Bone Rattle

by Marc Cameron

  Grimsson swore that his wife was alive when he left. No one could prove otherwise, no matter what their gut told them to believe.

  The senators swirled their glasses ever so slightly, tinkling the ice. They wanted Grimsson to suggest they have a little more of his eighteen-year-old Glenfiddich. He would give it to them, of course. In time. The girls would be here soon and they would take the nervous edge off these two, stop them from fretting like a couple of old women. Girls, flown up from Seattle so they didn’t know faces. That always did the trick.

  Grimsson finally grew tired of the incessant sound of rattling ice and got up to get more whiskey.

  Politicians were a squirmy lot, and keeping one in your pocket meant constant oiling with good booze and submissive women.

  Grimsson filled the senators’ glasses himself. Not because he was a particularly good host, these buffoons would be too free and easy with his Glenfiddich if he let them pour their own. Dollarhyde always stuck with ginger ale – and though this meant he didn’t drink up all Grimsson’s good whiskey, it was just another off-putting thing that made it difficult to trust him completely. Setting the bottle down on the oaken bar behind him, Grimsson sank down in the chair and took a black briar pipe from the pocket of his wool shirt. He’d taken up smoking a pipe shortly after his wife’s death. His attorney said it made him look more avuncular, whatever the hell that meant. In any case, the process of cleaning and repacking the bowl took his mind off having to work with idiots like Senator Loop.

  The soapy man looked as if he might sunburn if he got too near a lightbulb. He pushed a wispy lock of blond hair off his forehead and stared into his glass. At length, Grimsson shot a quick glance at Senator Fawsey, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  Fawsey, a politician from Juneau, had the dark features and rugged good looks of a model from a sporting goods catalog. He was easily the more grounded of Grimsson’s two pets, with a good head for money and practicality – which meant he was willing to do practically anything that was necessary to make money. It was good to have a steady man on the payroll, but it also meant Grimsson had to fork over more money to him, a factoid both men kept from soapy Senator Loop.

  Fawsey took a contemplative sip of his whiskey, closed his eyes to savor it, and then heaved the deep sigh of someone who was about to say something of great import.

  “Harold,” he began. “I’ve gotta tell you, everyone worries about how much these Hernandez brothers can be tied back to you.”

  By everyone, Fawsey meant he and Loop.

  Grimsson filled his pipe with tobacco from a leather pouch. He used his thumb to pack it down and then pointed at the other man with the stem. “Don’t you worry about the Hernandez brothers.”

  “Ah, but that’s the problem,” Fawsey said. “We have to worry. Dirt from your hands gets on our hands. We are tied to you. And if you are suddenly connected to two heroin smugglers, then we are connected to two heroin smugglers by association.”

  “They can’t be linked to me.”

  Fawsey drained his glass quickly, as if he thought Grimsson might take it away for disagreeing. “There are two assistant US attorneys prosecuting this case. One’s a dinosaur, doing his duty, but not going out of his way. Ah, but the other guy, he’s young, ambitious, trying to make a name for himself. Are you saying that no matter how deep this ambitious guy digs, he won’t discover that you were the one bankrolling the Hernandez brothers?”

  “He does seem awfully determined,” Loop said.

  “I’m telling you that there’s nothing to worry about,” Grimsson said. “There are things underway that—”

  Loop’s hand shot up, as if to ward off a blow. “If you say not to worry, then that’s enough for me.” It was clear from the hollow tone that the man didn’t believe his own words. He wanted something to be done, but was terrified of finding out the details. Neither senator wanted to know anything about how the sausage was being made.

  “And the new mine road?” Fawsey asked, trying to change the subject.

  Butane lighter in one hand, Grimsson clicked the pipe against his teeth with the other, pondering the fate of the Native kid who’d made such an issue of finding the Native burial site. Dollarhyde had offered to pay him – a lot, but the idiot kid remained devoted to his science right up to the moment he realized he was going in the water. By then it had been far too late to bargain. When Dollarhyde decided to dump you overboard, no amount of pleading kept you in the boat.

  The senators would both shit themselves if they knew that little detail. Grimsson contemplated telling them, just to watch Fawsey’s head explode. Instead, he sighed, and grunted around his pipe.

  “We’re good as far as the road is concerned. Should get the main bed cut in by late tomorrow. I’ll have equipment at the mine by—”

  The whine of a boat motor cut him off.

  Dollarhyde stood easily, even from his low chair.

  “That’ll be your entertainment, sir,” he said, heading for the door.

  Even the gloomy Senator Loop brightened at that. He downed the rest of his drink, but continued to clutch the empty glass like a security blanket. Fawsey hung his head, slightly embarrassed by the boat’s arrival. He’d lost his wife the year before and used the company of these women as his drug of choice.

  Dallas Childers came in first, shaking the rain off his jacket and stomping his boots in the entryway. He was one of Grimsson’s heavy equipment operators at the Valkyrie mine, but Dollarhyde borrowed him often for more sensitive work. Schimmel, Childers’s sidekick, brought up the rear, keeping the girls bunched tight between them as if they might scurry off like mice. The boat they’d come in on had an enclosed cabin, but it was raining hard enough to soak the little group on the short walk from the dock to the front door. The girls’ hair was plastered to their exhausted faces.

  “Rough seas?” Grimsson said, eyeing a fragile-looking blond waif. She swayed on her feet and was awfully green around the gills. Loop would choose this one. Grimsson was certain of it.

  “Rain’s coming down in buckets,” Childers said. “But the waves weren’t too bad, sir. Rhonda here just has a little case of the jitters. I offered to take her back to the plane, but she said she needs the money.”

  “Is that right?” Grimsson asked, tilting the young woman’s quivering chin up with the crook of his index finger. “Rhonda, is it?”

  She nodded, licking her lips like a nervous animal.

  “Do you want to stay? No one is forcing you to be here.”

  “No… I mean, yeah…” Her tiny body trembled like a birch leaf in the breeze. Dark half-moons, part smeared mascara, part malnutrition, puffed her eyes. “I mean, I’ll stay.”

  Grimsson smiled, almost smirking. “There’s booze and a few other items you might be interested in through that door.” He looked at the senators. “Why don’t you men entertain these ladies for a few minutes. I have some things to discuss with Mr. Dollarhyde.”

  Childers and Schimmel led the way into the great room. The four women, all of them prostitutes from Seattle flown up specifically for this evening, followed obediently. They no doubt hoped the “other items” their host mentioned was something a little stronger than alcohol to help take the edge off. They would not be disappointed. Senators Loop and Fawsey brought up the rear. Seattle was only some nine hundred miles away by air. Grimsson doubted the girls even knew they were in Alaska, let alone recognized anyone here. Still, his private plane was stocked like a pharmacy, so they were already beyond caring by the time they arrived.

  “I need an honest assessment,” he said, as the door was shut.

  Dollarhyde sat down again and picked up his ginger ale. He held the glass and sighed. “Honestly, sir, it’s not good. We need to take some drastic action to settle things down.”

  “Meaning it’ll get worse before it gets better?”

  “In a word,” Dollarhyde said.

  Grimsson groaned, long and low, animalistic. “Gone are the days when you can dump s
omeone into the Stephens Passage and be done with it.”

  Dollarhyde peered up, no doubt thinking how he had recently done just that.

  “I hear you, sir,” he said, a little too smugly for Grimsson’s taste. “But the Hernandez trial has the potential to go south in a hurry.”

  “I don’t want it to go south,” Grimsson said. “I want it to go away. I have certain financial obligations, and those idiots got an extremely large investment impounded by the federal government.” He jabbed at the air with his pipe again. “That creates a problem for me. I don’t need to tell you, but I’m losing money every day that I’m not taking gold out of that new adit. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can happen to delay that road, you understand me? I’ll take care of any investigation later, or even a corruption trial if it comes to that, but I need cash flow. There’s enough gold in that mine to provide a hell of a lot of goodwill in the way of jobs.” Pipe in his teeth, he nodded toward the back room and the sounds of strained female laughter. “And the things money buys, buy me my politicians.”

  “I can slow down the trial,” Dollarhyde said. “Taint the jury or whatever, but to be honest, that only gives the US attorney more time to run at the brothers with a plea deal. Sooner or later, they’re going to see it is in their best interest to cooperate. I’m already hearing whisperings.”

  “I was under the impression those shitballs wouldn’t be a problem much longer. Neither of them knows me, but they know people who know me. If either one starts naming names… So how about you tell me why they’re still breathing?”

  Dollarhyde gave a little shrug. “Lemon Creek Correctional is relatively small. That cuts down on the pool of inmates who might be willing to do a hit.”

  Grimsson gripped both armrests of his chair and looked hard at Dollarhyde. “I pay you to solve problems like this. Solve it.”

  Dollarhyde swirled the ice in his ginger ale and stared into it, like it was something potent enough to offer advice.

  Grimsson let his head fall sideways. His wife’s golden-green eyes stared at him from above the mantel. For some reason, seeing her face there, so vibrant and alive, soothed him, focused his thoughts.

  “I want this fixed,” he said at length. “Understand?”

  “I do.” Dollarhyde set his ginger ale on the side table and rose, as if he was getting straight to work. “I’m glad to fix what you need fixed, but in order to do that, things will get bloody.”

  Grimsson thought of the dead archeologist, dumped in the sea because he was more attached to a bunch of ancient bones than his own. “It’s already bloody.”

  Dollarhyde gave a chilling smile, a dog finally let off the leash to yield to its more basic natures.

  “Well, bloodier then,” he said. “We’ll hit them tomorrow in their weakest spot – between Lemon Creek and the federal courthouse. It’s just a couple of marshals and a sedan.”

  Chapter 8

  Anchorage

  Mim Cutter sat at her kitchen table and tried to hide a satisfied smile from a prickly teenage daughter who sat across from her doing homework. Something was brooding between the twins, but Mim was used to that. Eight-year-old boys fought as hard as they played. Matthew, the younger, and outwardly the tougher of the two, could break into tears at any moment. For now, Arliss had them both happy, and Mim would take all the happiness she could get, thank you very much.

  Constance was a different story. She was fifteen and wasn’t content unless everyone around her was just as grouchy as she was. The poor kid had a right to be sad, they all did. Mim had basically curled up and gone catatonic after Ethan was killed. Thankfully, people from the church had brought over food for two solid weeks. Otherwise, the kids might have starved. You never really snapped out of losing a spouse – but Mim had gotten numb to the pain. A little. Arliss helped. A lot. Right now, with the sound of the twins’ laughter mixing with the celery and black pepper odor of caribou stew on the stove, she just couldn’t bring herself to be glum – even if it did piss off her daughter.

  Suddenly chilled, Mim reached behind her for the cardigan she’d draped over the back of her chair. It was a ratty thing of natural wool, with frayed sleeves and an oblong hole the size of a hen’s egg where the bottom button should have been. As a rule, Mim changed out of her scrubs as soon as she got home from work – too many animalcules floating around the hospital that she didn’t want to bring home to her kids. Today, ten minutes before the end of her shift, her last patient was an off-duty police officer who’d nearly severed his thumb with a new hunting knife. She’d been standing directly in the line of fire when he took away the wad of paper towels he’d used as a makeshift bandage, and got a healthy squirt of arterial blood in the chest for her trouble. That put her in a fresh pair of clean lavender scrubs before she walked out the door – perfect for sitting at her laptop and facing the bills. Dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a no-fuss mom-ponytail. Peaches-and-cream complexion flushed, her heart warmed as she watched her brother-in-law try to teach twin eight-year-olds how to cook biscuits.

  A white dish towel thrown cavalierly over his shoulder, Arliss explained how his grandfather, Grumpy, had made the perfect biscuit – taking care not to manhandle the dough. Folding it into layers and cutting it square so there wouldn’t be any wasted pieces that had to be reworked. Mim’s boys had the attention span of a couple of squirming puppies. She’d written off getting anything close to the flaky biscuits she’d known Grumpy Cutter to bake. But, as Arliss often told her, cooking together wasn’t about making perfect food, it was about making better boys. If he only knew what that kind of talk did to a mother’s heart.

  There was noise in the house again. The oppressive despair from her husband’s death hadn’t gone away, not completely, but Arliss helped chase it into the corners. The boys fought and laughed, and fought some more, like eight-year-olds were wont to do. They loved having their uncle Arliss around. For a man who rarely smiled, he sure made everyone laugh.

  Mim hid behind the security of the laptop screen. Constance glared at her, horrifically loud music buzzing out of her earbuds like melting brain matter. Her lips pursed in a perpetually sickened, are-you-kidding-me sneer. If Mim hadn’t mandated she stay in the common areas of the house until after dinner, the kid would have stayed in her room and survived on nothing but Cheetos and Diet Coke.

  A glance at the spreadsheet on her computer smacked Mim out of her momentary bliss. Budgeting sucked the life out her. Ethan had had good life insurance through his engineering firm, but the heartless bastards were tying up the payout in court, saying the explosion that killed him was his fault. Arliss paid rent – way too much for the cramped bedroom. He offered more, reasoning that she was feeding him, but she reminded him he bought most of the groceries – and cooked them too, like he was doing now.

  Matthew, the younger of the twins, opened the fridge. His head leaned back in an honest hoot of laughter that showed his teeth, then darkened suddenly as if he’d just recalled some reason to be angry with his twin brother. Matthew not only looked like Arliss, he also possessed his uncle’s tendency toward an impressive mean-mug.

  Michael, the older twin by mere minutes, stood on a chair at the counter grating a knob of frozen butter into a chilled bowl of flour. He was the darker of the two, and less emotional – like his father. He said something under his breath that Mim couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it set Matthew off and he slammed the fridge door with his foot. Stumbling in the process, he dropped the entire quart of buttermilk onto the floor.

  He froze, straddling the puddle, blue eyes wide, chin quivering.

  “I wrecked everything!”

  Michael stopped grating his frozen butter on the downstroke. Even Constance’s withering side-eye warmed for a split second.

  Mim held her breath. Everyone in the house was always a half a blink from breaking into tears. For some reason, buttermilk had been hard to find at any of the stores around Anchorage. It was essential to Grumpy’s biscuit recipe. Cutter barked at peopl
e all day long. He was surely tense from work. It was only natural and certainly understandable if he snapped.

  Instead, the man who never bumbled anything did a half turn and knocked a cup of flour off the counter with his elbow. He gave an easy chuckle, as if he spilled flour on top of buttermilk puddles every day, and tossed the towel from his shoulder over the mess. Matthew’s hesitant sniffle turned into giggles – until he opened the fridge and scanned the inside. “But… we’re out of buttermilk.”

  “Au contraire, mon frère,” Arliss said, grabbing the regular milk from the fridge. “We’ll make some up before we wipe our wreck off the floor. All it takes is a little milk and a couple of teaspoons of vinegar.”

  “That sounds gross,” Michael said, grating the butter again.

  “That stew smells delicious,” Mim said.

  Cutter adjusted Michael’s grip so he didn’t grate his fingers off. “We have Chief Phillips to thank for the caribou.”

  “Speaking of caribou,” Mim said, “I found Ethan’s hunting knife in the chest of drawers the other day. He called it his M.A.K. – multianimal knife. He took that shop on Fifth Avenue a piece of fossilized mammoth tooth that he’d found and they used it to make the handle. I think he’d want you to start using it when you’re out in the bush.”

  Michael looked up from his grater. “I love that knife store. Uncle Arliss has taken us there before.”

  “I’m sure he has.” Mim smiled at her son and then focused on Arliss again. “Are you sure the chief’s okay with this Juneau trip?”

  “It was her idea,” Cutter said. His eyes narrowed. “Funny thing, though. She referred to you as Mim, like you guys know each other. Am I missing something?”

  “Nope.” Mim did her best to fake ignorance. She had in fact confided her worries about Arliss’s dark moods to the chief.