Stone Cold Read online

  Stone had been drugged and hypnotized and even now, he was not sure what else he had divulged. The fantasy of him turning and sympathizing with Al Qaeda during his brief incarceration in Afghanistan had been well staged and even documenting the despicable venture, providing the FBI and Secret Service with digital money trails and both a solid witness and a co-conspirator, he was a long way from clearing his name. “It’s pretty bad,” he replied eventually.

  “I’m still a lawyer. If we negotiated a small fee for a consultation, I would be bound by lawyer-client confidentiality and privilege. I could perhaps see a way through this for you.” She paused. “Call it a dollar… Just to keep it legal.”

  Stone smiled. “Well, it’s food for thought. But trust me, you don’t want this on your conscience.”

  Katy looked worried for a moment, then smiled, “OK, but I doubt it’s as bad as you think. People run when there are all sorts of ways that their innocence can be proven …” Then she looked a little distant for a moment. “The police will be here tomorrow afternoon,” she said tentatively. “Is that going to be a problem for you?” Stone’s expression said it all. “So, I guess you’ll be heading out in the morning…”

  “I’ll take you to your claim first.” He paused. “I’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind?”

  “Sure, I’ll give you the guided tour.”

  “I’ll push onwards after that. Don’t worry about me, don’t leave anything out of your statement.” He paused. “But don’t hold back on Tanner, either. He showed his true colors tonight, and the guys that he met this morning are bad news. If you point a finger at Duke Tanner, then if he is behind your attack, then he won’t try anything again. He’ll be the number one suspect, and he’s not that stupid.”

  “And if he is innocent?”

  “Then it’s no skin off your nose. It’s an allegation, that’s all.”

  “This has all gotten so very messy.”

  “Well, when you’re in a mess, things tend to get a whole lot messier before you’re through and out the other side.”

  Katy pulled the cover off her and started to undress. She smiled at Stone, looked somewhat gleeful at his expression which was somewhere between indecision and bewilderment. “Well, if it’s that messy already, then this won’t exactly make things any worse…” Stone watched as she stripped down to her bra and panties and knelt on the bed. He had not been with a woman for a long time. Eight solitary, dry months. And the anticipation was almost too much to bear. He tore off his shirt and tossed it aside, and she smiled as she straddled him, placed her hands on his firm, expansive chest and pushed him back down onto the bed. “Easy there, partner,” she said quietly. “No rush, we’ve got all night…”

  Chapter Eight

  Stone was not a lover of biscuits and gravy, so he had upgraded to scrambled eggs and bacon and pancakes with syrup when he paid for Katy’s breakfast. They drank a lot of coffee between them and chatted comfortably. The day after the night before usually told how things would play out, and Stone found himself wishing things could be different. That he could afford to stick around with the police investigating and did not have the threat of prosecution and incarceration hanging over him, like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. He liked Katy and he could tell that she liked him, too. They had clicked at dinner, clicked in bed, and clicked at breakfast, basking in the comfortable and satisfying afterglow that new lovers enjoyed. Stone had not felt so fulfilled in all manner of ways in years.

  There had been no credit left for Stone at the auto parts store. He had not been surprised. He had paid for the four new tires in cash, choosing to get over-sized all-terrain tires while he had the chance, and both he and Katy had ambled around the carpark and watched the birds on the estuary while they waited for the tires to be fitted. Again, the chat had been comfortable, although neither of them had mentioned the antics in the motel room. Some things were better left unsaid, and this was not going to be the start of something new, but the end of something all too brief.

  The drive out to where she had been run off the road had taken a little over half an hour and when Stone pulled up and parked at the side of the road Katy looked despondent. “You don’t have to get out,” he said. “But I want to have a look around.”

  “I’ll be OK,” she replied. “It’s not the crash that’s freaking me out. It’s the fact that the man was trying to smother me…”

  Stone nodded. They had barely talked about the attack, each time Stone had tried, Katy had been evasive. He wondered whether they would have slept together had she not been traumatized after the attack, and then he worried that he should have perhaps rebuffed her advances, given what she had experienced. He touched her arm and rubbed her reassuringly. “Can you remember anything about him?” he asked. “Anything at all would be helpful, and the police are going to want to know as much as you can tell them.”

  She shook her head as they walked towards the wreckage. “I guess he smelled,” she said. “Yeah, he was pretty ripe. Body odor and unwashed. Cigarettes and beer on his breath, with strong potato chips, like Cheetos. Really cheesy.”

  Stone nodded. “Anything else? Hair, eyes, teeth?”

  “I clawed at him… He may have scratches on his face. But he managed to pin both my wrists in one hand, then knelt on my arms so he could use both hands… It was too dark to see…” She frowned, closed her eyes, then opened them intensely. “When you all arrived in the truck, the dim lights lit him up faintly. I was passing out by then… But he had a tattoo on his neck. Like barbed wire…” She paused, stifling a sob. Her eyes were red and moist. “I thought that ugly tattoo was going to be the last thing I saw… He was looking your way, which was why I didn’t see his features, I guess.”

  “You need to tell all of this to the cops,” said Stone.

  “You won’t stay?”

  “I can’t.”

  “OK.”

  “I want to, though…” Stone turned and studied the truck. It was an old Ford Bronco and most of its engine had spewed out from the hood and into the drainage ditch. “You’re going to need a tow truck and a hoist,” he said.

  “That was my dad’s truck. I kind of liked driving it around. It reminded me of him.”

  “That guy with the tires this morning had a pretty handy looking shop. Would he mend something like that?”

  “He would. He’s the only guy for miles. He keeps all of Lame Horse’s vehicles on the road. But it doesn’t exactly matter,” she said solemnly. “I can’t afford to get it done anyhow, and my insurance won’t cover me for that…” She shrugged as she saw Stone’s quizzical expression. “OK, I let the policy slide…” She paused. “There’s an old truck I can use at the mine. One of the maintenance guys can get it going for me…”

  Stone nodded, then walked around the truck. There was sign of an impact on the rear left quarter. He recognized the technique. A hard contact from the pursuing vehicle on the rear edge of the target vehicle upset the balance and then inertia did the rest. Hit a vehicle on the left side of its bumper and it will generally force a hard left turn. The driver usually corrected it, but inevitably sent the vehicle into an opposite spin. “Most of the debris looks to have been from the other vehicle,” he noted. “The State Police will be able to match the parts to get a clear identification of the vehicle. Then they need to search for vehicles of that make and model that are registered in the vicinity. The people who did this will have suffered extensive damage to their vehicle for certain. With few places to mend their vehicle and with the police putting out a watch, they have a good chance of catching them. It just relies on those places reporting them, and that’s another matter entirely.”

  “Money talks.” Katy shook her head. “And if the vehicle isn’t registered in Alaska, then it changes everything. And then there’s the fact that some trucks are here in their thousands. In their tens of thousands when you factor in Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. That’s where most of the seasonal gold and fishing workers come from. Hel
l, they come from all over!” She paused. “People even make the trip up from Florida for a season’s work and the promise of a fair dollar and a slice of the American Dream!”

  Stone said nothing. Katy was still clearly shaken and had resigned herself to the fact that Alaska’s wildness, its rugged wilderness, and huge expanse was never going to see her attackers caught, tried, and sentenced. Alaska was as big as the entire Eastern Seaboard and every state that formed it. Perhaps that was what had made the place so appealing for people on the run, who Stone reflected, were people like himself.

  “You were more than just a soldier,” Katy said. “And you already said you weren’t a cop. I can’t imagine you working as a PI and tailing cheating partners or insurance scammers. So, I figure you were with another kind of law enforcement agency, or even intelligence agency, for that matter. An agent of some kind.” Stone smiled. He didn’t usually like questions, but then he didn’t usually like the person asking them. “Hell, I could Google until I found your photo, the FBI’s Most Wanted List…”

  “Please don’t,” he replied. He shrugged. “You’ll push me away…”

  “You’re leaving anyway,” she said coldly.

  “But I want to come back already,” he replied. “I can’t if I’m all out of options…”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and hugged him close. “I didn’t mean to upset you, to back you into a corner. Christ, it’s only been a day, but I’ve fallen for you…”

  “And a night,” he smiled.

  “I don’t usually do that,” she said coyly, her face flushing despite the chilled air.

  “I do,” he said. “If a beautiful woman wants to be with me, who am I to turn them down?” He shrugged. “You never know where it will take you, or how much you’ll enjoy it on the way.”

  She smiled. “You’re quite the hopeless romantic,” she said.

  “Or just hopeless…”

  “Certainly not hopeless, by any means…”

  “Hopeful, then.”

  She smiled. “Come on, let me show you my life,” she said. “Before you leave and decide you don’t want to come back…”

  Chapter Nine

  “This is Marvin, my foreman,” said Katy. “I’m just going to get Don to have a look at the old Blazer, see if he can get some life into the engine,” she smiled and headed towards a group of men who were standing about smoking and drinking coffee from thermos cups. Stone watched as some of them straightened up and flicked their cigarette butts into the dirt. A few of them did not look overly concerned that their boss was heading their way and by nine-thirty, they were still on a break, or yet to start work altogether.

  Stone looked at the man in front of him, shook his hand but he already knew he did not care for him, something about his eyes. Stone liked people who could hold his own gaze. Marvin was an old timer. Or he could have just been in his late fifties. Alaska was a tough place and gold mining was a sight tougher on the body and features. His face was weathered, and his stubble was as grey as the few hairs which remained on his head. The man’s hands were hard and calloused. Stone’s own were softer by comparison, toughened from years of weapon handling and gripping weight bars, but nothing compared to the man who appeared to excavate the dirt with his bare hands.

  “You’re the fella who done gone and ruined Phil’s season…”

  “Ah, last night.” Stone shook his head. “No, I figure I gave him good and fair warning,” Stone replied. “News certainly travels fast in these parts.”

  Marvin shrugged. “We’re a tight knit community.”

  “If you’re so tight knit, how come you don’t recognize loyalty?”

  “What?” Marvin turned and glanced at Katy talking to the group of men. He glared back at Stone but was met with Stone’s thousand-yard stare. Marvin looked uneasy. But he pressed on. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, your friend Tanner is putting a great deal of pressure on your boss to sell. You need to work out what and who is more important to you. Your friend, or your livelihood.”

  “I’ve known Duke Tanner for years,” Marvin replied indignantly. “And I worked with Katy’s father. I did odd jobs for her grandfather when I was a kid.”

  “She’s having a tough time. Her season was a bust last year because of her father’s debts and this year it’s make or break. You should tell your buddy to back off, get behind your boss and drive this season forward. Duke Tanner should back the hell off. If not because of Katy persistently turning down his offer, then because you should be telling him to leave her be.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own God damned business?”

  Stone stared coldly at him and said, “Right now, I’m looking out for Katy. I’m just passing through. When I come back, I don’t want to see her still being hassled by Tanner. Perhaps you should have a word…”

  “You think you can intimidate me?” Marvin grinned. “You don’t know me, boy.”

  “And you don’t know me. Or what I’ve done. Now, I’m giving you the chance to play nice. I’ll be talking to Duke Tanner, too.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” he sneered. “I’m going now. Got to go and make a cut. I wouldn’t want to let my boss down, would I?”

  Marvin walked towards a large bulldozer, barely acknowledging Katy as she walked past him and back to Stone. Katy didn’t miss a beat and Stone figured she was used to not having her manager’s respect. Or showing common curtesy for that matter.

  “Don will have the old Chevy Blazer up and running by the end of the day,” she said. “What’s wrong, didn’t you get along with Marvin? He’s tricky, but he knows gold mining.”

  “That’s what concerns me,” Stone replied. He sighed and said, “Come on, I thought you were going to show me your life?”

  Chapter Ten

  The ground stretched out before them, the mine waste making it look more like a lunar landscape than a gold mine. Stone could see the trees in the distance, but there were piles of broken trees poking out of what he had learned was called over burden – the topsoil that needed to be removed before they got down to the bedrock. The bedrock itself held the gold deposits in pockets, that would once have been riverbed or glacier.

  “We are bound by contract to bulldoze the over burden back afterwards, which allows new trees to grow back, eventually.” Katy paused, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand as she pointed to the most desolate area at the foot of the mountain. “You’d be surprised by how quickly the trees regrow. A few summers’ worth of seed dispersal by the wind and this place will be green with saplings, after another few years the trees will be head high. There are mines throughout the valley that have been mined out ten years ago, and they are all forest again now.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” said Stone. “Because this place looks like one of Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell.”

  “Yeah, it’s not pretty. I get that.” She paused. “But I think of it as a short-term thing. The land does get returned to nature.”

  “Not so much raped, as briefly fondled…”

  Katy sniggered. “Oh, OK. That doesn’t make it sound so great, I admit.” She paused. “Are you an environmentalist?”

  “It’s on my mind more these days,” he admitted. “But in a past life I was a gear head, I guess I would be again if I had the chance.”

  “Cars?”

  “Cars and motorcycles.”

  “Well, we use a lot of fuel with our excavating and hauling, and generators. I’m not all that comfortable with it, but I need to get this done before I go back to practicing law, drive a Prius and start recycling my coffee take-out cups…”

  “You’ll mine the ground until it stops giving up the gold, then just quit?”

  “I’m finishing what my grandfather and daddy started.”

  Stone nodded. “There’s nothing like finishing unfinished business.”

  “You have experience with unfinished business?”

  He nodded. His brother had been in the FB
I. He had been a hell of an agent by all accounts. An assassin had cut his throat and left him to die in the gutter. He glanced at his Rolex. It had belonged to his father, then gone to his older brother when his father had passed away. Stone had been given the watch at his brother’s wake. It was the only possession he had that meant a damn. “I do,” he replied. “But unfinished business eventually gets finished, and you just have to hope it hasn’t cost you more than it was worth along the way.”

  “I think I know what you’re saying,” she said quietly. “Is it like the Chinese proverb that a man seeking revenge must first dig two graves?”

  “In a way,” Stone replied. “You want to find the ground where your father took his samples, but you risk losing everything in doing so. Sometimes you need to know when to hold and when to fold…”

  “And when to walk away and when to run?”