Deadly Detail (2 page)

“No, no, this is really good. See, Oley was trying to sober up in the Coffee Cup Café. She latched onto him and dragged him up the back stairs at the Nordale and into her room.” That was as long as he could go without a drink; he had to stop and chug. I glanced at Stan and he was getting agitated, hands almost fidgeting, toying with his beer bottle. He’d worked himself up to confide, maybe embarrassed himself a little, and wasn’t taking the interruption well.

The two straight men were swilling and grinning, urging the spokesman on. “Well, see, Oley had just got his pants off when two detectives busted in the door.” He sipped fast, but couldn’t wait for the punch line. “So, Oley is standing there, naked and all, but the cops didn’t go for him. They went straight to the closet and pulled out these two teenyboppers.”

That wasn’t specific enough for the guy on his left. He chimed in, “Real youngies, man, like high school. San Quentin quail for sure.” He lifted his bottle and drained it. Our narrator took over.

“See, it turns out Molly was teaching them the trade. She had them stashed in the closet to watch.”

The one on my right stopped sucking his bottle long enough to insert, “She should have asked me, man. I’d have taught them the trade for free.” He went back to nursing and the narrator took over.

“See, the thing is, if Oley can’t convince the DA he didn’t know the girls were in the closet, we won’t see him no more for prob’ly twenty years.”

Stan gave me the elbow and extricated himself from the confab. “Hey, Alex, we’re late. We’d better hit the road.”

“Right.” I stood and Satch materialized in front of us. I did the math, dropped a twenty on the bar. “Round for our buddies here. Sorry fellas, gotta split.”

Stan strode toward the door. I was right behind him but Jody caught me in the doorway with a bear hug and stood on tiptoes for a kiss. “My motor’s in overdrive, big boy. I get off at three.”

“Right, thanks.”

Stan was crunching across the gravel toward his pickup, but Jody was glued to my arm. “You won’t forget?” She strained up for one more kiss, booze, tobacco, chalk-flavored lipstick, and tongue like an agitated snake.

“Sure, I’ll tattoo three o’clock on my forehead.” I shook her off and started after Stan. I had ten feet to go and was already reaching toward the door when Stan started his engine. The door shot toward me, knocked me halfway back across the lot, and a belch of flame felt like it seared off my face.

Chapter Two

I must have been out for a while. I found myself sitting on the gravel, leaning against the rough logs beside the step. The lot was full of noisy people milling around, cop cars and a fire truck rotated red-and-blue flashes across the scene. Stan’s pickup was a smoldering wreck. I couldn’t even look at it.

My head was in black fog but struggling out, and the first cogent thought was,
Angie
. I suddenly had the feeling that I needed to get to her, fast. I wobbled to my feet. Everything was sore but apparently nothing was broken. The crowd had its back to me so I slunk behind them to my pickup, using the logs for support. My forehead felt wet. I swiped it with the back of my hand and it came away bloody, but sticky and congealed, not flowing.

The engine started on the first revolution, and I turned left on the Steese. I burned the new paving, fishtailed onto Hot Springs Road with a shower of gravel, and blasted into the hills. I didn’t know why, but the feeling that I needed to get to Angie was a palpable presence, and it was shoving down on the gas pedal.

Angie is spawn of the Kuskokwim, specifically the Demoski clan from Crooked Creek. She grew up in a one-room log cabin with the smell of the river always with her and counting the seasons by its changes. By the time she was ten years old, she was braced in the back of a riverboat, helping to pull in driftnets full of salmon. The river was in her blood, and probably a lot of her blood was in the river. She grew into a tall, slender figure with flowing black-silk tresses from her Athabaskan Indian ancestors, but a touch of Russian genes had softened her features into that classic beauty you see in magazine ads for tropical vacations. She’d been waitress and maid at the lodge in McGrath the summer Stan had filtered the black sand and rubies, but barely a thimble full of gold, out of Alexander Creek.

Instead of camping on the creek as usual, Stan had headquartered at the lodge, borrowed a riverboat, and commuted to his digs. I figured at the time that Angie had a lot to do with that. When they met in Fairbanks that winter, maybe by design, they melded like gold to mercury. Stan forgot about prospecting and worked odd jobs around Fairbanks. Angie was obviously the best thing that ever happened to him.

Their cabin site in the woods was probably picked because the Little Chena River came right to their backyard. The Little Chena isn’t much, compared to the Kuskokwim, but it is a river. It marks the seasons with freeze-up and break-up, and is home to grayling and seasonal salmon.

The pickup floated on its springs when I topped the final hill, no shock absorbers, of course. I stood on the brake and threw gravel to make the turn through the woods into their driveway. It was getting dark, but Angie hadn’t yet started the generator to turn on lights. She was framed in the big picture window wearing jeans and plaid shirt, and she was radiating anxiety.

I slid to a stop ten feet from their steps. She had the door open before I got to the porch, but was staring at me in shock. “Alex?” It was a question. It hadn’t occurred to me how bad I must look. My face had that tight painful feeling like the second day in the Miami sun, and I realized the strange stench I’d been ignoring was burned hair.

“Where is Stan?” She was trying to see past me, like maybe he was in the pickup. She already knew the answer, but was obviously clinging to hope.

“Angie, I’m so terribly sorry.” My expression must have said it all.

She screamed and crumpled. I caught her and guided her onto the couch. She sat forward, elbows on knees, hands covering her face, and rocked like an autistic child. It might have been easier if she’d been sobbing, but her shock was too deep for that. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Angie….”

“What happened, Alex?”

“It was a bomb in his truck. It was instant, he never felt a thing.” That was the only comfort I could offer.

“But, why, why, why?”

“Angie, I don’t know, but I promise you this. I’ll find out, and whoever did it will wish they were already in hell.”

She slammed her fist down on her knee. “Damn, men are so
stupid
. He picked me up from work looking like he was seeing ghosts, and he kept telling me that nothing was wrong. He didn’t want to worry me, right? Damn him, that worried me ten times more, and now he’s…gone?” She jumped up and ran for their bedroom.

I just stood there. Sobbing from the bedroom was the sound of abject grief, but she obviously wanted to be alone. The realities were finally sinking in for me, too, and I didn’t need an audience to watch me rub my eyes. The stone fireplace on the left had a birch fire already laid, waiting for a match to turn it into the centerpiece of a cozy evening. I kept glancing at the door, still expecting Stan to come bursting in, light the fire, and bellow for Angie to come give him a kiss. Sudden death, often violent, is very much a part of life in the Arctic, but is normally due to accidents. My mind was refusing to accept what I’d seen.

Stan and Angie had built the double-studded, double-insulated house with its ten-inch-thick walls to last a hundred years. The three doors on the right were the spare bedroom, the bath, and the master bedroom at the back, next to the kitchen and dining table. The front bedroom had always struck me as a nursery for future use, but now….

Gravel crunched when a car stopped out on the road, and that was strange. I stepped to the big double-paned window. Twilight was deepening, but slowly. Sun above the overcast would be scooting sideways along the horizon, so there was just enough light to show the figures striding down the lane.

They were two uniformed city cops, but why had they parked out of sight? Then I noticed that one was carrying a rifle. What the devil? Cops should come to break the news to Angie, but they couldn’t have been that fast. Maybe they followed me. Maybe it’s a crime to leave a scene like that, but they hadn’t been in my mirrors.

They paused forty feet from my pickup. The tall one gestured, the one with the rifle turned between the trees to circle the house. The tall one drew his automatic but held it out of sight, almost behind him, and strode toward the door. Did they think I was armed and dangerous? I opened the door, hands up, palms out.

“Hi, officer, I’m not armed. What’s the problem?”

He was obviously surprised to see me. He stopped dead and stared. They must have come for Angie, but with weapons drawn and circling the house? I suddenly realized that he wasn’t wearing a badge, and he was swinging his automatic up toward me. I slammed the door and dove for the carpet. Two .45 slugs punched through the door, throwing splinters, and slammed into the wall behind me.

Turk, Stan’s eighty-pound husky, set up a frantic ruckus of barking and snarling in the backyard. I crawled for the bedroom. Angie was lying on her belly on the bed, hugging a pillow. Her eyes will haunt me forever: red rimmed, tears brimming, but they were empty.

The shots and my scrambling across the carpet on all fours jerked her back to the present. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know. Where’s Stan’s shotgun?”

“It’s in the closet.”

The shotgun and a .30-06 hunting rifle were leaning against the back of the closet. I grabbed the twelve gauge, pump action, three shells, and jacked one into the chamber. Turk was outside the bedroom window, growling and lunging at his chain, concentrating on the woods past the end of the house. Stan had set a pole in the middle of the backyard and Turk was tethered to a ring on top of it.

“Is Stan’s canoe still on the riverbank?”

“Yeah, it’s there. Alex, what is happening?”

“Angie, I haven’t the foggiest, but two guys are here to kill us. Grab your jacket and crawl, don’t walk, to the back door. When you hear me shoot, run for the canoe, and leave the door open.” She got the message, grabbed a denim jacket from a hook behind the bedroom door, hunched down and ran. I raised the window sash. The twelve-gauge belched an explosion of fire and smoke and splintered the top of the pole. Turk’s eyebolt ripped loose and he was into the trees like a shot.

I was setting a new personal best, but it was a long fifty-foot run across the yard to the riverbank. It was almost dark, but I could see Angie crouched down wrestling to turn over the canoe. The sounds of cursing and crashing brush were coming from the trees on the right, much too close. I handed Angie the shotgun, grabbed the canoe, flipped it over, and shoved the craft into the water. Angie scooped up two paddles that had been under the canoe, cradled them and the shotgun, and scrambled in on elbows and knees. I shoved us out into the river, grabbed the shotgun out of Angie’s bundle, and sprawled on top of her. Two shots came from the woods, a yelp from Turk, then silence.

Angie lay flat on the aluminum canoe bottom. I raised up on my elbows and stuck the shotgun over the side, but realized that if I fired over the side, recoil would roll the canoe. Trees were moving by fast; we drifted toward mid river. Stan’s clearing disappeared behind us and nothing moved along the bank. I turned around carefully, propped the gun on the rear seat where it would be safe to shoot over the stern, and waited.

The river gurgled. A splash and an angry slap ahead of us was a disturbed beaver. Cold water had turned the aluminum hull to an instant icicle, and the air was heavy with moisture, smelling of wet dirt and dead leaves. The canoe slowly turned crosswise to the current. Birch trees on both banks were dark and silent.

Chapter Three

I’d been wishing it were darker, now we could have used some light. In fall, the river was low but still clipping along at ten miles per. Angie sat on the front seat with a paddle; I was at the rear, but we weren’t trying to make time, just trying to steer. Shores were black now, the ragged silhouettes of trees barely darker than the sky. Water was just a little lighter than the banks, a twisting, roiling rope reflecting overcast sky. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees when the sun went down, and I guessed it was near freezing.

The Little Chena seemed to be turning constantly. The insides of curves were gravel bars, the outside crumbling banks with fallen trees waiting to impale us. Sometimes it was thirty feet across, sometimes the trees almost met overhead. Mostly, we were steering by sound. Mid river was deep and silent. When we heard water rushing around rocks or splashing against snags, Angie dug in and paddled around them. I tried to keep us aligned with the current.

In a straight line it might be ten miles to the junction with the main Chena, then another ten to Fairbanks, but the way that creek was twisting, it was probably twice that. Good that no roads come near the river until town. Also good that there had been some frost so we weren’t fighting swarms of mosquitoes.

Angie screamed, “Look out!” and fell backward off her seat. I ducked, and a fallen birch whacked me in the head and scraped across my back.

“You okay?” She was lying on her back looking up at me.

“Yeah, I’m fine, but if you hadn’t hollered, I’d have been knocked off the stern.” The bow hit something, shuddered, and we turned sideways. We were caught by another birch that had fallen into the water and the current was trying to shove us under it or smash us against it.

The tree, maybe four inches in diameter, was still attached to the right bank, and we were snared in the branches. “Grab something, push us this way.” We were shoving, like climbing a tree sideways. The canoe wanted to roll, the river was furious at being blocked. We were stuck, black water boiling up with a hungry roar, inches from swamping us. The pressure seemed to be crushing the canoe. We scrabbled frantically at branches and the trunk, moved a few inches backward toward mid river.

“Again, together,
push
.” We slid a few more inches, branches bending and breaking like pistol shots. Water drops slapped us, so cold they seemed to burn our skin. The stern cleared the branches and swung to drag us downriver. Broken branches scraping across aluminum sounded like giant nails on a blackboard, but we pulled free and were racing again, now backward.

I was still trying to sit up, digging leaves out of my hair and collar, when the stern plowed into gravel with a crunch and stopped. A whinny like a startled horse erupted right beside us. A black silhouette of moose that looked the size of a mountain reared up and spun away. He crashed into the brush and was gone.

I reached over the side and found three inches of freezing water over gravel. “Sit tight,” I whispered. “Maybe we should stop and think while we’re still able.” I crouched, held onto the sides, stepped over the back seat, and over the stern onto dry gravel. “Okay, come on.”

“Alex, I lost my paddle.”

“Least of our problems.”

I steadied the canoe while she climbed past me, then pulled it up onto the rocks. I could still smell the moose. He was sporting some powerful musk, and I guess that smells good to lady moose. It reminded me of childhood on the farm and horses in the rain.

“How you holding up?” I asked.

“Nearly frozen, but not drowned.”

With our frantic gyrations on the water, I hadn’t noticed how wet we were. When we stopped moving, the cold air took over and suddenly had us shivering. My hands felt like clubs and seemed to be permanently curled to fit the paddle.

“Let’s find some wood and build a fire.” I tried to pretend the situation was normal and survivable. “I don’t suppose you thought to bring hot dogs?”

Angie joined me in the game. “Damn, I’m so forgetful, but I might have enough branches in my hair for a campfire.” She dropped down to crawl along the gravel bar, feeling for driftwood. I turned toward the trees and ran smack into a medium-sized spruce. Spruce usually have dead branches at the base, and this one did. I broke off an armload of tinder-dry dead stuff without getting my eyes poked out.

Branch tips fanned out into lace. I wadded a snowball of the tiny twigs, held my lighter under it, and it blossomed to blessed light. By the time I’d built a teepee of branches over the tinder, Angie was back, dragging several chunks of driftwood. Our fire lit a circle of canoe, black rushing river, dry gravel bar, and trees. Angie sat down on the gravel, cross-legged, leaning toward the fire, but she was shivering spasmodically, her teeth chattering. I knelt behind her, opened my windbreaker, and pulled her against my chest. It was brotherly and practical, and that’s the way she took it. She leaned into my embrace, and the shivering subsided.

“Talk to me, Alex. What’s going on?”

“Right now, what we’re doing is trying to stay alive. If we swamp the canoe, we’ll be dead. Even if we swim out, which is highly unlikely, with wet clothes and nearly freezing temperature, we’d be gone without a trace. It’s probably twenty miles to Fairbanks, at least five back to the cabin. And if we go back, we might get shot.”

“But why? Why on earth would anyone want to hurt Stan?”

“Pure irony. Someone thinks he overheard something that he shouldn’t have. The irony is, I don’t think he really caught anything damning. He wasn’t even sure what they thought he overheard, and he never got a chance to tell me even what that might have been. What we know now is that these guys are desperate and deadly. They must have monitored our radio conversation and our plan to meet. Stan was in the club less than ten minutes, so they must have been waiting in the lot for him.

“The other irony is that I owe my life to Jody. She saw me with a roll of cash and when I started to leave the club with bankroll intact, she panicked and tried to climb my frame in the doorway. Otherwise, I’d have been in the pickup with Stan.”

Angie shivered and snuggled closer, but it wasn’t the cold. “And you think the guys at the cabin came to kill me?”

“Yes, I do. They assume that Stan told you whatever it was. They know he went to the club to talk to me, so now I’m part of the imaginary threat. Those guys were dressed as cops, probably just so you would open the door, but they weren’t wearing badges, so let’s hope to heck they weren’t real cops.”

“If they weren’t real cops, where did they get the uniforms?”

“That’s the scariest part. Angie, these guys are professionals. Putting a bomb in a truck in a matter of minutes took skill and practice. Cop uniforms are generic until they put on patches and badges, so they’re probably tools of the trade. They might have even worn them while they worked on the truck. No one would have questioned them.”

The moose must have been lurking. Maybe he came for a drink and we interrupted him too soon. He did some snorting and stamping just outside the firelight. We’d made a problem for him. His experience had taught him that this was a safe place to drink, but we were in his way. He was reluctant to take the chance and scout another drinking spot. Since it was a night for ironies, that was another. His instinct to return to known safe spots is exactly what gets him killed. Hunters find where he drinks, or where he sleeps, and wait for him. I wondered if that principle applied to us and Stan’s cabin. I helped the moose by tossing a rock at him. He grunted and crashed away.

I released Angie from the hug and got up to tend the fire. One of the chunks she’d found was cottonwood, six inches thick and four feet long, that had been chewed off at both ends by beaver. I banked the fire against it, added branches and chips until it flared up, then used the light to gather more wood. My Casio said twenty-three hundred, which translates to eleven o’clock. I was guessing four or five hours until daylight would let us onto the river safely.

I found several more beaver-severed logs, so a dam must have burst, probably during spring flood. With enough wood to keep us warm for several hours, I sat down beside Angie again, lightly brushing shoulders.

“Are they going to kill us, Alex?”

“Not if we can help it, and every hour that goes by is to our advantage. We didn’t know we were in danger, and Stan wasn’t even sure there was a problem at all. Now, I’ll recognize at least one of them and we’ll be on guard. The good thing is that they won’t recognize you. They may have gotten a glimpse of me at the club or the house, but I was cleverly disguised as a disaster survivor so they might not know me if I clean up my act.”

Angie nodded and turned her back to lean against me. “Hold me, Alex. Just hold me and don’t talk. I want to pretend that you’re Stan. Do you know how wonderful it is for a woman to have a man like him? I thought we were safe against the whole world.”

I slipped my arm around her and pulled her close. The fire burned down, the shadows deepened. The river made swishing and gurgling noises. Angie was sobbing quietly. Each in our own way, we were mourning Stan. Angie’s hair held the perfume of the life that was gone, the slender strength of her a touchstone in the wilderness, the assurance that life could, must, go on.

The moose slipped out of the woods, almost silently in spite of his four-foot rack. He’d moved thirty feet downstream and ignored us. He took a long drink, raised his massive head, and faded back into the trees.