I read Jamaica Inn too young and was forever scarred, resulting in my short story “Wreck Rights,” coming out in the anthology Wild Crimes in September 2004.

Authors in Wild Crimes

Michael Armstrong
Margaret Coel
Mike Doogan
Loren D. Estleman
Laurie R. King
Skye K. Moody
Brad Reynolds
S.J. Rozan
James Sarafin
Dana Stabenow
John Straley

Excerpt from “Wreck Rights”

A twenty-four year old woman in 1991 Ford supercab pickup had been driving back from the liquor store which pretty much justified the existence of Crosswind Creek. She was there because she’d run out of whiskey, and not because she’d been serving it to guests.

Her drinking was no longer a problem. Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers wouldn’t have minded so much except that on her way out of the liquor store’s parking lot she’d T-boned a 1994 Dodge Stratus four-door sedan with a mother, two children and a set of grandparents inside. The grandfather was DOA. The thirteen-year old had a chance if the medivac chopper made it to the hospital in Ahtna in time.

The rest of the living were on their way to the hospital via ground transportation and the dead were in body bags when the second call came in. Another accident, this one about halfway between Tok and the Ahtna turnoff to the Park. A 43-year old man driving a 1995 Toyota 4Runner had collided with a 19-year old man driving a 2001 Ski-Doo snowmachine. The snowmachine driver had been on his way to visit his girlfriend in Glenallen, and from the tracks at the scene had been operating his vehicle along the side of the road as he was supposed to, until he came to the Eagle Creek Bridge. Eagle Creek was narrow and deep and fast and never froze up enough in winter to take the weight of a snowmachine, so the driver had come up off the trail next to the road to use the bridge. Demonstrating a totally ungenerational care for his hearing he’d been wearing earplugs, which was probably why he’d missed the sound of the oncoming pickup, which, again according to the tracks, had seen the snowmachine only at the last minute, when it had been too late to swerve and there wasn’t any room to swerve anyway. The weather hadn’t helped, a day of wet snow followed by a night of freezing rain, resulting in a road surface suitable only for hockey pucks.

The 4Runner driver was dead drunk, with three prior DWIs to his credit, not to mention a suspended license. The snowmachiner was just dead.

Jim had barely contained that scene when a third call came in, this one from just south of the Park turnoff. Kenny Hazen, Ahtna’s police chief, was already there when Jim’s Blazer slipped and slid to a stop. Hazen, a big, square man, hard of eye and deliberate of speech, met Jim halfway, ice crunching beneath the grippers pulled over his boots. “The Ford Escort was making a left on the Glenn when the asshole in the Chevy pickup T-boned her. Near as I can figure he was doing about ninety-five. And you know that curve, there’s that hill and you can’t see a damn thing around it, especially on a winter night.”

Jim knew the curve. “Alcohol involved?”

“Smells like it.”

Jim sighed. “My night for drunks in pickups.”

“Every night’s a night for drunks in pickups,” Hazen said. “The woman driving the Ford Escort is dead. So’s the eleven-year old riding in back of her. The teenager riding next to her has at least a broken arm. The baby was in a carseat in the back, for a miracle buckled in correctly; it seems okay. The pickup driver’s stuck, can’t get either door open. The fire truck and the ambulance are coming from Ahtna, I—“

The rest of what he had been about to say was drowned out by the sound of shrieking brakes and skidding chains coming at them fast from up the hill and around the curve. Jim didn’t wait, he dove for the ditch, and he’d barely hit snow when Hazen Hazen’s massive figure hurtled over him and landed two feet west with a solid thud and a grunt. Jim had maybe a second to admire Hazen’s 10.0 form before the semi currently screeching sideways down the hill slammed into the snow berm above their heads. For another very long second it seemed as if the berm would hold, but no. The double trailer, already jackknifing, broke apart. The rear trailer rolled right over the berm and the tops of their heads, the ditch providing the minimum required amount of shelter. It rolled downhill twice more until a grove of pines slammed it to a halt. Its sides tore like paper and pallets broke open and cases of canned goods went everywhere, a box of mandarin oranges nearly braining Jim when he stuck his head up to take a look.

The front trailer teetered on the edge of the road about fifty feet down the hill from where the rear one went over. Jim thought it might have had a chance if the snow berm had been higher. As it was, inertia and momentum took charge and over it went, rolling at least half a dozen times, the doors bursting open and more pallets breaking apart and more boxes flying everywhere to explode upon impact. Cans of soup and green beans and tomato paste, bags of pasta and popcorn and potato chips, sacks of rice and sugar and flour, six-packs of juice and pop, bottles of vanilla and soy sauce and red wine vinegar, boxes of Ziploc bags and Equal, packages of toilet paper and paper towels, it all tumbled down in a runaway landslide of commercial goods.

Jim, watching from the safety of the ditch, said in an awed voice, “I’ve never really appreciated the phrase “bombs bursting in air” before.”