Money Shot (10 page)

“That’s the slaughterhouse.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not pretty but it’s up to code.”

“Don’t tell me you’re the island’s health inspector, too?”

“No,” he said as he shouldered open the cabin’s back door. “I helped Einar convert it when he decided to raise chickens, that’s all.”

She considered that as she followed him into a miniscule galley kitchen. “You helped him? Or you turned his nasty old shed into a legitimate slaughterhouse while he walked around with his shirt off in case any ladies happened by?”

He chuckled as he wrestled the lid off an old-fashioned metal trash can inside the pantry. “Some of both, I guess.” He dipped a plastic bucket into the can and came up with a scoop of chicken feed. He filled a second bucket and headed for the chicken coop. Goose followed.

The plastic arch was maybe six feet wide, and just high enough for a tall man to walk under without stooping. A complicated arrangement of chicken wire, plastic sheeting and two-by-fours spanned the butt end of the arch, and Rush untwisted a series of wires that allowed him to swing it open like a gate. He held it open and waved for her to precede him.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Come on, di Guzman. You’re letting the cold air in.”

Goose gave him a look that promised retribution should this be some kind of elaborate practical joke, then stepped under the PVC arch supporting the plastic sheeting.

The air was close and surprisingly warm, thick with the distinct but not unpleasant odor of living things. Light filtered in through the sheeting, watery and gray, and Goose realized that rows of hay bales lined the interior walls of the coop as well as the exterior. Chickens of all sizes, shapes and colors roosted by the dozens on long poles suspended horizontally above each row of hay bales, facing each other across the narrow walkway that bisected the space. Not, Goose thought, that anybody could actually walk on the eight inches of wood shavings littering the floor.

The birds all swung blank chickeny eyes toward the source of the draft—toward her—and Goose tensed. In terms of decent ways to die, getting pecked to death by angry fowl wasn’t exactly taking a bullet for the president. But the chickens only whirred and chucked and snicked to each other, supremely unconcerned by her unannounced arrival.

Then they saw Rush.

MORE ACCURATELY, Goose supposed, they saw the feed buckets dangling from his hands.

Chickens exploded off their roosts as if catapulted and screeched through the air toward her like fat, feathery hand grenades. Goose squealed—a shameful, girlie noise—and threw her hands over her head. She dropped into a crouch on the wood shavings and braced for impact.

It took two hard thuds of her heart to realize that she wasn’t dead yet, her eyes pecked out by savage poultry. She risked a peek through her arms in time to see that Rush—good, strong,
wise
Rush—had heaved the feed buckets over her head to the far end of the coop.

The chickens, in an unexpected feat of aerial dexterity, reversed direction en masse to land in a squawking, scrabbling pile in and around the buckets. Within seconds, the coop was once again filled with the soothing chirr of fluffed feathers and placid birds.

“What,” Goose managed, “was
that
?”

“Feeding time,” Rush said, climbing up to sit on a hay bale. He shrugged out of his backpack, unzipped it and offered Goose a bottle of water. “Better hydrate,” he said. “We’ve been hiking all day.”

Goose accepted the bottle and climbed up on the hay to sit beside him. Her knees were a little wobbly still. “Is it always like that?”

“You get used to it.”

They drank in silence for a minute or two while Goose turned a fascinated eye on her surroundings. Finally she said, “There must be four dozen chickens in here.”

“Easy. More like five or six.”

“So between the hay and the body heat, it stays pretty warm. I get that part. But how is it that this place doesn’t stink to the high heavens? I mean, I’m no farm girl, but even I know chicken shit stinks.”

“Einar’s a deep litter man.”

“Yeah. I got that.” Goose eyed the thick blanket of wood shavings on the floor. “But deep litter usually equals deep odor.”

“No, deep litter is a method of coop maintenance. It means you just throw down another few inches of pine shavings every time it starts to stink, sprinkle it with a chemical that dries the shit faster, and basically let the coop compost itself. Which, in one of those neat little synergistic things farmers are so good at, generates yet more heat.”

“Huh.” Goose was impressed despite herself. “Einar’s a good farmer?”

“Einar’s a lazy farmer.” He smiled without malice. “In this instance, it happens to work.”

They drank in companionable silence for a minute or two more.

“So,” Rush said eventually. “How’s the investigation going?”

She cast him a sidelong look. “You mean have I decided whether or not you’re a stone-cold assassin yet?”

He didn’t smile. “You’ve read my file, Goose,” he said quietly. “You know what I am.”

Something bleak and terrible moved through his eyes, a profound aloneness that tore at her heart. Warning bells sounded in her head—do
not
touch this man!—but she slipped her gloved hand into his anyway. Screw danger. When a man this strong hurt, decent women comforted.

“I do know what you are,” she said. “But more importantly, I know what you’re not.”

“What am I not?”

“You’re not an attention whore, and you’re not a coward. Men who make threats—particularly big, grandiose threats like stabbing people with flaming pitchforks—are inevitably both.”

He dropped his eyes to their linked fingers, then looked back at her. What she saw now in those silver eyes stopped the breath in her lungs. “So I’m in the clear?”

She didn’t pull her hand away. “Looks like.”

“On the pitchfork thing, anyway. What about the other?”

She did pull her hand back this time, and stared. “The other?”

“You don’t expect me to believe the Secret Service wastes personnel like you on flaming pitchforks, do you? I know you’re looking at me for something else.”

“Am I?”

He lifted his hand, traced a finger down the line of her cheek. He came up with a piece of straw from the ends of her hair and flicked it away. Goose didn’t breathe the entire time.

“A girl doesn’t kiss a stranger like you kissed me unless she’s looking for something.”

“Ah. And what was I looking for?”

“Hell if I know.” He cocked a brow, leaned in. “You want to have another go at kissing it out of me?”

Because
yes
churned in her gut, she forced a smile. “Ah, no,” she said. “Thanks, though.”

He shrugged, lifted his water bottle to his lips. “Your call. But if you’re not going to interrogate me the fun way, maybe you should just ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Whatever it is you want to know.”

But she didn’t need to ask. Not really. Rush was no counterfeiter, and he was no smuggler. She knew that. He was too real, too good. Too absolutely, brutally
honest
. He said he was a killer, but he wasn’t. He was a soldier. Goose knew the difference even if he didn’t. Laws, rules, order—they meant something to Rush. Meant everything.

“You in a hurry, Rush?”

His eyes dropped to her mouth. “Yes.”

Heat bloomed, rich and sultry, inside her. She breathed through the first, overpowering wave of it, then forced it into the deepest corner of her consciousness.

“Easy, slugger. We’re just going to talk.”

“Talk, then,” he said with a focused intensity that had Goose pausing to gather herself. Sheesh. This guy went to her head like hard liquor. She had to think. Tread carefully. Everybody on this island had some connection to Rush, and if there was one thing Goose knew without question, it was that Rush honored his connections. One way or another every single one of these people—his neighbors, his employers, his family—fell under the considerable umbrella of his responsibility and authority.

Most of them returned the regard. Or seemed to. But appearances, as Goose knew only too well, were malleable. The exterior had no responsibility to reflect the interior, and somebody on Mishkwa had perfected the art of smiling betrayal. Because that would be how Rush saw it. It wouldn’t be about the money to him, but about the deception. About dirtying his home with greed. About breaking the law when it was Rush’s responsibility to uphold it.

She cast around for a neutral topic to start with. “This is your ancestral home, huh? Handed down from your grandfather?”

“Yeah. It’s the only privately held property within the park borders.”

“Were you born here? On Mishkwa?”

“Yep.”

“What kind of name is Rush, anyway? The predominant ethnicity up here seems to be Swedish and Norwegian. Shouldn’t you be a Sven or an Ole or a Soren or something? How’d you end up named after an eighties hair band?”

“Your mom delivers you in a fishing boat six weeks early, you get named Rush.”

“Whoa.” Goose blinked. “Your mom sounds like some woman.”

“She was.”

“Where are your folks now?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Still.”

He accepted the sympathy of a genuine smile, squeezed her fingers in reply. Warmth crawled into her chest, knelt down alongside the dangerous throb of banked desire. She cleared her throat.

“Were they commercial fishers, your folks?”

“Yeah. It was a family business. My grandfather held one of the original fishing claims on Mishkwa. My mom was his middle daughter; she and her husband—my dad—fished with Grandpa every summer. His oldest daughter—that would be Lila—ran the house. His youngest daughter—Gerte—ran wild. I don’t know much about her, other than that she came back to the island only once after she left. Pregnant, alone. She delivered Einar here. He’s two months younger than I am, in case you were wondering.”

“And the father?”

“She never said anything about him. To hear Lila tell it, one day she was here, the next she was gone.”

“She abandoned her baby?”

“She left him with her family. My folks took him in and raised him like he was my brother. Is that abandonment?”

She conceded the point with an inclination of her head and he went on. “My folks had built a cabin on a claim down the shore from Grandpa’s when they married. Earliest thing I can remember is untangling fishing nets in the boat shed. By the time we were eight, Einar and I were fishing alongside Grandpa and Dad every summer.”

“And in the winter?”

“Grandpa and Lila stayed here on the island. We—my folks and Einar and I—wintered over in Hornby Harbor on the mainland. Went to school.”

Goose smiled at the way he said “school.” Like somebody else might say “prison” or “hell.” “Must’ve been tough on a kid like you to spend six, seven hours a day cooped up in the classroom.”

He twitched a shoulder. “I survived. Well enough to graduate.”

“And then you came back here?”

“No. By that time the fishing had gone to crap and the Park Service had taken over the island. Decided to lure in the tourists by returning it to a pristine wilderness condition.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Anybody who squatted on the island, didn’t own their property, was booted off outright, their cabins burned to the ground.”

“Hurrying up nature’s triumphant return?”

“Exactly.”

“But your parents owned their land?”

“No.”

Goose closed her eyes. “They burned your house down?”

“Yep.”

“God. I’m sorry.”

“Einar and I watched from Grandpa’s dock.”

“He owned his land?”

“Yeah. Landowners got a slightly better deal. They were allowed to keep their property and their fishing rights, but only if somebody kept their primary residence on the island year-round and fished commercially at least three months a year.”

“Which would be, what, approximately nobody?”

“Nobody but Einar. Grandpa died that summer, and Einar moved into this cabin. Summers, he fishes just enough to satisfy the letter of the law. Keeps the restaurant down in South Harbor in lake trout a couple times a month.”

“Why Einar and not you?”

Rush shrugged. “I didn’t want to fish. Not when I was eighteen and ready to take on the world.”

“And Einar did?”

“Want to fish? No.”

“Then why wouldn’t he just sell the land to the Park Service?”

He rolled a single shoulder. “It’s his home.”

“It’s your home, too. You left.”

“Eighteen’s not quite old enough to be sentimental about the ancestral home, I guess.”

“And yet Einar was?”

He locked his eyes on hers, and she felt it all the way to her toes. “What are you asking, Goose?”

“Not asking anything,” she said. “Just thinking.”

“About?”

“About what happens to a child when his mother abandons him. Seems like a kid’s self-esteem might take a hit. Might have some trouble belonging.”

“He was taken in by family.”

“But by necessity, not by choice. And in a tiny community where everybody knew it, too.” She shook her head. “Tough on a kid’s self-worth, I’ll bet.”

Rush regarded her steadily over their joined hands, and she stepped carefully because she knew this was dangerous ground.

“And if that wasn’t enough to shake a kid’s foundation,” she continued, “then the government comes along and tosses his
family
”—she purposely emphasized the word—“off its land and burns down what little claim to a home he has. Call me crazy but I think it’s enough to turn a normal person into an antigovernment gun nut with revenge fantasies.”

“Nice analysis.” Rush lifted his water bottle, took a long pull. “Psych degree, I assume?”