Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

a barrel that was. He shook his head, resigned to his whipped lot in life for as long as it lasted. He wasn’t breaking any laws, or even any sacrosanct moral code, just office policy. It was only his career at stake. But if this informant came through with the promised information, his career would be able to weather a lot of storms.

He eased the door shut. The parking lot was all mossy stone and brown shadows beneath the enormous trees. It felt like a graveyard – not the kind of place you slammed a door. A gravel path followed the gentle slope down between the buildings, toward the sea. A small, tree-covered hummock rose out of the water at the end of a narrow spit, perhaps a hundred yards long. The stone chapel where he was supposed to meet the informant would be out there, completely hidden by the trees.

Basketball-size rocks landscaped with shrubs of ash and juniper lined the gravel path. This had been built by humans, but there had likely been a path to the island for millennia, exposed by falling tides and disappearing when they rose. It made for the perfect sacred island. There was a word for such an island mound connected to land by a spit… Tyler’s vocabulary was far superior to the other AUSAs in the office. It was better than most people he knew except for his father, who had a true photographic memory. He was eidetic if a person wanted to use the precise word – which Van’s father always did.

He continued out the spit toward the little bump of land…

What was that word…?

Tyler thought about looking it up on his phone but decided he’d let the back of his brain do the work while he focused on getting the Hernandez brothers convicted along with everyone else who had anything to do with smuggling a boatload of black tar heroin into Alaska.

He took a deep, cleansing breath of sea air to clear his head. There were no clouds, but it was getting late, and an evening haze hung over the distant snowcapped mountains across the Lynn Canal. The water was glass calm, undulating like quicksilver in the long light. A man in an aluminum skiff fished off the gravel bar north of the shrine. The path climbed gradually into the trees, and a humble gray chapel of gray melon-size river stone came into view. It resembled a small fort.

Still trying to think of the elusive word for this kind of island, Tyler walked the circumference of the grounds twice, stopping at each of several religious statues, halfheartedly reading their inscriptions, killing time. He expected someone would approach him in the shadows like a Cold War spy. No one did, so he pulled open the polished timber door and went inside the church.

Ensley Rogers stuffed her phone in the pocket of her jacket as soon as Van walked down the little hill between the buildings and out of sight. She’d suffered from FOMO before anyone gave it its own acronym. Fear of Missing Out. Never being the type to wait in the car – not for anybody – she wanted to see this informant for herself. Like that Hamilton song, she wanted to be in the “room where it happened” – in the thick of things. Most of all, she wanted to protect Van. He was a good guy, even if he was a little preoccupied with his cool hairdo.

Her leg began to bounce. Her fingers drummed the center armrest. After what seemed like hours, she pulled out her phone again to check the time.

Seven minutes.

Her leg bounced harder. The finger drumming became more intense. She’d planned to introduce herself when the informant arrived, like a good assistant, and then walk out to the shrine together. But no one showed, and she began to think the meeting was already going on. Without her.

Van would be mad if she followed him, but she’d make it up to him later.

She got out, easing the door shut so it didn’t make a sound, and snugged her jacket up tight around her neck. She wasn’t chilly. The dark shadows and towering trees just made this place spooky as hell. She checked her phone again.

Fifteen minutes. That was long enough to wait.

The tiny bud in Dallas Childers’s left ear clicked with static a moment before Schimmel’s discombobulated chatter came across the air. He was in the boat, fishing, watching, supposedly ready to give a heads-up when anyone approached the shrine. Childers had had the attorney in his sights for three full minutes before the idiot had said a word about it.

The voice-activated radios were encrypted, better than cell phones for this job. Childers did not want to leave his position on the gun to push or swipe any buttons needed to take a call. It was a good thing, too. The witless US attorney had walked within ten feet of his hide. This time, Childers wore a ghillie suit, uneven strips of multicolored burlap that matched the thick foliage of highbush cranberries and devil’s club. He’d dug into the duff and decaying spruce trunk, covering himself with debris. A multicam sniper veil draped across the rifle’s optic, breaking up the outline to any casual observer. But in the end, Childers stayed hidden because the lawyer, like most people, walked around with his head up his ass. Obviously nervous, the guy looked everywhere but saw little.

“I… I think… he’s gone in the church,” Schimmel stammered.

“I can see that,” Childers whispered, hyperaware of his own breathing. The tiny mic was so close to the corner of his mouth that he was nearly eating it, so a whisper was plenty loud. The door was around the corner from his hide, out of his view, but he could see Tyler through the window now.

Schimmel started jabbering again. “Tall brunette just started your way from the parking lot.”

“A female?” Childers confirmed. Surprised. “Alone?”

“Yes and yes,” Schimmel said.

“Recognize her?”

“I don’t know,”