The Hunger of Crows, page 26
CHAPTER
49
FOR THE FIRST half hour or so, Carla lets Scott drive in silence, sensing that he’s still upset about slaughtering that man with his shotgun. She’s trying to put the dead man out of her mind and is thinking about Shire and the twins, already missing them. She abandoned her girlfriends in Phoenix with barely a word, and now she’s losing the only friend she has here in Alaska. Except for Scott, of course, whose place in her life she’s still trying to figure out. Even if she could stay, what would he be to her? A best male friend and confidant? That would be a first. She’s long known that she can’t be platonic friends with men. A serious love interest? Too soon for that. Not that it matters. She’s going to have to give him up too. She would’ve liked to find out at least.
Between those feelings and the excitement and terror of the shooting, the adrenaline rush of driving away from all that, she hasn’t thought about what D’Angelo said since she got in the truck. Now the door of the glove compartment, two feet in front of her, turns her mind back to it: The guy running the hunt for you thinks you were planning on blackmailing Gordon with it.
The photo is right there inside the glove box. She watched Scott put it in an envelope and stick it in there.
She tries to put that out of her mind. D’Angelo’s guy is going to set her up someplace safe. What does that mean? What kind of place? And how will she live for the rest of her so-called “new life,” wherever that is? Yes, she still wants to stop Gordon McKint, but she has to think of herself now too. Maybe if she gives it back to Sidewinder, they’ll stop hunting her. But if she gives it back, nothing will stop McKint from his plans for the border. Is she willing to give up that idea? She’d like to think of herself as the same idealist she once was. Still, the thought of a huge ransom from McKint is tempting. How exactly would someone do something like that?
The truck hits a pothole and breaks that train of thought. She glances over at Scott, wondering how long she’s been staring at the glove compartment. He’s watching the road ahead, deep in his own thoughts. She closes her eyes, exhausted by the day and by an inchoate idea lingering in her brain now. How much money would that thing be worth to McKint? After what she’s been through, she owes it to herself, at least, to wonder. Somehow, she dozes. When she awakes, they’re crossing a wide, glacial river.
Scott looks over at her. “Feeling better? You slept for almost an hour.”
“Did I?”
“You needed it.”
His concern stabs her. He’s too nice for his own good. “Listen, Scott, there’re things you should know about me.”
He looks over at her. “Why do I need to know them? You’re going away.”
“Yeah, well, after I’m gone, I don’t want you remembering me as some kind of angel who landed in your life. Guys do that when they get unexpectedly laid.”
“I’ll try to keep the angel fantasies to a minimum.”
“Well, you saved us from that maniac. I guess I know something about you now. And this is something you should know about me.”
“All right,” Scott says.
The forest speeds by her window, densely green. She gets up the nerve to tell him what she never even told her husband. She wants Scott to hear it for some reason. And it’s a way to stop thinking about that photo and McKint.
“When I was fifteen, my mother had a boyfriend living with us. He was a big catch for her. A poet, and a professor, or almost a professor. Ten years younger than my mother. His name was Ashton. Seriously, a poet named Ashton Bolt.”
“A boyfriend in the house,” Scott groans. “Aw, man.”
“It’s not what you think, exactly.”
“Look, Carla. It’s none of my business. I don’t need the messy details.”
She shakes that off. “Maybe I just need to tell it to somebody.”
Scott is quiet as she tells him about Ashton Bolt, who he was, why her mother needed him.
“One night at dinner we were celebrating. Ashton had won a big award for his poetry and was on track for tenure at the college. He had too much wine and made some shady comment about us all doing a three-way. He made it sound like a joke, but there was no doubt in my mind that if my mother and I indicated any interest whatsoever, he would have jumped all over it.”
“With you and your mother? Jesus,” Scott says. “What did your mother say?”
“Nothing. She just smiled and ate her quinoa.”
“Oh, brother.”
“So when Ashton finally got me alone and got what he wanted, I told her.” She stops, catches her breath, a little surprised at how painful this still is. She’d thought she’d gotten over that part. “You know, for a half a minute, I seriously believed my own mother would stand up for me, say something to protect me. Just once.” A small laugh escapes her lips. “Not a chance.”
Scott groans. “That’s terrible, Carla. What a mess.”
“It got a lot messier. I was so pissed at her, I told my guidance counselor. Ashton got charged with statutory rape, hauled off in handcuffs. He lost his job at the college. Almost went to prison.”
“Well, the dumb bastard should’ve kept his hands off you,” Scott says.
That makes Carla warm inside. “Thanks, Scott. That’s what I wanted my mother to say. I wanted her to choose me over him. The whole thing was just a bothersome embarrassment to her.”
“So, what’s so terrible about all that? He shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s the part I never told anybody.”
“What?”
“I seduced him.”
Scott looks at her, confused.
“I initiated it. I jumped on him the next time we were alone in the house. He didn’t put up much of a fight. But I started it.” Carla chews her lip. “It was not my finest moment.”
“Did your mother know that?”
“Of course. I told her. I wanted her to know I had ruined Ashton, her boyfriend.” Carla sighs. “We had a terrible fight. She went off about how my slutty behavior was affecting her reputation. Not that my behavior was bad for me, mind you—it was making her look bad. That’s what bothered her. I got so mad I threatened to kill her with a kitchen knife if she called me a whore one more time. We’re both lucky she believed I’d do it.” Carla takes a minute to watch the country roll by. “I swore I would never let anyone have enough power over me to make me that angry again. Never.”
The whole McKint thing flashes before her. Her life upended. Talk about having power over her. Scott is quiet again, driving carefully.
“The next day I moved out, got emancipated. I lived with a girlfriend’s family for the rest of high school. I wouldn’t even talk to my mother for a year. Hung up if she called.” She hears herself say that and, not for the first time, regrets setting the terms of their estrangement so intractably.
Scott is looking at her, waiting for her to continue.
“Anyway, her reputation managed to survive. She’s still a player in the Phoenix art scene. I see her name in the papers sometimes. Some gallery opening or show. She got what she wanted. She got rid of me.”
“I’m sorry your mother was so rotten to you.”
“I believe you are. You’re a sweet guy.” She reaches over and squeezes his elbow. “The women of Homer are going to be all over you, mister.”
Scott coughs. “I don’t know about that.”
“I’m serious. You’re good in bed, and you actually listen to what a woman is saying to you. That’s a deadly combination.” She’s happy to be talking lightly again.
He takes his eyes off the road and studies her for a moment, apparently trying to see if she’s teasing him. “Wow,” he says, quietly. “Good in bed.”
Carla laughs and punches him in the arm. “Just focus on the part about listening to them talk, okay?”
They drive on and come to Soldotna—all fast food and slow traffic, car lots and auto parts stores, coffee stands on every corner, big-box stores—and then on across a flat landscape of grassy swamps and stands of stunted black trees. The road enters the Kenai River valley and snakes through heavily forested hills. When it meets a bigger highway, a sign indicates Anchorage to the left. Scott turns, and they begin to climb into the Chugach Mountains. Though it’s nearly summer solstice now, the higher peaks are dotted with patches of residual snow like dollops of whipped cream. Carla drove through all this country on her frantic way to the end of the road two months ago, remembers little of it. She takes it all in now, knowing she’s never going to see it again.
She looks over at Scott. He seems calmer. She’s happy he’s gotten his mind off the killing. And she’s gotten hers off McKint and that photo. She pokes him in the ribs again. “Good in bed.”
“Quit it,” he says, but he doesn’t look like he really wants her to stop saying that.
She looks at the glove compartment again and forces herself to look away.
CHAPTER
50
THE WEATHER IS grim again when Scott drives down out of the mountains and they’re at sea level once more. Rain splatters the windshield. Under the brooding sky, marshes and sea grasses stretch from the highway to the barren mud flats of Turnagain Arm. Several dead white trees lean together in one direction as though still trying to get away from the relentless wind that bent them that way.
Scott’s exhausted after more than three hours on the road. He rolls his window down and inhales the salt air as they cross a small, silty river flowing out of a valley on their right. A half mile farther along, in the otherwise wild country, a strip mall sits incongruously at the juncture of the highway and a small side road heading up the valley to the Alyeska Ski Resort along the river. There’s a Quick Stop with gas pumps at one end. He glances at his gas gauge. Plenty. He doesn’t slow.
“I have to stop,” Carla says.
“Carla, it’s only forty minutes to Anchorage. We’re making good time, but it’s ten thirty. You have to make that call before midnight.”
She gives him a hard look. “Bathroom.”
Scott groans and puts his turn signal on.
Though most of the tourist shops are closed for the night, the Quick Stop is surprisingly busy with people traveling between Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula. Cars at the gas pumps. Winnebagos parked in front of the store. Tourists and fishermen bustle in and out, arms loaded with junk food and drinks.
Scott pulls around to the side of the mall and parks. There are just a couple other vehicles, fewer people in sight. The sky is still showing dim but persistent daylight under the wet-looking clouds. On each side of the valley, the mountains tower into black rain clouds. At the far end, he can see the ski resort tram stretching uphill over slopes now snow-free and lushly green. “I’ll wait here.”
Carla nods and gets out, walks around the corner to the Quick Stop.
Scott yawns, the long drive and the nearly sleepless night on the boat conspiring to put him under. He thinks about Carla. She’s been quiet most of the way. He hopes she’s as disappointed about leaving him as he is about losing her. Not that it makes any difference: she has to get out of Alaska.
He’s still thinking about that as his eyes close a moment, and then he’s sleeping.
* * *
Scott is yanked awake by a man’s high, almost womanish voice. “Where’s Jules?”
He startles, not sure where he is or what time of the day or night it is. He spins around to find a skinny, older man in the back seat pointing a pistol at him. The guy has long white hair and a weathered, leathery face that Scott has seen once before. A single teardrop tattoo drips from the corner of his left eye. He’s wearing a long army-surplus khaki coat. This time Scott remembers: he was one of the men Scott confronted on the river behind his house. He was with the red-bearded guy Scott shot today.
“Turn around and look straight ahead,” the man says. “Answer me. What did you do with Jules? He’s not answering his phone!”
Scott faces forward as told. Carla is going to walk right into this.
“Who’s Jules?”
“Bald guy. Red beard. My son, Jules!”
Scott shrugs, stalling, heart banging. “I don’t know anybody like that.”
The guy presses the muzzle of the gun against the back of Scott’s neck. “Is that so? Well …”
The passenger door swings open. Carla slides into the front seat, a bag of chips in one hand. “I can’t believe how busy that place is at this hour,” she says. “There must’ve been …” She sees the man. “Fuck!” Her right hand goes for the door handle.
“Open that door and he dies, girlie,” the man says.
She goes rigid, staring straight ahead.
“Put your seat belt on.” He waves the gun her way and then points it back at Scott’s head. “And sit nice and quiet.”
Scott says, “Come on, mister. You don’t need her. Why don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up!” He cracks Scott on the back of the head with the gun butt, then pushes the muzzle into his neck again. “Okay, now that everybody’s said all they wanted to say, we need to go someplace a little more private. Drive, carpenter.”
Scott starts the truck. He feels the back of his head with his left hand, taking the moment to look over at Carla. D’Angelo’s pistol is lying on the seat between them. Scott knows little about handguns. He’s not even sure he could find the safety on the thing very quickly. He’s a hunter, not a gun nut. Even if he could grab the pistol, he’d never be able to turn and shoot before the man blew his head off. This is going nowhere but downhill, fast.
He rubs the back of his head and glances down at the gun so Carla sees him do it.
She slides the bag of potato chips off her lap, covering the pistol.
Scott’s fingers come away with blood. He puts the truck in gear. “Which way?”
The man points to the small road branching off the main highway. “Turn right onto that.”
Scott knows it leads to the resort farther up the valley—he was an avid downhill skier while at college in Anchorage. For several miles the road winds through unpopulated terrain as it parallels the silty glacial river that drains the mountains. The bottomland is a thicket of alders and willows. A good place to hide a body. Or two.
With the man’s gun touching the back of his neck, all he can do is drive.
CHAPTER
51
THERE IS NO traffic on the small road at that hour, but Carla peers through the windshield like she’s expecting something good to come their way. What exactly, she’s not sure. This guy looks every bit as dangerous as the creep who almost killed Shire in the driveway. She glances at the bag of potato chips covering D’Angelo’s pistol. No chance.
Jesus, every time she gets her hands on a bag of chips, she ends up facing death.
Scott hasn’t driven a mile when a narrow gravel trail veers off into the scrub on the right side.
“Turn,” the man says.
They drive down the rutted track, willows slapping at the fenders, until it opens out onto the riverbank.
The man says. “Park it.”
When Scott turns the engine off, Carla can hear the river flowing past with a hissing sound like a long continuous whisper. It’s wide and swift and a slate-gray color, heavy with silt and mud.
The man slides across the back seat and opens the passenger door behind her. “Here’s how we’re going to do this.” He waves the gun at Scott. “You stay put. Hands at ten and two. You take them off the wheel, she dies.” He taps her on the shoulder with the gun. “You, missy, are going to ease out along with me now. No fast moves.”
He steps out of the back seat and opens her door, the pistol trained on her. Scott sits with his hands on the wheel. “Do what he says, Carla.”
“Yes, Carla,” the man says. “You’re going to do exactly what I want. Then we’re going to find out what happened to my boy and why you both want to die so badly tonight.” He spits on the ground. “Oh yeah, and where that high-priced picture is. All the big questions. Now get out, girlie.”
Carla unbuckles her seat belt and climbs out. This has got to stop.
She turns to the man and says, “If I give you the photo, will you let us go?”
“Carla!” Scott says. “Don’t!”
“It’s here in the glove box,” she says. She nods toward it.
Scott groans.
“Open it,” the man says. He points to the glove compartment with the gun. “Don’t do anything stupid.” He holds her door open with the gun hand, the pistol pointing into the air for the moment as she bends back into the truck toward the glove compartment. She’s breathing heavily, almost panting.
“Carla,” Scott says. “What are you doing?”
The man leans in close behind her. She can smell some kind of fried-food odors coming off him. “Give it to me.”
She pulls the envelope out of the glove box and turns to the man. As she goes to hand it to him, she fumbles and drops it. She bends after it.
Scott must see what she’s going to do. “Wait!” he says.
She comes up out of the crouch with the stun pen and jams it into the man’s neck under his jaw. The thing throbs with the high-voltage discharge, crackling in the quiet night air. She feels the power vibrate in her fingers.
The man yelps. His pistol flies out of his hand and clatters on the rocky river shore. He staggers back, trying to get away from her. But Carla keeps lunging at him, pressing the stun weapon against his wrinkled neck. He trips and falls backward onto the stones. Carla stays with him, riding him down, still pushing the crackling weapon into his neck for another second until it sputters out.
She rolls off the man and hears Scott unbuckle his seat belt, his car door open. He runs around to her and helps her stand.
The man lies sprawled on his back on the stones, eyes closed. His face is hideously contorted, jaw slack, eyelids still twitching. She steps back away from him and closer to Scott. “Oh my God.” She feels like she too is about to pass out. But there’s something else. A sense of calm relief, almost elation. “What did I do?”
