Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (2 page)

“Last one,” the bartender said as he set two drinks down on the counter, and followed those with two checks, one for Ken and another for Pete James.

“Wait a minute,” Ken said angrily. “What does that mean? That you're cutting me off?”

“Don't take it personally,” the bartender told him. “We generally close this bar up at midnight. If you want another drink, there's still the small bar off the lobby that stays open until one.”

“Oh,” Ken said. “That's all right then.”

Pete James paid in cash and left. Ken, on the other hand, downed his drink in one long gulp and then scribbled his name and room number onto the tab, along with a fairly hefty tip. Faye always accused him of being a light tipper. It did his heart good to prove her wrong.

“It's late,” he said to the bartender. “S'pose I should hit the hay.”

When Ken stood up, he had to grab on to the back of the barstool to keep from tipping over. It was enough to cause the bartender some concern. “You gonna be all right, Dr. Glass?” he asked. “I can get someone from security to help you.”

“Don't bother, I'm fine,” he said. “Fresh air'll do me a world of good.” Ken looked around for the guy who had bought the drink, whose name he had suddenly forgotten, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Thanks anyway,” he muttered.

With that, Ken set off unsteadily across the bar and let himself out through a patio entrance that led past one of the hotel's several pools to his wing of the massive complex. Standing outside in the nippy March weather, he paused long enough to pluck the phone out of his pocket. Once more he tried dialing home, and once more the phone rang and rang in a house where nobody answered.

Damn her anyway!
Ken thought angrily.
She's out somewhere whoring around with some boyfriend instead of being here with me. I'll show her. I'll divorce the little bitch and we'll see how well she does for herself out in the open market
.

As Ken fumbled the phone back into his pocket, he heard what sounded like hurrying footsteps behind him. Half-turning and trying to get out of the way of whoever it was, he saw only an upraised arm. There was no time to cry out; no time to defend himself. Ken felt something hard thud against the side of his head, followed by the sensation of falling—of falling into the water. Even drunk, Ken knew enough to hold his breath and to try to rise to the surface, but when he did so, there was something that kept him from reaching air—something that pushed him back down, and not just once, but again and again.

Eventually he couldn't hold his breath any longer. When Ken Glass finally exhaled, water flooded into his mouth and lungs. He struggled for a while after that, but finally there was no fight left in him and he fell still.

Seconds later, the man who had introduced himself as Pete James climbed unhurriedly out of the pool, toweled himself dry, and then slipped back into the clothes he had left concealed behind a hedge at the pool's far end. Wrapping the wet towel around the police baton he had used to whack Ken Glass on the head, he made his way back to the rental car he had left in the hotel parking lot.

Other than the bartender, no one in the hotel had seen him or even known he was there. As he headed for the Hertz lot at Sky Harbor International, he couldn't help but be proud of himself. This wasn't his first job, but it was certainly his best—clean, trouble-free, and by the book.

“Another one for our side,” he said under his breath. “One more down and God knows how many to go.”

T
HE BLONDE FIXED ME
with an appraising eye that left me feeling as defenseless as a dead frog spread-eagled on some high school biology student's dissection tray. “And what do you do?” she asked.

When the headwaiter had led me through the cruise ship's plush, chandelier-draped dining room to a round table set for six, four of the chairs were already occupied by a group of women who clearly knew one another well. They were all “women of a certain age,” but the blonde directly across from me was the only one who had gone to considerable effort to conceal the ravages of time. I had taken one of the two remaining places, empty chairs that sat side by side. When I ordered tonic with a twist, there was a distinct pause in the conversation.

“Very good, sir,” the waiter said with a nod before disappearing in the direction of the bustling waiters' station, which was directly to my back.

For the better part of the next five minutes the conversation continued as before, with the four women talking at length about the generous divorce settlement someone known to all of them had managed to wring from the hide of her hapless and, as it turned out, serially unfaithful ex-husband. The general enthusiasm with which my tablemates greeted the news about a jerk being forced to pay through the nose told me I had fallen into an enemy camp made up of like-minded divorcées. So I wasn't exactly feeling all warm and fuzzy when the ringleader of the group asked her question. The fact that I was on a heaving cruise ship named
Starfire Breeze
pitching and bucking my way into Queen Charlotte Sound toward the Gulf of Alaska did nothing to improve my disposition.

With little to lose, I decided to drop my best conversational bomb. “I'm a homicide detective,” I told the women mildly, taking a slow sip of my icy tonic which had arrived by then. “Retired,” I added after a pause.

I had put in my twenty years, so retired is technically true, although “retired and between gigs” would have been more accurate. However, it didn't seem likely that accuracy would matter as far as present company was concerned. So retired is what I said, and I let it go at that.

Over the years I've found that announcing my profession to a group of strangers usually cripples polite dinnertime small talk. Most people look at me as though I were a distasteful worm who has somehow managed to crawl out from under a rock. They give the impression that they'd just as soon I went right back where I came from. Then there are the occasional people who set about telling me, in complete gory detail, everything they know about some obscure and previously unsolved crime with which they happen to be personally acquainted. This tactic always serves to turn dinner into an unpleasant parlor game in which I'm set the lose/lose task of coming up with the solution to an insoluble mystery. No winners there.

Surprisingly enough, the blonde took neither option A nor option B. Instead, she gave me a white-toothed smile that was no doubt as phony and chemically augmented as the rest of her. “My name's Margaret Featherman,” she announced cordially, standing and reaching across the table with a jewel-bedecked, impeccably manicured hand. She gave me a firm handshake along with an unobstructed view of a generous cleavage.

“These are all friends of mine,” she chirped. “We went to college together. This is Naomi Pepper, Sharon Carson, and Virginia Metz.” As she gestured around the table, each of the women nodded in turn. “The four of us are having our annual reunion. And you are?” Margaret prompted, resuming her seat.

She had a gravelly voice that made me want to clear my throat. I pegged her as a smoker or maybe an ex-smoker.

“Beaumont,” I told her. “J. P. Beaumont.”

I didn't voluntarily elaborate on the Jonas Piedmont bit any more than I had on my employment situation. Nothing was said, but she frowned slightly when I said my name, as though it displeased her somehow. It occurred to me that maybe she had been expecting to hear some particular name, and Beaumont wasn't it.

Although the other three women had been chatting amiably enough when I first arrived, now they shut up completely, deferring to Margaret Featherman as though she were the only one of the group capable of human speech. Whatever it was that had disturbed Margaret about my introduction, she regained her equanimity quickly enough.

“Now that we're out from behind Vancouver Island, the water is a little choppy,” she allowed a few seconds later. “I suppose your wife is feeling a bit under the weather.” She gave a helpful hint by nodding pointedly in the direction of the empty chair beside me.

“I'm a widower,” I said.

Again, that wasn't quite the whole story. If a wife dies in less than a day, is her husband still legitimately a widower? And if a first wife dies years after a divorce and it still hurts like hell to lose her to the big C, are you not a widower then? After all, Karen and I may have been divorced, but we had two children together and were still connected in a way no legal document could ever quite sever. Even now I'm surprised by how much her death continues to grieve me. Maybe if I were still drinking, I'd be in such an emotional fog that I wouldn't notice. But I'm not, so I do, and that wasn't any of this nosy broad's business, either.

“My wives are dead,” I added brusquely. “Both of them.” So much for winning friends and influencing people.

I expected the comment to shut her up, but I doubt even that would have worked had it not been for the appearance of our white-coated waiter. His name was Reynaldo and his accent was definitely Italian. He came to the table prepared to take orders for the
Starfire Breeze
's second dinner seating. Like my tablemates, Reynaldo blithely assumed I would know whether or not whoever wasn't occupying the empty chair next to me was coming to dinner.

“Will your wife be joining you, sir?” he asked.

“I don't have a wife,” I growled at him.

It was far more of a rebuke than the poor guy deserved. After all, Margaret Featherman was the one who'd gotten my dander up, but Reynaldo was obviously experienced in dealing with cantankerous American tourists.

“Very good, sir,” he responded smoothly. “And what would you like for this evening's first course?”

It turns out placing a dinner order on a cruise ship is a complicated affair—appetizers, salad or soup, an entree along with pasta and fish courses, as well as dessert. It was a world away from the greasy grub at Seattle's long-gone Doghouse where they used to fry everything, including the lettuce. On the
Starfire Breeze
the menu was written in assorted European languages with rib-eye steak nowhere to be found. Reynaldo patiently explained each menu item. His English, I'm sure, was fluent enough, but his pronunciation was somewhat opaque. Or maybe his and my failure to communicate had less to do with his accent and more to do with all those years of work-related target practice before anybody came up with the bright idea of muffling ears to shut out the noise and the damage.

What with one thing and another, it took a long time for everyone to place their orders, and I welcomed the breather. As long as Reynaldo was quizzing the ladies over their dining choices, the blonde had no other option but to leave me alone. I knew that once she tackled me again, I'd be forced to admit the ugly truth—that I was on the
Starfire Breeze
for one reason and one reason only: to serve as my newlywed grandmother's chaperon.

“I'd feel so much better if you'd agree to come on the honeymoon with us,” Beverly Piedmont Jenssen had said to me a number of weeks earlier. “Lars and I are both getting up there, you know. If anything did happen to go wrong—not that it will, mind you—I wouldn't worry nearly so much if you were along to take charge of things.”

“Getting up there” was something of an understatement. When my grandmother stepped onto the gangplank of the
Starfire Breeze,
she clocked in at a spry eighty-six-soon-to-be-eighty-seven. Her new husband, Lars Jenssen, is a year older than she is. My new step-grandfather also happens to be my AA sponsor.

The two of them had met months earlier, doing KP duty after the memorial service for my dead partner, Sue Danielson. That acquaintanceship, struck up over washing and drying dishes, had led to a whirlwind romance. Beverly had lobbied for “living in sin” and not disturbing the social security and retirement arrangements left to her by my late grandfather. Lars, a retired halibut fisherman, had convinced her that he had salted away enough money to take care of both of them in their old age, whenever that might occur. To prepare for that eventuality, they had bought their way into Queen Anne Gardens, a retirement/assisted living place on Queen Anne Hill, only a matter of blocks from my Belltown Terrace condo at Second and Broad.

Beverly and Lars had tied the knot at a simple ceremony in front of a justice of the peace. Lars, who still regretted never having made good on a promise of taking his deceased first wife to see his old haunts in Alaska, was determined to treat his new wife better than he had his previous one. Their honeymoon cruise on the
Starfire Breeze
had been Lars' idea. Having me along as aide-de-camp was Beverly's, although, to give the man credit, Lars never murmured a word of objection.

The very word “cruise” is usually enough to turn me green around the gills. During my college days, I had once tried to earn money by joining up with one of my fellow Ballard High School Beavers as a summertime hand on his father's salmon-fishing boat. We had barely exited the Straits of Juan de Fuca before I became hopelessly seasick, helped along by an old Norwegian salt who had cheerfully advised me that putting a chaw of tobacco under my tongue would help ward off the unpleasant symptoms. I ended up being put off the boat and shipped home from Neah Bay in what could only be termed total disgrace. After that I became a committed landlubber, swearing never again to set foot on a ship or boat. For more than thirty years I had made that vow stick—right up until I went head-to-head against Beverly Piedmont Jenssen about taking my grandfather's ashes on board
The Lady of the Lake
over at Lake Chelan. And now, she was trying to do it again.