by John Straley
“That’s what I heard.” Delaney sniffed.
“Radicals hated him. He was making real progress getting the boys on the docks better pay. He was beating them at their own game and still making management happy.”
“So?” Delaney acted as if he were also looking for clues.
“So, why was he killed with Ben Avery’s gun?”
Tom Delaney stamped softly on the ground, then looked down at George Hanson and motioned him closer with his right hand. George noticed Delaney’s Masonic ring, too tight for his fleshy finger.
“Listen, there haven’t been any tests done. No one can say anything for sure.”
“You can’t do any tests because you don’t have Ben’s gun. But it sure looks like both Avery and Kept were killed with the same caliber.” George stopped scanning and stared at something ahead of him and off to the left.
“How in the hell do you know that?” Delaney hissed.
“Christ, Tom, I’m a policeman. I’ve got to do something with my time.” Then he took three quick steps forward. “You said everybody from last night’s party has been treated and released from the hospital?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.” Delaney’s voice was growing softer, backing away from his indignation.
“What’s the name of the hospital?” George asked as he knelt down next to some dark blood spatter on some jagged rocks.
“Walk out of here, George.” Delaney stepped behind him so that his shadow fell over the blood.
“I want you to go back to the fire and give your statement to one of the detectives. I want the names of everyone who was part of this last night and I want to talk with them.”
Tom Delaney stood silently. Both of his hands were balled into fists. Then he took a toothpick out of his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. He was standing there weighing his next move, when George made it easy.
“Go!” he said, and Delaney did, though not to the fire but up the trail and back to the cars. He whistled as he walked and his men ran after him like sheep dogs headed to their kennels.
The cops who had come with George started to put up a fuss and one of them got out his cuffs but George waved him off. “As long as you got their names and contacts let them go. Send the boys from the morgue down here in case there is another body tucked away somewhere.”
The Floodwater ops trailed off up through the blackberry tunnel. One of George’s detectives pulled on a pair of leather gloves and started looking through the ashes around the edge of the fire.
“What do you think we might find here, George?” he called out over his shoulder.
“I’m not sure. Look for blood first. Look for big splashes of blood and see if they lead to anything,” he called to his detective.
“Anything like what?” the man poking at the fire pit asked.
“Anything like a dead person,” George hollered back.
George followed the blood spatter under the trees. He followed the rocks with blood and fresh dirt kicked up around them. He saw some rocks with their damp sides facing up. He saw broken sticks and drag marks punctuated by blood spatter. He walked through the woods away from the fire. Sunlight shimmered down through the trees and the smell of warm mud rose from the ground. George saw more drag marks and blood spatter leading toward the south. There was a piece of a cloth snagged on a fallen spruce lying across the path. The material was a cotton print fabric, possibly from a dress. There was a small splotch of blood on its edge. He found a partial footprint where a rock had turned in the soggy ground. It was a small pointed shoe, pressing down with way too much force: a small print deep down into the mud. Drag marks were next to the print, with blood spatter spaced every three feet or so. A woman was carrying a bleeding adult on her back.
George followed the tracks out onto the beach. The tide was up and the waves pushed lazily against the cobblestones along the shore. Two skinny spruce logs floated in the drift with a skirting of seaweed like a rubbery mat along the edge of the water.
George watched the tracks of a small, strong woman carrying a man on her back. He watched her drop him back in the woods, tripping on a slick log. He watched her struggle down the cobble beach, overturning some large rocks, blood dripping down from his dangling sleeve or his nose.
Then he watched her carry the bleeding man into the sea and disappear without a trace.
The dory sat in the bower for four nights. Slip lay in the brush and Ellie took care of him. They didn’t build a fire and they didn’t turn on a torch. They ate mildewed crackers and two of the cans of stew. The spit ran a quarter mile from the railroad tracks running along the Sound. They were somewhere north of Seattle and south of Edmonds. From the brush Slip could see the railroad bulls walking up and down the tracks. At night they took their switcher engines and traveled slowly back and forth shining their lights off to either side. A few boats passed by close to the beach and they could have been looking for them, but no one sent up a cry or came ashore. Ellie had gone down the beach early the first morning and brushed away their tracks in the sand using her hands and a spray of beach grass. That night Slip hobbled west with a bucket to get fresh water from the creek running through a culvert under the tracks. When he got back Ellie was curled on the tarp in the darkness of the bower.
“I thought you were going to sneak off,” she said, and she rolled on her side propping her head with her elbow.
“I didn’t think I could make it back.” Slip winced as he sat down.
“You took a beating,” was all she said.
“I’ve been thinking about taking out on my own.” Slip sat beside her. “I can make it to the other side of the tracks through the culvert and then get up the bluff and into the woods. I’m sure to hit a highway if I head east.”
She rolled against him and pulled his shoulder down. The damp canvas smelled musty, like animal sweat. Their clothes and blankets had begun to dry out in the spring sun. But still they were cold as she folded the tarp over the two of them.
“Stay,” she said, and her hands reached up between the buttons of his shirt. His wounds were still exquisitely tender. Her fingertips brushed the gash in his side and he sucked in his breath.
“Ellie. I killed that detective back in Seattle. They’re looking for the three of us. It would be better if we weren’t traveling together.”
“Stay,” she said again, and she slipped off his shoes, undid his belt buckle, and pulled his pants down. Slip arched his back while she pulled them all of the way off.
“I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in. I don’t know who was in that car we dumped in the water and I don’t know who Pierce and Conner are and why they wanted to talk to you that night when all hell broke loose at the meeting hall. The truth is I don’t want to know … because I know that there’s nothing I can do to fix it.”
Slip looked up through the tangle of the beach roses and his eyes glazed with tears. Moisture clung to the thorns so they caught the starlight like tiny knife blades. A nuthatch hopped through the thicket and Slip held Ellie’s hands as she tried to kiss his tears away. He could smell the damp fur of the animals who had bedded down here. He tasted his own blood in his mouth. He wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else.
When daylight came Slip worked on the dory, cutting new sockets for the oarlocks from timbers he found on the beach. He fit them in place and by working some old screws out of the seats he was able to strengthen them so the sloppy pivot didn’t rob the energy going to the oars. He spent an entire day working with his tools, using the chisels and the hand brace. Just hefting them, taking them out of their leather sheaths, made him feel better. Seeing the bright curl of wood lifting from the blades, feeling the grain of the wood, gave him some needed strength.
As the evening came on Slip grabbed his bindle and toolbox and he walked toward the bluff. He went through the culvert under the tracks and he crossed up into the steep woods. Ellie had given him his money back. She had taken her ledger sheet to keep. His tobacco tin was sec
ured in his toolbox and held fast with a leather bootlace. That part of his future was secure at least.
The bluffs were made of gray clay, and it took him two hours to go the first two hundred yards up to a bench where he could look down on the bower. He wanted to make his way up the bluff and back to the roads running north. He thought that if he got the right rides he could be in Canada in a day.
He looked down at the bower. His head throbbed under the bandages that Ellie had tied. His ribs seared with each breath. He could only take three steps before having to stop to let the pain subside. The woods ahead were a dense tangle of blackberries and alder scrub. His hands and arms were freshly scratched and the cuts on his chest were open and bleeding again. He looked back toward the dory. Maybe just a few more days, he thought to himself, and he turned back down the hill.
As the sun was going down on the fifth day, Slip started loading the dory. The wind was calm. Ellie had done a good job keeping Slip’s injuries clean but he bled every time she peeled the bandages off. Slip sat on the sand as Ellie and the girl pulled the dory out of the brush and eased its stern into the water. Ellie helped Slip climb in. Annabelle, who hadn’t said a word to either of the adults for almost two days, brought Buddy out of the brush and got into the bow of the boat. Ellie pushed off and settled in the stern, facing the logger as he started to row.
The new night was warmer than the others. Slip’s hands were stiff and his shoulders still hurt. His old cut from the nail in the warehouse had scabbed over but opened up when he started to pull on the oars. His head was full of bees. He rowed north as the sky above Puget Sound turned from silver to black with a flare of red over the Olympic Mountains. He rowed until his hands started bleeding again and he kept rowing as the girl and Ellie fell asleep. He pulled and the water mumbled something he couldn’t quite make out. He pulled and the wind whispered something just out of reach and soon he too was asleep.
George Hanson had little left to go on. He had asked his men to keep shaking down the Floodwater ops who patrolled the train lines. He drove to every small port north of the hobo jungle to see if anyone had seen an injured man and a woman in a small boat. He even asked a pal of his with a fishing boat to cruise up and down the shore and let him know if he saw anything. George called the navy and the customs patrol boats, but he had gotten nowhere. He put the squeeze on Fatty but the fat man played cute. He had a pile of evidence, but his case was going cold.
He reviewed the Everett case files and wanted to reinterview the union boys from Everett to see where the nervous Raymond Cobb might have gone. The Everett cops shook them all down except two, Pierce and Conner, who had quit the country apparently, because no one would say where they were. George had opened a file on each of these new missing men. Each file had a name and a photograph and very little else.
He spent as little time at home as he could manage. Emily stayed to herself in her room. When he tried to get her to come down and speak with him she always promised that she would, but hours passed and the door never opened. He cooked her a pot roast on the weekend but it remained uneaten. One night he sat on the porch as the darkness came on. Kids were running down the sidewalk in the soft spring air. All he wanted was for her to come down from her room. The moths bumped against the screen door. A chill rode on the air from down the street. George turned off the lights and slept on the couch.
The horn blast shattered Slip’s sleep. He sat up abruptly and held his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes. The sail hung limply at the front of the dory and the sun was just beginning to warm their clothes. A large black boat was bearing down on the dory. The sizzle of its bow wake was close enough to sound like a mountain stream.
Slip lifted the little girl and set her down gently on the stern seat. He stood up and waved his arms overhead. A man in a navy pea coat and watch cap stood on the flying bridge on top of the boat. He cranked the wheel hard over and the boat swung parallel about thirty feet from the dory. A gentle wake rolled under the two boats.
“I thought I had me an abandoned dory,” the skipper of the boat called across the distance. “You need some help?”
Ellie was just waking up on the floor of the boat. She looked up at Slip, who was struggling to stand.
“We’re doing okay. We were just taking a nap,” Slip said.
“You got some fishing gear set out?” the driver asked, and he idled the big boat’s engine down.
“No,” Slip said, knowing that it wasn’t enough. The boats rolled on the easy waves. A handful of gulls hovered above the stern of the black boat.
“You sure you’re okay? It’s kind of crazy you being out here like this.”
“Naw, we’re fine. Just … traveling north. Had the wind last night and thought we’d make up some time.”
“Where you headed?” the driver asked, and he climbed down the ladder to the main deck.
Slip looked around Puget Sound. The mountains to the west seemed closer than before. The mountains to the east were hanging back in the distance. It was a mild day and only a few clouds were running south to north above them.
Slip couldn’t think of anything to say. The man in the pea coat stared at him, passing a coil of line from one hand to another.
Ellie stood up suddenly in the dory and yelled across to the black boat. “We’re headed to Alaska. Juneau, Alaska,” she said in a firm voice. “We got work in the mine up there.”
Slip glared at her as if she had suddenly burst into flame. “What?” he mouthed.
“Long ways north,” the skipper said, looking at Slip’s bleeding hands. He walked to the stern of the black boat and picked up a stern line. “I’m going north. I can tow you a ways if you want.”
Slip started to shake his head when Annabelle stood up beside him. “Can I bring my bird on board?” she yelled.
“Well …” said the skipper, making a show of looking around his old wooden boat, “Seeing as how I left the cat at home, I don’t see why not.” He threw a line across the distance to Slip and began pulling the small boat closer.
She was an old wooden fishing boat with a great squared-off stern and a boxy house built on three-quarters of the deck space. Her hull was made of massive oak ribs with cedar planking. All the lines on deck were coiled neatly and she looked to be freshly painted. She was called the Pacific Pride and her skipper was Johnny Desmond.
Johnny was headed north to a cannery up a fjord in British Columbia to deliver some lumber for making shipping crates. He had gotten this job through a cousin who knew the cannery manager. Johnny’s house in Tacoma had become overrun with his wife’s relatives, who had gone bust in Texas. Johnny had told her he was doing this one job and would be back in two months but the truth was he was scouting out a new place to live.
He had heard of a new town being built on the Alaska coast to the west of Juneau. A new town built for the fishing industry. It was called Cold Storage. He had heard about it from a Swedish fisherman in a Chinese restaurant near the Tacoma docks. A brand-new town, without in-laws in a place where freeloading Texans would not follow. Johnny wanted to go and see it for himself.
The Pacific Pride had left Tacoma two days before and Johnny had been hoping to pick up a crew in Seattle. His regular crew had taken off for jobs on a bigger, more profitable boat, and Johnny had not liked the looks of any of the men who were wandering the docks in Seattle. He had been planning to hire a deckhand somewhere up the coast, and when he saw Slip in the dory he figured he was a hand-line fisherman who might want to work his way north.
But when he looked down into the dory and saw the battered man, a blonde woman, and a little girl with a caged bird, Johnny sucked in his breath and considered cutting them loose. But he didn’t like the idea of leaving that girl out there in the middle of the Sound.
“You need a doctor for that man?” Johnny called down to Ellie.
“I don’t think so. I think he just needs to heal up.”
“Can he walk?” Johnny asked, thinking more about asking wheth
er he was going to live through the day.
Annabelle was the first to clamber up over the side. She smiled, said “hello” and shook Johnny’s hand, then leaned over and asked Ellie to hand the birdcage up to her.
Ellie helped Slip on his feet. He whispered, “Juneau, Alaska? Why didn’t you tell him we were going to the North Pole?”
Ellie narrowed her eyes at him. “Shush. It’s fine.”
Slip closed his eyes and tried to pull himself up the side of the Pacific Pride. With the first motion the pain from his ribs jolted down through to his legs and he buckled, so Johnny grabbed his arms and pulled him up over the side and laid him on the deck. Ellie climbed up and tried to get Slip back on his feet.
“He gonna die?” Johnny asked Ellie.
“Certainly not,” she said, and waved dismissively. “We got jumped by some guys on a beach a ways back. He took a bit of a beating, but he’ll be all right.”
“Jumped you? Who?” Johnny asked.
“Just some boys camped out by the railroad tracks. They wanted our boat and whatever … you know. They were drinking.” She said the word “drinking” as if it were turning sour in her mouth.
“We could put in up here a bit and you could talk to the police. Wanna do that?”
“No. Please, we don’t want to cause a delay.” The blonde waved her hand again. “It’s over now. They didn’t get anything. We pulled out fast enough. Police won’t make anybody heal up any faster.”
“Okay …” Johnny looked over at Slip and let his voice trail away. Then he looked over at the little dory floating next to them.
“How long you had the dory?”
“Just got her,” Slip grunted from the deck, wanting to save some face. “Friend of mine won her in a card game and he let me have her cheap. I heard there was work up north and the first thing I knew, I had company for the trip.”
“I know how that happens,” Johnny chuckled.
“Thank you for stopping,” Slip said, holding his hand out for an awkward moment until the skipper reached out his own and pulled him to his feet. The men shook hands quickly and a silence slipped between them.