Bone Rattle Read online

  “No, Dollarhyde works for the boss,” Merculief said.

  “So that makes him our boss,” Childers said.

  A man wearing dark green rain gear came around the trees on a growling four-wheeler below. Auclair, the grizzled mine foreman, bounced up the rough roadbed, dodging rocks the size of basketballs. The rain was beginning to pick up, and Merculief was relieved to see that he’d brought some tarps.

  “Dollarhydesaidbringthese.” The foreman habitually blurted out everything he wanted to say at once, like he didn’t want to spend the effort to space his words. “Coverthesite. Keepitdry.”

  Merculief exhaled sharply through his mouth, tension leaving on the cloud of vapor. Maybe the boss was on board with this.

  * * *

  Dean Schimmel wasn’t against work, so long as the bulk of that work meant he was leaning on his shovel and watching other people. Childers was pissed, he could tell, and that always made him a little nervous. It took fifteen minutes for the four men to help construct a makeshift tent over the shaman’s grave using tarps and heavy rocks. The fool archeologist ran his mouth the entire time, like he’d just found the Crystal Skull or some shit and not a bunch of dried-up bones. All of them were soaked and covered with mud by the time they got the rain directed away from the gravesite. Finally, Auclair put the babbling archeologist on the back of his four-wheeler and carried him down to Dollarhyde and the waiting fast boat.

  Childers and Schimmel stood in the ankle-deep mud, hoods pulled up around their faces for awhile, and smoked. Childers didn’t feel like talking to Schimmel, and Schimmel never knew what to say unless someone else started the conversation, so they stared at the hole they’d dug and listened to the stream rush down from the glaciers.

  Ten minutes after he finished his second cigarette, Dallas Childers threw back the hood of his raincoat. He grabbed the bar on the side of his backhoe and hauled himself into the cab with a grunt.

  Schimmel, still leaning with both hands on the shovel handle, looked up, trying to make sense of what was going on.

  “What are you doin’?”

  “We got a road to build,” Childers said. Settling into his seat, he snatched up a thermos and unscrewed the top to get a warmup from the coffee – and the other Kentucky goodness he had mixed in there.

  “What about the bones?”

  “What bones?” Childers said. “I don’t see any bones.”

  “And the archeologist?”

  Childers chuckled at that. “What archeologist? Auclair is taking him to the south dock to meet Mr. Dollarhyde. Nobody’s gonna see him get on that boat.”

  Schimmel gave a slow nod as the understanding crept in like a tickle on his brain.

  Mr. Dollarhyde would shoot Merculief, or maybe hit him with a rock. You could never tell with that guy. He might even tie an anchor around the kid’s feet and dump him over alive – that dude was always licking his lips and smiling that sadistic smile. Schimmel didn’t want to know the details. Not knowing meant he could tell himself he wasn’t a witness to a murder. He wouldn’t have minded killing the dumbass kid himself. But witnessing a killing made you a loose end, and Schimmel sure as hell didn’t want to be a loose end with lip-licking Dollarhyde sneaking around tying things up for Mr. Grimsson.

  Schimmel stepped back as the backhoe’s diesel engine rattled to life. This shit was about to get real. It was better to stay in the dark about the details.

  “Get your ass outta that dig!” Childers yelled. He bent over to fiddle with his backhoe controls.

  Schimmel stooped quickly and lifted the edge of the tarp, scooping up the bone rattle while Childers was busy, and shoving it in the pocket of his Frogg Toggs. He glanced sideways, holding his breath, bracing himself for the shit storm that would fall on him if Childers saw him try to walk off with evidence that the burial site existed. Tension always made him feel like he had to pee.

  Childers sat up straight in his seat again. “I told you to get out of the dig!” No mention of the rattle. Childers was so deaf from the rumble of diesel engines and gunfire over the years that Schimmel was sure he hadn’t heard a thing the archeologist kid had said about how much the bone rattle was worth.

  Schimmel scrambled out of the roadbed, dragging the blue tarps with him so there would be no trace when Childers put the skeleton and creepy deer-hoof apron back where it belonged, deep in the dirt. His hand dropped into the pocket of his rain coat, fingers wrapping around the handle of the bone rattle. It felt exceptionally heavy, especially with Childers frowning down at him, with the big gun strapped across his chest. Half a million bucks was a lot of money. Worth the risk, Schimmel told himself. Still, you couldn’t spend a dollar if you were dead. He could sell it at a discount to someone who knew how much it was worth. But he didn’t know anyone who had more than a couple hundred bucks besides Mr. Grimsson or Mr. Dollarhyde, and he sure as hell wasn’t telling them. No, he’d have to figure something out. But he had time.

  He wondered if the rattle might be cursed. It could be. There were curses in the Bible. Bad ones, and witches too. Maybe. He wasn’t really sure about the witches. Schimmel lit another cigarette and ran a finger along the bumps and ridges of the carved horn inside his pocket. Maybe Isaac Merculief had eaten all the bone rattle’s bad luck. Knowing Mr. Dollarhyde, the kid was already taking a saltwater snooze by now.

  He adjusted his earmuffs and then leaned on his shovel to formulate a plan. If everything worked out just right, he’d make some good money, and it probably wouldn’t get him killed.

  “Kua aere a rauuru te noo nei a mata.”

  “Only the drones are left. The warriors have gone to work.”

  —Cook Island Maori Proverb

  Day One

  Chapter 1

  Anchorage

  Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Arliss Cutter’s grandfather had warned him early on: If they’re cornered, just about anybody on earth would jam a pencil into your eye.

  That was Cutter’s job – cornering people.

  On paper, Jarome Pringle was just number 3 on a list of wanted criminals the Alaska Fugitive Task Force had focused on for the week – nothing special. Not dangerous. But then, Jarome Pringle had never been cornered.

  Cutter took his grandfather’s teachings to heart – and passed them on to the deputies he trained, the deputies he kicked doors with.

  Like today.

  Whenever possible, Cutter liked to hunt his fugitives in the tiny sliver of time when dogs and dopers overlapped their sleeps. It was the safest, if not the most convenient time to hit a house for a fugitive.

  It lowered the odds that anyone on his team would get a pencil in the eye.

  It was still dark, but that rarely helped you tell time in Alaska. In this case, it was early, a little after five a.m. It was still cold enough for a coat, but getting warmer every day, warm enough that the gray mountains of snow – fifteen, twenty feet high – that had been piled up in virtually every Anchorage parking lot and neighborhood cul-de-sac would weep rivulets of dirty water into the streets as soon as the sun came up in a couple of hours.

  With any luck, the task force would be done by then, and making ops plans for the next fugitive.

  Fugitive work – often simply called “enforcement” – was the sexy side of the Marshals Service. Everybody had to hook and haul prisoners at some point in his or her career. Deputy US marshals – DUSMs – sat in court and listened to attorneys drone on for so long they probably could pass the bar. They took mug shots, rolled fingerprints, conducted strip searches (lift and turn please), met the airlift with van loads of bad guys – but nobody came aboard for all that. You got a job with the Marshals Service because you wanted to work enforcement.

  You wanted to hunt.

  A good chief deputy spread the wealth. Jill Phillips was one of the best. She made sure every POD – plain old deputy – in the District of Alaska, even the ones who’d just graduated from Marshals Basic at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, had a warrant or tw
o of their own to work.

  PODs divided their time between court, judicial protection, asset forfeiture, hurricane aftermath, guarding dignitaries with State at the United Nations General Assembly – pretty much anything the Attorney General decided he or she wanted the Marshals Service to do. Deputies assigned to the Alaska Fugitive Task Force rarely had to dilute their schedule with collateral duties. They hunted. Every day – and many nights. They cornered the name on the paper, took him or her to jail, and then moved on to the next warrant in the stack, all the while trying not to get shot or stabbed by some bad guy’s baby mama.

  Cutter mulled over his grandfather’s wisdom as he drove through the backstreets of midtown Anchorage in the gunmetal chill of the predawn darkness. Gravel popped under the tires of his government-issue SUV. It was a Ford Escape – surely a joke from USMS fleet management in DC.

  His partner, Deputy Lola Teariki, a Polynesian of Cook Island Maori descent, sat in the passenger seat. She was not a particularly large woman – but her personality sprawled across the inside of the vehicle and took up a lot of space. Still a ways from thirty, she had four years on with the Service. Thick ebony hair piled high on her head in a tight bun, still glistening from the shower after her zero-dark-thirty workout. She and Cutter were dressed alike – navy blue long-sleeve shirts, khaki Vertx pants, and olive drab load-bearing ballistic vests with a five-pointed circle-star badge and police: us marshal embroidered in white across the back.

  Gazing out the passenger window, she brooded over something. She’d speak up soon. She always did. Even half-formed ideas seemed too much of a burden for Lola to carry around. She had to get them off her chest. That usually meant telling it all to Cutter, letting him in on what she’d figured out with the certitude that came from her two-point-something decades on the planet… He didn’t mind. She was a good kid. A little blabby, but her heart was in the right place – and she’d sure proved herself. Fit, smart, and hit on by pretty much every male officer or agent who met her, she was tough as an old boot, ready to jump in and go to town when more fragile souls might shy away. She could bat her lashes innocently one minute, then intimidate the hell out of some bad guy when she rolled her eyes and scrunched her nose the next. She called it “going Polynesian-princess to Maori-warrior face.”

  For now, whatever notion that was taking shape inside her head was still in its early stages, so she was quiet, allowing Cutter to ponder on his grandfather while he drove the last two blocks to the meeting.

  For as long as Arliss had known him, the old man, called Grumpy by most, lived by a certain creed. He called these doctrines his Grumpy Man-Rules, and passed them on to the grandsons he’d raised. Arliss’s brother, Ethan, had gone on to become an engineer. A noble profession to be sure, but a mystery to Grumpy. The old man had been an officer with Florida Marine Patrol. He chased poachers, rescued idiots, patrolled in his airboat to enforce the law on the water – and there was a lot of water in Florida. Arliss had followed, but on the federal side of the business, which riled the old man at first. Still, Grumpy saved back a few of his axioms that had special meaning to someone who carried a badge, even if it was for the feds, who he generally felt were as useless as tits on a boar hog.

  Well over a decade in the US Marshals – not to mention Cutter’s time with the 75th Rangers – had borne out the old man’s wisdom in spades.

  Cutter made a left.

  Lola kept quiet, still forming her notion.

  Jarome Pringle’s warrant file said he was harmless, but Cutter knew better. There was no such thing as harmless, not in this line of work.

  Cutter mulled over the possible outcomes, letting the chilly wind through his open window hit him in the face, bracing him awake.

  Spring in Alaska wasn’t all kite flying and daffodils. Breakup, they called it. As in the ice on the rivers was breaking up. Breakup in the city meant mud and dust and more mud. He found himself glad that temps had dropped into the high twenties overnight, frosting the grass and freezing the mud while they worked this warrant.

  Some sourdoughs joked that there were only two seasons – winter and July. A native of Florida and lover of all things to do with the sea and beach, Cutter found the Great Land pleasant – mostly. He loved the fall, enjoyed the summers, found new things to learn in the austerity and bitter winters of the Interior. But breakup… there wasn’t much to like about slop and slush and windshields that you could never get clean.

  The light was good, though. By mid-May the sun would rise in Utqiagvik – or Barrow – and wouldn’t dip below the horizon again for eighty-four days. Anchorage wasn’t as drastic. Here, they gained something like five minutes a day until they had about twenty hours of light.

  Cutter was the supervisory deputy over enforcement in Alaska, which meant he ran the task force. He chose which paper the teams worked, approved the operational plans, and kicked the biggest ones up to the chief for her check before anyone kicked a door. Safety for all members of the task force fell to him. It didn’t matter if they were deputies like Lola Teariki, officers detailed from Anchorage Police Department, Alaska State Troopers, or other feds from DHS or ATF. Cutter led from the front – which often meant getting out of the way and letting his guys do their job – another thing Grumpy had taught him.

  A thick head of perpetually mussed blond hair put Cutter at little over six-three. He steered clear of weights for the most part, staying in shape with running, push-ups, pull-ups, and swimming – plus a little work on the heavy bag every couple of days. With a fighting weight of two and a quarter, he was only just able to wedge himself behind the wheel of the midsize Ford SUV when he wore all his tactical gear. In his early forties, Cutter had yet to hit the metabolic wall that caused so many of his peers to turn into Deputy Donuts instead of the lean machines they’d been out of Marshals Service Basic.

  He was lucky in that regard. The rest of his life—

  “We need a new name, Cutter,” Lola said, shattering the silence. The weight of her idea had grown too heavy for her to bear alone. Her father’s Kiwi accent sharpened Teariki’s vowels and chased away her Rs when she was tired, turning “Cutter” into Cuttah.

  They were too close to the meeting point to get into a long conversation, which is why he humored her. “A new name for what?”

  Lola yawned, big, like a lioness. “For the Alaska Fugitive Task Force. AFTF is stuffed as far as acronyms go. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It’s too early for this, Lola,” Cutter said, driving over a bump of old snow as he took a corner.

  “Hear me out, boss.” Teariki patted the console between them. “A good acronym says something about what it stands for – like the FIST operations the Marshals Service used to do back in the day. Fugitive Investigative Strike Team. Now that’s got verve.”

  Cutter shrugged. “How about the FALCON roundups.”

  Lola scoffed, making a buzzer sound. “Lame! Federal and Local Cops… I don’t even remember. On Nightshift…? No, also stuffed. The acronym should at least make sense.” She folded her arms over the front of her ballistic vest and stared out the windshield at the darkness. “I’ll keep thinking on it.”

  “You do that,” Cutter said, making another turn down a dark street toward the rally point, where his team would link up with two uniformed Anchorage police officers.

  The smell of new birch and cottonwood buds on the cold air pinched his nose as he drove. There were other odors too, coming through the open window, less pleasant. Anchorage was a city of over 60,000 dogs. Which was all well and good. Cutter liked dogs. But not every owner was responsible, and that many pups left behind a lot of little melting land mines as the snows receded.

  Another reason not to like breakup.

  One of those sixty thousand dogs woofed somewhere down the block, grumbling at the chill.

  Another SUV was already parked along the road ahead, along with two marked APD cruisers.

  Cutter pulled in behind the SUV, two blocks east of Jarome Pringle’s
residence.

  It was time to not get stabbed in the eye.

  Chapter 2

  A part from being a tall, fat white guy who spoke with a distinctive Jamaican patois, Jarome Pringle seemed an unremarkable fugitive. The task force had dealt with him before. He’d been no problem – but in that instance, they’d snatched him out of a vehicle on a traffic stop. This time, they were going into his house, or more accurately, his new girlfriend’s house.

  Cutter had chosen the edge of this vacant lot for a quick briefing. It was near an Anchorage green belt of birch and spruce trees that ran along Chester Creek, but far enough away that no one at Pringle’s could hear vehicle doors shutting in the predawn darkness. Cutter killed the headlights and reached between the center console and his seat for his Battle Board.

  The dome light remained off when he opened the door – anything else was a recipe for getting shot.

  Lola arched her back, stretching, hands pressed flat on the Ford’s headliner in another long, feline yawn.

  “You got the warrant file?”

  “Got it,” Cutter said.

  He held up the multi-cam Battle Board – essentially a ballistic nylon folder with a clear Plexiglas face, under which he’d slipped a map of the neighborhood and a hand-sketched floorplan of the house.

  He’d marked up the map and floorplan with a grease pencil to aid in the briefing he was about to give the two Anchorage police officers who were there to help with the early-morning arrest. He’d gone over everything with Lola and the other two participating members of the task force the evening before.

  The DEA had arrested Pringle for possession of heroin the month before. They had some intel that he was trying to establish a foothold for a Jamaican posse in Anchorage, but he’d been holding only a couple of grams at the time – not enough to prove intent to sell. His defense attorney had convinced the judge that he was only holding the drugs for his troubled girlfriend – merely a good man, doing the right thing to help curb the terrible opiate epidemic. The magistrate hadn’t exactly believed that theory, but was troubled by the small amount of heroin if Pringle was supposed to be such a player, and allowed him out on bond. He’d promptly gotten arrested again for the DUI. The state judge allowed him out on his own recognizance as soon as he was sober enough to stagger, but the incident had triggered a federal supervised release violation.