Seaweed in the Soup (28 page)

Nobody answered. I was repeating the same message when the gunmen resumed firing.

By then, loose water sloshed in the bilges and was rising between gaps in the floorplates. The
Belle Girl
was sinking. Above the noise of rifle fire and ricocheting bullets came a muffled roar; the boat's interior lit up with oily yellow light. The
Belle Girl's
fuel tank had blown up. The cockpit became a blazing inferno.

With liquid flames lapping towards me, I tried to open a cabin window. It jammed halfway. I was trapped. By then, my pant legs were ablaze. The cabin was full of black smoke combined with red and yellow flames. I groped blindly down to the cabin sole, and after struggling for a bit, I yanked a floorboard loose and used it to smash the window. I slid over the side.

Black seawater closed around me like a suit of ice and dulled the searing pain of my burns. Instead of swimming hard and making splashes, I did a slow breaststroke that kept my legs and arms underwater. I couldn't see the Zodiac. That magnesium flare had gone out. The
Belle Girl
was well alight by then, burning and going under about a mile off Quanterelle Island. With the tide in my favour, I figured that I had about a fifty-fifty chance of making it to shore. I wondered if Charlie's bucket of guts had immobilized Twinner Scudd's dogs.

Then another magnesium flare went up. The men in the Zodiac found me in about fifteen minutes. When the Zodiac came abreast, I looked up and saw three gunmen wearing black survival suits. Their faces appeared to float, disembodied, like white balloons. One of the men had a metallic splint taped across his nose. Laughing, he went to his knees on the Zodiac's inflated rubber side. I reached out. He grabbed my wrist. Instead of pulling me aboard, he punched my face and then shoved me down and held me underwater for a while. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest, louder than the Zodiac's outboard motors. When he let me up for air, Eddie Cliffs said, “Welcome to Quanterelle, smart guy.”

Grinning, Cliffs picked a fishkiller club out of the bottom of the Zodiac and raised it menacingly. Time seemed to slow down as the fishkiller described a slow arc before it connected above my left ear. My head exploded into a universe of red and yellow pain. Eddie Cliffs was enjoying himself. Only half-conscious, I went under again.

I came to my senses when the Zodiac's hull grounded on Quanterelle Island. I was propped up in a sitting position, with my back against the side of the boat and my legs stretched out on the floorboards. Instead of moving, I kept still, opened my eyes a fraction. One of the boatmen had carried the Zodiac's bowline up the beach and hooked it over an iron mushroom. He then continued on up the beach and went into a small hut. Lights went on inside the hut. Another boatman was fiddling with the Zodiac's engine controls. Eddie Cliffs was leaning over the stern, using a knife to hack away strands of kelp that had wrapped themselves around the Zodiac's propellers.

The second boatman said, “I'm all finished here, Eddie. We'll need to gas her up before we take her out again. What do you want done with the cop?”

“When I'm finished cutting this kelp away, we'll drag him ashore. Twinner will want to talk to him when he wakes up.”

“
If
he wakes up, you mean. The poor fucker's probably dead.”

“Serves him right if he is dead,” Cliffs replied hotly. “The fucker busted my nose and nearly broke my fucking knee.”

“Asshole, you had it coming, probably. And there was no need to hit him with the goddamn club. Twinner never said nothing about killing him.”

“You worry too much.”

“And you don't worry enough, Cliffy,” the man said, as he stepped ashore off the bows and walked up the beach to the hut.

The fishkiller club that Cliffs had used on me was less than six feet away. It was lying on the floor near the steering console. Cliffs was still busily cutting kelp at the stern. It was now or never, time for me to make a move. I bent my knees, used my elbows to push myself away from the side of the boat, and tried to stand up. I never made it. Weak as a kitten, I raised my ass off the floorboards six inches, and then I collapsed. Cliffs turned. He was grinning. He grabbed the fishkiller.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The nightmare that overtook me took place within the pulsing radiant dome that was my skull. I was on Flea Island, following a woman dressed in a hooded black raincoat and gumboots. Rain sheeted down; my throbbing head seared with agony, but my body was cold, naked, shivering. A ravenous horde of fleas feasted on my face and inside my nostrils and mouth. The woman I was following had a black hole where her face was supposed to be, but I knew who she was all right: She was P.G. Mainwaring. Flea Island was about the size of a football field and forested improbably with aluminum Christmas trees. P.G. was walking too fast. I couldn't keep up and lost sight of her once or twice, until she left the trees and went inside an unfinished house. The house had a shingle roof and planked floors, but its walls were just bare wooden studs. I saw P.G. go down on her knees before a fireplace and try to lodge something up in the chimney. The thing wouldn't stay put, and it kept falling to the hearth. When I looked over her shoulder to see what she was trying to hide, her faceless head swung towards me. I saw something horrible under the black hood and raised both hands to block the sight of it. P.G. grabbed my arm and pulled me to her. Instead of struggling, I curled myself into a ball, and waited for the world to end . . . 

A voice I didn't recognize said, “Shhhh, take it easy, you're waking up.”

Was I dead
? No. I was alive and in the real world. My crack-addict dream receded. My head ached abominably; my mouth felt as if someone had driven a blade into my gums and was scraping the dental nerves. I opened my eyes: I was lying on a wooden floor with a woman leaning over me.

“Hold still and keep your eyes shut for a minute. I've bandaged your head. Now I'm going to put a poultice on your face,” she said quietly. “It's wild lily-of-the-valley leaves infused with cascara bark. It's a gooey mess, but it'll cool your skin.”

“Aaaaargh, gruuugh.”

“Try not to speak, it'll make your gums bleed worse.”

I fell into another doze. The next time I woke, I was lying on a low couch with a cushion beneath my head. The woman was absent, but a man sitting in a Coast Salish chief's ceremonial chair was watching me. It was Twinner Scudd. Behind Scudd's chair was a giant sun mask from the centre of which a Raven-Transforming-into-Wolf face gaped out. The mask was old. I was wondering how Twinner had acquired it when he got down from his throne and swaggered over. He said, “Having a shitty day, Seaweed? Eddie Cliffs gave you a good hammering, used your face as a punching bag. But you've been stupid, right? You were asking for it and maybe you deserved it.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words that emerged from between my swollen lips were garbled and indistinct.

“I've been waiting for you to show up,” Twinner said with his usual cocky self-confidence. “Not much goes on around here without me knowing all about it. I knew you were in Whaletown five minutes after the mail plane landed. I didn't know
who
you were, not at first. The Zodiac that was tied up to the government float when you landed belongs to me. It's the same Zodiac that Cliffy picked you up in last night.”

I licked my parched lips. It didn't help much, because an invisible sadist was tearing at my gums with red-hot pliers. Twinner went away for a minute and came back with a pitcher of water and a glass. He raised my head from the cushions and let me drink.

“It isn't hard to figure out why you came,” Twinner remarked. “It's because of her, right? That stuck-up meddling bitch.”

Twinner's words made little sense. What was he talking about?

“Do you have any idea how many people depend on me for jobs?” Twinner Scudd went on rhetorically. “Nearly fifty. Fifty of the greedy bloodsuckers, and I'm only talking about full-time workers. I've got grow-ops all over Desolation Sound, and when we start chopping bud in a couple of weeks, I'll need even more of the bastards. Let me tell you something else. Turnover is heavy in my business, and good help is hard to find. Guys rip me off, or try to. Some of these half-smart fuckers can't even follow simple instructions, and the guy who worked you over last night is one of 'em. He's a sadistic bastard, Cliffy is.

“I wouldn't mind so much except unnecessary violence can bring on a shitload of grief. Believe me, Seaweed, I know what I'm talking about,” he said, smiling now like a man who wanted to be liked. “Any time you feel like working for me instead of Whitey, there's an opening for you. Come in with me, Seaweed. I'll pay you more money in the next six months than you've earned in your whole life. With what you know about cops and crime, you and me could clean up. You could move off the reserve, live on a big yacht like I do. You'd have money up to the ying-yang, so think it over.”

Twinner Scudd went back to his chair and sat down, motionless and silent, until he took his dark glasses off and rubbed the back of a hand across his dark eyes. He put the glasses back on. “I need immunity from prosecution,” he said quite humbly. “I'm ready to make a deal with you. A plea bargain, because my ass is in a sling and I want out. I know what's being going on and I'm gonna turn the killer over to you. In exchange, I get to walk.”

Which killer
? I wondered.

He said, “Are you listening to what I'm saying?”

In your dreams
, I thought. But I nodded my head. If I'd been capable of it, I'd have smiled too because, if Twinner Scudd was involved in murder, I'd see he went down for it.

“I can handle a little slap on the wrist, maybe a suspended sentence, because that's all I deserve,” he said, nodding sagely. “Believe me, Seaweed, I didn't conspire to kill nobody. What it was, it was just a big misunderstanding. I can prove it.”

He might know what goes on in his own neck of the woods, but evidently he didn't know that I'd been suspended. That my present influence with Victoria's police department was zero.

“I've got something to show you,” Twinner said. “You still look bad, though, like something the cat dragged in. Do you think you can walk a few yards?”

I didn't want to walk. I wanted to stay where I was until the pain went away. With a big effort, I got up on my elbows and swung my legs off the couch. When I stood up, the world began to revolve.

With Twinner Scudd's support, I shuffled across the floor to a carved and painted wooden screen, and then through a narrow doorway into a small regalia chamber. It was quite dark and silent inside the chamber. Twinner helped me to sit on a ceremonial chief's throne identical to the one I'd seen in the other room. Twinner Scudd made himself comfortable on the floor. He was a soft fat blob sitting in the lotus position holding his knees.

Half a dozen tall men stood silently here and there. Seconds elapsed before I realized that I wasn't looking at human beings, but at carved wooden totem poles. Masks and dancing blankets draped the regalia chamber's cedar-panelled walls. Then I noticed Eddie Cliffs.

Hardly breathing, as still as the totem poles that surrounded him, Eddie Cliffs was standing perfectly still and upright with both arms behind his back. Several more moments passed before I understood that his wrists were tied and that he was partially suspended from a roof beam. His heels barely touched the floor.

“Feel like kicking Cliffy in the balls or gouging his eyeballs out?” Twinner said to me. “Go ahead. It's payback time for what Cliffy did to you last night.”

“Coooey ow,” I mumbled.

“Did you say cut him down, Seaweed?” Twinner laughed. “Aren't you generous. This is the guy who used brass knuckles on you, knocked you cold. Now Cliffy's feeling a bit of pain himself.”

Pointing a finger at Eddie Cliffs, Twinner said, “How's it feel so far?”

Cliffy groaned.

“Hear that?” Twinner said to me. “Fortunately for him, Seaweed, Cliffy is still awake. If he flakes out he ends up with two dislocated shoulders. It's a little trick that Bush's CIA pals picked up from the Syrians. They tell me it hurts like a bastard, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of is you end up permanently crippled with two bum shoulders.”

“Fo Gogh sake, 'winner,” I muttered.

“God's not listening to you,” Twinner laughed. “Cliffy's been appealing to God for hours already, and he ain't had an answer yet either. I'm softening Cliffy up for a grand finale in case he don't do what I want him to do and say what I want him to say.”

“Help me, Seaweed. I'm sorry what I done to you,” Eddie pleaded. “Somebody help me.”

Seated like a fat Buddha, Twinner Scudd said, “Seaweed, I'm gonna tell you how Larry Cooley got killed. It was on account of that Mainwaring bitch. I believe she's a favourite of yours, though. You got a hard-on for her, Seaweed?”

I didn't answer.

“Maybe you got a hard-on for her, but every time I see that woman, all I get is a hard time. Did you know she owned the Nanaimo building?”

I didn't respond. Twinner Scudd took his dark glasses off and rubbed his eyelids with his soft fingers. “With me, Piggy's all business,” he said after shielding his eyes with those dark lenses once more. “I owed her a little rent money, nothing serious. It's kind of a landlord-versus-tenant game I was playing with her. I was wondering how far I could push her before the sheriff showed up at Nanaimo's. Dumped my possessions on the street and nailed a writ to the door. She came to my office a couple of times. Laying down the law. Telling me how she was going to pull the rug out from under me. The last time Piggy came in throwing her weight around, I got mad. I threatened to kill her. It was just a bluff, Seaweed. I didn't mean it. I was gonna pay her eventually.”