Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) Page 2

  The blonde girl was waiting for the two guys at the bottom of the hill, a little above where Bryant crosses Water Street. I put the ice cream cone in front of my face and licked at it slowly. Just a guy with a beard, licking ice cream. The mustachioed man was still at the outdoor goods store, flicking through a rack of sunglasses. He was using the little mirror there to keep an eye on the group.

  They had come together now. Looked like the girl was in charge. She was talking, the others listening. She examined the big guy’s nose. He was tall, but so was she. Tall enough not to have to reach up to examine the cut. The blood had dripped onto the guy’s shirt.

  After a minute or two, the three of them turned and walked the short way down to Water Street. The cruise ship loomed at the dock across the road, like a floating city with gangways. One to the right, maybe a hundred yards away. Another to the left, maybe two hundred yards away.

  A shiny black Chevy Suburban pulled to the curb. The girl opened the passenger door, revealing a cream leather interior, like the inside of a snake’s mouth. The two guys piled in the back and the girl got in the front. I couldn’t see the driver. Thirty seconds later the Suburban was gone.

  I watched the mustachioed guy walk after them. When he reached Water Street, a Subaru 4x4 pulled up, painted a fancy dark blue green. The word ‘teal’ crawled up out of some dark recess of my brain, like an unwanted guest. Another guy came out of the Subaru. He had a light-colored beard and long hair tucked behind his ears and wore a John Deere hat. I watched the two of them converse for maybe thirty seconds. The new guy got back into the car. The mustachioed guy stayed. The Subaru took off in the same direction as the big Chevy.

  I watched the guy with the mustache. He was looking up at the cruise ship. It was blocking the sunlight. I counted the floors. The ship had eight levels, like an extra wide tower block apartment building. The ship had a name, The Emerald Allure. I wondered why anyone would voluntarily walk up that gangway. Looked like the perfect place to catch a virus, like a floating experiment in epidemiology. The guy started walking along the dock.

  I concentrated on finishing the ice cream. When I had finished, I turned my jacket back around and put it on. I got up, slung on my backpack, and walked after him.

  Four

  Them following me, following him, following them. The equation had changed. Now it was just me following him.

  The guy represented a group, evidenced by the other guy in the teal Subaru. Therefore, two groups in some kind of conflict. Or maybe not yet in conflict. There was the question of why the first bunch was after me specifically.

  Half of me wanted to know more, and the other half didn’t. The other half was pretty happy to get the hell out of Port Morris and down to Seattle. The salmon season was over, and I was done with Alaska. It had been a fine experience, but I had already mentally placed Alaska in the past tense.

  It had started in Seattle, at Ivar’s Fish Bar. Halibut fish and chips had been excellent. I was eating alone, standing on the deck at a high round outside table. Looking out to the ocean. Seattle had been fun. There was a girl. She liked me, and I liked her. She was traveling through the continental United States from east to west. Couldn’t go much further west, so next up was Asia. An even bigger continent. From Seattle you strike land on the islands of Japan and you’re there, Asia. You can keep going, five or six thousand miles later, you’re in Istanbul, Turkey, standing on the east bank of the Bosphorus, still in Asia, looking across the water at Europe.

  I had spent years on the west side of the world’s largest continent. Mostly Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with assorted side trips elsewhere. Now I was in Seattle, looking toward the other side, eastern Asia. The girl wanted me to go with her on that trip, which I thought was a fine idea. Island-hopping Japan and then hit the mainland. Maybe an epic trip from Japan into North China. Then over through Mongolia and into Kazakhstan.

  The problem was money, more specifically the fact that I didn’t have much of it. Certainly, I didn’t have enough to go traveling through Asia for a year. So, she was going to leave, and I was going to stay.

  Then Joe Guilfoyle stepped in front of me. Guilfoyle was not a big man. Medium size, bearded and red-faced. He had been polite. Asked me how I liked the fish and chips. We started to talk. Turned out Joe had been in the military, 1st Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton. Guilfoyle had participated in Task Force Ripper, the assault into Kuwait City. Before my time. Now Guilfoyle was the captain of a fishing boat. He worked the salmon season in southeast Alaska. He had offered me a job. Said he had four guys for a five man crew, was looking for a fifth. I said, “Why me?”

  He said, “Why not? You’re staring at the ocean. I can arrange a whole lot of ocean if you’re interested.”

  The truth is, I had already pictured what it might be like working on a fishing boat in Alaska. The picture had been a romantic one. The ocean. The bow of a wooden boat. Spray coming up off it into my face. The mountains, channels, rainforests of Alaska. Whales jumping and turning in the mist. All of that stuff was passing through my mind, and Guilfoyle knew it. He was looking at me with a little smile on his face, like a cherub.

  I said, “What will I do on the boat?”

  He said, “Web man.”

  “What’s a web man?”

  “Three guys on the back. Guy on the left is the weight man. He handles the sinkers that pull the net down. Guy on the right is the floater guy. Handles the floaters to keep the other side of the net up. Guy in the middle is the web man. Handles the net. That’s you.”

  I said, “Thought there were five guys on the boat.”

  Guilfoyle said, “Me, skiff driver, and three guys on the back.”

  So I had agreed.

  There had been two weeks in Seattle getting the boat ready. Painting and repairs, plus supplies. The crew had gathered. Then we drove the boat up to Alaska. Seventy-two hours, four-hour shifts. That had been in June. There had been no night. Only a twilight at the end of the day, followed by another day. Going up through the inside passage, the water had been calm. We saw porpoises and bald eagles, whales, and orcas. The picture in my head that day at Ivar’s Fish Bar had been correct. That is exactly what I got.

  Good times, hard work.

  Four months pulling salmon out of the ocean with a five-man crew on a fifty-eight-foot purse seiner. Now I was done with that. It was time to leave. I had a plane ticket back to Seattle in my pocket. Departure was scheduled for that afternoon. I also had money in the bank. The season had been a good one, so they said. I had more than enough to get going on that epic trip through Asia. Only question was how to get to Japan. There was air travel, and there was boat travel.

  But that was not up to me. The girl was still down there in Seattle. Not exactly waiting, she had used the time to take a couple of college summer classes. She had planned the Asia trip. On top of all that, she was meeting me at the airport in Seattle that evening.

  Now this.

  The man was walking out of town, opposite direction from the airport. I thought about turning around. But I didn’t.

  Why not? I wasn’t sure. I was thinking about that while I followed him. Fact was, I felt like a hound on the scent. Maybe I’m a natural hunter. In the military it had been simple. I was the guy who went in and did the damage. A combat medic in a special tactics unit of the United States Air Force. Medic, but not the kind of guy that cleans up the mess, more like the guy who makes it. That Others May Live is the motto. But sometimes you need to clear a path to get to them.

  I’d been out of the military a couple years by then. Just bumming around, pretty much. In the beginning I had wanted to feel like a free man. So I started traveling. Eventually most guys will settle down and get their feet stuck into some version of a pair of cement shoes. All the stuff that keeps a person in one place, like planting grain and watching it grow all year, versus hunting and foraging.

  I guess I’m not a farmer type. No problem with farmers, I’m just not made for it.

/>   Port Morris wasn’t a large town, the curving streets ending half-way up the hill. And when the roads ended, the woods began. Not regular woods, North Pacific rainforest. There was nothing on the other side of the rainforest except channels and islands, filled with more rainforest and then mountains, then glaciers, and after that, more mountains and more glaciers. Eventually, after walking and swimming for months, you might arrive at the boundary of some remote settlement. You might be in Canada. You might be in tribal territory. That is if you hadn’t already frozen to death or been eaten by a bear.

  After fifteen or twenty minutes, the streets became more sparsely settled and I had to hang back pretty far just so the guy wouldn’t notice me following. He was trudging along, moving steadily. Lateral to the south and uphill slightly to the east. The guy turned around a bend and I lost him. I kept on going for a while, but he wasn’t there anymore.

  It was a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Maybe three houses deep from the woods. Two-story family dwellings with aluminum siding. Looked like they’d been built in the 1970s or 80s. Cars out front were the rustic kind. Four-wheel-drives or small and reliable runners that could survive the brutal winter. The asphalt turned to gravel and the road ran sharply uphill. I saw the guy up at the end of it. He turned left and disappeared into evergreen growth.

  I went indirect. A bushwhack through the woods. Easier said than done. The rainforest is thick with ferns and mossy roots. A couple of minutes later I was on the edge of a backyard looking at a smokehouse, which resembled an outdoor toilet. Fumes coming out of the chimney smelled like sockeye salmon curing. Smelled good. I shifted position around a big tree and was able to see into the large back window of the house. Looked like a living room on the left through the big window, then a kitchen on the right, giving out to an elevated deck.

  I could see the man from the ice cream store. He walked from left to right through the living room and disappeared into the kitchen. Then he reappeared in the window of the kitchen door above the elevated deck. I stepped behind the tree.

  Then I heard the kitchen door open and close. I peered around. A different man came down the stairs, and then across the yard. It was the bearded giant from the night before in the Porterhouse Bar. The giant lowered his head and entered the smokehouse. He was armed. A paddle frame holster behind his right hip held a small revolver of some kind.

  No big deal. Alaska is pretty much the last place on earth where you’d need to worry about carrying a gun. You don’t even need to register your gun. No permit required. I had to admit to myself that it was all kind of mysterious and intriguing. The bearded giant from the night before, the blonde girl, and the mustachioed guy from the ice cream store. Whatever, I was out of there.

  I turned around the tree to back out of the woods and came face to face with the barrel of another gun.

  Specifically, it was the short and fat barrel of an AR-15 style rifle. My eyes lingered for a moment at the black hole looking right at me, then my gaze moved forward along the fancy ribbed rail in three dimensional space to the rifle stock pushed against a shoulder, which was some kind of tactical military-grade minimalist option from a catalogue. Then I looked up at the face, it was the guy in the Subaru with the John Deere hat. He was looking back at me.

  “Hands out and open, buddy.”

  I opened my hands and put some air in my armpits.

  The guy said, “Walk to the house.”

  I took half a second to scold myself for not being tactically alert. But that was all.

  I turned around and stepped onto the back yard grass. Then I started walking over it. The bearded giant was standing by the smokehouse holding a side of salmon. His fist was closed around the hanging wire. He stared at me, but that was it. I was expecting more. But then I figured that the giant hadn’t even seen me the night before. He had looked right through me.

  The smoked sockeye salmon was a strong and contrasting red against the green grass and the green woods. The bearded guy growled at me, then plucked a bit of flesh off the fish and popped it between his lips and started to chew. I looked away from him to the house. The mustachioed guy was standing in the picture window looking down. He wasn’t smiling.

  The barrel poked me in the spine, below my backpack and the guy said, “Move.”

  I considered pushing back at him. What was the guy going to do, shoot me? But I figured it was better to just go with the flow. Maybe I’d learn something.

  Five

  The mustachioed guy watched me as I came in from the kitchen door on the deck. He was standing in the living room with a smirk on his face.

  He said, “So this is the guy who came from town.” He looked proud of himself for having said it.

  I walked through and said nothing. The deck gave on to the kitchen. To my left was a living room featuring the big window, floor to ceiling. Straight ahead was a hallway and then the front door of the house. It looked as if the house was being used as some kind of dormitory for overgrown children. There were beer bottle empties on the coffee table and a stack of pizza boxes.

  The guy with the AR-15 kept the gun on me. The guy with the side-parted hair and the mustache said, “Who the hell are you?”

  I pushed the rifle away from me. “Someone who doesn’t like guns pointed at him.”

  The guy in the John Deere hat put the gun back on me and took a step away. “We are still in the gun-pointing-at-you part of the relationship.”

  I looked at the guy with the mustache. “People follow me, then you’re following them. Then I follow you, and then your guy is following me. It’s like a snake eating its own tail.”

  The mustache smiled. It was not a pretty smile. He was all groomed with hair product and clean clothes, but it was exactly like lipstick on a pig. “I like that. Isn’t it the symbol of something?”

  I said, “Rebirth. Renewal. The cycle of life.”

  Mustache said, “Well I don’t know about that.” He pulled a straight-backed wood chair from a desk in the corner and placed it in the center of the room. “You’re invited to sit. And let’s see some ID.”

  I said, “It isn’t going to go down like that.”

  The guy with the gun sniggered. “Oh yeah? How’s it going down?”

  I spread my hands open and spoke in a quiet and reasonable tone. I had in mind something like the emotional tone of a statement of terms and conditions. I said, “We are at a juncture right here. A key moment in the cycle of your lives. Right now, I’m more curious than interested. Curiosity is temporary, it speaks of a fleeting attention that isn’t yet in the realm of interest. Broadly speaking, it can still go two ways. Either I’m interested in you, or I’m not. If I’m, very bad for you. If I’m not, much better for you. That’s my intuition at the moment, not knowing much about you. I have to tell you that I’m leaning on being interested. But you tell me. Should I be?”

  The guy with the AR-15 was confused. “Should you be what?”

  I said nothing.

  Mustache looked at me seriously for a moment. Then his concentration lapsed and he said, “What’re you, like a poet or something?”

  The barrel poked me again. The guy with the AR-15 said, “Sit.”

  I don’t like being poked with anything, but being poked with a gun barrel is up there on my list of the worst things to be poked with. The man with the mustache picked up a roll of duct tape. He started to unravel a length. I like duct tape. It is an important thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of uses for it, and plan on using it in the future. But I don’t ever plan on having it used on me.

  I said, “I’m not going to sit down, and if your friend doesn’t stop pointing that thing at me, I’m going to wrap it around his head and then feed it to you.”

  He laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

  I turned and looked at the AR-15 guy. He wasn’t smiling. I looked at the weapon, it was still pointed at me. I looked back at him. He said, “What?”

  I said nothing.

  Mustache was watching. H
e said, “My ice cream-eating friend, let me give you another piece of advice. Willets here is an actual real-life government-trained killer. So, if I were you, I’d just sit the fuck down. But it’s a free country.”

  I looked at the man named Willets, who was looking pleased at the description. I shrugged. “Well, you could have said so from the beginning, would have saved all of us this brief moment of tension.”

  He allowed a thin smile. “Good man. Now sit your ass down.”

  I moved toward the chair and noticed that the barrel of Willets’ rifle had lowered a pinch. Which was what I was waiting for. Flattery never fails. I took another small step and put a hand on the chair back, like I was going to sit down on it. But instead of sitting on it, I whipped the chair around and hurled it at Willets. He used the rifle to block the chair, which had the effect of radically adjusting his line of potential fire. From me, to the ceiling. That was the whole point, because then I could follow up on the distraction with something more kinetic. In this case, a knife edge strike into Willets’ windpipe.

  The edge of my hand went into his throat. Hard, fast, like a snake bite. I stood back and watched him. I also looked at Mustache, who didn’t react. Willets was silent for a half second, kind of standing there looking lost, then he wasn’t silent anymore. When you feel like you might suffocate, nothing else really matters. So, Willets stumbled around for a while coughing and sputtering, turning red and paying no attention at all to the gun.

  I stepped over to him, took the weapon in one hand, and kicked him into the sofa with my foot. I was closer to the big window now. Down below, the bearded giant was repairing the smokehouse door. He looked up at me through the window and we made eye contact. Then he looked away. By then, Mustache had a pistol up. He said, “Who the hell are you?”

  I inspected the AR-15 copy. One in the chamber. I ejected the round onto the carpet. Then I thumbed the magazine release and tossed it into the kitchen, heavy with ammunition. I was aiming for the sink, but a couple of beer bottles got in the way and there was a clatter. I dropped the gun onto the sofa next to Willets.