Beginning with You

by Lindsay McKenna

  “We’ve got two trucks boarding with hazardous materials. One is carrying swimming pool chemicals—HTH—and drums of brake fluid oil. The second is a fuel-oil tanker. There’s also a truck carrying scrap copper, but that doesn’t pose any problem.”

  “Chlorine and fuel oil on board, eh?” York asked. Hazardous materials weren’t to be transported unless declared before they reached Canadian Customs in Victoria.

  “Yes, sir.” Tony pointed to the bill of lading. “Inert. He’s carrying thirty-pound canisters of HTH in dry form. I’ve placed all three trucks together up at the front of the bow. They’ll be the first off.”

  York put on his wire-rim glasses, studied the paper closely and then grunted his approval. “Five hundred canisters of HTH?” And then he smiled. “You wouldn’t think any fool would own a swimming pool over in Canada, would you?”

  Tony’s long face broke into a grin. “There are a lot of rich Canadian retirees over there, Skipper. A lot. They can all afford pools, even if they can only use them three months out of the year.”

  York agreed, flipping through the rest of the papers. Satisfied that Customs wasn’t going to give him heartburn over what was being transported, he said, “Let them board, Mr. Knox.”

  “What’s that smell?” Jim leaned over, sniffing Rook’s hair as they waited to board the ferry. Rook had let it grow the past few months, and it was curling around her face, making her just that much more feminine in his eyes. She gave him a dirty look, but her mouth pulled into a smile.

  “What? God, Jim, quit acting like a bloodhound on a scent. What’s the matter with you?” Rook laughed, slipping her arm around his waist and hugging him as they began to walk up the ramp that would lead them to the upper deck of the ferry.

  “Perfume. You’re wearing perfume, aren’t you?” They followed the foot traffic across the boarding ramp of the Flyer. Below them, vehicles of all makes, sizes and descriptions were beginning to load quickly and efficiently, thanks to the hard-working crew of the Flyer.

  “I thought I’d try some,” Rook muttered self-consciously.

  “I like it,” he murmured, smiling down into her gray eyes. Jim knew she was sensitive about becoming more feminine, and he encouraged her exploration of it.

  He gripped her hand and they walked through the open hatch. Pointing to one of the large red vinyl booths, he said, “Let’s grab this one.”

  Rook agreed. The ferry was going to be crowded, but that was typical on holidays and weekends. She tolerated the sardine feeling because once they were over in Victoria, away from prying eyes, they were free to enjoy themselves. Jim sat down and Rook settled next to him, content with his arm around her shoulders.

  “I like the perfume,” Jim told her, meeting her glance. “It accents your natural scent.” Which drove him crazy when he made love with her.

  Rook wondered if she’d ever stop blushing. In the last few months, Jim had brought out a side of her she’d never realized existed—a softer side. He had taught her not to be afraid, but to reach out and be all of herself. Rook slid her hand down his powerful, curved thigh, the denim a delightful texture beneath her fingertips. “It’s Giorgio. I bought a bottle last time we were in Victoria. Remember?”

  Jim nodded, relaxing as he absently watched the crowds of vacationers, tourists and locals from Port Angeles walk past them to find seats. “Even shopping is fun with you.”

  Rook jabbed him playfully in the ribs. “I don’t buy that much, Jim Barton, and you know it.”

  “Just sexy, beautiful things that drive me crazy, that’s all….”

  A shiver of expectation feathered through Rook when he lowered his voice. He made her feel womanly, sensual. “Stop that.”

  Jim studied Rook’s tilted face, from her sparkling gray eyes to the curve of her lush lips. Wanting to lean over and kiss her, but not daring to, Jim embraced her instead. “Stop what?”

  “You know what, Barton. You’re such a terrible tease.”

  “I thought only women got blamed for doing that.”

  “I thought so, too, until I met you.”

  “But you like the way I tease you,” Jim whispered against her ear.

  Rook colored fiercely. The ferry was filling up rapidly. “If you don’t quit…”

  “You’ll do what?” Jim lightly kissed her clean, apricot-scented hair. Rook looked incredibly appealing to him in a loose-knit cranberry tank top and white cotton slacks. She wore a bright pink silk scarf that was the same color as her cheeks right now. The sandals were delicate on her small, but oh-so-perfect feet. He sighed dramatically, sliding down a bit more in the seat, content. When Rook didn’t answer him, he glanced over at her. She was smiling and, if he was any judge of her feelings, very happy.

  “You know,” Jim confided to her quietly, “I can’t ever recall being this happy. Can you?”

  Rook shook her head, languishing in the warmth of the sunshine that came through the huge windows around the upper deck of the Flyer. “No.”

  “Kinda nice, huh?”

  “The best.”

  Jim met and held her warm gaze. He ached to kiss Rook, to feel the sleek, soft warmth of her body against his. She was such a passionate, giving woman. “Kinda glad you took that fearful step and decided to let our relationship develop?”

  “Now, yes.” Rook ran her fingers through Jim’s thick brown hair. In the sunlight, his hair picked up reddish highlights. There wasn’t anything not to love about him. Rook frowned. Love…there was that word again. She wasn’t sure what real love was, and it was too soon to say that was what they felt for each other. Time…they had time, and Rook was satisfied to let all these new feelings Jim was effortlessly bringing to the surface blossom naturally. Rook didn’t want to put words on what she felt toward him or what he felt toward her.

  She grew thoughtful as she leaned against him. Sometimes, especially after they had made love, she would see an indecipherable emotion linger in his dark-blue eyes. Rook had the intense feeling that Jim wanted to tell her he loved her, but didn’t because he knew she still might run from him.

  Jim sighed and smiled. “Just think, we’ve got a whole two days to ourselves.”

  “Where are we going today?”

  “A special place for a special lady.”

  She smiled. “Where?”

  He raised his eyebrows in mock horror. “And spoil the surprise?”

  “Jim!”

  Grinning, he murmured, “How can I keep a secret from you when you give me that sexy look oóf yours?”

  Rook had never thought of herself as sexy—until lately. “Well?”

  “Okay, I’ve got us a room at the Empress Hotel. She’s the grande dame of buildings in Victoria. We’ll have an elegant, typically English room with more antiques than you can shake a stick at—and their restaurant is excellent.” Jim reached over, caressing her cheek. “At four today we’ll have high tea in the lobby. It’s a very proper, English thing to do, you know.”

  Delighted, Rook sat up. They had often walked by the huge stone edifice that greeted everyone when the Flyer pulled into the docks of Victoria. Rook leaned over, giving him a quick kiss on his curved mouth. Jim smelled so male, so wonderfully inviting. She had to control herself. This wasn’t the place to show too much affection. Rook was jumpy about Eve Logan possibly writing another embarrassing column on her. “Wonderful,” she whispered.

  Jim patted her thigh. “We’re going to have the best two days of our lives,” he promised her huskily. “We’re celebrating our ten-week anniversary.”

  Rook’s laughter pealed through the aft section of the ferry. “You’re crazy, Jim Barton! But I like you anyway”

  “That’s good to know,” he gloated, matching her smile.

  Eve sat with Julia, scrunched down in her vinyl booth seat at the rear of the ferry. From her vantage point, she could easily watch Jim Barton and Rook Caldwell.

  “Juicy,” Julia whispered to her. “She’s all over him.” She kept snapping her Nikon digital came
ra, getting a lot of shots of them.

  Eve diligently wrote her notes. “Wouldn’t you be, too, if he was worth that much money?”

  “You bet, sweetie,” Julia laughed.

  Excitedly, keeping her voice purposely low, Eve said, “This was a great idea, Julia. Who would have thought to follow them to Victoria? This will make our editor very happy.”

  “Just don’t forget I’m taking some discreet photos every now and then.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.” Eve raised her head, scanning the crowd of passengers who were now settling into the rows of booths and seats. There just might be another story here, Eve decided. Three long blasts on the ferry horn announced that they were now underway. Soon, they’d be leaving the deep-water bay, chugging past Ediz Hook where the Coast Guard station sat and moving out into the open waters of the straits. Eve spied two other Coasties.

  “Psst!”

  “What?” Julia sat up, alert.

  “Look, over there! There’s Annie Locke. If I remember correctly, I think that’s Dave Harper with her.”

  Julia craned her neck in that general direction. “Isn’t Locke the one who had major dental surgery about six weeks ago?”

  Eve snickered. “Yeah. Gil told me they used to call her Bucky Beaver over at the hangar. I talked to Jody Theron the other day about Annie. Her surgery was very successful—that Harper guy is a hunk.”

  “No kidding. Wish I was in my twenties again,” Julia commented. “I wouldn’t mind making a play for Harper myself. You know, Annie looks pretty good. I thought you said she was homely.”

  “She was, believe me!” Eve pushed up a bit more in the seat, using the back of the booth and her legs to steady her as she stared across the way at Annie. She sat back down. “She’s hardly homely anymore.” Eve wrote some more notes. “Her jaw was broken and reset. I guess she has to wear braces for the next year or so, but that’s all.”

  Julia watched Annie Locke, who was on the port side and quite a few booths in front of them. “She’ll never be beautiful.”

  “No, but at least she isn’t ugly anymore. This is great. We’ve got two couples to watch. This trip is turning out to be fantastic!”

  “I have a feeling it’s going to be a great one,” Julia agreed, patting herself on the back for the idea in the first place.

  “Where the hell is he?” Ward barely ground out the words from between his clenched teeth. Marcia stood at his side, just inside the bus terminal. All the passengers on the bus from Seattle had disembarked and were now leaving the small station.

  “Oh, Ward, what do you think happened?”

  Stuart headed in the direction of the phone in the stationmaster’s office. “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

  Marcia stood off to one side, listening, as Ward talked on the telephone with the rehab clinic. The man he spoke to told him that the clinic driver had put Ken on the bus and left the station before it had pulled out for Port Angeles. As far as they knew, Ken had been on board.

  Marcia followed Ward outside. The July morning was warm, the sun taking away the chill she felt. She saw the worry and anger in her husband’s face. Marcia voiced what he was thinking. “Do you think he slipped off the bus after the rehab people left and stayed in Seattle?”

  “I don’t know,” Ward began irritably. “That goddamn kid! He’s causing us so much pain and embarrassment!”

  Gripping Ward’s arm, Marcia wisely led him away from the terminal and any ears that might overhear them speaking. As they walked toward their car she said, “Let’s call Sheriff Cole. He said if we needed help to contact him.”

  Ward rubbed his chest angrily. “I’m not dragging the damn sheriff into this, Marcia! Jesus Christ, my career is hanging by threads now. The sheriff has to log in all complaints. Once he does, they’re public information. The goddamn Star would have a field day, and so would Savage.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  He turned to her, his brown eyes burning with anger. “I’m going to give Paul Berne a call, over at District Legal. He’ll keep this quiet.” Ward drew in a shaky breath. He and Berne had flown fixed-wing aircraft up in Alaska together. Their friendship spanned decades. “I’ll ask him to do some unofficial checking with local authorities to see if we can track Ken down.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Kenny braced himself as the ferry moved out into the straits. The behemoth rocked unsteadily through the four-foot waves as he walked between the rows of cars and trucks on the lower deck. Good, everyone had gone topside to look out the huge glass windows that enclosed the upper deck.

  He smiled and stopped in front of a truck with a tarpaulin over the rear, weaving unsteadily. He could feel the high that the coke had given him slowly beginning to fade. He could climb in there, smoke a couple of joints, take a nap and wake up refreshed in Victoria. Kenny had spotted a couple of Coasties on board the ferry and didn’t want them to identify him, so he had decided to stay below.

  Kenny climbed into the rear of the truck. It was dark, except for a bit of light between the tarp that hung over the rear-end cargo compartment. He looked around. Gathering up some loose cardboard and one of several gunnysacks, he created a makeshift bed for himself and lay down. He had already used up his supply of coke between Seattle and Port Angeles. All that was left were a couple of joints of marijuana. Rolling the first joint with a good, thick portion of grass within the paper, Kenny struck a match and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he held the smoke in his lungs for as long as he could, letting the marijuana work its magic.

  God, he was tired. After hitching four different rides to get to Port Angeles, he was beat. Kenny sucked contentedly on the joint until it burned down to his fingers. He dropped it on the wooden floor beside him and rolled another. The first one had ironed out all the kinks in his body. He was hungry, but that could wait. Grinning, Kenny settled back. Wouldn’t his old man shit if he found out he’d robbed a liquor store in Seattle before hitching his way to Port Angeles, and that the first thing he’d done with his money was buy drugs? He patted the bulge of bills in his pocket contentedly.

  The second one relaxed him to the point of sleep. His hand slipped off his chest, the half-smoked joint dangling loosely between his fingers. Closing his eyes, Kenny sighed deeply. He’d get off in Victoria, show his driver’s license to the unsuspecting Canadian customs agents and he’d be free—free of his old man, free of a school he hated and free of people trying to tell him what to do. He’d live in Canada, get a job and become a nameless American. No one was going to tell him what to do, ever again….

  The joint slipped from between his fingers as he fell asleep. The motion of the waves made the glowing tip roll into a stack of loosely tied burlap bags. First one thread and then another smoldered. The burlap was dry and old; the smoke rose in thin wisps. The ferry continued to rock, moving the glowing tip back and forth in the stack of bags. Soon, the threads had enough oxygen to catch on fire.

  Burlap is like sawdust; it burns hot and deep. Smoke rose in the upper portion of the eighteen-wheeler, then descended like a heavy white blanket, trapped within the confines of the truck cavity by the tarp. Kenny, who was in a deep, exhausted sleep, breathed it in. Suddenly, small tongues of flame, reaching for oxygen that slipped between the tarp and the rear of the vehicle, leaped upward. The flame moved slowly from the twine around the burlap down toward the rear, to the tarp.

  A thick cotton cord, nearly an inch in circumference, lay by the opening. The flames greedily ate into the cotton, moving silently up the rope. The instant the flame came in contact with the fresh air, it leaped hungrily to the tarp itself. Within minutes, the tarp caught on fire, followed by the smoldering pile of burlap. Kenny awoke, coughing violently. He felt heat; his skin pricked. Disoriented, still floating in a cloud of drug-induced euphoria and exhaustion, he couldn’t move fast enough to save himself.

  The burlap exploded into a wall of flame that completely enveloped the entire rear of the truck. The cardboar
d containers carrying the powdered chlorine quickly burned. As the white crystals spilled out, mixing with the flames and heat, yellowish-green clouds of smoke began pouring from the rear of the truck. The heat rose quickly—first a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and then fifteen hundred. When it reached two thousand degrees, the brake fluid barrel lids starting popping off. The hydrocarbon fumes from the brake fluid mixed with the oxidizing agents contained in the chlorine. The five canisters in the first row exploded like a chain of firecrackers.

  Ward’s beeper went off just after he arrived at the house. Already upset over Ken’s disappearance, he jerked the device from his shirt pocket. Marcia rolled her eyes, wondering what had gone wrong now.

  “This is Captain Stuart, Chief McDonald. What’s going on?”

  “Sir, we’ve just gotten a mayday call from the Flyer,” he gulped. “There’s been a chain of explosions on the lower parking deck and the ferry is in trouble. She’s got three hundred people on board.”

  “My God,” Ward whispered. Suddenly, his mind went into overdrive. He steadied his voice, hearing the panic in McDonald’s. Both realized the implications of this disaster.

  “All right, Chief, get all available resources underway and start an immediate recall of all base personnel. I’ll be there—” he glanced down at his watch “—in fifteen minutes.”

  Relief came through McDonald’s voice. “Yes, sir!”

  Ward turned to Marcia. “The Flyer’s on fire out in the straits. There are three hundred people on board.”

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Oh, Ward….”

  He kissed her quickly, running toward the back door to the garage. As he drove down toward Port Angeles, he could see the Flyer, no more than five miles off Ediz Hook. Huge, rolling, yellow-green clouds were mixing with black, oily smoke. Green smoke? What the hell could that be? And then he remembered Jody Theron telling him on Friday afternoon that Rook Caldwell was supposed to be on that ferry. So were Annie and her new boyfriend, Harper. He cursed softly, stepping on the accelerator. In the history of the Coast Guard, there had been only one other rescue this large that he knew of—the Prinsendam.