The Alaska Escape

by K. B. Spangler

  Tamino reacted as if I had kicked him in the stomach. His hand went to his gun. “Get out,” he hissed. “Get out of that car, now.”

  “Now, I’m no longer recording. Now, I’m livestreaming this to a friend at CNN,” I lied. “You want to kill me on national television?”

  He thought about it. He actually thought about it. I saw hatred wrestling with common sense as he weighed out whether the immediate gratification was worth it. I’ve been in some pretty dangerous situations, but this was probably the closest I’ve ever come to dying. One guy with a gun and a grudge.

  Humans are complicated.

  It took a million years, but Tamino finally removed his hand from his gun.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now we can talk about the bear.”

  Bewilderment stomped straight across his face, followed by a much more natural scorn. “Bear?” he laughed. “Yeah, we get bears up here.”

  Damn it. Okay, might as well be extremely sure.

  “Officer Tamino, I owe you an apology.” I gave him a sheepish smile. “I don’t want to part on bad terms twice. Can I make it up to you? Let me buy you the best drink they’ve got in Anchorage.”

  “Drink?” He checked his watch. “It’s not even seven.”

  I let my overall sense of exhaustion fall over me like a shroud. Anyone with an ounce of empathy has felt that way on their worst days: Tamino rocked back on his heels, suddenly stunned. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I’ve had a couple of days like you wouldn’t believe,” I told him, letting my forehead press against the steering wheel. “Turns out my friend’s grandfather has this bear…”

  It was a decently complete version of the story. I made sure to add the parts with a large dose of humility: Tamino ate up the parts where the bear had decided to snuggle up on me. We ended up sitting on the hood of his police cruiser, sharing coffee out of a giant thermos. Tamino was bewildered about the bear, and confirmed that, yes, the blood found in Pappy’s cabin contained an anticoagulant citrate solution. Just like the kind used in blood donations.

  Was Pappy still a suspect in an assault?

  Well…there was no body, and the scene appears to have been staged, so…maybe he was a victim? In any case, there were questions which still needed to be answered.

  I made sure he had time to call into the office and let them know where he was, that Pappy had been located, and that he was about to get a statement.

  Fifteen minutes later, Raven hadn’t shown up.

  Damn it twice.

  I got back into my car and he followed me the last mile up the road. When we arrived, Pappy was outside, flipping that enormous knife around and around so the handle kept smacking against his open palm. He came at me, knife in one hand, the other clenched into a fist. “She stole Brenda!”

  “Someone’s been kidnapped?” Tamino brightened with the promise of a big case.

  Damn it three times.

  “Brenda is the bear,” I explained, as I reached out and snagged Pappy’s knife out of the air before it could finish another rotation. I inspected it: the knife was a solid, heavy piece of work. It was also different than the one he had been carrying the last few days. He had found his missing Bowie knife. “Sir? Who else knows about Brenda? Did you show her off to anybody?”

  “No one.” He glared at me until I returned the knife, handle first. “I didn’t even tell my son.”

  “No shit, dad!” Douglas shouted from an open window.

  The door opened and Mare came outside, smiling at Officer Tamino. “Hello, officer,” Mare said in a singsong voice. That smile didn’t reach her eyes at all, and showed plenty of teeth. “Welcome back.”

  “He’s here to take an incident statement,” I said, shooing Pappy and Tamino off to conduct business. Mare tended to smile like that when she wanted to dissect someone with her words alone.

  “Did you do your thing?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said aloud, staring at the road. “They’re already on their way. Should be here soon.”

  I whistled softly. “How did you pull off such a tight timetable?”

  She sighed. Her presence in the link was a complicated knot of stress, as if she was wrestling with betrayal but was also resigned to that outcome. “I told them that they’d get Brenda.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Officer Tamino turned out to be a great actor. Which was good, because when you’re dealing with OACET Agents, you need to go live and nail it on the first take or nobody will believe it’s real.

  I hid behind the police cruiser so I wouldn’t end up as part of the shoot. On the count of five, Tamino hit the button on his phone and made the call.

  “Hungerford!” he said in a harsh whisper, his face tight in the lens of his phone’s camera. “Send someone out here! Murphy’s cabin! Right now!”

  I was riding along on the call, so I heard Sergeant Hungerford ask,” What? What’s happening?”

  “Here! Here! Look at this!” Tamino turned the camera away from his face to show her the inside of Pappy’s cabin. It was exquisite timing: the white bear chose that moment to rear up and roar, its enormous broad, furry back dominating the frame.

  Tamino turned the camera away from the bear and back towards himself. “This…this bear…I came to get Murphy’s statement, and he said its two siblings were killed, so his son is going to put it on a plane and fly it out of here to Canada, and—”

  “Hey!” Mare opened the cabin’s front door, her expression shifting from confusion to anger. “What are you—”

  I reached out through my implant and severed the phone call, and then started to applaud. “That’s a wrap! Well done! Well done, everybody!”

  Scattered applause broke out behind me. The two new arrivals had followed my lead and had hidden behind the cruiser to make sure they didn’t get snagged in the shot. Behind us was an antique truck marked “Uncle Roy’s Bear and Tiger Emporium!” with cartoon renderings of a bear and a tiger chasing each other around a poorly drawn cartoon planet Earth.

  “All right!” Uncle Roy himself had come along on this expedition. He was a giant balding Santa Claus of a man, with a jolly laugh. He ran a tourist trap on the outskirts of Anchorage, showing exotic animals recovered from nasty situations to the kiddies. The polar bear in Pappy’s living room had performed in a circus for twelve years. Her name was named Gladys, and Uncle Roy had sworn she was as trained as a polar bear could get.

  (The polar bear’s handler had leaned over and whispered that even a highly trained polar bear was about as stable as bucket of lit dynamite, and no, I could not pet her. I hadn’t wanted to—or asked if I could—so I suppose he needed to field that question a lot.)

  “Get Gladys back on the truck, and let’s get going,” Uncle Roy said. “Gotta go prep a paddock for my new albino baby.”

  “Not an albino,” Mare said. “Brenda’s eyes and nose are dark. We think she’s at least part Kermode bear, and—”

  “Not now, babe,” I said, as I put myself between her and Gladys as the polar bear padded her way back to the truck. The animal was at least twice Brenda’s size. We had decided to keep the video call short and sweet, and only show the parts of Gladys which were definitely the bear part, and not the polar part. The shape of her head alone would have given the game away.

  That game?

  Triplets.

  Raven had killed Brandon and captured Brenda. Only Pappy could say for sure that there wasn’t a third white bear out there. Raven would have to check out this lead, or risk losing one of the most impressive collections a modern-day hunter could acquire.

  Tamino’s phone kept ringing. “Go ahead,” I told him.

  He answered it. “Hungerford. Yeah, I’m safe. Yeah, nobody’s hurt. They hired that Uncle Roy guy to move the bear to the airport. They’re loading it onto the truck now.”

  Which was true. There was a second truck, one without the cartoon abominations airbrushed across the sides, and the trainer was coaxing a willing Gladys up the ramp with the help of w
hole salmon. The ancient cartoon-encrusted truck would follow the back roads to the airport, while the truck holding Gladys would take the straightest route.

  And once we got to the airport?

  Gates would shut. Security forces would be called. Done and done.

  Tamino thumbed his phone off, and came over to join me and Mare. “You sure about this?”

  “Ninety percent sure,” Mare said, as she snuggled up against me. “The poacher has someone feeding them information from within your department. It might not be Hungerford, but we know they’re connected to her.”

  It was Hungerford. We’d probably never be able to prove it, but someone had managed to come into Pappy’s cabin and get their hands on the Bowie knife he’d been carrying around since Vietnam. It’d be easy to do that if you were sleeping with him, and nearly impossible if you weren’t.

  Since that person also snuck back into the cabin and returned the knife… Well, that said a lot. Mare and I weren’t sure what it said, exactly, but it said a lot.

  “Even if they’re just monitoring her phone, that’s something you’ll want to stop,” I told Tamino. “And if she is involved…” I trailed off as Tamino began to grin. It was similar to Mare’s predatory grin, and was a good reminder that Tamino was not necessarily Deep Down A Nice Guy.

  We all use each other. Tamino was about to use the upcoming arrest of a big-game poacher to skyrocket his career. Mare and I were using Tamino to draw Raven out. I had used a couple of well-meaning security guards to—oh shit, I still needed to call them! I mean, I had paid the bill and bought them suits, and I’m sure they had gotten some, but…

  Oh, well. You get the idea. I think the definition of love is when we recognize the value of others based on their own merits, instead of what they can do for us.

  I tilted my head so I could feel Mare’s hair against my cheek. She still smelled of the lake from two nights ago. A moment of peace.

  Mare relaxed against me for the space of two long breaths, and then pulled herself back into business mode. “All right! Split up and meet at the airport!”

  My job was to ride shotgun in the cartoon truck, with the expectation that Raven would assume I would in the same truck as the third bear. Officer Tamino would follow along in the cruiser for the same reason. Meanwhile, Gladys would be driven by her trainer, with Mare, her father, and grandfather following along in the bland rental sedan. We’d all meet up in an unguarded shipping hanger outside of the main terminals and pretend to wait for a plane.

  And then?

  I wasn’t sure.

  If Raven was as smart as she had shown herself to be thus far? She should take Brenda, cut her losses, and run.

  But….

  …but Raven had a history of poaching animals from protected lands, and she knew the next time she was caught, she’d face jail time. She still did it anyhow.

  …but Raven knew that Brenda was guarded by a murderous mountain man who had killed before. She was willing to frame him for assault or worse, to try and put him in a holding cell during the hunt.

  …but breaking the terms of our deal? Something which was sure to anger two of the most prominent public-facing Agents in the most infamous federal organization in history? Raven had played along until she saw an opportunity to snatch the bear, and then she had prioritized the animal over our arrangement.

  The only explanation that made any sense was that Raven was an addict. Either the risk wouldn’t let her go, or she was driven to acquire the full set, or both. The way she looked at it, she had at least ten people working for her at this moment, plus those she had seeded throughout the local community. I had four people we could count on, and those were the three members of the Murphy clan plus myself. Everyone else was an unknown quantity; I still half-expected Officer Tamino to shoot me when my back was turned.

  If I were Raven, I’d see this as a winnable challenge. The odds were in my favor, and the lure of a third trophy would be a risk worth taking.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Uncle Roy tried to make small talk. I listened and replied, but most of my attention was riding along with Mare in the sedan. Her presence in the link felt like an argument waiting to happen. Pappy wasn’t happy she had sold Brenda to a tourist trap, and Mare was doing her best to calm him while also keeping watch for Raven.

  “I shall murder him,” Mare told me. “Death. All of the death. Perhaps followed by recreational stabbing, for my daily cardio.”

  “Wait on that,” I replied. “We still don’t know if Brenda is alive.”

  Sadness, followed by rising anger as she engaged in a conversation I couldn’t hear. And then—

  A moment of calm. Not peace. No, this was the pure white flash of shock.

  Then, a crashing wave of pain.

  I lunged forward so fast that the seatbelt threw me back against my seat. “Mare!” I shouted, both aloud and through our link.

  “…Josh…”

  “Mare! Babe, what’s happened?!”

  She sent me an image. The car windshield, spiderwebbed from impact. Her father, motionless in the driver’s seat in front of her. Two men emerging from a Jeep Grand Cherokee at the top of a hill, the big chrome grill on the front beaten to hell.

  Emotions. Her arm…her ribs…pain!

  “…crashed. Help…”

  “Go!” I shouted at Uncle Roy. The old man was staring at me as if I had grown an extra set of eyes. Right, right, he had no idea what was happening. I took a breath. “We need to get to Gladys,” I said, more calmly. “There’s been an accident.”

  That got him moving.

  It was the most agonizing five minutes of my life. Uncle Roy would have driven like a bat out of hell, except the old truck wasn’t up to the task and couldn’t be pushed. The link allowed me to take some of the pain from Mare, but without skin contact, there was only so much I could do. All I could really do was talk to her, keep her awake and focused.

  “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Pappy’s fine…shook but fine…the crash sent us into the ditch. He’s out of the car…he’s got his gun.”

  God, how had I forgotten about that hand cannon of his? How do you even carry something like that in public? “Why is his gun out?” I asked her.

  “The men…more cars are here. Uncle Roy’s other truck stopped to check if we needed help, and the car boxed them in.”

  Shit. Shit! Never in a million years did I think Raven would take it this far. I had underestimated her again, and now Mare was hurt, and now—

  “Shut up. This was my plan.”

  Right, but that didn’t change how I was here and she wasn’t and—

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?” I yelled.

  “We’re almost there!” promised Uncle Roy.

  Towards a steep hill, with the old truck deciding it had done enough and it stalled out on the rise. Mare was just over the top—just over there!—so I kicked the door open and jumped out.

  Over the top of the hill and—

  Bodies. Fire. The roaring of an enraged bear from the back of a burning truck.

  Asphalt kicked beneath my feet, showering my legs with hot fragments. Someone was shooting at me! I dove into the trees at the side of the road, and rolled down a steep woody slope. At the bottom was Mare’s rented sedan, the driver’s side caved in from impact.

  Pappy was using the car’s hood as cover, his elephant killer of a handgun aimed at the road above us. He saw me coming and pointed at the car: “Get them out!”

  I went in from the passenger’s side. Mare saw me and gave me a weak smile. “Finally.”

  “We took the scenic route,” I said. From the front seat, her father forced a chuckle. “Tell me what hurts.”

  “My left side,” Mare said. “Dad’s legs.”

  Her left arm was hanging wrong. I activated a physiological diagnostic program that one of OACET’s medical professionals had developed, and scanned Mare first, followed by her father. She had gotten the worst of it, with a bro
ken collarbone and bruised ribs. The airbag had caught most of Douglas’ momentum, but his bad knee had been wrenched sideways and was trapped between the car seat and the twisted metal of the door.

  “You first, babe,” I said.

  “No, my dad—”

  “Mare!” the three of us shouted at once.

  “Fine. Hurry,” she said, as she draped her right arm over my shoulder. Her bare skin touched mine, and pain flared within my body, mimicking her injuries. We both gasped: me, from taking half of her pain, while she sighed with relief.

  “C’mon,” I said, as I slowly pulled her from the car. She didn’t as much as whimper. “You need a hospital.”

  “Get my dad, and make people to stop trying to kill us!” she gasped. “Then, hospital.”

  “Priorities.” I took her weight and carefully slid her to the ground beside Pappy. I kept a hand on her bare arm to keep a tight grip on her pain.

  Pappy glanced down to make sure Mare was safe, then back up to watch the road, fast as lightning. “Can you get to Dougie?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “His leg is pinned. I need to go in from the driver’s side door, and I’d be exposed.”

  “Okay.” Pappy pointed with the barrel of the gun. “Only one of them has a firearm, and they’ve gone through a lot of bullets. If I cover you, can you get to the second truck?”

  Second truck? For a moment, I thought Uncle Roy might have coaxed the old junker over the hill. Instead, I recognized the first as the one hauling Gladys. The second truck was new to me, and it was the one on fire.

  I started to laugh. Brenda was alive, and from the sound of it, she was pissed.

  “Get my girl out of that truck,” Pappy said. “She’ll do the rest.”

  Volunteer to be the first thing in the way of an angry, panicking bear she’s finally set free? That didn’t sound anything close to a good plan. Besides, I had seen Gladys’ trainer lock the back of her truck with a giant padlock. I assumed that was standard policy when you were hauling around actual apex predators. “I can’t. She’s locked in.”