A few minutes later, Harley showed up with Eddie and Russell. Their hands were so filled with donuts and bagels and cardboard cups of coffee they didn’t know how to get the van’s doors opened. Finally, Harley put his own cup on the hood of the car and slid open the side door. Charlie wondered to himself how these three would ever be able to accomplish anything more complicated.
But it was his job to make sure they did.
“What’s the word?” he asked as they settled into the backseats. “Have you got a boat?”
The three of them exchanged baffled looks before Eddie volunteered that he could probably make off with his uncle’s boat for a few days. “But I might have to throw him a few bucks if he finds out.”
“Throw him a six-pack and he’ll never find out anything,” Russell said.
“You boys have got to get onto that island by tomorrow,” Charlie said.
“And do what?” Russell asked, crumbs spilling from his mouth. He had the look, Charlie thought, of a cow chewing its cud.
“Get the jewels before these government guys get there.”
“Who says they’re even going there?” Eddie asked.
Charlie took a second to calm himself, then said, “They don’t do surveillance runs over places they don’t plan to go. And they don’t give my brother, Harley, here grief about that coffin lid if they’re not planning to look for the rest of it themselves.”
“But they’re gonna have all this equipment and shit,” Eddie said.
“That’s why you’re going to get there first, and land on the leeward side of the island,” Charlie explained. “As far from the beach as you can get.”
“There’s nowhere else to put in,” Eddie replied.
“A big boat, no, but your uncle’s trawler draws under six feet. You can get it into a cove. And of course you’ll have to wait until dark.” These days, darkness was falling sooner and sooner in the afternoon. “You can’t light any fires, either. When the feds do come, you don’t want them smelling your smoke or spotting the campsite. A cave would be good. Find a cave.”
“For how long?” Eddie whined.
“As long as it takes,” Charlie replied. “And bring some guns.”
“Guns?” Russell said, finding his voice again. “I’m not shooting it out with a bunch of Coast Guardsmen. Two years at Spring Creek was plenty for me.”
“Wolves,” Charlie said. “The island’s got wolves, in case you haven’t heard.”
“Oh.”
Some of the townspeople were filtering out of the annex now, pulling on hats and gloves. Geordie Ayakuk, eating a hot dog, had on neither. These natives had natural blubber, Charlie thought — another sign of God’s mysterious handiwork.
The two sisters appeared in the throng, coming toward the van, and it was as if Harley and his cronies had seen a ghost.
“Okay then,” Eddie said, hastily unlatching the side door and sliding it open. “I better get going.”
“Me, too,” Russell said, spilling out after him.
Harley remained in the front passenger seat. With a dubious expression, he said, “How long do you really think this is going to take?”
“It all depends.”
“On what?”
“On how fast you can dig.”
Rebekah was now standing by the car door, plainly waiting for Harley to give up the front seat to her.
“I’ll drop you off at your trailer,” Charlie said, “and you can get started on the packing.”
But Harley took one look at Bathsheba — eager to share a ride in the backseat with him — and said, “Forget it — I’ll walk.”
Chapter 17
As the van pulled away, Harley put up the collar on his parka and trudged down Front Street in a biting wind. It was only midday, but the clouds were thick and the light was already fading from the sky. Everything around him — the smattering of storefronts, the crooked totem pole, the rusted-out trucks with the monster tires — was bathed in a dull pewter-colored glow, like it was all contained under some overturned bowl. What would it be like, he wondered, to see hot sunlight on palm trees and walk around in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts?
And what would Angie Dobbs look like with a real tan, not that lobstery color she sometimes got when she’d been to the tanning parlor in Nome?
Both the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe and the lumberyard were closed because of the funeral service, and apart from the violet glow from the snake tank filtering through the slats of his blind, his trailer, too, lay dark and silent at the end of the alleyway between them. The Rottweiler in the gun shop barked ferociously as he passed by, and threw itself against the chicken-wire screen in the window.
“Shut the fuck up,” Harley said, as he went to the storage shed behind the lumberyard. There was a padlock on the door, but Harley knew that the owner had lost the keys so many times he didn’t bother to lock the damn thing anymore. Besides, what was there to steal, apart from the few shovels and picks that were precisely what Harley was after? They probably wouldn’t even be missed before he was back from the island with what he hoped would be the jewels in hand.
The jewels that would buy him his first-class ticket to Miami Beach.
Cracking the metal doors open just enough to slink inside, Harley groped for the string attached to the lightbulb in the ceiling. The whole fixture swayed, throwing shadows over the already gloomy interior. There were piles of rotting boards, a couple of broken-down lathes, sagging sawhorses littered with tools. Toward the back, leaning up against the wall like a bunch of drunks, he saw the shovels and spades and iron pickaxes that they’d need to dig up the graves and crack open the coffins. Just looking at them made his arms ache, and he reminded himself to make sure that Eddie and Russell did most of the hard labor. He was the foreman on this job, and the foreman’s job was to oversee things. He could already anticipate the shit he was going to get from the other two.
Skirting a wheelbarrow with a missing wheel, he started to rummage around among the shovels, looking for the ones best suited to the job. He’d need at least one with a broad flat blade in case the snow came down hard, and a couple more with sharper, firmer ends for penetrating the soil. Chisels would be good, too; they could be driven into the ground like stakes and, if placed well enough, Eddie and Russell might be able to remove whole slabs of earth, virtually intact, all at once.
The wind was blowing so hard at the metal doors that one of them banged shut again, and Harley jumped at the sound. The hanging light fixture swung from the ceiling like a pendulum, and Harley wished the damn thing had a higher-wattage bulb in it. Everything in the room cast a weird shadow around the corrugated metal walls, and for one split second Harley thought he caught a glimpse of something moving behind him, as if it had just entered the shed.
Could the damn dog have been let loose? He stood stock-still, waiting, but he didn’t see anything skulking along the ground, among the planks and chain saws. And if he listened carefully, as he was doing now, over the sound of the wind he could hear the Rottweiler howling in the gun shop next door, right where she belonged.
But howling like she was freaking out over something.
Harley didn’t understand the point of dogs. As far as he was concerned, they were just failed wolves — and you could shoot the whole lot of them, for all he cared.
He went back to picking his tools — he didn’t want to spend all day in here, since what he was doing might, technically, be called stealing if the owner caught him at it — but stopped when he thought he heard something moving again, on just the other side of a tall stack of boards.