Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  “Ready?” he asked, putting down the phone.

  “Sure,” she said.

  He rummaged in a cupboard and turned to her and said, “Gosh, I can’t find the damn coveralls we keep for visitors. I guess those Japanese buyers used them all up.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Shall we be very daring and walk through without all that stuff? You won’t tell my quality control manager, will you? Just don’t touch any product.”

  Jane, who had no intention of touching anything in a fish plant if she could help it, said, “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. But won’t we be setting a bad example for the third shift?”

  “Oh, there was a message on the voice mail. The manager sent them home early. Seems we ran out of fish.”

  She followed him down a dark, narrow corridor until they came to a door that led to a big concrete room with wet floors and walls, filled with gleaming stainless-steel equipment. It was freezing cold.

  Putnam turned to her in the half light and smiled, then drew back his arm and hit her across the face with his knuckles. She fell onto the cold, wet concrete. Beyond the ringing in her ears, she heard his voice and its echo. “You lying bitch!” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  She had to get up. All she could think was that she had to get up as soon as she could. She had to get up so she could get away. She had to get up because the floor was wet and cold and hard. She had to get up so he wouldn’t be standing over her, humiliating her as he was now.

  She pulled herself backward over the concrete so that when she did get up she’d be out of range of his knuckles. It was ridiculous—he could step toward her, he could hit her again, he could do anything he wanted, but she wanted to stand up away from him.

  He let her struggle to her feet, then stepped toward her, into her space. She took a step back. “Don’t!” she heard herself say. She sounded scared.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted. “What are you after?”

  “I’m visiting your plant,” she said, trying not to panic.

  He rushed at her, twisted her arm behind her back and leaned into her face. “What are you and that Kraut up to?” he demanded. She closed her eyes, unable to bear his face so close to hers. “You told me at dinner you didn’t even see him in Seattle. Now I find out you arrived in town together.”

  “Ow, you’re hurting me,” she said.

  “That’s right. And I’m going to go on hurting you until you tell me why you’re spying on me. Why did you lie to me? I don’t like people playing games with me.” He gave her arm a yank, and she cried out in pain.

  “Let go,” she gasped, “and I’ll tell you.” She knew that he was perfectly capable of torturing her until she told him something plausible. What really scared her was the feeling she had that he wanted to hurt her anyway, that he was enjoying it. He’d smiled right before he’d backhanded her.

  Putnam was still holding on to her arm. “I’m working for him,” she said. “He’s a detective. He hired me to ask you a few questions, that’s all.”

  “So you set up that little scene in Norway just so I’d come in there and be the cavalry?” he said.

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that at all,” she gasped, shifting her position a little so that her arm wouldn’t hurt so much. “He only hired me a day or so ago. This is the first thing I’ve done for him.”

  With his free hand, Putnam grabbed her hair and yanked her face closer to his. Her whole scalp hurt. It felt as if he were pulling it off her skull. She cried out. “What does he want to know?” he hissed.

  Jane didn’t think for a single moment of not telling him. She wasn’t getting paid enough to stonewall under these circumstances. “He thinks you might know something about this salmon sabotage,” she said, her face contorted with pain as he gave her arm another tug. “I told him I was sure you didn’t, but he wanted me to check it out anyway.”

  Putnam let go of her hair, and the first, faint feeling of hope came over her. Maybe if she talked more, he’d let go of her arm, too.

  “For some reason he thought you and your brother knew who was turning salmon blue. He’s investigating the whole thing for the salmon farmers,” she said quickly.

  He let go of her arm. Jane stepped away, rubbing her arm, then stood up straight, trying through sheer willpower to summon back her dignity. “I’d like to go now,” she said. “We can forget this ever happened.” Not damn likely, she thought. She would never forget about it, and one way or another she would find some way of humiliating Bob Putnam the way he’d humiliated her.

  “You better be telling the truth,” he said.

  She stepped back a pace and looked over his shoulder at the door. His body was beginning to bristle again. Please, she thought. Please, God, don’t let him knock me down again.

  His face was twisting back into anger. “Something here doesn’t add up. If you’re lying again, so help me God, I’ll—”

  “I’m afraid to lie to you,” Jane replied truthfully. “Please, I just want to go.” Maybe if she seemed weak, he would let her go. What else could she do? There wasn’t any way she could be stronger. She could only be weaker and hope it worked. “It’s so cold here,” she said in a frightened voice. Back in Seattle she knew a huge Samoan she could hire to knock him down, smash his face in, kick him, hurt him.

  Putnam smiled unpleasantly. “Your Kraut friend wants you to fuck me to find out if I’ve been turning salmon blue, right?”

  She started to feel nauseated, then heard a telephone ring in the distance. Putnam turned in the direction of the sound for just a second, as if deciding whether or not to answer it. While he did, Jane ran.

  There was a pair of flat metal doors without knobs at the other end of the cavernous plant area, the kind of industrial swinging doors you saw in hospitals or big restaurants. She didn’t know what lay beyond them, but she decided she had no other choice but to run in that direction. She ran what seemed like the length of a football field, careening around the stainless-steel equipment in the half-light, going as fast as she could without slipping on the wet concrete.

  She could hear footsteps behind her, but they weren’t running. They were walking, slowly and steadily. Why wasn’t he chasing her? The phone had stopped ringing. Putnam’s footsteps sounded maddeningly calm, as though he knew she could not escape, while her heart was crashing against her ribs and her body was covered with prickles of fear.

  She flung herself against the doors, making a huge metallic thump. They were locked. She could see an inch or so of light where they met and, halfway down, the black bar of the lock. Now she understood why Putnam was taking his time. His feet echoed steadily, coming closer.

  Suddenly Jane heard a tune she had sung hundreds of times coming from behind the steel doors. It was “Some Enchanted Evening” in a slushy string arrangement. There must be a nightwatchman listening to the radio. She pounded on the metal surface, making a loud, hollow, shuddery sound. “Open the door!” she yelled.

  Putnam’s footsteps came faster now. He had begun to run. Another set of much slower footsteps was approaching from the other side of the doors. She pounded again and again, hammering the door with her closed fists and screaming, “Please! Help me!”

  Finally, just as Putnam reached her and laid a viselike hand on her shoulder, the thin column of light that came from between the doors went black, and she heard the click of the lock.

  The doors were being pushed toward her from the other side, so she had to step back against Bob Putnam. The feeling of his body behind her filled her with a rage that wiped away the physical sensations of fear.

  As soon as the gap was wide enough, Jane tumbled through the open doors into the arms of an astonished-looking man.

  “Thank you,” she heard herself say to him breathlessly as she stepped into a carpeted hall. A strangely accented male voice began to accompany the lush string orchestration of “Some Enchanted Evening.” She took a look at her savior. He was about forty, wearing a yellow broadcloth sh
irt with a loosened striped tie and gray slacks.

  “Hey, Dennis,” Putnam said easily. “Thanks. We got locked in there, and the lady panicked, I guess. Good thing you were here. Working late?”

  Dennis gave Jane a quick, puzzled glance and turned his attention to Putnam. “I’ve got those buyers from Osaka in the conference room. We’re having drinks and we’ve got the karaoke machine cranked up. We were just about to head out for dinner. It’s going great. I figure we can move a couple of containers to start and then go on from there.”

  Dennis’s deferential manner made it clear that complaining about her abuse at the hands of Bob Putnam might be a mistake. “I’m Jane da Silva,” she heard herself say in an astonishingly normal voice. “Seafood Now magazine. Sorry I lost it there. I guess I do get claustrophobic. Any chance you could give me a lift back to somewhere near my hotel? That is, if you’re heading that way? I am kind of shook up.”

  Dennis looked to his boss for approval of this plan. Jane gave Putnam a steely, defiant stare, intended as a threat. If he tried to prevent her leaving, she’d make a huge fuss in front of Dennis and the fish buyers from Osaka. “Let’s just call it a day,” she said to Putnam.

  He shrugged. “Okay. I’ve got some stuff I can do in the office,” he said to Dennis. “I’d appreciate it if you’d run her back.” He glanced at Jane. “I’ll be in touch,” he said ambiguously, then walked casually down the hall away from them, his hands in his pockets. Jane willed herself not to break down and collapse. She had to wait until she was safely away from here.

  Dennis led her through an open doorway into a smoke-filled room with a big conference table, a collection of executive-style swiveling chairs and a teak sideboard with doors open to reveal a well-stocked bar.

  Four Japanese men in blue suits were laughing and applauding a fifth, who was bowing, microphone in hand, in front of a karaoke machine with screen and speakers, apparently having concluded his version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic.

  Dennis introduced her to the men, who lined up and presented her with business cards, while she apologized that she didn’t have hers with her. “We’re giving the lady a ride to town,” he explained. Jane wondered if her face showed signs of having been struck. Bruises would take some time to develop, she supposed. No one seemed to be scrutinizing her face, so she decided she must look normal.

  “But first she must sing for us,” said one of the men with a big smile. Jane had a feeling that the happy hour had been going on for some time.

  “No, no,” she said, trying to look modest and shy. All she wanted to do was get the hell out of here.

  “Yes! Come on!” the man said playfully while the others laughed, sipped whiskey and chatted among themselves in Japanese.

  “They can be pretty insistent,” Dennis said apologetically. “They’re really big on this karaoke stuff.”

  “I know,” said Jane. “They invented it.” This had to be one of the most bizarre evenings of her life. One minute she was struggling with a maniac, the next she was asked to entertain some out-of-town businessmen over drinks.

  Dennis gave her a pleading look.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, trying to sound like a good sport. In a perverse way, she actually didn’t mind that much. She felt grateful to her unwitting rescuers, and the idea of singing made her feel that she was safely back in her own normal world again.

  They loved her “As Time Goes By” and appreciated the fact that she didn’t even need to read the crawling white letters. After a round of enthusiastic applause, they finished their drinks, crushed their smokes and followed her and Dennis out through the rain to his car.

  They all piled into some kind of van and drove back up K Street. The windshield wipers were cranked up to full speed. Jane wondered what Bob Putnam was doing right then. It didn’t matter. She was safe. “Just let me off in front of my hotel,” she said, practically falling out of the vehicle in her haste to get away.

  She went into the lobby for just a second, but as soon as she figured Dennis and his customers had left, she went back out and walked up the block to Gunther Kessler’s motel. She knew that as soon as she saw pedantic, irritating old Gunther, she’d feel much better. She wanted him to take her back to Seattle that night.

  She couldn’t help imagining Bob Putnam stalking her for that one block in the dark. The street was completely deserted, and she was very cold. She walked briskly, ignoring the rain that came down hard, her feet lit by the pale yellow of the occasional streetlight reflecting in a smear from the puddles of the old, uneven sidewalk. The brighter lights of his motel served as a beacon. Room 17 was on the bottom floor, around the corner from the office, and there was light coming from behind the curtains. Jane rapped hard on the door.

  There was no answer. Had he gone out to get a bite to eat? His rental car was there. A wind came up and rattled the door. Jane tried the knob. It turned. She stepped into the room.

  Gunther lay sprawled across the bed, a thin, mustard-colored bedspread twisted underneath him, a blood-spattered pillow next to him, his arms flung to either side, a massive splotch of red covering his chest. From the wide-eyed stare and the gaping mouth, the horrifying, abandoned look of a face without a soul, she knew right away that he was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She went into the room, picking her way over an upturned lamp that sent a crazy oval of light into one corner of the ceiling, leaving everything else in semidark, past Gunther’s highly polished black shoes, arranged neatly next to the bed, side by side. The door slammed shut behind her, which almost made her scream. By force of will she turned it into a sharp intake of breath and told herself that the wind had done it. She had to stay calm.

  She looked around the tiny room, peered into the bathroom. There was no one here. She picked up the telephone receiver and, shaking, held it to her ear, all the while trying not to look at Gunther’s face, focusing instead on his feet—long, rather elegant feet in smooth, black, silk ribbed socks. She stabbed at the 0 button, but the line was completely dead.

  She would have to go to the motel office, somewhere on the other side of the building. She let the receiver fall from her hand with a clunk that sounded very loud in the still room and backed away from the phone, working her way around those shoes and then quickly back to the doorway.

  As soon as she opened the door, she felt herself pushed back into the room by large hands. A meaty arm wrapped itself around her throat, and a sharp metal object jabbed her in the ribs.

  “Shut up, okay?” said a voice. She found herself face-to-face with Bob Putnam’s brother, Don. At the level of her chest, he held a small black gun.

  “It’s okay,” he said in a voice edged with panic. “Just be quiet. Be quiet or I’ll shoot you. I gotta find out what to do.”

  She stared at the gun, willing it not to go off. “I was going to get some help,” she said innocently, as if Gunther had merely fainted.

  “Too late. He’s dead,” said Don. “His chest is all blown away. I didn’t mean to. He tried some weird martial arts thing on me. I didn’t have a choice. It’s just a little chicken-shit gun. It doesn’t even make noise. Just a little pop. It’s a ladies’ gun.” His voice was shaking, and when Jane looked down at the gun, ridiculously small in his big paw, she saw his hand was shaking, too.

  “Don’t shoot me,” she said. “Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Bob will know what to do,” said Don, his confidence returning slowly. “He might be mad at me, but he’ll know what to do.”

  “You can explain everything real easily,” she said, desperate to calm him down so he wouldn’t panic and fire. “It sounds like it was all in self-defense. Bob knows that Gunther knew that martial arts stuff. He tried it on Bob, too, back in Norway.”

  “It’s the gun. He’ll be mad I kept the gun,” said Don, biting his lower lip. “He told me to get rid of it in Seattle. I had an accident with it.”

  She forced herself to look at the gun. It was small and black, wit
h a rubber grip. And he’d called it a ladies’ gun. She had a good idea just what that accident might have been.

  “We won’t tell,” Jane assured him. “Maybe if you give it to me, then he won’t know. I can throw it away.”

  Suddenly he stiffened. “You think I’m stupid, I guess,” he said. “Well, I’m not. No way.”

  “Of course I don’t think that, Don,” she said, hoping that if she used his name, it would all seem more personal and make it less easy for him to shoot her. “You’ve just had a few bad breaks. You didn’t mean to kill Gunther, I know that. You didn’t mean to hurt that girl, either. Like you said, it was an accident.”

  He looked frightened all of a sudden. “How did you know?” he said in a whisper.

  “Bob told me. Bob told me what you did,” she said.

  “No, he couldn’t have,” said Don, looking confused.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Jane said.

  Don’s voice caught. “She pointed the gun at me,” he said. “I tried to take it away from her, that’s all. The fucking thing went off.”

  There was a timid knock at the door. Maybe someone had heard something. Maybe the manager was coming to investigate. As soon as the door opened, she’d hit the ground in case Don panicked and fired.

  Don smiled. “There he is,” he said. “Open the door, okay?”

  But Bob Putnam opened the door himself, just wide enough to insinuate himself inside the room. He closed the door gently.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, taking in Gunther. Then he looked over at Jane. “Oh, great,” he said. “She’s here.”

  Don shrugged. “She was here when I came back from calling you.”

  “Keep that gun on her,” Bob said. “If she moves or tries to make any noise, you know what to do.” He moved back to the door and slid the brass bolt into the door frame. “We gotta figure out what the fuck we’re going to do.”