Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

Breacher

Jack Lively

To the Boy and the Wolf

One

I was crossing the street, noticing the cross-walk lines on the road, freshly painted, and the foot gear choices of the cruise ship tourists. It looked as if trail walking was high up on the list. New and newish hiking boots, adventure sandals, low-top trail shoes. Then I raised my eyes and caught the guy’s reflection in the window of a drug store.

He was walking behind me. Not too close, but close enough. It was a guy I’d seen before.

Specifically, I had seen him during the third bite of my burger, which was about twenty minutes earlier and memorable. I had looked up and there he was at a deuce by the window, looking right at me. Eye contact. An athletic blond man in his late twenties with a trimmed beard. He was drinking from a mug with a string coming out of it. It took me a moment to realize it was a hot beverage called tea. By that point he had looked away. Besides the tea, the other thing was the beard.

In Port Morris, Alaska, beards are not memorable. They are commonplace, but a well-trimmed beard less so. Most beards I’d seen in the last four months working on a fishing boat had been either untrimmed or badly trimmed, but this guy’s beard was well-trimmed. Like he had access to a good mirror and good light. Maybe a mirror with lights on it, like in a hotel with a star rating. Good mirror and good light, two things definitely missing in the sleeping quarters of a fishing boat, which tend to be dimly lit mirrorless cavities behind the engine room.

I stopped and pretended to look at something in the window display. The guy swerved, slowed up, and started thumbing through a postcard rack outside of the tourist gift store. His left hand was bandaged, so he was thumbing through the cards with his right hand. I scanned in the reflection for other watchers. Another man was posted by the door to the diner. I hadn’t seen him before. He was leaning against the wall, below the stairs. Baseball hat and light blue button-down Oxford. I started walking again, nice and slow this time.

The next intersection was catty corner to a bank with an angled window. I glanced at the reflection before crossing the street. The guy with the well-trimmed beard was moving, now around forty feet behind me. I upped the pace from casual to brisk. Walked a couple of minutes without looking behind me. If there was a team tailing me, that might string them out and break their formation.

I cut left over a footbridge, crossing the creek to go up Lake Road. There was overflow from a bar. Fishermen taking a smoke break from drinking their salmon money. All beards were either badly trimmed, or untrimmed. I asked one for a cigarette, using the interaction to turn and glance down the road. The well-trimmed beard guy was on the bridge, both hands on the worn railing, looking down at the fish running up the creek from the Pacific toward the sweet water spawning grounds.

At the intersection, I saw a crowd of tourists from the cruise ship. Around forty of them packed together like fish in a net, spanning the street and sidewalk. They were coming down Bryant Street, headed back to the boat after a tour of the salmon creeks. I let myself be absorbed by the crowd. Threaded my way in and amongst them, keeping my head low. I dropped down as if to tie my shoe, screened by geriatric vacationers. It only took a couple of gestures and a shrug to pull off my backpack and jacket. I had a ball cap in the bag. I turned the jacket inside out and wrapped it around the backpack. When I stood up again, I wasn’t a bareheaded guy wearing a forest green Gore-Tex jacket and a backpack, I was a guy wearing a t-shirt and a black cap and holding a tan package under my arm.

I reversed direction to join the flow of tourists as the group shuffled downhill toward the dock. I smiled at an older lady pulling on the arm of her partner. I said, “Are you with the boat?” She nodded and I turned away. From the hill I could see the cruise ship below. In fact, it was visible from almost anywhere in town. I moved down the street, going with the flow. Like a paper boat in a rain-swollen gutter. I didn’t see the first guy from the diner. He was probably still searching for me further up the hill.

A minute later we passed the guy with the Oxford shirt. He was walking uphill, looking like a kid who had lost his teddy bear. I broke out of the crowd below him and stepped into the shadow of a chartered trips office.

I was now a few buildings up from the diner where I’d had that burger, like a full circle. I stayed there for a minute, observing. My baseball cap was pulled low and I figured with the beard I looked just like any other fisherman in Port Morris. Mid-thirties, tall, and jacked from pulling on ropes all season. I hadn’t been in shape like that since pararescue indoctrination.

I recognized the girl standing on the other side of the road. She hadn’t made me. She was blonde, wearing a tourist bucket hat with a Port Morris logo, and carrying a bag from the souvenir store. Like she was just another tourist. But I was pretty sure that she wasn’t just a tourist.

I had met her the night before.

Two

The night before I was in the Porterhouse Bar playing pool with Joe Guilfoyle. The Porterhouse is old-school Alaska. Burnished wood fixings. Everything robust and built to survive the harsh elements. Which is to say,