Read The Last Detective Online
Authors: Robert Crais
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Fiction, #Private investigators, #Hard-Boiled, #Mystery fiction, #California, #Los Angeles, #Los Angeles (Calif.), #Cole, #Elvis (Fictitious character), #Private investigators - California - Los Angeles
The Last Detective
Contents
for Wayne Warga
who maintained his post under
intense enemy fire and did not waver
even as he was overrun.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following people for their contributions:
Eli and Tara Lucas, masters of
Emydon
out of Petersburg, Alaska, provided information about commercial fishing and the Alaskan brown bear; more important, they allowed me to share in the richness of their lives.
Kregg P.J. Jorgenson and Kenn Miller provided insight and detail about U.S. Army Rangers, Ranger operations, and LRRP (lurp) missions conducted during the Vietnam war. Gary Linderer provided additional information. The liberties taken with reality (i.e., use of the term
hoo
) are my responsibility, as are all errors of fact.
Randy Sherman, MD, Professor and Chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the USC School of Medicine, provided information, illustrations, and early-morning counsel on wounds, wound trauma, and recovery; Joe Pike could not have a finer surgeon.
Elyse Dinh-McCrillis provided Vietnamese translations.
Detective-3 John Petievich, LAPD-retired, opened doors to Missing Persons operations within the Los Angeles Police Department.
Additional thanks go to Aaron Priest. Jason Kaufman, Steve Rubin, and Gina Centrello made it better, and demonstrated patience beyond any that could reasonably be expected. Thank you.
The Church of Pike
Angoon, Alaska
T
he cold Alaskan water pulled at the fishing boats that lined the dock, the boats straining against their moorings to run free with the tide. The water here in the small harbor at Angoon, a fishing village on the western shore of Admiralty Island off southeast Alaska, was steel-black beneath the clouds and dimpled by rain, but was clear even with that, a window beneath the weathered pilings to a world of sunburst starfish as wide as garbage cans, jellyfish the size of basketballs, and barnacles as heavy as a longshoreman's fist. Alaska was like that, so vigorous with life that it could fill a man and lift him and maybe even bring him back from the dead.
A Tlingit Indian named Elliot MacArthur watched as Joe Pike stowed his duffel in a fourteen-foot fiberglass skiff. Pike had rented the skiff from MacArthur, who now nervously toed Pike's rifle case.
“You didn't tell me you were goin' after those bears up there. It ain't so smart goin' in those woods by yourself. I don't wanna lose my boat.”
Pike secured his duffel between the skiff's bench seats, then took hold of the gun case. Pike's weapon of choice that day was a stainless-steel Remington Model 700 chambered in .375 Holland & Holland Magnum. It was a powerful gun, built heavy to dampen the .375's hard recoil. Pike lifted the case with his bad arm, but the arm failed with a sharp pain that left his shoulder burning. He shifted its weight to his good arm.
MacArthur didn't like this business with the arm.
“Now you listen. Goin' after that bear with a bad arm ain't the brightest idea, either. You're gonna have my boat, and you're gonna be alone, and that's a big bear up there. Has to be big, what he did to those people.”
Pike strapped the rifle case across the duffel, then checked the fuel. It was going to be a long trip, getting from Angoon up to Chaik Bay where the killings had taken place.
“You better be thinkin' about this. Don't matter what kinda bounty the families put up, it ain't worth gettin' killed for.”
“I won't lose your boat.”
MacArthur wasn't sure if Pike had insulted him or not.
Pike finished with his gear, then stepped back onto the dock. He took ten one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and held out the money.
“Here. Now you won't have to worry about it.”
MacArthur looked embarrassed and put his hands in his pocket.
“Let's just forget it. You rented it, it's yours. You're makin' me feel like a miser and I don't appreciate that.”
Pike put the money away and stepped down into the skiff, keeping his weight low. He cast off the lines.
“You bank the boat when you get up Chaik, use that orange tape to flag a tree so I can find ya if I have to come looking.”
Pike nodded.
“Anyone you want me to call, you know, if you need me to call someone?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
Pike nosed away from the dock without answering and set off for deeper water, holding his bad arm close.
The light rain became fat drops, then a low foggy mist. Pike zipped his parka. A family of seals watched him pass from their perch on a promontory of rocks. Humpback whales spouted further out in the channel, one great tail tipping into the sky as a whale sounded, Pike's only thought to wonder at the perfect quiet that waited in the waters below.
Pike rubbed his bad shoulder. He had been shot twice high in the back almost eight months ago. The bullets shattered his shoulder blade, spraying bone fragments like shrapnel through his left lung and the surrounding muscles and nerves. Pike had almost died, but didn't, and had come north to heal. He worked king crab boats out of Dutch Harbor and fishing boats out of Petersburg. He long-lined for black cod and halibut, and if the crews on the boats he worked saw the scars that laced his chest and back, no one asked of their nature. That was Alaska, too.
Pike steered north for four hours at a steady six knots until he reached a circular bay with two small islands at its mouth. Pike checked his chart, then double-checked his position on a handheld GPS. This was the place, all right. Chaik Bay.
The pounding chop of the channel gave way to water as flat as glass, undisturbed except for the head of a single white seal. The bottom rose as Pike eased toward shore, and soon the first of the carcasses appeared; dead salmon as long as a man's arm drifted with the current as they washed out of the creek, their bodies mottled and broken with the effort to spawn. Hundreds of seagulls picked through the fish that had washed onto shore; scores of bald eagles perched in the treetops, a single eagle at the peak of each tree, watching the gulls with envious eyes. The smell of rotten fish grew sharp.
Pike shut the engine, let the skiff glide into the rocky beach, then stepped out into ankle-deep water. He pulled the boat high above the tide line, then tied it to a hemlock limb. He flagged the limb with orange tape as Elliot MacArthur had asked.
Alder, spruce, and hemlock trees lined the shore like an impenetrable green wall. Pike made camp beneath the soft boughs, then ate a supper of peanut butter and carrot sticks. Later, he smoothed a place on the beach where he stretched until his muscles were warm, then did push-ups and sit-ups on pebbles that clawed at his flesh. He worked hard. His spine arched and his legs lifted in the most strenuous asanas of hatha yoga. He spun through the strict choreography of a tae kwon do
kata
, kicking and windmilling his arms as he blended the Korean form into the Chinese forms of kung fu and wing chun in a regimen he had practiced every day since he was a child. Sweat leaked from his short brown hair. His hands and feet snapped with a violence that frightened the eagles. Pike pushed himself faster, spinning and twisting through the air, falling within himself in a frenzy of effort as he tried to outrace his pain.
It was not good enough. His shoulder was slow. His movements were awkward. He was less than he had been.
Pike sat at the water's edge with a sense of emptiness. He told himself that he would work harder, that he would heal the damage that had been done, and recreate himself as he had recreated himself when he was a child. Effort was prayer; commitment was faith; trust in himself his only creed. Pike had learned these catechisms when he was a child. He had nothing else.
That night he slept beneath a plastic sheet and listened to rain leak through the trees as he considered the bear.
The next morning, Pike began.
T
he Alaskan brown bear is the largest predator living on land. It is larger than the African lion or Bengal tiger. It is not named Smokey or Pooh, nor does it live a happy-go-lucky life at Disneyland playing the banjo. The male bear, called a boar, can weigh a thousand pounds, yet slip through the wilderness in absolute silence. The bear appears fat with its barrel-shaped body, but it can accelerate faster than a thoroughbred racehorse to chase down a running deer. Its claws reach a length of six inches and are as sharp as plank spikes; its jaws can crush a moose's spine or rip a car door from its hinges. When the brown bear charges, it does not lumber forward on its hind legs as portrayed in movies; it crouches low to the ground with its head down, lips pulled high in a snarl as it powers forward with the speed of an attacking lion. It kills by crushing the neck or biting through the braincase. If you protect your neck and head, the bear will strip the flesh from your back and legs even as you scream, swallowing whole chunks without chewing until it reaches your entrails. The ancient Romans staged fights in their blood pits between Ural Mountain grizzly bears and African lions. The Romans would set two lions against a single bear. The bear usually won. Like the great white shark that glides without fear through the depths, the brown bear has no peer on land.
Pike heard what happened up Chaik Creek from a boat captain he met in Petersburg: Three Department of Fish and Game biologists had ventured up Chaik Creek to conduct a population count of spawning salmon. On their first day, the biologists reported a high number of brown bears, which was typical for the spawning season and not unexpected. The biologists were not heard from again until a garbled plea was received by a passing boat four days later. Officials from F&G working with local Tlingit trappers determined that a mature boar stalked the three biologists for some distance along the creek, then attacked when the trio stopped to build a fish trap. Though armed with high-power rifles, the ferocity of the attack prevented the team from using their weapons. Two of the team members—Dr. Abigail Martin, the senior biologist, and Clark Aimes, a wildlife supervisor—were killed immediately. The third biologist, a graduate student from Seattle named Jacob Gottman, fled. The boar—estimated by the depth and breadth of its track at weighing better than eleven hundred pounds—pursued Gottman to a gravel bar downstream where it disemboweled the young man, tore off his right arm at the elbow, and pushed his body beneath the uprooted base of a fallen alder tree. Gottman was still alive. When the bear returned to the original attack site to devour Martin and Aimes, Gottman made his way downstream to Chaik Bay where he called for help on a small walkie-talkie. One of his last pleas was heard by the fifty-foot salmon boat,
Emydon
. Gottman bled to death before he was reached.
“It had to be a mercy.” The captain stared into his coffee. “No doubt, it had to be a mercy. They said his guts trailed behind him like a garden hose.”
Pike nodded without comment. He had seen worse done to men by other men, but he did not say that.
The captain explained that tests on their remains indicated that the bear was rabid. Fish and Game sent two teams of trackers to hunt it down, but neither team was successful. Jacob Gottman's parents put up a bounty. A Tlingit trapper from Angoon went in to find the bear, but didn't come back. The Gottmans doubled their bounty. The trapper's brother and father-in-law spent two weeks along the creek, but had found only one sign: the single largest print that either had ever seen, with claw marks the size of hunting knives. They had felt him in there, they said; felt the dark deadly weight of him like a shadow in the trees, but they never saw the bear. It was as if he were hanging back. Waiting.
Pike said, “Waiting.”
“That's what they said, yeah.”
That evening Pike phoned a man in Los Angeles. Two days later Pike's rifle arrived. He set out for Angoon.
W
ilderness swallowed him. Trees as old as the land pushed from the earth to vanish into a canopy of green. Rain leaked through their leaves in an unwavering drizzle that left Pike wet to the bone. The steep sides of the creek were so tangled with ferns, saplings, and the clawed stalks of devilclub that he slipped into the water and waded. Pike loved this wild place.
The others had come earlier in the spawning cycle when the creek was filled with fish. Now, dead salmon littered the gravel bars and hung from roots like rotten drapes. Easy meals weren't so easy. Pike reasoned that the mad boar would have driven away the cubs, sows, and smaller boars to keep the remaining fish for himself.
Pike hiked for the rest of the day but found nothing. That night he returned to his camp. Pike hunted like that for five days, each day working farther upstream. He paused often to rest. The scars in his lungs made breathing painful.
On the sixth day, he found the blood.
Pike slipped around the uprooted base of a fallen alder and saw streamers of crimson like spilled paint splashed on a gravel bar. A dozen dog salmon had been scooped from the water, their torn flesh bright with fresh blood. Some were bitten in half, others were absent their braincase. Pike froze, absolutely still. He searched the devilclub for eyes that stared into his own, but found nothing. He took a butane lighter from his pocket and watched the flame. The wind blew downstream. Anything upstream could not smell him coming.
Pike crept to the gravel bar. Tracks as wide as dinner plates were pressed into the mud showing claw marks as long as daggers.
Pike hefted his rifle to settle his grip. If the boar charged, Pike would have to bring the rifle up fast or eleven hundred pounds of furious insanity would be on him. A year ago he would have had no doubts about his ability to do it. Pike released the safety. The world was not certain; the only certainty was within you.
Pike waded upstream.
The creek turned sharply. Pike's view ahead was blocked by a fallen hemlock, its great ball of roots spread like a towering lace fan. Pike heard a heavy splash beyond the deadfall. The splash came again; not the quick slap of a jumping fish, but something large pushing through water.
Pike strained to see through breaks in the deadfall, but the tangle of roots and leaves and limbs was too thick.
More splashes came from only a few feet away. Red flesh swirled around him and bounced off his legs.
Pike edged around the deadfall with glacial silence, careful of every step, soundless in the wild water. A dying salmon flopped on a knobby bank, its entrails exposed, but the boar was gone. Eleven hundred pounds, and it had slipped from the water into a thicket of alder and devilclub without making a sound. A single huge paw print showed large at the edge of a trail.
Pike stood motionless in the swirling water for a very long time. The boar could be laying in wait only ten feet away or it could be long gone. Pike climbed onto the bank. The boar's trail was littered with bones and the slime of rotting fish. Pike looked at the dying salmon again, but now it was dead.
Pike eased into the thicket. A shroud of ferns, devilclub, and saplings closed around him. Something large but unseeable moved ahead and to his right.
Huff!
Pike raised the gun, but the devilclub clawed at the barrel and was stronger than his bad arm.
Huff!
The boar blew air through its mouth to taste Pike's smell. It knew that something else was in the thicket, but it didn't know what. Pike wrestled the gun to his shoulder, but could not see where to aim.