Arctic Fire (37 page)

He took another swallow from his mug. He was going to be exhausted when they pulled out of Missoula at dawn, but she’d been right to want them to go out. He’d had a great time for the past hour. She was awesome.

“Damn!”

The cowboys he and Karen had been playing for the last few minutes shouted their disappointment together as she dropped the eight ball in the table’s far corner pocket.

It turned out he and Karen had something else in common. They were both excellent pool players. They’d held the table for the last forty minutes. No one had come close to beating them. And they’d won several hundred bucks.

Karen tossed her cue on the table, ran up to Jack, threw her arms around him, and gave him a huge hug. “I love this game!” she shouted over the music as she leaned back and gazed up at him.

He chuckled. “Me too.”

“Know what else I love?”

“What?”

“That you’re so damn handsome!”

He couldn’t possibly have heard her right. “What?”

She smiled and shouted while she twirled around in front of him. “I think you’re handsome, Jack. I love your dark hair and your eyes and how tall you are. I love everything about you.”

“But you—”

“No, no, I said you and Troy looked different. I never said anything about who I thought was better looking.” She stopped twirling and pointed at him. “I saw that face you made when I said it, even though you tried to turn away.”

Jesus, she was amazing. It was as if she could read his mind.

She slipped her arms around his neck again and kissed him deeply. “Gotcha,” she murmured when she pulled back. Then she kissed him again even deeper.

J
ACK COULDN’T
believe his eyes when Ross Turner emerged from the seaplane at the dock on Puget Sound. For a few seconds he didn’t think it was really his old friend. He figured the huge man squeezing through the narrow door and stepping down onto the plane’s pontoon was actually a pilot Turner had hired to fly down from Alaska. The man didn’t look anything like the tall, skinny, clean-cut kid Jack had known at Denison.

Jack didn’t believe it was Turner until Turner stepped up onto the dock and introduced himself loudly to Karen, then gave Jack a bear hug that squeezed most of the air right out of his lungs. And the friendly slap on the back after the hug was so powerful Jack almost took an unplanned plunge into the sound’s icy cold waters.

The last time Jack and Turner had seen each other was eight and a half years ago in New York. It had been a month after
graduation, and they’d met for lunch in Manhattan at the Racquet Club, thanks to Bill, who was a member of the exclusive establishment. The next day Turner was leaving for Alaska. A year of hunting and fishing, and then he was coming back to the lower forty-eight to go to Harvard Law School. At that lunch Turner had still looked like the guy Jack had met in the Denison dormitory on the first day of college. He had still been a toweringly tall string bean with stooped shoulders.

But now Turner looked like the massive brown bears he hunted. He had a huge chest and broad shoulders, his brown hair fell well below his collar in the back, his dark red beard was full and curly, and his voice had gone lower. He even looked an inch or two taller to Jack.

After taking off from Puget Sound, they’d flown over open ocean with the Canadian and then Alaskan coasts off the right wing in the distance—until they’d reached Dutch Harbor. The town had less than four thousand full-time residents and existed solely to support the fishing fleet.

“So, tell me why you drove all the way across the country to Seattle instead of flew,” Turner said as the three of them walked down a side street of Dutch Harbor through a raw, late-afternoon mist. Turner’s seaplane was secured to a dock a few blocks behind them. “Why take all that extra time, Jack?”

“I was worried that if Karen and I flew commercial and I used a credit card to pay for the ticket—”

“Somebody would spot you,” Turner interrupted. “Yeah?”

“Bingo.”

There were only a few bars in Dutch, and, according to Turner, they were all dives. But at least the one they were headed for right now—the Fish Head Pub—was off the beaten track, Turner had claimed.

As much as anything around in Dutch Harbor could really be just off the beaten track, Jack had figured as they’d taxied to the
dock a little while ago. As far as he was concerned,
everything
in this tiny town was
way
off the beaten track to begin with.

“So, it’s that serious?” Turner asked.

“I almost got hit by a van on Broadway a few days ago, and I’m pretty sure the guy was aiming for me.” Jack nodded at Karen. “And a few minutes after I met up with her in Baltimore, we got chased by two guys who jumped out of an SUV and started shooting at us without asking any questions.”

“Holy shit,” Turner muttered.

“That’s what we thought.” Jack hadn’t mentioned anything to Turner about what was in the black box they’d retrieved from the cabin outside Bemidji. He figured it was better for Turner if he didn’t know about all that. “So we drove.”

“So this is more than just finding out if what happened to Troy is different from the official version you got?”

Jack took a breath and winced. The pungent odor of fish was everywhere in this town, and he still hadn’t gotten used to it. “It didn’t start like that, Ross, but that’s how it’s turned out. Look, I’ll tell you the whole story right now if you really want to—”

“I don’t want to hear the whole story,” Turner said matter-of-factly as he stopped walking and motioned for Jack and Karen to do the same. “I don’t care about any of the other stuff. In fact, the less I know the better. I just want to get this meeting with Bobby Mitchell over with. You’re an old friend, Jack, and I want to help you with Troy if I can, if there’s anything to find out.” He glanced down at the ground and kicked at a pebble on the wet street. “Look, I got busted for cocaine possession a year ago,” he mumbled, “and I can’t get in any trouble while I’m on probation. I could lose my guide license if I did, and I can’t have that. I’d have to leave Alaska, and I’d shoot myself before I did that. This is my home now.”

Jack and Karen exchanged a subtle glance as Turner kept staring down at his shoes.

“Well, look,” Jack said, “I don’t want you to—”

“It’s OK, Jack. I want to do this for you. Like I said, you’re an old friend. And there was that time you pulled my ass out of the sling. The cops were going to arrest me for that DUI. I still can’t believe you talked them out of it. That wouldn’t have looked good on the law school apps.”

Jack glanced over at Karen, who was smiling tenderly at him. He liked that smile. “How the hell did you get this meeting for us with Mitchell?” he asked, still thinking about how surprised he was that Karen had been able to cast her spell on him quickly and completely. He cared about her so much already, and he wondered if she had those same feelings for him. She’d acted like it at the bar in Missoula the other night, and then later in the room. But she’d seemed distant yesterday on the drive from Montana to Seattle. “I thought the captain of the
Arctic Fire
didn’t let his crew talk to anybody.”

“I didn’t get this meeting for
us
,” Turner answered. “It’s just gonna be Bobby Mitchell and me in there. You guys are gonna wait outside, because if Mitchell sees you two with me, he’ll probably run. I didn’t tell him I’d be dragging an entourage. And, by the way, people in Alaska tend to be pretty skittish to begin with.”

“OK,” Jack agreed. “But how’d you get to him?”

“We have a mutual friend, and we all like to hunt browns.” Turner glanced at the entrance to the Fish Head. It was just a few doors up the street. “And I think Bobby Mitchell wants to talk. It’s just a gut feeling, but I think he’s got a story to tell. It sure sounded like it when I spoke to him on the phone.” Turner glanced around the area before going on. “I’m betting the captain of the
Arctic Fire
threw two people overboard,” he continued. “Maybe he did it to save a greenhorn’s share of the haul money. Or maybe he did it for another reason, now that I’ve heard about those people blasting away at you in Baltimore without even talking to you first.
Either way, maybe Bobby’s getting amped about getting caught up in something bad. Maybe he figures it would be a good idea to tell somebody about it now so he doesn’t go to jail for murder. So I can verify his story after the cops pick him up.” Turner shrugged. “Or maybe he’ll walk out of the bar as soon as I bring it up.” He tapped Jack on the chest. “If he does, then you’re stuck, because that’s all I got for you. You understand?”

It would suck if Bobby Mitchell turned out to be a dead end, but Jack understood that Turner would have hit his limit as far as helping them at that point. “Yeah, I got it.”

Turner started to move off, but then he turned around. “Are you both carrying weapons?” His gaze flickered back and forth between the two of them.

They nodded.

Jack spoke up. “That’s another reason we drove to Seattle.” He’d explained to Turner in the plane that Karen was an ex-cop. “We both wanted our guns.”

“Good. Now I’m gonna give you some really good advice on surviving in Alaska. If you follow these three rules, you’ll be good to go. First, don’t be afraid to use those guns you’ve got. Don’t die with them in your belt. Too many people make that mistake up here. They aren’t for show. Second, always be ready for the weather to change, and not for the better. It can always snow harder here, and the winds can always blow stronger. Always assume it will get worse, not better.” He hesitated. “And this is the most important rule of all. Never, and I mean
never
, ask a man what his last name is in Alaska. Let him tell you, let him volunteer it. If he doesn’t, don’t worry about it and walk away without looking back when you and he are done.” Turner paused again. “An old man in a bar told me all that the first week I got here, and I’m glad he did. He was exactly right.”

As Jack watched Turner head up the street toward the Fish Head Pub, he quickly committed the three rules to memory.

“You shouldn’t be out in the open like this.” Stein was sitting behind the big desk of the hotel’s top-floor suite, going through the president’s detailed dossier for the next few days. “You’ll be vulnerable on an outdoor stage like this,” he observed, speaking up as he pointed at the line item on the dossier and then a picture of the venue on the opposite page of the thick green folder. “I think you should make this speech inside. We’ll have much better crowd control if you’re inside.”