The Cold Winter
The Cold Winter
Claudio Hernández
Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo
“The Cold Winter”
Written By Claudio Hernández
Copyright © 2017 Claudio Hernández
All rights reserved
Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.
www.babelcube.com
Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo
Cover Design © 2017 DNY59
“Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Cold Winter | Claudio Hernández | Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo
The Cold Winter | Claudio Hernández
Beginning
Biography of the author
The Cold Winter
Claudio Hernández
Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo
“The Cold Winter”
Written By Claudio Hernández
Copyright © 2017 Claudio Hernández
All rights reserved
Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.
www.babelcube.com
Translated by Nestora M. Salcedo
Cover Design © 2017 DNY59
“Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.
The Cold Winter
Claudio Hernández
First edition eBook: July 2017.
Title: The Cold Winter.
©2017 Claudio Hernández.
©2017 Cover Design: DNY59 Getty images
©2017 Cover Design: Arman Zhenikeyev shutterstock
©2017 Correction: Tamara López
©2017 Translated : Nestora Salcedo
Not part of this publication including the cover design can be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means, and by any media, either electronically, chemical, mechanic, optical, recording, in the internet or photocopy, without previous permission of the editor or the author. All rights reserved.
I dedicate this book to my wife, Mary, who has to put up with childishness like this every day, and I hope she never stops doing it. This time, I have involved myself in another adventure that started in my childhood and, with support and determination, I have finished it. Another dream come true. She said that I sometimes shine... sometimes.
Beginning
He was called Jack Feather because he never left a fucking mark on the snow. Perhaps the thick snow that was falling that winter in Boad Hill, one of the whitest of the last ten years, had erased all the tracks with its flakes crashing to the ground while the wind had finished smoothing them.
They all appeared with their panties at their ankles and their eyes open and glassy, showing pain and cruelty, staring at the dark sky. The snowflakes covered them to form a brilliant sculpture while the horror was still there.
In that cold winter of 2017, Peter had fallen in love for the first time of his impossible love.
1
"Sir, what do we do?" Lloyd Chambers's eyes were stony and did not emit any brightness, quite the opposite: darkness and uncertainty.
Sheriff Burt Duchamp glanced sideways at him for a moment and shook his head under his felt hat, now covered with a thick layer of snow, falling heavily.
Lloyd was one of his men. It was the new one, the fellow. In a city like Boad Hill, everyone knew each other, and one could guess from which foot each limped and from which family came. But Lloyd had come from far off Michigan to face the sheriff Burt's men.
Jack Hodge, the fatty, one of the Sheriff’s agents of Boad Hill, was always sticking his nose into his business, laughing in his face. He glanced at him, later spat a green phlegm that glued on the ground as a mint gum. But that was inside the offices if one could call it that to the Burt’s hovel. Four tables and one study, with a broken glass door. Everybody thought, Meh! Last name!
Lloyd Chambers was an emaciated guy who begins to have the belly beer. In a few years, he would be with a deformed body, with his stomach on his eggs and his back curved by the weight. Now he would weigh, with the snow on top of the hat, about sixty kilograms. He was dark skinned and had slightly long hair, something that annoyed Burt. His eyes were green and his nose quite pointed. His closed lips drew a thin line, like a closed zipper. Now he wore the official uniform, but when he was on leave, he used to wear jeans to mark the package. A non existent package. He did not smoke or drink alcohol. He never stepped into Moll's bar. What a name, he thought with a rictus on his lips. Prostitute, that's what I wanted to say and, in fact, you found them in there seducing to their possible clients, like ticks about to suck all the blood. He was 47 and had the longest and thinnest cock in the world, but he was proud of it. He had used it only twice. One with Charlize, a mentally retarded woman, but with bright ideas, and again with Elizabeth, how well that name sounded ... But she was never the mother of his children.
I was alone. He was one meter seventy five high and had the boniest hands in the world. His pulse often shaken. He was addicted to coffee.
"It's frozen, sir." His voice was deep and growly. His long neck served as a musical instrument, in this case, to modulate the voice. Why did the frail guys always have a serious voice? Burt wondered.
"And how do you want me to be under the snow?" Sheriff Burt scolded him as he crouched down to the girl's corpse, which now looked like a dune in the snow.
Burt Duchamp was a hunky man, weighing a hundred kilos, shaved head with grey hair, and a moustache of the same colour that covered his upper lip. His eyes were dark, and his countenance was always serious. It was as if life would piss him off every second. He was one meter and eighty, and he always wore his uniform, even on days when he was free, which he never had. His revolver, the 9 millimeter Glock 19, was always at his fingertips, despite that in Boad Hill, a seemingly quiet town where only strange things happen from time to time, everything else was normal. Fights between drunkards, mistreatment of couples, who went no further than a black eye, and a few hooliganisms of the children and their fucking firecrackers.
But now they were faced with something new. Such new that they had no experience in this type of case, since what was learned in the academy had been thrown into the toilet. But Burt was a resource man and knew what to do. Disconcerted, although he disguised it quite well.
"I want you to dig up this poor girl and identify her." I want prints. I want the killer. And he was so calm. The snow was falling heavily, and his moustache was white, and his nose was red, and it was running at times. They had never had such a cold winter in Boad Hill either.
"Sir, this is Rachel Geller, Tom's daughter. The voice of one of the officers who had dug it up earlier, informed him with bewilderment about who was.
"Well, there's not much to figure out here," Burt said, turning to face him. "And why the hell did not you tell me before?" Tom was a childhood friend who now lived in a library full of books like blocks of a writer of terror and fantasy.
"Do you want to know the cause of death?" Asked Martin, the agent who had told him the name.
"I suppose so," said Burt, almost in a whisper that carried the wind through the surrounding trees, so tall and white that they looked like snowy snowmen who threatened to fall to the ground.
The blue lights of the two patrol cars gleamed in the snow and were reflected between the branches of the trees and their faces as if it were a merry go round. The ambulance arrived in silence, had not set the siren. Red and white, it barely stood out against the glistening white of the snow, which enveloped everything like a large woollen blanket.
"The woman, well ... the girl," Martín said, "was torn apart ..."
"Stripped?" Burt cut him off as two men got out of the ambulance with a red stretche
r.
"Yes, on both sides," the officer continued in a murmur, his face a little flushed, even though the snow was clinging to his skin like a suction cup.
The wind, literally ate the noise of the bustle of the men in the hat, while the snow fell with such intensity that they had to blink continuously to remove their flakes from the eyebrows.
"And how did you find out if she's buried in the snow?" Burt wanted to know, with his back to the victim, who covered her with moments of new snowflakes.
"We proceeded to unearth it this morning because we thought we saw that ..." The agent shrugged and blushed. His sparse beard was completely white.
"What?" Come on, spit it boy! or you'll choke, fuck."
"We saw a part of what were red panties ..."
"They were, and they are, are not they?" Burt's lips were cut, and one of the lines began to appear blood, a thin line hot to the touch and slippery. He licked it with his tongue.
"Yes, sir. It's the only proof we have of the crime."
"Then she was raped, was not she?"
"Yes."
"On both sides." Burt had to raise his voice to a new gust of air that sounded like the howls of a hungry wolf.
"Unfortunately, yes, sir. She has bled from both holes."
"Say through the vagina and the anus!" He screamed this time, closing his eyes and sticking more snowflakes. "You see a pussy, and instead of getting a boner you start to tremble," he mumbled.
Jack Hodge began to laugh like an incoherent, about to swallow the chopstick dangling between his teeth, resting in one of the cars patrolled like a huge barrel of beer.
"It's not funny," Martin barked, and before Burt's watchful eye they all fell silent and gave way to the whimpering wind.
"And in such a short time she has been buried in the snow again?" Burt asked his men, looking at them with a serious face and circling in front of them.
The silence was present for an extended and eternal silence, except for the frantic noise of the wind. Finally, Lloyd spoke.
"Yes, sir, that is so. In a few minutes, the falling snow buried her again, so you did not see anything. It's only been five minutes."
Burt was already suspecting that they had called him when they had gotten out of the balls. His forehead had begun to sweat, a magical combination of hot sweat and ice, he stayed calmer.
"And what else have you been able to find out, smart asses?"
"That she died suffocated," said Lloyd.
"How do they know?"
"By the purple marks on the neck, sir," Martin said. You have not been able to see it through the ..."
"Yes, the damn snow!" Burt shouted as much of the snow cap on the top of his hat fell off.
Burt was a rather grave and aggressive man at times, above all when he did not drink the glass of whiskey in the morning. He had neither his wife nor his two sons at his side.
Everything had gone to hell for more than four years, because of his character and alcoholism, in which he had fallen again. His red nose kept crawling under the snowstorm. His family had moved to Boston.
The blue lights kept flashing between the snow and the poor girl, turned into an Egyptian tomb.
2
Not far away from there, through the window of his room, was Peter Bray staring at the snow and all its splendour, even as the sun shone.
Peter's hair was dark, straight and greasy as if it had been sprayed with a bottle of oil on his head. His haircut made him more youthful, but he was already thirty two, and still in love with Ann German, ever since he first saw her when he was sixteen when she was leaving high school. She was younger than him.
"Someday you'll be mine," he whispered to the window.
His face left tracks of hollows caused by severe acne from the past. His lips were eerily red and his eyes a light blue. He wore black bone frames glasses and occupied a large part of his face. He had bought the larger ones that existed, so much, that they looked like diver's glasses.
He was thin and quite tall. His hands were fine, and his knuckles were marked as white lumps every time he closed them in a fist. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt. Above all this, instead of putting on an anorak, wore a black raincoat, like Dracula's cape, which reached to his ankles.
As the wind whipped the glass of the window into a shake, was heard the whisper of a series of cartoons from a children's channel he had left on plasma television was heard behind him.
And he continued to contemplate how wonderful was the white blanket of snow, and how it licked every corner of the city and shone like a led bulb.
With his index finger drawing a heart in the cold windowpane, he thought of Ann.
3
"I want you to dig up this poor girl. I need to see with my own eyes how the poor has been left," said Burt, waving his hands like a millstone. At once, all his men and the two of the ambulance began to unearth it with their hands.
Removing the snow from her face, they noticed that her glassy eyes remained open. They were bright green, like a cat's. She was blond and looked good looking. But now she was pale and bruised at the same time. She had some scratches on her cheeks and his upper lip swollen. The nose was purple. And on the neck, were finger marks that had left a chain of bruises as big as the ass of glass.
It was Rachel Geller, no doubt.
"I want you to analyse those marks on the neck. We may find a clue," said Burt, standing before his men and her body, which was beginning to be visible even though the snowflakes covered it with a new cloak.
"I'm afraid the killer would have worn gloves, sir," Hodge explained, looking away at Burt, who was arms folded and snow on his shoulders as if he were a snowman.
Burt frowned. I knew he was right.
Lloyd cleared of the snow the area of the chest and touched two big boobs, hard as two balls of ice and, somewhere in it, felt a sexual lasciviousness.
The men of the ambulance were digging up from the waist down, and they discovered the red panties, carved and with something that looked like snot.
"Mr Sheriff, this looks like semen," one of the men said, holding up his hand with the panties stiffer than a piece of cardboard.
Burt extended his long arm, and his fingers touched the cold cloth. He clenched his fist and pulled his panties up a handful of eyes so he could watch them in the blizzard. Obviously, there was a spot of something dull and could be semen or vaginal discharge.
He walked to his car, sinking his big boots into the snow, and took a plastic bag from the trunk. The instant it opened and closed, it was filled with snow. With subtlety, he put the panties inside the bag. And then he headed for the passenger's door to take a pen from the glove compartment. The strong gust of wind almost ripped the door open. On the sticker on the bag, he wrote: "Evidence one, Rachel."
He dropped the closed bag to the passenger seat, closing the door slowly.
When he returned to where the group was digging up Rachel, he saw with amazement how torn apart she was. This had not been a simple rape, and it was possible that have been introduced a metal bar or something similar. The ice, which bordered on her slightly open legs, was dyed red and had spread like an icy river. She had lost a lot of blood. The cowboy pants she wore before being raped appeared a meter further, buried in the snow. There were marks of something dark. Burt kept it as a second evidence.
The agents' hands, glove coated, now brushed against Rachel's flat, hard belly, which focused them with her lost gaze. One of the officers wanted to close her eyelids, but he could not. That look made them nervous while they dug her up. Also, the huge breasts, naked and hard as a rock, that had the nipples purple and stony. The sweater appeared beside her, in the snow. Now, her curved hips appeared naked and purple. The agents stared at it and her pubis, with the dull hair. They could not avoid looking at her steadily.
Then, Burt had an essential question to ask.
"How long do you think she's dead?" He looked at them all through the snowflakes, which were falling fast on the ground,
dragged by the strong wind. "Who is the smart guy who dares to give his opinion?"
The men continued to dig it up until the entire body, totally naked, was raised rigid like a mummy. Finally, Lloyd answered.
"I think I could have spent the night here," he said with a strange grin in his mouth. He was not sure.
"Well, we'll see it when they do the autopsy," Burt admitted, removing the sticky snow from his moustache.
Then, Rachel's stiff body stepped onto the stretcher, and in the middle of the storm, they took her into the ambulance, which was almost a handful of snow on top.
The hollow of the body in the snow filled again, and Burt felt like digging to see if there were any more clues.
And that was all that happened on that January morning.
4
"Dad, you must not stand for long," Peter said to his father, affectionately.
He was standing in the hallway next to the door frame that Peter had left open. His feet trembled, and all the force fell on his two almost skeletal arms, resting on two old crutches.
"Son, you know I cannot be quiet. Also, this snowstorm has me altered. Do not you hear howling in the wind at every corner of the house?" John looked at the silhouette of his son in front of the window, with some optimism and sadness at the same time. His whole world lay in the cabal of what would happen if his heart fucked off. Then, he thought of Peter, at thirty two years of age, without independent himself yet.
"The truth is there is a fucking storm ..."
"The little words," his father interrupted. "You know that I do not like bad words and if any one escapes in this house, only me can say them. You already knew your mother." John glanced at the windowpane, and his eyes darkened as he remembered her. "She's there, in the snow, in the weeping wind and nature."
Peter glimpsed a smile and walked over to his father with strange jumps as he walked. He limped. The thing was that there was a sequel left when a drunk man ran him over with a Ford pickup while ran through the hard shoulder of the road leading to Boston. He suffered four surgeries and needed crutches for two years. One day he rose euphorically and threw the two crutches out of the window. The glass shattered and her mother, terrified, shrieked like a mermaid. That was years ago, when his Dad had not yet retired, and every fucking morning he took the lunch in a backpack that hung on his back.