“Your father is fine. You banged your head when the boat overturned, but the doctors say you can come home in a couple of days.”
“Alec? Mr. Collins?”
His mother wiped away a tear. He didn’t hear her words.
He never again went near the water. A few weeks later, his parents took him on a picnic to a beach. He sat there for a few minutes before his heart started to race, his breaths shallowing. The waves grasping for him, sweat forming on his face. He fled from that place to the car, refusing to be enticed from it. His parents packed up the picnic basket and blankets and drove to a park. One that was surrounded by trees. He had never even entered a swimming pool since.
————
He awoke. The bedsheets were damp. His back, his underarms, were slippery with sweat. He looked at the clock. 2:37. He got up and poured himself a glass of water. It would be a long time before he got back to sleep. Was his nighttime panic a memory or an omen?
14
At Bentron’s, Travathan expected that Winters would drive him to a launch dock and where, even before he lifted the kayak off the roof rack, Travathan could back down, cancel the trip, and ask his questions. But when he got out of his car, a bus with about a dozen people on board was waiting. Winters beckoned to him to get in.
“Who are all these people?”
“Rafters. They’re going through Hell’s Gate as well.”
Damn. He had hoped to get Winters alone before they got into the kayak. With a crowd of tour guides and rafters, that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe he could delay their trip until after the raft was launched. No, there was still the bus driver and a few assistants from Bentron’s. Much as he loathed the idea, this was looking like plan B: get into the kayak and plead with Winters to beach it before they reached the canyon. Could he do it? His heart thudded in his chest, the sweat pooling under his arms. He steeled himself. He was a cop. An investigator. No longer a teenaged boy traumatized by a tragedy. If he had to subject himself to the river and the kayak, he would. He had one consolation: when he pleaded with Winters to beach the damn thing, he wouldn’t have to feign terror.
The bus pulled up to a landing a couple of miles above Hell’s Gate where the tourists got off and gathered near the riverbank while the guides readied the rafts. Winters carried the kayak to the water and called to Travathan. “We’re up first. Let’s go.”
Plan B. Travathan inhaled, closed his eyes, and eased his way into the kayak hoping Winters was too busy to notice his fear.
The river was narrowing, squeezing into a channel, the water becoming more restive with whitecaps toward the middle and eddies swirling nearer the banks. Travathan, seated in the rear compartment, forced himself to paddle. A focus on the work, one step at a time, might divert his mind from the fear. But he soon found out there wasn’t much paddling to do. The current was enough to move them along, and Winters was doing no more than necessary to keep the boat on course. So he quelled his terror by gripping the paddle and concentrating on the river banks for a spot where he could plead for Winters to pull into.
A motion to his left. A man near the shore raised something. Puffs of water exploded beside the kayak. Travathan yelled, “Rifle. Someone’s shooting at us.” He heaved on his paddle, swinging the bow of the craft toward the opposite shore. Another hail of bullets spattered the water beside the kayak.
Winters shouted, “Hold your breath,” and thrust on the paddle.
The kayak overturned, the two men suspended upside down in the water. Travathan saw the strategy. The kayak’s hull, half submerged, would present a target too small for the gunman.
But he was in the water. He had to get out of here. No. Giving in to impulses made things worse. Years of training had carved the lesson into his brain. Squelch panic. Evaluate.
Get out? Then what? He’d be alone in the river. Tumbling toward rapids he could never survive. His best chance? Stay in the kayak. Hope Winters’s boast was accurate. He swallowed, trying to hold in the air he had been able to suck in before the kayak overturned. His lungs were screaming. Bubbles of air leaked from his mouth. A reflex. A small breath. Water in his lungs. He gasped. He clamped his mouth shut against the spasms from his chest. He could hold on no longer. His lungs expanded. His diaphragm contracted. Water flowed down his windpipe. He gripped the sides of the kayak. Leaving it would be suicide. So was staying. He was slipping away.
Air. Against his face. The kayak righted. He coughed, doubled over, water spewing from his lungs. His breathing changed from chokes to gasps. He looked back up the river. The gunman was nowhere in sight. His panting eased, his spasms subsided. He was becoming conscious of the flow of air now filling his lungs. And of a roaring sound. He heard Kevin Winters yell, “Hang on.”
The kayak hit the leading edge of the foam. Winters whooped, a bellow of joy. Travathan gripped the sides of the craft. What the gunman had been unable to achieve, the river would, and if this was the day he was to die, it might as well be with gusto. His yells joined with Winters’s. The kayak plunged into the gorge.
He lost all sense of direction. His body was a puppet being wrenched by a madman. He snapped to and fro at the will of the river, slamming against the sides of the compartment. He braced his legs against the ribs of the kayak to prevent them from smashing through. He gripped the rim, his paddle long gone. Solid spray, insubstantial, violent, overwhelmed him. The rock of the canyon wall was a blur, close enough to touch, granite fingers groping for the craft. If the kayak hit it, it would be demolished, but the fate of the kayak wasn’t in his hands. This was Kevin Winters’s show. He forced his eyes shut. If death came, he didn’t want to see it.
His world calmed. The chaos subsided. They were through. He gaped back at the turmoil, now behind them and joined Winters in cheers of triumph, not over the river that still raged, but in celebration of his victory over the death that had seemed inevitable. He was alive. He raised his arms in jubilation and grinned back at Winters.
They pulled the kayak onto a sandbar and turned it over, looking for holes. The elation of their passage through Hell’s Gate was over, the memory of the gunman casting dark shadows over Winters’s face. “Sometimes, we have people throw stuff at us. Vandals. Once someone even tried to drop something off the footbridge, but nobody’s ever shot at us. I have to apologize. I’ll get you a full refund. More, I’ll give you a one-year pass for any of our tours. If you hadn’t spotted that idiot, we’d both be dead.”
Travathan looked around. This spot was as good as any. “Actually,” he said, “I think he was after you, Kevin.”
Winters’s face flickered for an instant before it returned to normal. “Kevin? My name is David.”
“No, you’re Kevin Winters, former letter carrier and sometime lover of Sherry Galina before she was murdered.”
Winters started to object, then slumped back against the sand. “How did you find me?”
“Does it matter? The point is we did, and so did someone else who wants you dead. Look, Kevin, believe it or not, I’m on your side. I’m not here to turn you over to the cops. If I were, I would have just done so instead of putting myself through that.” He gestured back toward the gorge.
“So what do you want?”
“Information.”
“Hell of a way to get it. It would have been easier just to buy me a beer.”
“I couldn’t take the chance you’d duck out again.”
“Again? Hold on. Do you think I killed Sherry and ran? No way. Okay, we were having sex. In fact, it was the best sex I’ve ever had. But it was never anything other than two people out for a good time. She made no demands on me, and I sure didn’t want anything from her other than a great lay. There’s no way I would have killed her.”
“Well, you have to admit it looks suspicious, but I’m open to other explanations.”
“Why do you care? What’s your interest in her?”
“I’m rectifying a miscarriage of justice. I think the wrong man was convicted of her murder.�
��
“And you think I did it?”
Travathan shook his head. “No, I don’t. I suspect you were also supposed to be a victim. Like Ron Mahmoud.”
Winters’ eyes narrowed. Travathan saw a man who seemed to be struggling between protecting a long-held secret or revealing it to the man who had just saved his life. He sighed and said, “What do you want to know?”
“What happened when Sherry Galina was killed?”
Winters shook his head. “I don’t know. I stopped over at her house that morning. We had sex. I carried on. She was alive when I left. I heard about her murder on the news that evening.”
“The medical examiner puts the time of death at between four and six p.m.”
“Yeah, I know. I was at a bar with a bunch of the guys from the post office. We got there about four, and we finally broke up around seven. I’ve got an alibi.”
“Well, Kevin, that makes it even more puzzling that you ran. Even if the police found out about your affair, your alibi puts you out of their reach. So why take off, leaving, I might add, two weeks’ pay behind? And why did you change your name? What are you afraid of?”
Winters looked around as if, even in this sandbar isolated on the edge of a dense forest, ears were listening. “I’ve lived with this for three years now. I guess it’s time to talk about it. Okay. I’ll tell you what I know.”
15
Winters studied Travathan and said, “I guess I haven’t lived the most upstanding life.”
“Your former co-workers told me that.”
“Yeah, party animal and all that. Well one thing they didn’t know was that I was also a gambler. And not a good one. I was into a bookie, a guy named Strelnick, for about twenty grand.”
“Twenty grand? That’s a hell of a debt.”
“You’re telling me. I hit that when I put five thousand on the Lakers to beat the five-and-a-half-point spread. They won by five. One lousy bucket, and I’d have scored big. It would have wiped out my debt and put a wad in my pocket. But it didn’t happen.”
“And that pushed you to twenty thousand? Pretty big hill to climb.”
“Too big. No way I’d ever be able to repay it on my salary.”
“Is that why you ran?”
Winters said, “Why I ran? No. This happened a few years before I ever met Sherry.”
“Did this Strelnick take his pound of flesh?”
“I expected him to. I went to a bar and got drunk. I guess I figured if I was boozed up, I wouldn’t feel the beating I was sure his goons were about to give me.”
“Did they?”
“No. They grabbed me after I left the bar. I figured I was dead. But they shoved me into a car with Strelnick and another guy.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I never did find out his name. Strelnick told me this guy was going to make me a proposal. If I accepted it, my debt would be erased. If not, I’d probably be dead.”
“What was the proposal?”
“This guy wanted me to give him an address on my route, one that received a lot of mail. He said he didn’t intend to harm the people at that address, he just needed to use it. Understand, I’m no hero and I sure didn’t want to face Strelnick’s enforcers. So I gave him an address. The Cramers. 5967 Roseway Crescent.”
Travathan frowned. “That’s Sherry Galina’s address.”
“Yeah, it was. But at that time, the Cramers lived there.”
“What did this man want?”
“He told me that every couple of weeks, there would be a letter addressed to someone named Leslie Charters at that address. I was to intercept the letter and not deliver it.”
“Did he tell you what was in the letters?”
Winters grimaced. “I asked, but this guy said he wouldn’t tolerate questions. He also implied that if I opened a letter, it could be fatal for me.”
“Fatal?”
“That was the word he used. Believe me, I never asked.”
“What did he want you to do with the letters?”
“There’s a recycle bin at the Roseway Circle Shopping Center. He told me I was to drop the letter into the bin. It had a sign. Bottles, Cans. I was to remove the S from cans and drop it into the bin as well.”
“And that was it?”
“That was it. The guy said I’d be paid five thousand dollars a month. For the first eight months, he’d pay the money to Strelnick to pay off my debt plus a hundred percent interest. After that, the money was mine.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Only that no letters would be sent after the twenty-fifth of each month. He told me to arrange my absences accordingly. Oh, yeah. He also said I was to change out of my uniform before I put the letter into the bin. He figured a letter carrier putting a letter into a recycle bin would attract too much attention.”
“And you agreed to do this?”
“I was petrified. For a moment, I considered walking away and letting Strelnick do his worst. But that wasn’t an option.”
Travathan sat on the sandbar, his excitement growing. He was right. This was far more than just another murder. At the mention of the letters, he enjoyed the aha experience that always came when his investigations startled him with a twist he hadn’t expected.
“How long ago was this?”
“About eight, maybe nine years ago.”
“And you’ve never told anyone else about it?”
“Told anyone? Are you kidding?”
“Did you find out who picked up the letters from the recycle bin?”
“The guy warned me not to try to find out. He said that could also be fatal.”
“Sounds serious, but you didn’t answer my question. Did you find out who picked up the letters?”
Winters sighed. “It was an accident. One day I had to use the bathroom. When I came out, I saw a beggar rummaging through the bin. I figured he was looking for bottles for the refund. I wanted to chase him away, but I couldn’t risk exposing myself. I was trying to figure out what to do when he closed the lid and walked away. The letter S was back on the sign. The beggar must have picked the letters up.”
The beggar.
Aha.
“Tell me about the letters.”
“Not much to say. They were standard, business-size letters.”
“Was there a return address? Was there a stamp or was it franked?”
“No, there was no return address. They had a stamp, but from all over. Some from Germany and Italy I recall, a lot from Eastern Europe and the Middle East.”
“So most of them were mailed overseas. Okay. Tell me about the beggar. Did you ever see what he did with the letters?”
“No damn way. I dropped them into the bin and took off. Hell, I even stopped shopping at that store just in case I happened to see the handoff while I was there.”
“After Sherry Galina was killed, you ran away. Why?”
“There was a letter the day Sherry was killed. It had been the third in just over a week. That’s way more than before. And it arrived on the twenty-seventh of the month. No letters were supposed to arrive after the twenty-fifth. It was as if something was happening, about to explode. Then I heard she’d been killed. That night, I went into hiding. I kept telling myself it was nothing and I was just jumpy, but the next day, I found out about Ron and the beggar. That’s when I took off and came here. They already knew me as David Claudy. A few years back I was involved in a bit of a scandal, so I used the name Claudy whenever I came here. I didn’t figure anyone would find me.”
Travathan said, “I suggest you leave. Whoever is after you knows where you are. I probably led him here, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Don’t even go back to your place. I can give you a ride back to the city.” He handed Winters a card. “When you get settled, let me know where you are and what name you’re going by.” Winters took the card and stared at it as if it was about to bite him. Travathan added, “That’s more than a request. If you don’t contact me within a month, I’
ll go to the cops. They’ll find you.”
Winters nodded, his eyes showing something surprising for the conqueror of Hell’s Gate. Fear.
They paddled downstream to the pickup point where Ruth Janner waited. The crew loaded the kayak onto the top of the bus along with a couple of river rafts, the bus half full of rafters babbling with one another. Winters talked to one of the crew for a minute, then joined Travathan and Janner as they pulled out, back to the city. Travathan dropped Winters at a motel, took Janner to her office, and returned to his hotel.
16
Kagan said, “A dead letter drop. That puts this thing in a nasty new light.”
Janner, who had joined Kagan and Travathan in the Foundation’s meeting room, said, “A dead letter drop? I thought that was for spies to pass on secret information.”
Travathan nodded. “It is, but this one sounds more like an order for contraband such as drugs or weapons. The customer sends the order in a letter, which is passed on by drops. In this case, the letter carrier, the beggar, and probably one other person before it gets to the supplier.”
Janner said, “Why use drops? Why not just fill the order? After all, if it’s clandestine, the police wouldn’t know about it.”
Travathan scowled. “Come on, Ruth, these are criminals. None of them want to risk being ratted on. A drop system prevents that. After all, you can’t squeal on someone if you don’t know who he is.”
Kagan asked, “Okay. So you figure there’s only one other drop? Three in all?”
“Probably. Once you go beyond three, the risk of losing a letter spirals up. Fewer than three and it’s easier to break the sequence. Also, these drops don’t work for free. Paying for a lot of them is expensive.”
Kagan said, “Why do you think these drops were killed?”
Travathan shrugged. “Probably somebody wanted to eliminate the supplier.”
A Vicious Balance: A Mystery Thriller Page 9