Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) Read online

  Now that I was interested.

  When I reached the road, I swung the bike onto the asphalt and let it roll downhill, coasting around the ridges until I got to the edge of town. There, the last buildings faded out behind me and the road was a gray line in the growing darkness. It was all Pacific rainforest. I got into a rhythm with the pedalling and breathing. Just me and the bike in the middle of nothing. Maybe a couple of bears were watching. The chain and wheel bearings made only the slightest purring sound. Joe Guilfoyle was a meticulous man.

  A mile down the road, I turned up a logging path. The trail cut north across the island, above Port Morris and over to Beaver Falls. My plan was to get there the back way, through the woods. I wanted to take a good look before committing. The logging trail veered off in the wrong direction, so I stashed the bike and walked through the rainforest. An hour later night had fallen. I was up on one knee looking over the Beaver Falls Lodge.

  The lodge was an isolated resort in the southeast Alaskan style. All rustic wood with First Nation stylings. The place was a set of connected wood structures looking across the water to Gem Cove on the other side of the channel. The main building had an elevated deck with huge picture windows. The lights were on. Clean smoke came out of the chimney. I could see down to the parking lot. The Chevy Suburban was parked in the guest spot.

  I walked down and got under the deck. No lights on downstairs, just upstairs. I went around the corner and down toward the water. The lodge had a dock that pushed out into the channel. A weathered zodiac boat was tied up and waiting. I came around the other side. Still no lights on downstairs. The walkway to the entrance was lit and lined with thick rope connected to wood posts every five yards or so. I walked in the ferns below it and looked up at the deck. Lights on, jazz music playing.

  I looked up at the walkway. I was not interested in making an appearance on a security camera video. So, I came around again to the side where I had started and shimmied up the thick deck support until I was able to fold myself over the balcony. I crouched in the dark corner, listening. A few yards away was the picture window and a set of wide sliding doors.

  Didn’t hear anything besides the music coming from inside, so I moved over and looked in the window. Nothing to see, just embers in the fireplace and an empty room. Nothing moving except the smoke from the hot coals going up the chimney. The sliding door was not locked. I pushed the left side open and stepped in. The volume went up on Nat King Cole singing "Autumn Leaves". To my nine o’clock, polished wood countertops formed a horseshoe-shaped wet bar.

  I stepped around the counter. Jane Abrams lay on the terracotta tile floor. Blood had pooled beneath her head. She looked very dead; her right eye was open. Her left eye had been punctured by a bullet, so was neither open or closed really. There were two more entry wounds at her chest. A whiskey glass had shattered where it impacted in the corner. The place smelled of bourbon and cordite. The ice had melted and the water was running up against the blood and starting to swirl in with it.

  Ten

  I held a palm a half-inch above Jane Abrams’ mouth. The lips were slightly parted, showing the tops of even white teeth. There was no breath, but there was warmth. Her internals were cooling down, but that would take time. Eventually the body would be room temperature. Then the decomposition would begin and she’d heat up again. Except by then she wouldn’t be a she, she’d be an it. The sound system was controlled from a little box on the counter. I used my knuckle to press the stop button.

  Abrams stared up at the ceiling with her one good eye. Good in terms of it being in one piece, but not good in terms of seeing. The unseeing eye stared sightlessly into the burning core of a recessed halogen. I was crouched over the body. The rest of the lodge house made only small and subtle sounds, like the embers in the fireplace, like the sound of the wind outside and the creaking of wood joists.

  I stayed still and silent. Counted off two minutes. Which is a long time when you’re counting. I eased up out of the crouch and stepped carefully back from the blood. Jane Abrams had been wearing white leather ballet flats. The one on the right foot had come off, revealing painted toenails. The chosen color was black.

  I made my way across the open space of the lounge area. By then I had my knife open and held loosely in my hand. Knife against gun does not make a good equation for the guy with the knife. But then it’s better than nothing. The fireplace was modern. A big circular pan in the center of the room, with the flue pipe traveling up to the vaulted ceiling and punching through it. The seating was arranged around the hearth, a couple of different areas with appropriate furniture choices for the place and the context. Beyond that was another open space and further on I could see a pool table. I figured that was a games room.

  As I crept silently forward I noticed a hand on the floor beneath the pool table. The hand was attached to an arm in a sleeve, and none of it was moving. That was for damn sure. More than that, I couldn’t see. There was a doorway off the corridor. It had a sign on it that read ‘Sauna’. The door had a little window made of tinted toughened glass. I pushed the door open with my boot. The hinges creaked. It opened into a vestibule containing a simple wooden bench, hanging hooks for clothes, a neat pile of white towels, and a neat pile of white robes. It all looked clean and fresh and smelled like laundry detergent and heated wood.

  From the vestibule, there were two ways to go. The sauna, and the bathroom. I toed the bathroom open. Empty and humid. The shower curtain was wet. I pushed the sauna door in. Empty and hot. There was a towel on the bench. I picked it up. Moist. The coals were being cooked by the electric coil below. A pail of water was beside it, the surface flat and unmoving. A wooden ladle lay over the top. The ladle was dry, which didn’t mean anything. It was a sauna. Everything was dry. Except the towel, which meant that it had recently contained something wet, like a person who had just showered.

  But there was no longer a wet person wrapped in the towel.

  I backed out of there and continued down the corridor. At the threshold of the games room I could see bodies, plural, two of them. One was the blonde bearded guy with the bandaged hand. The other was the guy whose nostril I had sliced with my fishing knife.

  The sliced nostril guy was sprawled upright into a liquor cabinet. His head rested on a shelf where it shared space with Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. There was also Makers Mark and Wild Turkey. The shelf above had even more exalted characters, like Laphroaig, Yamazaki, and Lagavalin, among others. Beside the nostril cut, the guy had suffered a gunshot wound to his neck that was visible from the doorway. I moved closer and saw another one at the temple, in front of his left ear. That had been the shot which pushed him into the liquor cabinet. The neck shot had been the follow-up, pinning him there. It occurred to me that the neck shot had been a kind of joke. Like the nostril slice guy had been about to fall over and the neck shot had redressed the balance. A third bullet had gone in at the heart. There was not much blood from that one. The blood from the head shot was pooling on the glass shelf, running in and around the bottles, but not spilling over the slightly raised shelf lip.

  The blond bearded guy had been playing pool. The shooter had got him first in the back of the head. That shot had killed him. But he had been standing upright and the head is a heavy thing. When the brain ceased to function, it had stopped firing out messages to the guy’s muscles. The head was no longer able to defy gravity and had tumbled forward and down. The rest of his body had followed. The head had smashed into the top of the side rail, leaving a nice mark in the polished wood. The body had then crumpled to the floor face-down, where it had stayed. The guy’s arm had unfolded beneath the table.

  Beside the head wound I couldn’t see another entry wound. But given that the others had been shot three times, it was likely that this guy had been as well. Which is why I figured the entry wound was facing the floor, chest most likely. But there was no exit wound at the back. So I guesstimated right then and there that the gun had been a .22 caliber.

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sp; There were three drinks in the games room. Two beer bottles on a small table between comfortable lounge chairs. A whiskey glass on a counter near the liquor cabinet. Two dead guys, one dead woman. Four drinks in total if you included Abrams’ smashed whiskey glass.

  I was thinking about the blonde girl and the wet towel in the sauna. I dipped a finger into the whiskey glass and tasted it. Diluted bourbon. The ice had melted.

  But then I was thinking about myself, because I could hear police sirens in the distance. I was thinking that being in the house when the police arrived would be somewhere between bad and catastrophic. Not that I was guilty of anything, but good luck explaining that to a judge.

  Eleven

  But first there were things to do, things to know about. There were the bodies and the blood and the smashed glass. There were casings to check for, but no casings to be found. Which didn’t surprise me, as the killings had all the features of a professional hit. I figured I had five minutes, tops. Time enough for a rapid tour. The Beaver Falls Lodge had five bedrooms. Four of which had been occupied. One minute per room, one minute for miscellaneous movement and to get out of the house.

  I didn’t see surveillance cameras. Part of what you get when you can afford luxury is privacy. There would be a camera at the gate, to scan and record vehicles.

  I looked out the large picture windows. There were many of them, on all sides. All dark, throwing back reflections from inside the house. I wondered who would have been around to call the police. One answer was the shooter on a burner phone. A corollary to that was the idea that the shooter was watching me now, from the woods. I used up four minutes searching the house.

  One minute to go. Sirens approaching fast.

  I went out past Jane Abrams, still sightless, still dead. I slid the glass door closed. The wind had picked up and with it came fine droplets of rain moving through the air. I looked out at the woods. Dark and indifferent. Maybe there was someone out there, maybe not. On the other side, water glinted in the channel.

  I let myself tumble over the banister. Grabbed hold of the post and shimmied down. At the bottom I crouched under the deck, up against the inside of the post. I saw the flashlights before I heard the people holding them. Two lights moving up in the woods where I’d come from. West to east. Police foot patrol. Problem was, other than the driveway, that was the best way out. They must have parked a quad bike up on the trails and moved in on foot. Vehicles were coming from the south, and the only other land route out was north, along the coast.

  No more time.

  Two Ford Explorers with flashing lights pulled into the drive. The sirens stopped. The cops inside the vehicles scanned the woods on either side with spotlights. I heard a car door slam, and the crackle of a radio. I slipped between the bushes and the house and started to slowly creep north. I figured I could get away, then double back to the west and get the bike from where I had left it on the logging trail.

  But north was not going to happen. Two more handheld lights were coming through the brush. A second foot team. Another radio squawking cop code. Two foot teams plus the approaching cars. Which meant that I was cornered against the house. I crouched at the building foundation, keeping my head down, relying on my hearing and peripheral vision. The police were moving along the ridge, so I moved in the other direction, laterally below the ridge.

  When I got clear I saw the opportunity to move behind their position and make it north into the woods. But I stopped. The two foot teams were coming together in a huddle about fifty feet away. I couldn’t hear them speaking, but I wanted to hear them. So, I moved back in.

  I shimmied into a bush around the foundation corner. Dangerous, but maybe useful. Another cop was coming from the west. Then I heard the cops from the vehicles. They had found Abrams’ body. Footsteps up on the deck. Then a male voice, gruff.

  “Shit.” A guy came out and leaned over the railing coughing and cursing. The cops below looked up at him. He got his breath and said, “Dead. One dead woman.”

  A female officer called up to him from the huddle. “Want me to call it in, detective?”

  “I’ll call it in.” When he spoke into his radio there was the weird double sound of a real live voice and its remote twin coming from the two-way radios clipped to the patrol belts. “Dispatch, this is thirteen, I have a one eight seven at the Beaver Falls Lodge. Repeat, one eight seven. Need an ambulance and a supervisor.”

  The radio squawked twice. The dispatcher’s voice came back. “Copy that, thirteen.”

  The cop upstairs went back inside. I figured thirteen was a badge number. His voice returned in the ghostly form of a radio squawk only. No live sound this time. “Base, this is thirteen again. Let me know as soon as state comes through.”

  Base squawked back. “Roger that.”

  One of the cops below the deck said, “Jesus Christ.”

  I figured they were going to find the games room soon. I started slipping around the other side of the house. I got to the west side of the building and one of the police teams had started to circle round to the north, so that was blocked off again.

  I remembered the zodiac.

  I moved down to the outbuilding through a gulley below the driveway. The door was open and it was pitch dark inside. I moved slowly and felt around. The police radios were squawking up at the house. It was a matter of minutes before the detective in charge thought to send officers down to the shed.

  My plan was to get the boat out quietly. Then, start it up once I was out far enough. But I needed something to get the boat’s motor started, since I didn’t have a key.

  I moved methodically in the dark, feeling my way along a work bench. A cop light beam swung across the shed and shone through the small window on the side. For a brief flash I saw the tool peg board before it went pitch dark again. I started feeling my way along the workbench and running a hand across the tools.

  People who are without sight can use touch to see, or echolocation, like bats. I visualized as I passed my fingers along the peg board. First up was a section of pliers. Different types, different sizes. Next were hammers. Then there were rubber mallets in a couple different sizes. After that were the wrenches. Looked like they had a full set of combination wrenches, all the way from eighth-inch to three inches. Finally the screwdriver section. What I needed was a long screwdriver. That way I could bypass the starter and spark the engine up.

  I was running my fingers down from the top of the board to the bottom. The top were shorter screwdrivers. The head didn’t matter. I needed a long one. When I got to the place where I expected to find one, it was missing. I checked again. Then checked on the work table below the peg board, in case someone had left it there. Nothing.

  I stepped carefully around the workbench, feeling with my hands. There was a doorway to a second room. Outside, I could see the beam of a powerful light cutting through the foliage. It was the spot from one of the police vehicles. I waited until it came across again, into the window, and focused my gaze into that room. When the light slashed across the inside of the shed I was able to make out the shape of someone crouched into a corner. There was blonde hair involved.

  I spoke into the dark. “You alright?” There was no response. But I heard her breathing. Shallow and hurried. I scuttled over in the dark. I said, “You can hear me. Just say it.”

  The blonde girl said, “Keeler?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  She said, “You didn’t get on the plane.”

  “No.”

  The blonde girl said, “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  I said, “I need to get out of here, for a couple of reasons.”

  She said, “Take me with you.” I didn’t speak for a while. She said, “For a couple of reasons.”

  I said, “We need a long screwdriver, or something like that.”

  She said, “I’ve got one.”

  The light slashed again through the shed. I caught a glimpse
of her. She was holding the screwdriver. It was precisely what I had been looking for. Maybe she had planned to stab me with it. Her hair was wet, but she had clothes on, which was plus for her because it wasn’t a warm night. On the other hand, the clothes were not very substantial. She was going to be cold.

  The light came again from outside. This time it was closer, more focused. The police were nearby. I crouched next to her and we shuffled together, back against the wall. She was shivering.

  I took the screwdriver from her hands. “What were you planning on doing, stabbing someone with this?”

  She said, “Yes. I was frightened.”

  The police radio squawked again. The light swerved once more and the radio sound dropped off. I felt her moving next to me. I said, “We need to go. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  We scuttled to the shed door on the other side. The door let out to the dock.

  I said, “Wait here until I whistle. Then you go, and you lay down in the boat.” I didn’t wait for a response.

  I slipped into the cold dark water between the boat and the dock. Ten seconds later I had the rope cut. I gave a low whistle. I couldn’t see the blonde girl from where I was in the water. But I heard bare feet padding to the dock, then I felt the vibrations in the rigid hull when she climbed in. Then it was still again and I started to inch the zodiac out into the channel. I swam the boat away from the dock, hugging the darkness of the coast and the overhanging trees and rocks. My boots were heavy in the water. The lodge was long out of sight before I climbed onboard.

  The blonde girl was there, lying down against the side of the boat, like I had told her to. The zodiac had two seats in the back and the pilot cabin right in the middle. I said, “You can get up now. Sit in one of those seats if you like.”