Restless in the Grave (36 page)

Boyd steered Kate through the crowd to a table, acquired chairs by a feat of sheer legerdemain, and held hers for her with an inviting smile.

She smiled back. If she didn’t get away from Boyd soon, it was going to wear out and she’d have to replace it. “Order me a beer and a burger?” she said. “I’m just going to go freshen up a little.”

Boyd raised his voice to be heard over the crowd. “She going with you?”

Kate swiveled, saw Mutt a pace behind, and batted her eyelashes. “You know how us girls are. We can never go to the bathroom alone.”

Boyd’s laughter followed them into the john, a four-holer that showed the same attention to cleaning and maintenance as the bar. Of course there wasn’t a back door.

Kate went into one of the stalls. There was a full roll of toilet paper. It was the best that could be said.

A pair of giggling girls came in as she emerged from the stall. Both of them reapplied their makeup while exchanging less than complimentary notes on the last five men who had propositioned them. She took her time drying her hands, and was rewarded when one of the bartenders came in. A stocky white woman of middle age, she had muscular arms and a firm belly beneath a knotted bar towel. “Hey,” she said to Kate.

“Hey,” Kate said.

“Nice dog.”

“Thanks.”

“Wolf?”

“Only half.”

“Jesus,” said the other woman with neither surprise nor fear, and without much emphasis, either. She went into a stall. Kate waited. The bartender came back out and went to one of the sinks. She wore a T-shirt with three-quarter sleeves. When she reached for the soap, the sleeves pulled up enough for Kate to see bruises that looked as if they’d been left behind by someone grabbing her arms above the elbows.

The woman saw her looking and pulled her sleeves back down. She pushed the soap dispenser, squirting soap into her hands.

“What’s your name?” Kate said.

“Jean.”

“Hi, Jean, I’m Kate.”

“Nice to meet you, Kate,” although Jean didn’t sound particularly excited.

“I wonder,” Kate said. “Is there a back way out of here?”

An experienced bartender, Jean didn’t ask why Kate needed a back door, especially with Mutt for a bodyguard. She turned off the faucets and reached for a towel. “Outside, go to your immediate left, follow the wall past the men’s all the way to the back, right around the corner, left through the storeroom. There’s a gray steel door. Should be unlocked.”

Kate raised an eyebrow. “Not the first time you’ve given those directions.”

“Won’t be the last in this bar, either,” Jean said. She pitched the crumpled towel in the garbage, and left.

Kate waited until there was a crowd of people between the restroom and the table where Boyd sat, and slipped out. Jean’s directions were foolproof. A minute later they were on the outside of the storeroom door.

Kate grinned down at Mutt. “Solidarity, that’s what I’m talking ’bout.”

Mutt, just glad to be back on honest dirt, give an enthusiastic sneeze of agreement.

Twenty-five

JANUARY 21

Adak

The bar wasn’t far from the docks. Kate and Mutt dodged a few forklifts and a couple of trucks, picking up a smattering of wolf whistles and not a few offers of marriage along the way. They passed a gear shop and Kate went in and bought a navy blue hoodie in men’s large with an unobtrusive Adak Fisheries logo on one shoulder, and a pair of thick wool socks, also in men’s large.

When she came out again the sun was sliding down the horizon, casting conveniently long shadows. Kate found one next to a tottering stack of battered wooden totes that smelled of fifty years’-worth of pollock. It was a peek around a corner from a full view of the freezer trawler where they’d dropped off the Cessna’s cargo. Kate was relieved to find it still there.

She cast a quick glance around at the other docks. One of the processors was gone, and it looked like the cutter was preparing to get under way. Gigantic frozen bricks of processed seafood and shellfish were being unloaded from the other trawlers. They were settled on trailers and towed off to the warehouses, Kate guessed to wait on a container ship that would ship it to market.

She ducked back around the totes and pulled the hoodie over her jacket and tied the hood around her face so that only her eyes and nose showed. It hung down to her knees, and she pulled the hem in a little, too. She looked down at herself, satisfied. With the bulk of jacket and jeans beneath it the hoodie was voluminous enough to totally desex her. In a town where gender alone brought more attention that the traffic would bear, the more people who didn’t notice she had breasts, the better.

The large navy blue socks she pulled on over her boots. The cursory glance she had been allowed of the freezer trawler had told her that the crew wasn’t all that keen on maintenance and she wanted to be sure of her footing on the slimy decks when she went aboard. The rough wool should take care of that nicely, as well as muffle her steps.

Her biggest fear was that Boyd would show up on the dock looking for her, but the sun dropped below the horizon with no sight of him. The tide was coming in, and she had watched the superstructure of the freezer trawler slowly rise next to its mooring. There were no lights on in the wheelhouse, but then there usually weren’t, the watch saving its night vision for the depth and radar screens, electronic charts and the LED readouts packed into most bridges. If the ship had any kind of a responsible captain, there should be at least one person on watch 24/7, but if Kate were lucky, the rest of the crew was onshore. She might even have had her ass pinched by one of them on her way to the bathroom at the Aleutian Sports Bar and Grill.

She waited until it was full dark, huddled next to Mutt on a none-too-clean and not-very-thick pad of old cardboard boxes. Mutt, always and ever a direct-action kind of girl, was being very patient with all this lurking around. “Good girl,” Kate said softly. She squeezed the arm around Mutt’s neck. “Stay,” she said, and got to her feet.

Mutt got to her feet, too.

“No,” Kate said, putting as much force into her voice as she could without raising it. “Stay, Mutt. Stay.”

Even in the dark and in the shadow of the stack of totes, Mutt’s yellow eyes took on a stubborn sheen. “I mean it, Mutt. Stay.”

She waited until a forklift rumbled by and emerged from behind the totes in its wake. She walked down the dock—head down, brisk, assured stride—past the trawler. She didn’t see another boat parked past the trawler, but she was counting on whoever was on watch on the trawler not to look twice at her if she didn’t look like a girl and did look like she knew where she was going.

No one hailed her. She walked all the way down the dock to the end and found a ladder and started down it until her head was beneath the level of the dock. If someone was watching, with any luck they’d think her boat was too small to show, although if they’d thought about it for five seconds, they’d know it was high tide.

She counted to a hundred, one-Mississippi at a time, feet braced between a rung and the stringers. She’d pulled the hoodie’s sleeves down over her hands but the steel felt cold through them and even through the soles of her boots, and the air was colder even just those few feet closer to the water.

No one yelled or came to peer over the edge of the dock where she had last been seen. When she finished her count, she climbed until just her head was just above the edge of the dock.

There was no movement on the trawler, no new lights. She climbed up the rest of the way and walked down the dock, keeping as close to its edge as she could without tripping on a cleat and pitching over the side. The last time she’d gone overboard in the Gulf of Alaska at this latitude she’d been wearing a survival suit. She didn’t care to repeat the experience a second time, with or without one.

When she got to the ladder that led down to the trawler she stepped on it without looking around and made her way down without haste. She stepped over the gunnel and onto the deck and proceeded to the rear of the house, the place she figured she was least likely to be seen by the casual eye, either from the dock or the wraparound windows of the bridge. The harbor was almost flat calm. A mooring line rubbed against a piling, a block rattled as the deck shifted, and there was as always the soft sound of water slapping against the hull, but the seagulls had headed for the barn long since and the rest was silence. Kate was grateful for the forklifts and tugs on the docks. With more luck, they would cover any inadvertent noise she made.

Or not. She heard a thump and looked up to see Mutt’s head peering inquisitively over the roof of the superstructure.

“Mutt!” she nearly shouted, and just barely didn’t.

The head disappeared. There was another thud and Mutt’s head peered over the aft deck of the house.

Kate was furious, in part because she couldn’t vent it in the pile of language that was backing up behind her clenched teeth.

There was the merest echo of paws on steel grating stairs, a small pause, and Mutt’s nose poked cautiously around the side of the house.

Kate glared at her.

Big yellow eyes blinked owlishly back.

There had been a moment late last fall when Kate and Mutt had had it out over who did what job in the partnership, and just how far backup went. Mutt had won that argument, with a pretty bold line drawn beneath it, too.

It appeared that she had not forgotten it.

And just how the fuck am I supposed to get you off this fucking boat again?
she thought at Mutt.

Mutt gave a disdainful, albeit muted sneeze in reply.

The sooner she got what she came for, the sooner they’d be off this rusty bucket and away.

She took a cautious step toward the hold and a very loud car horn honked several times what felt like right behind her. When she got her heart back under control, she looked through the pilings of two docks to make out the hull of the Coast Guard cutter. A truck moving very fast ran out on the dock and behind the cutter’s superstructure so she couldn’t see what was going on. Somebody late for duty. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves and moved out of the shadow of the house once more.

A movable ladder set over the lip of the hatch led down into the hold and Kate made for it, Mutt padding behind. The ladder was cold and slimy and it was dark when she stepped off at the bottom. Her boots splashed in something. She was fumbling for her trusty penlight when she heard another heavy thump, followed by a scrabble of claws. She swore beneath her breath and cupped the end of the penlight before she turned it on.

It silhouetted Mutt like a movie star in a spotlight. She was standing on top of a twenty-foot freight container bolted to the back wall of the hold. It was set back beneath the edge of the deck and Kate couldn’t imagine how Mutt had contorted her body to jump from the deck to the container.

She panned the light around. There was nothing else in the hold except an inch of water in the bilge, glittering iridescently in the penlight from all the oil that had been spilled over the years. The scent of twenty years’-worth of hauling fish and crab from fishing grounds to dock was strong enough to make her eyes water.

The door to the container was on the left end, and she made for it, hampered by the ribs of the steel hull, which interrupted anything like smooth progress. The third time she tripped she saved herself from falling only by catching the corner of the container.

There was a thump followed almost immediately by another and a third with a splash. A second later a cold nose pushed at her hand and she jumped and nearly slipped and nearly fell again. She brought the penlight around to look at her dog. “I just hope you’re proud of yourself!” she said in a furious whisper. “How the hell do you think we’re going to get you out of here?”

Mutt raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

Kate grabbed back everything she wanted to say at the decibel level she wanted to say it at and sloshed around to the door of the container. It was bolted but, as her karma seemed to be running lately, unlocked. It was a long bolt and a little rusty, like probably every other metal thing at this lat and long, and the hinges gave a long and, to Kate’s stressed sensibilities, nerve-racking protest when she opened the door.

She shone the penlight around the inside. The pallet of rubber totes was lashed down in the back.

At least something was going right with this little B&E. She stepped inside and heard the
ticky-tack
of Mutt’s toenails behind her.

She put the penlight in her mouth and had the knife out of her pocket and the blade extended three steps away. Loosening the lines, she got one of the totes free and ran the blade around the top beneath the lid. Duct tape, an Alaskan staple that stood up to almost anything, nevertheless bowed even its head to naked steel. Kate pulled the lid off the tote and stood staring down at what the penlight revealed.

Behind her Mutt let loose with a growl that could have been heard in Newenham. With no conscious thought, Kate spun on her heel and launched herself at the door. She and Mutt crashed into it together, just as it slammed shut on them both.

They tumbled to the floor. On the other side, above their heads, the bolt slid home with a malevolence that felt distinctly final.

In the same moment, the deck shook beneath their feet, followed by a low rumbling roar and a bubbling of water from the stern. Someone had started the trawler’s engine.

“Well, shit,” Kate said.

There was a shout from on deck, too muffled to understand, but Kate heard some non-Mutt thuds that she was pretty sure were lines hitting the deck, probably after they’d been let loose of the dock. They were casting off.

She pushed herself to her feet and shoved at the door. It moved enough to open a crack, which in itself only revealed the darkness inside the hold.

Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself,” Kate said severely, “letting them get the drop on us like that?”

“Wuff,” Mutt said, which Kate correctly interpreted to mean,
You should talk.