Wreck Rights

Paul Kameroff was found at the bottom of an icy hill, hands and ankles neatly bound, with a bullet hole in the back of his head. They don't think it was suicide. A short story
"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."