Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

As a saltie — an ocean-going cargo boat, not the freshwater ships that stayed in the Great Lakes — it was long at six hundred feet. The green-and-red steel of its hull was marred by discolored water lines and orange swaths of rust. Three thirty-foot cranes towered above the deck like praying mantises. The German-flagged ship had started its Atlantic crossing in Rotterdam and made its way through the Seaway, unloading shipments of steel coils in Canada and New York. In two more days, it would cross Lake Michigan and Lake Superior and pass under the lift bridge into the port of Duluth.

One of the ship’s crew leaned against a portable toilet two hundred yards from the Ingersstrom . The toilet smelled. So did he. His tight-fitting white T-shirt was thick with grease, and he hadn’t showered in three days. It was after dark, and he was largely invisible where he stood, but the port was alive with spotlights and metallic noise and the silhouettes of men who looked like busy ants. His blue-gray eyes moved slowly, studying the movement around him. Every hour in port made him nervous, but there were no surprises tonight.

Nearby, heavy boots scraped on gravel. A man waddled toward him from across the railroad tracks near Boundary Road. The crewman shoved his hands in his jeans and curled the fingers of his left hand around an ice pick. The man approaching him was squat and heavy-set, with a beard and greasy black hair. He recognized him as one of the engine crew from the Ingersstrom , but he didn’t drop his guard. He made sure the man was alone before he released the wooden handle of the pick.

‘Hello, Bernd,’ the man said to him.

Bernd grunted a greeting back.

‘Any troubles here?’ the heavy-set man asked. ‘All good?’

‘‘All good,’ Bernd said.

‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I had a sausage sandwich in town,’ the man told him. ‘With cheese fries. Better than the shit on board.’

‘Anything is,’ Bernd said.

‘Calm seas, eh? No worries?’

‘No,’ Bernd said, but he didn’t like small talk. The man had gone into the city of Gary for a reason, and Bernd was impatient to get what he’d paid for. ‘You have something for me?’

‘Yeah, I got it. No problems.’

The beefy man reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and extracted a package wrapped in a blue plastic bag. Bernd took it from him immediately.

‘It works?’ Bernd asked.

‘What, you think I tested it? Like I should shoot somebody?’

Bernd shrugged. ‘Cartridges?’

‘In the bag.’

He examined the automatic inside. It would do. He preferred revolvers, but the bigger clips of the black gun would be more useful. And his last revolver had been bad luck. After he’d blown off the face of the blond woman who was trying to run, he’d lost the gun on the wet steps when that other bitch tackled him.

Bernd shoved the gun into his belt and pulled his T-shirt over it. He squeezed the box of cartridges into his back pocket. He felt more secure having a weapon again. It had been a long time without a gun, but those purchases were easier in the USA than in Amsterdam.

The two men stood silently beside each other. The business of the docks went on around them.

‘So,’ the other man said. ‘Duluth again, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Another delivery?’

‘Yeah.’

The fat man thought about this. ‘Captain says he’s hearing things online. More surveillance. More questions.’

‘A body turned up in Amsterdam,’ Bernd said. ‘One of ours.’

‘So they’ll be searching. People will be on guard.’

‘Let them search.’

‘You say that, but it’s all our asses if things go bad. Maybe we should wait.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Bernd snapped.

The fat man didn’t look happy. He wasn’t alone; others among the crew had begun muttering about the authorities. Bernd didn’t like extra heat, but skipping the delivery wasn’t an option. Their buyers were already impatient. The Saudis paid a freaking fortune for the American girls on their shopping lists, so they got what they wanted. Bigger risks meant bigger payoffs.

‘Well, keep your eyes open, eh?’ the fat man said, waving goodbye, heading across the busy port for the Ingersstrom .

Bernd grunted a salute.

His full name was Bernd Frisch. He was twenty-six years old. His narrow, pale face was heavily dotted with freckles, and his chin was rounded. He had blond hair shaved to his scalp on the sides and sitting in short, tight curls on top. His lips were thin, his nose a small, shallow bump on his face. Unlike most of his crew mates, he didn’t have a tattoo anywhere on his skin, and he was mostly hairless. He was tall, with a lean, hard body.

He’d lived most of his childhood life in Germany, and he spoke German and English fluently, thanks in part to a succession of American tourist girlfriends. He’d left school at fifteen, when he concluded that he was smarter about the real world than most of his teachers. For five years afterward, he drifted. Berlin. Prague. Riga. Tallinn. Needing money, he’d joined an Estonian gang as muscle to take care of their street-level problems. When the gang expanded into smuggling operations, he’d helped them bribe, blackmail, and threaten their way onto the Ingersstrom . The ship was now the backbone of their North American ventures. That included fresh-faced girls who could fetch as much as fifty thousand dollars with certain Arab buyers. They’d trafficked girls six times in two years.

His only failure had been the one who tried to run. The loss of a prime package didn’t sit well in Tallinn, and other gang members had paid for smaller mistakes with a plastic bag taped over their heads. Bernd was lucky. He was too valuable to lose, but the ice under his feet was thin.

He felt his American cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked his surroundings and then slid the phone into his hand. He’d been waiting for his Duluth contact to check in by text:

Are you on time?

Bernd keyed in a response: Two days. Be ready.

Always.

What about the package?

Already in storage.

Bernd typed: I expect no problems this time.

There was a long pause before the reply.

The last package arrived late. Not my fault.

Bernd didn’t want excuses. The situation with the woman from Colorado had been a disaster, and he couldn’t afford a repeat. None of them could. As it was, he was afraid the situation in Duluth had become too hot. He wondered about the police investigation and how far it had gone.

Have you had visitors?

Yes.

How much do they know?

Enough to cause problems. Plus, we have a new situation.

What?

There was a problem with the gun I gave you. It had a history. I didn’t know.

Bernd felt his anger rise. More problems. More mistakes. Whenever he relied on other people, they disappointed him. He’d invested time and money in the Duluth operation, and it was too late to walk away now. The only thing to do was to see it through.

Stick to the plan. Collect the girl. And then tie up loose ends.

He wrote:

Make sure the package is ready. I’m coming.

Cat listened to the whistle of trains across the street from Al’s house. She rested her feet on the broken footrest of an old recliner and sweated in the stifling living room. Dirty bowls and plates were stacked on a tray table in front of the sofa. The beige carpet was littered with video games and toys.

The walls were white, not yet scuffed with dirt and fingerprints. She saw family photos in frames that hadn’t been rehung yet. If she inhaled, she still caught the tiniest whiff of fresh paint. A couple of months earlier, she’d been here, with the furniture pushed into the center of the room under a plastic tarp, and a roller brush in her hands. She’d painted the downstairs, and Anna had painted the upstairs bedrooms.