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

be in tribal territory. That is if you hadn’t already frozen to death or been eaten by a bear.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the streets became more sparsely settled and I had to hang back pretty far just so the guy wouldn’t notice me following. He was trudging along, moving steadily. Lateral to the south and uphill slightly to the east. The guy turned around a bend and I lost him. I kept on going for a while, but he wasn’t there anymore.

It was a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Maybe three houses deep from the woods. Two-story family dwellings with aluminum siding. Looked like they’d been built in the 1970s or 80s. Cars out front were the rustic kind. Four-wheel-drives or small and reliable runners that could survive the brutal winter. The asphalt turned to gravel and the road ran sharply uphill. I saw the guy up at the end of it. He turned left and disappeared into evergreen growth.

I went indirect. A bushwhack through the woods. Easier said than done. The rainforest is thick with ferns and mossy roots. A couple of minutes later I was on the edge of a backyard looking at a smokehouse, which resembled an outdoor toilet. Fumes coming out of the chimney smelled like sockeye salmon curing. Smelled good. I shifted position around a big tree and was able to see into the large back window of the house. Looked like a living room on the left through the big window, then a kitchen on the right, giving out to an elevated deck.

I could see the man from the ice cream store. He walked from left to right through the living room and disappeared into the kitchen. Then he reappeared in the window of the kitchen door above the elevated deck. I stepped behind the tree.

Then I heard the kitchen door open and close. I peered around. A different man came down the stairs, and then across the yard. It was the bearded giant from the night before in the Porterhouse Bar. The giant lowered his head and entered the smokehouse. He was armed. A paddle frame holster behind his right hip held a small revolver of some kind.

No big deal. Alaska is pretty much the last place on earth where you’d need to worry about carrying a gun. You don’t even need to register your gun. No permit required. I had to admit to myself that it was all kind of mysterious and intriguing. The bearded giant from the night before, the blonde girl, and the mustachioed guy from the ice cream store. Whatever, I was out of there.

I turned around the tree to back out of the woods and came face to face with the barrel of another gun.

Specifically, it was the short and fat barrel of an AR-15 style rifle. My eyes lingered for a moment at the black hole looking right at me, then my gaze moved forward along the fancy ribbed rail in three dimensional space to the rifle stock pushed against a shoulder, which was some kind of tactical military-grade minimalist option from a catalogue. Then I looked up at the face, it was the guy in the Subaru with the John Deere hat. He was looking back at me.

“Hands out and open, buddy.”

I opened my hands and put some air in my armpits.

The guy said, “Walk to the house.”

I took half a second to scold myself for not being tactically alert. But that was all.

I turned around and stepped onto the back yard grass. Then I started walking over it. The bearded giant was standing by the smokehouse holding a side of salmon. His fist was closed around the hanging wire. He stared at me, but that was it. I was expecting more. But then I figured that the giant hadn’t even seen me the night before. He had looked right through me.

The smoked sockeye salmon was a strong and contrasting red against the green grass and the green woods. The bearded guy growled at me, then plucked a bit of flesh off the fish and popped it between his lips and started to chew. I looked away from him to the house. The mustachioed guy was standing in the picture window looking down. He wasn’t smiling.

The barrel poked me in the spine, below my backpack and the guy said, “Move.”

I considered pushing back at him. What was the guy going to do, shoot me? But I figured it was better to just go with the flow. Maybe I’d learn something.

Five

The mustachioed guy watched me as I came in from the kitchen door on the deck. He was standing in the living room with a smirk on his face.

He said, “So this is the guy who came from town.” He looked proud of himself for having said it.

I walked through and said nothing. The deck gave on to the kitchen. To my left was a living room featuring the big window, floor to ceiling. Straight ahead was a hallway and then the front door of the house. It looked as if the house was being used as some kind of dormitory for overgrown children. There were beer bottle empties on the coffee table and a stack of pizza boxes.

The guy with the AR-15 kept the gun on me. The guy with the side-parted hair and the mustache said, “Who the hell are you?”

I pushed the rifle away from me. “Someone who doesn’t like guns pointed at him.”

The guy in the John Deere hat put the gun back on me and took a step away. “We are still in the gun-pointing-at-you part of the relationship.”

I looked at the guy with the mustache. “People follow me, then you’re following them. Then I follow you, and then your guy is following me. It’s like a snake eating its own tail.”

The mustache smiled. It was not a pretty smile. He was all groomed with hair product and clean clothes, but it was exactly like lipstick on a pig.