Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

and the engineer, I think they might have come with the boat. They were never around when Albright’s goons set up the ring and we fought. If you could even call what happened in there a fight. Not sure if they don’t actually know what’s going on or just don’t want to know. Either way they’re probably not all in. So four of them at least, plus Albright at the moment. Clint and Travis are his main men. Tall, stringy, bad news.”

“We’ve met,” Jared said. They talked for a while longer, and then the lawyer began to perspire and his voice faltered and his eyes closed and he drifted off. Jared wiped him down again, this time with cold water, and watched him for a while, thinking it all through. He stood up and did some slow stretching and worked his way through some katas and tried to summon the old skills, but he only felt slow and clumsy. Half an hour in he gave it up and lay back and closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing his pulse and getting some sleep. It didn’t come.

His watch had been smashed when he was taken, but he calculated it was three hours later when they finally came for him.

Chapter 46

Passages 1

Annie J

The seas were still building. The quick turnaround between fronts had the southeaster blowing against the leftover northwest swell from the high and the result was a choppy, uncomfortable vertical sea that had the little double-ended troller rising up and slamming down with her progress reduced to under two knots an hour. It had been bad enough for the previous six hours but now the tide was beginning to ebb against him as well, and if nothing changed, Danny figured he’d soon be lucky to make one knot an hour in the Annie J. He was basically burning fuel to bob up and down in misery in more or less the same place. He cursed and slapped the barometer for the tenth time in the last two hours and it did exactly the same thing it had done the previous nine. It stayed the same, or maybe even dropped another hair.

It was unseasonable and annoying; a complete aberration, and Danny was taking it personally. What should have been a comfortable fifteen-hour run up the coast was well into its second day, and now it looked like he’d have to run in for shelter and tie up behind one of the little islands along the coast for the night. It seemed his voyage was cursed. First a plugged fuel filter that had him drifting and tossing around for two hours and resulted in a savage cut across his forehead as he leaned in to change it, and then a long skein of drifting kelp that wrapped itself around the prop shaft and would not fucking come off! And now this sudden shift in the weather. Remaining out here bouncing up and down in the tide rips while taking the occasional green one over the bow was pointless and even a bit risky. With the raised seas and pounding rain the Annie J’s radar was having difficulty picking up the logs and debris that were always a hazard out here in the Strait. To make matters worse, there was a lot more clutter than usual strewn about, a result of the high tides and raised swell that had plucked beached and stranded logs off the shore and put them back into play.

The troller was built like a tank, but even so: shit happened. Ever since he’d been a small child fishing alongside Joseph and his brothers, Danny had heard the stories of the “queer ones,” rogue waves that suddenly rolled up out of nowhere, compressed and balled like huge green fists and took out windows and cabins, and, sometimes, the men sheltering inside as well.

It just wasn’t worth the risk. The weather had to moderate and blow out soon. It was late autumn in the Pacific Northwest for God’s sake, not March in the Bering Sea. He looked at the chart plotter and punched in a course on the autopilot that would take him inside Lasqueti Island. There were some good hidey holes from a southeaster in there, two of which he knew well from having sheltered in them previously.

It was annoying, but his search would just have to wait until the weather improved. According to the marine forecast, they were getting the same crappy conditions up north that he was, and if Danny knew Jared, he would have Arrow anchored snug in some sheltered bay by now and be nursing hot rums and waiting for a let-up. Comforting himself with this thought, he ran off towards the islands, a protected anchorage, and a good night’s rest. Less than an hour later, Danny was asleep in his bunk with a hot toddy warm in his belly and a childhood dream of Joseph and Annie soothing his mind. 2

Legalese

Clarke hadn’t really thought they’d come, him being a cop and all, and them being . . . well, he wasn’t really sure to tell the truth. Not innocents, though, that was for damn sure. But the pair of them had showed up shortly after his phone call with their luggage in tow and it was too late to renege. Ivery told Clarke he’d been trying to contact the Blue Harp for three days now, without success.

“The terms of the charter specify that they remain in touch, check in regularly, but Albright is not answering his phone or emails. Thomas called the boat on the VHF. Same story. No contact. It’s surprising to say the least. Their captain has his hundred-ton ticket, and this is jeopardizing it. There is no way he would not be monitoring the radio channels and responding to our calls. Something has gone badly wrong up there, and it probably has something to do with Albright.”

Clarke said, “I have the same problem with