Dark Moon Walking (11 page)

“Yeah. Me too.” He looked down at her, feeling her fear grow again. “Hungry?”

She stared up at him for a long moment and then the outline of her body relaxed onto the rock. “Oh, God! I'm starving. Have you got anything?”

He reached back and took the bag off his belt, holding it out over the edge so she could see it. “How does smoked salmon and fresh berries sound?” he asked. “You'll have to come up here, though. I don't think I can get down there.”

“Okay, but it'll take me a while. I have to go round to the other side to get off the ledge.”

Walker wasn't sure he liked the idea of her clambering around the cliff. “It's pretty dark. You gonna be all right?”

“I'll be fine. I'll take it slow. It's not as bad as it looks from up there. Besides, there'll be more light on the other side. The sun hasn't been down that long.”

It was almost half an hour before she appeared beside him. For a while he had listened to the small sounds she made as she moved slowly along the ledge, but soon they had stopped and he'd sat listening to the silence and watching the flicker of the light through the trees.

“Walker!” she said again as she slid to the ground beside him. “It is so, so good to see you.”

He smiled and opened the bag, reaching in to pull out a piece of salmon. He handed it to her, his smile widening as she snatched it and crammed it into her mouth.

“Oh, that's so good!” She spoke around a mouthful. “I was ready to chew the bark off the trees!”

He looked up the oddly twisted trunk that grew beside him. It was shedding its bark, jigsaw pieces of reddish brown wood flaking off to reveal the pale green cambium layer underneath. “Nah.” He smiled. “Not a good idea. It looks pretty, but it would taste terrible.”

He turned back to find her staring at him, her eyes huge. “How can we be joking? They want to kill me!”

“How do you know? What happened?”

She turned to look across to where the ship's light danced in the darkness. When she answered, her voice was again tight with fear.

“There has to be a reason they're hunting her,” Dan said.

Walker and Dan were talking on the radio, and even though Dan's voice was distorted, Walker could hear in it an odd, distant quality, a change in cadence that he recognized. He pictured Dan staring off into space, his eyes unfocused, as he leaned across the bridge. Ten years ago, when Walker had first met him across a scratched metal table in a cold and featureless interrogation room, Walker had mistaken that distant look for arrogance, had called him an “arrogant white bastard.” He had been wrong. It was Dan's way of relaxing his mind so he could let it run free, sorting through the details, connecting the dots, noting the gaps in the story, trying to put it all together.

“You sure she didn't see anything?”

“Nope. Came back from kayaking and they were waiting for her with guns,” Walker replied.

“Huh. Gotta be something big. Drugs, most likely. Those containers could hold a lot of coke or heroin. That kind of money would make it worth going to a lot of trouble to get rid of her.”

The radios fell silent as the two men considered the possibilities of the events that had occurred. Walker looked across at Claire, curled up on a bed of ferns beside him, her face slack in the depth of sleep. A faint hiss of static emanated from the speaker as he stared up into the dark bowl of the sky and watched the stars wheel overhead. It felt strange to be talking to Dan as an equal, stranger still to feel a sense of kinship, but it also felt right and natural, and he realized that he was enjoying it.

The radio came to life again. “Thing I can't figure out is why the hell they would sink it all, then hang around.” Dan sounded like he was mostly talking to himself, and Walker figured he didn't expect an answer, so he didn't offer one.

“Any chance you can stay where you are for the night?” Dan's voice had become strained. “I can't get hold of Mike till tomorrow, but I'm going to see if he can get the guys in the marine division to send one of their boats up here to take a look. I'll have to use the satellite radio to call him, so I need to be here, and it would be good if we knew whether the black ship was still anchored over there.”

Walker heard the rushed words and understood that Dan was talking too much in an effort to deal with the discomfort he felt at making such an outrageous request. He smiled as he listened to the awkward pause that followed, remembering his own discomfort years ago sitting across from this man in that dingy interrogation room. It wasn't just the situation that had changed; their roles had been reversed.

Dan spoke again. “I'm not sure it's a good idea to bring the dinghy over there now either. Sound carries really well at night, and it could be a problem if they hear us.”

Walker looked around the rocky knoll they were sitting on and nodded to himself. He and Claire had talked about moving again, getting away from the black ship under cover of night, but it might be safer to stay where they were. He could find enough food for them both and Dan was within reach if they needed him. Plus, he knew Dan was right in thinking it would be good to have someone watching the black ship and keeping an eye on dinghy traffic.

“You still at Shoal Bay?” He needed to be absolutely sure Dan was close enough to be able to reach them quickly. It was the least he could offer Claire as reassurance.

“No. I'm in a cove on the north side of Midsummer Island. I'm pretty well out of sight. If Mike can get the marine guys to come, they'll probably come down from the north, through Wells Passage. Maybe anchor up in Kingcome somewhere and send in a couple of guys in one of the inflatables to take a look.”

“We might need you here if the guys from the black ship come sniffing.”

“I'll keep the radio beside me, and the outboard is already mounted. Tell me again exactly where you are.”

Walker listened to the sound of paper rustling as Dan hauled a chart out and followed the route he gave him. He wondered about the kind of strings Dan would have to pull to get the marine division to divert one of its big catamarans to come and check things out. He knew from talk back in the village that the division was stretched pretty thin, with only thirty cops spread between four boats, patrolling an area that was about six hundred miles long as the crow flies and stretched from Vancouver in the south to Stewart, on the Alaska–British Columbia border, in the north. And if that wasn't tough enough, the deep, twisting inlets and over forty thousand islands that formed the complicated coastline of the land his people had called home ever since the ancestors had arrived made the actual distance closer to seventeen thousand miles.

Whatever Dan said—or promised—would have to be pretty spectacular, and Walker was pretty sure that if he did manage to pull it off, there would be some form of payment extracted from him when he returned to his home down south. But Dan didn't seem to be bothered by the possibility and Walker guessed it would simply be something the ex-cop would deal with when the time came. For now, he just sounded glad for any help he could get.

“Okay. The radio is on and the dinghy is in the water and ready to go. I'll call you as soon as I get through to Mike. I don't need to wait for the marine guys to get here. If they come, they'll do their own thing. They won't need me to help them out. I'll just give them the information and tell them where to look. And you call me if it even looks like someone is coming your way.”

“Okay. How long will the batteries last in this thing?”

“They're good for at least a couple of days with the spares I gave you. I'll be there long before that.”

Walker turned the radio to standby and put it back into the bag that hung from his belt. He would have to move the canoe before it got light, but that would wake Claire and it could wait for a few hours. He settled himself more comfortably against the tree and closed his eyes.

The Great Bear constellation hung far to the west when he nudged Claire awake and slid down the bank. Another hour and the first pale fronds of dawn would stain the horizon. Enough time to find a hiding place for the canoe and something to eat. A fish would be easy, but he could not risk a fire, and no fire meant that most of the roots and bulbs he could collect were also off the menu. He had seen a sea cucumber and a few sea urchins clinging to the rocks, but he doubted he could reach them unless he dove for them, which meant a long, hard scrabble back up. That left the oysters and mussels that were clinging to the rocks, and there were plenty of those. Plus, he could see kelp floats undulating just off the shore and they would be easy to pull. There was dulse too, and rice-root lilies in the clearings between the trees, as well as ripe berries on the wild lily of the valley that grew in the shadows. They wouldn't go hungry.

“Walker!” Her voice was low. “There's another boat coming!”

The urgency in her voice jarred him. He had been so busy thinking about starting to collect food for their meal that he had not heard her approach. Earlier, they had decided to split up, each finding a spot with a good view of the black ship but on opposite sides of the island. That way, if either of them spotted one of the dinghies returning, or anything else, for that matter, he or she could alert the other. It was a good plan, but it required patience, and he had allowed himself to be diverted while he got caught up in planning their meal.

“A boat or a dinghy?” He pulled himself to his feet.

“A boat. Looks like a crew boat or a water taxi or something. It's fast. I think it's going to the black ship.”

He sent her back ahead of him, knowing he would slow her down. “Keep your head down.”

She gave him a quick smile. He knew she hated being in sight of the black ship, but when he had suggested staying there, she had immediately understood the reason. Now perhaps it was paying off.

By the time Walker caught up with her, he could see that it did look like a crew boat with its aluminum hull and narrow decks. The new boat was throttling back, the bow wave moving forward as the hull settled deeper into the water. The roar of big diesels dropped to a rich purr as it slid easily up to the side of the black ship. Two men came out of the cabin and reached out to grab the bumpers that were already hanging from the railings. The newcomer had obviously been expected.