Arctic Fire

by Stephen W. Frey

  He glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight. “Hey guys, I’ve gotta go,” he said firmly, starting to stand up. “My wife will be—”

  “Sit down,” the guy in the chair closest to him ordered sharply just as there was a hard rap on the door. “Now!”

  A few moments later the man who’d knocked on the door was sitting in a chair in front of Hunter and the other two men had disappeared into another room.

  “Hello, Hunter.”

  The man wore an expensive suit, a sharp button-down shirt, and a Hermes tie. He looked more like a Wall Streeter than a government guy. He was small—short and narrow—but Hunter still sensed danger about him. He seemed to naturally emit it with his eyes.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” he said with a thin smile.

  Hunter sensed that the smile and the friendly demeanor were forced. Maybe they were going to grill him on who’d given him the stock tip after all. Maybe they were after bigger fish and it was a plea-bargain situation. Well, he was going to get a lawyer before he said anything.

  “That’s OK.” Hunter tapped his watch, trying to seem a little irritated. “But it’s getting late.”

  “Cigarette?” the man asked, reaching into his suit coat and pulling out a pack.

  “Nah.”

  “Well, look, I know you’re wondering why you’re here.”

  “To tell you the truth, that had crossed my—”

  “Why did Jack Jensen quit his job at Tri-State this afternoon?” the man demanded. His friendly demeanor soured as he leaned forward.

  “What?” Hunter asked, taken completely by surprise. “I, I have no idea,” he stammered. “How the hell do I know why he—”

  “Tell me!”

  “All I know is that Jack quit. He didn’t even tell me he was going to quit before he did. It was a shock.”

  “Bullshit, Hunter. You’re his best friend. You know more than that.”

  “No, I don’t.” Hunter felt himself really starting to panic. There was something so terrifying about this man’s eyes. “I swear.”

  “Is he going somewhere?”

  Hunter just hoped to God the man wasn’t a mind reader and hadn’t seen the word Florida flash through his brain. It probably didn’t matter if he had, Hunter realized, because the word was probably tattooed on his forehead by now. “I…I don’t know. I’m serious.”

  The man glanced at something over Hunter’s shoulder, but before Hunter could turn around, a clear plastic bag slid roughly down over his head, a rope cinched tightly around his neck, and his hands were clamped together behind his back. Through the bag shrouding his face, Hunter saw the man puffing on his cigarette, calmly watching.

  Hunter struggled violently, but it was useless. There were too many of them and they were too strong. He couldn’t move—or breathe. The bag was going halfway down his throat every time he tried to suck in air, and he could feel himself quickly losing consciousness.

  As his eyes closed all he could think about was that conversation he’d had with Jack about being interrogated as a terrorist.

  After grudgingly agreeing to pay twice the advertised rate up front in cash, along with a forty-dollar tip, the old man doing the graveyard shift behind the cheap motel’s front desk hadn’t required a credit card imprint or a name. However, the anonymity was providing Jack little peace of mind.

  With one final heave, the heavy chest of drawers stood directly in front of the door to his room. Jack backed off slowly and sat down on the edge of the bed beside the envelope full of cash Cheryl had given him earlier. Maybe all of this was overkill and he didn’t need to be so worried. Maybe that warning voice whispering to him from the back of his brain was wrong.

  He shook his head as he reached for the loaded pistol lying on the mattress beside him. No way. Better safe than sorry, especially if being sorry meant being dead. Better to go the extra mile—an extra thousand miles if that was necessary—than get run over by a van.

  Better safe than sorry. That was going to be his mantra until this thing was finished—one way or the other.

  CHAPTER 16

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, was more than four thousand miles from Dutch Harbor, but that was where Jack had come to pick up the trail of truth about Troy.

  A man named Ross Turner had pointed him there. Turner had been Jack’s fraternity brother at Denison, and he was one of those few friends from way back Jack still had.

  After graduation, Turner had gone to Alaska to hunt and fish for a year before going to Harvard Law School. Harvard had given Turner a deferral to get the Alaska bug out of his system. But one year had turned into eight, and any lingering thoughts of the law had been erased by images of the grizzly bears he’d shot and the king salmon he’d landed. Now Turner made his living hunting and fishing—as a guide.

  Jack’s second call to Turner in a week—a call Jack had made only minutes after almost being killed by the white van on Broadway—had prompted Turner to dig even deeper into Captain Sage Mitchell’s sketchy reputation. During his years in Alaska, Turner had made contacts everywhere, including police barracks and Coast Guard stations up and down the seaboard. And it didn’t take him long to uncover a fascinating piece of information that had somehow steered clear of the press.

  The Arctic Fire had lost a greenhorn to the Bering Sea during last year’s king crab hunt as well. His name was Charlie Banks, and he’d been thrown overboard by a rogue wave during a violent storm while he was up on the crab trap mountain trying to secure equipment that had torn loose in a gale. His body was never recovered, and Captain Sage had provided few details of the incident to the Coast Guard or the police. Banks’s family and fiancée had flown to Dutch Harbor from the lower forty-eight to make sense of the tragedy, but Sage told them even less than he’d told the authorities.

  Turner had learned from his source that Banks’s family and fiancée had pushed hard for a more intense investigation, but there was nothing the state or local authorities could do. There was no body and no reason to suspect foul play, so they couldn’t allocate what were always scarce law-enforcement resources in Alaska to the situation. And, after all, crabbing on the Bering Sea was the deadliest job in the world. Men and women who chose to sail those dangerous waters in November understood the risks. If they didn’t, they were stupid. And in Alaska there was little sympathy for being stupid.

  Charlie Banks’s story was so chillingly similar to Troy’s that as soon as Turner had called back this morning to relay the details, Jack had gone straight to Penn Station in Manhattan and bought himself an Amtrak ticket for Baltimore. Banks was originally from Baltimore.

  More importantly, so was the girl Banks had intended to marry when he died.

  Sidewalkers Cafe was just a hole-in-the wall joint on the Baltimore Harbor with twenty wobbly wooden tables and some corny fishing memorabilia hanging from the walls. But everyone around Jack in the Amtrak car had told him this was the place to go to get the best seafood in a city known for its seafood.

  Jack leaned back in his chair to give the waitress room to put the plate down. It was piled high with two crab cakes, fried oysters, and a fried filet of flounder as well as heaping helpings of hush puppies and french fries. There was nothing healthy about it, but it looked and smelled delicious, and one bad meal wasn’t going to kill him. He hadn’t eaten since last night, and he was starving.

  “Thanks.” He smiled up at the waitress. He was glad the restaurant had gotten great reviews from people on the train, but he would have come here even if it hadn’t. This place had been his ultimate destination all along. “Sure looks good.”

  “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

  The pretty young woman had long black hair, high cheekbones, glistening brown eyes, full lips, and a beautiful smile. All of that black hair was piled together haphazardly on top of her head in a wild bun; she didn’t have makeup on, and she was wearing a loose University of Maryland white sweatshirt and baggy jeans. She wasn’t dolled up, but she still looke
d great.

  She was nice too, really nice. She’d seemed so genuine as she’d taken his order a few minutes ago. And during those brief moments Jack was convinced he’d seen a naïveté and an innocence hiding in her naturally trusting expression and those big brown eyes—which, of course, he was drawn to.

  “More tartar sauce, please.” He didn’t want to wreck her night, and his first instinct was always to protect vulnerable women. But he had to stay focused on the fact that he was here to find out what had happened to Troy. “One dish won’t get me through all this food.”

  “No problem.” She gave him that easy smile. “Be right back.”

  Maybe he should let her finish her shift before he started firing questions at her, Jack figured as he watched her walk away. He hated the thought of making her dredge up such terrible memories.

  “Here you go,” she said as she got back to the table and put the dish of tartar sauce down beside his plate. “That should do you.”

  He gazed up at her, still going back and forth. “Thanks, Karen.”

  She’d been about to turn away, but the sound of her name made her freeze. She wasn’t wearing a name tag, and she hadn’t said her name to him when she’d first come to the table. Jack saw the emotion race through her expression.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked in a hollow voice as she stared down at him intently.

  It was like she’d seen a ghost, he realized. “I just want to ask you some questions.” The anxiety in her eyes disappeared, and Jack saw a steely toughness rise up to replace it. “That’s all I want, I promise. Please help me.”

  She gazed down at him for several seconds more.

  Maybe there was a chance, he prayed. “Please.”

  But she turned and bolted for the door.

  “Damn it!” He grabbed a crab cake off his plate and took a bite as he jumped up and sprinted after her. As he dodged his way through the tables, out of the corner of his eye he saw another waiter quickly put down his tray of food. “Why can’t anything be easy?” he muttered to himself, tossing what was left of the crab cake down onto another patron’s plate as he raced past the table.

  He rushed through the entrance out onto the sidewalk just as Karen darted between two parked cars on the other side of the street. He took off after her, avoiding an older couple with a quick juke and an agile sidestep. As he did, he was aware that someone had burst out of the restaurant’s front door behind him.

  Karen was fast, and it took Jack several blocks to catch her.

  “I just want to talk to you for a few minutes!” he yelled when he was finally only a few strides behind her. At thirty he was still in excellent shape. He’d been a good high school football and lacrosse player. Nowhere near as good as Troy, but good, and he still worked out. “Come on, stop!”

  “I don’t have anything to say!” she yelled back over her shoulder. “I already told you people that. Leave me alone or I’ll call the cops.”

  “What people? I don’t know who you’re talking about.” God she was fast. “My name’s Jack Jensen. My brother Troy just died on the Arctic Fire.” And she had stamina. She hadn’t slowed down at all. “The captain said he was thrown overboard by a rogue wave, but I don’t think—”

  Karen pulled up so suddenly Jack could only avoid crashing into her by diving over the trunk of a car that was parked by the curb. As he scrambled to his feet, someone raced around the back of the sedan at him.

  “No, Mick!” Karen yelled. “No!”

  Jack heard Karen shriek frantically as he blocked the guy’s punch with a forearm, then delivered a wicked body combination. Mick dropped to his knees and clutched his stomach as Jack coiled up to put the guy down for good with a right hook to the chin.

  Before he could pummel whoever the guy was, Karen barreled into him from the side and knocked him away.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted.

  “What am I doing?” Jack demanded angrily between gasps for breath, impressed by her body block. She didn’t look like she weighed much, but it had been powerful. Maybe she wasn’t as vulnerable as he’d first thought. “That guy’s the maniac.” He pointed at Mick, who was still hunched over, clutching his stomach. “Who the hell is he?”

  “A friend,” Karen muttered, breathing hard too. “He was just protecting me.”

  “From what?” Jack asked, bending over and putting his hands on his knees.

  “You.”

  “But I wasn’t doing anything. I just wanted to ask you some questions. I told you that at the table.”

  “How was Mick supposed to know that? How was I? You chased me out of the restaurant like a nut job.”

  “Well, you ran out of the restaurant like a nut job.”

  “Well, you knew my name.”

  “OK, OK.” Jack lifted off his knees and held his hands out apologetically. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done it that way.”

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Jack. Jack Jensen. A week and a half ago my brother went overboard off the Arctic Fire. The captain said it happened when a rogue wave hit the ship, but I didn’t buy that. Then I heard about what happened to your fiancé and I had to talk to you. The captain of the Fire told the cops exactly the same story about Charlie Banks that he told them about my brother.”

  Karen knelt down next to Mick and patted his back. “How did you find me?” she asked Jack.

  “I’ve got a friend up in Alaska who knows—”

  The sound of screeching tires drowned him out. In the glow of the overhead lights he saw two men jump from a dark SUV across the street. Both of them had pistols.

  “Come on!” he shouted, grabbing Karen’s wrist and pulling her between the cars as the sounds of guns exploding and bullets pinging metal pierced the darkness.

  “Wait!” she yelled, yanking her hand from Jack’s. “Mick!”

  But as Mick staggered to his feet between the cars, a bullet slammed through the back of his skull and tore out of his right eye, spraying blood and brain matter into the air. Karen screamed as Mick crumpled to the ground in front of her and the red and gray mess splattered her white sweatshirt.

  Jack pushed Karen down on the sidewalk behind the car, then whipped the Glock .9 mm out of his belt. It was the same pistol he’d slept with last night at the motel, and now he was damn glad he’d listened to that paranoid voice inside his head.

  He chambered the first round, rose up so he could barely see over the trunk, and blasted four shots at the men racing toward them. One of the men tumbled to the street on the other side of the car while the other peeled off to the right and dived behind a car that was several up from the one they were kneeling behind.

  “Come on,” Jack yelled, jabbing the barrel of the gun in the opposite direction of the way the second guy had just headed. “Let’s go!”

  “I can’t leave Mick here.”

  Jack grimaced as he glanced down at her blood-spattered sweatshirt. “There’s nothing you can do for him. Come on!”

  “Wait!”

  Jack watched in amazement as Karen reached to the small of her back and pulled out a revolver from a holster clipped to her jeans.

  She dropped to the sidewalk, put the right side of her head onto the pavement so she could see below the bottom of the car, aimed, and fired twice. As Jack’s gaze flashed in the direction the second guy had gone, he heard a scream and then a loud groan from the other side of the car—just as a dark silhouette appeared between the second and third cars up the street. He fired four shots at the silhouette, which quickly ducked down between the cars again.

  As another SUV screeched to a halt behind the first one and two more men piled out, Jack and Karen helped each other up and raced away.

  “There!” Jack pointed at the corner of a brick building in front of them, ecstatic that she was so fast and could keep up so easily. They cut quickly to the right and raced down the dark alley. “Let’s get behind that thing and ambush them,” he muttered, pointing at a
Dumpster fifty feet ahead on the left. “They’ll never see it coming.”

  “How many rounds do you have left?”

  “I’m not sure. Not many.”

  “You have another clip on you?”

  “No.”

  “No good, then,” Karen gasped as she ran. “Not enough ammo, and besides, there might be more of them around. Better to get out of the alley altogether,” she muttered as they sprinted past the Dumpster.

  All of which made a lot of sense, Jack realized. “Were you in the military?” They’d almost made it to the end of the alley.

  “No, I was a Baltimore city cop for two—”

  Gunfire rang out behind them, and once again the air was filled with bullets.

  A moment later Karen tumbled headfirst to the pavement and her pistol clattered down the alley in front of her.

  Amy Smith was tall and blonde with soft though not beautiful features. She was only thirty-two, but she dressed like a matron. It was as if she were advertising how much she wanted to be a mother.

  But that hadn’t happened yet.

  Amy was the daughter of a Wall Street money manager who’d shot himself in the head six years ago just as the SEC was raiding his lower Manhattan offices. He’d defrauded his institutional clients of over five billion dollars, but no one had ever held her father’s crimes against Amy. She’d never been involved with her father’s firm, and she did a great deal of charity work for children.

  She and Hunter were married several months after her father’s suicide, and they lived in the guesthouse of an estate that was a few miles from the Jensen farm. They’d tried desperately to have children for the first several years of their marriage, but it hadn’t happened. Now they were looking into adoption, hoping that would be the answer to their prayers.