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

the tiller of the little thirty-horse outboard. The GPS said they were making a solid twenty-one knots with the two of them and minimal gear, which felt even faster in the chop. Enough spray flew over the bow as they raced across the waves that it might as well have been raining. Cutter didn’t care. They were moving forward. That’s what mattered.

Lori Maycomb sat midships, facing him. She’d pulled her hair back with a couple of elastic bands. A chilly wind pinked her oval face, slightly bewildered that he’d allowed her to come along. She nodded at his belt, eyeing the worn leather pouch that was half hidden by the rain jacket, opposite the Colt Python.

Leaning toward him, she raised her voice over the roaring engine and the chatter of the boat against the waves. “What’s with the medicine bag?”

“It was my grandfather’s,” Cutter said, offering no more information.

She sat back, looking at him for a time, then said, “You’re thinking that you’ll be able to track them?”

“I plan to try,” Cutter yelled. “Levi and Donita would have had to take a boat out there. If they came this way, we’ll find where they docked. There’ll be some sign.”

Maycomb chewed on that idea. “Might be all we find is bear sign.”

“Maybe,” Cutter said. “We’ll poke around. Two people can leave a very distinct trail if you know what to look for.”

She leaned in, wanting to hear everything. “And you know what to look for?” She sounded more impressed than skeptical.

“This terrain is different from where I grew up,” he said, able to speak at a little more normal volume now that she’d moved closer. “I’ve done some tracking in similar forests on Prince of Wales Island.”

“Yeah,” Maycomb said. “But was it chasing murderers?”

Cutter chuckled. “As a matter of fact, it was…”

She grimaced at the thought.

“That has to be different from Florida.”

“Different and the same,” he said. “People move across the ground, they leave sign. Grass, downed trees, dirt. It might be slow going, but I can follow a trail if we can pick it up.”

“Thanks for letting me come with you.”

Cutter gave her a nod.

“Why did you anyway – let me come with you, I mean?”

“Two reasons,” Cutter said. “Donita Willets is your informant. That means she trusts you. I imagine she thinks everyone is trying to kill her right now. She might not come out of hiding if some ugly-looking guy like me starts poking around. She could be armed. I could get hurt.”

“She does trust me,” Maycomb said. “What’s the other reason?”

“The main reason,” Cutter said. “I don’t like the way your sister-in-law treats you.”

“Let me get this straight,” Maycomb said. She’d missed a lock of hair with her elastic bands and a gust of wind blew it across her face, wet with spray. “You let me come because Rockie Van Dyke didn’t want me to?”

“About the size of it,” Cutter said.

“That’s about the coolest thing anybody’s ever done for me,” Maycomb said, more to herself than Cutter.

Heavy chop at the entrance to Berners Bay forced Cutter to tack into the waves to keep from swamping the little skiff, curtailing their conversation for the time being.

Lori Maycomb had seen plenty of men who knew their way around a boat, but the ones Cutter’s age usually made a little show of it. They wanted you to know that they knew what they were doing. The behavior was evolutionary, she supposed. Look at me. I can make fire. I can catch you fish. I will keep you safe on the open sea. I would be a good mate.

Lots of people said they didn’t care what others thought. Apparently, Arliss Cutter was one of the few who actually meant it. He did what needed to be done and then moved on to the next thing. Oddly, his behavior only made her want to watch him more closely.

Thomas Horning had loaned them a nautical chart for the area. Cutter folded it so he could look at the relevant section through a gallon-size ziplock bag he kept on his knee. The chart allowed him not only to orient himself with landmarks and terrain as they headed south, but to tuck in relatively close to shore while avoiding boat-eating rocks that lurked under the surface.

The concrete tanks and dark brown wood of the abandoned hatchery appeared through the mist less than half an hour after they left the Echo Cove boat launch. Below the hatchery, a smooth gravel beach dropped quickly to a newish wooden dock. A painted US Forest Service sign marked the trailhead that disappeared uphill into a heavy thatch of devil’s club, cow parsnip, and sky-touching spruce. Behind the dock, a treeless point of black rock jutted sixty or seventy feet from the shore, forming a natural jetty.

Cutter eased off the throttle, but instead of motoring to the dock, he swung out, arcing well away from the point. Lines of rock like that rarely ended abruptly, instead trailing into the sea just under the surface, like hidden teeth, waiting to rip the bottom off a boat.

“We’re not tying up at the dock?”

Cutter nodded at the point. “Levi’s still missing, so we have to assume others are actively hunting for Donita. That kid doesn’t strike me as a very convincing liar, so whatever he knows, the bad guys will know soon enough.”

“Still,” Maycomb said. “I thought we were going to track them.”

“We are,” Cutter said, looking down at the chart before bringing the skiff abeam the rocky point. “I’m hoping to hide the skiff. Hopefully it’ll give us a slight advantage if—” He stopped, cursing under his breath. “Looks like they beat us here.”

Another aluminum boat bobbed nearshore on the far side of the natural jetty. Slightly larger than the Smoker Craft, this skiff was much older, dented and scraped. A fifty-horse Suzuki hung off the transom, kicked up to keep from damaging the prop in shallow water.

His left hand on the tiller, Cutter’s right dropped to the gun on his