Death Echo

10

DAY ONE

ROSARIO

10:35 P.M.

Carrying a bottle of bourbon in a paper bag, Mac climbed to the top of the marina gangway, pushed open the gate, and headed for the old pickup he used when he was in town. Marina parking was too expensive for anyone but tourists. He always left his truck in a lot a few blocks away, close to the commercial docks favored by fishing boats. As a rule, commercial boats didn’t play well with private marinas and yachties.

Before Mac got a block away from Blue Water Marine Group, he heard a car engine start up in the parking lot he’d left behind.

Just someone going home late, he told himself.

He turned right and headed for his truck. A minute later he stopped to fiddle with one of his shoes-and look over his back trail.

A white Jeep idled in the mouth of an alley. The headlights weren’t on, but the streetlight glanced off the windshield and grille, giving away the vehicle’s location. A shadow figure sat behind the wheel. The driver had been forced to expose himself in order to keep Mac in sight.

Okay, not someone going home late.

Mac stood and walked briskly toward his pickup truck. If someone was dying to talk to him, he’d take care of it after he saw Tommy. Until then, it would be easy enough to lose a watcher among the heaped seine nets and crab traps that stood watch over the commercial docks.

The dark hulls of fully rigged fishing boats tied off at the docks closed in around Mac. He moved lightly down another ramp, took a spur dock, and climbed back to the parking lot via a third ramp. Nobody noticed him. The fishermen who slept aboard were already deep in their dreams of nets filled with seething silver wealth.

When Mac surfaced at the parking lot, there was no sign of the white Jeep. He waited anyway, taking a long look at the shadows surrounding his truck. The only sound was his own heartbeat and the sudden scream of cats fighting or mating in the rough boulders that lined the working marina’s waterways.

Mac unlocked his truck. No light came on when he opened the door. He had spent too many years dodging bullets to ever feel comfortable about spotlighting himself when he climbed into a vehicle at night.

No headlights showed up in the parking lot. No lights came on in any of the moored boats. No one walked or waited near the parking lot exit.

Good to go.

Mac started the truck, wincing at the noise. But there was no help for it. A diesel engine was one loud son of a bitch. Not to mention the whine of a water pump that he should have replaced by now, but he had been too busy driving yachts for Blue Water and other brokers to manage any truck work on his own.

After a last look around, Mac put the truck in gear and headed across the lot, headlights off.

No car lights came on in front or in back of him.

He drove slowly through the jumble of cars, work trucks, crab and prawn pots, gill and seine nets, and the large metal drums designed to pull and store nets during the fishing season. He didn’t vary his speed, easing his way through the obstacle course without flashing his brake lights. He entered the street the same way. When he turned onto a more heavily used street, he flipped on his headlights and began driving like a regular citizen.

There wasn’t much flash and glitter in Rosario to distract Mac as he drove. It was a blue-collar, sweat-stained working town. Or it had been. Those glory days were more than a half-century gone, but the town refused to adjust to the new reality of tourists and boutiques. It was a battle that had been fought through the city council and mayor’s office for as long as Mac could remember.

As far as he could tell, about everyone lost. The fishing was gone, the forests logged out, the crabbing unpredictable, the town itself too poor to pave some of the streets within the city limits. People who lived in Rosario drove to nearby towns to shop for anything more durable than groceries and beer.

Through all the years, smuggling was the only Rosario industry that had truly thrived. Cigarettes north and marijuana south, a round trip that could net thousands or end in gunfire, prison, or death.

The smuggling was run by the Eastern European immigrants who had been fishermen and smugglers in their homeland. There had been no reason to change a winning combination when they emigrated to America a century or more ago. With each generation or each old-world conflict, their ranks grew. Overseas cousins, second cousins, relations by marriage, and relatives no American bothered to count fled to the New World when the Old World became deadly.

Once, Mac had thought of joining the local smuggling industry. A close friend of his had been Ukrainian, another was Salish Indian, giving him an entre into the closed worlds of Rosario’s immigrant and native communities. Mac had been seventeen and too full of testosterone to put up with the small town of his birth. But after a few smuggling runs, he got smart, left town, and joined the navy.

His best friend died two months later, simply vanished during a smuggling run. Tommy still survived, if anyone called living as a barely functioning alcoholic on the rez survival.

Most of the time Mac thought he’d made the right choice in leaving Rosario and smuggling behind. If he had any doubts, all he had to do was visit Tommy.

My own personal penance.

Yet Mac couldn’t figure out what he was paying for. He’d got out, Tommy had stayed, and life went on either way. Yet somehow Mac felt guilty, as if whatever life he’d enjoyed had come at Tommy’s expense. It was stupid, but there it was. Guilt for being born white in a time and place where non-whites were considered second class.

The distant flash of headlights in the rearview mirror shook Mac out of his bleak thoughts. There wasn’t much traffic out late on a weeknight. The people who had families to support were asleep. The people with habits to support had either scored or gone home with the shakes. The drinkers were wrapped up in their favorite bar, huddled protectively over their poison of choice. They wouldn’t move until they passed out or the bars closed.

God, I hate this town.

But I love Puget Sound.

The headlights in the rearview mirror jiggled again as the vehicle went over a rough patch of pavement. The state highway that headed out to the federal freeway always needed repair. Eventually the state highway would get what it needed, after the densely packed voters in Seattle got what they wanted. Simple math and electoral politics.

Mac slowed so he could turn onto Tribal Road without hitting his brakes. No point in making it easier if someone was following him. Since his white guilt had taken him many times to see Tommy, Mac knew the way. He could have driven without headlights, but he didn’t want to run over stray animals or people.

He watched in the rearview mirror as the headlights that had been behind him passed the Tribal Road’s turnoff.

So much for paranoids having real enemies, he told himself.

Tribal Road skirted the edge of tidal mudflats for several miles before heading into the scrubby, fourth-growth forest that bordered the tidal zone. The road was in the open until Mac reached the trees. He kept glancing at the rearview and side mirrors.

Brake lights glowed on the highway as a vehicle slowed, then made a U-turn and came back toward Mac. The vehicle turned onto Tribal Road.

Score one for paranoia, he thought unhappily.

He killed his headlights, accelerated hard, and prayed the tribal cops were drinking together. He didn’t lift his foot until he reached the bend in the road. Fifty yards later he turned and coasted onto twin dirt ruts that bored into the scrubby forest. The tires skidded a little in the shallow muck before they bit in. He kept coasting until he saw the old cedar stump. It was twelve feet high and wide enough to hide a truck behind, a leftover from the nineteenth century when big trees were cut off where the trunk finally began to narrow, no matter how high up that was. The fifteen-or twenty-foot-high stump was left behind to rot. With cedar, it took a long time.

He tucked behind the stump, turned the engine off, and yanked on the emergency brake. An instant later he was lowering the window.

A slight breeze. The scent of moldy forest and evergreen and salt. No lights anywhere. No sound but the irregular ticking of the truck’s engine as it cooled.

And the mosquitoes. It took them about ten seconds to realize there was fresh food available.

Chow down, he thought. I hope I poison you.

He heard a vehicle approaching from the direction of the highway. It was still several hundred yards away and closing fast.

Mac got out and eased the door shut behind him. From the dense shadow of the forest, he watched the narrow opening onto Tribal Road that was the only sign the rutted, partially overgrown track existed.

A car flashed by the cramped opening.

Pale. Could be white.

Could be a Jeep.

And it could be a tired driver returning to the rez after a long day on the water or working at the casino.

As the sound of the speeding car faded, Mac jogged toward Tribal Road, swearing at himself for being paranoid but not about to change. He hesitated in the shadow of the forest just long enough to be certain there wasn’t any traffic heading his way. When he was sure he was alone, he scuffed out the fresh tire marks he had left in the peaty mud when he had turned onto the nameless, overgrown dirt lane. Soon there was no clear sign of his recent passage.

To make doubly certain, he broke off a cedar branch as long as his arm and messed up the tire tracks even more. Then he threw the bough back into the woods and scattered some old forest debris over the lane. He’d just finished when heard a distant engine. He pushed deeper into the forest and waited.

He didn’t wait long.

Score two for paranoia.

A car was coming back down Tribal Road, heading for the state highway. The vehicle’s high beams were on and it was moving slowly. A flashlight speared through the open driver’s side window and probed the dark roadside.

The skin on the back of his neck tingled.

Mac was close enough to the road to recognize the body shape of the Jeep when it went by. But no matter how hard his paranoia worked, he couldn’t figure out even a stupid reason for someone to follow him.

Yet there it was as big as life, a white Jeep whose driver was shining a flashlight over every opening along Tribal Road, looking for him.

Mac wasn’t particularly worried about being found. He had been trained in escape and evasion by experts. He could vanish in bare desert at high noon. Nighttime in the forest was easy.

Mosquitoes sung nastily in the darkness.

He resigned himself to being fast food for bloodsuckers.

Headlights and the flashlight flickered through the woods as the prowling car slowly approached. The Jeep stopped at the far end of the tunnel. The beam of the flashlight ran over the shoulder where Mac had brushed away his tracks. As the driver studied the ground, the light twitched back and forth like a hunting cat’s tail.

The driver’s door opened.

No overhead light, Mac thought sourly. I wish that surprised me.

Without getting out, the driver bent over and held the light almost parallel to and only inches above the ground. The raking beam of light revealed more details than a light held at ninety degrees to the ground would have.

Someone has been trained in the basics of tracking. Mac breathed slowly, shallowly, making no sound. This just keeps getting better and better.

The light raked over the dirt lane. Mac hoped that he’d done a good enough job cleaning up.

Should have been more careful. Been a civilian too long.

At least he hadn’t left parallel lines in the muck with the branch. Not all of his training had been forgotten or ignored.

After a long minute, the flashlight snapped off and the Jeep drove on down the road.

Mac didn’t move until the sound of the Jeep’s tires had faded. Then he reached up and rubbed away the mosquito that had been drilling down into his neck. A second insect had already come and gone from his cheek. He could feel a welt rising there.

Damn. I’ll itch for hours.

But he kept standing in the night anyway, waiting, listening, waiting some more.