Harley laughed. “To who? You really think anybody’s listening out there?”
Charlie did sometimes wonder how many there were, but envelopes containing small checks and five-dollar bills did occasionally show up in his mailbox, so there had to be some. Not to mention the fact that he had two women in his house who had found him over the Web.
“I’m not gonna argue about this,” Charlie said, with the authority that always carried the day. “Get going.”
When he hung up and turned around on the cold deck, Rebekah was standing in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of one of her long dresses. Bathsheba was lurking right behind her, apparently persuaded that the Rapture had been postponed. Their white faces and beaked noses put him in mind of seagulls.
“We lost the connection online,” Rebekah said. “I told you we don’t have enough bandwidth.”
Harley dropped the phone on the mattress and lay there for a while. Why did Charlie always get to call the shots? It couldn’t be because he was in a wheelchair; it had been like this his whole life. Angie had told Harley he should just leave Port Orlov and start over someplace where his brother couldn’t boss him around. And he was starting to think that, dumb as she was, she was right about that much. If this graveyard gig worked out, and the coffins did contain valuable stuff, then that just might be his ticket to the good life in the Lower 48.
He wouldn’t even give his brother his phone number.
Getting up, he stumbled around the trailer, looking for some clean clothes—or clothes that would pass for clean—and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a proper brush. The floor was ankle deep in detritus—beer cans, cereal boxes, martial-arts magazines—and all of it was bathed in a faint violet glow from the snake cage on the counter next to the microwave. Glancing in, he saw Fergie curled on the rock, and he said, “You hungry?” He couldn’t remember when he had last fed her, so he opened the freezer and took out a frozen mouse—it was curled up like a question mark in a plastic baggie—and nuked it for about a minute. Once he had left one in too long and the stench had made the trailer unlivable for a week. He’d had to move back home with Charlie and the witches, and that was so creepy he couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bathsheba, in particular, kept turning up outside his door on one dumb pretext or another.
The trailer was parked about a hundred yards off Front Street, between the lumberyard and a place called the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe. Harley had never asked anybody if he could park it there, and nobody had ever told him he couldn’t. That was one thing that you could say for Alaska—the place was still wide open.
But freezing. Even though the Yardarm was only a few minutes’ walk away, by the time he got there his ears were burning from the cold, and he had to stand in the doorway soaking up the heat. The usual crowd was around, Angie was carrying out a tray of burgers and fries, but some things were different: there were two guys at the bar he had never seen before—real straight-arrow types, still in their Coast Guard uniforms—and over in the far corner, Nika Tincook was at a table with two other men he’d never laid eyes on. Four strangers in one night, in a bar in Port Orlov—that was positively breaking news.
On her way back to the kitchen, Harley snagged Angie by the arm and said, “What’s up?”
“Harley, don’t do that here—the boss is watching.”
But he couldn’t fail to notice that her eyes had flitted in the direction of the two Coast Guard dudes, one of whom had glanced back.
“Who are they?”
“Pilots.”
“I can see that.”
“Were you just handling those dead mice again?” she said, wrinkling her nose. She brushed at the place on her arm where he’d been holding her.
“What are they doing here?”
“You got me. Why don’t you ask them?”
She pulled away and went back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Harley, hoping nobody had noticed how she shrugged him off all of a sudden, sauntered over toward the bar and eased himself onto a stool near the Coast Guardsmen. Engrossed in their own conversation, they didn’t acknowledge him in any way.
He ordered a beer and then, leaning toward them, said, “Never seen you guys around town.”
“Just passing through,” the one with the blond crew cut said, but without turning around.
“On that chopper that flew in?”
The red-haired one—who’d been checking out Angie—nodded warily.
“Oh yeah? If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the job?”
“Routine,” the redhead said, and when Harley looked over at the crew-cut guy, he, too, just stared down into his nearly empty mug and said, “Training mission.”
Then they kind of closed up like a clamshell, talking to each other in low tones, and Harley felt like a horse’s ass sitting there on the stool next to them. But he wasn’t about to get up and leave right away because that would make it look even worse. Instead, he sat there and finished his beer, trying to draw the bartender into conversation about the latest Seahawks game. But even Al was too busy to talk.
There was a boisterous laugh from the rear, back near the pool tables, and Harley saw it was from the husky guy in glasses, the one sitting between the tall, thin guy and Port Orlov’s illustrious mayor, Nika. Harley had never had a thing for native chicks—he liked leggy blondes, even if they were fake blondes like Angie—but for Nika, he had often told his pals Eddie and Russell, he would make an exception. She couldn’t have been more than five-three, five-four, with big, dark eyes and hair as black as a seal. But he loved the way she was built—trim and hard, and when the weather was good and she went around town in just a fleece jacket, with her long hair loose and whipping in the wind, he had to admit she got him going.
After putting away one more beer and hanging out by the jukebox like he cared what played next, he meandered back toward the pool tables. Selecting a cue from the rack, he pretended to be checking its tip and its straightness, and then, as if offhandedly, noticed Nika sitting a few feet away. “Hey, Your Honor,” he said, facetiously.
“Harley.”
“Want to run a few balls with me?”
“Another time.”
He was debating what his next move should be when the tall guy, with the remains of a burger and fries on the plate in front of him, saved him the trouble. “Is that Harley as in Vane?” he asked.
“The one and only. Accept no substitutes.”
“Frank Slater,” he said, rising enough to extend a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you. I heard about your ordeal.”
“Yeah, that’s what it was, all right.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he said, pushing out an extra chair. “I’m a doctor—it’s in our nature.” This was too good to be true, Harley thought, even if Nika did look like she was going to shit a brick. Harley turned the chair around so that he could lean his arms on the back as he sat down.
“This is Professor Kozak,” Slater said.
“Prof.” When they shook, the guy’s grip was like a vise—not like any professor’s that Harley’d ever heard of. Had to be a Russkie.
“I’m glad to see you look completely recovered,” the doctor observed. “No residual effects then?”
“Nah, I’m okay,” Harley said, though if the guy had asked about any mental effects, he could have told him a different story. Every time he closed his eyes, he had a nightmare about being chased by a pack of black wolves, only they all had human faces.
“You know, there’s something called PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and it can hit you days, weeks, or even months, after something like what happened to you.”
Harley had seen enough TV shows to know all about it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard.”
“I just wanted you to keep it in mind,” he said, “and let you know that you should see someone if you start having some problems dealing with the fallout. It would be completely normal if you did.”
Harley snic
kered. “Yeah, okay. If I start freaking out, I’ll just go and see one of the shrinks we don’t have, at the hospital that doesn’t exist.”
The doc nodded, like he knew he’d just made an ass of himself, but at the same time Harley felt this weird urge to take him up on the offer and get some of this crap off his chest—to tell him about the dreams of the wolves and the sight of somebody with a yellow lantern. It wasn’t like he could confess any of it to Russell or Eddie—they’d just tell him to have another beer—and even Angie would think he was acting like a pussy.
“You mind if I ask you a question now?” Harley said.
“Shoot.”
“What are you doing out here in the armpit of Alaska?” Glancing at Nika, he added, “No offense, Your Honor.”
“None taken. And you can knock off the ‘Your Honor’ stuff.”
He liked that it had gotten to her.
Slater bobbed his head, wiped up some ketchup with the last of his fries, and said, “Just some preparedness drills with the Coast Guard. Better safe than sorry.”
But his eyes didn’t meet Harley’s, and now Harley knew that something pretty big must be up, after all. Charlie’s suspicions were right; he might be an asshole, but he was smart. Harley would give him that.
“By the way,” Slater said, “what ever happened to that coffin lid that you rode to shore like a surfboard? I saw a photo of it in the paper.”
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
“As a doctor?”
Slater’s expression gave away nothing—and everything.
“I was thinking about putting it up on eBay,” Harley taunted. “But if you want to make me a cash offer …”
“Actually,” Slater said, “I was thinking along rather different lines. I was thinking that it doesn’t belong to you, and it ought to go back where it came from.”
“Oh yeah? Where’s that?”
“To the graveyard, on St. Peter’s Island.”
Then Slater looked straight at Harley, no bullshit anymore, and Harley could see he was dealing with more than some doc on a training run. So it was high time that the doc knew who he was dealing with, too.
“Law of the sea,” Harley said. “I found it, it’s salvage, and it’s mine. And no one better fuck with me.” He stood up, pushing off from the chair. “See you around,” he said, before glancing at Nika and adding, “Your Honor.”
“I do not think I would trust that man,” Kozak said, as Harley stalked off. Finishing off his mug of beer, he plunked the glass down on the table and burped softly.
“I think you would be right not to,” Nika said. “Harley and his brother Charlie are both bad news.”
Kozak excused himself to head for the men’s room, and Slater asked her for the full rundown.
“We’d be here all night,” Nika said, “just going through the police blotter.” But she gave him the capsule description of the Vane family and its long history in the town of Port Orlov. He seemed particularly intrigued when she mentioned that Charlie ran an evangelical mission over the Web.
“So that explains the lighted cross above that house in the woods,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice it from the chopper.”
“X marks the spot.”
“And you think he’s for real?”
That was a tough one, and even Nika was of two minds. “I think he thinks so. But can a leopard really change its spots? Underneath, I’ve got to believe that Charlie Vane is still the same petty crook he’s always been. You can judge for yourself tomorrow.”
“How come?”
“He’s sure to be at the funeral service for the crew of the Neptune II. The whole town will turn out.”
“I’m not sure the professor and I should attend.”
Nika laughed. “You might as well. I mean, if you think your being here is some kind of secret, you’ve never been to a town like Port Orlov. Harley’s probably bragging already about how he told you to stuff it. If he’s lucky, it’ll be a good enough story to get Angie Dobbs back into bed with him.”
“Who’s Angie Dobbs?”
“The town’s most eligible bachelorette,” Nika replied. “The blond waitress over by the jukebox.”
Indeed, Harley was loudly regaling her, and a couple of others, with some tale or other. Slater wryly shook his head.
“It sounds like you’ve got your hands full running this town.”
Nika shrugged; she didn’t want him to think she felt that way. But it was the truth, nevertheless. Port Orlov, like so many Inuit villages in Alaska, was a wreck. With far too few social services and way too many problems, there were times when she felt marooned in the wilderness. Even if the town could just manage to get a decent, full-time medical clinic, it would be a huge step forward, but try finding the money for it, much less a doctor to staff it. For all of her noble intentions, Nika only had two hands and there were only so many hours in the day.
“We make do with what we’ve got,” she finally said.
“Sometimes,” he sympathized, “the satisfaction has to come from knowing you’ve done all that you can. No matter what the odds.”
She had the feeling that he was talking about his own work, too, and she wondered what terrible scenarios he might be revisiting in his mind. He had the look of a man who’d seen things no one should see, done things no one should ever have to have done. And despite their differences—not to mention that fact that they’d gotten off to a bumpy start at the hockey rink—she was starting to feel as if Slater might prove to be a kindred spirit.
In a backwater like this, they weren’t easy to come by.
Chapter 16
“Who do you trust?” Charlie asked, staring into the Skype lens attached to his computer.
“You mean which doctor?” the woman asked, confused. “I don’t know, they’re all so confusing, talking about carcinomas and—”
“Who do you trust?” Charlie broke in, his powerful hands gripping the wheels of his chair.
The woman on the screen visibly drew into herself, shoulders hunched, head down. Her straggly hair looked plastered to her skull.
“Who gives it to you straight?”
“You do?” she ventured, like a student hoping she’d found the right answer.
“Wrong!” he exploded.
She shrank further.
“I’m just the vessel, I’m just the messenger. Jesus gives it to you straight. ‘Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Jesus is saying, put your faith in me—all your faith, not just a little bit, not just whatever you think you can spare—but the whole enchilada.”
“I do,” she pleaded, “I do believe in the whole thing, in God, but—”
“No ‘buts’ allowed! God says give it all, and I will return it all, one hundred fold. What’s holding you back?”
She paused. Children’s voices could be heard from another room. “I’m afraid,” she said in a furtive voice. “I’m so afraid.”
Charlie realized he was losing her; he was coming on too strong. This woman was still in the grip of worldly concerns, she was afraid of dying, and she was putting her faith in all the wrong places. He deliberately lowered his voice and adopted a more consoling tone. “I was once like you,” he said, “before God took away the use of my legs. I lived in fear, every day, fear of losing whatever I had—my health, my family, the love of my friends.” Even Charlie had to admit that the love of his friends was a bit of a stretch, but he was on a roll and could be forgiven. “And then, God gave me a good hard slap, he wrapped my canoe around a rock in the Heron River Gorge and stuck me in this wheelchair like he was planting a turnip in the ground.” In the time before the Forestry Service had gotten there to rescue him, Charlie had seen Jesus, as plain as he saw this woman on his computer screen now. He was wearing a long white robe, just like in the pictures, only his hair was long and black and the crown of thorns sparkled, kind of like it was made of tinsel. “And I have been growing ever since. My body has shriveled, but my spirit
is as tall as a sequoia.” He had never seen Jesus again, but he knew that that day would come—either in this world, or the next.
Just out of range of the lens, and in a low voice not meant to be picked up by the computer, Rebekah said, “We’re going to be late.” She was standing in the doorway to the meeting room, her coat and gloves already on.
He waved one hand behind him, again too low to be seen, to signal that he had heard her. The woman on the screen was crying.
“I’m not as strong as you,” she murmured. “Between the biopsies and the scans and all the tests, I’m just … exhausted.”
“I hear you, Sister.” He called all of his online parishioners either Sister or Brother. “But God never gives us more than He thinks we can handle.”
“Bathsheba’s waiting in the car,” Rebekah hissed.
“I have to go now. There’s a prayer service in town; they’re waiting for me.” Although he might have given her the impression that he was presiding at the prayer service, which wasn’t exactly true, he hadn’t lied, either. There was a service—the memorial for the crewmen who had drowned on the Neptune II—but the only reason they’d be waiting for him was because he was planning to pick up his brother, Harley, who was supposed to offer some remarks. Charlie had already written them out for him.
“God be with you, Sister,” he concluded. “If you don’t abandon Him, He won’t abandon you. Never forget that.”
“I try not to.”
“PayPal,” Rebekah urged in a low voice from the doorway.
“Right,” Charlie said, so wrapped up in his divine mission that he had almost forgotten the Lord’s instructions to find the means to spread the word. “And don’t forget to send in your tithe via PayPal.”
The woman nodded, blowing her nose into a wadded-up ball of Kleenex.
“Bless you, Sister.”
“Bless you,” she said, before signing off.
Rebekah, sighing in exasperation—“You must think this place runs on prayers instead of money!”—wheeled him down the ramp to the garage, then helped as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of the blue minivan. His upper-body strength was still good. While Rebekah stowed the chair in the back, Bathsheba huddled over a book. If Charlie asked her what she was reading, she would claim it was Scripture, but more than once, it had turned out to be one of those Twilight books about vampires and such. Charlie had had to chastise her severely.
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