Page 92 of Backtrack

The Cape Fox Hotel sat on a hill above downtown Ketchikan, but the mountains kept going behind it. The clerk said she’d seen a goat on a hike the day before, and a grizzly bear the day before that. They’d had rats at the Eastham Unit and roaches. The occasional opossum somehow made it in past all the rings of security—but a bear and a mountain goat within hiking distance of the hotel? That was wild.

Maybe Shayna would want to live in a place like this—after they took care of what they’d come to do. Pink wouldn’t mind that. Alaska was anything but confined.

He walked across the path from the hotel portico to study a single totem pole. It was shorter than the one at the bottom of the hill and looked new. He couldn’t tell what the carved figures were but thought the top one might be a raven. Ravens were everywhere—in the art and croaking in the trees. This one looked solemn, broody, dangerous—like Pink felt.

A curse from Shayna shattered the silent reverence of the totem.Pink tamped down his immediate flush of rage and turned to see what her problem was. She’d come out of the hotel entry with the phone to her ear, barking at someone. Her face scrunched and twisted into an angry frown.

“What’s happened?” Pink said, instantly on alert.

She held up her hand to shush him. “Yeah … No … I can’t believe you, Bart! … Oh, for Pete’s sake … No, Bart, you dumbass. Whatever you do, do not do that …”

Pink had no idea what was going on, but now he could channel his rage at Bart, resolving to pull off the idiot’s head the next time they met. Shayna ended the call and shoved the phone in her pocket.

Bart Preston and Leo Bouchard were Shayna’s cousins. Leo was a former Georgia cop. That in and of itself was enough for Pink to hate him. With perpetually mussed salt-and-pepper hair and ill-fitting sports coats, he looked more like a harried English professor than law enforcement. For whatever reason, he’d quit and gone to work as a used car salesman. Pink had never bought a car, used or otherwise, but he’d watched enough movies to know salesmen couldn’t be trusted.

Bart owned a gym in Conroe, Texas, south of Huntsville. Both men spent hours there, pumping iron and planning activities that should by all rights have earned them long stints in prison. Somehow, maybe because of Leo’s insider experience, they’d skated through life without getting arrested. Clean criminal records had allowed them to show passports and follow Joellen Cutter onto the cruise ship in Seattle.

It killed Pink to let them out of his sight.

“I’m so mad I could spit,” Shayna said through clenched teeth. “You know that boyfriend Joellen took up with on the boat? Well, my rocket scientist cousins decided they should toss him overboard.”

“They did what?” Pink roared, drawing a startled look from two elderly Native men walking into the hotel from the parking lot. Pink lowered his voice. “Overboard? Did the cops get them? They have cops on the ship? Right?”

“They have security,” Shayna said. “Not cops per se, but they do have a jail.”

“They’re in jail?”

“No,” Shayna said. “I’m just saying they have a jail on the ship. Bart swears no one saw the scuffle. Says he didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Pink said. “If that asshole messed this up, I’m gonna—”

“I think we’re fine,” Shayna said. “For now, anyway. It sounds like Leo threw a sweater over the nearest camera. There are cameras all over, but so far it looks like they’re in the clear. He says they have an inside man to help them with security cameras.”

“An inside man?” Pink fumed. “A man on the inside means someone else knows about us!”

“Maybe,” Shayna said. “Could be he’s just looking the other way.” She changed the subject. “Ya know, Joellen is on her way north to see her husband, but she’s making time with some other guy on the ship. What if they were planning to take the diamonds for themselves?”

Pink took a deep breath and counted to four, the way his therapist taught him, pushing down his rage again. “Maybe so. I was looking through your notes last night. Who’s Miriam Cutter?”

“The older brother’s widow,” Shayna said, a verbal shrug, dismissive, coaxing Pink’s rage to the surface. “So what do you think about my theory? Could Joellen and her cruise ship fling have been planning to keep the diamonds and deal Arliss out?”

“It’s possible,” Pink said. “We’ll talk to her, and by talk, I mean kick the shit out of her until she tells us what we need to know.”

“If we have to,” Shayna said.

“We have to,” Pink said. “I would have liked to talk to the boyfriend.”

“Bart can get a little overzealous.”

“I’m gonna kill him,” Pink said, meaning it.

“Me too,” Shayna said. “We’ve worked too hard for this, honeybunch.”

It was true. They had worked too hard. Pink had dreamed of little else than getting even with D Wayne Cutter. He’d taken the diamonds after he murdered Millner. Pink was sure of that. He’d seen the look in the deputy’s eyes. It was the only thing that made sense. That asshole was just as guilty as they were—murdering someone to steal their diamonds.

It had taken Pink years to piece together a picture of D Wayne Cutter’s life from inside the prison. His cellie, Hog Head, had found a newspaper article about the old man and his grandsons winning a fishing tournament out of Fort Meyers, Florida. No mention of his wife. She must have died. Good riddance. He’d found another when his son, Bodie, died. Pink eventually figured out that the old man had adopted his two grandsons. The oldest died in some explosion in Alaska. The other one had gone into the Army, and then became a cop like his bastard granddaddy. Arliss. He looked like the old man. Same mean scowl. There wasn’t much on him on the Internet, but it looked like he was cut from the same cloth as the old man. He was a marshal in Florida. Pink found out that much. Married to a clerk in the federal court in Miami—Joellen Cutter. That article must have been wrong, because the last record he could find showed Arliss Cutter in Alaska. He was about to think he’d made a mistake when Joellen booked her trip to Alaska—heading toward her husband. Could be they’d moved the diamonds up there.

The old man up and died, escaping the judgment day he deserved before Pink could get to him. Someone had to pay the price for Vince Millner’s murder. That responsibility now fell to his strapping grandson, Arliss Cutter—and everyone he loved.