Taking Liberty (11 page)

___________________________

I left Rae holding the fort and headed out, scooped up my parka from the lobby and jumped into the waiting police vehicle. Hillyard hit the gas and the Expedition accelerated up the main street. It was early afternoon, midweek, but everywhere was closed for the Holidays. Everyone at home, roosting with their eggnogs. Children more absorbed with packaging than presents. We made a right at the first intersection, tires crunching on the gritted blacktop.

“What are we looking for?” Hillyard asked.

“A vessel called Free Spirit. And a guy with a melted face, if we’re lucky.”

He glanced my way, waiting for an explanation.

“The killer looks like Freddy Krueger’s half-brother. You can’t miss him if you try. He rented the boat a few days back. Possibly to ship the victim out to Akhiok.”

The roadway descending into an area of wooden port buildings and various retail stores, all closed. A hundred boats moored in the marina to our right. Mostly fishing craft of all shapes and sizes. Some covered in blue tarpaulins, bedded in for the winter.

“One more thing,” I warned as we bailed out, “he’s dangerous. If the boat’s here and you sense he’s on board, retreat and wait on backup.”

The marina consisted of four long piers with slips either side, jutting out of the main jetty like bristly antennae. Not many empty berths. One or two weathered fishermen giving us the eye as we scuttled down the main ramp leading onto the waterfront. I could smell brine and diesel. Hear gulls cawing in the distance. Hillyard took the first pier. I ran onto the second and started scanning boat names.

Sea Otter, Throwback, The Aurora, Bad Mistress …

Something froze me in my tracks. It was a beaten-up fishing boat with battered hull rimmed with old car tires. It had a flying bridge and a pair of whip aerials. Everything weathered and faded. Rusting bolts leaking orange stains over flaky white paintwork. The name on the stern read
The Undertaker.

A shrill whistle blasted across the harbor. I turned to see Hillyard signaling from down near the end of the first pier. Saw him point to a small vessel berthed in the very last dock.

Free Spirit
– had to be.

Heat blossomed in my chest.

I signaled acknowledgement, then hurried back down the jetty. My cell phone rang as I reached the connecting pier.

Rae Burnett
.

The heat intensified. Had Cornsilk returned to the hotel and Rae was calling for the cavalry?

Her tone sounded urgent, but not panicked: “I’ve come across a drum of fishing wire in the closet, together with cutters and a reel of duct tape. Didn’t you say Cornsilk made bombs?”

I didn’t answer – mainly because the heat had choked my throat. I could see Hillyard at the far end the wooden walkway, his police-issue firearm extended as he inched toward the back of the charter craft. I stuffed the phone away and picked up the pace – running full steam in his direction, boots clattering against the ice-slicked wood. I saw him step completely onto the boat. I went to holler a warning – in the exact same moment an intense ball of brilliant orange fire ballooned at the end of the pier, completely enveloping Hillyard.

___________________________

Fact: light travels faster than sound.

Fact: thought processes don’t.

I ran straight at the expanding sphere of gas and debris without slowing. Reaction-time on a go-slow.

For the first few heart-stopping moments, the fireball blossomed in silence, pushing an invisible wave of heat and concussion pressure out across the marina. I saw what looked like a broken marionette being yanked backward on invisible strings. Flying up and away from the blooming inferno. My pace hadn’t slowed any. Neither had the adrenaline squirting through my system. I saw it strike the mast of a boat on the other side of the pier and fold in two as it fell in an arc toward open water. Trailing gray smoke. Then the blast front caught up with the visuals and the din of the explosion boomed across the quayside. The compression wave hit like a sledgehammer, bowling me off my feet. I went slithering across the decking as the nearest boats lurched in their berths, recoiling from the detonation. They smashed into one another. Wood splintering. Metal creaking. A swell of water swamping over the pier and rushing my way. I rolled to my feet as the energetic fireball plumed skyward, carried aloft on a donut of black smoke. Fiery debris rained down. Smoky projectiles peppering the nearest boats and hissing as they hit the water. I splashed into a sprint. Shucked off my parka and skipped out of my boots. Reached the burning, fractured end of the pier at full speed. And, without giving it a second thought, dived into the frigid black water.

___________________________

It was like being sucked out of an airlock into the freezing vacuum of space. Merciless. Deadly. As the liquid ice encased, every bit of my body reacted, badly. Muscles cramping. Blood retreating. Steel talons scratching over exposed skin. I wanted to scream with shock, but my mouth was clamped shut, preventing precious hot air from bubbling out of my pancaked lungs.

In TV documentaries I’d seen goose-greased people bathing in icy Scandinavian lakes. Wondered how their bodies had tolerated the near-death temperatures. Now I knew. They didn’t. Cold stress caused the nervous system to withdraw, so that it could concentrate on keeping the internal organs heated. Instant numbness was the consequence. Starting at the extremities and working inward. The longer the skin shed heat faster than it could be replaced, the more the body was prepared to sacrifice. Death was an inevitability.

I estimated a couple of minutes, tops, before my body would start shutting things down.

I didn’t stop to worry about it.

I kicked and pulled through the biting water, just beneath the surface. Ignoring the waves of pain slamming into my super-chilled brain. Dragged hand over hand. Forcing forward. Flesh numbing. Nerves screaming. Lungs aching.

Twenty yards, I figured. Maybe less, I hoped.

Endurance swimming had never appealed to me. Sure, I could do the basics: crawl a few lengths and tread water for a few minutes. Maybe swim thirty seconds underwater. But this wasn’t a heated swimming pool. This was an open-air harbor in Alaska, filled with arctic water, in late December. No comparison. No way I could hold my breath and swim twenty yards without the punishing pain pulling me down to my doom.

I broke the surface and sucked in air.

There were bits of boat ablaze all over the place, bobbing on the rippling water. Some of it still raining down. Fizzling. I could hear the main fire raging away like a netted dragon, ten yards behind. Hear plastic popping. Timbers crashing. Secondary eruptions spewing flames and lesser shockwaves out across the immediate marina.

Already, my clothes were as heavy as a suit of armor. I trod water, desperately scanning the uneven surface, trying to fight gravity. I spotted something that didn’t look like a piece of floating wreckage and pushed toward it. Looked like a blackened face, staring skyward, unblinking.

Officer Hillyard.

I clamped chattering teeth together and plowed on with muscles filling with slurry. Slush Puppy blood. Chainmail clothing. Somehow, miraculously, I reached him and scooped his scorched face clear of the water. No idea if he were alive, unconscious or even breathing. His head rolled into my hands and stared up at me with bomb-blasted eyes. It was only then that I realized the explosion had not only killed Hillyard, it had beheaded him in the process.

___________________________

Here’s another fact: people die around me – acquaintances, partners, friends, loved ones. Seemingly anyone who comes too close to my curse.

I was perched on the steel back plate of a Kodiak City Fire Department truck, swaddled like a takeout burrito in a fleecy blanket and a foil wrap. Mildly hypothermic. Mood as black as the harbor water. I was thawing out, slowly. Feeling was returning, but most of it was bad.

Hillyard.

Dead in the water, and taking its sweet time sinking in.

My fault.

There was a jumble of emergency vehicles crowding the wooden wharf: shiny red fire trucks and black-and-white police cruisers with their light bars blinking. The crackle of radio chatter. Emergency personnel on scene. All of it a blur. I had brain fog. Not from the concussion of the blast, but from immersion hypothermia.

Compared to Hillyard I was the epitome of good health.

Rae pushed a foam cup into my hand. “Right now you need to drink this. You look like you couldn’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground.”

I put the cup to my mouth and sipped over tingling lips. Coffee, black, sugar-loaded.

“Thanks.”

I’d already been interrogated by the surly Chief of Police, then asked the same bunch of circular questions by one of his morose detectives. Then once again, partly to double-check my story, but mostly because it took their attention away from the recovery underway in the harbor below us. I’d blabbed through the brain fog. Told them about our discovery at the Kodiak Inn. About the fire-bomber who was ex-FBI. About him being our prime person of interest linked to the body found on Akhiok’s seafront. About him booby-trapping the boat he’d rented from
Minky’s Charters
. About Officer Hillyard taking the full brunt of the blast, head-on.

I’d given the Chief a description of Snakeskin. He’d summoned all hands on deck, issued a BOLO – a
be on the look-out
– to his officers and to the port authorities in charge of Kodiak’s harbors and airport, then left in a whirlwind. I’d gotten one of his men killed on Christmas Day and somebody had to tell his family.

I decided I hated Gary Cornsilk.

Other than going inland and sitting it out, he’d have nowhere to run. Not with his poster-boy looks on show and his only private means of leaving the island now resting at the bottom of the marina. Eventually, he’d have nowhere to hide. Sooner or later he’d surface. Sooner or later there’d be a confrontation.

Every cop on the island had a glimmer of determination in their eyes.

Snakeskin had just killed Christmas.

“Shoot,” Rae said. “The press are here.”

On the roadside running parallel with the marina, I could see crowds gathered. Onlookers taking pictures. Some pointing. One or two with shoulder-mounted video cameras. Looked like the whole of Kodiak had made the effort and turned out for the Christmas Day fireworks.

“Just in time to film the gory bits,” she added.

The firefighters had extinguished the flames at the end of the pier, but not before the inferno had blackened the nearest boats and burned a large section of the jetty away. Scorched paintwork and smoldering timbers all around. Debris scattered over tarps. Ballerinas of smoke pirouetting out across the bay. As for the source of the explosion – the charter boat
Free Spirit
– she had blazed and then sank, leaving an oily swirl on the flotsam-strewn water. Arrangements were being made to get a crane onsite to winch the wreck out, but it was Christmas and no one was picking up.

Down on the jetty, p
aramedics were unfolding a black body bag on a gurney.
The Coast Guard had already deployed frogmen to recover Hillyard’s remains. It was looking like a difficult task in the fading daylight.

A sour tang burned on my tongue.

Cornsilk had killed twice in Alaska.

First Nathan Westbrook and now Officer Glenn Hillyard.

I didn’t think Christmas Day could get any worse.

I was about to be proven deadly wrong.