by Wood, Ted
There was real passion in his voice and I suddenly understood. I was careful when I spoke. "That's not my way."
He let go of my sleeve and sat back in his seat. "No, I guess it isn't," he said quietly. "I just don't want to see that woman hurt. They don't come like her very often." I shut the car door gently and he waved and left. I watched him go, then turned to walk into the motel. Alice was at the desk, registering a guest who turned and looked at me and then away without interest.
I could tell by his clothes that he was American. There's something about the casual assurance in the way an American dresses that you never find in Toronto or even Montreal. Good clothes, a little softer and looser than a Canadian would wear. I wondered idly what he was doing up here. A salesman, I guessed, tougher looking than most of them and with noticeably bad skin, but they don't deduct marks for acne when you're selling drill bits.
Alice was behind the counter and I winked at her without speaking. I didn't want my greeting tangled up with the other guy's business. Sam was beside her, on his feet with his tail wagging, staying close to Alice but anxious to remind me that he had recognized me.
I waited until she had given the other man his key and directions down the hall, then I reached over the counter and pulled her close. Her kiss was soft and we lingered over it, craning awkwardly over the counter until Sam gave a tiny, miffed bark.
Alice pulled back and laughed. "Looks like we both missed you," she said.
"That's doubly nice. Just tell him, 'Good boy, go to Reid,' " I instructed, and she did and Sam jumped on the counter and down my side and wagged his fool tail off. I crouched to fuss him, rubbing his big head and telling him he was good and letting him know that the feeling was entirely mutual. Most of the time he's the only living creature around to let me know he cares if I'm alive or dead and I wanted him to know I appreciated it. Then I told him "Easy" and straightened up.
"If you're looking for your old room, you're out of luck," Alice said. "Mr. Wallace from Buffalo, New York, has just taken it, you saw him."
"So I sleep in the car," I said, and she laughed.
"Not if you play your cards right," she promised. "It's good to have you back."
"I hated to leave in the first place. Did anybody miss me, besides you two sentimental slobs?"
She shook her head, but she had stopped laughing. "Nobody. But I was glad of the company last night. There was someone outside the house around two a.m." She pointed at Sam. "I'd told him 'Keep,' like you showed me, and he barked for about ten minutes, then stopped." Her face was serious. "I've never had prowlers before, even now when the town is full of guys from out of town, looking for work."
"That could have been those two rounders who tackled me. I'm glad you had Sam with you," I said, and when he heard his name, Sam gave a happy little bark. "Listen, if you're on duty, hand off the ball somewhere while I give Sam a walk, then we'll head on home."
God! it felt good to use that word. I still didn't think of my place at Murphy's Harbour that way. I'm square enough that I need a woman around to make it complete. Over the eighteen months I'd been there I'd had a couple of volunteers, but nobody I wanted to assign the duty on a regular roster.
"We're slack at the bar tonight, I'll close up and leave a card for people to speak to the barman over there if they have problems," she said. "You do the thing with Sam while I lock up."
That's what we did. I put my bag back in my car and then took off my town jacket and ran halfway to the highway and back, with Sam springing beside me like a kid let out of school. A couple of cars came by, slowing to see what was going on, but Sam ignored them, happy to be back with me again.
I was sweating by the time we got back and found Alice waiting in the doorway of the office. "I've got a lake trout thawed out at the house," she said. "Put Rin-Tin-Tin in the car and let's go."
I hugged her, feeling more like a kid than I had since I left Sudbury to enlist in the Marines. In the back of my mind was the sick certainty that this couldn't last. But I've grown with that feeling since Nam. This was like a quiet time on patrol, no snipers, no booby traps, nobody trying to infiltrate. I was happy to enjoy it and let the next day take care of itself.
I drove to her house and she invited both of us in. "The hell with sleeping in the car, he's family," Alice said.
The house was cool, but I lit the stove and then showered while she put the fish in the oven and opened one of the bottles of Pouilly Fuisse I'd picked up in Montreal. And then, as we sat down to eat, she gave me the news.
"I heard something funny today," she said, "Wanna hear it?"
'Td rather hear there were seconds on the trout, but fire away."
She helped me to another slice. "Well, that Indian friend of yours, Jack Misquadis. One of his nephews was in the bar, early on. He'd had a few beers and it got to the point where I didn't want to see him snockered, so I asked him to leave."
"And Sam gave you the required minimum use of force," I said.
"No," she frowned. "He went okay, that wasn't it. But instead of trying to break the place up he said something that stuck in my head."
"What was that?" I didn't really care about barroom chat, but her animation made her even better to look at so I listened.
"Well. He went, but he said, 'My uncle Jack could buy this place up, no trouble.' I didn't know any of the people in the band were rich, did you?"
"He sure doesn't live rich." I remembered his shack, crude and comfortable but worth maybe five hundred bucks total. He had that and his traps and his old twenty-dollar World War II rifle and his canoe, that was it.
"Well, I didn't argue. You don't when somebody says something like that. It's kind of like, my dad can whip your dad," she explained. "But then he said something else."
I stopped eating and looked at her. Her oval face was lit from above by the Tiffany lamp and she looked beautiful. I didn't much care what any drunk had said, I just wanted to watch her repeating it. "What was that?" I prompted.
"Well, he said, 'Jack's the real owner of all them claims.' " She frowned slightly. "Does that make any sense to you?"
I put down my knife and fork and looked at her seriously. "It makes more sense than anything else I've heard since I came up here."
11
We had no prowlers. If it had been Tettlinger who'd been hanging around the previous night he must have recognized my car and stayed away. But I wasn't sure he would keep on staying away. Guys like him don't let go of a grudge. And now he had even more reason to dislike me—the threat of a jail term. He might decide that the best way to stay free would be to stand off and blast me from a distance with a deer rifle. Before the sound died away he could be gone, melted into the bush that reached back behind Alice's house until he found a nameless lake to throw the gun into. I'm not paranoid, but there was something particularly ugly about that guy that worried me.
That's why I insisted Alice keep Sam with her while I went down to the police station and talked to Gallagher.
He was in his office, preparing his duty roster for the coming month. He waved me to a seat. "Try some of the lousy coffee. This won't take but a minute," he invited. So I did, and found he was right. Bad coffee seemed to be an art form with his secretary. But she, or somebody, had brought in a box of donuts and one of them took the taste away and within a couple of minutes Gallagher was ready.
I told him what Alice had repeated. He listened, looking at me narrow eyed as if he'd found me shoplifting the donut. "I never knew an Indian yet ever staked land," he said. "Did you?"
I shrugged. "There's nothing minable in Murphy's Harbour, but no, I'd have to agree with you."
"Which means what?" he wondered out loud. We stared down one another's eyes blankly for a minute and then I put forward my idea.
"I wonder if maybe he's acting for somebody else. Somebody who doesn't want the world to know he's staking claims."
"Could be," Gallagher growled. "But if his nephew says that he owns the claims, they must be in h
is name. That means they're his property, that's no good to anybody else."
"But what if he's acting for a company? The ABC Mining Corporation. He's a vice-president, they tell him. He gets to register the claims but they belong to the company. He's just one of the crowd, a guy doing the clerical work. That way, when Darvon or somebody wants to use the claims, all the management gets a share, including him."
"And including the rounder who set him up," Gallagher completed for me. "Yeah, that would work. Let's go see him."
We took the scout car and drove to Misquadis's shack, but he was gone. The shack was unlocked—it didn't even have a lock, for that matter. A lot of cabins don't, up that far north. A place is there to be used if somebody doesn't have a roof and the weather turns vicious. People go in, stay warm, use what they have to, and then leave the place as they found it, paying for the stay by topping up the wood pile before they go.
His old car and canoe were missing, so we guessed what was happening, but Gallagher opened the door anyway and we went in. His rifle was gone, so were the blankets from the bed. "Gone hunting," Gallagher said. "The fool council put a bounty on that bear that's supposed to have killed Prudhomme. I'll bet a million bucks to a cup of Gladys's lousy coffee he's up there on that island shooting one."
We went out and stood in the pale fall sunshine and thought about our next move. "I guess the best thing would be to check the claim files and look for any unknown names," I suggested.
Gallagher snorted. "Have you got any idea how many crackpots got into the act? Hell, when they found that ore deposit, you couldn't find anybody in town for a month. Everybody was out registering claims. Old Yoong at the laundry was out there, even. Must be seventy, but he trekked out and looked for gold. No, I'd rather go find Misquadis and talk to him. He's a straight guy, if there's anything he can do to help, he'll do it when I explain."
I objected. "He likely left yesterday. I'm not sure where this place is that he's going to. But it's a couple of days' paddling and portaging and then we could draw a blank. Can you afford a helicopter to head in and check the location where the body was found?"
"Me?" Gallagher laughed a big, square-mouthed, mirthless laugh. "Helicopter nothing. It's all I can do to squeeze enough out of the council to run the scout cars."
"In that case, let's go at it a different way. If this is what we think, and Prudhomme set it up, he'd have made sure the claims were all in the richest area he could find. How can we find out where that is?"
Gallagher straightened up and tapped his hat more firmly on to his head. "Let's go ask the expert," he said. "Get in the car." He took the wheel and poured on the gas, up the highway to the site of the new mines.
There were three of them, all within a mile of one another, the shiny new headframes visible above the trees at roadside. We passed the first two and drove to the third one, the Darvon mine. Gallagher nodded at the headframe as we turned into their roadway. "Look at that. A fortune in gold lying not a hundred yards off the Trans-Canada Highway. And the poor slobs down in Olympia have lived and died on what they make at the pulp mill for damn near a century. No justice, is there?"
He stopped at the barrier and a prettyish girl in a hard hat let us in, directing us to the office up the road. It lay on the other side of the construction site where earthmovers as big as a house were removing broken rock. Gallagher switched off the radio. "They ask you to do that. Damned if I see how it could set off their dynamite, but mining is dangerous enough without extra risk."
The flagman on the road let us through between loads, and we drove to the work office. It was a cluster of sixty-foot-long house trailers set up on waist-high stands and interconnected by a central passageway. There were pickup trucks with the insignias of a dozen construction and building trades companies parked alongside. Opposite stood a similar complex, without any parked vehicles.
"Those are the miners' quarters," Gallagher explained as we got out. "Not like the shacks the old miners used to live in. They've got showers, TV, everything except women."
Inside the office was the kind of clattering busyness that can't be faked. Draftsmen were working, women were typing, men in big construction boots and hard hats were clumping in and out with plans in their hands. Gallagher nodded to a few of them and they nodded and grinned and called him "Chief."
"That's what gets to you about being the kingpin in a place like Olympia," he confided over his shoulder. "The town's going to double in size. All of these people will be in my patch before they're finished. And I'm tryin' to get to know them all before they settle." He expanded on it as we walked on. "A year ago I could police this town like being dad in a family. When the bonspiel is on at the Legion, I'd park up there, and when a drunk came out I'd take his keys and tell him, 'Take a cab, Eddie, pick up the car tomorrow.' They liked that and they respected the law. Now I'm going to have to treat 'em all like strangers. It's the only way to be fair and it's the end of the hominess of this town." He sucked his teeth and sighed, not looking at me.
There was a small private office at the end of one of the trailers. Outside it sat the prettiest girl in the whole place, tapping something out on a word processor. She looked up and beamed when Gallagher approached. "What's up, Chief, Mac forget to pay his parking tickets?"
Gallagher warmed to her smile and I realized how much he thought of women and wondered why he was up here alone. Maybe he had a story like mine to tell. In any case, his looking like a bear didn't seem to be stopping him from winning real affection from women. "No. He's been a good boy. I just wanted him to meet a friend of mine. Is he busy?"
"Always," she said, with another grin. "I'll tell him you're here." She got up and tripped into the inner office, moving nicely. She kept the door tactfully half shut around her as she talked to the man inside, then turned and pushed it wide open. "Come on in, please."
"Thanks, Sue." Gallagher smiled his big honey-bear smile and we went on by. The man inside was as big as he was, wearing green work pants with a good shirt and tie. He stood up and stuck out his hand. "Hey, Chief, nice to see you. Who's this?"
Gallagher introduced me and we shook hands. I learned that his name was Walter McKenzie and he was the construction manager for the mine. He had a good handshake, powerful but not crushing.
"Siddown." He waved us to a couple of old wooden chairs. We sat and he asked, "What brings you out here? You majoring in crises?" We all laughed and his phone rang, then stopped.
Gallagher said, "Reid here has been asking around about the last days of that guy, what's his name?" He turned to me and I supplied Prudhomme for him. "Yeah, you remember, the guy who was killed by the bear."
McKenzie looked at me with new interest. "Checking up on the chief?"
I shook my head. "No, just an insurance hassle. But I'm trying to look into all the things I can while I'm here, and part of it is trying to get an idea of where he was working, generally, before he died."
McKenzie waved over his shoulder toward the window. "The whole shooting match," he said cheerfully. I noticed the faint buzz of the Highlands in his speech. He was another expatriate Scot, I think maybe they're the most widely scattered race in the world.
We all grinned at his joke and I acted humble and added some detail. "No, in particular I wondered if he had been following up something logical, something connected with the ore body. The chief said he didn't think so, that he was outside the area, but we thought you could spare me a minute to tell me where that runs."
McKenzie looked at me under eyebrows that seemed to bristle more every minute. "Y're in a curious kind of insurance work, Mr. Bennett," he said.
Gallagher took his cue. "Don't worry, Mac. I checked him out good, he's legit."
McKenzie took out an old pipe from his desk, looked at it grimly, and put it away. "Giving it up again," he said, then looked at us. "If you're happy, Chief. Sure. I can tell you." He stood up and walked to the wall where there was an oil company map of the area pinned to a board. "The survey maps aren't smal
l enough scale to show the extent of the whole area that interests us," he said. "This is the biggest deposit I've seen in all my years in mining." He indicated a semicircle with a radius of about thirty miles. "This whole area is worth looking at closely. You won't necessarily find another deposit like this one, but you might."
"So Prudhomme was just looking around in a general sort of way," I suggested.
McKenzie's phone rang, then stopped. He tapped the map with his finger. "No. He was found here, on an island in this lake. The thing is, he'd already looked there, it was in his preliminary report. Hell, we'd already drilled a test hole there and come up empty. He had no reason to be there."
"And what about the other deposits you think are around? Are they all the same quality, or what?" I asked.
He gave me another frown. "Now this isn't my area, you understand, but so far we've only identified one deposit for sure, right here on the highway, where all three companies are opening their mines. Like I say, the geology is promising for the whole region, but so far this is the only strike we've made for certain. And that's fine by me, it means we can build right on the highway. It's so damn convenient, you can't believe it. It saves millions in construction costs alone, not having to build a road in."
I had to ask him: "Excuse my ignorance, but what kind of a find are we talking about? For a layman, you understand."
McKenzie didn't even look around. He had the figures on the top of his mind and he rolled them off at me. "We're estimating nineteen million ounces of gold. And just so you'll get the idea, that's six times the amount that came out of the whole Yukon strike in the last century." Now he turned and grinned. "In case you're counting on your fingers, that comes to something close to six billion dollars' worth if gold stays at three hundred dollars an ounce." I whistled with respect. Six billion is enough to cause all kinds of disappearances.
Gallagher took over, asking the next question so naturally that McKenzie would never have known it was loaded. "And I suppose you cagey bastards have sewn up all the hot spots where there might be gold," he said.
