River Run

by J. S. James

  “Have you seen any sign of these?” She passed around the marketing renditions of Ham Tran Snyder’s Starcraft boat, Isuzu pickup, and Calkins trailer. From Ham’s duck call moniker, she’d easily recovered driver’s license, auto, boat, and trailer numbers. “Anything like them? Maybe an abandoned boat hung up somewhere on the riverbanks?”

  The driver asked, “Who’d hunt outa that red-and-white piece of shit?” and got back hearty laughs.

  Chin Whiskers handed the photos back. “Ain’t seen nothin’ like those, ma’am. You, Cletus? You, Norm?”

  “Nope.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “We gotta be goin’,” said the driver.

  Delia took down license names and addresses, then passed out four PCSD cards, saying, “Call if you see something out of the ordinary.”

  Chin Whiskers finger-flicked his card. “I’d call, even if I don’t.”

  Delia shot him her give-me-a-break look. “Have a nice day.”

  They drove off from Riverview Marine Park, their trailered boat spewing dirty river water from its unplugged interior.

  Like the other 142 she’d questioned coming off the river over several days, these hunters had given her little to go on. She got in the Camaro and sat, tapping on the steering wheel, thinking back on those detective stories she’d read as a child. The board games she used to play with her aunt and uncle and Enrique. Clue and Mr. Boddy had gone far to inspire her.

  But this was no Colonel Mustard in the parlor. No tidy little cozy mystery. It was a clueless, leadless mess. Her case going nowhere, frustration was mounting. She keyed the ignition, then killed the motor.

  A grizzled-looking guy who stood at the far end of the marine park in solid mud-brown hunting clothes had caught her attention. He was doing what she’d done for the past week: moving from parked rig to parked rig, taking down truck and boat trailer license numbers.

  She got out and strode toward him. “Hey, Mister.”

  He pivoted toward her, yanked something from his mouth, and tossed it down. Without hesitation, he took off on a trot, down toward the far woods at the waterline.

  “Hold on.” She broke into a trot. Seventy yards away, he sped up to a full-out run and disappeared behind the trees. By the time she got there, sounds of an outboard motor racing around a bend reached her ears.

  She turned back and traced along his path, speculating. Could the guy be an antihunter? Someone else? When he’d swiveled toward her, she’d caught an impression of something black covering his chest and neck. Too thick and shiny for underwear.

  Reaching the empty boat trailer where he’d last stood, she froze, then knelt.

  “Well, well … An actual clue to bag?” The gold-banded clue smoldered on the pavement.

  * * *

  The next day, Delia rolled up to a pump at Independence, Oregon’s twenty-four-hour Octane Stop, wondering what in the world possessed hunters to scramble out to a river before four AM just to bang away at creatures who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, maybe they’d eat it. She didn’t know what ducks ate, or anything about hunting. One reason she was here, sitting under the yellow glare of sodium lights, hours before the sun came up. The other was to interview more hunters—so far, 146—who saw, heard, spoke no evil.

  She opened her window and killed the ignition. Tink-tink went the motor. Think-think, it said, bringing to mind Harvey’s old think like a killer saw. Except her version took it one step better: Outthink a killer, catch a killer. To do that, she had to immerse herself in the crime, its victim, the scene, the evidence gathering.

  Exactly her problem.

  Focusing on the most recent case, she knew who the victim was and how he was killed, but that was about it. For a crime scene, she had a nasty, meandering, miles-long river. In rapid motion, constantly washing evidence away. A river she wasn’t about to set foot on, for sure not in some wobbly boat. To Delia, the crime scene was an alien, hostile world where even the victims packed weapons, where she could not just walk out and canvass a neighborhood.

  “High-test?” The acne-faced attendant looked sleepier than she felt.

  “Highest you’ve got.”

  He ran and returned her card to her. “Figured. Lotta compression under that hood,” he said, as he started the pump and sauntered off. Yawning, she checked her watch and thought over the choice she’d made.

  After she’d reread Armstrong and Erskin’s Water-Related Death Investigation, realizing she had virtually nothing to go on, a conclusion had gelled—she desperately needed a hunter SME. Police and writers used subject matter experts all the time, and Grice’s in-house tether did not keep her from carrying out in-depth civilian interrogation—what she’d call it in her reports.

  So who’d make a good, unpaid SME? Harvey hunted, but was due for more surgery. Castner hunted only big game, and Delia considered him expert at nothing. The rest of the county deputies were stretched to breaking. Charlie Lukovsky was out of here but had given her a lead, describing him as “the best goddamned waterfowl hunter on the river.”

  The gas nozzle clicked off. No attendant appeared.

  She’d left messages for her SME prospect, got no callbacks, and buzzed Charlie again. He was driving a U-Haul to Minnesota but told her the good bets were either at the prospect’s favorite launch point or here at his prehunt pit stop. She’d picked here.

  Delia opened her door and got out, tempted to commit an Oregon no-no—finish pumping her own gas—when a red pickup towing a small boat wheeled in. She recognized the driver but not the young passenger.

  Zack Lukovsky left his truck and strolled up, eyeing her convertible from fender to fender, his mouth shaping a silent whistle.

  “’Lo, Detective. Heard you took Charlie’s spot.”

  She shrugged, relieved he hadn’t brought up applying for deputy sheriff. “Something in between. His desk’s still open. Your brother said you were an expert at duck hunting on the Willamette River.”

  “He did?” It seemed to take him back a second.

  “That’s why I’m here,” she answered. “Two bodies turned up on the river, and—”

  “Hunters? Drowned?”

  “Can’t go into it, but I suspect foul play. Zack, I’m looking for someone to bring me up to speed on river hunting and hunters. Their equipment. The hunting culture. How they deal with antihunters. Can you do that?”

  His head tilted in a deliberating way. The frown on his brows lifted and his expression seemed to lighten.

  “I guess I can all right.” He motioned back toward his truck. “Fact is, you can start right now. Me and my Gonzaga U cousin’s headed for the river. I’ll dig out an extra life vest, and you can—”

  “Hold on.” Her hands flew up, but she stopped herself from taking a step back. “No can do—uh—not this morning. No. What I want is a sit-down interview where you supply details on what I need to know. How best to talk with hunters, ways to get at what I’m looking for. The no-snitch code they seem to follow.” She paused a moment, slowing her speech. “See how that goes, then talk about next steps.”

  The attendant returned, did his thing, and disappeared inside.

  Zack pulled at a corner of his mustache. “Good enough. Where and when?”

  Relieved, Delia handed him one of her PCSD cards. “Call when you’re done hunting.”

  * * *

  In near pitch river darkness, Zack Lukovsky lowered his stocking mask over his face, yanked the outboard motor to life, and levered the gearshift ahead.

  “Kenny, sit down before you fall down.”

  Fair warning. Standing with a boot heel against the frost-coated boat transom, Zack hand-throttled the old fifteen-horse Johnson with a vicious twist. The little Jon boat lurched out from the launch dock.

  Caught in a four AM yawn, his cousin, Kenneth Lukovsky, tumbled backward onto a pile of decoys with a ka-wump. The Q-Beam he clutched blazed a column of spotlit glitter straight up into the icy mist.

  Zack snorted, squelching a laugh. He’d nee
ded that. Helping his brother Charlie load furniture into a U-Haul and watching him drive down the road had filled Zack’s heart with lead.

  But the thing with the detective sounded interesting. More interesting than Kenny, if he’d gotten her to come along. Funny, she’d never said a thing about deputy training.

  Grumbling, Kenneth—his Joe College cousin preferred Kenneth, so Zack called him Kenny—worked his way off the decoy pile and onto the bow seat and glommed onto the side railings as if he wanted to draw them over him like a blanket. Lesson learned.

  Zack aimed the metal twelve-footer’s bow into fast current, but not too far out from his landmarks. He’d done enough predawn runs up the Willamette to know how thick air played tricks, made a boater think he was where he wasn’t.

  Two-thirds throttle was plenty. Even now, silt-colored water splashed over the bow like slopped coffee. He glanced back toward the marine park’s fading streetlamps, relieved to see no glowing backup lights. No big-ass trailer launching a big-ass boat for a hairy-ass run past them to the best hunting spot.

  Up front, Kenneth kept a mittened hand glued to the boat side while he retrieved the spotlight from the decoy pile. Wherever he played the Q-Beam, the shore brush glistened with a white coating. The first hard frost of the fall.

  “Kenny, do like I told you. Shine that light out front and low on the water.”

  “I can’t see a thing, Zack. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  Making fair headway, Zack had to shout over the engine’s steady buzz. “You’ll know when it comes at us.”

  “What?” Kenneth twisted halfway forward. He sprayed the beam around, but up high so that a wall of blinding light bounced back off the fog. “When what comes at us?”

  Zack jerked his free hand from a coat pocket and made a lowering gesture. “On the river, Kenny. On the fuckin’ river.”

  A three-day rainstorm, followed by a sharp temperature drop, had bumped the Willamette up near flood stage and made for a frigid boat ride. Fog was good for duck hunting. High water was another story. A guy never knew what castoffs nature might float at him.

  Kenneth turned full ahead and angled the beam lower. Better, but the powerful beam still reflected back more sparkling whiteness than it penetrated. Thirty feet didn’t allow much zig time.

  Zack’s eyes never left the river as he held up the bottom part of his ski mask to spit sideways and discard an overworked cud of Red Man. Resetting the mask, he squinted past the Gonzaga Bulldogs stocking hat riding low over Kenneth’s stringy brown hair. Out into that band of gray mush between air and river.

  His pansy-ass cousin was here only because Zack had promised his mom and Charlie not to go hunting alone on the Willamette.

  He jigged the tiller and skated around a boil-up marking one of several well-known snag piles. Back on track and into a fairly safe stretch of river, he watched Kenneth tug at the tightening straps on his life jacket, the spotlight’s cone of safety meandering every which way but out front, where it should be. Zack tried to picture his cousin helping in a crunch situation. Yeah, like that would happen.

  Crooking a knee over the tiller, he was about to finger a second tobacco pinch inside his lower lip when Kenneth’s spotlight picked up a dark stain out front. They overtook the discolored water. In a blink, the patch had swelled to a lump thirty feet across and several feet thick.

  Zack dropped the can of Red Man, grabbed for the tiller, and bellowed at his cousin.

  “Hang on.”

  They hit with a thump and sailed over a monster log. The little Johnson screamed, its prop slicing air instead of water. For a split second, Zack saw Kenneth free-float above his seat. Then the hull pancaked with a sickening whump. Zack’s bent legs absorbed the landing shock and the outboard dug in, droning along as if nothing had happened. Up front, Kenneth was hunched forward. Head sunk between his shoulders, he gripped the boat sides like he’d just survived a Tornado ride at Six Flags.

  Zack powered down and let the hackles settle on the back of his neck, watching his cousin scuttle backward onto the boat floor, his legs wedged against the side ribbing. Elbows on the bow seat in front of him, Kenneth sprayed light around, muttering ohmigods for all he was worth.

  Another lesson learned, the hard way. Zack waited for his heart to stop banging against his ribs before throttling up. Slower this time. No need to hurry.

  Frozen in place and lighthousing the river, his cousin mouthed something over one shoulder. Zack made him repeat it.

  “Huh? You say somethin,’ Kenny?” Nothing like bluster to cover his screw-up.

  Kenneth found his voice. “I said this is way too weird. What did we run over, anyway?”

  His composure back, Zack couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get in a dig. “Felt like a BMFL.”

  “A B-M-what?”

  “Big motherfucking log. Sometimes they drift downriver after heavy rainstorms. No BFD.”

  “Zack, we gotta go back. This is insane. I—I can’t swim.” Kenneth’s stocking hat rubbed back and forth against the rim of his collar. “How you call this fun I’ll never know.”

  Charlie would know. It’s what Zack and his brother had done for years. Running the river on pitch-black mornings was special. Kept a guy on his toes, and brothers close. But Charlie had flown the coop, and now Kenneth sat in Zack’s boat. Like one sack of decoys too many.

  “Ah, come on, ya wuss. That little speed bump was a fluke. Hell, we’re over halfway to Black Dog now. If you don’t crap your pants before we get there, you might just have a good time. I’ll show you some fun shootin’.”

  “Oh boy, can’t wait.” Kenneth rolled onto his side and fixed a pasty-faced gaze back toward Zack. “Why couldn’t we have slept in? Had a nice breakfast, then come out here about ten or so, when we can actually see?”

  “Kenny, I told you. Have to beat the competition to a special place if we want to get in a decent hunt.” And Black Dog Slough wasn’t just any old backwater. It was a duck hunter’s glory hole, even before the field puddles froze up and channeled migrating ducks down onto the river. “We’ll be there in no time.”

  “Hey, Zack.” Kenneth was staring at the river behind their wake. “Is that the sun coming up?”

  “At four AM? Don’t think so, Kenny.” Snapping a look over his shoulder, Zack glimpsed a yellow-white glob cutting through the inky gray. “Damn, somebody’s tryin’ to beat us upriver.” He gauged the approaching light as it sharpened into a disk, the tight beam bouncing off one bank, then the other. “Shit. They’re comin’ on fast. Prob’ly that sumbitch Tweety and his Go-Devil.”

  “Who?”

  Zack coaxed the flat-bottom craft up toward planing speed, shifting his weight as far forward as the tiller extension allowed. “Scrunch into the bow, Kenny.” Adrenaline thrill pumped through his veins as he squeezed out the last drop of boat speed, his earlier scare a dull memory. The outboard burred in tune with his anger. No way was he getting beat out.

  Kenny ducked low when the splintered end of a floating oak limb scraped past, just missing the side of his head. Disregarding the danger, Zack kept the Johnson full out and leaned into the wind, as if willpower added horsepower. Needle Island’s lower end showed, a blur of flooded woods. Not far above lay the inlet to Black Dog.

  In no time, a converted metal bass boat, its open bow piled with decoy bags, overtook Zack and his cousin.

  Four hunters blew on past, raising one-finger salutes, laughing and yelling in unison. “Loo-hoo-sers!”

  They disappeared into the darkness ahead. Zack yanked the Johnson’s kill switch and threw down his gloves, bobbing his head on each word out of his mouth. “Son. Of. A. Bitch. Man, those guys are nuts, goin’ that fast out here.”

  He let his boat slide back downstream, rocking in the wake of the faster vessel, the fading rumble of its monster outboard grinding defeat into his ears.

  “Well, so much for choice hunting.” He shaded his eyes when Kenneth wriggled around, flashing the powerful light i
n his direction.

  “So, we can go home now, right, Zack?”

  “Kenny, point that goddamn light someplace besides my face.”

  Peeling the ski mask up over his forehead, Zack gazed downriver for a long count. “I guess we can try back at the Santiam, or—”

  A screech, paired with a loud bang, cut him off. A misty hush settled over the river as shivers drilled down his spine.

  Zack and Kenneth locked eyes.

  “Did those guys run into something, Zack?”

  “Yeah, something. But that didn’t sound like no BMFL.”

  14

  Delia parked the Camaro in a police slot, snatched up her portable Toughbook, and hustled toward the hospital’s emergency entrance. The cherry-red Apache and boat trailer sat close by.

  Barely an hour earlier, Zack’s garbled call to her had come over the roar of an outboard engine. Something about a boat crash, then a “Hell yes” to her question about 911, then that he could see the EMT unit waiting on the Marion County side of the river. The last words she understood before his phone cut out midshout were that he was bringing back four “ice pops” he’d fished off an island. A few minutes later, her call to the 911 dispatcher had confirmed the EMT unit was en route to Salem Hospital with four severely hypothermic boaters. At a sub level, her suspicion was that these off-kilter river incidents—overactive protesters, sabotaged hunting blinds, slashed boat trailer tires, and now a wrecked boat—were either tied in with or provided cover for the killings.

  Just past the ER reception desk, she spotted Zack and the college-age kid she’d seen with him—the only ones wearing heavy camouflage coats and hip boots, and looking like they belonged out in nature’s bounty.

  Delia took the empty chair beside Zack. “What happened?”

  He flipped a hand up. “Battery died.”

  “No, the boat crash.”

  The youth in the blue, red, and white Bulldogs hat peered around Zack. “I told him we had no business being out there.”

  “Sit back, Kenny.” Zack jabbed a thumb to his left. “My cousin.” He took a deep breath and started in.