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

of steel pipes and chutes blasted into the rock. Streams large and small, fed by Juneau’s frequent rain and melting snow, tumbled down from the icefields in the high country above to fill the ditch. This massive amount of hydropower was channeled down the mountain to the Treadwell, Mexican, 700 Foot, and Ready Bullion mines that made up the Treadwell enterprise. There it was harnessed to run the stamp mills used to crush the gold-bearing ore when it came out of the mountain. Treadwell ran over nine hundred such mills, with hammers that looked like organ pipes. The moving water turned a flywheel that turned an offset camshaft, lifting the hammers the size of small telephone poles and letting them fall in turn, smashing the rock to get at the gold, day after day, night after night. Childers was half deaf from the roar of his backhoe, but miners back in those glory days must have gone a little crazy with steel pounding away at tons of rock all day and all night but for Christmas and the Fourth of July. Those two days must have been hell on the miners. The silence after all that constant racket… That would be off-putting as hell.

Childers’s boot slipped on a piece of rotting wood as he turned off the main trail to cut directly across the mountain. The forest was littered with fallen trees, snot-slick with moss and rain. Broken branches stuck up here and there like mossy punji sticks. Even sidehilling required a lot of up and down. It was a good place to break a leg.

He grabbed the nearest branch to keep from falling. It happened to be devil’s club. He let a muffled curse through clenched teeth, brushing the stickered leaves and stalk out of the way with the forearm of his raingear. The thorns were small, hairlike, just enough to piss him off. He hiked on, keeping his body upright on the angle so his feet didn’t squirt out from under him. He wanted to get well off the established trail. Too many people down there for what he had in mind.

Hikers were like rain in Juneau. They didn’t come along every day, but they could show up anytime. You had to figure them into every plan when you went into the backcountry. The Treadwell Ditch Trail was nearby, as were the Mount Jumbo and some smaller trails near Paris Creek, the stream that fell over the rocky cliffs and into the flooded Treadwell Glory Hole, hundreds of feet below. The trails were well groomed, far too apt to draw a crowd for any kind of clandestine meeting, even early in the morning. Hell, especially early in the morning. That’s when all the algae-juice-swilling health nuts got a few miles in before plopping down in front of their computers. A random encounter wouldn’t pose much of a problem. Most of them looked to be clueless when they ran, buds jammed into their ears, staring at their feet. Childers would be able to walk up and clobber most runners with a rock before they ever knew he was there. Still, he might as well avoid it if he could. That way, he could focus his efforts on Schimmel. He stopped picking his way over the mossy deadfall long enough to laugh at that thought. What a joke. Like Dean Schimmel would take any effort.

The moist earth and lush vegetation of an old growth forest had a way of eating sounds. It was even worse in the fog. Ravens croaked here and there in the treetops, a porcupine snuffled by. And water. There was always water trickling or dripping somewhere. If you didn’t stop to listen, you might think the mountain was as quiet as a tomb.

Schimmel sat on the edge of an old timber dam, head down, swinging his legs like a bored schoolkid. Childers was tempted to sneak up just to scare the shit out of him and see if he keeled over like a fainting goat. Childers made it to within ten feet before he even looked up.

Schimmel brightened and slid off the old logs to land on his feet.

“Thanks for coming, man,” Schimmel gushed, looking like he might cry with joy. Clueless little prick.

“Yeah,” Childers said. “What the hell happened to you in town? That thing with the kid…”

“I know, right?” Schimmel said. “I had to do something.” He lifted his shirt. “Look what that sadistic bastard Dollarhyde did to me.”

Childers gave a low whistle, admiring the outcome of his work. The flaky little puke looked like a redneck Frankenstein. Childers counted three long slashes and two shorter ones crisscrossing his chest from armpit to armpit. Blood oozed from under each arm, coating the otherwise ghostly pale skin of his ribs. His left side was worse than his right, which made sense, Childers thought. Short pieces of duct tape ran the length of each wound like oversized butterfly bandages. The tape did a decent job of keeping the deep gashes closed, not necessarily a good thing since it trapped the infection that already turned Schimmel’s chest into a swollen mass of pink tissue.

“Damn,” Childers whispered, sounding sympathetic despite how humorous this was. “You need help. Can you walk?”

Schimmel nodded. He dropped the tail of his shirt, wincing like a baby again. “Hurts like hell, but I made it all the way up here.”

“Follow me,” Childers said. “I know a quicker way down. You can tell me what happened on the way.”

“I can’t figure it out,” Schimmel said, staying close as the two men picked their way over, under, and around deadfall and devil’s club. They weren’t going far, but Childers took the hardest route, just for the fun of it. Schimmel followed like a dutiful puppy.

“Why would Dollarhyde cut you up?”

“No idea,” Schimmel said. “He’d kill me if he wanted me dead, but this is just sick, man. Razor blades in somebody’s soap, I mean, that takes somebody twisted beyond belief to do that. I coulda