Sea to Sky (26 page)

Elspeth was fed up. The jolly biker just wasn’t cut out to be a private eye. He was supposed to get the name of that gang-banger trucker who had muscled in on poor old Jerome’s load out of Blue Hills Industries. She realized that it might not be important, but then again, it could be the piece of the puzzle that allowed Hunter to solve the case. She’d screwed up trying to help Hunter out in the past, and she really didn’t want it to happen again.

As it was, she’d sent that clown Sorenson all the way to L.A. with Hunter’s truck without clearing it with Hunter, and now she couldn’t find a load out of there to bring them home. Unless she came up with some decent information on Blue Hills — and a load — pretty damn quick, Hunter was going to be pissed off. Good thing he was still tied up in Whistler. El looked at the big clock on the wall. It had been over two hours since she’d last spoken to Sorry. He had no cell phone. She had no way to reach him.

Her phone started to ring and she lunged for it. “Watson!” she barked.

“Hello, El.”

Her heart sank. It was Hunter. What could she tell him? She decided she had no choice but to lie like a carpet.

“Hi, there, sweet-cheeks. What’s happenin’? Are you still hung up in Whistler?” She tried to sound as if all was right in her world.

“What’s the matter? You sound cheerful.”

“Fuck off, Hunter,” she growled.

“That’s more like it. You had me worried for a minute there. To answer your question, I’m at home now, and not even under arrest. When do I get my truck back?”

El cleared her throat. “I can’t find a load out of Redding. I’ve had to send Sorry a bit farther south.”

“I thought you already had a return load lined up from Redding.”

“Fell through. I’ll get him back here as soon as I can with a paying load.”

“That’s all I can ask, El. And let me know just as soon as possible what his ETA is going to be. Looks like I might have to drive the runaway boy back to Calgary.”

Yes! El figured that would give her a couple of days’ grace. “You found the kid?”

“I’ve got a lead. I’m heading to downtown Vancouver to look for him almost as soon as I get off the phone.”

“What about the killer?” she asked, hoping that Sorry’s trip to Sylmar wasn’t going to be in vain. She still wanted a chance to help solve the murder.

“The Mounties always get their man,” he said.

“They got him?”

“Not yet. But they will.”

El heaved a sigh of relief as she hung up the phone. It was time to get on the phone and call in some favors, if she still had any left, from some of the L.A. area freight brokers she’d worked with in the past. Maybe one of them could hand off a load that would get Sorry back on the road to home.

She’d called four or five of them with no results and fielded calls from two local shippers and three drivers when her phone began to ring again. This time it was the call she’d been waiting for.

“Whatcha got for me, Sorenson?” she asked.

“It was a fuckin’ waste of time. Took me an hour and a half to track down Jerome again, and he wasn’t happy to see me. He wasn’t answering his phone — you were right, his number was in the phone book — so I had to find his house, and of course, he wasn’t there. I hung out there for another hour until his wife came home and seeing me almost scared the shit out of the poor woman.”

“Well, yeah. That’s because you look like a bad-ass biker.”

“That’s because I
am
a bad-ass biker, bitch.”

“And then?”

“I was wrong about Juan Valdez. His name is Hor-hay Vasquez.”

“Hor-hay?”

“That’s what Jerome said. And he drives for an outfit called Don Julian Transport in Industry. Now when do I get outa here?”

“Is that all you got?” The name on the truck didn’t sound as important as El had expected. Well, she didn’t really know what she’d expected, but she’d hoped that a bell would go off for her, and it hadn’t.

“That’s what you asked for, that’s what you got.” Sorry’s normal high-decibel voice had gone up a few decibels. “Now where do I go?”

“I’m workin’ on it. Call me back in an hour.”

“Yeah, but… I’m parked here at a fuckin’ McDonald’s in Pomona. You want me back at the trailer?”

“Yeah. Go back to Castaic and call me from there.” She hung up before he could give her any more lip, then immediately punched the button for another line, but there was no dial tone.

“Hello? Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Watson Transportation. What can I do for you?” said El. It didn’t sound like any of her regular callers.

“Oh, hello. I’m looking for Daniel Sorenson. I believe he’s working for your company. It’s important that I get hold of him as soon as possible.”

El cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I can’t give out a driver’s home number…”

“Oh, no. I can’t wait for him to get home. I need to reach him now. I just called his home, and his wife gave me your number.” The voice was mature, and calm in spite of the urgency implied by her words.

“The best I can do is have him call you, ma’am. I should hear from him in the next couple of hours, although with Sorry, you never know.”

“Well, if that’s the only way, I guess. What did you call him?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” A pause. “Oh. ‘Sorry’. I see. Did you want my number?”

“Right. Go ahead.”

“Please have him call his mother as soon as possible,” and she gave El a number with a 530 area code, thanked her, and before El could ask her what it was about, she was gone.

El sat back and looked at the number she’d scrawled in the dog-eared notebook she always kept beside her phone. It was obviously urgent, and that usually meant bad news. The woman didn’t sound ill, so it could be about Sorry’s father. Something sudden, maybe a heart attack or a stroke. She just hoped that whatever it was wouldn’t interfere with Sorry’s ETA when she found him a load.

A load. She pulled her Rolodex closer and started flipping through the cards for the phone numbers of freight brokers in southern California. She’d better have a load lined up by the time she heard from Sorry again, or Hunter Rayne would have her hide.

Traffic for the Lions Gate Bridge was backed up almost to Capilano Road, and Hunter switched from the local news station to the country music station as the Pontiac inched forward. Only one lane of the three lane bridge was open to Vancouver-bound traffic, and the two lanes from North Vancouver had to merge with two lanes from West Vancouver into a single line.  Toby Keith’s Blue Moon song came on and it made him think about his ex-wife, and whether he really missed her.

No, he decided. It wasn’t Chris that he missed — although he had at first — but what he really longed for was that sense of family they’d had, he and Chris and their two daughters. He missed being a part of an entity that came together at the end of a day, were interested in what the other parts had done that day and cared about what they planned to do tomorrow. Gord was right, though. He couldn’t go back to something like that, not right now. He guessed he had more solo miles to travel before he was ready to become a piece of something bigger than his lonesome self.

When he reached the deck of the old suspension bridge, built by the Guinness (as in Irish stout) family in the late 30’s, the traffic started to move. He always enjoyed the view from Lions Gate. The waters of Burrard Inlet stretched west toward the Strait of Georgia and Vancouver Island under the day’s blue sky, and were populated with an assortment of small boats and rust-streaked freighters, one of which was just emerging from beneath the bridge deck. Then the Pontiac cruised between the living cedar walls of the Stanley Park causeway as it wound its way toward downtown Vancouver, where the tall cedars on either side of the roadway were replaced by walls of concrete and glass.

He debated whether to drop in on Joe Solomon first, and decided that his best bet was to drive past the pizza place and the Skytrain station, just in case the boys were in sight. At a stop-light, he pulled out his copy of the photographs and studied them to refresh his memory. Nathan was the taller, Adam had lighter hair. He could see some of Ken in the boy’s facial features, and he wondered if the boy resembled his dad in other ways. He didn’t think his chances of finding the kids at this time of day were good, but he had to try.

He was right. He drove by as slowly as traffic would allow, but couldn’t see anyone resembling the two boys panhandling in front of the station, and wouldn’t have found space to pull over if he did. He knew he’d have to check out the area on foot. He found a parkade several blocks away on Richards Street that would still give him change from a ten dollar bill for a couple of hours’ parking, and made his way back along the busy sidewalks, watching closely for familiar faces under the ball caps and hoodies that he passed.

There was a mix of people on the streets of Vancouver, ranging from well-dressed women in makeup and heels bent on a business destination to grimy vagrants with unkempt beards and crazy eyes drifting slowly along the walls as if they couldn’t walk straight on their own. At one store front a beaten looking youth with a guitar sat behind a sign asking for change. The sign said ‘hungry’. Hunter threw a dollar coin into the open guitar case and walked on. At a recessed service entrance smelling of urine, there was a bundle of rags and flesh snoring beneath a layer of cardboard. Perhaps it was safer and warmer to sleep during the day.

From October to March, Vancouver gets an average of 34 inches of rain, so a dry day like this one was a welcome change. But there’s a price to be paid for sunny winter days. With no insulating cloud cover, the temperature can drop to well below freezing. It was hard to imagine that anyone would sleep on the city’s streets by choice at this time of year. If Adam Marsh had any sense, he would jump at a chance to return home. Unless, of course, home was an even colder place for his young soul to be. Hunter couldn’t believe that was the case.

He stepped inside the door of the pizza joint Joe had mentioned. A few heads turned his way, and the man behind the counter looked up from cutting a pizza with a rolling blade. Hunter didn’t see anyone resembling Nathan or Adam, so he turned on his heel and walked back out to the street. Pedestrian traffic increased in the block in front of the Waterfront Skytrain entrance. It was an imposing historic edifice with a red-brick façade and a row of white columns, first built as a railway terminal in 1914. Now it served as a station for Vancouver’s Skytrain and the SeaBus from North Vancouver, as well as the Western terminus for a new commuter train from the suburbs. The volume of pedestrian traffic made it an attractive place for panhandlers.

The main doors spewed out a trainload of new arrivals, drifting away and apart at varying speeds. There were a few knots of young men and women smoking cigarettes and talking in the rare afternoon sunshine in front of the building, and Hunter scanned them carefully for the runaways with no success. Inside the building, his luck changed. He saw a tall, dark-haired youth at the newsstand, counting out change for a chocolate bar. He waited for the kid to turn around, and when he did, Hunter approached.

“Nathan. There you are,” he said, offering the kid a friendly grin. “I was hoping I’d run into you.”

The kid stopped in his tracks and eyed Hunter warily. “Do I know you?” His hair looked unwashed and he had the beginnings of a patchy adolescent beard.

Hunter put out his hand and said, “Hunter Rayne. Adam might remember me as Sergeant Rayne of the RCMP, an old friend of his father’s. Where is Adam, by the way?”

Nathan shrugged, ignoring Hunter’s hand. “Haven’t seen him,” he said. He jammed both hands into his pockets, along with the Mars Bar.

Hunter frowned. “What do you mean, you haven’t seen him? You were with him here last night.”

“He went his own way last night, I guess. I haven’t seen him since.” The kid started to walk away.

Hunter grabbed the kid by the back of his jacket. “Whoa, chief. I’m not finished talking to you.”

“Fuck off.” He chopped at Hunter’s forearm with his left hand to free his jacket.

Hunter grabbed the kid’s wrist and twisted his arm up against his back, leaning forward to speak in his ear, soft and low, from behind. “I guess you didn’t hear me say I was with the RCMP. I don’t care what your plans are, I want to find Adam Marsh and you’re going to help me. Understand?”

“Ow. That hurts. Let go of me.”

“You mean, ‘Let go of me, sir’.” Hunter increased the pressure. He had a low tolerance for smart ass kids who showed no respect.

“Ow. Okay. Sir. Let go.”

Hunter lowered the kid’s arm but didn’t let go until the kid turned around to face him. Hunter smiled at him, but his smile still carried a warning. “Where’s Adam?”

“I don’t know,” said Nathan, rubbing his left shoulder. “I told you the truth. I haven’t seen him since last night.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Exactly where.”

“There.” Nathan pointed to a bench near the Skytrain entrance. “He was sitting over there pretending to read a book.”

“Pretending?”

“He was feeling crappy. He wanted to lie down, but he didn’t want to get thrown out in the cold. Said he was going to pretend to be waiting there for someone.”