By all appearances, Cy Ford is no more than a quiet loner living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He works as a conservation officer and prefers the company of his sled dogs. What nobody suspects is that Ford's past is a fractured one, and all of it, down to his name, is a lie. During the winter months, Ford moonlights as a drug-running dog sled musher, a lucrative sideline that's allowed him to amass a small fortune. With Christmas around the corner, Ford has decided to get out of the game, but it won't be that easy. When a turf war breaks out between his Canadian employer and a Detroit-based mobster, he finds himself forced into one last run he and his team may never reach the end of.
By all appearances, Cy Ford is no more than a quiet loner living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He works as a conservation officer and prefers the company of his sled dogs. What nobody suspects is that Ford's past is a fractured one, and all of it, down to his name, is a lie. During the winter months, Ford moonlights as a drug-running dog sled musher, a lucrative sideline that's allowed him to amass a small fortune. With Christmas around the corner, Ford has decided to get out of the game, but it won't be that easy. When a turf war breaks out between his Canadian employer and a Detroit-based mobster, he finds himself forced into one last run he and his team may never reach the end of.
There was a peculiar smell. An eye-pinching aroma that hung in the air and its intensity grew with the seconds. A pair of lifeless, soot-covered hands were draped above broad metal. One of them twitched. Then the other. They began to awaken and scraped for something, anything to hold onto. A haggard man hung upside down in the passenger seat of an apple red F-150 truck that lay on its roof from an apparent accident. His seat belt was the only saving grace, securing him from falling completely onto the cab’s inside roof. Streams of sweat and blood ran from his face wounds under his dark and mangled beard that flowed past his Adam’s apple. His hazel eyes stung when they pooled in his sockets. Somewhere behind that wild tame of facial hair and blood, there was a hitchhiker in his mid-thirties, simply caught in the wrong place, wrong time.
The world around him felt as it looked. Cloudy.
Confused, he gradually gathered his bearings. When he turned his head to the side, he saw the male driver of the rig, of the same age, was in even worse shape. A bloody mess of what was once a dark-featured, smooth-talking Texan. His pearl white cowboy hat was crumpled over his face, and it was smeared with red. Unlike the haggard man, he hadn’t worn a seat belt, but was still positioned in the same manner as his passenger. The only reason he wasn’t completely thrown from the vehicle was because the dashboard had crushed into his chest, pinning him.
When the haggard man tried to reach to shake the driver to see if he was alive, he felt intense heat that beamed off his clothes. He then glanced through the cracked windshield to find heaps of flames spitting and crackling on the outside as if they were taunting them. He figured they originated from the engine block. It was only when he shifted his eyes at the driver’s gator-skin boots melting that he realized the entire cab was ablaze.
Panic set in. He had to free himself and do it quick.
His seat belt wouldn’t give an inch, though. It was jammed. Smoke billowed into the cab from under the driver side footboard and stole the air. The haggard man coughed and choked when more seeped in. There wasn’t time to formulate a plan. If he were to escape, he had to do it now. He tried to reach for his nylon backpack on the floor. There was a knife inside it he could use to cut himself free. Over and over, he stretched his arms as far as they humanly could to no avail. His backpack was too far under the seat for his reach. His thoughts quickly set in on the windshield again and he thrusted his foot forward to kick it, in hopes he could smash it entirely to release as much smoke in the cab as he could. When his foot wasn’t doing the trick, he used both feet and busted a hole that caught his right boot’s laces and refused to let him go. Awkwardly, he hung there. The more he twisted his body to try to extricate the boot the more stuck it became.
He released a frustrated scream from the hollows of his smoke-filled lungs and tried to use his other foot to break his stuck one out. As he did, his ears perked to a soft whimper followed by painful groans from the driver next to him. The driver’s cowboy hat slid aside, revealing his deformed face to the haggard man’s horror. His nose was ripped from his face, and it hung by a strand of skin on his cheek. One eye protruded from his skull, and the other was gone.
“Hey!” the haggard man yelled to him with his craggy voice as if the rust shook from his larynx.
He saw the driver’s head move slightly and then he choked a cough.
“Hey,” the haggard man yelled to him again. “Can you hear me? Hey!”
Through the coughing, the driver still didn’t answer, but at least the haggard man knew he was still alive. He felt useless. There wasn’t a thing he could do to assist the helpless driver, unless he could free himself first.
Panic turned to anger, which fueled his adrenaline, and he used his elbow to try to break his passenger side window. He slammed it with everything he had. The window bowed past its frame but declined to crack. Repeatedly he kept at it, every effort harder than the last. With a final elbow-shattering blow he broke through the window, and the blackest smoke he had ever seen in his life filtered out following shards of glass.
His baby blue denim shirt was torn, leaving the deepest of gashes on his forearm. He didn’t pay the wounds any mind and grabbed a sharp shard that was on the door’s armrest. Threads from the waist part of his seat belt started to give as he sawed the shard along it in an up and down manner. With every painful cough the driver next to him hacked, it kept the fight alive in the haggard man to keep cutting at his belt.
Faster and faster, the threads broke with whip sound snaps.
Groans turned into screams when the driver further entered consciousness. By now the fire had caught above his waist. His torturous howls stung the haggard man’s ears, who tried to block them out, and focus on the task at hand as best he could. It appeared the driver couldn’t move his arms or even his legs. He was presumably paralyzed, unbeknownst to the haggard man.
By the time the haggard man completely cut through his belt, its release helped dislodge his boot from the windshield, and he plunged on the inside of the cab’s roof. He felt like sizzling bacon on the metal that was now as hot as a greasy pan on a stove. Any exposed skin he covered with his clothes to prevent serious burns. With his hands balled inside the sleeves of his shirt, he crawled from the truck’s cab, rolling feet away into the brown grass. Fresh air hit his lungs and he coughed and rolled back on all fours. He gagged and heaved black mucus onto the ground underneath him, willing himself and clawing the grass to a stand.
There he stood, man versus inferno. Rest wasn’t an option, regardless of how exhausted he felt. To him, in this critical juncture, rest was for the weak. Surveying the spot, he saw the entire truck was in a ditch on the side of the highway they’d rode on mere minutes prior. Hard to believe that one moment he was listening to George Jones play on the radio as background music to the driver’s rambling, the next he was staring mortality in the face. The rig he considered lay halfway in the thick woods that surrounded the desolate area, and the other end of it was on the incline of the ditch. He scanned the wreck for any other opening he could enter the cab from that was easiest, as well as safest, to extract the driver. He scurried around to the driver’s side; the door was crushed and sunk into the earth. There wasn’t a sliver of freedom. Prying it open wasn’t an option. Damn near impossible. Back to the passenger side he went. Before he could even make a move to return, the engine exploded, blowing out the windshield completely. Flames poured into the cab like running water. The haggard man covered his head from what debris rained on the spot. Still, though, he could hear the driver’s screams. They pierced his ears, louder than ever before.
“Come on you stupid son of a bitch,” the haggard man whispered to himself as he tried to gather the courage to enter what was surely a death trap.
His legs shook. He pumped the fingers on both hands into his palms, each pump tossing aside the fear. His fingers formed a fist and he bolted back inside the cab.
Cy Ford is the kind of person who might be quoted as saying, "the more people I get to know, the more I love my dogs." In Ford's case, these aren't just any dogs, but highly trained sled dogs. Ford's sled team is invaluable in helping him with his legal occupation as a conservation officer. They're arguably even more necessary for his (ahem) not-so-legal side job of running drugs across the Canadian border.
Ford's not exactly a good guy. But he's not a bad one, either. He's just a man with a broken past and too much baggage: a man who'll do what he has to. He's a pretty likable guy, as characters go, even if he does prefer the company of his dogs to that of people. He keeps to himself and gets his job done the best that he can.
Unlike the people he'd come across in his travels, dogs weren't full of hate, resentment, or judgment. They never wanted anything from him. They were just loyal. Loyalty was a quality he rarely saw in people. But for dogs, it was literally their code from birth. A straightforward code that Ford understood and could get behind.
Ford and the two other officers at his post, Jett and Avery, have been secretly running drugs during the winter for a Canadian drug boss. But it's time to move on before things get too hot. Unfortunately, their situation heats up before they can take their last run as a Chicago mob boss decides he wants to take over the Upper Peninsula drug business. Including Cy and his team.
This is a wonderfully written story, moving at the pace of Olympic speed skaters on their final lap. The combination of man vs. elements and man vs. man reminded me of so many great stories, including those written by Jack London or C.J. Box. It's raw, emotional, abrupt, intense and stark. It seems as though a man's fate can turn in the blink of an eye in a place where the elements are so often life threatening. Certainly, our three dog mushers find themselves in situations they never expected from one heartbeat to the next.
I loved the characters depicted in this story. Cy is a very complex man seeking nothing more than a simplistic life. He's not a hero, but he reads like one. As the story unfolds, we learn more about Cy's history, but we never get the full story. Not yet, anyway. Because this may be the first book for this character, but definitely not his last.
As intriguing as Cy's character is, I found myself most drawn to a secondary character named Sam. He's one who obviously has much more going on than he shows. For a minor character, he packs a big punch, and I'm hoping to get more of his past later.
This well-written novel is one I would heartily recommend to fans of fast-paced thrillers/suspense novels as well as adventure fans. It flies at the speed of a prize-winning sled team at the Iditarod and allows the reader to climb onboard that sled with them to feel the cold ice in your face and the terror in your veins.