Points West (A Butterscotch Jones Mystery Book 5) (6 page)

“But—”

“I don’t want to discuss this matter over the phone. You
know we’re on a party line and we don’t want to cause panic with our
speculation. Or alert the zoologist. That might just lead to a bigger
cover-up.” I turned to Chuck. “Maybe Doc could send down a blood sample for
analysis.”

“But, is this Parris Grant discreet enough?” I looked at
Chuck with disbelief. “Sorry. Yes, I’m sure he’s great, but should we risk it?
It would have to go to a lab somewhere and what if….”

“But if it’s frozen and if he’s warned….”

But could we really warn the people at the lab without explanation?
How the hell else were we going to know how to put Brian’s
screwup
back in the bottle? We were working blind.

“Let’s think about it. I’m too tired to make decisions,”
Chuck said. And he looked it. Chuck was never going to be completely at home in
the outdoors and today had been especially grueling.

“You’re right. And we won’t be doing anything until the snow
stops. We have time to plan.”

“Except eating dinner.
That you
must do,” Big John said and then stood as the Flowers approached our table. Though
I had felt ill a while ago, at that moment food had never smelled so good to
me.

“Big John, could we borrow your computer later?” I asked.

“Surely.
But it has no Internet.”

“That will be okay for the first thing we need to do.”

“My phone has Internet,” Horace said proudly. “You can use
it if you want.”

“No,” Chuck and I said together.

“Cellphones can be traced,” I added. “We can’t risk it if
the zoologist is government. He knows you were on the plane after all and might
be monitoring your calls.”

Horace nodded, looking solemn. I could see that his
imaginary world was expanding.

“But not Sasha’s portable thingy,” Big John said after a
moment of thought. He clarified the comment. “He was telling me it has some
kind of thing on it that confuses anyone who’s listening. Makes them think he’s
in Istanbul or something.
Anatoli
got them for the
boys for … uh … business.”

“That’s handy,” Chuck said. “Because I find that for once in
my life I actually need Google.”

“Let me warm up your coffee,” Big John said as I picked up
my cutlery.

I nodded and fell on my steak. Chuck wasn’t shy either.
Almost dying burns up a lot of calories.

Chuck didn’t feel bad leaving his father at the pub.
Fiddling Thomas had come in and was tuning up his violin, and Sasha had put off
his apron and was teaching Horace a Russian card game. He would be entertained.

And Chuck was looking forward to bed with Butterscotch even
more than he had his dinner—and he had wanted that pretty badly.

There was a lot to think about, but it would have to wait
for morning. It wouldn’t do to act carelessly in this matter. A period of rest
and reflection—and perhaps a little recreation—was called for. Suffice it unto
the day the trouble therein.

*
 
*
 
*

Some snows are joyous, others oppressive. This snow was of
the latter variety. Fortunately it was in a rush to reach the States and
smother Chicago and so it sped by us in a hurry.

Chuck shed his lingering exhaustion and
worry
fairly quickly after I got some breakfast in him, and his father and Sasha were
dispatched to Seven Forks with instructions to act normally but to visit
Anatoli
and pick up all the gossip about the
zoologist
. I assured Chuck that Sasha
would keep his dad from harm. I don’t know that we really believed this, but it
was safer to have Horace out of the Gulch while we called a town meeting.

It wasn’t that I questioned Horace’s desire to do right and
help his son, but I was beginning to think that Horace was kind of crazy. Chuck
seemed surprised too and this made me nervous. How did we know that Horace’s
definition of “right” might not cause trouble for the rest of us in the Gulch?

Big John was arranging the meeting. He is the mayor of
McIntyre’s Gulch and is entrusted to make day-to-day decisions about what is
best for us, especially if it involved the outside world. But any matters that
pertained to town money or public welfare called for a town hall meeting. We
had called one for two o’clock so Doc could explain Brian’s condition and we
would decide whether to have a funeral for the pink glove. There would be a
potluck after since we couldn’t see any reason not to combine work with
pleasure.

Meanwhile, Chuck was able to use Sasha’s tablet—he had to
explain
tablet
to me since the last one
I had used had been made of paper—and to discover some information about Janet
Dee. She was a lab tech of some sort for a private company, and not part of the
governmental brain trust who thought up the cures and biological curses of the
modern age.
Unless you counted diet pills among the modern
evils.

In fact, if her social media profile was to be believed she
lived for doing Jell-O shots, watching hockey fights, and online dating.
Lots of online dating.
In her photo she wore a pink sweater
and had a pink bow in her hair. I found her unutterably sad. And not just
because she had been shot by a scoundrel and then eaten by bears. Perhaps it is
because I had never had a childhood of my own, but I found adult women who
clung to babyish ways to be pathetic.

There were other things that were disturbing. Living as I
do, the new technologies are especially wondrous, but they are also sinister in
a way that I don’t think most people understand. Take the Internet: for all
that it can supply people with masses of information it doesn’t bring any
wisdom about how to use it. It’s a tower of Babel that often lies and often
spies on its users. If we let it in I fear that the day will come when we won’t
be able to keep our secrets. Little by little our profiles will gather in
places where the people we are hiding from will be able to find them.

Though I had plenty of other things to distract me, part of
my mind was on that rock that looked so much like a rune stone. Wouldn’t it be
great if it was real? Not that I could tell anyone from the outside what it
was—but it would just be so wonderful if it was genuine and I could figure out
what it said. Imagine being the first person to understand a message from
someone who had died a thousand years ago.

Google was helpful. The memory stick proved to be more
stubborn though. We could see files there, but only one would open and it
seemed to be some kind of chemical formula and a proposed marketing plan for a
superfast weight-loss drug.

Maybe there is a lot of money to be made there, enough to
justify industrial espionage, but would Brian—who was in bed with the CIA and
the Russian mafia—bother with a formula for diet pills, if that was in fact
what the formula was?

And what the heck was in all those other files that we
couldn’t open? Thinking about it made my head hurt. There were too many
possibilities.

*
 
*
 
*

“Is possible to make an incendiary device with kitchen
chemicals,” Sasha assured Horace as they inched their way through the snow.
“Also many sheds have useful supplies. I will show you.”

“Thanks. I’ve read about making home defense explosives but
have never actually tried it.” Horace couldn’t bring himself to ask the large
man beside him how he knew so much about explosives. He was also wondering how
he had come to have the name of Jones when he was clearly Russian.

“We have large heap of trash gathered for bonfire. We will
have one tonight. Only perhaps we will not mention it to my wife,” Sasha added.
“Not until we are done with testing the little bombs.”

“Or my son.
Brave lad—won’t say a
word against him. But he sometimes gets a bit officious when he is working.
Forgets that I’m the father and tries to wrap me in swaddling cloth.”

“Is good to have son who cares,” Sasha said. “If I have son
I hope he will be like brave and loyal Mountie Chuck Goodhead.”

Horace felt a wave of pride.

“So what are your thoughts about this zoologist?” Horace
asked. “Think he’s here to try a cover-up?”

“Bah!
Is not zoologist.
He is spy.
Well, perhaps
zoologist spy
. Is possible,” Sasha
conceded as he coaxed the truck forward.

Horace blinked, wondering if his new friend was actually a
loony. But then he thought about it for a minute.

“What other kind of a spy would he be?” he finally asked,
willing to be fair-minded.

“
Hmph
.
It
is hard saying because the dead man was a bad, disloyal person. He was a whore
to everyone with money.”

“You knew the dead man?”

Sasha shook his head.

“But your son says he is a bad whoreson man and I believe
your son.”

“Chuck says he is a bad man, does he? Maybe it’s good that a
bear killed him then.”

Sasha shook his giant head again.

“Woman was eaten by bear,” he corrected. “The man was shot.
And poisoned.
By the woman.
Probably.”

Horace realized that there was actually quite a lot going on
in the Gulch that Chuck had failed to mention to him.

“Tell me your theory,” Horace invited.

“I do not need theory. Mountie Chuck Goodhead will discover
the truth and then we will make a plan.” Sasha sounded complaisant.

“Are you sure?” Such faith in his son baffled Horace who never
really thought of him as a leader of men. It was almost as strange as the idea
that Chuck had anything to do with undercover agents of any ilk.

“Always before he finds the truth about
spies.”

Horace was feeling disoriented.

“Spies have been here before?
But why?”
He couldn’t imagine that there was anything in the Gulch that would be of
interest to anyone.

“The first time it was our fault.
Anatoli
and I were with Russian mercenaries hired by mafia. We served with an evil
colonel who came to the Gulch looking for a plane that had crashed in snow. He
took prisoners and held them at the Lonesome Moose saying he would hurt them if
Butterscotch did not bring the money from the plane to him.”

“Holy hell.”

“
Da
.
But your son and Butterscotch rescued everyone before he killed them. They said
that we could stay if we did not want to go back to mafia. We are not
stupids
. We stayed and married with the Flowers.”

Horace was speechless.

“After that the government sent spies twice, looking for the
money and something else that was on the plane.”

“Did they find it?”

“No. Always they went away again after a while. The Mountie
has kept the secret so we can stay in Canada and not return to Russia to be
killed by
mafiosos
.”

“That’s good,” Horace said, completely caught up in the
drama and the idea that his son would place personal loyalty ahead of his job.
“Was it a lot of money on the plane?”

“Yes,” Sasha said simply.
“And jewels.
It is why I could marry with the Flowers.”

Horace shook his head in wonder.

“You said there was something else on the plane?”

“
Da
.
But we do not know what. It made an explosion in the lake. We thought then that
the spies would never come again.”

*
 
*
 
*

Chuck allowed himself to pace the
floor of the cabin. Probably he should go find Butterscotch and Max and take
the wolf for a walk—a short one.
In town.
And then it
would be time for the town meeting. He was rather looking forward to this
ritual.

And he needed to come up with a
good excuse for not being at work tomorrow.
Because he
wouldn’t be.
Even if he had a brain wave and solved every problem he
still couldn’t make it back to Winnipeg in time for the morning shift.

And, as if Brian and Janet were
not sufficient ills, there was the matter of the
zoologist
. Chuck was pretty sure that he was Brian’s minder, and
probably pretty pissed that he’d been given the slip. But there was no proof of
this and he could be someone and something more dangerous. The man had to be
placated and gotten rid of.

Yes, what he needed was fresh air.
And perhaps a snack.
He would go to the Lonesome Moose
and find Max and Butterscotch and get a good seat for the meeting.

Chuck bundled up, checked the
fire, and then stepped outside. He could smell the ozone as the clouds began
playing bumper car. He wasn’t surprised when the sky flashed white and the
thunder rolled through the mountains. The storm was a way off though so there
was still plenty of time for his father and Sasha to get back from Seven Forks.

*
 
*
 
*

I looked up and then smiled as the Mountie came through the pub
door. Gone were all traces of the rather stiff officer who had first appeared
in the Gulch. Like the best chameleon, he had assumed the local color and
blended right in. I knew that he was also making an effort to learn Gaelic but
that was progressing slowly since he had no one to practice on back in the
city. His accent was also cause for some amusement though no one laughed in his
face. Thanks to all the refugees we spoke a rather strange version of the
language ourselves.

*
 
*
 
*