by Scott Blade
Widow said, “You’re right. Let me pay for the postcard.”
He handed the postcard and the pen back to Uki and smiled.
She took them and looked over the postcard.
Uki set the postcard and pen down and stroked some keys on a computer beneath the counter. Uki typed up the card on the keyboard and gave Widow the price.
Widow pulled out his cash money and peeled off the remaining five and handed it to her. She stroked some more keys, and a cash drawer popped open. She inserted the money and came out with his change and dropped it in his hand. He returned the money to his wad and pocketed the loose change and then the wad of cash.
Widow took the postcard and slipped it into his pocket.
Uki asked, “Anything else I can help you with?”
“Where’s the ferry dock at?”
“Leaving Kodiak Island?”
“Headed back to civilization.”
Uki raised a hand and pointed behind Widow. She said, “Head down that street, take a left and a right …” She trailed off like she was counting in her head and said, “At the first stoplight. That’ll take you to the car entrance.”
Widow looked at a digital clock on the wall. It was still early. Earlier than he thought. The time was eight thirty in the morning.
“Know when the ferry counter opens?”
Uki didn’t turn to look at the clock. She checked the time on her wristwatch. “The counter is open now, but the first boat has already left. It left at eight.”
“When’s the next one?”
“There’s a couple more. Usually, one around lunchtime and then again around six tonight.”
Widow nodded and thanked her and walked out of the post office. He followed her instructions and went up the street and took the left and the right at the light. After nine minutes on his feet, he came to the end of the road that led to board a ferryboat. But there was no boat there.
There was a large parking lot with a herd of cars on one row, a loading zone, and the rest of the lot was empty. There were people here and there, waiting near or in their cars for the next boat. Seabirds cawed overhead. There were fishing trawlers on the horizon. Some headed into harbor. Some headed out to sea.
Widow walked to a hut built out of wood. There was a sliding glass window. The window was slid open. A young man sat back on a chair playing on his phone. The sign above the hut indicated it was where Widow would have to purchase his ticket for passage on the ferry.
He walked to the booth and stopped in front of the window. He cleared his throat so the kid would acknowledge him. The guy put the phone down on a ledge and smiled at Widow. He said nothing.
Widow said, “When’s the next ferry?”
The young guy said, “It’s at noon.”
“That’s the next one?”
“Yep.”
“Give me one ticket.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s booked solid.”
Widow glanced over his shoulder at the parking lot.
He asked, “It is? But there’s no one here?”
“Most people buy their tickets online. Today’s Friday.”
“And?”
“Most of the locals have a half day of work today.”
“And?”
“There’s a big music festival in Homer tonight. Everyone’s going to be there. They’re taking their cars. A bunch of locals will head over at noon and stay the night. Come back tomorrow.”
Not everyone, Widow thought. He said, “So the noon is booked up?”
“Yep. All the car space is gone.”
“I don’t have a car. Can’t I just book passage just for me?”
“No can do. Occupancy it all booked too.”
“Okay. What’s the next ferry?”
“Next one is around six p.m.”
Widow asked, “That late?”
“There’s a final one. It leaves at nine. If you would rather that one?”
“I’ll take the six.”
“Okay.”
The kid told him the price, and Widow pulled out his wad of cash money again and paid for the ticket. The kid rang it up on a calculator and put the money into a cash drawer without a register to slide into. The wind blew, and the bills shuffled at the tips but stayed in the drawer because they were pinched down by metal clasps.
The kid stared at the calculator and pulled out Widow’s change in ones and handed it to him. Then he tore a ticket off a roll, out of several different colored rolls, and gave it to Widow too. The colors indicated the time for the ferry. Widow pocketed the ticket and nodded a goodbye to the kid, who immediately returned to his phone.
Widow pulled the lip of his collar up to keep his neck warm. The wind was still blowing. The temperature dropped a few degrees. It was getting colder.
With time to kill, Widow did what he always did, he went hunting for coffee.
Across the street, standing behind trees, Peter watched Widow buy a ferry ticket, which was good. But then he saw Widow turn around and head back into town, which was bad.
He pulled out his cell phone and texted a message to someone. It wasn’t the Broadcaster. It was to someone else. Someone below him on the chain of command. It was an attack order. He issued it to one guy, who would relay the order to several guys.
The guy responded in the affirmative.
Peter couldn’t keep following Widow around all day. He had to get back. He had to keep eyes on Liddy. That was his first responsibility. Plus, he didn’t want Widow to make him. He might need plausible deniability later on.
He texted one last thing to the guy below him in the chain of command: "Make sure he doesn’t return. Tell me when it’s done."
Peter pocketed his phone and returned to the floatplane.
15
Widow walked the streets through the portside of Kodiak, looking in store windows, nodding hello to passersby, and staying vigilant on hunting down a place to get coffee. He hoped for a coffeehouse or café or an establishment with a dedicated coffee countertop, something that said, We take coffee seriously. Establishments that are devoted to coffee tend to offer the best brews, in Widow’s opinion.
Widow rounded a street corner and his brain target-locked on a store window at the corner of a tan brick building along a row of connected shops and offices with various awnings over the windows. A sidewalk sandwich board stood out front of the main entrance. It was decorated with a hand-drawn cartoon coffee cup, two different types of sandwiches, a cup of espresso with steam rising out of it, and a coffee cake. All of it was drawn in different colored chalk, color-coordinated in such a way that the illustrator must’ve had a bachelor’s degree in marketing. From the top down, there was a handwritten list of the daily specials—all of it neat, all of it tidy, all of it written with care and affection.
The store was a local coffeehouse called Kodiak Espresso. The name was posted on a sign above the door. It looked promising. It was the kind of coffeehouse Widow preferred, like a diamond in the rough. It was a local busines—small but not a stop-and-go. It was not a get-your-order-and-get-rushed-out type of place. It appeared quaint and cozy, like many of the hamlets on Kodiak Island.
Widow walked over and entered the coffeehouse as a local woman was coming out. She held the door open for him. He thanked her with a "Ma’am" on the end of it, like the Navy never left him, and he walked through the door.
Inside, there was sizeable seating area with multiple levels. There were six heavy, dark wood tables spread about and a rock fireplace and two sets of living-room furniture, one near the fireplace, giving it a similar welcoming feel as Liddy’s Lodge. The other was pushed into a back wall. Shag area rugs covered concrete floors. Off to one corner, there was a "Wet Floor" sign near a set of public bathrooms.
There were board games and paperback books, all with bent spines, scattered across shelves and coffee tables. Some of the books were old. Some were older. There was an old man in a tweed outfit playing a game of ch
ess with a younger man near the fireplace. The two men bared a striking resemblance to each other. One was bearded and one was not. They were both grayed, but at different levels. The older man was grayed through and through. The younger had gray in his temples. They looked like two generations of the same family. They were probably father and son or brothers nearly a generation apart, which was more improbable but not impossible.
There was no fire in the fireplace. But the heat was on. It was warm inside but not hot. Toasty was the right word for it. Widow soft-clapped his hands together quietly and rubbed them like two sticks to amplify the warmth. He turned a forty-five-degree angle and approached the counter. There was no line. He ordered from a young female barista. She could’ve just been out of high school. It was hard to tell. Widow noticed as he got older, young people looked younger and younger to the point where guessing their age became difficult. Everyone under twenty-five seemed to look the same age to him.
While he ordered from the young barista, a second barista stepped out from behind a white wall with warm plates of food in both hands like she came out of a back kitchen area. The second barista was male. His hair was clipped short on one side. The other side of his haircut was long and draped over his ear. If Widow were to guess, he’d guess that the second barista was in an aspiring garage band. And he would be correct. A single customer stood at the end of the counter waiting for the food in the band-haircut barista’s hands. Widow watched the food trade hands. The customer nodded at the band-haircut barista, and the barista nodded back without words. It appeared to be a daily ritual, like they were being friendly but also saying, See you tomorrow.
A third barista, another female, appeared out from behind the same back wall. She carried a tray of warm rolls. Steam rose up off them. The smell enticed Widow like a siren to a sailor at sea, only instead of crashing into rocks, the only danger was weight gain, something Widow had never worried about since he spent most of his time on his feet moving in one direction or the other.
At the counter, the first barista asked what she could get for him. He nearly ordered black coffee, but he thought of the place’s name and got a quad shot of espresso instead, thinking it was their specialty. He ordered it black, no cream, no cube, no peel. Before he paid, the smell of rolls seduced him, and he ordered two of them and paid for all of it with cash.
He left a five-dollar tip for the girls. The first one took it and dropped it into a glass tip jar. The other returned with the rolls and set them down on a thin plate. Widow scooped the rolls and waited at the end of the counter for one of the other baristas to make his espresso. He ate one roll right there.
One of the baristas told him the espresso would be a few minutes. He nodded and strolled back to the entrance and stood by the window, pulled his paperback out of his pocket, and started to read it. He ate the last roll over the plate as he read. He only got through two pages, but progress was progress.
After he was done with the roll, he closed the book, pocketed it again, and set the plate down in a bus tub set out near the door. It had a few other plates and two coffee mugs already inside. Then he threw away the napkin it came wrapped in at a trash station on the other side of the door.
Widow glanced out the window and saw a large guy, another of those dock roughneck-types, standing across the street. At first, he thought nothing of it, until another one—the same roughneck-look, the same fisherman clothes—came from around the corner and joined him. The first one pointed at the coffeehouse, and they both stared at it. They couldn’t see Widow staring back at them because the outside glass was tinted, and the sun was at their backs beaming down on the window. The sunlight glimmered back at them like a mirror.
Widow never read comic books in his life. But he knew who Spider-Man was. Who didn’t? He also knew what Spidey sense was. He never called it that, but that’s what he felt at that moment. His primal brain was telling him something was up with these guys. Of course, Widow lived in a civilized society. Although he was more analogous to a savage who had woken up in a block of ice, his brain did what anyone’s brain does. It second-guessed his instincts.
Skepticism kicked in and told him he was wrong. But then a third roughneck-type guy came around the corner. He was followed by two more. They came from all directions like they were in five different places, meeting up right there across the street like a roughneck convention. That happens. Friends, coworkers, colleagues meet up for a late breakfast every day of the week all across the world. Maybe their favorite breakfast place was Kodiak Espresso.
The only thing was that they weren’t coming in. They stayed standing across the street like they were waiting for someone to come out. Their intentions didn’t seem friendly. Not because it wasn’t possible but because they were all bowing up, talking to each other, clenching their fists. They looked to be scheming, planning something. They looked like a group of gorillas in the distance, warming each other up before raiding a rival gorilla population.
Widow looked around the room. The only customer that made any sense for them to be waiting for was him.
The evidence wasn’t conclusive. Maybe they were just meeting there, waiting for a sixth friend to show up before their late breakfast. But that didn’t fit either. Why the peacocking? Why the firing each other up?
Maybe they weren’t paying attention to the coffeehouse at all. Maybe they were about to go into the storefront behind them. The only thing about that theory was the storefront behind them was a bank. Looking at them, Widow doubted they would go into the bank all at the same time, not unless they were planning to rob it. No, they were up to something. Widow had been a part of enough ops to know that moment before it began was a moment of hyping each other up.
Widow heard the barista call out his completed espresso order, and he turned and went over to it. He scooped up the espresso, thanked the baristas, and took a swig. It was hot, fresh, and caffeinated, the three things he looked for in an espresso.
Widow walked to the entrance and opened the door. He glanced at the roughnecks across the street. Quickly, they all turned their heads away or at each other like they weren’t staring at the door waiting for him to come out. It was the saddest display of tradecraft he had ever seen in his life. These guys were like two sets of Three Stooges minus one Curly tailing someone. He stayed in front of the coffeeshop and took a pull from the espresso.
Widow looked left and looked right. No cars came from either direction. He crossed the street straight to the five guys and realized they were the same five from the dock. At least some of them were. One of them had a mustache. He was pretty sure that none of the roughnecks from Peter’s dock had a moustache. Then again, he paid little attention to their faces. He did notice they were all big guys, same as these five. He clocked a tattoo on one arm that seemed familiar. His best guess—it was them or some of them. They were definitely connected to Peter.
Widow stepped out into the road and stopped a little past center. He stayed back about four meters.
He said, “Hey. Any of you guys got the time?”
All five roughnecks looked at him, confused. One of them looked at his wristwatch, which looked more water beaten than the side of a boat. He gave Widow the time.
One of his partners gave him the stink eye, like he was saying, What the hell are you doing?
Widow nodded and thanked him, took a slow sip from his espresso, and turned and walked back up the road to the east. The roughnecks followed but stayed back, like they were still trying to maintain a sense of cover.
Widow stayed in plain sight for a long time. He had plenty of time to kill before he had to be on the ferry. He had some fun with the roughnecks. He walked a mile in one direction and turned left and then right, heading down one street to the other, all of it random. None of it made any sense to the roughnecks. He did it until another mile and then repeated the process, only he circled back around and headed right back in the same direction they had come.
The whole affair killed half an hour.
>
Widow glanced in store windows, using the reflection to make sure they were still following him. He used windshields on passing cars to do the same.
On the way back, he tried to stay with the sun at his back so he could catch glimpses of their long shadows across the streets.
One reason for him to head back toward the ferry was to wait for his ride out of there. But the main reason he turned around and led them back was that he had one last shot of espresso left. He wanted another. It was a damn good espresso—best on the island, he figured. It was an issue worth fighting for.
Widow took a final left and ended up between two neighboring buildings. There was about twenty feet of space between them. The path was straight with plenty of dark shadow on one side. It was a paved alleyway. Long jagged cracks allowed overgrown grass to cover much of it in sporadic spurts, like weeds.
Widow walked to the middle of the alley, still thinking that the five roughnecks were on his tail, but they weren’t. Not all of them.
Right then, three of the five roughnecks came from around the corner and stepped in Widow's path. They must’ve run around the buildings. The other two weren’t with them.
Widow stopped. He stayed where he was. He glanced at their hands. A common mistake when a potential street fight is about to break out is that people don’t check the hands of their opponents. The second guy had empty hands, but the first had his stuffed in the pockets of his coat. He was the one to watch. Could be anything concealed inside the coat. The worst-case scenario was a gun. The best case was nothing. Widow saw the third guy had a pair of brass knuckle-dusters in his left hand. He saw little skull engravings on the knuckles.
Cute, he thought.
The three roughnecks stepped up and stopped at different distances from him, but all stayed more than ten feet away. They spanned out in front of him from eleven to one on the clockface.
Widow took a deep breath and said, “I wondered when you boys would make yourselves known.”
One of them spoke. He asked, “What?”