Open Carry

by Marc Cameron

  Cutter washed up and threw a towel over his shoulder. “What about Man-Rule number ten?”

  Both boys threw back their heads as if to crow.

  “When a man cooks a snack,” they said in unison, “he makes enough for everyone else in the house.”

  Matt looked up and patted Cutter on the elbow. “Can I please wear it while we cook?”

  Cutter knew exactly what “it” was. He and his brother used to ask Grumpy the same question. He felt like he was looking in the mirror at his seven-year-old self.

  “Of course.” Cutter pulled a silver coin up from his shirt collar and looped the thin beaded chain over Matt’s head. The boy rubbed the medallion between his small thumb and forefinger as if to shine it. A little larger than a quarter, the medallion bore the relief of a navigational compass rose, the heading needle aligned with magnetic north, but the direction-of-travel arrow pointed toward the Big Dipper and the North Star. Both boys studied it with reverent awe.

  “Watch your heading,” Michael said. “Grumpy Man-Rule number one.”

  Cutter nodded, thinking how many times he’d heard his grandfather chide him with those same words—nearly as many times as he warned Cutter to “check his windage and elevation” when it looked like he was about to make a sketchy decision.

  “Can I please wear it after Matt?” Michael said.

  “Roger that,” Cutter said. He counted out the eggs so each boy would have an even amount to break. “So, two for each of you, three for me, three for Constance, and two for your—”

  As if on cue, the boys’ mother, Cutter’s widowed sister-in-law, breezed in through the door from the garage. Mim’s entrances had always been grand in Cutter’s mind. She smiled an honest smile when she saw Arliss and her twins in the kitchen, wrinkling her smallish nose, accenting the blush of her peaches-and-cream complexion. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back in a high ponytail—no doubt to keep it out of her way during her shift at Alaska Regional, but it suited her. She’d been wearing it in the same way the day they’d first met, twenty-five years and ten months earlier, the summer before they each turned sixteen.

  She had been working in a little bait shop on Manasota Key where the Cutter brothers had gone to hunt for shark’s teeth—and girls who had peaches-and-cream complexions. Arliss had seen her first, and she had just enough time to tell him that her name was Miriam but everyone called her Mim—before big brother Ethan swooped in. He smiled more, was a year older, and thus more sure of himself. He made the first move. Arliss took Grumpy’s Man-Rule number two to heart—“a man does not steal his brother’s woman”—so the rest was twenty-five years and ten months of history.

  Nursing came naturally to Miriam Cutter. She was empathetic and caring, but more than capable of making someone cry if it was for their own good. Cutter tore his eyes away before she caught him looking. Twenty years of marriage, three kids, and a whole lot of heartbreak had hardly aged her at all. She looked pretty damned sexy in her lavender hospital scrubs. She probably needed to hear it—and the good Lord knew Cutter wanted to tell her—but the “sister” part of sister-in-law, made him keep the thought to himself.

  “This looks interesting,” Mim said, stepping in to kiss both her boys on top of their blond heads. She touched Cutter on the arm. “What do we have going on here?”

  “Uncle Arliss is teaching us how to make creamy scrambled eggs like his grandpa,” Michael said. Matt was busy cracking his half of the eggs into a clear glass bowl.

  “Grumpy Man-Rules?” She smiled at Cutter.

  Both boys raised their hands above their heads and cheered. “Grumpy Man-Rules!”

  “Carry on then,” Mim said, winking at Cutter. “I’ll take two, please. It was a long day at the hospital and I didn’t get lunch. Where’s Constance?”

  “Room,” the twins said, again in unison.

  “Of course she is,” Mim said, heaving a sigh as she looked through a pile of mail on the counter. She took a single envelope—tan and official looking—and left the rest where it was.

  “All right, men,” Cutter said. “The secret to perfect creamy scrambled eggs is taking them on and off the burner—high heat but slow cooking.”

  Mim shot an almost imperceptible glance at Cutter. They locked eyes for a brief moment, he nodded, she disappeared down the hallway. There was still a hell of a lot left unsaid between them. He pushed it out of his mind and turned his attention back to the mess the twins were making with the eggs.

  “I think we’re ready,” he said after he’d pinched most of the bits of shell out of the bowl. He poured the yellow slurry in the nonstick pan with a generous gob of melted butter. He held the handle in his left hand and a silicon spatula in his right.

  Michael raised a wooden salt grinder over the pan and paused, looking at his uncle. “Salt?”

  “Nope,” Cutter shook his head.

  “Nope,” Matt repeated, as if it was common knowledge that salt would start the eggs to curdle a little too quickly at this point in the process.

  “We’ll salt them when they’re almost done,” Cutter said. He demonstrated as he talked. “The rest is easy: on the flame until they start to cook, then off the flame and stir with the spatula. Then back on the flame until they start to cook a little more, then off the flame and stir—”

  His cell phone began to buzz in the pocket of his jeans. He looked at the boys. “Ready to be men?”

  “Let us be men!” they said again.

  He passed the handle of the pan off to Matt and the spatula to Michael before turning off the heat on the stove. The eggs were about done anyway. “Don’t burn your paws,” he said, pulling the towel off his shoulder to dry his hands before picking up the cell.

  “Cutter,” he said, stepping back to give the twins enough space to mess up, but not ruin the meal.

  It was Lola Fontaine. She was the duty deputy for the month so she’d be triaging calls from the answering service, deciding if they could wait until the next day or were important enough to require a task force call-out.

  “Hey, boss,” she said. “Got time to chat a minute?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I just got an interesting call from the trooper in Craig, down on Prince of Wales Island.”

  “Where?”

  Alaska was a big state, with nearly ten times the land area of Florida, and Cutter was still learning the layout of his new district.

  “Craig is a little town on a big-ass island down near Ketchikan, about eight hundred miles to the southeast.”

  She went on to brief him about the fugitive Hayden Starnes, an unregistered sex offender who was supposedly hiding on the island. Keeping one eye on the boys, Cutter walked into the living room and grabbed a red paperback Alaska atlas from Mim’s bookcase. He sat down on the couch and found Prince of Wales Island in the book while Fontaine talked.

  “And the troopers can’t grab him?” Cutter put on his budget hat, figuring the taxpayer dollars they’d spend to take a commercial flight to Ketchikan, then the expensive air taxi to make the hour flight west through the mountains to Prince of Wales Island.

  “The trooper I talked to says he wants to help,” Fontaine said. “But our guy is in the wind—or the woods if you wanna be technical. And get this, boss, Starnes did a hundred and twenty-seven months in Marion for kidnapping and sexual assault—and a teenage girl went missing on the island around the same time he dropped out of sight.”

  Marion was a US prison, a step up—or down, depending on one’s point of view—from the more common federal correctional institution. White-collar criminals were assigned to camps, bad guys did their time at an FCI. Bona fide turds went to a USP.

  Cutter looked toward the kitchen in time to see Matthew chastise Michael for twisting the salt grinder over the pan. He stopped them with a look, then gave a thumbs-up to show that the eggs were done before turning back to the call.

  “Go ahead and set us up a flight first thing tomorrow morning,” he said. “Text me when you know
times. I’ll call the chief and get her to approve the funding.”

  “Just you and me?” she asked.

  Cutter groaned, wondering if Fontaine’s husband was sitting right beside her. He seemed the type that wouldn’t let her out of his sight when they were home. But then, she looked like the type to kick him in the teeth for being overbearing.

  “With Blodgett on light duty for the foreseeable future . . .”

  “True enough,” she said. “I’ll try to get us a hotel with a good gym.”

  “Fontaine,” Cutter said before she could hang up. “Is this going to be a problem? The two of us going on this trip together?”

  There was a long silence on the phone.

  “I’m a big girl, Cutter,” she snapped. “I don’t have to ask Larry’s permission to go on assignment, if that’s what you mean.”

  “This is serious,” he said. “It’s pretty clear Larry has a problem with you and me working together. I’m not going to fight a battle on two fronts.”

  “Not sure what that even means,” she said. The bristles were clear in her voice.

  “It means,” Cutter said, “that I don’t have time to worry about jealous husbands while I’m busy hunting a bandit—and neither do you.”

  “Roger that,” she said, obviously clenching her teeth at the other end of the line. “I’m telling you, it’s not a thing.”

  The line went dead. Cutter sighed, feeling a moment of sympathy for Lola Fontaine. Lord knew he’d married his share of crazies. He pushed the memories out of his mind and turned to the twins, clapping his hands. “Are we good?”

  The boys smiled. Both were already helping themselves to the freshly scrambled eggs straight out of the pan.

  “Go wash up and get your sister,” Cutter said. “I’ve got an early day tomorrow and I have to pack.”

  “Pack?” Matt whined, gulping down a spoonful of eggs and throwing back his head. He stuck out his lip in a pout. “Where are you going?”

  “Grumpy Man-Rule twenty,” Cutter said.

  Both boys lit up. “Hunting bad guys?”

  Cutter nodded, paraphrasing Isaac Parker, the infamous hanging judge out of Fort Smith, Arkansas—which happened to also be his grandfather’s Man-Rule twenty—“Let no guilty man go free.”

  CHAPTER 12

  JANUARY CROSS LUGGED THE HEAVY YELLOW EXTENSION CORD OUT OF the lazarette at the rear of her homely little boat. Built along the lines of a fishing trawler, but with a semi-displacement hull to gain a hair more speed, Tide Dancer was absent the trawling arms of her professional sisters. She had once been a sight to behold. At least forty years old, her bilge worked a little harder now and she squatted lower in the water. A previous owner had done some shoddy fiberglass work to the wheelhouse, leaving the brow over the front windows oddly canted, as if she were scowling. January’s father said the crooked aspect put him in mind of a “scandalized” sailing ship. She’d yet to look up the meaning under that context, but liked the sentiment and the word.

  A lot of things aboard Tide Dancer were scandalized.

  Cross plugged the male end of the power cord into the stainless steel shore box, allowing her to run her electronics and charge her batteries during the extremely short time she planned to stay in port. Tide Dancer occupied the outer slip on the last float at the farthest end of the dock—across from the drab US Forest Service building that loomed over the entrance to the South Harbor. She was about as far as she could be from the parking lot and the entrance to the small marina. This gave her some distance between the noisy kids skateboarding or walking past on the Craig-Klawock Highway, but it also put her in the wake of nearly every boat that came in. Given the choice, January Cross would always pick a spot that put her farther from people and closer to the sea. Plus, her position put her closer to Southern Cross, the beamy Westsail 32 berthed on the next pier over. She drooled over the double-ender sailboat each time she came to port.

  Someday, she thought, every time she saw it. And each time she came away realizing she wasn’t quite ready to cut the dock lines completely and sail away.

  January was a tall woman, a little broader than she wished she was, but not so broad that anyone would say she was heavy. Her blue-black hair was cut in a style she liked to call short and messy. She had her father’s wide shoulders and hazel eyes but the darker skin of her mother, a Tlingit from the village of Hoonah, two hundred miles to the north, nearer to Juneau. Her father was a navy man and the Tlingit were people of the tide, so it was only natural that January would eventually find her way home to the water. It had only taken her thirty-six years to make it happen.

  Havoc, her Jack Russell/blue heeler mix, sniffed at the base of the shore-power box and lifted his leg to do his part to add to the mineral quantity of the water below. Leaning more Russell than heeler, he was a small dog with tawny curls but a freakishly wide head that made him look a little prehistoric.

  January toed Havoc out of the way and turned the power cord into a neat Flemish coil at the base of the box, so it lay flat and out of the way on the wooden dock. It was the way her father had taught her, so as not to give any of the other live-aboard folks in the harbor a reason to grouse. She was not by nature a particularly neat person, and her father often harangued her with Melvillean sailing words like “ballyhoo of blazes” and “slobgol-lion” to describe her messy room. The boats beyond and across from hers were in poor repair but their dock lines were shipshape. The power cord of the shabby Hewescraft beside her was turned in a beautiful Flemish coil, a perfect mirror image of hers. January wasn’t about to be the only one on the docks setting an example of the “snivelized.”

  Pleased with the practical neatness of her Flemish coil, she stepped through the transom gate, back aboard Tide Dancer, shielding her eyes against the low sun. It cast a soft orange glow over the mirrored harbor, sending up reflections of two-dozen fishing boats—mostly purse seiners but a few trawlers too. There were a handful of sailboats and a couple of other converted fishing vessels—though, in January’s opinion, none as handsome as Tide Dancer. Another dozen pleasure craft of varying makes and in various stages of repair rounded out the mix.

  As pretty as it was, the harbor was still connected to towns—and snivelization just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Now, thirty minutes after she’d motored Tide Dancer into the harbor, she was already longing to cast off and get back out. Uncomfortable or not, there were plenty of reasons to come in. Provisions were low, her laundry smelled like diesel fuel, and then there was that whole doctor visit she had to worry about. A consummate list maker, she had every excruciating minute mapped out and planned to be back on the water by noon the next day. Until then, there was nothing to do but settle in.

  Back on board, she opened the portside bench to access the lazarette and the battery switch—which some foolish designer had placed at the far back corner, forcing her to bend completely over and nearly crawl inside the dark locker. Havoc hopped up on the edge of the open seat and peered over her shoulder, as if to make sure she flipped the switch over to shore power correctly.

  She heard the tightly wound motor of a boat approaching much too fast, but half in, half out of the locker, found herself unable to brace herself quick enough against the heavy bow wave that slapped the hull as the boat sped past. Tide Dancer lurched violently to starboard, nearly sending January tumbling over the side. She grabbed the rail and straightened up in time to see an aluminum skiff speed past, throwing spray and still on step. She immediately recognized Carmen Delgado and another member of the FISHWIVES! crew, heading toward their slip that was located nearer the parking lot at the base of the gangway.

  Havoc scampered toward the bow, sensing January’s frustration at the skiff, barking his bullish head off all the way.

  January yelled above the sound of their whining motor. “No wake zone, genius! Three-hundred-dollar fine!”

  Carmen shot a glance over her shoulder but seemed completely unaware of Cross. The twenty-something Rasta dude at the
tiller raised a hand over his head to flip her off without even turning around.

  “Shit for brains!” January screamed. “You almost knocked me in the water. How about I come over there and see how you like to swim?”

  Ten months earlier such an encounter might have reduced her to tears. It was not so much that she’d been weak as she’d been sheltered. No one had ever really yelled at her. Her father was strict but he was also soft-spoken, and if the navy had taught him how to curse, he certainly didn’t share that skill with his only daughter. And anyway, recent events had given her a more nuanced view of what it meant to be proper. Her mother was a stately woman who carried herself with a regal air the likes of which January had rarely seen in another human being. January had been raised in a sheltered environment, gone to college with other sheltered girls, married her first crush, and they’d both gone on to become middle school teachers.

  But sheltered also meant she missed plenty of signs a woman with more worldly experience might have seen right off, and the marriage hadn’t ended well.

  Now, she was perfectly happy to act unsheltered as she watched Captain Dreadlocks turn into the FISHWIVES! slip and hop out on the dock.

  “You’re such a dumbass!” January yelled again. “You know that!” Her rant drew a leaning, sideways look from old man Forbush in the twenty-foot runabout one float over. Dreadlocks looked back, but not at her.

  “Stupid little punk,” January said under her breath. Havoc gave a harrumphing bark to match her grumbles.

  January stood there seething and holding a cable backstay as she watched both members of the FISHWIVES! production crew unload their skiff and hustle up the gangway to their rented Jeep.