“Lucky you didn’t shoot your mouth off about that,” Charlie said.
Harley turned it over in his hands, marveling at the weight of it, wondering if the silver sheen was real, wondering what the gems would be worth, wondering what the Russian words inscribed on the back meant. There was a fence named Gus Voynovich in Nome—he and Charlie had used him now and then in the past—and if anybody knew what it was really worth, he’d be the one. The guy was a crook, of course, but he knew his business.
“So I figure it’s a fifty-fifty deal,” Charlie said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to fence it at the Gold Mine, right?” The Gold Mine was Voynovich’s pawnshop in Nome. “Well, you owe me half of whatever Voynovich gives us for it.”
“That’s bullshit. I found it. I nearly died getting it.”
“And if I hadn’t picked up your coat, the Coast Guard, or some fucking orderly, would have it by now. And then how much of a share do you think you’d have gotten?”
“I’ll give you ten percent.”
“I’m not arguing about this with you, Harley. I could just as soon have taken a gun out of that rack and told you to get the hell off of church property.” Vane’s Holy Writ was headquartered in the old house, and as a result, Charlie paid no property taxes. He also drew a tidy disability benefits check every month. “Now, there’s really only one question left for us to discuss.”
“What the hell is that?”
“How much else is there?”
“How much of what else? The coffin’s gone, it sank, same as the boat. Don’t you read the papers?”
“The coffin came from somewhere. And that somewhere would be St. Peter’s Island. It’s one of those old Russians who lived there. Who knows what else is buried in the other graves?”
Harley sat very still, the cross growing heavier in his hand by the second. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, we’ve got to go back out there, before somebody else does, and do some digging.”
“You want me to dig up graves?” Harley said, feeling exactly the same way he did when Charlie had told him to climb through the skylight of the liquor store on Front Street.
“Listen to me,” Charlie said, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you remember the stories?”
“Sure I do. The damn place is haunted.” He didn’t add anything about the black wolves … or that yellow light he thought he’d seen on the cliffs.
“Now you don’t really believe that stuff, do you? If you ask me, the Russians made up all that crap years ago, just to keep everybody off the island.”
“There was never any reason to go on the island.”
“No, there wasn’t,” Charlie agreed. “Back then.” Everyone knew there was nothing on St. Peter’s but the remains of the old Russian village, its wooden cabins no doubt fallen to pieces by now, and guarded, supposedly, by an old lady with a lantern, who walked the cliffs at night, luring mariners to their death. “But there is a reason now.”
Harley didn’t know what to say, or how to counter what his brother was saying. That’s how it had always been. Charlie had always won the arguments—sometimes all at once, and sometimes just by waiting Harley out.
“What other options have you got?” Charlie taunted him. “You think you’re ever gonna get another boat? Or a crew? Your fishing days are over, bro, in case you didn’t know it already.” He smiled broadly and smoothed his hands on the front of his flannel shirt. “This cross is what I’d call heaven-sent … and one thing I do know is that God doesn’t knock twice.”
Harley wasn’t so sure it was God knocking at the door at all.
But nodding at the Russian artifact, Charlie added, “And you might want to leave that here for safekeeping. That tin-can trailer you live in isn’t exactly burglarproof, now is it?”
Chapter 9
Slater wasn’t proud of what he was doing—sitting in his car, in the dark, parked outside his ex-wife’s house—but he hadn’t really intended to find himself here.
At most, he’d intended to cruise slowly past the house and take a look on his way home from the AFIP, but then a wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he’d had to pull over under the umbrella of a big elm tree. In preparation for the exhumation work in Alaska, he’d put himself on an antiviral regimen that he knew could have some debilitating effects, and the coffee he’d picked up at Starbucks apparently wasn’t doing much to counteract it.