by Marc Cameron
Mim looked at him for a long moment, then gave up on her interrogation. She sighed. “Just about every day. Especially here during the months after Christmas—even when Ethan was alive. The dark can be oppressive, but after the holidays is the worst. Truthfully, Alaska would grow on me if I could ever seem to climb out of this funk. But it really doesn’t matter. I can’t move until we settle the civil suit. Lord knows how long that’ll be.”
Cutter sighed. His brother had worked for an engineering company that held contracts for oil companies up on the North Slope. The job had paid for their move to Alaska, gotten them a nice home in the upscale Hillside area overlooking Anchorage—and killed him. Ethan had gone to the Slope to oversee the installation of some piece of equipment involving seals his company, and thus his team, had helped to design. They’d been out at the wellhead near the mouth of the Kuparuk River on the Beaufort Sea that dark and cold morning eighteen months earlier, when the explosion happened. The oil company blamed the engineering company, the engineering company blamed the engineering team—and the team, not wanting to get any of their living members in trouble, blamed Ethan. Witnesses said it had happened fast and that Ethan and the two roustabouts standing next to him were killed instantly. Written reports were more graphic, detailing how the men’s bodies had been torn in half. Cutter wondered if his sister-in-law knew the details, but supposed she did since lawyers in civil suits seemed to take great pleasure in using such things to play on the emotions and weaken the resolve of their adversaries. You describe in graphic detail how a woman’s husband was torn limb from limb in an explosion, and just maybe she’d stop wanting to bring up the incident.
The engineering firm’s insurance company had agreed to pay a claim, but at a reduced rate because they alleged the accident was Ethan’s fault. What they hadn’t counted on was Ethan being friends with a local attorney. Coop Daniels was a good guy, single, and kind of sweet on Mim. He’d agreed to take the case on a contingency so long as she stayed in Alaska to help him fight it. The boys thought Florida was too hot and were happy to stay in the only place they’d ever lived. Cutter tried for a promotion to supervisory deputy in Alaska and got it, allowing him to move up to help out. It turned out to be a win for everyone—except Ethan—and possibly Constance, the she-wolf who rarely came out of her room.
Mim cleared her throat and stood. She began rifling through more totes. “What else do you need?” she said. “Maybe a fanny pack from 1991?”
“I’ll be fine with the boots,” he said.
He turned to go back inside but she stopped him, resting her hand on his shoulder.
“I really appreciate what you’re doing, Arliss,” she said.
“We’re family,” he said. “This is what family does.”
CHAPTER 14
CARMEN DELGADO FELT LIKE AN IDIOT FOR RENTING A PLACE SO FAR out of town. The bulk of the crew lived in the same set of apartments in the city of Craig, but in her naive excuse for wisdom, Carmen had decided the main production offices should be located in a five-bedroom cedar house perched on the side of a mountain three miles east of the city. The nearest neighbor was five hundred meters away through a thick stand of red cedar. There were no streetlights and Port St. Nicholas lay like a black inkblot across the road of the same name—which ran along the water to terminate another dozen miles out of town.
The house had a huge picture window that offered a perfect view of the ocean, and the property manager had practically assured Carmen that whales swam right in front of it every day of the week. She’d thought it an idyllic spot for the production offices. The three-mile drive from Craig seemed much farther than you would expect and the extra distance would allow her to step away from the daily grind of dealing with a dysfunctional cast and crew. Maybe, if things worked out, she’d even be able to spend a little alone time with her hunky camera guy, Greg Conner.
But, by the time she finished with her sixteen-hour day and slogged up the steep gravel walk from the driveway, it was too dark to see whales—or anything else, for that matter. The spring had turned out much cooler than she’d expected, and the huge window that had been such a selling point turned out to be poorly insulated, forcing her to split and haul more firewood to heat the house and turning her sixteen-hour days into eighteen-hour days. Worse yet, the window was so large as to make it nearly impossible to cover, even with a king-size sheet, and Carmen could never shake the feeling that there was someone out there, watching her.
The earlier incident at the mine property had left her shaken and wobbly. The guys from the boat had chased them for miles, veering off only when they’d rounded Fish Egg Island and were almost back to Craig Harbor. A lonely house in a dark forest on a darker road overlooking a black ocean was not a place to be when scary dudes were after you for trespassing on their land.
Now, she peered past her own reflection in the same picture window and hugged herself against a sudden chill. Greg sat across the room in front of twin video monitors reviewing the day’s footage. The living room had been converted into a production room with aluminum shelving replacing end tables and art along the wood panel walls. Her team of three production assistants had gone crazy with the label makers and everything on the shelves was neatly marked.
Carmen jumped at the sound of a hollow thump somewhere in the darkness. It was either a car door or one of the trees on the hillside behind the house that intermittently toppled over during the night just to scare the pee out of her. She leaned in, pressing her nose against the window, her breath making a little spot of condensation on the chilly glass. The moon was still behind the mountains, but the feeble excuse for a porch light reflected off the hood of the rented Jeep Cherokee that stared up at her on the slanted driveway.
She shot a quick glance over her shoulder at Greg—the only good thing to come out of the damned house. “Did you hear that?”
Greg didn’t bother to look up from his spot at the video monitor. “It’s just the wind,” he said. “I wish you’d forget about those guys. They were only trying to scare us. We’re good.”
Carmen took one more look out the window at black nothingness and shivered again. She padded across the carpeted living room and warmed her hands over the woodstove. The heat did nothing to chase away the chill in her soul, so she gave up and flopped into the folding chair next to Greg.
He glanced sideways, raising his eyebrows up and down and giving her flannel pants a nod. “Have they morphed back into pajamas yet?”
Delgado reached up and pulled out her shirt, peeking down the collar. “Yep,” she said, giving him a wink. “They turned back into pajamas about ten seconds after I walked in the door.”
It was a dangerous thing, flirting with your staff, especially one as young and talented as Greg Conner, but being the boss was awfully lonely.
This stupid show made her lonely.
Less than a week after she’d gotten the green light, Delgado, and the other twenty-one members of the production staff, had descended on the island like a conquering army. FISHWIVES! followed the lives of four separate couples, necessitating as many as six different field teams. The ins and outs of such a production along with the care and feeding of assistant producers, camera ops, sounds techs, safety personnel, and even lowly production assistants, took a vigilant eye and often required her to be the bad guy—even with Greg. There was no clear rule about sleeping with the help, but it was stupid, and she knew it.
But now Carmen was scared so she cuddled up beside Greg in front of three large computer monitors set atop a long plastic table beside the woodstove, reviewing the day’s work. Only Carmen and one of the assistant field producers named Andy stayed at the St. Nicholas Road house. And now Andy, along with the rest of the entire cast and crew, were at a weekly beach party that Carmen was sure only helped to alienate most of the island.
The incident with the other boat had put her on edge, and though Greg was no lightweight, Carmen couldn’t help but wish that Kenny was in the house with his pistol an
d big honking knife.
Footage from each day was downloaded from the cameras onto one of a stack of two dozen hard drives and hand-carried weekly on the Inter-Island Ferry back to Ketchikan, where it was sent by FedEx to the main offices in Los Angeles. The footage remained on the cameras’ hard drives as well as stored media cards to create redundant backups until it was downloaded to the main drives in LA. Considering the reception they’d received, Delgado thought it prudent to copy the day’s footage as soon as they returned to the office.
Greg gloried in his talent as the footage of the dilapidated little cabin ran on the twin monitors in front of them, the light reflecting off his face and casting the shadow of his dreadlocks on the aluminum shelves behind him.
“I told you this would be gold,” he said. “LA’s gonna eat it up.”
Carmen watched the weather on a small flat-screen television beside the monitors. It was a station out of Juneau.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked. “Looks like a nasty low pressure system moving in from the west.”
“I saw it earlier,” Greg said. “Ain’t it great? We’re supposed to get gale force winds here by tomorrow evening—smack in the middle of the herring roe fishery.”
“That kind of a storm will be horrible for the seining fleet.”
Greg raised his eyebrows up and down. “Danger is just another word for money in our business. You couldn’t have scripted the timing any better.”
Carmen knew he was right, but it killed her.
A pounding at the front entry shook the walls and nearly caused her to jump out of her skin.
Greg groaned. “Carmen, bad guys don’t knock.” He pushed back his chair and got up to answer the door.
“It’s your little friend,” he said, nodding to her flannel pants. “Sure you don’t want to put on something decent?”
“Shut up,” Carmen said.
Greg stepped away from the door to allow Cassandra Brown inside. The Native girl walked past him without looking back. Kicking off her shoes, she opened her small backpack and handed Carmen a video camera. The production company used the little prosumer Sonys to scout locations or to give to interns who wanted to try their hand at shooting some footage.
Carmen thanked her and popped out the postage-stamp-sized media cards, grabbing two more from a manila envelope on the shelf. They went through this same routine every few days. Cassandra didn’t smile. In fact, the countenance of her face remained as unchanged as a piece of granite, no matter what went on around her. She simply accepted the replacement cards and snapped them back in her camera.
Carmen followed her to the door, expecting to find the car outside that had given her a ride. She saw nothing but the silver-black line of the ocean across Port St. Nicholas Road.
“Are you going to be all right?” Carmen asked. “How does a twelve-year-old girl get all the way out here at this time of night?”
Cassandra just shrugged. She really was a creepy little kid.
Carmen shot a glance over her shoulder at Greg, who was busy reviewing his footage. On a whim, she stepped into the chilly darkness and stood on the weathered front porch with the Native girl.
“I can trust you, right?” Carmen whispered.
Cassandra raised a wary brow. It was slight, but at least it was some show of emotion. A foot shorter, she stared up at Carmen with unblinking brown eyes, before giving a slow and deliberate nod.
“Good,” Carmen said, accustomed to doing all the talking. She reached in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a flat CFast media card. It was roughly two inches by two inches square and not quite a quarter of an inch thick. “I need you to keep this safe for me. Don’t tell anyone you have it. This is important. Okay?”
The corners of the little girl’s mouth perked, just a twitch, but for her, it was as good as a full-toothed grin. She seemed genuinely happy to have the extra responsibility.
“Be careful.” Carmen said as she watched Cassandra Brown walk down the steep hill toward the road and disappear into the darkness. Back home in LA, she would have called the police had she found a child wandering around on a lonely road at night. As it was, she shut the door and turned the bolt. For all she knew, the creepy little Haida girl had crossed the road and walked straight into the sea.
Greg’s face was glued to the computer monitor and the magnificence of his own creativity. “Those Sonys are nearly a thousand bucks a pop,” he muttered. “You sure you want to give one to some girl who’s probably just going to steal it anyway?”
Carmen slouched down in the chair beside his. “You’re a real jerk, you know that. Cassandra’s not going to steal it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Greg said. He sounded even more smug than usual. “Tucker gave that other Indian chick a camera and she ran off with it.”
Carmen gave him a stiff jab in the arm. “Native chick,” she said. “And anyway, she didn’t run off with it. She’s gone missing.”
Greg leaned back in his chair to give a long, groaning stretch. “That’s what I’m sayin’. She went missing with a thousand-dollar camera, and that’s money down the drain. I know the production company’s flush with dough now that the show’s been green lit, but I’d just as soon you gave that dough to your most talented camera operator in, say, the form of a bonus.”
“You’re right, as usual,” Carmen said. “Tucker does deserve a bonus.”
Greg rolled his eyes. “You cut me to the bone, my dear. If you’re not going to give me a bonus, how about you make us some coffee. This is a lot of footage we have to go over—and you gave everyone else the night off to party.”
Carmen let her head fall to one side. She was severely out of practice with such things, but hoped it looked seductive. “I did give them the night off,” she said. “So it’s just me and you here looking at footage. . . .”
He coughed, running a hand over the top of his dreadlocks. “I think I’m tracking, Jammy Pants.”
“Good,” Carmen said.
Greg groaned again, more intensely this time. “Just ten more minutes . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen.
Carmen’s eyes followed his, knowing from the look on his face that she was not going to like what she saw.
There had been no thud, no breaking glass, no telltale creak of the door, but standing in the dark kitchen were the two most terrifying men Carmen Delgado had ever seen. Greg was right—bad guys didn’t knock.
CHAPTER 15
THE HEAVY BEAT OF MUSIC AND THE HISS OF LAPPING SURF GREETED Trooper Sam Benjamin as he stepped out of his patrol car on Cemetery Island outside Craig and situated the flat brim of his blue felt Stetson over his forehead. He loved that hat, and not just because it signified his hold over Sergeant Yates. He never admitted it to anyone, but the Stetson was, in large part, the reason he’d joined the Alaska State Troopers over any other agency. He’d read studies about hats and how they commanded a certain respect. Given a choice between two responding officers, citizens were most likely to turn for guidance to the one wearing a hat. Hard helmets, like motor jocks wore, garnered the most respect, followed closely by the venerable campaign hat—like the Alaska State Troopers Stetson. Ball caps didn’t even rate.
Following the music, the trooper passed the Veterans’ flagpole and the white stones of the cemetery that gave the island its name and made his way down a wide gravel trail. He caught a glimpse of orange firelight flickering through the thick foliage and heard laughter ahead and to his left, toward the ocean. Huge spruce stood like silent sentinels in the darkness on either side of the footpath. The trooper chuckled to himself as he walked, thinking the big trees weren’t very competent guards if they allowed the likes of the FISHWIVES! crew into the park.
Following the party noise, he worked his way down the embankment of fiddlehead ferns and across a wide stretch of trampled grass. It was low tide, so the gravel beach was large enough to have a considerable bonfire. Sparks spiraled into the blue-black night,
pushed upward on the heat of crackling driftwood. Over thirty people stood out in dark relief to the flames, swaying to a Crosby, Stills and Nash song that poured from someone’s iPhone speakers. The night had turned chilly ahead of the approaching storm and the warmth of the fire felt good.
Murmurs of “Hey, Super Trooper!” and “I didn’t do it!” rippled through the gathered crowd—not very original for a bunch of creative television folk. Benjamin stifled the urge to pop back and scanned the group until he found Kenny Douglas. Something about the guy rubbed him the wrong way, but as the safety supervisor, Douglas’s job was to liaison with law enforcement, and there was little more serious to liaise about than a missing teenage girl. The trooper found him sitting on a large driftwood log tipping back a Heineken, shoulder to shoulder with a doe-eyed girl less than half his age. She was a local with hair pulled back in a fresh ponytail, not long out of high school, and working as a production assistant. Until now, her biggest life adventure had been getting her nose pierced behind her mother’s back.
Douglas was in his late thirties with the thick arms and beefy neck you’d expect from a head of safety and security. He’d buzzed his hair into a marine flattop to help beef up his tough persona. He liked to tout his experience using military slang, throwing around terms like “down range” and “battle buddy,” but he would never get specific about his experience. If he’d ever actually served, Trooper Benjamin expected it was as some rear echelon pogue.
While the cute, ponytailed brunette sitting beside him was just old enough to make it legal, Douglas was also old enough to know better. Under other circumstances Benjamin might have hassled him a little for being a letch. As it was, he decided to focus on finding Millie Burkett and let creepy old dudes be creepy old dudes.
“You find her yet?” Douglas asked, as if he’d been expecting the trooper’s visit.
“You know Millie Burkett?”
Douglas chuckled and toasted the air with his beer. “Everybody on this crew knows Millie Burkett. She’s always sniffing around, if you know what I mean.”