The Hunger of Crows, page 18
The words are barely out of her mouth when an Alaska State Troopers Ford Interceptor pulls up behind Carla’s truck and stops. The Trooper gets out and looks at her license plate. Scott puts his truck in gear and drives.
CHAPTER
32
IN SPITE OF Lundren’s threat to send one of his goons, D’Angelo will have to wait until dark to make a move on Carla’s truck. Without any immediate alternatives to pursue, he sits in the rental car in front of the harbor master’s office for another half hour, watching the marina. There’s nothing of great interest happening there, so he takes a moment and pulls his pistol out of its holster, keeps it low between his knees, and checks the chamber and magazine. Of course it’s loaded. What kind of idiot would walk around with an unloaded weapon? But old habits prevail. It’s best to be sure before he has to pull the trigger. Not that he really thinks Carla Merino is going to put up that much of fight. And if she did, he’d use the stun gun. If at all possible. Even so, like he said, it’s best to be sure. He’s going to get that photo, one way or another.
He’s slipping the pistol back into the holster when he sees the guy he passed coming down the ramp carrying a bundle of clothes, now stepping off the “C” Lady onto the dock. It must be local hero Scott Crockett. With him is a young deckhand. Still no sign of a dog or any other four-legged animal. Was the kid crawling around in there? Curious.
With nothing else as interesting in sight, D’Angelo watches Crockett and the boy through his binoculars as they head up the ramp. They’re halfway up to the parking lot when white-blond hair flashes into view. He pulls the binoculars away from his eyes and sees Crockett and the deckhand stopping to chat with someone descending the ramp.
Blond ponytail. Tracksuit. Shire Kiminsky. His alarms start vibrating. She just happens to know Crockett? That’s possible, maybe even probable, in a town this small. But if Carla has faked her own drowning in a boating mishap, who might know something about that? The person who owns the boat, that’s who.
He pulls the binoculars back up and watches her talking to Crockett and his young deckhand. The deckhand is mostly hidden behind Crockett’s broad shoulders. All D’Angelo can see is a face full of sunglasses. Then the kid reaches up with one thin hand and pulls the glasses down a couple inches.
And there she is.
Two months’ worth of work culminating before his eyes. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “Hello, Carla.”
Crockett hustles her up the ramp, sunglasses up, head down.
So there is no doubt that Carla and Mr. Legit are in the scam together. And now so is Shire Kiminsky. Funny how a boring day can turn into something else entirely. Crockett is a bigger rascal than people think. He left his wife for a dead woman.
D’Angelo loses them for a second in a crowd of tourists at the top of the ramp. And then he sees them getting into the Crockett Construction pickup truck.
“Shit.” He drops the binoculars and starts the car. The spit road is clogged with barely moving cars and motor homes. Crockett’s truck is five or six vehicles ahead of him, heading for town. Perfect. He can tail them as far as he needs to.
As he approaches the Orca, he glances over at Carla’s pickup, still parked in the same spot near the back door. A lanky Alaska State Trooper is stepping out of a Ford Interceptor. George Volker walks out the back door wearing a flowered shirt over bulky cargo shorts, sandals. With the bay beyond him and the gulls overhead, all he needs is a boogie board. He crouches and reaches up under the wheel well of Carla’s truck and hands the Trooper what must certainly be a key.
“Shit,” D’Angelo says again. He hits the brakes, veering into the parking lot of Harbor Bait and Tackle, across from the Orca. He glances up the road at Crockett’s pickup heading away toward town. With Carla Merino in it. Well, he can’t be in two places at the same time. And he needs to know if that Trooper finds anything. “Shit!”
From Harbor Bait and Tackle, he has a good line of sight on Carla’s truck. Volker is standing there, watching the Trooper glance inside the cab and then into the camper without putting any real effort into it. Understandable. They believe she drowned in the bay. Why wouldn’t they? A woman goes out in a boat and disappears in rough weather. In Alaska. Good chance she’s dead. Maybe they’ll move the truck now. Hopefully someplace less public.
The Trooper’s not there long. Exchanging a few words with Volker, he hands the key back to him. He climbs into the Interceptor and joins the conga line of motor homes, campers, and every kind of sport utility vehicle inching up the spit road.
D’Angelo relaxes. Carla’s Toyota will sit there a while longer, no doubt. And it’s still too exposed to search. He’s about to drive off and try to catch up with Crockett’s pickup again when he sees Volker climb into Carla’s Toyota. What in hell? When gray exhaust rolls out of the truck’s tailpipe, D’Angelo puts his car in gear and cuts across the road between the two lanes of slow-moving traffic.
He pulls in behind Carla’s truck, blocking it. He gets out. Volker sits cowering behind the steering wheel. D’Angelo puts on a friendly face and knocks on the window. “George! What’s happenin’?”
“I’m just moving the—”
Volker gets halfway out the door and D’Angelo hits him once in the ribs, a very controlled medium jab to get his attention. He picks him up by the front of his hibiscus-patterned Hawaiian shirt, pushes him against the side of the camper, and lifts him onto his toes.
“Jesus!” Volker gasps for breath. “What the hell, man? You punched me. I thought we were copacetic!”
“A love tap, George.” He holds Volker an inch off the ground. “Good to see you too.”
Volker’s face registers exactly as much fear as D’Angelo wants it to. He lets him slide down the side of the camper until his heels are back on the gravel. He carefully straightens the front of the shirt. “Where’re you going with Carla’s truck, George? A luau?”
Volker massages his ribs. “That hurt.”
D’Angelo leans in, curls his right hand into a fist, keeps that elbow tight against his side. “Don’t make me ask again.”
“Okay, okay. Chill, man. I was taking it to my crib! Just until Carla’s relatives or somebody claims it.”
D’Angelo fires up his fiercest, end-of-the-world eyes and cocks his elbow back another couple inches.
“For God’s sake!” Volker yelps. “I need this parking spot. Really, man. I’m just moving the truck to make room before I open.”
D’Angelo knows “too scared to lie” when he sees it. He backs off and gives Volker his atomic smile. “Sure,” he says. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” He leads Volker by one elbow back to the open door of Carla’s truck. “You’re going to drive it to your ‘crib,’ just like you started to do …” A thought occurs to him. “How were you planning on getting back out here to open the bar?”
“I was going to call my kitchen helper, Joey. Have him pick me up at my place. He’s just a kid. A teenager. Leave him out of this. Please?”
Again. Too scared to lie.
“Of course,” D’Angelo says. “Give me your phone.”
Volker hands it over.
“Now, you drive nice and carefully to your house. No need to call young Joey. I’ll follow you and drive you back here.” He nudges Volker into the driver’s seat. “I’ll be right behind you.” He pauses, puts a touch of menace into his voice. “There’s nobody waiting at your house, right?”
Volker shakes his head. “I live alone. You know … now that Carla moved out, and now that she’s … you know.” He glances out at the water in the bay, a genuinely pained look on his face. Which tells D’Angelo that Volker’s almost certainly not in on Carla’s scam.
“Okay, George, drive the speed limit. Trust me when I say that you do not want to talk to any more cops on our way.”
D’Angelo moves the Camry out of the way, and Volker drives Carla’s truck out onto the road to town. D’Angelo slips into the tourist traffic, two cars behind him.
This is progress. Carla is alive. Crockett and Shire Kiminsky are in on it. And he’ll soon have unfettered access to the truck. If the photo isn’t there, he’ll have nothing more to do but talk to Carla.
CHAPTER
33
CARLA IS LOATH to leave the photo behind in the truck on the spit but happy to be out of the harbor and on the highway out of town. As the road climbs higher and higher above the bay, it feels like they are physically rising above the threat she’s been living under for the past twelve hours. The past two months. Halfway up the hill, she yanks her hood down and peels the knit hat and the sunglasses off. Scott glances her way but doesn’t make her crouch down or put the shades back on. He must be feeling better—safer—too. “How’re you doing?” he asks.
“I wish we had the picture.”
“We’ll figure some way to get it. Like I said, maybe Shire is the key.”
She just nods, at the moment wanting only to feel the miles piling up between her and Homer and hopefully Cosmo D’Angelo as well. Scott apparently understands. He says no more.
At the top of the hill, the big paved overlook catches her eye. The sea-viewing area is half filled with cars and campers of all sizes, their occupants draped over the guard railing at the edge of the cliff, cameras and phones gobbling up the scenery. Kachemak Bay glitters in its deceptively alluring way hundreds of feet below. Nothing but lovely blue water here, it seems to say. Get in your skiff and come on out! A metallic taste fills her mouth, and her cheek twitches. She’s seen just how unfriendly that water can get. Up close.
She peers across the bay at the ghostly forms of the mountains on the other side, the old volcanoes, Iliamna, Mount Redoubt. Then a wall of big trees looms between the road and the water, obliterating the view. The forest continues on that side of the highway for the next few miles, a world of shaggy evergreen woods interspersed with fields of tall grasses and broad-leafed plants.
Scott drives on, repeatedly checking the mirror like an escaped convict in an old movie. All he needs is the striped outfit. It makes her anxious again. She looks in the side mirror. Nothing behind them but Alaskan scenery. Trees. Bushes. More trees. In the distance, mountains and glaciers. And up close, clusters of purple-blue flowers hugging the shoulders of the road. Not even a car in sight behind them. However tense Scott is, she’s ready to believe that no one is chasing them. Chasing her. She can believe that. Sure. Maybe.
She undoes the seat belt and wriggles out of the bulky rubber raincoat, twists to toss it into the back seat of the truck. There are toolboxes and power saws and big drills of some kind on the floor back there, the words CROCKETT CONST stenciled on them. There are other tools she doesn’t recognize. There’s a pair of muddy brown Xtratuf boots just like the ones she’s wearing. Her sneakers are in the bag with her damp clothes.
She wishes she could do this without Scott. And she told him she wasn’t asking for a prince. God, she wishes she had the photo in her hands again and didn’t need him. Didn’t need to get Shire involved. But she really has no other choice right now.
She turns back and buckles her seat belt, slides lower in the seat. Scott sits stiffly upright behind the wheel, clutching it with both hands, obviously tense. She says, “Scott, I’m sorry for all the trouble I’m causing you. Really. I am.”
He glances at her. “Well, I could use some excitement in my life. I mean, if you hadn’t floated into it, I’d be out there right now fishing. Alone.” He pauses and laughs quietly, shaking his head. “God. Is that pitiful enough for you?”
Carla feels herself smile, the tension lifting like the fog over the bay. Scott’s one of those rare, unguarded men who makes her happy to be talking with him. “Have you been a carpenter all your life?”
“I fished commercially when I was in high school. Paid my way through college.” He glances over at her like he’s not sure he believes she wants to hear his life story.
Carla nods. “Yeah, I’ve been here long enough to know that’s what some Alaskan kids do. Joey the kitchen helper at the Orca wants to fish, but his mother won’t let him. Too dangerous.”
“It is dangerous,” Scott says. “I almost got killed when I was twenty-five.”
“You kept fishing after college?” she says, joking now. “Did you major in crabbing or seining?”
Scott laughs. “Look at you, knowing all the terms.”
“I work at the Orca. The conversation is all fishing, all day.”
He shakes his head. “I kept fishing because I was an English major. Which means I needed a real job. And I loved commercial fishing. I gave it up and started the contracting business after the crabber I was on sank and almost took me with it.”
In spite of the warm sun beaming through the windshield, that chills her. “Yeah, well, I know something about nearly drowning.”
“You sure do,” he says.
They drive for a while in silence. “I’m glad you made it out alive,” she says. And she means it.
“Same here,” Scott says. His face reddens and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, hard. She can practically see his brain churning, trying to find something else to say. “How about you? You said you were a social worker?” he finally blurts.
She nods. “For about six years.”
“What made you quit? Ship sink?”
“Something like that,” she says. “The poverty. The misery. It was just one sad story after another. It wore me down after a while. It’s hard to explain.”
“Sure,” Scott says.
He drives on in silence until a narrow two-lane appears on the left. He turns onto it and checks the mirrors again to see if anyone turns behind them. Carla finds herself checking too. Nothing and nobody. She’ll be checking for the rest of her life. She doesn’t even want to think about how long—or brief—that’s going to be.
The smaller road is shouldered by short, bushy trees. She knows they’re called alders. She watched Shire cut some to use in her smoker for salmon. Alders. Carla’s learned that much about the outdoors since being here. Nature girl. That’s her. Two months and she can name one tree and two fish. By the time she’s seventy or eighty, she’ll be identifying small brown birds.
A battered and rust-blotched flatbed approaches Scott’s truck coming from the other direction. The approaching driver raises his forefinger off his steering wheel. Scott does the same.
Carla says, “What’s that, some kind of back-road salute?”
“I guess. You tend to see the same eight or ten people every day on a road like this. No need to get too excited about it.”
This secondary road is even curvier than the highway, winding around marshy ponds dotted with lily pads. In one lush green puddle, a moose stands ankle-deep in the shallows as if posing for a calendar, sloppy water weeds dripping from its jaws.
“Yearling bull,” Scott says. “See the little nubby antlers poking out by its ears?”
Carla says, “Do you hunt?”
“Used to, all the time. Moose, caribou. Only small game for the past few years. Grouse mostly.” He stops and thinks. “Last year, I don’t think I got out at all.”
“But you own a gun?”
“Guns. Plural. Rifles, shotguns.” He chuckles. “In Alaska, if you don’t have at least five guns, you’re not allowed to own property or vote.”
Carla nods, thinking.
“That’s a joke, Carla.”
“I know that,” she says. “I’m just glad you have a gun.” Still, it doesn’t comfort her as much as she thought it would. “You’re sure that even if D’Angelo is in Homer, there’s no way for him to guess we’d be up here in these woods. That’s true, right?”
“I can’t imagine why he would,” Scott says. “Nobody knows …” He pauses. “Except Shire.”
“Well, I’m glad she doesn’t think I’m dead now. Shire is smart and tough, and I want her by my side. But I’m still scared to get her sucked into this. Those girls …”
“I know. I shouldn’t have told her to come up here. That was stupid. I should’ve just arranged to meet her someplace in town to explain things, after you were tucked in at my place. Ask her to go get Volker to let her into your truck.”
“Why can’t you call her? How come you told her not to call you?”
“I don’t know.” Scott’s fingers fidget on the steering wheel. “In the movies, somebody’s always listening in on other people’s cell phones. The papers talk about satellites a hundred miles out in space with cameras so powerful they can see you taking a leak off your back porch. They say your own TV set can be used to eavesdrop on you. Really, I don’t know what to believe. Except that Sidewinder has the latest of everything.”
“They wouldn’t be listening to your phone,” Carla says. “D’Angelo doesn’t know you exist.”
“But he’ll know it was Shire’s boat you sank. He might be listening to hers.” He sighs. “Like I said, I just don’t know.”
This isn’t helping her nerves. She squirms in her seat.
Scott sees that. “Take it easy. We’re safe now. Like you said, Shire is smart. And as long as she’s careful, there’s no way in hell this D’Angelo guy could associate you with me or know you’re here in Anchor Point.” He reaches over and touches her elbow. “Look, there’s nothing up here except moose and squirrels. Really. Rocky and Bullwinkle live up ahead. I’ll point out their house.”
She snorts a laugh and hopes to hell he’s right.
He drives another mile or so. She looks out her window at the passing forest, thinking about moose and squirrels. “Are there bears around here too?” she asks.
“Mostly black bears. Some brown bears down on the river once in a while when the salmon are in. Are you afraid of bears?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen a wild one. But once when I was hiking with my husband in the mountains in Arizona, we saw bear tracks and I got scared about sleeping in a tent because I was having my period.”
