The Hunger of Crows, page 22
Shire and Scott look as terrified as Carla feels.
“Well, now that we all understand each other,” D’Angelo says, relaxing incrementally, “how about you make me a sandwich with that last piece of salmon, Crockett? And we’ll figure out who’s going to town.”
Scott looks at Carla and then Shire, questioningly. They both shrug.
“Okay,” Scott says warily. He stands again and goes to the stove. “But if we get you that picture, you have to go.”
D’Angelo holds one hand up. “I swear: You help me get that thing, I’m out of here.”
Carla’s touched by Scott’s attempt to protect her and still wondering what the hookup with him was about. She’s feeling way too warm about him for it to have been mere sport. Shit. Does she want to get involved with a new guy right now in the middle of all this? D’Angelo could revert to his death-threat mode any second. Like he said: he doesn’t have a gun in his pocket. That doesn’t make him harmless exactly.
At the moment he seems mostly interested in food. “Damn, that smells good, Crockett. What did you put on the salmon, dill?”
Shire looks at Carla from across the table and rolls her eyes. She mouths, Asshole.
“Yeah, dill. Come on, D’Angelo,” Scott says. He reaches into a cupboard and pulls out another plate. “You have to tell us why you’re so hot to get that photo. We know you and McKint lied to Congress about meeting the Colombian colonel in the picture. But even if you’re convicted, that’s a few months in a white-collar prison. You guys could do that time standing on your heads.” He makes a sandwich like the others, pulls a napkin from a drawer.
Carla feels her nerve coming back. “Scott’s right, Cosmo. You’ve been making my life miserable for two months. Now you want to sit and have lunch? And terrorize us into helping you? Are you really that intent on helping McKint run for president? That loyal to McKint?”
D’Angelo looks like he’s deciding how to answer her.
She says, “This isn’t about McKint’s so-called immigration emergency. You’re not a racist like him. I’ve been to your house, seen the picture of your Army friend from Mexico. And I’ve seen your face when you watch McKint running his mouth on TV.” She pauses, catches her breath. “So what’s this about? The money you’ll make if Sidewinder takes over the border? Is that all?” Carla hears the pleading in her voice. She really doesn’t want it to be about that.
D’Angelo is still. His face unreadable.
Nobody says anything for a moment. Somewhere nearby, a crow squawks. A dog barks.
Then D’Angelo sighs. He takes a seat at the table between Carla and Shire. Scott sets the plate of food in front of him. D’Angelo silently picks up the fish sandwich and takes a huge bite.
Carla feels the terror dissipating. Maybe it was getting that tirade out of her system. Or maybe it’s being this close to him, inches away now. She flashes to sitting on his patio chatting, eating the spaghetti he cooked for her, climbing into his bed. She’s heard it said that all humans are capable of becoming monsters. Well, maybe some monsters can be human.
“Oh man,” he says, his mouth stuffed, “the tartar sauce is perfect.”
Carla arches an eyebrow at him. “Cosmo? That photo?”
He takes a swig of beer, swallows. He nods.
“It’s personal for me too, Carla.”
CHAPTER
40
THE ORCA IS half-full. It’s too early in the day for the regular bar zombies, but a dozen tourists—all from the day’s cruise ship—are sitting at two adjoining tables, nursing pitchers of local Red Knot ale and marveling at the Alaskan bric-a-brac hanging on the walls. Gold pans, gill nets, a long piece of feathery whale baleen. Volker makes sure everyone is set for the moment, then heads for the liquor storeroom off the kitchen for some Tito’s to replace the freshly empty bottle behind the bar.
He’s still wondering what a dead-eyed ghoul like D’Angelo wants so badly from Carla’s truck. What he has to do with Carla at all. It’s clear the withholding bastard isn’t going to share that information. Or anything else. Not with all that secret-agent, need-to-know-basis bullshit he seems to wallow in. What a dick.
Cutting through the kitchen, Volker stops to say hi to his young helper, Joey, just arriving. Joey is hanging up his HOMER HIGH SCHOOL MARINERS letter jacket and putting on an apron. He’s old enough to work at the Orca—washing dishes, busing tables—but not to mix or serve drinks. “Go, Mariners!” Volker shouts.
Joey smiles and knots his apron. “Hi, Mr. Volker.”
Joey is the quietest, most polite teenager Volker has ever heard of. He loves embarrassing the kid with gross comments and crude, unsolicited advice.
“Dude, you’re early,” he says as Joey picks up a broom. “Don’t you have some pointy-titted cheerleader you should be poking this afternoon?”
Joey shakes his head and starts sweeping.
Volker doesn’t really need the extra help. He keeps Joey around because he promised the kid’s mother he’d give him a summer job. Angela, a nurse at the hospital, is a worried, nervous single mom but a lot of fun in bed. She’s also a helicopter parent of the first order. She doesn’t want Joey out working on the boats, where he would make a lot more money than the Orca pays—but where he could also get hurt or even killed.
Volker was dating Angela when Carla showed up. Throwing Angela over for her, he considered reneging on the promise to hire Joey. But keeping the boy on the payroll is relatively cheap insurance in case he ever needs to get back into Angela’s good graces. And the truth is, he enjoys the kid’s company. Now that Carla is gone, he’s suddenly remembering more of Angela’s good traits than her bad ones.
“So, Joey,” he says, as he unlocks the door to the liquor storeroom, “how’s your mom?”
* * *
Volker has the bottle of Tito’s in hand and is just switching off the storeroom light when he hears a thud out in the kitchen. “You break it, Joey, you pay for it!”
He walks out to find Joey facedown on the concrete floor, a short, bald man standing over him. The guy has a ginger, chest-length beard that’s braided and cinched with a leather thong an inch above the tip. He’s hunched forward, hands balled in fists tight to his hips, bright-green eyes bulging with anticipation. “George Volker?”
“Hey, what the hell—”
Volker barely registers the blurred movement in front of his eyes but feels the sudden numbness spreading across his face, hears the Tito’s bottle crash on the concrete. He’s just figuring out that his nose is smashed and that he’s on his back on the floor himself when the man crouches, grabs him by his shirt front, and says, “Carla Merino’s truck. Two thousand one Toyota. Where is it?”
Carla again. Of all the problematic women Volker has known, she’s taking first prize.
The little guy looms over him. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with some thrash metal band logo on it, tucked into camo pants, tucked into combat boots. The floor-mat beard, the neck tattoos. Definitely an Anchor Point off-the-roader.
Those guys don’t frequent the Orca much. What would they have to talk about with either the commercial fishermen or the tourists? None of them work or fish. None of them do anything, as far as Volker can tell. He knows the type, mostly from Atkins’s gas station up there, where he fuels up because it’s four cents a gallon cheaper than in Homer. There are always a few of the goons hanging around, gassing up their cobbled-together pickups with mismatched quarter panels and absent tailgates. Whenever one of them looks his way, Volker nods and says, “Hey, man,” and hopes they recognize him as the defiant, antiestablishment type he’s pretty sure his ponytail says he is.
“Are you listening to me?” This particular troglodyte now kicks him in the thigh so hard the pain rockets from his ankle to his armpit. The guy draws his boot back to deliver another one. “Her truck?”
“Stop!” Volker crab-scuttles upright against the stainless-steel sink stand. “The truck is at the cop shop. It’s in impound! I swear! Go look!” He raises one hand to his bleeding nose, squeezes his cramping thigh with the other. His pants are wet with vodka. He has a shard of glass in the palm of one hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that Joey seems to be unconscious but breathing. Angela’s going to blame this on him somehow. “Jesus, why is everybody so interested in Carla’s truck?”
The guy crouches so close to his face now that the beard tickles Volker’s neck. Although everything about the man screams tweaker, his teeth are straight and brilliantly white. His breath smells fresh, though vaguely chemical, like some kind of household cleaning product. “Who’s ‘everybody’?”
“A big guy from out of town. Looks like a cop.”
“Eye-talian name?
Volker nods.
“Yep.” The creep is apparently unsurprised. “Impound, huh?” he says, eyes slit.
Volker nods as quickly as he can. A spear of pain shoots through his skull. “I turned it in this afternoon.”
The thug straightens and peers down at him, twisting the end of his beard, no doubt deciding whether to believe Volker or beat on him some more. “If I drive all the way into town and it’s not there, I’m going to come back out here and stick your head in that deep fryer until your ponytail is crispy as a corn dog. You do know that, right?”
Volker nods harder, his sinuses exploding.
“Okay then. Have a nice day.” He turns and walks out.
Volker scrambles across the floor to Joey and rolls him onto his back. The left side of the kid’s face is bloody, that eye swelling shut. Volker shouts his name, shakes his shoulders. Joey’s right eye flutters open and stalls half-lidded.
“Joey! Can you hear me?”
“Mr. Volker?” Joey’s eye finally seems to locate him.
“Say something,” Volker says.
“I fucking quit, man.”
CHAPTER
41
D’ANGELO EATS RAVENOUSLY, biting off big chunks of his fish sandwich, gulping it down with the bitter IPA everyone seems to be drinking these days. The food is glorious, the garlic-flavored oil smoky but not burned. God, he hates overbrowned garlic. “Delicious. I think I might live to my next meal now.” He sips his beer.
“The picture,” Carla says.
“Okay. In 1997, I was with Joint Special Ops, providing ground branch protection for the CIA during the War on Drugs down in Colombia. It was chaos. Escobar was dead, and the other drug lords were slaughtering each other over his turf. Meanwhile, the Colombian Army and right-wing paramilitary groups were fighting the communist FARC guerillas. Everyone was financed by the coke we were supposed to be destroying.” He stops to take another bite and a swallow of beer. “Chaos.”
Carla says, “You were guarding McKint in the photo.”
D’Angelo nods. “Gordon was a CIA adviser to the Colombian Army. I was his driver-bodyguard. One day we met two men at a little hotel in the mountains. One was a colonel in the Colombian Army. The other was some Panamanian lawyer. Long story short? McKint and the colonel were stealing DEA money by the truckload. The Panamanian was laundering it for them.”
“Who took the picture?” Carla asks.
“Not sure. My bet is the colonel had it done. He wanted something to bargain with if he got sideways with the CIA,” D’Angelo says. “We’ll never know. Torres was killed in two thousand one.”
“So, how is this ‘personal’ for you?” Shire’s skepticism is thick.
D’Angelo takes a breath and starts again. “This meeting was almost over when a concussion grenade came through a window. Small-arms fire poured in. A real shitstorm. I was dazed pretty bad. Gordon grabbed me and basically shot his way out of the building. I was in the hospital for a month. I still can’t hear much out of this ear.” He points to the left side of his head.
“Now you owe the prick your life.” It’s Shire again. “Fucking great.”
D’Angelo continues. “Then a couple months later, Gordon left the Agency and asked me to join him in the new company he was starting.”
“Sidewinder,” Carla says.
“Yeah. Gordon predicted that the next twenty years were going to be one clandestine military engagement after another. America didn’t have the stomach for all-out wars anymore. There were fortunes to be made working as contractors.” He shrugs. “I took the job.”
“And it’s been a real moneymaker for you too, hasn’t it?” Shire says, dripping contempt.
“Can someone control this woman, please?” He’s almost laughing.
“Control?” Scott says. “I’ve known her for more than thirty years. I haven’t seen it done yet.”
“Okay. To answer her question then, yes, Sidewinder has made money all over the world. But today, we don’t have to go so far to do that. That’s why you see Gordon on TV ranting about the border.”
Shire hisses something under her breath.
Carla says, “That’s all it is? McKint saved your life, and you are forever indebted to him? So you’re going to take that photo from us and give it to him?” She shakes her head. “That’s some pretty disappointing B-movie shit, Cosmo.”
“Do you know where I got that photo?”
Carla shrugs. “Lisa Yi thinks your daughter might‘ve given it to you.”
D’Angelo nods. “Uh-huh. And do you know what the last thing she said to me was the day she died? ‘Do the right thing.’ ”
Carla looks like she wants to say something personal to him. But she gets control and just asks, “Why was that picture in your nightstand the night I was there?”
“The night you stole it?”
She cringes. “Yeah.”
D’Angelo slumps back into his chair. He takes a long swig of his beer, wipes his mouth with his hand. “When my daughter got sick, Gordon paid to get her into the best cancer treatment facilities money can buy. Still, Jennifer hated him. Wanted me to leave Sidewinder and use anything I knew to ruin him. But it was my choice. She told me I could burn the photo or use it against Gordon and turn myself in to the feds.”
This is excruciating, but he needs their help to get to the truck. He sees Carla’s face soften. Crockett seems unsure. Shire’s expression is glass-hard, not ready to give him an inch.
“I took the picture with me when I went out of the country to deal with some problems for Sidewinder. The night I got home from my trip, I’d been alone for two weeks. I needed company. So, I stopped at a bar.” He pauses again. “I met a very attractive waitress who followed me home. I put the picture in the nightstand with my passport.” He looks at Carla. “The next day the picture was gone.”
“Ah, jeez,” Carla groans.
Scott says, “You studied that photo for two weeks? What did you expect to find in it that you didn’t already know was there?”
D’Angelo chuckles ruefully. “I looked at my young face in that picture and saw a man who believed he was protecting his country. A man my daughter would be proud of.” He stops and shakes his head slowly. “And now what’s my job? Trying to prevent Mexicans from coming to work in America?”
Shire amps up the hostility again, glaring at him across the table. “Face it, D’Angelo, your boss isn’t doing the good work you were so proud of anymore. He’s not a hero. He’s a money machine. And you want us to give you that photo so you can save his sleazy ass?”
It’s time to tell them everything.
“You’re half right. I need the picture to honor my daughter.” He pauses and looks at them. “It’s how I’m going to destroy Gordon McKint.”
CHAPTER
42
DESPITE VOLKER’S WHINING objection, the EMTs take one look at him and Joey and call the police. They try to get him to ride in the ambulance with Joey, who is still drifting in and out of consciousness, but Volker insists on following them to the hospital in his own car. No way is he going to be held for goddamned observation. With Carla gone, he’s short a waitress. And Shire’s caught up in dealing with her ruined boat and the search for Carla’s body. The Orca is not going to sit dark during happy hour. He tells the EMTs he’ll meet them at the emergency room.
As he drives, his face swelling and pounding with pressure from his smashed nose, he worries about how much to tell the cops. With that scary D’Angelo prick and this amped-up freak from Anchor Point out there somewhere, the last thing on earth he needs now is the police making him look like a snitch. One or both of those maniacs will kill him for sure.
And what the hell is their connection? Cosmo D’Angelo has cop written all over him. The Anchor Pointer with the stupid beard is strictly from the receiving end of law enforcement. And what do either of them have to do with poor Carla, lying cold and dead at the bottom of the bay? How the hell did she get involved with those two?
At the hospital, one of the city cops, David Parrish, takes Volker’s statement. Short, bald, and fat, Parrish is a frequent Orca customer and seems to actually like Volker. “You say he didn’t steal anything?” he asks. “I mean, really, George? Guy just walks in, beats on you two, and leaves? Drives all the way down from Anchor Point to do that? They run out of innocent victims to whale on up there?”
Volker holds an ice pack on his face. “Maybe he hates longhairs.”
“That wouldn’t explain young Joey’s concussion. Kid’s as clean-cut as a Mormon.”
“David, I don’t know! Those hillbilly junkies might do anything. The guy could be shooting fentanyl straight into his eardrums for all we know.”
“Okay.” Parrish slaps his notebook shut. “If he’s on some kind of druggie rampage, we’ll hear about it again real soon.”
On the drive from the hospital back out to the Orca, Volker passes the police station and notices Carla’s truck in the impound lot, right where he parked it. Which makes him think about Carla. Which makes him think about the whole Carla-screwing-Billy-Griest peccadillo that started all this. Which makes his face hurt even more.
