Obstruction of Justice Read Online Free

the moment, as if it, too, had been taken aback at the last lightning strike. The sleet became colder, lighter. Coasting in on a cold gust, heavy white flakes of snow began drifting down.
    Cursing the mountain, Nina tied the flannel shirt over her head, bent to get out, and tried to follow Collier, but she found herself in white fog. She couldn’t see ten feet away. She didn’t know which way Collier had gone. He couldn’t see through this mist any better than she could. What if he fell? What if she couldn’t find him?
    She made it about twenty-five feet before she knocked her knee into a sharp rock and had to sit down suddenly. Wet snow soaked through her clothes to her shoulders and legs. She touched her freezing fingers to the cut, but couldn’t tell how bad it was.
    The swift succession of changes in the weather and atmospheric pressure, the afterimages burned into her retinas, and the temporary deafness from the thunder combined with the pain in her knee. She was going to pass out or get sick. But she had to find Collier!
    So she crawled back under the crag again to take stock. Huddled safely out of the weather once more, she opened her pack again, searching for dry clothes to heap on her shivering body.
    Her hand closed over her cellular phone, the new one she took everywhere and had stuck in the front pocket as they were locking up the car.
    No way. No way!
    "What the hell," she muttered, pushing the power button.
    Orange light glowed on the phone’s face. It beeped. She listened. She heard a dial tone.
    She punched in 911. Nothing happened.
    Closing the phone, she pushed in the antenna, hot tears of frustration on her cheeks. Try again, Nina, she told herself. Don’t give up.
    She tried the whole procedure again, this time more slowly. No reply. Nothing but the sound of dead air.
    Peering out into the fog, she listened for some new sound that would tell her where Collier was, some sound that would remind her that she was not all alone on the top of a mountain in a monster storm. She might just lie there and die. She might freeze to death in August in California, which would surely be one for the record books.
    She checked her limbs for numbness, but her fingers and toes burned with the cold. She didn’t want Collier to find her scrunched up under this rock, a beatific smile on her face from the warmth that she had heard crept up on people who were freezing to death.
    A more distant clap of thunder interrupted her foggy meditations. The center of the storm was moving on, leaving the whiteout.
    She sat back again, aware for the first time of blood spreading all over her pant leg. She opened the phone again to its spineless beep. She punched in the numbers, giving the little machine plenty of time to comprehend each one individually: 9 ... 1 ... 1.
    Each beep of the buttons sounded weaker. She stared at the numbers. She read the labels. "Idiot!" she shouted. She had forgotten it again! "Send!" The magic send!
    She punched it.
    A calm female voice answered.
    By the time the medevac helicopter arrived from Reno, setting off a flurry of fresh new snow, the clouds had broken up and blue sky showed above just as before. Two men in uniform jumped out and ran up to Nina, who sat on a rock next to her pack combing her long, wet hair, a bedraggled Lorelei.
    "You okay?" They spotted her injury immediately. One of them ripped her jeans above the cut, examining her leg with expert speed, introducing himself as Sven. He cleaned the cut, pronounced it relatively minor, sterilized it, and covered it with a clean bandage as gently as a mother. While he worked on her, her voice returned.
    "Boy, am I glad to see you guys. There are two men halfway down the slope. One of them is the man I think must have been struck by lightning. The other one is my friend, who went down there to help. I think I know which way they went. Let me show you." She heard herself jabbering, and didn’t care.
    "How’s that leg feel?" asked Sven,