Both the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe and the lumberyard were closed because of the funeral service, and apart from the violet glow from the snake tank filtering through the slats of his blind, his trailer, too, lay dark and silent at the end of the alleyway between them. The Rottweiler in the gun shop barked ferociously as he passed by, and threw itself against the chicken-wire screen in the window.
“Shut the fuck up,” Harley said, as he went to the storage shed behind the lumberyard. There was a padlock on the door, but Harley knew that the owner had lost the keys so many times he didn’t bother to lock the damn thing anymore. Besides, what was there to steal, apart from the few shovels and picks that were precisely what Harley was after? They probably wouldn’t even be missed before he was back from the island with what he hoped would be the jewels in hand.
The jewels that would buy him his first-class ticket to Miami Beach.
Cracking the metal doors open just enough to slink inside, Harley groped for the string attached to the lightbulb in the ceiling. The whole fixture swayed, throwing shadows over the already gloomy interior. There were piles of rotting boards, a couple of broken-down lathes, sagging sawhorses littered with tools. Toward the back, leaning up against the wall like a bunch of drunks, he saw the shovels and spades and iron pickaxes that they’d need to dig up the graves and crack open the coffins. Just looking at them made his arms ache, and he reminded himself to make sure that Eddie and Russell did most of the hard labor. He was the foreman on this job, and the foreman’s job was to oversee things. He could already anticipate the shit he was going to get from the other two.
Skirting a wheelbarrow with a missing wheel, he started to rummage around among the shovels, looking for the ones best suited to the job. He’d need at least one with a broad flat blade in case the snow came down hard, and a couple more with sharper, firmer ends for penetrating the soil. Chisels would be good, too; they could be driven into the ground like stakes and, if placed well enough, Eddie and Russell might be able to remove whole slabs of earth, virtually intact, all at once.
The wind was blowing so hard at the metal doors that one of them banged shut again, and Harley jumped at the sound. The hanging light fixture swung from the ceiling like a pendulum, and Harley wished the damn thing had a higher-wattage bulb in it. Everything in the room cast a weird shadow around the corrugated metal walls, and for one split second Harley thought he caught a glimpse of something moving behind him, as if it had just entered the shed.
Could the damn dog have been let loose? He stood stock-still, waiting, but he didn’t see anything skulking along the ground, among the planks and chain saws. And if he listened carefully, as he was doing now, over the sound of the wind he could hear the Rottweiler howling in the gun shop next door, right where she belonged.
But howling like she was freaking out over something.
Harley didn’t understand the point of dogs. As far as he was concerned, they were just failed wolves—and you could shoot the whole lot of them, for all he cared.
He went back to picking his tools—he didn’t want to spend all day in here, since what he was doing might, technically, be called stealing if the owner caught him at it—but stopped when he thought he heard something moving again, on just the other side of a tall stack of boards.
“Hey,” he said. “Somebody in here?”
But there was no reply.
“McDaniel?” he said, thinking it might be the owner of the lumberyard trying to catch him red-handed. “That you? It’s Harley.”
Still no answer, but definitely the sound of a footfall.
“I just needed to borrow a shovel to clear the ice off my trailer hitch. Hope that’s okay.” But knowing the reputation the Vane boys had around town, he added, “I was gonna put it right back as soon as I was done.” And for once, Christ, it was almost the truth.
With a spade still in his hands, he crept gingerly to the end of the pile, expecting maybe to see McDaniel, or even that Inuit kid who worked as his assistant, but what he saw instead, going in and out of the light, was more like some scrawny scarecrow. At first he even thought it might be a mannequin.
But then it blinked.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said, but even as he asked, he recognized him.
The wet brown hair, hanging down onto the gray tunic with the banded collar. The long black sealskin coat. The big dark eyes, the petrified skin, the yellow teeth protruding from the drawn lips.
It was the body from the coffin he’d found in the nets.
And as he looked on in horror, the creature extended his hand, as if expecting to be given something.
“What do you want?” Harley said, backing up but clutching the spade for dear life. “Get the fuck out of here!”
The young man opened his mouth—and Harley could swear that, even from ten feet away, he got a gust of the foulest air he had ever smelled—and said something in what sounded like Russian. But Russian spoken as if by someone still in the act of drowning, the words gurgling and slurred.
Harley lifted the spade and cocked it back over one shoulder, like a baseball bat.
“Don’t come any closer!”