One Way Out: Scout Ledger Thriller

by Elleby Harper

  Ledger rolled her shoulders. “What the hell would I spend it on?”

  “For a start you could leave a job that puts you in danger. You could travel. I know you have itchy feet. Like you said, traveling’s in your genes.”

  “Like you I don’t think I could sit around doing nothing.”

  “Why not change your job, start a new dream? You were posted to PR in the army, why don’t you put those skills to use and start up your own newspaper?”

  Ledger grimaced and shook her head. “Seriously, Dad, I was in the army for a decade and all you remember is my stint in PR? I left because I want to make a difference in the world.”

  “Then be the fourth estate. Air the nation’s dirty laundry to keep the government guys honest and make the bad guys pay. You could set up a website that exposes corruption.”

  “I’m already exposing corruption.”

  “Really? Your last text to me said you were pissed about the jobs you’ve been handed by your boss. This way you could expose the bad guys from behind the safety of a keyboard.”

  “Let’s not argue about it any more,” she said. “Instead, enjoy this expensive meal you’ve ordered.”

  Dinner was served on two fine china plates the size of the Ducati’s hubcaps. In the very center sat a sliver of fish, a few curlicues of greenery and a dash of sauce artfully smeared across the blank white canvas of plate.

  Four mouthfuls later the meal was demolished. Ledger caught Gene’s eye and his grimace as he shoved the last of his cucumber kimchi into his mouth.

  “Was it worth the fifty-five bucks a meal?” She had trouble keeping the smile out of her voice.

  “My stomach’s still grumbling. I’d rather have had a burger from the local greasy spoon,” he said.

  She laughed. “Me too.”

  He called for the check and, after paying the bill and leaving a generous tip, he drove around until they found a rundown sports bar.

  The inside was heavy on NBA paraphernalia for the Portland Trail Blazers with autographed photos along the walls and a section near the pool tables dedicated to the biggest basketball athletes in the club’s history. Ledger strolled over for a look at what was all but a mini museum harking back to the club’s earliest glory days with original balls and uniforms on display. Everything had a signature scrawled across it.

  “It has a certain rundown charm to it,” Gene said as their burgers were delivered.

  He had ordered a four ounce patty on a toasted bun, brimming over with sauce, melted cheese, caramelized onions and a thick cushion of iceberg lettuce for extra crunch.

  Ledger ordered the chili burger with extra kick, a slathering of sweet onions and topped with pickle.

  “This is more like it!” Gene said, but couldn’t resist adding, “You’re going to get heartburn from that little baby.”

  “I’m soaking up the chilli with my sweet potato fries. Besides I have the constitution of an ox. It comes from having to scrabble in the dirt for scraps.”

  Gene’s face clouded and Ledger immediately regretted her words. It was all the fault of those damn photos Gene had brought with him. They stirred up memories that were better left buried.

  Ledger finished her burger in silence, watched as Gene pushed food around on his plate, leaving more than he ate. She slurped up the last of her chocolate shake while Gene fumbled in his pants pocket. He slapped a heavy carabiner key fob on the table and pushed it across to rest next to Ledger’s cleaned plate.

  “What’s this? Apart from one glass of champagne, you haven’t been drinking tonight so I know I’m not the designated driver.”

  “I want you to have the Ducati.”

  Ledger gasped and shoved the key back towards him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dad! You’ve spent years working on that beast. You’ve only just got it roadworthy. It’s time to enjoy it.”

  “You worked on it with me, Scout,” he corrected her. “I don’t have Autumn’s financial nous so I don’t have a heap of money to leave you. But I want you to have something personal from me. Something that will bring back some good memories.”

  There it was. Out in the open. He’d finally voiced the elephant in the room they’d been hedging around all evening. She swallowed the lump in her throat. She could no longer ignore it.

  “How long?”

  He tried to look offended. “Can’t I give my daughter a present without the third degree? I’m not one of your ICE suspects!”

  “You wouldn’t give up the Ducati unless you had one foot in the grave. Which foot is it?”

  He chuckled, the sound merely a dry rustling of his throat. It was all he could work up. “It’s cancer.”

  “Treatable?” She kept her voice strong even though her insides were trembling.

  “It might have been if I’d gotten to the doc in time.”

  She felt the anger boil up inside her. “But you didn’t go! What were the symptoms? What did you ignore?”

  His words ignited a raging fury at him for putting her in this position. Almost everyone became an orphan at some point in their lives. Now he was making her relive the experience.

  Under the table her hands crabbed, nails biting through flesh.

  “I had some back pain. I just put it down to my age and the type of work I do. I left getting under the car to the younger guys. Then I got pain in my leg. That’s when I went to see the doc. He checked it out. Told me it was a blood clot. The clot turned out to be a symptom. Only, it was already too late. He said with this type of cancer it’s difficult to get it early. By the time the symptoms appear, it’s already spread. It’s gone from the pancreas throughout the body. It’s rife now.”

  The rage drained out of her leaving a void that quickly flooded with desolation. She knew she couldn’t reveal how devastated she was by his news. Inside her head she conducted a pep talk.

  She was an adult now.

  She should be able to handle the loss of a parent.

  Gene needed her to be strong, not to break down in front of him.

  She turned her head forty-five degrees and stared hard out of the bar’s grimy window. There was a clump of people on the far side of the sidewalk. She counted seven heads, bowed together in earnest discussion, like they were in a board meeting deciding whether to jack up the price of gas across the Pacific North West.

  Then she took in their clothing. Ripped jeans. Crop tops for the girls. Muscle Ts for the guys. Not a party of board members but a party of teenagers, maybe a mix of seniors and college freshmen. The topic of conversation less likely to be whether the sports bar was worthy of their patronage and more likely to be would they be able to get away with passing for twenty-one. How particular was this bar likely to be about photo ID?

  She watched them come to a decision, reform the group, with the oldest looking heading up the party. They entered in a bright bubble of noise and laughter. She watched them split in two. The younger members heading for a table while the oldest approached the bar. Their game plan was obviously divide and obfuscate if possible.

  She split her attention from them and flicked her eyes back to Gene.

  “How long have you known?”

  “I visited the doc in the new year. Just after your visit.”

  “Eight months!” she exploded. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  He had the grace to look sheepish. “You were just starting your new job. You were away at training. Then you were busy moving to Portland. You were starting a new life. You were excited. And there was no reason to tell you. By then I knew it was incurable.”

  “I would have stayed in Indianapolis to spend time with you. Time that can’t be replaced.” She banged a fist down on the table. He covered the hand with his own.

  His next words fell across the table like an offering of freshly minted pennies that had never been circulated. Opening up to her was new territory for him.

  “Try not to be angry about this. It’s life. I’ve had a good one. And since you came into it I’ve had the bonus of being a
father as well. Something I thought I’d never have. Your mother and I…” He paused and she saw his eyes tear up before he blinked away the moisture. “Finding you was the best thing that ever happened to me apart from marrying Autumn. Now, let me spoil you by giving you this bike. Every time you ride it you’ll remember the fun we had putting it together.”

  “More like the exasperation!” she said, on a hiccupped laugh. “The arguments we had were media-worthy.”

  “A difference of opinion from time to time. Still, the 750’s worked a treat. She’s a real beauty. A joy to ride.”

  “This is the reason you made the road trip?”

  “While I’m still fit enough. The bike’s not big by some standards, but it still takes strength to handle something that weighs four hundred pounds. I don’t think I can manage another week on the road going back. From now on every day’s a bonus. When you’ve earned some vacation, come and visit me. Maybe we can spend a few weeks together? But don’t be sorry for me, Scout. I’ve had the best innings anyone could ever have. Never feel sorry for me. Now, take me to the bus station. I’ll sleep on the Greyhound and be back in Indy by morning.”

  “Don’t you want to stay a few days?” She fought to keep the wistfulness out of her voice.

  He squeezed her hand. “You’re in the middle of a case. I don’t want to distract you. It’ll be better if you come by when you’re finished.”

  Gene left a tip on the table, wedged under his plate. Ledger picked up the key on its carabiner. Their exit was delayed by one of the bar staff kicking out the teenagers. There was a lot of swearing, a few phones were extended as threats amid protests of heavy-handed tactics from the bar staff as the two groups jostled. But in the end they accepted defeat and allowed themselves to be herded out of the premises. They shuffled along the sidewalk. The Ducati was parked twenty feet up from the bar in the opposite direction.

  Ledger took her father’s arm. It was hard not to feel protective of him. She released him and settled herself into the seat. Gene wedged himself behind her. The engine burst to life as she turned the ignition. She powered up the throttle, enjoying the rumble of power beneath her body. Then she eased out into the road and headed up Burnside towards the interchange to NW Station Way. When she reached the Greyhound Station, she pulled into the almost empty parking lot. Gene removed the soft leather paniers from the back of the bike. They turned into a convenient carry case.

  She helped him purchase his ticket online and walked with him towards the waiting area. Less than a half a dozen people sat in metal chairs, spaced apart from each other, some with backpacks or wheeled suitcases at their feet.

  “My bus doesn’t leave for another hour.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Ledger took the seat next to his.

  He sat with his shoulders hunched, his case resting on the ground and gripped between his legs. She pressed her back against the cold metal. They both sat in silence as the minutes ticked by because there weren’t immediately any comfortable words to say to each other.

  “You do know that I’m thankful every day that it was you who turned up in Gajevi that day the bomb went off.” Gene had detailed the events to her so often as she grew up that it felt like her own memory. “Anyone else would have left me in Bosnia. Only you had the persistence to work through the red tape to bring me back to America and share a life with a stranger. There’s no way to ever repay that generosity.”

  She leaned in towards him, kissed the sunken cheek. And they sat again in silence until the touring bus wheezed into its allotted parking bay. Gene rose to his feet. A beat later, Ledger did the same. They exchanged a hug. She tightened her arms around him and tried not to notice again the new fragility he had acquired. Then he turned to line up with the others.

  She stood and watched his progress until he boarded the bus that would take him back to Indiana.

  9

  Ledger chose the hijack spot carefully.

  She had studied the data on the movements of Woodle’s half-ton Ford pick up around the area to discover some pattern in his movements that she could target. Its most common route was along the road from the rental house he occupied, which Dallenbach had classed as the Sanders’ property, turning onto Pacific Way to head into Oyster Bay. The end point was most often Kendrew Shellfish Farm. The Ford would then loop back to the property, sometimes with a stopover in the town.

  The data she had examined contained many different bits of information. She concentrated on Woodle’s driving habits that showed he went to Northern Shore both during the day and the night shifts, but not in the same 24-hour period. And not every day. It was up to her to interpret what the bits of data meant. From what she’d seen of Woodle in the Northern Shore’s parking lot talking to the employees, she figured that particular driving pattern meant he met the employees as their shifts changed. The day shift workers sorted the oysters for sale and distribution. There were crews that went out from sunrise to sunset on boats, not only to harvest but to clean the oyster cages and maintain and repair the outlying nets and lines. These crews rarely came back to shore until sundown. It was fully dark before they left the oyster farms.

  Ledger had spent a further hour dissecting the data. She wanted to predict when he would be next on the road back to Northern Shore. He visited the oyster farm twice as often during the night time hours as the daytime shifts. That made sense as there would be fewer witnesses around.

  The spot she had chosen was a hundred yards down the county road turnoff from Pacific Way, the road that continued into town turning into the main thoroughfare of Maritime Parade. She straddled the brown Ford Taurus dead center on the gravel road, its nose pointing eastward, heading away from Pacific Way. The turnoff was little more than a lane, eight feet from shoulder to shoulder. The Taurus took up five and a half of those eight feet with its width. The road was well and truly blocked.

  She had surveyed the map data and knew that the graded gravel road traveled past a half dozen other properties besides the Sanders’ house before heading to a national park. They were all big lots, roughly four or five acres each. Plenty of land around double-storied, wide-porched houses and barns owned by rich commuting bankers, lawyers and doctors. Who owned them and what they did on the lots, wasn’t as important as the fact they were there and that the road had a destination that didn’t end in a cul-de-sac. She needed a valid excuse for being on the road. She didn’t want to make it obvious to Woodle that she was targeting him.

  The Sanders’ property had previously run horses on the estate. An aerial view revealed a spread of buildings clumped together like white cells fighting off an unwelcome virus. Plenty of opportunity for Woodle to hide whatever activities he was involved in.

  The road was bordered by huge Sitka spruces and western hemlocks. In between trunks the girth of an adult human, the area was thick with evergreen huckleberry and salmonberry bushes which provided privacy to these estates.

  She jacked up the hood. The universal signal of car trouble. Then she leaned in under the dash. Using a flat head screwdriver she inserted it around the edges of the plastic molding to ease off the cover. She removed the starter relay. It was no bigger than an electrical pin plug. She threw it into the back of the Taurus, hidden out of sight. She fitted the plastic molding back into place, rubbed her hands to get rid of a smudge of grease and settled down to wait.

  She had checked the daily shift schedules at the oyster farms and knew it was less than fifteen minutes before the boats would be brought back in. The sun was behind her. A ball of bright red sinking into the water, sending shadows to stretch ahead of her in uneven runnels across the gravel road.

  Ledger had chosen her outfit with great care, buying each item from a Portland clothing store that decorated its front windows with mannequins in bikini tops and cut off denim shorts. She wore a skimpy top with puffy sleeves that left her shoulders, arms and midriff bare. Under it she sported a short denim skirt to expose her long, toned legs. She could feel the gravel under th
e thin soles of her light weight sneakers.

  It was similar clothing to what she had noticed the young, pretty women Woodle pulled into his car wore. She released her dark hair from its hair tie and let it float around her shoulders. From a distance she hoped she fitted sufficiently into the feminine mold that would pique his interest.

  The only reservation she had with the outfit was that she was unable to hide her duty weapon. The compact Sig Sauer 2022 was nearly seven and a half inches long. She had tried various combinations but hadn’t successfully been able to conceal it. She had toyed with the idea of a longer skirt to field a thigh holster, but discarded the idea in case it didn’t play into the scenario of getting to Woodle. She was taking a chance, but she had assessed it as being of minimal personal risk. Woodle didn’t know she was an ICE officer. She had confidence she could play the part of an Hispanic girl new to the locality. Her intention was only to take a quick snap of Woodle’s face for ID purposes, not engage him in conversation to trap him.

  Even so, she had taken the precaution of filing her paperwork with Bogel. She wanted someone in authority to know exactly where she was tonight in case she needed help.

  At first Bogel had huffed and puffed and blustered about her going outside the parameters he had assigned her. Then he demanded to know her reasons for targeting Woodle. She had left Dallenbach out of her explanation, merely mentioning Woodle’s behavior at North Shore’s parking lot and her deductions about Woodle’s possible drug affiliations.

  That news had sparked Bogel’s interest enough that he had given her the OK to go ahead with her plan. Just as she was heading out, she had learned that CC and Wyche had been paired together by Bogel to stake out the North Shore parking lot and track license plate for any workers who were seen talking to Woodle, presuming that Woodle would go there after his brief encounter with Ledger. Bogel was positioning himself to take over her investigation and claim the credit if the operation was successful. Ledger had stewed over that thought on the drive up the coast. Then she had brushed off her vexed feelings. The only thing that mattered was nailing the guilty guys.