A Plunder by Pilgrims Read online

  The Bugle's modest headquarters was a one-room walk-up above a saltwater taffy shop, in the old downtown area on the east side of Highway 101. A third of the stores were vacant, a third were long term tenants, and the other third rotated every year through the usual suspects—antique shops, art galleries, t-shirt stores, and usually a combination of all three.

  The sky was a bold and cloudless blue, the kind of sky that showed up prominently on all the postcards. He parked his '71 Volkswagen van—he'd picked it up at auction shortly after moving to Barnacle Bluffs, and it was more rust-colored now than the original mustard—across the street. When he got out of the van, the wind sliced right through his leather jacket, and he pressed his fedora to his head.

  After crossing the street, he smelled popcorn and peppermint wafting out of the candy shop. When he took the green-carpeted stairs, the bottom of the stairwell open to the outside world, those smells were replaced by a faint whiff of mold.

  At the top there were two doors, one for an accountant, the other for The Bugle. That accountant's had an "Out to Lunch" sticky note stuck to it even though it was not yet eleven. He went into The Bugle's office without knocking, and there was Carmen Hornbridge in a room that looked like a tornado had ravaged it. She smiled at him. It was a smile that would have knocked a scrimmage line of football players on their asses.

  "Hi," she said. "Want to place an ad?"

  The room, no more than fifteen feet square, was a hodgepodge of desks, filing cabinets, Apple computers, and so much paper that it made Quinn's office seem sterile in comparison. With the curtains open, the full glare of the sun spilled into the room. Framed newspapers adorned most of the walls except for the one behind Carmen herself, which was covered by a giant corkboard; the corkboard itself was buried behind three or four layers of newspaper clippings, sticky notes, and business cards.

  Carmen Hornbridge was seated at the messiest of the three desks, bracketed by two wide monitors. Her nimble fingers were poised over the keyboard.

  Her powder blue blazer hung over the back of the swivel chair. The curly blond hair that had been let loose in her editorial page photo was now tied back in a pony tail. She was dainty, probably not more than a hundred pounds, with smooth skin, liquid green eyes, and childlike features. Her eyes gave her away, though. He'd guessed early twenties by her photo, but there was something about the intensity of her gaze and the subtle crow's feet that made him revise her age upwards a bit. Thirty maybe? She'd certainly aged well.

  The lingering aromas of chicken, onions, and noodles hung in the air. He spotted the white boxes from Ching Pau's behind one of the computers.

  "Chinese food for breakfast?" Gage said.

  She shrugged. "Maybe I'm having dinner at ten in the morning. What can I help you with?"

  He squeezed around cardboard boxes and settled into one of the two office chairs across from her desk. These chairs, unlike the ones in Quinn's office, had plenty of cushioning. He had to smile at that. You could tell who wanted you to stick around and get comfortable, at least in general principle.

  Closer to her now, he heard the faint mumble of voices, punctuated by static, and saw that she had a police scanner under a pile of magazines.

  "You run this whole place by yourself?" Gage said.

  She looked at him, blinking, as if her internal computer was assessing what level of attention Gage required, then finally turned away from her keyboard, folding her hands in her lap. She offered up a wan smile.

  "Do I look like I can't handle it?" she said.

  "I'm sure you can handle it fine. I was just curious."

  "Uh huh. Well, right now I do. There were two ad managers and a part-time secretary that came with this place, but I wanted to do things myself for a while so I knew the business inside and out." Those intense eyes narrowed. "Why, you looking for a job?"

  He chuckled. "No."

  "I didn't think so. You don't seem like the newspaper type."

  "Oh? What type do I seem?"

  She pursed her lips. He noticed there was a faint scar in the shallow valley between her lower lip and her chin, a mark that looked like it would blow off as easily as chalk. He also noticed that she radiated some kind of animal magnetism, a confidence that was damn appealing—appealing, that was, if he'd been on the lookout for that sort of thing.

  "Retired cop?" she said.

  "Now that's funny," Gage said.

  "All right, I give up. Who are you?"

  "My name's Garrison Gage."

  When he paused, she said, "Should that name mean something to me?"

  "I was waiting to see if it did. But it will as soon as I leave and you look me up on your computer."

  "Don't tell me. You're a retired adult film star, and you got that limp in the line of duty."

  He feigned offense. "What limp?"

  "You're ex-CIA, and you got shot in the cold war while running guns in Nicaragua."

  "No, but I watched the Iran Contra scandal on C-SPAN."

  "All right," she said, "I give up. Who are you? You better have once been in Cirque du Soleil, or I'm going to be pretty disappointed."

  Gage wasn't sure whether she was flirting with him, or if she bantered like that with everybody, but he liked her. Pretty, sharp, with a bit of an edge. It surprised him. She wasn't at all like Janet. In fact, from what he could tell so far, he'd say Carmen was Janet's exact opposite. He almost felt bad having to bring such a grim reality into the conversation.

  "I'm here about the girl on the beach," he said. "The one they found on Friday night."

  Her demeanor changed immediately; smile vanishing, the humor going out of the eyes. "Oh?" she said.

  "I'm the one who found her."

  "Really?" She reached for a pen and a yellow legal pad.

  "That's not why I'm here. I mean, it is and it isn't. I don't have any new information to give you other than that—not yet, anyway."

  Her eyebrows arched. They were thin and perfectly shaped. That was at least one thing she had in common with Janet; they both plucked their eyebrows with the precision of a surgeon. "Not yet?" she said. "What do you mean, not yet?"

  "I'm investigating her death."

  "So you are a cop?"

  "No, no."

  "Private investigator?"

  "Closer." When he saw the questions forming, he held up a hand. "You'll learn everything you need to know about me after spending a few minutes with Google, believe me."

  "Really?" she said. "Now you've really got me intrigued. So what do you want?"

  He liked that. Cutting to the chase—a woman after his own heart. "I'm here to make you a deal."

  "Uh huh. How so?"

  "Whether I told you who I was or not, you'd eventually learn about me once I started snooping around. No way to avoid it in this town. So here's the deal: You refrain from printing anything you know about me, and I'll make sure you get the first scoop when I find out who the girl is."

  "You're pretty confident in yourself, huh?"

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "You said when, not if."

  He shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I did. Probably because that's the way it usually works."

  "Usually? What percentage of cases do you usually solve?"

  "Oh, I don't know. All of them, I guess."

  Her eyes narrowed. "All of them?"

  "Yeah."

  "As in, you've never failed?"

  "Oh, I've failed all right. I've failed plenty."

  Her expression clouded. "Then I don't understand — "

  "Every investigation is a series of failures, Miss Hornbridge. You try on different theories, you head down a lot of dead ends. It's just a question of how much failure a person is willing to take. That's really the only thing that makes me different than most folks. I learned early on that I'm one of those people that's willing to fail a lot."

  She smiled wryly. "Like Edison and the light bulb, huh?"

  "Something like that."

  "Somehow I think there's more tha
n that that makes you different."

  "Well, sure. I was also born in a manger. So do we have a deal, Miss Hornbridge?"

  "Call me Carmen."

  "Okay, Carmen then."

  Outside, he heard an approaching siren. Through the window, he saw cars and trucks on Highway 101 pulling to the shoulder, and then saw an ambulance, lights flashing, roar past. Carmen glanced at her police scanner. He heard a mumble of voices, but couldn't make out what they were saying.

  "Chase a lot of ambulances?" Gage said.

  She grimaced as if she'd swallowed something bitter. "Comes with the job, I'm afraid. How about you?"

  He nodded at his cane. "I never chase something I can't catch."

  "Sounds like a wise policy," she said, and then added: "For a lot of things."

  She held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary, the double meaning hanging in the air, and he couldn't tell if she was opening a door or closing one. It didn't matter. "You didn't answer my question. Do we have a deal?"

  "I never make deals until I know the terms."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means, I'll know the terms after I've punched up your name on the Internet."

  "Ah. I guess I should have expected that."

  "Tell you what," she said, "you leave your contact information, and if for some reason I think the story of you in Barnacle Bluffs is bigger than a dead girl on the beach in Barnacle Bluffs, then I'll at least give you a heads up before I run the story."

  "Well, that's very kind of you."

  She laughed. "I don't want to get off on the wrong foot here, Garrison. But you have to understand my position — "

  But she never got to explain to Gage what her position was. The door to the office flew open and a teenage girl dressed in black stumbled into the room—face pink, breathing hard.

  "Mister Gage?" she said.

  It took a second for Gage to recognize her, because he usually only saw her for a few seconds when she answered the door, and she'd never bothered to speak to him before this moment. Mattie's granddaughter. Zoe. When he visited, she usually just shrugged and retreated to her room, leaving the front door open for him. He remembered the apology Mattie frequently made about her: "Don't mind, Zoe. She's not really that rude. She tells me she acts that way cause she's a nihilist. I don't know what that is exactly, but I figure it's like having the cramps all the time."

  The girl's black Mastodon t-shirt pictured a flaming skull. Over the summer, she'd cut her hair spiky short and dyed it black, and she now sported piercings in her nose, eyebrows, and so many in her ears that she might as well have been a traveling jewelry store.

  "Not the toilet again?" he said—and then immediately made the connection to what had passed by the office moments ago. His heart raced. "The ambulance? "

  Zoe nodded, hands on her knees as she gasped for breath. "Saw your van out front on the way to the hospital. She's coughing up blood."

  Chapter 5

  THEY TOOK GAGE'S VAN instead of Mattie's Jeep Cherokee. When they were outside the Bugle's office, and he saw that Zoe's hands were shaking, he insisted.

  When they got to the hospital, they already had Mattie set up in a room, and a doctor who was probably older than Barnacle Bluffs itself was shuffling out her door. In the quiet tones of an undertaker, he told them that she was doing okay, all things considered. Badly dehydrated. The coughing up blood was due to a side effect of one of the pain medications she was on—it caused a certain rawness in the throat. It didn't mean her condition had deteriorated any more rapidly than it already had, but her situation was still grave.

  He looked at Gage, and not at Zoe, when he said he didn't see her lasting more than a month, maybe less, especially since she was refusing further treatment. The cancer had long since spread beyond her brain. They really should think about hospice.

  There was a nurse taking her temperature when they entered the room. Mattie's eyes were closed, but they cracked opened when Gage closed the door. She looked like a much older woman than she really was, which was mid-fifties, aging twenty years in the last ten months. Her once rosy face had turned pale and gaunt. Her long hair, before mostly blonde, was now gray and waxen fanned out around her head. When she worked at his house, she always had it tied up in a pony tail, but he hadn't seen her put it up that way in months. They had her hooked up to an IV to get fluids back in her system.

  "Just took some of the worst god damn medicine I've ever had in my entire life," she said. "Tasted like mud mixed with vinegar."

  "It'll help your throat," the nurse said, and slipped out of the room.

  They drifted to her bedside. Gage attempted a smile; his face felt as hard and brittle as sun-baked clay. A heavy weight had burrowed into his stomach the moment he'd stepped through the pneumatic doors into the ER. It took enormous effort just to stay upright, putting all his weight on his cane. He'd spent too many hours in hospitals, either fighting off death himself or watching other people do the same.

  Horizontal bars of light from the blinds striped her tan bedspread. The thick windows muted the outside world, but he heard the dull drone of a motorboat out on Big Dipper; the hospital was on the east side, nestled in a grove of Sitka spruces.

  "Well, don't go on looking at me like I'm in a casket already," she said. "I'm still breathing as far as I can tell."

  "Aw, Grandma," Zoe said, her eyes misting.

  "What, I can't make jokes?"

  "Sure," Gage said, "but they should at least be funny. That one stunk like a corpse."

  She laughed, but it rang a little hollow; her eyes remained serious. She looked at Zoe. "Honey, can you go get me a cup of coffee?"

  "I don't know if they'll like that," Zoe said.

  "Well, they're not the ones drinking it. Cream, no sugar."

  Zoe shrugged and left. Mattie waited until the door had closed again before looking at Gage.

  "Find out much about the girl on the beach?" she said.

  "What?" Gage said. "What makes you think — "

  "Don't play coy. I'm a dying woman and I won't stand for it."

  "Mattie, you're not going to die."

  "Now you're just plain fibbing. Come on, out with it. No matter what you said last time, I knew you'd get involved eventually. What did you find out? Or you going to make me get up out of this bed?"

  He put up his hands in a mock gesture of defeat. "All right, all right. I'm going to ask around a little, that's all. Haven't found out anything yet."

  She smiled. It looked like it took so much effort, just smiling, that he almost wished she wouldn't. "That's all right," she said. "You will. You'll get to the bottom of it . . . The great Garrison Gage, back at work."

  "Stop."

  "What do I owe you for the toilet, by the way? I never did pay you." Up close, her lips looked slightly blue, webbed with thin black lines.

  "Don't worry about it."

  "No, no. I gotta pay something. I still got Ory's military pension, you know. I ain't totally broke."

  "Really, it's nothing," he said. "I had a hose that fit up at the house."

  "You're such a bad liar. Don't you think buying the place and letting us live there was already enough?"

  Gage shrugged. "It was a good investment."

  "Like hell. It's a craphole."

  "Hey, now. You're talking about my rental property there."

  "It can't be a rental property when we don't pay no rent."

  "I'm keeping a tab. You'll pay it back when you get better."

  She snorted, but didn't dignify his remark with the truth they both knew. He liked her sass and attitude. When Mattie had shown up to clean his house, she'd seen the picture of his deceased wife next to his bed and asked him how long ago she'd died. He'd asked how she knew, and she'd snorted and said there wasn't one woman thing in the house except the picture, and if they'd gotten divorced he certainly wouldn't have been sleeping next to her face.

  He'd told her that all he wanted was somebody to tidy up a l
ittle—he'd have done it himself, except for his messed up knee—and she'd fired back that she'd clean however she damn well pleased and maybe if he got out and walked around some instead of doing crosswords all day he wouldn't be such a cripple.

  That had been the first day.

  She closed her eyes, and was so still for a moment that he thought this is it, she's going right here. But then she lifted a thin arm and patted the baby blue bedspread.

  "Sit down, Garrison."

  He obeyed, careful to give her plenty of room. She took a few deep breaths, then cracked open her eyes.

  "You going to hit me with your cane?"

  "What?"

  "Look at your hands."

  He did. He had the cane in his lap, and was gripping it so hard that both knuckles had turned white.

  "Sorry," he said.

  "Don't go apologizing. I don't like hospitals either. I need to ask you something before Zoe comes back."

  "Okay."

  She smiled, and for the first time since he'd known her, she looked scared. "She's a good kid, you know. Don't be fooled by the way she dresses. She may act out some, but she's good inside."

  "I know."

  "She's had to grow up fast. Way too fast. I feel bad about that. She didn't need to deal with my problems after everything she's been through."

  Gage patted her hand. "She's lucky to have you, Mattie."

  "Yeah, maybe. But I worry about what's going to happen to her when I'm gone."

  "Mattie — "

  "Let's cut through the bullshit, okay? I know the clock's ticking. It really started ticking when I said no to surgery and more chemo. I also know that girl, she's practically an adult as it is. But she's not. She's only sixteen. She's only hinted at it, but I'm pretty sure she wants me to sign some papers emancipating her so that she won't end up in foster care when I'm gone. And I don't blame her. Who knows what could happen to her then."

  Gage didn't know what to say.

  "But see," Mattie went on, her voice growing hoarse, "I don't think she's ready. Oh, she could take care of herself all right. She's more mature than most folks twice her age. One thing I did that wasn't stupid is I kept paying on my life insurance, so at least there's a little money — not much, but a little — to help her for a few years, maybe get her going at college. But she's not ready. You know what I'm saying? It's not the taking care of herself part. It's the being alone part."