by Jack Lively
Breacher
Jack Lively
To the Boy and the Wolf
One
I was crossing the street, noticing the cross-walk lines on the road, freshly painted, and the foot gear choices of the cruise ship tourists. It looked as if trail walking was high up on the list. New and newish hiking boots, adventure sandals, low-top trail shoes. Then I raised my eyes and caught the guy’s reflection in the window of a drug store.
He was walking behind me. Not too close, but close enough. It was a guy I’d seen before.
Specifically, I had seen him during the third bite of my burger, which was about twenty minutes earlier and memorable. I had looked up and there he was at a deuce by the window, looking right at me. Eye contact. An athletic blond man in his late twenties with a trimmed beard. He was drinking from a mug with a string coming out of it. It took me a moment to realize it was a hot beverage called tea. By that point he had looked away. Besides the tea, the other thing was the beard.
In Port Morris, Alaska, beards are not memorable. They are commonplace, but a well-trimmed beard less so. Most beards I’d seen in the last four months working on a fishing boat had been either untrimmed or badly trimmed, but this guy’s beard was well-trimmed. Like he had access to a good mirror and good light. Maybe a mirror with lights on it, like in a hotel with a star rating. Good mirror and good light, two things definitely missing in the sleeping quarters of a fishing boat, which tend to be dimly lit mirrorless cavities behind the engine room.
I stopped and pretended to look at something in the window display. The guy swerved, slowed up, and started thumbing through a postcard rack outside of the tourist gift store. His left hand was bandaged, so he was thumbing through the cards with his right hand. I scanned in the reflection for other watchers. Another man was posted by the door to the diner. I hadn’t seen him before. He was leaning against the wall, below the stairs. Baseball hat and light blue button-down Oxford. I started walking again, nice and slow this time.
The next intersection was catty corner to a bank with an angled window. I glanced at the reflection before crossing the street. The guy with the well-trimmed beard was moving, now around forty feet behind me. I upped the pace from casual to brisk. Walked a couple of minutes without looking behind me. If there was a team tailing me, that might string them out and break their formation.
I cut left over a footbridge, crossing the creek to go up Lake Road. There was overflow from a bar. Fishermen taking a smoke break from drinking their salmon money. All beards were either badly trimmed, or untrimmed. I asked one for a cigarette, using the interaction to turn and glance down the road. The well-trimmed beard guy was on the bridge, both hands on the worn railing, looking down at the fish running up the creek from the Pacific toward the sweet water spawning grounds.
At the intersection, I saw a crowd of tourists from the cruise ship. Around forty of them packed together like fish in a net, spanning the street and sidewalk. They were coming down Bryant Street, headed back to the boat after a tour of the salmon creeks. I let myself be absorbed by the crowd. Threaded my way in and amongst them, keeping my head low. I dropped down as if to tie my shoe, screened by geriatric vacationers. It only took a couple of gestures and a shrug to pull off my backpack and jacket. I had a ball cap in the bag. I turned the jacket inside out and wrapped it around the backpack. When I stood up again, I wasn’t a bareheaded guy wearing a forest green Gore-Tex jacket and a backpack, I was a guy wearing a t-shirt and a black cap and holding a tan package under my arm.
I reversed direction to join the flow of tourists as the group shuffled downhill toward the dock. I smiled at an older lady pulling on the arm of her partner. I said, “Are you with the boat?” She nodded and I turned away. From the hill I could see the cruise ship below. In fact, it was visible from almost anywhere in town. I moved down the street, going with the flow. Like a paper boat in a rain-swollen gutter. I didn’t see the first guy from the diner. He was probably still searching for me further up the hill.
A minute later we passed the guy with the Oxford shirt. He was walking uphill, looking like a kid who had lost his teddy bear. I broke out of the crowd below him and stepped into the shadow of a chartered trips office.
I was now a few buildings up from the diner where I’d had that burger, like a full circle. I stayed there for a minute, observing. My baseball cap was pulled low and I figured with the beard I looked just like any other fisherman in Port Morris. Mid-thirties, tall, and jacked from pulling on ropes all season. I hadn’t been in shape like that since pararescue indoctrination.
I recognized the girl standing on the other side of the road. She hadn’t made me. She was blonde, wearing a tourist bucket hat with a Port Morris logo, and carrying a bag from the souvenir store. Like she was just another tourist. But I was pretty sure that she wasn’t just a tourist.
I had met her the night before.
Two
The night before I was in the Porterhouse Bar playing pool with Joe Guilfoyle. The Porterhouse is old-school Alaska. Burnished wood fixings. Everything robust and built to survive the harsh elements. Which is to say, the weather and the people, and not necessarily in that order. The music was playing from a jukebox.
The door opened, and the blonde girl came in. Everyone turned to look at her. That was normal behavior, checking out the newcomer. But when the heads swiveled back on necks, they did so slower than they normally would. There were a couple of reasons for that. The most obvious one being the location and corresponding demographics.
Port Morris, Alaska, has a year-round population of five thousand and change. A big town in the southeastern corner of the state. On a very cold and slushy day in February there might be a seven to one ratio of men to women. In late summer during salmon season the population swells by a couple of thousand, and the gender imbalance is more like two hundred to one. So that was one reason why everyone turned to stare at her.
The other reason was that she was good-looking.
Not good-looking like a cute neighbor, more like special-looking, like a model from the city. The kind of face and figure that people get lost in. Mysterious looks that attract fashion magazines, and guys with haircuts and skinny jeans. Photogenic looks that translate weirdly when experienced in three dimensions. Which made the fact of her very existence in Port Morris something along the lines of a big surprise, or an extreme event, like what they call a black swan.
The third reason why everyone was looking at her was because she was anxious, and in a hurry.
By default, most creatures pay attention to rapid movement. And the blonde girl was moving at speed. She came in quietly through the front. Kind of hunched over and nervous. By the time she rounded the other side of the bar she was moving faster. She skirted the outside of the room and hurried into the women’s bathroom. The door swung shut behind her.
A minute after that everyone went back to what they were doing, which was playing pool, mouthing off, and drinking beer. In my case I was drinking a chocolate milk shake. Not because I don’t drink beer, only because I hadn’t yet finished the chocolate shake I’d ordered with my pot roast at the diner.
It was Guilfoyle’s shot and he was a slow shooter. I watched him measure up the geometry and the physics. He had an annoyingly painstaking technique of checking the angles, crouching and peering down the pool stick at the ball. Lining it up. Squinting and then calculating the white ball’s line to the pocket, and then checking if it was going to hit at an angle likely to scratch, given the inertia and the spin. Besides being the captain of a salmon boat in the summer, Guilfoyle was a physics teacher at a community college back in Seattle.
He was still lining up his shot when the giant came in.
&n
bsp; There are some big people in Port Morris, massive guys who do nothing all year but pull on ropes. Sometimes it’s salmon, sometimes it’s king crab, other times it’s herring. But this guy was something else. He was maybe six foot seven and about the same at the shoulders. He had a big beard and long hair pulled back in a pony tail. He wore a black leather jacket and had a spiked wristband around his massive left wrist. He was the kind of guy you’d expect to have a spider web tattoo up his neck, maybe with a couple of tear drops out of his eye, announcing how dangerous he was.
But he had no tattoos, just pure natural menace. When he came into the Porterhouse, everyone’s neck did another swivel to the door. But the giant wasn’t looking at everyone, he was looking right at me. Staring straight into my eyes. Then he started coming at me fast. Not running but taking very big strides.
For a couple of seconds I stood there holding the pool cue and wondering what was going to happen. I’d never seen the guy before, but that didn’t change the fact that he was coming at me with intent. Like every other guy in the room, I had a beard. When I came on board the Sea Foam with Guilfoyle I had been clean-shaven. Four months later I had a beard.
So there I was, standing and looking at the incoming giant staring straight at me, about to arrive with speed and force. And it occurred to me that he wasn’t really coming at me, wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking through me to his real objective. I was just a guy with a beard to him, and he was looking for something else, which was past me at the bathroom. So, I stood aside and let him brush past, which in hindsight was an error. It just prolonged the inevitable. The giant went straight to the women’s bathroom and pulled the door open.
Then we all heard the blonde girl scream.
Everyone in the place stopped what they were doing and stared at the bathroom door, vibrating on its hinges. Everyone except for me. I wasn’t staring, I was moving. Guilfoyle said something, like a warning. But I was already pulling the door open. Inside there was only the giant’s back. Like a wall of black leather. He was reaching into one of the toilet booths. It looked like he had the girl by her hair and her throat, which meant his hands were occupied. She was gasping, trying to scream. The giant was silent. I hammered him in the right kidney. Once, twice, very fast and hard. Then again and another time. That’s usually enough, but not in this case.
The guy kind of leaned against the side of the booth, which shook the whole structure. Then he tried to turn. No doubt he was planning to swat me away, like a minor annoyance. But he didn’t have the chance. For one thing, he was stuck in the toilet booth entrance. For another, I gave him a vicious swiping kick into the back of the knees and he went down on them. The girl had climbed on top of the toilet, jammed to the back of the booth. I looped my right forearm under the giant’s chin. My left forearm went against the back of his neck.
That was it, he was under control.
The guy froze up like a single muscle. Like Coho salmon when they’re out of the water and you have them by the mouth. They twitch hard until they die. I didn’t kill the giant, but I did choke him out. When he was limp I lowered his head into the toilet.
Lucky for him the toilet was clean. In fact it sparkled with sanitation and cleanliness, presumably because the women’s bathroom was so seldom used.
I looked up at the girl. She was looking at me. Her pupils were dilated. But she was not too shocked to have her phone up in front of her, the tiny round camera pointed at me. The flash fired. I stepped back, my vision temporarily ruined. All I could see was her perfectly symmetrical face printed on the back of my eyeballs and the white flash bouncing around in my brain. I got my sight back eventually, but by then the blonde was gone.
And now, there she was again in a bucket hat, part of a little team of people on my tail. Maybe they wanted to give me a medal.
Three
Now I was curious.
The blonde didn’t see me and wasn’t even checking. She was waiting for the others, letting them do the work. Since the guy with the Oxford shirt was now cut out from the group, I decided to stalk him.
I started back up the hill, coming up on his six. None of his buddies were watching or covering. This was not a professionally trained team. So, I asked myself, what were they?
The Oxford shirt guy was walking slowly, looking left, then right, then back up the hill. I noticed the well-trimmed beard guy coming down the hill, on the other side of the street. The two of them made eye contact and I saw the well-trimmed beard moving his lips as he spoke into an ear-piece, which meant they were communicating. Not so dumb maybe. Oxford shirt guy started to walk faster up the hill. Probably following orders from the beard. Which suited me, because I wanted to catch him when he got behind the big tree, right past the dumpster in the alley next to the Porterhouse Bar.
I timed my movements. He was a big guy with a neck like a bull seal, but legs like toothpicks. Classic gym bunny. A guy who trained with weights and rubber bands and mirrors, which meant plenty of muscle up top. Good target. I could hit him there without killing him. All that muscle would protect his spinal cord.
As he stepped into the sweet spot, I swung a hard right hook into that thick neck. It landed well, just above the collar. The punch launched him into the alley, tumbling over thin legs. The guy stumbled a couple of steps and turned to look at me in fear and anger. His hat had fallen off. He started to say something, but by then I had grabbed him by the hair and had the point of my folding knife in his right nostril. I pushed until it drew blood and he winced but didn’t make a sound. I kicked his legs out from under him and knelt down without releasing my grip.
“What do you want?
The guy looked at me and stammered, “We just want to talk to you.”
I said, “What happened, did I win the lottery, or inherit a million dollars?”
“No. Just want to talk.”
The punch had knocked the ear-piece out of his head. It wasn’t fancy, just a regular ear bud from his phone. But I figured they had an open phone line and that others were listening in on the conversation. Which added uncertainty into the equation. Time to move.
I said, “Best to just leave me alone.” And nicked his nose with the blade. A minor, controlled slice up the inside of his nostril. Blood ran into the guy’s mouth. He licked his lips involuntarily and sputtered. I disappeared, joining the steady stream of tourists down the hill.
But I wasn’t done with them. Not yet. I was still curious.
About a minute and a half later I slipped into an ice cream place. It had a nice big window out to the main street, plus I could stand out of sight in the back. I figured the Oxford shirt guy would be returning down the hill. He would meet back up with the well-trimmed beard guy and I wanted to see what happened then.
I ordered a sugar cone with one scoop of chocolate and one scoop vanilla. Chocolate on top, vanilla on the bottom. The guy behind the counter wore a pink uniform with a pink visor. I moved into the shadow at the back of the store while he bent into the freezer to prepare my ice cream.
The front window was like a movie screen. The well-trimmed beard guy entered the frame from the left, moving uphill. He crossed through it, climbing up the grade and then went out on the right side. It was at least the second time he’d climbed the hill. The ice cream was three dollars. I licked the bottom scoop first. Vanilla.
There was one other customer, sitting at a little round table in the window. He was a clean-shaven man with a mustache, wearing a fleece vest over a button-down shirt. He had side-parted hair, which looked like it required regular maintenance and just the right amount of product. The guy was quietly spooning ice cream into his mouth and gazing out the same window.
The ice cream server asked me if it was good. I said it was. He asked me why I’d chosen chocolate on top and vanilla on the bottom. I told him it was the correct order of things, to my mind at least. When the server said that he approved of the chocolate on top and vanilla on the bottom decision, the guy in the window grunted in disagre
ement. He said, “Two scoops of the same flavor. Avoids all problems.”
Looking through the window over his head, I saw the trimmed-beard guy again. He came from the right side, going downhill. But now he was with the Oxford shirt guy, who was holding a balled-up tissue to his nose.
The other customer in the ice cream place was scraping the inside of his cardboard cup with a stubby plastic scoop; he hadn’t opted for a cone. I looked over his shoulder through the large window. The two conspirators across the street had stopped on the sidewalk, huddled together, speaking on the phone with someone else, maybe the blonde girl.
The two guys stopped talking and started walking. From right to left, down the hill. The guy in the window stood up slow, and at the same time crumpled the cardboard cup in his fist. He was tracking the two across the street. He didn’t bother to look around when he called out, “Thanks for the ice cream.”
The guy dropped his garbage in the trash can and walked out the door. I gave him a thirty second head start before following.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the mustachioed ice cream eater was following the two guys, and that he didn’t know me from Adam. So now I was following him, watching him follow them. Like a math equation. Them following me, following him, following them.
I stayed back as far as I thought prudent, while still keeping him in sight. The two across the street were oblivious. They weren’t even looking out for a tail. The mustachioed guy slowed down and pretended to look into the window of an outdoor sports store. The two across the street were coming to the bottom of the hill. I walked by the mustachioed guy from the ice cream store. There was a small square of grass to my left. On the other side of it was another foot bridge over another salmon creek. I found a bench facing down to the intersection and sat on it.