Master of understatement, that was Tim. Jo exchanged a wry look with their young winchman, Erik Ewald. She rubbed the salt-etched glass of the window with her cuff, wishing she was back at the radio station broadcasting another Northwest legend. Wishing she was anywhere but strapped into a helicopter.
Given their current heading, the ridges of Saddleback Mountain would be behind her right shoulder, the town and the river in front of her. That is, if she could see them.
Glancing down, she forced herself to relax her grip on the armrests before she dug holes in the leather. The helicopter pilots contracted by the Association flew in almost any type of weather, and Tim, whom she'd known all her life, was one of the best. She knew that.
The helicopter hit an air pocket, snapping her teeth together.
"Oops."
Oops?
"Sorry." Tim frowned at the controls. "She's acting a little sluggish today."
Sluggish? She raised her eyebrows at Erik, who shrugged, spreading his hands. Only a few years out of school, Erik was too young to have a sense of his own mortality, to realize he could be gone in the blink of an eye.
Tim caught her expression and chuckled. "Not to worry. I didn't expect this kind of turbulence, is all." His curly hair turned a burnished gold in a brief shaft of sunlight. "Since I bought the place up on Kensington, I can glance out the window for my weather report each morning. Can't beat that with a stick, now can you?"
He revved the engines, dropping below a layer of fog. Jo's fingernails dug back in.
"Course if Margie keeps bleeding me dry," he added, "I might not be able to make the mortgage payments."
"I heard about last night in the pub," Jo felt compelled to say. Tim and Margery's breakup had kept the whole town in gossip for more than a year now. They'd had, according to her friend Lucy who'd witnessed the event, one hell of a public row.
"Margie came in looking for a fight, that's for sure," he agreed. "It's almost like when I handed her the cash, it made her even madder. Lucy had to threaten her with an assault rap to get her calmed down."
"You paid Margie in public?" Jo shook her head. Men could be so clueless.
"Yeah, not my smoothest move, I guess."
As he angled the big chopper sharply to the left, Jo caught a brief glimpse of Youngs Bay through a break in the fog. In the thin winter light, the water looked cold and deadly. Her heart rate sped up.
According to Northwest legend, when Coyote had traveled to the Sky World, he'd been killed by his fall back to Earth. And wasn't she always admonishing her listeners to take those myths to heart?
She brought herself up short. What was her problem today, anyway? She made her living piloting huge freighters through the Columbia River bar, a narrow channel of shifting sand bars and forty-foot waves. And everyone who worked the big ships, whether they admitted it or not, relied on a combination of luck, skill, and superstition to get them safely back to port. On each crossing, she encountered more danger than she ever would in the short Seahawk flights. Her recent uneasiness on these trips made no sense at all.
"We had a heck of a storm while you were on the air at the radio station," Tim continued. "Gusts up to fifty knots, close-in surge over thirty feet, zip for visibility. Erik and I had no end of trouble holding this baby steady over the freighters. This fog looks like a piece of cake, considering."
"Right." She narrowed her gaze on the back of his head.
He glanced over his shoulder. "You doing okay?"
"Never a qualm, you know me."
He grinned, not fooled in the least. "Haven't seen you at the tavern lately. You develop an allergy for beer?"
"Been busy at the radio station." Since Cole's death, she'd buried herself in work at the community center.
"Yeah, I heard your broadcast the other night. That husky voice of yours…damn, woman. You're trying to make me regret I dumped you back in high school, aren't you?" He and Erik exchanged a very male look that had her shaking her head.
"I dumped you, not the other way around."
Tim thought about it while he rubbed a hand over his chin, then chuckled. "Yeah, you did, didn't you? Your loss."
She rolled her eyes.
"Still, you've gotta have time for a beer now and then, right? Why don't you drop by later tonight?"
"Can't. Prep party."
"Ah."
Saturday was the official opening of the Astoria Community Arts Center. She'd been working herself to the point of exhaustion, but she hadn't been able to stop. The center and its radio station were her tribute to Cole. If she couldn't lay to rest her questions surrounding his death, then at least she could make his dream come true.
Sensing Tim's regard, she glanced up. His expression was full of sympathy. Her grief—never far from the surface—had to be showing on her face.
Clearing his throat, he returned to the business at hand. "Okay, there she is." He pointed at the freighter now visible on the horizon, several miles distant. He pushed the chopper into a dive. "Here we go, boys and girls."
#
Thursday, 7:45 AM
"Caught a local radio broadcast on the way into town the other night." Keeping his voice casual, Mac brought the cleaver down with a sharp whack, neatly splitting the frozen block of bait in two.
Waves thudded against the hull of the Kasmira B with the force of depth charges. A fine mist of spray settled over him, icing his foul weather gear. Even the fur-lined rubber gloves he wore were slick, making it a challenge to hold onto the sharp knife.
Michael Chapman raised both brows but didn't break rhythm as he separated female and undersized crabs from those he tossed into the live tank. "You mean KACR?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
They were just off the South Jetty at the entrance to the Columbia River, around ten fathoms, working a crab season "lift." It was Mac's first time Out There, as the locals called it, on one of the world's most dangerous stretches of water.
When Michael left a message inviting him to be baiter for today's run, Mac had jumped at the chance. Though he was anxious to get to work, pulling together a police department in disarray after the death of its corrupt police chief, Mac's job didn't start until Monday. And the moving van with all his worldly belongings was idling at a truck stop outside Colorado Springs, waiting out a blizzard in the Rockies. The thought of sitting in his empty Victorian, avoiding his own ghosts, held little appeal.
"You can't know what this town is all about until you've experienced the river bar crossing," Michael had said in his voicemail.
He'd been right. When they'd hit the first set of monster waves in the pre-dawn darkness, Mac had instantly gained a new respect for the local fishermen.
The trawler shifted hard to starboard, and he had to scramble to avoid falling on his butt.
Michael caught the movement and grinned. "Haven't got your sea legs back yet, huh?"
"It's been a few years." Almost a decade, to be exact, since he'd retired from the Navy. He'd been off the water for far too long, he realized. "Give me another hour or two, I'll be back in form."
"May take you longer than you think—weather's supposed to worsen by midday." Michael swung the emptied and re-baited crab pot over the side, then lowered it with the boom. Though he spent most of his days heading up Astoria's Fire Department, he pitched in whenever he could on the fishing trawler.
Mac had a satisfying pile of bait prepared, so he pulled off his gloves and fetched a pair of small binoculars from the inside vest pocket of his sou'wester.
To the east, the bridge spanning the Columbia loomed high over downtown Astoria, backlit by the morning light, its four-mile-long, steel structure dropping to water level on the north end. Earlier, a helicopter had taken off from the airport, sunlight glinting off its fuselage before it disappeared into the fog. He could hear sea lions barking through the mists hovering at water level—the trawler passing them a thousand yards off their stern was probably a gill-netter.