The Hunger of Crows, page 6
He pours himself a drink. He feels like just slugging it from the bottle but forces himself to take the time to put three ice cubes in a short old-fashioned rocks glass. He sets a slice of lemon on top of them and pours the vodka through it. He leaves just enough room for a splash of club soda, drinks it in two long swallows, and makes another.
His mind races from one thing to another, pointlessly. Jennifer. Kevin Dykstra. McKint. Lundren. Jennifer again, and again.
Her last hug, her last words to him … He’s trying not to use the term last words. Her most recent words to him keep coming back. “Do the right thing. You know what it is.”
If only.
He walks into the bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, holding his drink between his knees.
That goddamned photo.
Jennifer gave him the cursed thing the day he left to go on the overseas job. One of her sources in the anti-McKint internet world had come by it somehow. D’Angelo took it with him out of the country on the job, studied it each time he found a peaceful, secure minute in the two weeks of madness there. He looked at it again and again on the several long plane trips going over and coming home. And what did it tell him?
The thing was two decades old. It had been snapped in Colombia, without D’Angelo’s or Gordon McKint’s knowledge. Each time he studied it again, he found himself looking at his then twenty-seven-year-old self, standing behind McKint in his camo fatigues and armored vest, cradling his M16.
He couldn’t stop studying his much-younger face. Looking for what? He wasn’t sure. Isn’t sure now. Maybe the kind of certainty he once felt about his role in everything McKint stood for.
Where did such assured devotion come from? And more importantly, where is it now? What exactly is he certain of anymore? Until these past few weeks, he would have bet that his smart, hotheaded, twenty-five-year-old daughter Jennifer would outlive him. That was something he could be certain of. He isn’t putting money on that now.
He’s always believed that the often-shady, sometimes-violent things he and Gordon McKint have done over the years in the name of drug interdiction, regime change, or counterinsurgency were needed to fight constantly evolving threats to the United States. Now, as the company shifts to domestic security contracts, the focus seems more and more on threats to the bottom line. How much pride is there in border security? Does he really want to devote his life to protecting America from the little old ladies who cook for Mrs. Chen?
Yet he owes Gordon McKint almost everything he has in this world. That much he knows for sure.
The day the photo was taken, he’d driven McKint to a small town in the mountains a few hours from Cartagena. As they approached the village, McKint told him the meeting was off book. “You mention this to no one.” It wasn’t the first time they were going dark. McKint was CIA. Who could tell if anything he did was sanctioned? That was half the pleasure in the job.
They met the Colombian colonel and the civilian in a hotel room in the village. No introductions were made. D’Angelo checked the room to make sure it wasn’t a surprise-party kidnapping or assassination. When he declared the place secure, McKint sent him out into the hall to guard the door.
Some time later, just as McKint came back out of the room, a concussion grenade crashed in through a window. McKint wasn’t seriously injured, but D’Angelo was deafened and dazed. Small-arms fire poured into the building. The Colombian colonel staggered into the hallway, screaming, “Get out of here!” obviously not wanting to explain to the regular Colombian army what he was doing there with the CIA officer. Gordon McKint hauled the barely conscious D’Angelo out the back of the building.
On the drive back to Cartagena, they got their stories straight: they’d been ambushed going to meet an unknown informant, someone they never did see. McKint didn’t want his superiors knowing about the meeting any more than the Colombian officer did. D’Angelo understood that this incident was way the fuck off book.
D’Angelo drinks the last of his vodka and sets his glass on the nightstand.
Jennifer doesn’t have much time, and he wants her to know the truth about what he decides to do—one way or the other. He owes her that.
One more look at the photo, and then he has to decide.
He pulls the nightstand drawer open, but his phone rings, and he turns and picks it up off the bed next to him. It’s Rebecca. “The hospital just called, Cosmo.”
“So soon?” he asks, his whole body feeling the weight of this.
“Fucking cancer,” Rebecca says, chokes, and hangs up.
He sets the phone down, turns back to the drawer, and pulls it the rest of the way open.
* * *
It’s been three days. Three days of sobbing family members, Jennifer’s friends. Condolences from everyone at Sidewinder. Three days of planning and paperwork at the funeral home. Three days since Carla Merino stole the photo, and with it any chance of D’Angelo honoring his daughter’s dying wish.
D’Angelo stops back in at the office on his way home from Jennifer’s wake. He spent the day there with Rebecca and her family—he has none of his own left. Maybe if he plows through the work that has certainly piled up during the day, he can get his mind off Jennifer’s death for a few minutes. But he can’t concentrate on the job, his thoughts constantly gravitating back to Carla Merino, the photo she stole three days ago, the fact that he’s still looking for her.
How would she even have known what the photo meant or that it was a threat? That’s a nagging question. But now that he has her phone records and has seen the call to Lisa Yi at the Times, it looks like she’s given the thing to them and has gone into hiding with their help. Was she working for the Times all along? He can’t see any connection to them—other than that phone call. How would she even know he had the photo? And where is it now? Why haven’t they splashed it? Gordon McKint has been all over the news for days, whipping his supporters into a frenzy over what he calls the “immigrant menace” threatening America. Trying out sound bites. Seeing what incites the most hysterics. That photo will stop him in his tracks. It will put him—and D’Angelo—behind bars.
If the Times had the photo, they would never sit on it. Never.
If they don’t have it, what the fuck has Carla done with it?
He pulls into the parking lot, still wondering about that.
He recognizes the one car in the lot besides the guard’s. Andy Krall, the oldest guy in the Phoenix office, is at his desk when D’Angelo lets himself in. Andy has been with Sidewinder since the beginning. Before that he worked with Gordon McKint and D’Angelo in parts of the world D’Angelo never wants to see again. He’s been a mentor at times. And one of the very few in the company D’Angelo trusts.
Andy stands and leans out the doorway of his office, his jowly face dark with sadness. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wake today, Cosmo. We’re all sorry about your loss. I can’t even imagine.”
D’Angelo can’t remember Andy ever calling him Cosmo before.
“Thanks, Andy.” Andy has adult children of his own, grandchildren. D’Angelo steers the painful conversation to the subject of work. “You’re at it late. What’s up?”
“Nothing serious. A little trouble at the facility in Nogales. Something else shaking over by Sierra Vista.” He shrugs. “It’s all border, all the time now.”
Andy is a language expert, fluent in several Central Asian and Caucasus dialects. He ran Sidewinder’s group in Uzbekistan, where their subcontractors are building an irrigation project at the Sea of Aral. His real job was providing surreptitious support for some quiet CIA programs designed to keep the region America friendly. But Andy’s been reassigned to the southwest border project now. Many of their best people have been. D’Angelo knows Andy isn’t a lot happier than he is about McKint’s new emphasis on domestic contracts.
“Yeah, I saw Gordon on the news again today,” D’Angelo says. As always, he avoids saying anything that could sound like criticism of McKint or Sidewinder policies. Andy is also adroit at staying neutral. While this is their home office and the building is empty except for the two of them, it’s quite conceivable that the company is listening in on its own employees. If they’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that people trained to spy, spy on each other. “Modern life, I guess,” D’Angelo says, and walks to his office.
What a day. In a lifetime of direly unpleasant situations, Jennifer’s wake felt like the worst punishment he’s ever endured. Rebecca—still clinging to Catholic rituals D’Angelo has long jettisoned—insisted on the open-coffin visitation, a gruesome, medieval ritual he abhors. In spite of the embalmer’s arcane arts, and contrary to what a well-meaning mourner assured him, Jennifer didn’t look at all like she was sleeping.
He sits at the desktop and cleans up some administrative stuff.
This isn’t going to take his mind off Jennifer’s death. Or Kevin Dykstra’s—which he has been quietly investigating outside the building. And it certainly isn’t going to clear his head of Carla and the missing photo—also being pursued in secret.
He picks up Kevin’s crystal and holds it up to the overhead lights. It doesn’t refract the light the way a diamond or even glass might. It seems to absorb it. How did this kid go from the left-brained, analytical thinking of the Air Force Academy to a belief that this piece of rock contains life-enhancing healing properties forged in the fires of the earth’s creation? Or something. D’Angelo tried to read about it, hoping Kevin’s alleged mysticism would reveal something about why he died.
He asked a friend at the FBI—an old Special Forces brother—about Kevin Dykstra’s death. On hearing the name, the guy slipped up and said something that made D’Angelo believe the feds had talked to the kid. Now why would the FBI be talking to a Sidewinder Security employee, secretly? D’Angelo couldn’t get any more out of the agent, but he could fill enough blanks to see that Kevin Dykstra, computer maven extraordinaire, had stumbled onto something in his rambles through the labyrinths of Sidewinder’s incoming data stream. Something that cost him his life.
Now, looking into the crystal, it occurs to him that Kevin and Jennifer were almost exactly the same age when they died. The cancer had come roaring back the same day he visited her for the last time. She was in a coma by the next morning. He never got to talk to her again about what he’s finally decided to do with the photo. If he ever gets it back. He never got to talk to her again about anything.
Tomorrow is the funeral, and then he’ll take some time off work. Gordon McKint himself called again to insist on it. And to say how sorry he was about Jennifer’s death, of course. It almost made D’Angelo laugh. Almost.
“She posted some unpleasant things about you, Gordon.”
“Story of my life. I never take it personally.” McKint sighed. Even over the phone it sounded fake. “It was her job, and she worked hard at it. Like her father. We all have a job to do. Right now, yours is to take some time off.”
Gordon made it sound like compassion. Maybe he’s capable of that. It’s hard to tell with him. But D’Angelo knows that this is partly because a man in his distracted state is going to make mistakes. And this is a business where mistakes can cost lives. Or is McKint just trying to get him out of the office again so he and Lundren can pull their next stunt? Are they gradually easing him out altogether?
“Gordon, I just got back. Literally,” he said. “Four days ago.”
“That was no vacation.” McKint was insistent. “Go. Andy Krall will manage while you’re away. He can call Phil if he needs help, but we’re not launching anything new for a few months during the campaign. Things will be quiet. Take as much time as you like. A month at least.”
In truth, he could use some time alone to think about all the things his daughter said to him in the last few months of her far-too-short life. And some time to track down Carla Merino and that photo. He doesn’t have to be in the office to do that. With access to Sidewinder’s codes, he can search for Carla on his own equipment. And there are plenty of independent contractors out there willing to do legwork on the ground, for a price. The trick is to find the photo without Phil Lundren or McKint knowing he’s looking for it. Let alone that he once had it and lost it.
He’ll tell them he’s going to take a few weeks off and go for a long drive across the Great American Desert. Get his head straight about Jennifer’s death. A “spirit quest” or “walkabout” or whatever the Kevin Dykstra types call such things. He doesn’t know too much about spirits. As far as he can tell, this hard life on earth is all there is. Existentially speaking, if he can’t cook it in a frying pan or shoot it with a gun, it doesn’t exist.
Two things that do exist are Carla Merino and that fucking photo. But where?
PART II
HOMER, ALASKA
Two Months Later
CHAPTER
9
WHEN THE FEROCIOUS pounding explodes against the door of her camper, Carla shoots upright on her sleeping pad, pulse surging, hands thrown out in front of her as if blocking a blow. For a second she thinks D’Angelo has somehow tracked her all the way from Phoenix. But she has a feeling that if and when he comes for her, she won’t hear anything. Until it’s too late.
She slumps back on the sweat-damp sheet, nerves jangling. More likely it’s just Volker. Jesus, he’s been possessive lately. Making plans. Talking about marriage, for Christ’s sake. The two of them running the Orca Grill together. Happily-ever-after shit. Not that the idea sounds so horrible. It’s not. The bar’s a moneymaker and Volker’s not a bad guy, if a little clingy. And she’s really beginning to like this town on the bay. But his plans involve paperwork. Public records. There are serious reasons why she can’t do any of that.
Volker started in on it again last night. When she demurred once more, he brought up Billy Griest, one of the young regulars in the bar. It got ugly. She hadn’t wanted Volker to find out about that little slip in judgment. She thought she’d been discreet. She’d certainly never meant to hurt him. But she has a birthday coming, and she let the flirtation with Billy go too far because she wanted to be reassured—she despises the archaic expression that sounds like something her mother would say—that she still has what it takes.
There’s more banging on her camper door, accompanied now by girlish giggling that tells her it isn’t Volker. It’s Shire and her five-year-old twins, there to take Carla dipnetting for salmon.
“All right, all right,” she groans. “I’m up.”
She’s wearing just her underwear and her watch—which says it’s seven thirty AM, though the sun is already high enough to beam through the skylight overhead. The camper is stuffy and too warm. She kicks the top sheet off and remains on her back. The sweat on her skin cools quickly. She closes her eyes. Just a few more minutes of sleep. Please.
She’s been living with George Volker for six weeks. But, last night, after the fight with him in the bar in front of all the regulars, she slept in the camper in the parking lot instead of going home. Volker can worry a bone like a Chihuahua, and she didn’t want to spend the whole night rehashing the Billy Griest thing. He’ll get over it.
She almost dozes off again when some kind of big SUV rolls in and parks alongside her truck, gravel crunching under the tires. A door slams. Men are talking—no, shouting—to each other in the parking lot. About fish. Of course.
She pulls the curtains back and squints at the uncommonly clear sunlight. First time after weeks of rain. Outside her window, a few feet away, a skinny young fisherman with rock-star hair and an orange trucker’s cap leans into the rear of the SUV, extracting fishing rods. Her window is directly at his eye level. All he has to do is turn his head. He straightens, oblivious to her presence, slams the door shut, and walks off toward the marina, tackle in hand. He presses his key fob, and the vehicle lock clicks shut.
Well, shit.
Fish and fishing. Fishing and fish. It’s all anyone in Alaska seems to think about. Nothing can distract these guys from the pursuit of scaly, cold-blooded sea creatures. Not even a half-naked cocktail waitress in a camper in the parking lot of a bar. Okay, a sweaty, middle-aged cocktail waitress. Still, there was a time she would’ve had every man on that coast climbing through her window. Now there are twin five-year-old girls and their mother pounding on her door.
The girls bash the sheet-metal door again. It sounds like they’re using hammers. “Carla!” they scream. “Dipnetting!”
The whole town is fish crazy. The regulars at the bar make a living at it. The tourists fish for sport. The locals—even the children—apparently live to kill as many fish as they can, by any means possible. Well, she wanted to get as far from Phoenix as she could.
The banging continues.
“All right! I’m coming!”
She swings her feet to the floor. The carpet is gritty with gravel and sand, her clothes scattered across it. There are two Alaskan Amber cans and a box of chocolate-covered graham crackers on the floor, an empty sardine can on the little counter top. Last night’s dinner. She stands and pulls the sheet off the pad and wraps it around her shoulders. “It’s a good thing I love you girls!” she says through the door. She slides back the dead bolt.
The door flies open. Shire Kiminsky leans into the camper, white-blond hair glowing under the morning sun. “You have to get a phone, Carla.” Shire’s twin midlife surprises, the equally blond Irene and Alice, push into the doorframe at each hip. Shire’s wearing a pale-blue tracksuit, white stripes down the arms and legs. The twins wear tiny knee-high rubber boots and flower-print dresses with bright-orange life jackets buckled over them.
“Hello, girls,” Carla says. She sits back onto the sleeping platform. “Did your ship go down?”
The twin on Shire’s right hefts a miniature baseball bat. She holds it out to Carla and points at the words burned into the wood: CAPTAIN SHIRE’S FISH WHACKER. The other one brandishes a long-bladed filleting knife, safely encased in a plastic sheath. “We’re going dipnetting,” she says, shyly. As an afterthought, she adds, “For salmon.”
His mind races from one thing to another, pointlessly. Jennifer. Kevin Dykstra. McKint. Lundren. Jennifer again, and again.
Her last hug, her last words to him … He’s trying not to use the term last words. Her most recent words to him keep coming back. “Do the right thing. You know what it is.”
If only.
He walks into the bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, holding his drink between his knees.
That goddamned photo.
Jennifer gave him the cursed thing the day he left to go on the overseas job. One of her sources in the anti-McKint internet world had come by it somehow. D’Angelo took it with him out of the country on the job, studied it each time he found a peaceful, secure minute in the two weeks of madness there. He looked at it again and again on the several long plane trips going over and coming home. And what did it tell him?
The thing was two decades old. It had been snapped in Colombia, without D’Angelo’s or Gordon McKint’s knowledge. Each time he studied it again, he found himself looking at his then twenty-seven-year-old self, standing behind McKint in his camo fatigues and armored vest, cradling his M16.
He couldn’t stop studying his much-younger face. Looking for what? He wasn’t sure. Isn’t sure now. Maybe the kind of certainty he once felt about his role in everything McKint stood for.
Where did such assured devotion come from? And more importantly, where is it now? What exactly is he certain of anymore? Until these past few weeks, he would have bet that his smart, hotheaded, twenty-five-year-old daughter Jennifer would outlive him. That was something he could be certain of. He isn’t putting money on that now.
He’s always believed that the often-shady, sometimes-violent things he and Gordon McKint have done over the years in the name of drug interdiction, regime change, or counterinsurgency were needed to fight constantly evolving threats to the United States. Now, as the company shifts to domestic security contracts, the focus seems more and more on threats to the bottom line. How much pride is there in border security? Does he really want to devote his life to protecting America from the little old ladies who cook for Mrs. Chen?
Yet he owes Gordon McKint almost everything he has in this world. That much he knows for sure.
The day the photo was taken, he’d driven McKint to a small town in the mountains a few hours from Cartagena. As they approached the village, McKint told him the meeting was off book. “You mention this to no one.” It wasn’t the first time they were going dark. McKint was CIA. Who could tell if anything he did was sanctioned? That was half the pleasure in the job.
They met the Colombian colonel and the civilian in a hotel room in the village. No introductions were made. D’Angelo checked the room to make sure it wasn’t a surprise-party kidnapping or assassination. When he declared the place secure, McKint sent him out into the hall to guard the door.
Some time later, just as McKint came back out of the room, a concussion grenade crashed in through a window. McKint wasn’t seriously injured, but D’Angelo was deafened and dazed. Small-arms fire poured into the building. The Colombian colonel staggered into the hallway, screaming, “Get out of here!” obviously not wanting to explain to the regular Colombian army what he was doing there with the CIA officer. Gordon McKint hauled the barely conscious D’Angelo out the back of the building.
On the drive back to Cartagena, they got their stories straight: they’d been ambushed going to meet an unknown informant, someone they never did see. McKint didn’t want his superiors knowing about the meeting any more than the Colombian officer did. D’Angelo understood that this incident was way the fuck off book.
D’Angelo drinks the last of his vodka and sets his glass on the nightstand.
Jennifer doesn’t have much time, and he wants her to know the truth about what he decides to do—one way or the other. He owes her that.
One more look at the photo, and then he has to decide.
He pulls the nightstand drawer open, but his phone rings, and he turns and picks it up off the bed next to him. It’s Rebecca. “The hospital just called, Cosmo.”
“So soon?” he asks, his whole body feeling the weight of this.
“Fucking cancer,” Rebecca says, chokes, and hangs up.
He sets the phone down, turns back to the drawer, and pulls it the rest of the way open.
* * *
It’s been three days. Three days of sobbing family members, Jennifer’s friends. Condolences from everyone at Sidewinder. Three days of planning and paperwork at the funeral home. Three days since Carla Merino stole the photo, and with it any chance of D’Angelo honoring his daughter’s dying wish.
D’Angelo stops back in at the office on his way home from Jennifer’s wake. He spent the day there with Rebecca and her family—he has none of his own left. Maybe if he plows through the work that has certainly piled up during the day, he can get his mind off Jennifer’s death for a few minutes. But he can’t concentrate on the job, his thoughts constantly gravitating back to Carla Merino, the photo she stole three days ago, the fact that he’s still looking for her.
How would she even have known what the photo meant or that it was a threat? That’s a nagging question. But now that he has her phone records and has seen the call to Lisa Yi at the Times, it looks like she’s given the thing to them and has gone into hiding with their help. Was she working for the Times all along? He can’t see any connection to them—other than that phone call. How would she even know he had the photo? And where is it now? Why haven’t they splashed it? Gordon McKint has been all over the news for days, whipping his supporters into a frenzy over what he calls the “immigrant menace” threatening America. Trying out sound bites. Seeing what incites the most hysterics. That photo will stop him in his tracks. It will put him—and D’Angelo—behind bars.
If the Times had the photo, they would never sit on it. Never.
If they don’t have it, what the fuck has Carla done with it?
He pulls into the parking lot, still wondering about that.
He recognizes the one car in the lot besides the guard’s. Andy Krall, the oldest guy in the Phoenix office, is at his desk when D’Angelo lets himself in. Andy has been with Sidewinder since the beginning. Before that he worked with Gordon McKint and D’Angelo in parts of the world D’Angelo never wants to see again. He’s been a mentor at times. And one of the very few in the company D’Angelo trusts.
Andy stands and leans out the doorway of his office, his jowly face dark with sadness. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wake today, Cosmo. We’re all sorry about your loss. I can’t even imagine.”
D’Angelo can’t remember Andy ever calling him Cosmo before.
“Thanks, Andy.” Andy has adult children of his own, grandchildren. D’Angelo steers the painful conversation to the subject of work. “You’re at it late. What’s up?”
“Nothing serious. A little trouble at the facility in Nogales. Something else shaking over by Sierra Vista.” He shrugs. “It’s all border, all the time now.”
Andy is a language expert, fluent in several Central Asian and Caucasus dialects. He ran Sidewinder’s group in Uzbekistan, where their subcontractors are building an irrigation project at the Sea of Aral. His real job was providing surreptitious support for some quiet CIA programs designed to keep the region America friendly. But Andy’s been reassigned to the southwest border project now. Many of their best people have been. D’Angelo knows Andy isn’t a lot happier than he is about McKint’s new emphasis on domestic contracts.
“Yeah, I saw Gordon on the news again today,” D’Angelo says. As always, he avoids saying anything that could sound like criticism of McKint or Sidewinder policies. Andy is also adroit at staying neutral. While this is their home office and the building is empty except for the two of them, it’s quite conceivable that the company is listening in on its own employees. If they’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that people trained to spy, spy on each other. “Modern life, I guess,” D’Angelo says, and walks to his office.
What a day. In a lifetime of direly unpleasant situations, Jennifer’s wake felt like the worst punishment he’s ever endured. Rebecca—still clinging to Catholic rituals D’Angelo has long jettisoned—insisted on the open-coffin visitation, a gruesome, medieval ritual he abhors. In spite of the embalmer’s arcane arts, and contrary to what a well-meaning mourner assured him, Jennifer didn’t look at all like she was sleeping.
He sits at the desktop and cleans up some administrative stuff.
This isn’t going to take his mind off Jennifer’s death. Or Kevin Dykstra’s—which he has been quietly investigating outside the building. And it certainly isn’t going to clear his head of Carla and the missing photo—also being pursued in secret.
He picks up Kevin’s crystal and holds it up to the overhead lights. It doesn’t refract the light the way a diamond or even glass might. It seems to absorb it. How did this kid go from the left-brained, analytical thinking of the Air Force Academy to a belief that this piece of rock contains life-enhancing healing properties forged in the fires of the earth’s creation? Or something. D’Angelo tried to read about it, hoping Kevin’s alleged mysticism would reveal something about why he died.
He asked a friend at the FBI—an old Special Forces brother—about Kevin Dykstra’s death. On hearing the name, the guy slipped up and said something that made D’Angelo believe the feds had talked to the kid. Now why would the FBI be talking to a Sidewinder Security employee, secretly? D’Angelo couldn’t get any more out of the agent, but he could fill enough blanks to see that Kevin Dykstra, computer maven extraordinaire, had stumbled onto something in his rambles through the labyrinths of Sidewinder’s incoming data stream. Something that cost him his life.
Now, looking into the crystal, it occurs to him that Kevin and Jennifer were almost exactly the same age when they died. The cancer had come roaring back the same day he visited her for the last time. She was in a coma by the next morning. He never got to talk to her again about what he’s finally decided to do with the photo. If he ever gets it back. He never got to talk to her again about anything.
Tomorrow is the funeral, and then he’ll take some time off work. Gordon McKint himself called again to insist on it. And to say how sorry he was about Jennifer’s death, of course. It almost made D’Angelo laugh. Almost.
“She posted some unpleasant things about you, Gordon.”
“Story of my life. I never take it personally.” McKint sighed. Even over the phone it sounded fake. “It was her job, and she worked hard at it. Like her father. We all have a job to do. Right now, yours is to take some time off.”
Gordon made it sound like compassion. Maybe he’s capable of that. It’s hard to tell with him. But D’Angelo knows that this is partly because a man in his distracted state is going to make mistakes. And this is a business where mistakes can cost lives. Or is McKint just trying to get him out of the office again so he and Lundren can pull their next stunt? Are they gradually easing him out altogether?
“Gordon, I just got back. Literally,” he said. “Four days ago.”
“That was no vacation.” McKint was insistent. “Go. Andy Krall will manage while you’re away. He can call Phil if he needs help, but we’re not launching anything new for a few months during the campaign. Things will be quiet. Take as much time as you like. A month at least.”
In truth, he could use some time alone to think about all the things his daughter said to him in the last few months of her far-too-short life. And some time to track down Carla Merino and that photo. He doesn’t have to be in the office to do that. With access to Sidewinder’s codes, he can search for Carla on his own equipment. And there are plenty of independent contractors out there willing to do legwork on the ground, for a price. The trick is to find the photo without Phil Lundren or McKint knowing he’s looking for it. Let alone that he once had it and lost it.
He’ll tell them he’s going to take a few weeks off and go for a long drive across the Great American Desert. Get his head straight about Jennifer’s death. A “spirit quest” or “walkabout” or whatever the Kevin Dykstra types call such things. He doesn’t know too much about spirits. As far as he can tell, this hard life on earth is all there is. Existentially speaking, if he can’t cook it in a frying pan or shoot it with a gun, it doesn’t exist.
Two things that do exist are Carla Merino and that fucking photo. But where?
PART II
HOMER, ALASKA
Two Months Later
CHAPTER
9
WHEN THE FEROCIOUS pounding explodes against the door of her camper, Carla shoots upright on her sleeping pad, pulse surging, hands thrown out in front of her as if blocking a blow. For a second she thinks D’Angelo has somehow tracked her all the way from Phoenix. But she has a feeling that if and when he comes for her, she won’t hear anything. Until it’s too late.
She slumps back on the sweat-damp sheet, nerves jangling. More likely it’s just Volker. Jesus, he’s been possessive lately. Making plans. Talking about marriage, for Christ’s sake. The two of them running the Orca Grill together. Happily-ever-after shit. Not that the idea sounds so horrible. It’s not. The bar’s a moneymaker and Volker’s not a bad guy, if a little clingy. And she’s really beginning to like this town on the bay. But his plans involve paperwork. Public records. There are serious reasons why she can’t do any of that.
Volker started in on it again last night. When she demurred once more, he brought up Billy Griest, one of the young regulars in the bar. It got ugly. She hadn’t wanted Volker to find out about that little slip in judgment. She thought she’d been discreet. She’d certainly never meant to hurt him. But she has a birthday coming, and she let the flirtation with Billy go too far because she wanted to be reassured—she despises the archaic expression that sounds like something her mother would say—that she still has what it takes.
There’s more banging on her camper door, accompanied now by girlish giggling that tells her it isn’t Volker. It’s Shire and her five-year-old twins, there to take Carla dipnetting for salmon.
“All right, all right,” she groans. “I’m up.”
She’s wearing just her underwear and her watch—which says it’s seven thirty AM, though the sun is already high enough to beam through the skylight overhead. The camper is stuffy and too warm. She kicks the top sheet off and remains on her back. The sweat on her skin cools quickly. She closes her eyes. Just a few more minutes of sleep. Please.
She’s been living with George Volker for six weeks. But, last night, after the fight with him in the bar in front of all the regulars, she slept in the camper in the parking lot instead of going home. Volker can worry a bone like a Chihuahua, and she didn’t want to spend the whole night rehashing the Billy Griest thing. He’ll get over it.
She almost dozes off again when some kind of big SUV rolls in and parks alongside her truck, gravel crunching under the tires. A door slams. Men are talking—no, shouting—to each other in the parking lot. About fish. Of course.
She pulls the curtains back and squints at the uncommonly clear sunlight. First time after weeks of rain. Outside her window, a few feet away, a skinny young fisherman with rock-star hair and an orange trucker’s cap leans into the rear of the SUV, extracting fishing rods. Her window is directly at his eye level. All he has to do is turn his head. He straightens, oblivious to her presence, slams the door shut, and walks off toward the marina, tackle in hand. He presses his key fob, and the vehicle lock clicks shut.
Well, shit.
Fish and fishing. Fishing and fish. It’s all anyone in Alaska seems to think about. Nothing can distract these guys from the pursuit of scaly, cold-blooded sea creatures. Not even a half-naked cocktail waitress in a camper in the parking lot of a bar. Okay, a sweaty, middle-aged cocktail waitress. Still, there was a time she would’ve had every man on that coast climbing through her window. Now there are twin five-year-old girls and their mother pounding on her door.
The girls bash the sheet-metal door again. It sounds like they’re using hammers. “Carla!” they scream. “Dipnetting!”
The whole town is fish crazy. The regulars at the bar make a living at it. The tourists fish for sport. The locals—even the children—apparently live to kill as many fish as they can, by any means possible. Well, she wanted to get as far from Phoenix as she could.
The banging continues.
“All right! I’m coming!”
She swings her feet to the floor. The carpet is gritty with gravel and sand, her clothes scattered across it. There are two Alaskan Amber cans and a box of chocolate-covered graham crackers on the floor, an empty sardine can on the little counter top. Last night’s dinner. She stands and pulls the sheet off the pad and wraps it around her shoulders. “It’s a good thing I love you girls!” she says through the door. She slides back the dead bolt.
The door flies open. Shire Kiminsky leans into the camper, white-blond hair glowing under the morning sun. “You have to get a phone, Carla.” Shire’s twin midlife surprises, the equally blond Irene and Alice, push into the doorframe at each hip. Shire’s wearing a pale-blue tracksuit, white stripes down the arms and legs. The twins wear tiny knee-high rubber boots and flower-print dresses with bright-orange life jackets buckled over them.
“Hello, girls,” Carla says. She sits back onto the sleeping platform. “Did your ship go down?”
The twin on Shire’s right hefts a miniature baseball bat. She holds it out to Carla and points at the words burned into the wood: CAPTAIN SHIRE’S FISH WHACKER. The other one brandishes a long-bladed filleting knife, safely encased in a plastic sheath. “We’re going dipnetting,” she says, shyly. As an afterthought, she adds, “For salmon.”
