt into compliance. Most of the time. On at least two occasions
somebody who had imbibed a little too freely of John Barleycorn took a swing at Big Blue. Instead of the many responses such behavior invites, all Blue did was pick the offender up by the belt and shirt collar and gently but firmly place him on this face on the ground, holding him down with one knee and one hand, then cuffed him with the free hand. He’s pretty darn good at what he does.

  Alexis, on the other hand, is petite, dark-haired, model-pretty, and a karate black belt. They are the Mutt and Jeff of the local State Police Post, and have the good-cop-bad-cop routine down to a science.

  Alexis is also a primo crime scene investigator. She got out her gear and started doing the CSI bit, while Blue, aka Trooper Bob Conners, looked at the body with Sheriff Pace. I had to smile at the contrast they made. Sheriff Pace, maybe five ten when he was standing up straight, a small potbelly hanging over his belt, posture slightly stooped like a geezer with a sore back, and Big Blue, huge, menacing with his bald, shaved head. Pace might have been eye candy when he was younger, but Big Blue? Nah. Even without all the padding, the piggy eyes and the constant frown, I don’t think he would have been much to look at.

  A few minutes later it was time to remove the body from the snowbank, and I confess I was very relieved when, as he was rolled gently out of his snow cocoon, the hilt of a knife hove into view, sticking out between his shoulder blades. At least it wasn’t me and my trusty plow blade that had punched his ticket.

  Just about that time the ambulance crew rolled up. Beats me why they insist on dispatching a crew on a definite dead body - or "K" in EMS parlance - especially since at any given time there are only two crews on duty, one on each side of the county. This is a very small area population-wise, but huge square-miles-wise, and it can take a crew a long time to get from one end of the county to the other. Then when you factor in the many camps and cabins that are at the end of miles of bad two-track, a crew can be tied up all day before they’re back on duty. If you choose to live out in the woods like that, you better make sure your will is up to date and your life insurance is paid up.

  Soon Dr. Sharif Mahadev, the local physician who serves as medical examiner, joined us. For some reason, this area attracts a lot of physicians who originally hail from Asia, especially India. Doc’s English is better than most, as is his sense of humor.

  "Yup, he’s dead." he dead-panned.

  "No shit, Sherlock," Trooper Connors snorted , "you don’t need a medical degree to figure that one out." Doc just grinned and squatted down to take a closer look.

  "Hmmm." he said, looking in the guy’s ears, pulling up eyelids to inspect eyes, palpating - docspeak for putting hands on - chest, abdomen, limbs, head. "Hmmm - looks like he was stabbed, but I don’t think that’s what killed him. I’ll know more after a post, but looks like he basically froze to death."

  I was relieved. My plow blade and I were off the hook.

  Sheriff Pace said "Well, it’s still definitely not suicide - I doubt if he accidentally fell on dat knife stickin’ outa his back, eh?." The others grinned at his attempt at cop humor. I grinned at his heavy Yooper accent, which always thickens when he’s under stress. "We find da owner of dat knife, we find us a murderer."

  2

  The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or U.P., is a long chunk of land which is not physically connected with Michigan, but instead borders Wisconsin. It looks sort of like a hunchback rabbit running flat out. Rumor has it that back in the early days Michigan got the U.P. in exchange for ceding Toledo to Ohio. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a good story.

  People who live in the Upper Peninsula call themselves "yoopers." As in UPers. You’ll find "yooper" in a lot of business names like Yooper Engine Repair, whose motto is "Engine Pooped? Get it Yooped." And of course, the infamous singing group "Da Yoopers" who travel around the country doing concerts which are heavily attended by displaced Yoopers, Yooper snowbirds, Yooper wannabes, and people who just like their brand of bathroom humor. I wonder who the guy was who laughed at the first fart joke.

  The U.P. is where the likes of Henry Ford had their summer getaways, where the timber barons got rich by clear cutting the dense stands of white pine, and where the copper and iron barons got rich by ripping the ore out of the earth and shipping it via the Great Lakes. The U.P. is bounded by Wisconsin on the west, Lake Superior on the north, Wisconsin and Lake Michigan to the south, and Lake Huron to the east. A magnificent suspension bridge connects it to the lower peninsula, and every once in awhile someone raises the idea of blowing up the bridge to keep all the Trolls who live below the bridge from invading the U.P. That idea usually has a very brief existence, because since the copper and iron mines have closed and the timber industry is a mere shadow of what it was a century ago, the U.P. depends on tourism for its lifeblood. Deer hunting, fishing and camping in the brief warm weather season, snowmobiling, ice fishing and cross country skiing in the long winter, all bring much-needed money to the U.P.

  Plus a lot of Baby Boomers are starting to move into the U.P., driving up land prices so that locals who don’t already own land can no longer afford it. People who have made their fortunes in Chicago and California and Milwaukee and New York sell their million-dollar homes and build new ones on the shore of one of the thousands of lakes or banks of the many rivers and streams in the U.P.

  Can’t say as I blame them. If I had that kind of money, I’d probably build a three story glass, stone and log palace by a lake on a thousand acres, like the Chicago financial CEO who has bought up eleven hundred or so acres around his own lake, and gated off all the roads to it so that people who for years have been using the roads to access their own properties now have to go the long way around.

  Money may not buy happiness, but it sure does buy things to be happy about.

  As it is, I managed to buy my eighty acres just before the Boomer boom started, me being among the first Baby Boomers to be born just after the end of World War II. The guy who slashed me and killed his wife before my eyes was a very rich man, much less so after I got through suing his ass off, and I used my tidy little settlement and some of my investments to purchase the land and build a modest log cabin on a large pond smack in the middle of my eighty. I deliberately did not make many improvements to the winding road much, to discourage looky-loos and kids seeking a private place for snogging or drinking or both. I don’t advertise my road by putting up a bright yellow gate with a chain and padlock like the summer folks do, and if you don’t know where to look you can drive by a dozen times without seeing where my road parts the trees and winds its way the quarter-mile to my little castle.

  I can hear a motor vehicle long before it reaches me, and I have a loaded rifle propped up next to the door in case it’s someone who thinks a short, squatty grayhaired woman alone makes an easy target. I hate guns, so I have spent a lot of time and money becoming proficient in the use of both rifle and handgun, and have a license to carry.

  I usually don’t.

  I bought a good used truck that came with the plow already mounted, and every fall I put the blade on and, like the rest of the Yoopers, spend the winter with the blade weighing down the front and sandbags in the back so my headlights don’t point down at the road.

  Practicing law lost its appeal to me after the knifings - figure that one out - but in fairness I have to admit I was becoming disenchanted with the system. The "justice system" isn’t about justice, as anyone who has ever been wrongly convicted, much less executed, for a crime he didn’t commit, can tell you. It’s about keeping order, following the rules. It’s not about who’s in the right, it’s about who meets all the deadlines and follows to the letter all the nitpicky requirements courts develop to keep people out of the courtroom. Many a righteous case has been thrown out because a lawyer didn’t dot an I or cross a T. Which, of course, means a booming business in legal malpractice insurance and lawyers who do nothing but represent other lawyers in malpractice cases.

  And then there’s family law - divorce, custody, child suppo
rt, parenting time battles. Abusive fathers hire belligerent lawyers to browbeat mothers into allowing unsupervised visits. Dope addict mothers go through the motions of rehab and sobriety to regain custody of their children, when in reality all they want is to preserve their state assistance, which they lose if they don’t have custody. Kids are removed, placed in foster homes where they receive the love and structure they need, only to be sent back to the parents who haven’t changed a bit. Fathers who don’t really want the responsibility insist on regular visits with their kids, because they have the idea that if they’re gonna pay child support then by God they’ll have their rights to make the kids skip sports and extracurricular activities because they have to spend the summer with Dad, who leaves them with Stepmom or New Squeeze. And on and on. I could rant for days.

  And criminal law? Don’t get me started on that soapbox.

  Suffice it to say the attempt to slice and dice me was a blessing in disguise, a Cosmic Boot in the Ass which, although it hurt like a bastard and still pains me in the winter, got me out of a profession I was coming to despise.

  I had a friend who had a camp in Iron County, and had spent a few weeks with him in the area over several years’ time. It was the first place I thought of when I decided to ditch the law practice and lose myself somewhere where, hopefully, nobody could find me.

  After spending a couple of years wandering the Lower 48 and Alaska with a little diversion into Mexico, I headed for Iron County and started looking for a place where I could leave my old life behind and cultivate the art of doing very little, very slowly.

  I spent several years developing my little Eden and practicing becoming a Yooper. I traded in my designer power suits and Manolo Blahniks for plaid shirts, rubber boots, and insulated overalls.

  Of course, I couldn’t be a real Yooper without a dog who goes everywhere with me. Look in any direction and you’ll see a dog hanging its head out a vehicle window (or riding in the back of a pickup) with its ears flapping in the breeze, as happy as any living creature can be. Except most local canines are Labradors or other breeds of hunters, where mine was a huge Irish Wolfhound, who decided she belonged to me when she ran out in front of my motorhome and put a sizeable dent in it.