Page 126 of Backtrack

“Right, sure. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Malosi cut the cameras for us and got Joellen Cutter’s excursion schedule. I couldn’t very well let him talk to the marshals. I had to whack him, or this whole thing would have been over. Anyway, they must have seen me jump off the boat and—”

“The entire ship knows you jumped off the boat,” Ricky said. “The captain made a man-overboard announcement.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Well, you wanted me to get the guns. So I got the guns.”

“You did,” Ricky said, agreeing but sounding no less dangerous. “And Cutter knows you were off the boat, so he must have assumed any danger to his ex-wife is over.” He turned and walked to the Ritz Cracker box, studying his shots. Leo and Shayna stayed where they were. Pink came back to them carrying the shovel.

“We can get her alone at the cemetery,” Shayna said. “We cart her back into the woods somewhere and tie her up, use the knives on her if we have to. She’ll tell us if Cutter knows where the diamonds are.”

“Cutter …” Ricky said, as if he was unconvinced.

“I’m telling you, hon,” Shayna said. “The ex-wife is the place to start. She stayed in his room last night.”

Ricky’s head snapped around. “How do you know that?”

“Twenty dollars to a room attendant who works the same hall,” she said.

“Why are you just telling me this now?”

She put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off. “You know how focused you are. It didn’t seem important until now.”

“Focused,” he whispered, staring up the road toward the Klondike Highway.

“Ricky,” she said. “You scare the shit outta me when you go quiet like—”

He held up a fist. The universal sign for freeze. A moment later, a rusty white truck bounced down the road toward the ball fields.

An older man in a tattered ballcap got out and sauntered over. His gray beard was dyed orange around his mouth from a lifetime of roll-your-own cigarettes.

“Thought I heard shootin’,” he said, nodding at the Glocks and then tapping the blue-steel revolver in his waistband. “It’s a free country and I sure as hell got no skin in the game, but there’s better places to shoot upriver some toward Dyea.”

“That a .357?” Ricky gave a nod to the man’s handgun.

“Smith & Wesson in .45 Long Colt,” the man said. “Shoot the nuts off a mayfly at twenty yards.”

“Got any more rounds for it?” Ricky asked.

The man’s mouth disappeared in a frown behind his grizzled beard. “In my truck. Why?”

Ricky shot the man in the neck with the silenced Glock, then whispered, “Because I want it.”

Shayna screamed, “You stupid, ignorant baby! Do you have any idea what—”

Pink hit her in the face with the shovel.

The blow was one-handed, and it scared her more than hurt her. She raged at him now. “You son of a bitch!” She raised the unsuppressed Glock, intent on putting it to good use—but he hit her again, this time with gusto. The gun slipped from her hand. She folded, collapsing backward and landing on her butt. Blood streamed from her nose and a large gash beneath her eye.

Ricky pressed the gun to her forehead.

“Leo,” he said. “If I blow your cousin’s brains out the back of her head, will you still help me kill Arliss Cutter.”

“Will we still look for the diamonds?”

“Leo!” Shayna sobbed.

“Of course we’ll look for the diamonds,” Ricky said.

Tears pressed between clenched lashes.