Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (25 page)

46

The
Ingersstrom
floated in the black water of Burns Harbor in Indiana.

As a saltie – an ocean-going cargo boat, not the freshwater ships that stayed in the Great Lakes – it was long at six hundred feet. The green-and-red steel of its hull was marred by discolored water lines and orange swaths of rust. Three thirty-foot cranes towered above the deck like praying mantises. The German-flagged ship had started its Atlantic crossing in Rotterdam and made its way through the Seaway, unloading shipments of steel coils in Canada and New York. In two more days, it would cross Lake Michigan and Lake Superior and pass under the lift bridge into the port of Duluth.

One of the ship’s crew leaned against a portable toilet two hundred yards from the
Ingersstrom
. The toilet smelled. So did he. His tight-fitting white T-shirt was thick with grease, and he hadn’t showered in three days. It was after dark, and he was largely invisible where he stood, but the port was alive with spotlights and metallic noise and the silhouettes of men who looked like busy ants. His blue-gray eyes moved slowly, studying the movement around him. Every hour in port made him nervous, but there were no surprises tonight.

Nearby, heavy boots scraped on gravel. A man waddled toward him from across the railroad tracks near Boundary Road. The crewman shoved his hands in his jeans and curled the fingers of his left hand around an ice pick. The man approaching him was squat and heavy-set, with a beard and greasy black hair. He recognized him as one of the engine crew from the
Ingersstrom
, but he didn’t drop his guard. He made sure the man was alone before he released the wooden handle of the pick.

‘Hello, Bernd,’ the man said to him.

Bernd grunted a greeting back.

‘Any troubles here?’ the heavy-set man asked. ‘All good?’

‘‘All good,’ Bernd said.

‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I had a sausage sandwich in town,’ the man told him. ‘With cheese fries. Better than the shit on board.’

‘Anything is,’ Bernd said.

‘Calm seas, eh? No worries?’

‘No,’ Bernd said, but he didn’t like small talk. The man had gone into the city of Gary for a reason, and Bernd was impatient to get what he’d paid for. ‘You have something for me?’

‘Yeah, I got it. No problems.’

The beefy man reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and extracted a package wrapped in a blue plastic bag. Bernd took it from him immediately.

‘It works?’ Bernd asked.

‘What, you think I tested it? Like I should shoot somebody?’

Bernd shrugged. ‘Cartridges?’

‘In the bag.’

He examined the automatic inside. It would do. He preferred revolvers, but the bigger clips of the black gun would be more useful. And his last revolver had been bad luck. After he’d blown off the face of the blond woman who was trying to run, he’d lost the gun on the wet steps when that other bitch tackled him.

Bernd shoved the gun into his belt and pulled his T-shirt over it. He squeezed the box of cartridges into his back pocket. He felt more secure having a weapon again. It had been a long time without a gun, but those purchases were easier in the USA than in Amsterdam.

The two men stood silently beside each other. The business of the docks went on around them.

‘So,’ the other man said. ‘Duluth again, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Another delivery?’

‘Yeah.’

The fat man thought about this. ‘Captain says he’s hearing things online. More surveillance. More questions.’

‘A body turned up in Amsterdam,’ Bernd said. ‘One of ours.’

‘So they’ll be searching. People will be on guard.’

‘Let them search.’

‘You say that, but it’s all our asses if things go bad. Maybe we should wait.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Bernd snapped.

The fat man didn’t look happy. He wasn’t alone; others among the crew had begun muttering about the authorities. Bernd didn’t like extra heat, but skipping the delivery wasn’t an option. Their buyers were already impatient. The Saudis paid a freaking fortune for the American girls on their shopping lists, so they got what they wanted. Bigger risks meant bigger payoffs.

‘Well, keep your eyes open, eh?’ the fat man said, waving goodbye, heading across the busy port for the
Ingersstrom
.

Bernd grunted a salute.

His full name was Bernd Frisch. He was twenty-six years old. His narrow, pale face was heavily dotted with freckles, and his chin was rounded. He had blond hair shaved to his scalp on the sides and sitting in short, tight curls on top. His lips were thin, his nose a small, shallow bump on his face. Unlike most of his crew mates, he didn’t have a tattoo anywhere on his skin, and he was mostly hairless. He was tall, with a lean, hard body.

He’d lived most of his childhood life in Germany, and he spoke German and English fluently, thanks in part to a succession of American tourist girlfriends. He’d left school at fifteen, when he concluded that he was smarter about the real world than most of his teachers. For five years afterward, he drifted. Berlin. Prague. Riga. Tallinn. Needing money, he’d joined an Estonian gang as muscle to take care of their street-level problems. When the gang expanded into smuggling operations, he’d helped them bribe, blackmail, and threaten their way onto the
Ingersstrom
. The ship was now the backbone of their North American ventures. That included fresh-faced girls who could fetch as much as fifty thousand dollars with certain Arab buyers. They’d trafficked girls six times in two years.

His only failure had been the one who tried to run. The loss of a prime package didn’t sit well in Tallinn, and other gang members had paid for smaller mistakes with a plastic bag taped over their heads. Bernd was lucky. He was too valuable to lose, but the ice under his feet was thin.

He felt his American cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked his surroundings and then slid the phone into his hand. He’d been waiting for his Duluth contact to check in by text:

Are you on time?

Bernd keyed in a response:
Two days. Be ready.

Always.

What about the package?

Already in storage.

Bernd typed:
I expect no problems this time.

There was a long pause before the reply.

The last package arrived late. Not my fault.

Bernd didn’t want excuses. The situation with the woman from Colorado had been a disaster, and he couldn’t afford a repeat. None of them could. As it was, he was afraid the situation in Duluth had become too hot. He wondered about the police investigation and how far it had gone.

Have you had visitors?

Yes.

How much do they know?

Enough to cause problems. Plus, we have a new situation.

What?

There was a problem with the gun I gave you. It had a history. I didn’t know.

Bernd felt his anger rise. More problems. More mistakes. Whenever he relied on other people, they disappointed him. He’d invested time and money in the Duluth operation, and it was too late to walk away now. The only thing to do was to see it through.

Stick to the plan. Collect the girl. And then tie up loose ends.

He wrote:

Make sure the package is ready. I’m coming.

47

Cat listened to the whistle of trains across the street from Al’s house. She rested her feet on the broken footrest of an old recliner and sweated in the stifling living room. Dirty bowls and plates were stacked on a tray table in front of the sofa. The beige carpet was littered with video games and toys.

The walls were white, not yet scuffed with dirt and fingerprints. She saw family photos in frames that hadn’t been rehung yet. If she inhaled, she still caught the tiniest whiff of fresh paint. A couple of months earlier, she’d been here, with the furniture pushed into the center of the room under a plastic tarp, and a roller brush in her hands. She’d painted the downstairs, and Anna had painted the upstairs bedrooms.

That was when she’d met Al. He came home late, exhausted from his second job at the Anchor. She remembered the smile on his face when he saw the walls all white and clean. It was something new in a house that didn’t see many new things. She remembered the look in his eyes when he saw her, too. Men usually looked at her like a lion looks at food. Al’s eyes were different. He didn’t assume that she was for sale. He didn’t even notice the little pooch that said she was pregnant. He’d looked at her with a sense of wonder, as if she were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. Cat – tired, dusty, with flecks of white paint in her hair and on her golden skin – saw that look and fell in love with him right then and there.

She was such a fool.

Al’s mother wandered into the living room from the kitchen and handed Cat a can of warm Mountain Dew. The woman fell into a corner of the sofa that was nearest the recliner. ‘Silence. Isn’t that grand? Everybody’s finally asleep.’

Cat sipped the pop and smiled nervously. ‘It’s not like that a lot, huh?’

‘No, hardly ever. Except late at night like this. Mostly, it’s jabber jabber jabber.’ She put a hand gently on the wall behind her. ‘Gotta tell you again how sweet that was of you to paint this place. Real nice.’

‘It was nothing,’ Cat said. She wasn’t looking for praise for painting the house. Right now, she wanted to forget all about it.

Al’s mother was friendly, but her eyes weren’t naive. She sized up Cat like a butcher who didn’t need a scale to know how much ground beef was in her hand. ‘Is Al the daddy?’ she asked, pointing at her bump.

‘Oh, no, he’s not.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

The woman took short, shallow breaths, but despite her emphysema, Cat caught an aroma of cigarette smoke on her clothes. It was hard to stay away from the things you shouldn’t touch.

‘How old are you, Cat?’ she asked.

‘Seventeen.’

‘I had Al around the same age. Believe me, I know the drill. Is the daddy still in the picture?’

‘No, he and I aren’t together,’ Cat said. She wasn’t going to tell the truth about her baby’s father and the life she’d led before. It didn’t matter. Somehow she had a feeling that Al’s mother was shrewd enough to figure her out.

‘I don’t envy you what you’ve got ahead. It’ll be tough. No point in pretending otherwise. Me, I was lucky. My man stuck with me.’

‘I want the baby,’ Cat insisted.

‘Good for you, but if you’re thinking about my boy as your meal ticket
—
’

‘I’m not.’

‘Hey, I don’t blame you if that’s what’s in your head.’

‘It isn’t.’

Cat didn’t know if Al’s mother believed her, or if she even believed it herself. She thought that she was in love with him, but she was scared, and scared people can convince themselves of lots of things. Al was cute. Nice. Hard-working. Respectful.

And he’d slept with Anna.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

‘I just need to talk to him,’ Cat said.

His mother eyed her. ‘What’d Al do?’

Cat looked at her hands in her lap. ‘Nothing.’

‘Girl shows up at my house late at night and wants to talk to my boy? Come on, you might as well tell me. Otherwise, I’ll get it out of him myself.’

‘I should go,’ Cat said. ‘It was a mistake to come here.’

‘Do what you want, sweetheart.’

Cat tried to get up on her own and couldn’t. She pushed, but her body sank back into the recliner. The effort made her cry. Emotion gushed out of her like water through a broken hose. ‘He slept with my best friend!’ she wailed, feeling like a child.

Al’s mother sighed. She didn’t look surprised, but she waited for Cat to get control of herself and wipe her face before she said anything. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I thought I raised my son better than that. You want me to talk to him?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I’ll talk to him anyway. I expect more from that boy.’

Cat sniffled. ‘I’m sorry. I should go. I don’t even know why I came here.’

‘No, you sit there and wait. Al always gets home about now. You give him hell, girl. He deserves it. And when you’re done with him, he’ll have to answer to me, too. But don’t misunderstand me, okay? I don’t approve of you and him. I’m not in favor. He can’t support you and your baby. He’s got other things to do with his life.’

Cat said nothing. She was miserable, and all she wanted to do was leave, but she heard the noise of a truck door outside. Al was home. Suddenly, Cat didn’t want to see him. It would hurt too much, because she hated him, and she loved him. Then the door opened, and there he was, looking startled to see her sitting there with his mother. He stood in the doorway, not moving, and his mother shoved herself off the sofa. She clucked her tongue at her son and then slapped him in the face.

Al rubbed his stinging cheek as his mother turned on her heels and left them alone. ‘What was that about?’ he said. ‘Why’d she do that?’

‘You know why.’

Al sat down on the sofa, looking like a deer frozen by car lights. ‘What’s going on? I’m sorry I haven’t called you. I’ve been busy.’

‘You’ve sure been busy,’ Cat said. ‘Anna told me what happened.’

Al swallowed hard and closed his eyes. He looked as if he’d begun to sweat through every pore simultaneously. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘All that talk. “It’s okay to wait, Cat. I want it to feel right for you. We don’t need to have sex.” Nothing but talk.’

‘Cat, I’m really sorry,’ he insisted. ‘It was one time, and it was a mistake. I never meant for anything to happen. I was over at the Grizzly Bear talking to Fred, and Anna’s car crapped out. So I took her home.’

‘You took her home and fucked her,’ Cat snapped.

Al took hold of his head with both hands. ‘Look, what do you want me to say? It just happened! She said, how about a drink? I figured, what the hell, one drink. Next thing I knew, we’d finished off a six-pack, and we started making out. It was stupid. You have to believe me, I don’t care about Anna. I care about you. I love you. You wanted me to say it? There, I said it.’

‘Yeah, because it means so much to me now,’ Cat snapped.

‘How can I make this right?’ Al asked.

‘You can’t. You can drive me home, and you can keep your mouth shut the whole way, and then you can go away and leave me alone. I don’t ever want to see you again. I wish I’d never met you.’

‘Cat, please
—
’

She pushed against the arms of the recliner, but she still couldn’t get up. Al jumped to his feet, took her hands gently, and helped her. As soon as she was standing, she pushed him away, not wanting him to touch her. His arms dropped uncomfortably to his sides, as if he had no place to put them.

‘I made a mistake,’ he repeated. ‘People make mistakes.’

‘Take me home,’ she muttered.

He yanked his keys from his pocket. She made her way to the front door, and he followed her silently. His head was hung low in shame. He felt bad, and she was glad. All she wanted to do now was hurt him. Punish him. Having Al betray her was worse than anything else, because she’d begun to count on him being there for her. He’d let her think that a boy could be with her for who she was and forget about who she’d been.

Instead, he’d proven what she always believed.

Nothing good ever lasted.