“Come on,” Eddie wheedled. “It’ll be a blast. Think of how many propane deliveries you’d have to make to get this kind of money.”
“If you don’t come in on it,” Harley said, “you have got to keep your mouth shut.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Russell said. “I just don’t want to wind up back in Spring Creek.”
“You won’t,” Harley said. “All we’re doing is … prospecting. It’s an old Alaskan tradition. The gold mine just happens to be a graveyard this time.”
Eddie liked that, and laughed so hard it made Russell start to smile. That’s when Harley knew he had him. He put out his hand, fist clenched, and Eddie bumped his knuckles against it. Then, a few seconds later, Russell slowly lifted his hand and bumped him, too.
When Harley left the Yardarm a few minutes later, in time to go home and throw a fresh sheet on the bed, there was a powerful wind blowing from the northwest—the direction of St. Peter’s Island. For a second, he thought he could hear the baying of the wolves. He put up his hood, drew it tight, and looked up and down the deserted street. This was going to be his lucky night. Angie Dobbs, at last. And, to get the good times rolling, he stepped to the curb, took out the hunting knife he always carried in the back of his belt, and jabbed it into the front tire of Geordie Ayakuk’s jeep.
Chapter 11
The wind around St. Peter’s Island was even stronger than usual, but instead of dissipating the fog that clung to the rocky shores, it had whipped it into a milky stew. It howled around the old wooden buildings of the Russian colony like a pack of wolves, and whistled through the breaks in the stockade wall.
Old Man Richter could hear the gusts tearing at the roof timbers, but the ramshackle church, with its onion dome, had stood for many decades, and he doubted it would collapse tonight. And tonight was all he needed.
He would be dead by morning.
He wasn’t terribly afraid of that anymore. He’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea. Ever since he was swept off the Neptune II, he had been cheating death at one turn or another … first by clinging to a piece of the shattered lifeboat, then by crawling ashore and climbing a flight of stony steps, no more than a foot wide, that led him to higher ground … and into the ruins of the old colony.
He had collapsed in this church, under a pile of petrified furs, for a day, maybe even two. In his dreams, he’d heard what sounded like helicopters and foghorns, but he’d been unable to awaken, unable to move. And who would believe that anyone, much less Old Man Richter, could ever have survived a shipwreck like that? He was sure that no one else had.
He prayed that that idiot Harley Vane was the first to drown.
He had hoped to restore his strength with sleep, and maybe some food, but all he found in his pockets were a couple of waterlogged candy bars that he’d been rationing out to himself. There was nothing in the church but some old straw that he’d chewed on like a horse, and a pool of rainwater that had dripped through a hole in the dome. Even to get to that puddle, he’d had to drag himself along on his elbows. His feet were frostbitten, and they’d gone from blue to purple to black, the discoloration inexorably rising up his legs. For days, he had drifted in and out of consciousness, astonished each time that he’d managed to awake at all.
And, truth be told, disappointed, too.
He wanted it to be over. He’d lived long enough, and he wasn’t much interested in being rescued now, when they’d only have to cut off his legs—and a few of his fingers, too, now that he couldn’t feel them either—and leave him to wither away in the corner of some nursing home. He was only sorry to be so alone. He would have liked to see one more human face before he died. He’d have liked to have someone there to say good-bye to. Someone who might even have held on to his frozen old paw while he went.
It was dark, so dark he wasn’t sure he was actually seeing anything at all, or just pictures made up in his mind. He kept seeing his wife, and she’d been dead for twenty years now. And a horse he had when he was a kid. Brown, with a white nose. Named Queenie. Why couldn’t he remember what had happened to her? He took a train once, when he was a thirteen-year-old boy, from Tacoma to St. Paul, and it was the best time he’d ever had in his life. The porter took him up and down the train cars, showing him how everything worked. He’d always liked to know how things worked.
There was a window in the church, with half a shutter still covering it. That half a shutter had been banging all night. Richter wondered how it could have stayed on at all, and for so long, loose like that. It banged again now, and a blast of wind swept into the church, stirring up the dirt and straw.
Another picture crossed his mind … of a lantern, burning bright.