River Run

by J. S. James

  She stood on one of two log pontoons the Quonset-type structure rested on. Their boat was tied alongside. Harvey’s boot cast hindered his exit, but he made it up to Delia with a man under each wing. Once he was level, she helped him hobble toward one of the Quonset’s openings.

  Jerzy followed, muttering aloud. “Man-oh-man. Hard to believe you found this place.”

  The coordinates Delia had given Jerzy to feed into his Lowrance Chartplotter had led them on a roundabout but dead-on course, downstream then up a former channel and into a cove notched back inside a river peninsula. On the way, she’d been surprised by how well Harvey and Jerzy had hit it off, aided big-time by the fact that Jerzy’s father was Harvey’s surgeon. Zack had stayed church-mouse quiet, until Harvey brought up Charlie’s funeral and apologized for not being well enough to attend. The full perk-up had come when she mentioned Zack’s interest in the Deputy Sheriff’s Academy.

  “Okay if I work on those swing-out boat doors?” Zack now hovered over Jackie’s controls. “Get some light inside this creep crypt?” Delia could tell he was itching to do something useful—anything involving Jerzy’s boat.

  Halfway through the Quonset’s hatchway, she paused and gave Jerzy a look. “That all right with you?”

  “Go for it,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  Delia flicked on her Rayovac, shining it over fifty feet of moored relic. Duck pluckings drifted across its deck like an invasion of spider ghosts. The fuzzy remnants seemed to complement the scum trailing off the old boat’s hull.

  “Judas Priest,” Harvey said, stepping across then leaning against the boat’s railing, so his weight was off his injured foot. He gawked around in the semigloom as if he’d boarded a museum piece preserved in mold. “Like stepping into a movie set for an attack scene, downgraded to a horror flick.”

  “Apocalypse Now wasn’t a horror story?” Jerzy asked.

  “I was thinking much older, like Heart of Darkness,” Harvey answered.

  Delia shrugged, taking photos as she made her way to the open engine bays. “Greed and savagery are sides of a coin. Have a look at Tweety’s little workshop of horrors.”

  Delia watched Jerzy whack his knee on a box-shaped object, knocking one side open. The pungent tang of dried meat wafted over. Her cell phone flash revealed a half-pint refrigerator that had been gutted and converted into a smoker.

  He made it to her side without incident.

  Filling the former engine room below deck, a fletcher’s workbench displayed Tweety’s handiwork. Hybrid projectiles of all sorts featured deer hunter’s razor-thin multiblades fused to elongated crossbow bolts and stuffed in quivers.

  Delia left Jerzy shining his light toward the target dummy hung on the Quonset’s back wall, where she’d already been. Her interest was on the boat deck she’d been examining and snapping shots of ahead of every step. Beyond theirs, only one set of footprints dominated in the accumulated dust and grime. No second set meant no accomplice, no serial-killer tag team. No Robb?

  She headed forward, intending to recheck the deckhouse, when a metallic crunch drew her attention to the front of the boat shed. Teeth-grinding screeches followed when Jackie’s bow nosed into a crack of light. Zack stood in that bow, prying the boat shed’s main doors open, flooding the place with daylight and fresh air. A cottony swirl of down and duck feathers tumbled toward the rear of the Vietnam War–era Swift boat.

  * * *

  After helping Craig fit the tree stand and the rest of his gear into the Interceptor’s trunk, Gus climbed into his nephew’s pickup and followed him to Monmouth, where they split up—Craig driving the Interceptor to the woods below Buena Vista, Gus taking Craig’s Dodge truck to meet Bannock behind a big-box store that had gone belly-up.

  Bannock had nosed the Navigator’s grille into an empty loading bay and stood beside the vehicle, swaying on his canes.

  Gus backed Craig’s pickup to within six feet of the SUV’s rear bumper. He gathered up the parcel map and stepped around toward the Navigator’s hood. The ever-volatile snake-eater spoke first.

  “You have what we need on the Bastard?”

  “And more.” Gus spread the map and set his jeweler’s loupe on one corner. “Here’s ground zero.” He pointed to the Gatlin house, then trailed the nail of his pinkie finger beside the access road through the woods. “We’ll drive up along here, which puts the old Gatlin house to our left—”

  “How’s he get there?”

  “By boat.” Gus’s stomach was knotting up already.

  “How do you know he’ll be there?”

  “Where else but the place Gatlin grew up? The real question is, how right are you about him packing all that money around, or at least stashing it close by?”

  Bannock’s attention was on the map. “The Bastard’s got it with him, and if it’s someplace else, I’m going to enjoy finding out where.” He picked up the loupe and bent low over one corner. “Now, load up while I identify a forward position and work out the details.”

  Gus didn’t need reminding he was too damned old to wrestle sixty-pound hay bales around, but he managed to make room for the ordnance transfer. Didn’t need the knee-popping told-you-so, either, climbing off the bed of Castner’s pickup.

  Three crates the color of headstones crowded the Lincoln’s cargo area.

  From his brief glimpse the night before, Gus knew the larger box housed the core of the weapon system, a belt-fed, squat-barreled grenade launcher on a machine gunner’s tripod. A smaller box held its eyes and brain: night camera, laser aiming unit, ballistic computer. The one in the middle was chock-full of metal ammo canisters: four long-lows crammed with blue-tipped, high-explosive fragmentation shells, and a fifth marked BZ—silver-nosed grenades containing a nerve-blocking gas. Somehow, Bannock got hold of munitions the military had supposedly destroyed. The two types of shells looked alike. The functional difference was night and day.

  Gus set to work, transferring the load. A 48-cartridge belt spilled out when he snagged the lid of a long-low on a crate. The belt lay in segments on the Navigator’s floor, so he decided to leave it.

  “Unfuckingbelievable,” was all he got from Bannock, who bent back over the map.

  By the time Gus had manhandled the larger crate and the rest of the long-lows onto the pickup, his parka was clammy. Coolness wormed down his ribs, dampening his shirt and the machine pistol secured inside his parka.

  It had been too cold to sweat outside the motel the night before. Yet an icy chill had run down Gus’s spine, watching Bannock fondle the grenade launcher’s flash suppressor while the man lamented the mess “The Bastard” had made of his life. “The Navy can go to hell,” Bannock had said, slurring words. “Only thing I’ll miss is blowing shit up and fragging bad guys.”

  One thing was certain, listening to Bannock had made it feel so right for Gus to have an insurance policy back in the trees.

  * * *

  Delia joined Harvey and Zack at the Swift boat’s railing. Both were looking up with their mouths ready to catch flies. Harvey closed his. “Dee-Dee, you notice what’s in the gun tub?”

  “Been up there. Disabled both guns first thing.”

  “How’d you do that?” Zack asked.

  “Trick my advanced-firearms instructor taught me. I think we’re looking at what might’ve been Tweety’s last stand.”

  Again the two men gawked at the .50 caliber armament hanging at rest, its twin barrels innocently pointing toward the Quonset hut’s metal rafters.

  Jerzy strode up and handed Delia one of the crossbow quarrels she’d seen poking out of the practice target. “Boy, was I way off about the guy my dad and I hunted with.”

  “Lucky, too,” she added, shining her light toward the stern. No center-mass shots for Tweety. The straw-filled Gore-Tex camo coat hanging on the Quonset’s back wall sported a head with an evil-looking hunter’s face drawn on. Between that and the coat, a flesh-toned Styrofoam neck bristled with a quiverful of bolts. Except for the target po
int, she’d bet this one matched the bolt she and Zack had found at Charlie’s death scene.

  Zack elbowed in for a closer look. “So this all means the ex-guide Detective Chavez and me boated downriver to warn is the sumbitch that killed my brother. The others, too.” He twisted a corner of his mustache. “I figured him for squirrely, but how the fuck did we—”

  Delia laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’d suspected as much, Zack, but had nothing to go on without a body.” She turned to Harvey. “Any lab results on the bolt I passed on to you, Harv?”

  He shrugged. “No blood. Partial prints yielded nothing from the FBI database. For a match check on Tweety Bates, we’ll still need a body. But we might have enough here to go on. Ready to call in a state crime lab crew?”

  “Not yet.” She made to step around, but he stopped her.

  “Not yet? This place has to be our tie-in with the hunter killings.”

  “One more pass-through, Harv,” she said, pulling surgical gloves from her coat pocket. It was the link, but she had to be sure Robb wasn’t involved with the killings or Tweety, or this sad war relic. Rubber snapped against wrists as she broke off and made for the deck cabin.

  Jerzy met her at the rear hatchway. “Can I help?”

  She handed him a spare pair of gloves. “I’ve already photographed down there. You see something, let me know.”

  Delia assigned Jerzy the forward berth while she searched the pilothouse. Her first gut-clenching discovery came from a box wedged under the chart table. The trophy collection was mounted in a thin, hardwood display case with spaces for sixteen items. The top row of four was filled. Each mounted finger was crooked into firing position. Three were small and wizened, with coppery skin. She’d bet the first belonged to the Yamhill body Harvey had started to investigate. The fourth digit was larger. Fresher. A shudder rippled through her. An odor wafted off the collection. She bent low, sniffed, and popped straight up, nearly gagging. The smell was pungent as beef jerky.

  She returned the box. Zack shouldn’t be there when she told Harvey Tweety had smoked Charlie’s finger, along with the others.

  From down below, she heard a muffled thud. Then—

  “Ouch. Shit.”

  “You find something?”

  “It found me. Right on the noggin.”

  Delia joined Jerzy in the Swift boat’s deckhouse. Packets of small cigars were scattered across the floor. Jerzy stood before a locker crammed with old military clothing. His index fingers and thumbs delicately pinched opposite corners of a yellow-and-black box with gold lettering—a humidor, she’d learned, on looking up the brand from the cigar butt she’d recovered at the Riverview parking lot.

  “The day you hunted with Tweety Bates, he was smoking.”

  “One of those,” Jerzy said, nodding toward the floor.

  Another degree of separation. She breathed easier, recalling no hint of tobacco use by Robb during their hours together.

  She perched on one of the bunks—her cell phone flashing in camera mode—when the back of her heel made contact with something solid. Kneeling, she slid a small metal chest from beneath the bed and opened it.

  On top were piles of photographs. Several appeared to be Vietnam military scenes. Another was clearly more recent. The two figures in that picture wore old-style fatigues.

  “The young guy on the left is Tweety,” Jerzy said, sitting beside her. “The other must be his dad.” They looked alike. Both appeared highly fit.

  Delia tapped on Tweety. “He’s the one I chased across the Riverview parking lot. Got away in his boat. Tried questioning him at the Octane Stop. If I had picked him up either time, the body count might have been halved.” From beneath the photos, Delia dug out what she first thought was a photo album.

  As if kippered trigger fingers hadn’t been enough, that storage chest find was the clincher. On first glance, the bound volume appeared benign. A gussied-up logbook? she wondered. Too ornate. A diary? Nuh-uh.

  Though somber, the title on a cover inlayed with mother-of-pearl gave scant forewarning it was anything but a hunting rights sermon:

  Why I’m a Hunter, Not a Murderer

  A Personal Anthology

  by

  R. “Tweety” Bates Jr.

  Delia opened to page one. They read together in silence.

  There are two kinds of hunters, decent and indecent. Decent hunters honor the sacred ethic of the best sport in the world. Indecent hunters violate that ethic every time they go outdoors. They range from out-and-out Concentrics to low-down Hunturds. They have to be culled from the herd because they endanger a natural sport for the rest. That is the mission I chose to accept.

  Jerzy tapped on the page. “He called us that. My dad and me.”

  She glanced at him, then at the book. “Called you what, Hunturds?”

  “Decent,” he answered. “I thought he meant we were good at hunting, not that he thought us worthy of staying alive.”

  “Looks like you dodged a bullet. Or a dart from a crossbow.” They dipped their heads and read on.

  Why, you ask? Guide enough Concentrics and witness the heinous acts of Hunturds over fourteen years and you get a bellyful of reasons. Here’s a sample, every one deserving of capital punishment:

  – They chase down mallards and blast away, their outboard motors at full tilt while they laugh like maniacs.

  – They blast away on the water before birds get airborne then congratulate each other on their kills.

  A short way into Tweety Bates’s diatribe, she found herself drenched in death thoughts oozing from the pen of a murderer who’d almost killed her. His off-kilter justifications chilled and stunned, each accompanied by a different “stalk and cull” tactic. His nightmare images disturbed and fascinated, drew her deep into the mind that conjured them. Even more disturbing were the flashes of recall they triggered as she scanned down the list.

  – They toss dead birds in the brush so they don’t have to pluck, clean or eat them.

  – One even dispatched wounded ducks by biting down on their heads, showing how macho he was.

  “Sweet Jesus, but the guy lived a skewed life.” Jerzy leaned forward, craning to see into her face. “You okay reading this?”

  Delia nodded. She had to keep on keeping on, hoping she’d find nothing to implicate Robb.

  They had gotten several pages in when Zack dipped his head inside.

  “Harvey wants to know if you’re done. Says there’s weather on the way and thought Detective Chavez would want to call in that crime lab outfit.”

  She gave Jerzy a gentle push toward the hatchway. “You two help Harvey get settled into Jackie. I’ll be along.”

  Jerzy followed Zack. Delia stayed, drawn to the anger.

  The final example in Tweety’s list was without doubt his last straw.

  – This stinking Hunturd shoots my dog, Trudy, because he forgets to flip on his gun’s safety.

  As much as she hated the twisted message, that dark rationale resonated on a personal level, got her heart racing, her head swimming with birds-of-a-feather torments. Had she been culling pedophiles last August? Last year? Where Bates portrayed an unnamed target, she saw the taunting figure of Zedo Camacho in the RV behind that Independence tavern. Had she stalked and culled Camacho? And before him, the skeletal grin of the first one, the chicken hawk she’d winged a year earlier, but wanted to castrate from the neck down? Flexing her stomach muscles to slow the thumping inside her chest, she traced Bates’s twisted logic and favored MO for the river killings back to its early roots.

  I learned the warrior code from R. T. Senior, my ex–Navy SEAL dad who whipped me into shape with his own brand of BUD/S training. The code: A warrior kills but never murders, so long as he draws a line of conduct he will not cross. I never stalk an unarmed enemy. I make it fair game with only a crossbow or a knife. God made me a righteous hunter. He rewarded me with the thrill of a different kind of hunt.

  Delia swallowed, her throat like sandpaper. Those intima
te accounts of Bates’s kill rushes hit home. Her officer-involved shoots—the two resulting deaths—were justified. But, like Bates, she had enjoyed the after-kill. Shivered through those conscience-numbing adrenaline spikes. The guilt relief they brought.

  Ink and yellowed paper blurred together. She now saw her own shootings as revenge for Bebé Tío’s childhood abduction.

  Doubts aside, the few hours spent with Robb had washed away much of that guilt. But would she apply ballistic therapy on the next pedophile that crossed her path? She’d get no more stay-out-of-jail cards from Harv.

  “Ready to shake a leg?” This time it was Jerzy, poking his head in through the hatchway.

  She kept her head down. “Almost. I’ll see if the OSP crime lab crew can meet us back at the dock.”

  Her breath took a steep intake as she read Tweety’s last line. Words that separated her from Bates by miles and miles.

  I knew I was a full-fledged warrior the day I culled Dad.

  So, Tweety had lived and “worked” alone, and Robb had nothing to do with the Swift boat. But how was he going to “shut the lid on hell”?

  Delia returned the anthology to its storage chest, closing the book on Tweety Bates.

  41

  Back at Riverview Park, wave tops slopped over the boat dock’s wind side, wetting the toes of Delia’s chukkas. A dirty mattress of clouds had smothered the afternoon sun. She pinched in her coat collar, peering outside the circle of men she stood among, wondering where Jerzy had gone. He’d disappeared while she, Harvey, and Zack had been busy debriefing three OSP crime lab specialists before their trip to Tweety’s Swift boat.

  Her overview had included details of their preliminary boat search and Harvey had left it to Delia to sum up her investigation into the river murders, with Zack chiming in as witness-in-chief. The lab crew stayed focused on Tweety Bates and was satisfied she’d kept the chain of evidence intact. When one of the specialists asked why OSP hadn’t been brought in earlier, she laid it squarely in Grice’s lap. Harvey backed her up, alluding to the ongoing investigation into his conduct.