In the e-mail itself, Bay reiterated his warning not to show this to anyone and the reason why would become obvious. He wrote that what I wanted to see began at thirty-four seconds and ended at twenty-three minutes. I didn’t have time to watch it now. It was 6:05, and Carlos was probably at the amphitheater waiting. But I got it started as I re-donned my Arctic protection. The first thing you see in the video is Kevin Shanks’s craggy face looking right into the camera. He smiles and says, “Sweet!” And then apparently he buckles the watch to his wrist, and we see a Christmas tree and the familiar Halliday Christmas gifts, and then the screen goes black, but we hear a woman’s voice say, “We weren’t supposed to leave until after Christmas. This is total bullshit.” My cell phone rang. I clicked it on and said, “Be right there,” and hung up. I switched off the e-mail and shut down the computer. Wow. Bay was right. I’d want to watch this straight through with a drink in my hand. I went outside and headed to the amphitheater, but not before looking around very carefully. For a few seconds I’d forgotten all about Vladimir. If I could just talk to him, I was sure we could put an end to this foolishness. Shanks had been there when Krysia was alive. I’d told Carlos that Shanks was a psycho. Wouldn’t believe me.
I thought I’d disguise my walk, so I took these tiny, uncertain steps like an old and feeble man, but it would have taken me a half hour to reach the amphitheater, so I opted for jaunty and took long strides as I swung my arms, and I felt suddenly and strangely Scandinavian, somehow. The lights were spectacular undulating sheets of green and red. I thought I heard a crunch on the snow, or maybe I just had a premonition. At any rate I turned toward the lodge and saw, I was sure of it, a figure, dressed in what might have been red, duck behind a spruce. I took off a mitten and put my hand on the butt of my gun. I was trembling. Where the hell was Carlos? Six-fifteen already. He’d just called. I needed to make myself a smaller target, so I knelt in front of the stone bench and peeked over the top. I yelled, “Vladimir! It’s me, Wylie,” which I immediately realized was the wrong thing to do—so much for my clever masquerade. He stepped out from behind the tree and walked toward me down the shoveled path until he was about fifty feet away. He took out his gun. I pleaded with him to stop and think. And then we both heard someone hurrying our way—Carlos, thank God. Vladimir turned and fired at the figure. I didn’t hear a gunshot, but I saw a burst of green from the barrel, and I aimed for the center mass and fired. He dropped to the snow.
Carlos came running with his hands raised and screaming his name so I wouldn’t shoot him. He knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse. “He’s dead.” The bullet had torn a ragged hole in Vladimir’s down parka near the heart. Blood seeped like black ink onto the silky fabric. Poor Cerise, I thought. Fuck! Carlos told me to get what I needed from the suite and meet him back here in ten minutes.
“Aren’t we going to call the cops?”
“Are you insane? You just killed an unarmed man.”
“I saw the gun.”
“You saw a glove,” he said. “This glove.” And he held it up.
“I saw it fire.”
“You thought you did. You panicked. It happens. Now go.”
When I got to our suite I didn’t know what I needed. I heard what sounded like a gunshot and I jumped. I put on my vest, my own jacket, grabbed the cognac, and left a note at the desk for Gayla and Clement saying I might be very late. Not to worry. I got back to the scene. Carlos had wrapped Vladimir’s body in what looked like a body bag. “I improvised,” he said. We carried the body to the SUV. Carlos went back and removed the bloody snow in a bucket that we set in the backseat.
“Where are we going?”
“Get in.” Carlos pulled onto the Richardson Highway and drove east toward North Pole. We were towing a Ski-Doo on a trailer, and in the Ski-Doo, wrapped in plastic and swaddled in blankets, was Vladimir with a bullet hole through his heart.
I said, “The only way to make things right is to come clean, tell the truth, and whatever happens, happens.”
“That may be how to make yourself feel better or noble or whatever, but it makes nothing right. And this is not about right or wrong. We’re way past right or wrong.” He asked to see my phone. I handed it to him. He lowered the window and tossed the phone out. “You wouldn’t have had any service anyway.”
We drove on, heading for Delta Junction, ninety miles south. I felt terrible remorse. I didn’t know what I would tell Cerise, and then I thought, Tell Cerise? Am I crazy? But what if she knew he’d come to Alaska—on a hunting trip, he would have told her—while I was also here? Alaska’s a big state, Cerise. I didn’t run into him. I’d killed someone, but it didn’t seem possible that I had. I said, “I could go to prison for this, Carlos.”
“You’re not going to prison.” Carlos pulled over, got the snow out of the backseat, and tossed the bucket over the mounds of plowed snow.
So we were fleeing the scene of a crime, which was wrong in every way, but I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to imagine my life back home in a year when all of this was a dim memory. Does murder ever dim? I wanted to sleep. I rested my head against the window and shut my eyes. I wanted to wake up and see that this nightmare had been just a dream. I reminded myself that this wasn’t actually a murder. There was no premeditation. So how would I explain the handgun purchase and the shooting lesson? I’d just tell the truth, was all. And the truth would set me free? Probably not.
We were barreling down the highway near Salcha, and Carlos had the radio on to the college station, and Bon Iver were singing about “Skinny Love.” And then, out of nowhere, our car was bathed in red and blue light, and in my half slumber I thought maybe the aurora had descended to earth, but it was, of course, a state trooper on our tail. It took Carlos a while to stop safely. He told me not to utter a word, to keep my hands where the officer could see them, and to take a deep breath. I put my hands on the dashboard.
Carlos said, “Don’t get antsy. We don’t want this turning ugly.” He was extremely polite and deferential, and when he was asked to provide his license and registration, he must have flashed some kind of police ID because that was the end of our hassle. The trooper told Carlos to drive more prudently. The roads, he said, were treacherous already, and it wouldn’t be unusual to round a bend and see a dumbfounded moose standing in the middle of the highway hypnotized by your headlights. He tipped his hat and walked back to his cruiser. He stopped at the Ski-Doo and apprized its contents. Carlos slipped his hand into his pocket and yelled to him that we were on our way to Kenai.
“You have a pleasant trip,” the trooper said. “You can put your hands down now, sir,” he yelled to me.
Carlos laughed. “You done good, Kimo Sabe.” He checked the rearview mirror. “You know how lucky we were, don’t you?”
I felt something in my jacket pocket, but I couldn’t touch it. Something hard and about the size of a business card. Carlos was paying close attention to the sideview mirror and to the speedometer. I figured, no, it must be in the vest pocket. And I was right, an inside vest pocket that I hadn’t taken note of before. I took out what turned out to be a Spark Nano GPS. I read the Post-it note attached: Keep in pocket. Tell no one. Bay.
“What’s that?” Carlos said.
“Myles’s iPod thingie. No headphones.”
Carlos pulled off the highway and drove a hundred yards down a narrow snow-packed gravel road. He cut the lights and took his foot off the brakes. We waited until we saw the trooper drive past on the highway. “Cops are some devious bastards,” Carlos said. “He’ll be waiting for us at Delta Junction.” Carlos smiled, and backed us down the road, trailer and all.
Twenty minutes later, back on the highway, we could see there’d been an accident up ahead at the bottom of a winding hill, and as we slowed down we saw that it was our trooper, who’d gone off the road and into a ditch. The car was a wreck, but the trooper seemed okay. He stood in the middle of the road, flagging us down. From the skid marks, it looked like he had hit h
is brakes and swerved, lost control, then skidded several hundred feet while spinning in a big circle, coming to rest against a tree facing back the way he’d come. Carlos lowered the window.
The trooper waved us to the side of the road and yelled for us to pull over. Carlos nodded, waved, shut the window, put on his directional, told me to put my head between my knees, and drifted down the hill, tapping on his brakes, and I thought, Oh, shit, the cop knows! But what does he know? He doesn’t have to know much for us to be in big trouble. And then Carlos hit the accelerator and we took off.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“It’s better that we don’t stop. Do I have to explain why?”
About five miles north of Big Delta, we took a left off the highway onto a small road leading to Quartz Lake.
“The trooper got your license tag number.”
“Paul Kunkel is in big trouble.”
23
I split a length of firewood with a whetted hatchet and slid the piece into the wood-burning stove. Carlos and I had commandeered ice hut D10, the farthest of the fishing huts from shore on Quartz Lake and the only one now occupied. When we arrived, Carlos shot off the combination lock just like they do in the movies. While I got the fire going, Carlos slid the now-frozen corpse off the Ski-Doo and laid it on a seven-foot pulk. He backed the Ski-Doo off the trailer, hooked the pulk to the Ski-Doo, and drove another seventy-five yards out toward the center of the lake. He left the pulk and drove back. He moved the SUV to hut D8, the nearest hut to ours, so that any late-arriving sportsmen would think it was taken.
We sat on camp stools by the stove and warmed our feet, which only made them hurt more. Carlos kept jutting his tongue and running it along his lips. That sort of thing sometimes indicates that you’ve been caught doing something naughty, but he hadn’t been caught, had he? I told him what we were doing was wrong. He told me to stop whining. We had no choice.
“You’re a cop. Cops’ll listen to you.”
“I’m not here, remember?”
“You’ve got an alibi. Is that what you mean? Well, good for you.”
He took a swig of cognac and passed me the bottle. He said, “Let me explain something to you. You’re in a world now where nothing you value is of any importance. Tolerance? Compassion? Civility? Kindness?” He shook his head. “Meaningless.”
“So what matters?”
“Survival. And I am the only person who can save you right now.” He stood and put on his gloves. “It was your life or his life. You did the right thing.”
The plan was to sink Vladimir’s body in the lake. Sometime in the spring the body, or a part of the body, might surface, the body of an unknown man who would seem to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “People go apeshit all the time up here,” Carlos said. “The Inuit call it pibloktoq. People run naked into the snow, screaming their heads off, eating their own shit, and hallucinating like mad.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Give me your gun. They’ll find the weapon in question when they send down divers. Suicide. Case closed.”
“I don’t know how I’ll live with myself.”
“Time will put it all into perspective. You shot a cold-blooded assassin, a man who was out to kill you. You’ll be able to look Cerise in the eye and tell her you’re sorry for her loss.”
I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d ever feel happy again.
Carlos told me to sit tight. He grabbed the power auger he’d packed along with the body, the auger extension, one of our two lanterns, and went out to drill through what he figured to be three feet of ice. He didn’t want to drill more comfortably through one of the fishing holes in the hut because he worried that the corpsicle, as he was calling it, might bob up through the hole when the next fisherman drilled, and anyway, the drilling area was too narrow.
My nose hairs were frozen; my ears stung; I couldn’t move my face. The crushing pain in my hands was wretched and exhausting. I wanted to stand and move around, get the circulation going, but I couldn’t. I knew alcohol would only make everything worse, but I took another sip of cognac and warmed my throat for a moment. I nodded off or I didn’t and dreamed or imagined I was in Florida on the beach asleep and dreaming about being in an ice hut on a frozen lake in Alaska and knowing that the dream was a lie, even as I dreamed it, and when the sound of the auger stopped, I woke up. I stood, lifted the canvas from the window, and looked out on Carlos bathed in the heavenly green light and saw him slide the pulk to the hole, lift the body, and try to wedge it into the water. Not even close. And then he tried it feet first—a breech delivery. Still no go. He unrolled the blankets and removed the improvised body bag from the corpse. I watched the several black garbage bags swirl up, float away, and then drop to the ice and get blown toward the distant shore. Vladimir, parka-less but wearing the balaclava, still would not fit. Carlos shook his head. I thought I should get out there and help, take the skimmer, at least, and keep the hole free of ice. But I didn’t want any part of it.
Carlos rode the Ski-Doo back to the ice hut to warm up. He said he needed to widen the hole about five inches. I told him how depressed I was, how frightened. He said about ten to fifteen more minutes should do it. “I’ll drop him in; we’ll wait for the ice to refreeze in the hole—not solid, just enough—an hour ought to do it.” I asked him how he knew so much about the cold.
“In the Army. I was stationed at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks. I spent two years up here. I fished this lake—all the lakes around here.”
“You were in the Army?”
When we had driven the SUV out onto the ice earlier on the way to the hut, Carlos had told me to take off my seat belt and crack the window. I thought he was joking. He insisted. If we go through a hole in the ice, you don’t want to be fooling with a seat belt. You got about forty seconds to surface and fifteen minutes to get out before hypothermia puts you to sleep. Open windows are easier to break, and electrical windows won’t operate in water.
When I asked him now about Inez and the kids, he told me she’d moved out, gone with the boys to her sister’s, filed for divorce. She told him, “You’re married to that job, so you can just fuck that job.”
“She’s pissed.”
“We’ll never be divorced in the eyes of God.”
He told me we wouldn’t be here in the morning to see it, and we hadn’t drilled a fishing hole inside, but if we had, then just when the sun peeked over the horizon, and we were sitting here in the dark shack, we might see the sunlight shining up at us from the hole. The sunlight penetrates the ice and gets inside however it can.
I said, “Can you believe how much our lives have changed since Christmas?” I shut the door of the unsteady stove with my foot. And then I told him my theory about the Halliday killings, how I thought the killers were in the house before the family got home. No one saw them leave because they didn’t leave. They called in the crime. The killers were the cops. Shanks, Sully, and whoever else. And they were inside long enough to stage the scene and sanitize the place. And that cop from the Wayside, Kind, I thought he was in on it too.
Carlos’s eyes locked on mine, not with interest or curiosity, but with something more visceral that I would have guessed to be fury, except I knew him too well for that. Clearly, however, he was upset. He had a right to be, I supposed.
He said, “You think there was a conspiracy of cops to commit murder?”
“Maybe.”
“A death squad?”
“It makes more sense to me than anything else.”
“You’re starting to piss me off a little.”
“Sorry.”
“You forgot I was there?”
“I didn’t forget.”
“How can you look me in the eye and say this crazy shit?” Carlos went back outside to finish his grisly business. I sat and looked at the inch of cognac left in the bottle and thought about how much colder it was going to seem when that was gone. And then I took a drink. I wondered if Vl
adimir ever took my advice and wrote things down in a notebook, and if he had, would it now be evidence? Would Cerise, having found it, already know what his Alaskan hunting trip was all about? I heard the auger start up and hoped the hard labor would help Carlos work off some of his irritation with me. I didn’t want him staring bullets at me again. And with that thought and its attendant image, I remembered something that Carlos said earlier that now seemed curious. He had said that I would be able to look Cerise in the eye and express my condolences for Vladimir’s disappearance. But I had never told Carlos that Cerise lived with Vladimir or even knew him. But maybe the cops had Vladimir under routine surveillance, given his line of work. That must have been it, of course.
I picked up the skimmer and walked outside and headed for Carlos, whose back was to me. I wondered if it was conceivable that Carlos would cover up a murder to protect cops. He was covering up a murder now, sort of. A killing. To protect a friend. I tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped. I held up the skimmer, and he shook his head. I looked at the corpse and saw the entry wound in his chest and a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. His balaclava was stained with blood. I pulled it off, and when I did, the mystery of Kevin Shanks’s whereabouts was solved. I looked at Carlos. We both knew I hadn’t shot twice. And I hadn’t shot Vladimir. I said, “What’s going on?”
No Regrets, Coyote Page 24