Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2)
Page 23
I went out and stood on the deck looking across the yard at the dark woods. Nothing moving. Nothing happening. Just animals staying silent and alert until they could relax once again. I came down the skeleton staircase to the yard, then walked around the side of the house and looked out front. Willets’ Subaru was gone. There was an old pickup truck parked nose-in. Maybe a Ford. On the other side of it was a second vehicle. Not a truck, a recent model Nissan. A practical car, white and very dirty. The vehicles would belong to Jerry and the Viking. Except for the tourists and the hikers, people in Alaska don’t tend to walk very much. I couldn’t see the front of the vehicles because the drive was blocked by a line of low bushes.
Forty
I crossed the yard and retrieved the Remington. I got about forty feet deep into the woods and worked my way over through the forest so that I had a good view of the house from another position. The same but different. Another three-quarter angle, but this time the front and the side. The new position had a straight-on view of Hagen’s window.
Because of the elevation on this side, there was no need to climb a tree. I set up behind a rocky outcrop which made a clearing in the woods above the house. I put my eye to the scope and scanned. Nothing much was going on. The roller shades were still down and Hagen hadn’t turned off the light. There was a possibility that he might be too lazy to get up out of bed. Maybe he had returned to his Viking show with the fancy headphones back over his ears.
Maybe not.
I waited patiently to find out. The end of the rifle barrel was resting on rock. I was in a prone position, belly-down on the dirt and stones. Unmoving and watchful, an alpha predator with the advantage of height.
I thought about where Willets might have gone. Maybe to the bar up past the airport, like Jerry had said. Maybe not. I pulled out Hank’s phone from my pocket and took my eye off the scope long enough to dial Dave. He picked up after three rings.
I said, “What’s happening?”
He said, “Nothing. There’s a boat the size of a neighborhood and water lapping at the dock. I’ve got the window down, so I can hear that. Besides the sound of water, I’ve got Fred Granson a hundred yards from the car, drunk as usual. I can hear his hiccups, one every thirty-two seconds, on average.”
I said, “Fred Granson?”
“Local drunk guy. One of many.”
“How do you know he’s drunk?”
Dave paused. “Fred comes down to the water almost every night. Once in a while, his girlfriend and his mom come down and get him.”
“Okay.” I hung up the phone.
Twenty minutes later, Hagen’s silhouette crossed the window. Ten minutes after that, the front door opened and out came the bearded giant.
He walked straight to the white Nissan. Hagen had left his glasses at home. I figured he knew he looked scarier without them. He got in on the driver’s side. The car started up. The engine was modern and quiet, making an efficient hum. I tracked the big guy in the sights. He looked unconcerned, going through the motions of backing out his car. Hagen steered his vehicle down the drive, away from me.
Only then did I see the Alaskan plates, yellow with dark blue characters and numbers. Seven characters separated by a small Alaskan state flag, furling dark blue with eight yellow stars. TGN on the left, 8462 on the right. Which was precisely the combination that I had found revealed on George Abrams’ yellow legal pad.
Hagen’s vehicle disappeared around the curve at the bottom of the driveway. I took my eye off the scope and watched the taillights through the trees until they were gone. Red brake lights used prudently. The bearded giant’s driving was reasonable and cautious.
The consequences were interesting. I pictured George Abrams in his apartment and went through some of the scenarios in which that license plate number might have been noted down on the pad, and the top sheet torn off.
The first scenario was Abrams returning home. He gets in the door and walks to the dining nook. There, he writes down the number on that yellow legal pad. It was a number he’d seen somewhere, heard from someone, something he wanted to check or pass on. Maybe.
A second scenario had someone else writing that number down. A mystery person, probably an adversary. It could be whoever had placed that laptop in Abrams’ office. An intruder searches Abrams’ apartment, plants the laptop as a trap for anyone else coming around. Gets a call from the boss. Reaches for whatever he can find and notes down the number. Then he rips out the page and pockets it.
A third scenario occurred to me. The dining nook in Abrams’ apartment was tucked into a corner with large windows. I remembered seeing the cruise ship from the window, which was impressive. Less impressive was the view of the street. I mentally walked over to Abrams’ dining table. The yellow legal pad was sitting right there, a ball point pen keeping it company. I visualized looking down through the window to the street below. In that third option, George Abrams gazes down the street, and sees Hagen sitting in the white Nissan. Maybe not for the first time. He notes down the plate number.
I was in no position to follow Hagen. The Land Cruiser was through the woods a ways. It was time for a rendezvous.
Back at the vehicle, I laid the long gun into the case and zipped it shut. I removed the Match King rounds from my pocket and returned them to the box. I placed Hagen’s Smith & Wesson into the glove compartment. Nice little gun, but not accurate enough to be useful. More like the kind of thing you’d use if you wanted to blow someone’s head off at point blank range. More than ten yards from the target, I’d consider the gun useless.
The truck started and I rocked the lever south to drive. There was no way of getting straight out to the airport from that neighborhood. I would have to go back through town, and then up the airport road. And I wasn’t in a patient mood. So I decided to wing it and get into the logging trails to avoid the paved roads. By then it was wet out, not exactly raining, but not far from it. Even so, moonlight trickled through the thin cloud cover. A light mist had blown in from the Pacific and was filtering through the rainforest. I didn’t know the trails but navigating by intuition always worked for me. Maybe it is related to my sense of time, as if I have a special connection to the spinning of the planet on its axis.
Or maybe not.
The airport was a flat runway viewed through the fence, with the low mist crawling all over it. The logging trail ran alongside and pulled in after the fence. The Land Cruiser rumbled along the gravel, tires crunching. Past the fence I hit the asphalt with a lurching bump and turned left. Then it got nice and smooth. After a minute the airport was behind me, and the road just one more shade of gray making a hole in the darker shades of enveloping forest.
Until the road ended.
Abruptly, without a warning. A horizontal line of asphalt advanced under me as the Toyota sped through the night. Suddenly I was off the asphalt and onto dirt again. I stopped the vehicle, put it in reverse, and backed up quick. There had been a sign on the side of the road when the asphalt had ended. I backtracked to look at it. With the Toyota Land Cruiser’s headlights I read two lines. On top it said, ‘Leaving America’. Below that was written, ‘Entering Tribal Lands.’
Another three miles of dirt road in the dark. Then the road widened to a parking lot, and I was there at the Rendezvous. The lot was big and flush with parked vehicles. I backed the Toyota into a spot with a good view of the place. Then I sat and watched for a while. The roadhouse was a one-story building. The roof was corrugated iron and the rest of the structure was clad in worn wood siding. There were colored lights and a porch. Music was coming out of it at a low, mellow volume. Roadhouse music.
I examined each vehicle. No silhouettes, no nothing. Just boxes on wheels with closed windows and the dead air inside of them. I waited two minutes. Nothing moved except the drizzle, the mist, and the leaves on the trees. A raccoon scuttled in from the right side of the lot. Three others came after it. The leader led the troop back to the side of the building and all four disappeared around
it.
Then I smelled the barbecue.
The question was, go in armed, or not. I thought about it, for about a fifth of a second and decided to leave the firearms in the truck. I locked the vehicle, walked over and pulled open the screen door.
The room was large. A plain wood plank floor littered with cigarette butts and peanut shells, like something out of another time. Lighting design was courtesy of the Miller High Life sign taking up one side of the room, and the Coors Light sign on the other. In between were wood trestle tables, wood stand up tables, and a pool table with a worn green felt covered slate top. Left of the door, the bar took up the whole wall. The juke box was on the right side, pushed against the wall. A woman was leaning into it, trying to feed the machine a five dollar bill, which it kept on rejecting. Straight ahead, across the room, was a double wide door. In front of it a guy sat at a table. Other than him and the lady at the jukebox, there were three other people in the room, one of them worked the bar, the other one was me.
I looked back outside at the parking lot. At least two dozen vehicles, maybe more.
The bartender was as far as you could possibly get from the door. I started walking to the bar, and he slid himself over so that we met in the middle. I leaned my arms on it, he mirrored the gesture.
I said, “What do you have?”
He said, “We’ve got Alaskan. You can take your choice of Alaskan Amber or Alaskan IPA, either one works.”
“You choose.”
“Okay.”
I said, “I’m hungry.”
The guy jerked his thumb to the double wide door in the back. “Ten bucks gets you in and gets you barbecue. Just pay Jimmy over there and he’ll give you a stamp.”
Jimmy didn’t look up until I was standing right there in front of him. Jimmy opened his eyes and looked at me. I had a ten-dollar bill ready. He took the money with one hand, and the other stamped the back of my hand as soon as the bill was in his. It was a complex operation that looked simple.
I went through the double wide door.
Forty-One
The room was barely lit, so at first I couldn’t see a thing. Then the contours of the cinder block walls became clearer. Two short sides, two long sides, a rectangle. I stood smack in the middle of one of the short sides. In front of me was a wall of backs, specifically, the backs of men, and many of them bearded. Behind those backs were more backs, each one attached to a person. They were facing the far side of the room, the other short side. There was something going on up there. Some kind of a show.
A young guy leaned against the wall just inside the door.
He was clean shaven with short, cropped hair. Clean shaven was an anomaly here. It made him look out of place, and I figured it was the same for me. The guy was in the shadows, so I couldn’t see his eyes. But I could tell that they had fastened on to me. I saw the silhouette of a curly earpiece cord against the light grey wall. It wasn’t a phone cord, it was a coil tube earpiece for a two-way radio system. Which meant two things. A professional security detail, and someone to listen to through the earpiece. The guy wouldn’t be alone.
I moved up the long axis of the room, against the wall. People made way for me. Mostly grudgingly, sometimes unwillingly. I got some looks, I gave some looks. I got some shoulder blocks. I pushed through them, hard. Mostly, people were letting me through because they were occupied with the activity in front of them. Whatever that was. I couldn’t see up there because the room was ridiculously sloped in the wrong direction, up toward the front. No matter how tall you were, the guy in front of you was taller. Which was why people were locked in position, peering through any angle they could get. I wondered if it was worth it.
They were fixated on the front. Fixated and fascinated, or horrified. They weren’t smiling, that’s for damn sure. No music, no talking. Only a soft patter-patter coming from up front, like a couple of dripping faucets. Every ten drips punctuated by a soft slap. Then there was labored breathing. Like someone struggling but multiplied. Like two people struggling. I slid my way up the wall some more, until I could see properly.
A single light bulb hung from a long cord. Two men were hunched over, legs splayed for balance. At first, I thought they were staring each other down. But then one of them moved in a jerky way, an exhausted twitch toward the other guy, who absorbed it, steadied himself, then twitched in return.
They were playing a game of bloody knuckles. Each one took a turn hitting the other guy in the knuckles with a clenched fist. That was what the slapping sound had been, two fists hitting together. I didn’t know how long they’d been going, but it must have been a long time. They were slow, clearly exhausted. Both fists were bloody knobs of raw flesh. Between them was a puddle of blood on the unvarnished wood flooring. That was the patter-patter sound. The steady drip of blood from inflamed, exposed, and bleeding muscle and bone. Each time they smacked fists, the blood splashed out in thicker spurts, increasing the growing puddle under their feet.
One of the men had long blond hair hanging to his shoulders, moist and sweaty from exertions. His face was specked with blood. The other guy looked like a wrestler. No shirt, tribal tattoos, shaved head. The tribal tattoo guy was wide and solid. A lot of flesh on his body, but maybe that didn’t work so well for the task at hand. The other guy was emaciated, like a tapeworm was stealing his nourishment, leaving him all bony and hard edged. I figured his punches might hurt more.
The guy with the tattoos landed a solid punch into the thin guy’s right fist. It sounded like a tomato hitting a cement wall. Neither of them flinched, but the lanky guy sagged a little. Then he punched the tattooed guy’s fist. It was a jerky punch from no distance. The wide guy absorbed the blow, his face expressionless. Deep pain, deep fatigue. Both of those guys were going to be permanently damaged.
I whispered to the guy next to me. “How long have they been going?”
He cupped his hand to his mouth and said, “Good hour. At least.”
To win at bloody knuckles, all you have to do is keep going. The loser is the guy who stops. By now, neither of the two was able to open their hands. Fists were glued closed by the hemorrhaging blood and inflamed tendons and muscle. It was all about endurance and legs. I figured the wide guy had the legs, but he also carried the weight.
“What’re the stakes?”
The guy indicated across the room. He said, “Ten grand to the winner. Zero to the loser.”
I glanced in the direction my neighbor had indicated. There were a couple of cocktail tables, over on the other side of the stage, like a VIP area. I didn’t have a clear view of who was sitting over there, because there were men standing in the way. Not in the way of the VIP’s view, in the way of my view of the VIPs. But I was able to get a glimpse of legs and shoes. Specifically, female legs, and women’s shoes. Legs that were presumably coming out of skirts or dresses. Two women on either side of one man. I examined the shoes. Two sets of heels on either side of a pair of penny loafers. Neither of the women were petite, that was for sure. Big healthy feet scrunched into sizable high heels. On the other hand, the man was not large, or at least his feet weren’t. The penny loafers were child-sized, the feet barely touching the ground.
I recognized the penny loafers from the Chinese restaurant. Same guy who had walked through the coat room. Mister Lawrence, I assumed.
But then I was also noticing the security detail. Strategically seeded into the crowd were plainclothes guys like the one with the curly cord ear-piece at the door. They weren’t big guys. No gym bunnies. These were guys in perfect physical condition. Lean and ready. It wasn’t hard to pick them out of the crowd, because they weren’t watching the show, they were watching me. So I turned to watch the show, figuring they’d get bored of the new guy. I had counted six men in the security detail, plus the guy at the back by the door. Seven guys, probably armed. Made me wish I’d brought the Glock.
On the other side of the VIP area was an opening. Maybe another area, or maybe just the bathrooms.
It took maybe half a minute to elbow and shoulder my way through. Not too fast so that I drew attention. Not too slow that I’d be blocked by a bunch of intransigent bearded men. Just fast enough to cut through quietly to the other side. Once clear, I looked over to the opening. I was in time to see a flash of blonde turning the corner. A guy was following her, coil tube earpiece curling from his ear to his collar.
The blonde woman had Amber Chapman’s distinctive profile.
Forty-Two
Chapman looked different all dressed up. She had makeup on and was wearing a deep blue satin dress that hugged her figure, making the most of slim curves. Her hair was combed and shiny and pleated into layers, different than the last time I had seen her being ducked into a Port Morris police department cruiser.
I came around the corner and there were two options. One was a hole in the concrete wall leading to an outdoor area, smelling of barbecue. The other was the bathroom. No men’s room, no women’s room, just one room. A large enclosure with stalls on either side. The guy who had followed Chapman was standing at the door. A steady flow of bearded customers moved in and out of the stalls, beer soaked bodies either relieved or in need of relief, either hustling in with short steps on tight legs, or coming out, loose limbed and ready for more Alaskan.