The Hunger of Crows, page 24
“Great,” Carla says. “What happens now?”
“When Shire gets back here with the picture, you and I are going to haul ass to Anchorage and call Mr. Plan B back. He’ll tell you where to pick up your new ID and some other things you’ll need. Then I take the photo to the FBI office. My contact in the Bureau in D.C. gave me the name of a guy I can trust there. They’ll put me in protective custody.”
Scott says, “Wait, doesn’t your plan B guy have to be paid for the ID? That can’t be cheap.”
“That’s the fun part. There’s a slush fund on the dark internet Sidewinder uses for all sorts of off-the-books things.” He grins. “I’m using their dark money to help Carla disappear.”
Carla tries to smile. This is her way out. She’ll go live someplace where nobody knows her. Change her name, her hair. Start over. Sidewinder will never find her. She should be relieved, right? Yet the weight of that lands on her like a falling building. And that word disappear keeps popping up.
Scott’s says, “What’s the matter, Carla? You look bummed.”
“I can never see anyone I know again. I can never see Shire or the twins. I had friends in Phoenix.” She hesitates, looks at him. “I can never see you again.”
Scott’s cheeks go so red he looks like he’s been slapped.
The crow lands on the railing again and crams more bacon bits in his beak.
She walks back into the house, Scott trailing behind her.
D’Angelo apparently can see what’s going on. “I’m going to stay out here and wait for Shire, keep an eye out for trouble, make friends with this bird.”
Back at the kitchen table, Scott says, “Carla, I didn’t expect anything serious. You know? But I would have liked to take you fishing some time, down to the river behind the house, maybe in the fall when the cottonwoods leaves are all yellow and the steelhead come in from the sea.”
“What are those? Steelheads?”
“They’re trout. Really big, really beautiful rainbow trout.” He pauses, swallows. “I would’ve liked to take you out on the boat trolling for king salmon on a calm winter day too, when the snow is falling and there’re hardly any other boats on the water. Just loons and cormorants and otters. I would’ve liked showing you that.”
Carla feels a thickening in her throat. “That sounds nice,” she chokes. “And I wouldn’t mind hanging around to see you cut a swath through the women in this town.” She has to keep joking now. “I could’ve helped you pick out some replacement undies for those tighty-whities of yours. Promise me you’ll do that, at the very least.”
That makes him laugh. “I think I could go as far as maybe some black ones.”
“Now you’re talking.” She leans over and gives him a kiss before he can move out of the way. He doesn’t move at all, just sits there and takes it, eyes closed. She pulls back. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for me.”
D’Angelo comes back in from the porch, grumbling. He shows them a spot of blood on the tip of one finger. “That bird almost took my hand off.” He stops in the doorway and looks at Carla and Scott. “You two all set now?” he says. “Good. Soon as Shire gets back with the photo, Carla and I are out of here.”
CHAPTER
45
SCOTT—THINKING ABOUT Carla leaving for good—sits fidgeting at the table with her and D’Angelo.
“What’s taking Shire so long?” Carla asks.
D’Angelo looks at his watch and shakes his head, lips tight.
The crow shows up at the kitchen window demanding more food. It hammers the glass with its beak. “I’m thinking of naming him Nuisance,” Scott says.
“He is relentless,” D’Angelo says. “Does he ever get enough?”
Scott stands and goes to the pantry for bacon bits. “I think he’d eat constantly if he could.”
“So would I, if I could,” D’Angelo says.
“He’s super smart. And vicious. If a songbird—a nuthatch or a chickadee—hits one of my windows, the crow will hear the thump and come flying in to peck the stunned bird to death.”
“Sounds like the people I work for.”
“Bunch of dicks,” Carla says.
Looking at Carla, listening to her run that beautiful foul mouth of hers, Scott’s heart flops around in his chest. He wishes they were still alone here at his house. Just Carla and him. He wishes that could’ve lasted a lot longer.
D’Angelo looks at his watch yet again. He doesn’t say anything, but he looks concerned.
Scott says, “Should you try calling her on Volker’s cell?”
D’Angelo shrugs. “Yeah, maybe. I doubt Lundren is monitoring Shire’s calls. But I’d rather use the phone as little as possible. Let’s give her another minute.”
As though on cue, the sound of gravel crunching out in front of the house turns them that way.
“That must be her,” D’Angelo says. He goes to the front door, followed by Carla. Scott hesitates, feels something tighten in his chest. If Shire has the photo with her, this will be the last time he sees Carla.
Carla and D’Angelo walk out onto the front porch to meet Shire. “I’ll be right there,” Scott calls out. He needs to get some composure before watching Carla leave. He lingers at the table a minute longer, looking at the crow peering in the window. “I’m going to get a few more bacon bits for my fine feathered friend.”
He goes into the pantry, feeling like the wounded teenager he was when Lu Ann Freeman threw him over for that douchebag Charlie Whiting. Almost staggering under the weight of it, he walks back out into the kitchen. The crow bangs on the glass. Again Scott finds himself imagining Carla living there with him, sitting on the porch, hand feeding the bird in the afternoon sun. And again, that fantasy is shattered.
“Stop right there, D’Angelo!” an unfamiliar voice blares from the front of the house. “You move a muscle and Blondie gets her head blown off!”
Scott’s whole body clenches.
D’Angelo says something in reply that Scott can’t make out.
He tiptoes to the window over the sink, heart fluttering.
D’Angelo and Carla are standing side by side at the top of the porch steps, facing the driveway, their backs to him. Scott can see D’Angelo’s pistol protruding from the waistband of his pants. Shire’s car is parked close behind Scott’s truck. Her driver’s side door and the door behind it are thrown open. Shire is walking up the driveway toward the porch, her back rigid as a two-by-four, a short, bald man with a red beard tight behind her, clutching her ponytail in his left fist. He presses the muzzle of a black pistol against her head with his other hand. He’s wearing camo pants and a white T-shirt with some lettering on it. Something about him looks familiar. Scott can’t think why.
“I mean it,” the man says. “Any move at all, it’s going to rain blond hair and brains.”
“Do I know you?” D’Angelo asks evenly, as though people point guns at him or his friends all the time.
The red-bearded man nudges Shire ahead until they’re even with the left front fender of Scott’s truck. They stop there, the man crouching against Shire’s back. Scott can see that, even if D’Angelo had a chance to reach for the pistol behind his back, he has no shot from the porch. Not with Shire and the truck shielding the goon. He’s keeping his hands at his sides where the goon can see them.
Heart stuttering, Scott ducks lower and creeps to the living room, opens the gun safe. He reaches for a rifle but thinks better of it. He isn’t a great shot, and his marksmanship isn’t going to improve with someone shooting back. He pulls out his bird gun—an old Browning pump shotgun—and loads it with bird shot, not the rifled slugs he uses for bear protection. It will be harder to miss with the scatter shot. The trick will be to avoid hitting Shire.
He hears the gun thug say, “The picture, tough guy. Where is it?”
D’Angelo stalls. “I’m still looking for it. Got any ideas you can share?”
The goon doesn’t have the photo. Shire must not have found it in Carla’s truck. Or she has it on her and the thug doesn’t know that.
One thing is for sure. The man is going to start hurting people if he doesn’t get what he wants. Shotgun in hand, Scott sneaks back through the house and out the back door onto the deck. He scrambles down the stairs and over soft tundra mosses, behind his shop to the gravel pit, and kneels behind the excavator.
Breathless, his ears roaring, stomach going sour, he thinks that this is what it must be like to be in combat. He’s grateful he’s never done that but now wishes he’d been trained the way D’Angelo must have been. Scott’s been called a hero. But this is very different from the night the Polar Huntress sank, everything happening so fast it went by in a blur, being pulled out of the raging sea by rescue swimmers the next thing he knew. Here and now, time is slowing, jelling, every second stretching out as he tries to decide what to do. He edges forward behind the big, mud-clodded tracks of the machine until he can see the thug holding the gun to Shire’s head a few yards away. His Crockett Construction truck is behind them from this angle.
D’Angelo is saying, “I can show you where it is.”
The man twists Shire’s ponytail and shouts, “Don’t fuck with me, you dago cocksucker! I know you have it.” Shire groans in pain or fear.
“If I had the photo, shit-for-brains, why would I still be here?” D’Angelo says. “Think about it.”
That seems to flummox the man momentarily.
Scott could step out from behind the excavator and shoot. He can’t miss from this distance. But Shire is too close to the guy. The bird shot pattern is unpredictable. He doesn’t want to put a BB in Shire’s brain. He still has a feeling he knows the man’s face from somewhere. Where? He hesitates.
D’Angelo says, “Look, friend, leave the women out of this. They don’t know what you’re talking about. Let them go, and I’ll take you to the photo.”
“Okay, wise guy. Maybe I just shoot Blondie here, and you’ll see I’m not dicking around.” He lets go of Shire’s ponytail and steps back, leveling the pistol at the back of her head. Shire squeezes her eyes tight in terror. Carla moans from the porch. There’s no question, the guy is going to pull the trigger.
D’Angelo still has no shot, not with the man that tight against Scott’s truck. He yells, “Wait!”
But this guy isn’t waiting. He levels his aim on Shire’s head and says, “Good-bye, Blondie.”
Then the crow shrieks, fluttering onto the edge of excavator a yard from Scott, demanding food. The man turns his head to look toward the sound, pistol still trained on Shire. He squints at Scott and the bird. He hesitates.
Scott doesn’t. He raises the shotgun and points as he would at a flushing spruce grouse. The blast explodes in his ears, the gunstock kicking against his shoulder. The man flies sideways, slams against the door of Scott’s truck, and hangs there on the side-view mirror, a dark stain blooming across the left side of his T-shirt. He’s still holding the pistol in his right hand, that elbow resting on the mirror bracket.
Scott pumps another shell into the chamber, puts the bead on the man again. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees D’Angelo shove Carla aside and start down the porch stairs, pistol in hand now.
The thug moans and raises his gun. When it goes off this time, the report is lost beneath the simultaneous roar from Scott’s shotgun. This load catches the guy in the side of the head. He bounces off the truck again and pitches facedown into the gravel.
Scott runs out from behind the excavator to see if Shire’s been shot, but it’s D’Angelo who staggers and sinks down onto the top porch step, holding his right side with one hand.
Carla yells, “Scott! Cosmo’s been shot!”
CHAPTER
46
EARS RINGING, BRAIN scrambling to absorb what he’s just done, Scott runs through the cloud of cordite fumes to the man lying on the driveway. He half expects to remember where he knows him from. But the left side of his face and one eye is missing. A jumble of bones and meat oozes intensely red blood into the gravel around his destroyed head. Scott feels his own head swim, thinks he might faint. “Jesus, I shot him,” he hears himself crying. “I thought he was going to kill Shire.”
“Hey!” D’Angelo barks at Scott. “Snap out of it. He was going to kill Shire. You did all right.” Shire and Carla are crouched over him where he sits on the top step, still clutching his side. He groans. Through locked teeth, he adds, “I wish you’d fired that second round a little sooner.”
Scott looks at the bloody mess on the gravel, head spinning. He turns away and staggers to the porch. Carla lets go of D’Angelo. She scrambles down the stairs and pulls Scott into a hug.
“I never shot anybody before,” he says to her, ears still ringing, but not from the shotgun blast now.
“It’s okay,” Carla says. “That guy needed to get shot. Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. I guess.” Scott wants to stay there pressed against Carla. But he finds the strength to pull away. He turns to D’Angelo. “What about you?”
D’Angelo lets out a pained yelp as he pulls open his Windbreaker. There is a deep-red stain spreading on his right side, just above his hip. Reaching around to his back, he grimaces. “It went right through. We’ll get it patched up in a minute. But first, I need the guy’s cell phone and wallet. Now. We gotta keep moving. These guys don’t come alone.”
Scott feels himself quail at the thought of rolling the man over to search his mutilated body.
Apparently D’Angelo can tell he’s not up to that. “Shire,” he says, “go through the man’s pockets. Can you do that?”
Without hesitation, Shire kneels over the body and pulls out the man’s phone and wallet. Scott wishes he had her strength. She brings them to D’Angelo. He checks the phone and holds up a photo, shows it to Shire. “This is how he recognized you in town.”
“How did he get a picture of me?”
“You have a Facebook account?”
Shire rolls her eyes. “Who doesn’t?”
D’Angelo says. “Lundren sent it to him. Here’s one of me. And this is Carla’s Arizona driver’s license photo. They apparently don’t believe you’re dead. There’s a picture of Volker in here too.”
Shire looks at the photo of Volker. “It’s from the help-wanted page on the Orca website. The picture’s fifteen years old. George is trolling for new waitresses.”
With another groan, D’Angelo pulls the dead man’s driver’s license out of the wallet. “Well, this explains how he got here so fast. The guy’s address says Anchor Point. He’s local.”
“That’s it,” Scott says, stomach churning. “I ran into him and a couple of older rough-looking guys on the river last fall. Maybe ex-cons. One of them had one of those teardrop prison tattoos under one eye. They came roaring up on four-wheelers, trashing the riverbanks and plowing across the spawning beds. I told them that was illegal, and they bitched me out and drove away.”
D’Angelo says, “You ran off three thugs with a fishing pole?”
“I had this with me too.” Scott holds the shotgun up. “There’d been a brown bear on the river eating salmon carcasses.” He pauses, his voice going quaky. “I thought I knew him. Jesus.”
D’Angelo looks at the guy’s phone again. “Well, the good news is he hasn’t called Phil Lundren back since he got the incoming call when they set him up. That means he didn’t tell them he’d grabbed Shire and was coming here. So when they start looking for him, they won’t be coming to Anchor Point. That’s very good news.”
Scott’s head is clearing a little. “What’s the bad news?”
D’Angelo wipes sweat from his forehead and winces with pain. “He texted an Alaskan number just as he pulled up here with Shire. The name on it says Pop. He sent your name and address, and said, ‘Come now.’ ”
“Oh no,” Scott says.
“Yeah, we’ve got company coming. Let’s hope whoever this ‘Pop’ is hasn’t relayed this info to Sidewinder. And pray he’s isn’t coming from close by.”
D’Angelo hauls himself up and leans against the railing. “This guy texted about fifteen minutes ago. We gotta move fast. We need to get me patched up and get out of here. Soon.” He winces again. “Shire, did you get the photo?”
She raises her eyebrows and pulls the photo out of the front of her tracksuit. “He didn’t see it.”
“Good,” D’Angelo says. He turns toward the house. “Come on, patch me up now.”
Scott says, “What about the body?”
D’Angelo nods toward the gravel pit. “Is that your excavator?”
“Oh, man,” Scott groans. “How deep you want him?”
“Use that hole right there.” He points to a deep excavation close by the machine. “And throw his phone and gun in with him. You have lime?”
Scott feels like he’s going to puke. “Yeah, a couple bags in the shop.”
“Make it fast. When it’s done, park your excavator on top of the disturbed gravel. And wash that blood off your truck. Is there any shot damage?”
“A couple BB holes in the window. But this is Alaska. It won’t attract any attention.”
“Okay. Keep that shotgun with you in case his partner shows up.” D’Angelo turns to Shire and Carla. “Come on, help me. Nothing fancy, just a quick patch to stop this bleeding. Then we all have to get the fuck out of here.” They head into the house.
Scott yells, “There’s a first-aid kit under the kitchen sink.” He staggers toward the excavator. He’s always considered himself a good man in an emergency, and he proved it when it was needed on that crabber. This is way more than he ever thought he’d have to do.
CHAPTER
47
D’ANGELO SITS AT the table watching Carla open Scott’s first-aid kit. “Hurry, ladies.”
“Let me see that wound,” Shire says to him. She sets the photo on the table and crouches next to his chair. She pulls his jacket open, yanks up his shirt, pushes him forward. The pain rips through him. “You’re right,” she says. “There’s the exit hole.” She grabs a dish towel off the oven door handle, presses it against the wound.
