Taking Liberty (15 page)

I heard Locklear call from behind:

“Do you even have any idea where you’re going? Those waters are treacherous after dark. Full of submerged rocks and rip currents. You’re crazy if you think you can make it.”

I didn’t tell him I already had a certificate proving as much.

I cut down an alleyway between buildings. Disturbed a bunch of rats trying to break into a garbage can.

I should have stopped, taken heed of Locklear’s warning. I didn’t. Couldn’t. Desperation is a logic suppressant. It makes us stupid. And stupidity makes us act impulsively.

My legs rolled into a sprint. I was focused solely on my objective. Twenty yards later, I came to the three-foot drop-off where the sea had cut away the land to form the narrow band of beach. I dropped down onto frozen shingle and sprinted along the line of black water, heading for the cement slipway.

I was almost there when a long, flickering shadow began dancing around on the snow ahead of me. My shadow. I glanced over my shoulder. Locklear had suited up and was tracing my steps with the beam of a bright flashlight.

“Wait up!” he shouted.

___________________________

We all choose which path to walk. No one forces free will. Coercion, manipulation and obligation are sweeteners, sugarcoating our bad choices. But in the end, it’s all down to us.

I didn’t think twice about dragging Locklear away from his family at Christmastime. His choice. Maybe I should have.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he was complaining as he gunned the outboard. “Why would the doc move the body?”

 “I have no idea, Locklear. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be.” I didn’t add
and neither were you
– because I could see the realization was already screwing up his face.

“You’re thinking he’s moved it to his house?”

Locklear caught on quick.

“For what reason?”

I had no answer. Not yet. But it was my intention to find out.

According to Locklear, Engel’s place was located on the shore of Deadman Bay: a popular fishing stretch located a mile or so northeast of Akhiok. Ordinarily, in daylight, getting there by boat was a straightforward affair of navigating around a pair of smaller islands, then crossing the mouth of Moser Bay. At night, with only a salting of stars to guide the way, it was suicidal – unless you had a local tour guide at the helm, that is.

“Sure you know where you’re going?” I asked.

It all looked the same to the untrained eye.

We’d been heading out to sea, out into pitch blackness, for some time.

Away from the shelter of the shoreline, the skiff was rising and falling on long swells, slapping the surface and spaying icy saltwater against my skin. Seasickness had never worried me. But the prospect of getting lost out here on increasingly choppier water was tightening up my gut.

“I know the way.” Locklear’s response was cool bordering on bored. “Close to the islands there are many more dangers. Please sit down before you fall overboard.”

I was agitated. More reasons than one.

Truth was, we were a couple of hundred yards out and already I couldn’t see Akhiok. The fishing village had completely vanished in the dark. So, too, had the humpback islands. Night had swallowed us whole. Just about the only features I could make out were the inland mountains covered in dark gray snow, and even they were nothing more than indistinct blemishes against the smattering of stars.

“Try Engel’s number again.”

Locklear made a disgruntled noise and offered up his phone, “Be my guest. I’m busy navigating by starlight and memory.”

I selected the last number dialed and jammed the phone to my ear. The number rang out. I heard the call make a connection, heard Engel’s voice, went to speak, then realized it was just his answering machine message kicking in.

I handed it back to Locklear. “What happens if there’s a medical emergency?”

“We bring in the air ambulance. Anything less serious usually waits until morning.”

Like everything else around here, I thought. Come nightfall, the entire place dropped off the edge of the world and fell into a coma.

“See over there on the left, those lights? That’s the doc’s place.”

I squinted in the indicated direction. Barely visible: a swarm of dim glows nestling together in the dark like fireflies. No idea where the sea stopped and the land started. No sense of scale or distance. Mistakenly, I had thought we were still heading out into open waters.

“It’s easy to lose your bearings out here.” Locklear had read my mind. “Good thing I came with you, agent.”

The skiff moved on an intercept course, settling onto smoother water as it approached the land. The jumble of Christmas lights grew bigger, resolving into the individual squares and rectangles of windows. Within their glow I could see the shape of a tall building and several smaller sheds off to one side.

“Looks big.”

“It is. Bigger than most of the fishing lodges hereabouts. The doc had it specially constructed. It’s the only private residence on the island with three floors.”

“Why’d he need all that space?”

“In a word, freedom. That’s what you get out here, agent. Freedom by the bucket load. No one poking their noses in your business or snooping round your backyard. Mostly, mainlanders come here to escape the rat race.”

Locklear’s answer didn’t explain why Engel had built himself a small hotel in the middle of nowhere.

Now I could hear music, rolling out across the water to greet us. At first I thought it was the rumble of distant surf crashing on a pebbly beach. But as Engel’s place grew bigger, it became recognizable as something more artificial. Something synthesized. Not my kind of music. Not Engel’s kind of  music, I would have thought. It sounded like a hundred robotic woodpeckers hammering holes in a steel pylon. Electronic beats, ebbing and flowing on the stiff breeze.

Locklear saw my scowl. “It’s called Trance. Sounds better on ecstasy – or so I’m told.”

“Is that Engel’s poison?”

“It isn’t mine.”

The stilted shape of a long jetty emerged out of the darkness. With it came a 40-foot motor yacht moored alongside. Lights out. All aerodynamic lines, with a distinctive black paint sash running the full length of its white hull. The same swanky cruiser I’d seen in the photos in Engel’s consultation room.

A metal ladder descended from the pier into the black water. Locklear brought the skiff against it and cut the outboard.

“Stay here,” I told him as I hauled myself out.

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

He handed me the flashlight. “Okay. Just don’t be too long. The meter’s running.”

Stiffly, I sprinted down the slippery boards.

My legs were shaking, but not from the trip over.

The demon in my belly had clawed its way out.

It wanted answers. So did I.

___________________________

A gravel track led up to the house.

This close, Engel’s place was more like a modest motel. A big rectangular box, covered in seamless metal paneling and painted sky-blue. Modern Georgian, if that makes sense. Judging by the amount of windows, more than two dozen rooms spread over three tiers, easy. Every window ablaze with light – mostly glowing yellow or stark white. One or two electric blue. An outpouring of light that brought a false dawn to the immediate area and threw long shadows out across the snowy tundra.

No signs of a front lawn sleeping underneath the blanket of snow.

It sounded like a rave party was underway inside.

Three long concrete steps gave rise to a large main door. A polished steel fascia. It had a small porthole of thick red glass set in the center, shining like the Eye of Sauron. I banged a fist against the thick metal. If it made a sound, I didn’t hear it; booming dance music was pummeling my eardrums. I banged with both fists, but my efforts were lost within the din.

“Engel!”

I kicked the door. Shouted out his name again. No reply. No surprise. An atom bomb could have gone off and you wouldn’t have heard it.

I stepped back and inspected the ground-floor windows. A half dozen either side of the door. None open and none lower than head height. All with stout metal bars crisscrossing the glass, inside and out. Panes that looked thicker than normal, maybe even bulletproofed. What was Engel up to here? The place looked like a small fortress. Everything braced and reinforced. Hard to imagine just how loud the music was on the inside.

I looked higher. More metal bars on the next level of windows above. Same above that.

What was with all that?

I made my way down the side, around a large snow drift mounded up against the house – ten foot tall and compacted halfway up the side windows. I passed through contrasting bands of light and shadow and came round back. There was a cluster of outbuildings with heavily-padlocked doors and dark, barred windows. Tool sheds with snowy roofs, set back against the tundra. More sloping snow drifts. A mountain of propane gas bottles of various colors, thirty, easy, stacked on their sides. A larger barn in the middle with a caged lean-to running its entire length, possibly a canine compound. There was a big cube-shaped tank on stilts over to one side of it, with pipes running into the barn – probably feeding juice to a power generator. A tangle of thick cables reached out of the barn’s roof, suspended on tall poles, some branching off to other outbuildings, but the main bunch entering the house about two thirds of the way to the roof. Ten foot below that, a sturdy canopy ran the entire length of the house, extending about six foot out over the backyard. Beneath this sloping roof was another stout metal door and more barred windows blazing with light. Electronic dance music just as deafening. But there was something different here: a long dark opening in the aluminum siding, protected by the canopy. It looked like a built-in garage, with the corrugated steel roller shutter pulled halfway up from the ground.

A way in.

I stooped inside and shouted out Engel’s name. My voice was instantly drowned in the waves of music crashing through the walls. I lit up the flashlight and scanned the garage. Its beam picked out work benches, a circular saw, a lathe, tools pinned to the walls. It looked like a carpenter’s workshop, only it was the cleanest workshop I’d ever seen. No sawdust or wood shavings on the poured concrete floor. Just a few darker stains that looked like old oil patches. Either Engel was a clean freak or he hadn’t turned any wood in here in a very long time.

The beam fell on a door at the back, at the top of three concrete steps.

I went for it. Pushed it inward. A cavalcade of earsplitting trance music stampeded over me. Beyond was a short passageway. Again, I hollered Engel’s name. No answer. I flicked off the flashlight and ventured deeper. The passageway stopped at a T-junction. A wider corridor running left and right, cutting the first floor in half. No pictures on plain cream walls. Several arched openings leading off into big rooms, two to the right and three to the left. No internal doors. No way to tell where the dance music originated. It reminded me of a certain night in a certain nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard. The synthesized sound seemed to be seeping from every surface.

“Engel!”

Nothing – except for a hoarse throat.

I made an educated choice and headed left. More archways this way, and what looked like the foot of a staircase.

The first opening on my right led to a wide hallway running down the middle of the house, front to back. More door-less openings located either side, and what looked like the back of the front door down at the far end, heavily braced. More locks and bolts than a Manhattan loft.

“Engel!”

No response.

I continued on. 

Flickering light coming out of the next archway along. I stopped and peered inside. It was a sizeable living room. Blood-red walls with big white hunter trophies: elk heads sporting impressive antlers, huge fish in glass cases. Three big sofas were arranged in an arc around a large bear skin rug, facing one of the biggest flat screen TVs I’d ever seen. Sixty inches, easy.

The TV was the only source of light in the room.

But it wasn’t showing primetime TV – at least none I’d ever seen. This was hardcore porn. Sixty high-definition inches of it. Looked like sadomasochism. Two males in black masks, doing dastardly deeds to several chained women. Naked bodies cavorting, writhing, doing things that porn actors do to earn a living. Unnervingly, everything moving in time with the insane beat pounding through the house.

This was Engel’s private space and I was intruding. And now I knew something about him I wished I didn’t.

Collateral damage.

I needed to know where Engel had moved the body, and why. Sometimes turning over stones means finding creepy crawlies.

I turned my back on the TV, ready to explore deeper. The music sounded like it could be coming from upstairs. Maybe that’s where I’d find Engel – holding a one man acid rave.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

There was a man standing beneath the archway leading to the corridor. He had on a brown leather apron and work boots, and not a stitch of anything else.

Even in the flickering light I could see it was a pissed-looking Paul Engel.

And there was something in his hands, pointing my way.

At first I thought it was a broom handle, then I realized with a start that it was something far more deadly.

Alaskan’s call them bear insurance.

We call them 12-gauge shotguns.

And I was intruding.