Death Echo

15

DAY TWO

ON THE RESERVATION

1:30 P.M.

As Mac turned onto Tribal Road, he kept watching his mirrors. Apparently the intriguing Ms. Cross was more interested in hanging out at the marina than she was in following him. All he saw behind him was the glorious blue sky and whipped-cream clouds of a San Juan Islands autumn.

The air flowing through the open truck windows was cool, silky, and rich with the smell of intertidal mud flats. The state highway leading past the casino and gas/liquor store deeper into the reservation was lightly, if carefully, traveled. The few vehicles that were out had no interest in anything but getting wherever they were going without getting tagged by the state, county, city, or tribal speed teams that haunted the area.

When he turned off the highway, Mac set the cruise control to equal the ridiculously low posted speed limit on the rez. Zero tolerance for outsiders was the rule. Just one more way of getting even.

Or getting respect, depending on which side of the rez blanket you were born and raised.

Mac turned off onto the rutted, overgrown dirt lane that led to Tommy’s trailer. The truck’s water pump was making the kind of unhappy mechanical noises that told him he’d be lucky to get home without a tow truck. He hoped everything would hold out until tomorrow, when the much-needed water pump would finally be in stock at the Rosario auto supply store.

All around the truck, alder and big-leaf maple competed with cedar for a place in the wet earth. In the mixed forest, twilight was pretty much an all-day thing. He parked behind the old cedar stump, locked up, and walked deeper into the trees. When he reached the clearing, the trash fire and outhouse still flavored the air, telling him that Tommy was probably still around.

“Yo, Tommy! You there?” Mac called.

“Who cares?” Tommy called back, opening the front door a crack and peering out.

“Hey, it’s me,” Mac said. Tommy looked a little wild-eyed, but it could just be a hangover.

Hope it isn’t crank. He’s snake-mean on that poison.

“Thought you might like food and a beer, my treat,” Mac said. “We didn’t get much time to talk last night.”

The broken screen leaned drunkenly, halfway covering the front door. Tommy kicked the bent frame out of the way.

“Last night?” Tommy stared and shook himself hard, like a dog coming out of water. “You here last night?”

“That bourbon really tanked you.”

Tommy blinked, rubbed the dense beard shadow on his face, and blinked again. His hazel eyes began to clear. With his chestnut hair, Tommy looked less Native American than Mac did. They used to joke about it.

These days, Tommy didn’t have much sense of humor.

“Oh. Yeah. You were here.” Tommy cleared his throat. “Guess I had a little too much.” He looked behind Mac. “You alone?”

Mac nodded and wondered why Tommy cared. He was giving off a deadly-edgy kind of vibe.

“You tweaking?” Mac asked.

“Nah. Got any more bourbon?”

“They have beer at the bowling alley.”

“Can’t leave,” Tommy said roughly.

“Problem with the town cops?”

“No. Just waiting. Got a job coming down. Supposed to be tomorrow, but could be sooner. Dude’s going to pick me up here. I have to be ready to roll.”

“It won’t be today.” Mac watched Tommy without seeming to. “Blackbird is still being fitted out.”

Tommy flinched and looked away. “What the hell you talking about?”

“Your job. Blue Water Marine Group wants a boat moved. The boat’s name is Blackbird.”

“Who told you about that?” Tommy snarled, flushing. “They told me they’d beat the crap out of me if I-” He stopped abruptly. “They wanted it real quiet, you know? How’d you find out?”

“I brought Blackbird from Seattle.”

It wasn’t really an answer, but Tommy nodded.

“You want it quiet,” Mac said, “it’s quiet.”

Tommy made a visible effort to calm himself. He dug a limp cigarette out of his T-shirt pocket, lit it with a match, and took a long draw.

“Quiet. Yeah. Dead quiet.” He laughed wildly, then looked around the dark clearing as though expecting people to be listening behind every tree. “Let’s go inside. Better there.”

Mac doubted it, but followed Tommy into the trailer. Mac didn’t know if the man’s paranoia was a side effect of tweaking or based in reality.

“You never used to worry about Stan,” Mac said easily.

“Screw him.” Tommy slammed and locked the door. “It’s his buddy I worry about.”

“His cousin?”

“That pussy?” Tommy waved his cigarette in dismissal. “Nah. The other one. Temuri. At least I think that’s the bastard’s name. Blood brother to a shark.”

Mac filed the name and went back to fishing for information. The instincts he had tried to leave behind in Afghanistan had taken a single look at Temuri and come to a quivering point.

That was one stone killer.

“Wonder why Bob and Stan got in bed with someone like that,” Mac said.

Tommy went to the window, stood to the side, and looked out. “Money, dude. What else?”

“Are they hurting?”

“Isn’t everyone?” Tommy kept squinting out the window, searching the dim forest. “Besides, I heard Stan talking about it in the inner office with Bob. The Temuri dude is a prick, but he’s some kind of family.”

Mac shrugged. “So long as they pay.”

“Oh yeah. Half up front. Half on delivery. Forty big ones. Supposed to go tomorrow. Having trouble with some of the electronics. Wrong size or some such crap.”

“Forty thousand American?” Mac asked, black eyes narrowed. That was a lot for the kind of short-haul transit the other man did.

Tommy nodded, making his lank hair jerk.

“Sweet,” Mac said. “Want another hand aboard?”

Tommy turned on him with a snarl. “No. And you never heard of the job, hear me?”

“Sure,” Mac said easily. Unless Tommy was taking the boat across the ocean to Vladivostok, it was an outrageous payday. “Long trip, huh?”

Tommy took a hard drag before he ground the cigarette out under his shoe. “Don’t know.”

Mac didn’t push it anymore. “You hear anything from Jeremy?” he said, asking after the last of the wild ones who once had run together as a teenage pack.

“What do you care?”

“Shove the attitude. It’s me, Mac, the dude you used to steal crabs and boost beer with. Sometimes Jeremy went along, remember?”

Tommy blinked, seemed to refocus. “Sorry, man. I’m a little tweaked, waiting for this job. I really need it.”

“I get that.”

“Jeremy’s pulling pots for some white guy.”

“Thought crabbing was closed.”

Tommy lit another cigarette. “The white guy’s a sport crabber.”

Mac didn’t need to hear the details. If Jeremy got caught-unlikely, given that the fish cops couldn’t afford to put gas in their boat-he played the Indian card. White courts couldn’t touch him. Tribal courts wouldn’t.

“It’s a living,” Mac said.

“Pays shit.”

“And all the crab you can eat or sell on the side.”

With a jerky movement, Tommy flicked ash onto the floor of the trailer. “It’s still shit. That’s all we ever get. Fucking whites.”

“Present company excepted,” Mac said neutrally.

“Huh?” Tommy blinked, focused again. “You know I don’t think of you as white.”

“And I don’t think of you as not white. Ain’t we the rainbow pair.”

Reluctantly Tommy smiled, then laughed, the kind of laugh that reminded Mac of all the good times they’d had as kids, running wild in a ragged land. They hadn’t been innocent, but they hadn’t believed in death.

If that isn’t innocence, what is?

He and Tommy had come a long way since then. They hadn’t ended up at the same place.