Harbor Lights Excerpt

Prologue

It was very quiet in the gym at midnight and she loved the stillness as she lay back lengthwise on the narrow bench, enjoying the sensation of the leather on her skin, and looking up at the barbell lying across the support pegs on the rack overhead. Above the bar her spotter smiled confidently down at her.

“You can do this!”

She gripped the bar, her hands measuring the right balance points, felt confidence grow, and nodded.

“One, two, three,” the spotter said helping with the lift off.

Elbows locked until the bar stabilized, she began lowering the weights towards her chest. The forty-five pound bar with fifty pounds of added weight at each end would be a personal best in the bench press – 145 pounds.

As she dropped the bar towards her chest she became aware of the spotter’s hands hovering, poised to help if the weight was too much.

The bar touched for an instant across her breasts and she felt the momentary thrill as she began pushing it back up, feeling the physical and mental rush as her muscles responded and she knew she could do it.

Half way up the spotter’s hands gripped the bar.

“What the hell,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m not in trouble. Let go.”

“I’m afraid you are,” was the answer, as the hands pushed the bar down and across her neck. “Though this lift was, forever, your personal best.”

Chapter 1

It was 4:00 in the morning when Sam maneuvered his aching body out of his battered white pickup in the Harbor Lights Gym parking lot. Though stiff from seventy odd years of wear and tear, injury and illness, his weight lifters body still incited younger men’s envy – and a number of women’s lust. Sam didn’t object, merely ignoring the former, and indulging the latter.

He stretched in Kodiak’s early morning October cold and looked up at the moonlight gleaming off Pillar Mountain’s recent snowfall. How quickly the island had gone from summer’s emerald green to the brief autumn gold, to winter white. Sam frowned to himself, thinking how the daylight had shrunk, from June’s twenty hours to today’s fourteen or so, and with another two months of additional encroaching darkness to go until the December equinox.

He thought about his own shortening days as well, shivered, then laughed aloud, and hobbled across the lot favoring his misshapen left leg. The moon’s glow, in the early hours of a rare clear morning, reflected off his full head of white hair as he bent over and fitted the key into the front door’s big Schlage lock. The deadbolt turned easily and Sam felt his way inside to the alarm panel, punching in the code with a practiced touch before flipping on the light switches.

His smile faded as the hundred watt bulbs lit up the weight racks, benches, leg presses, treadmills, cross trainers, ellipticals, cable weight machines – and her body. He didn’t need a closer look to know she was dead.

“Shit!”

Sam snapped the lights back off and relocked the door from the inside. Feeling much older than he had a minute earlier, he crabbed his way through the dark to his office, retrieved the phone by touch, and punched in a number he hadn’t called in a long time.

 Chapter 2

The ringing phone had me trying to focus my eyes enough to read the clock dial’s blurred green glow. No such luck. My right hand – forgetting I’d quit a month ago – groped for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. My left finally found the phone on the fourth ring just before the answering machine kicked in. My right eventually remembered I’d kicked the butts and quit looking.

“Hello?”

“It’s Martha, Ethan.”

“What’s the matter?” Not that anything necessarily was when it came to my elderly – and she’d decapitate me if I ever used that word within earshot – landlady and friend. A Seventy-something, long retired madam and widow, she was tougher than snot, and not inclined to permit anything to be “the matter”. Fit, active, and with a plethora of gentleman callers, she was also used to getting her way.

“It’s Samuel from down at the gym.”

“Sam? Jim?”

“Ethan!”

“All right,” I said, and sat up. “I’m awake. Try it one more time. Please.”

“Samuel called. He owns that old workout gym down by the small boat docks.”

“Oh. Harbor Gym?”

“Yes. When he opened up at this morning, about ten minutes ago, he found a woman’s body.”

“Not an accident.”

“No. He called me. I said I would collect you and we’d be along.”

“Why’d he call you?”

“Because we remember, and honor, old favors.”

“Good for us,” I said as I snapped on the bedside light and looked around for socks, underwear, jeans, turtleneck, and boat mocs. My flannel jacket still smelled of cigarettes as I pulled it on three minutes later and I wished to hell I could have one now without slipping back to two packs a day.

Mz. Martha declined to be seen riding in the much-modified Studebaker pickup truck I’d sort of inherited from the Episcopal church. Nor did she trust me with her venerable Mercedes. Consequently the October night found us purring down Rezanof Drive with her at the wheel. Always in character, she ignored the town’s solitary signal light and hung a brisk left on red. Life was always an adventure with Mz. M.

Three minutes later we were parked next to Sam’s truck, and crossing the lot as he opened the gym’s door a foot, taking a good look at me. I don’t know what he saw beyond the usual out of shape guy nudging fifty. Six foot five, 240 pounds, most of my own hair and teeth. Hair going from brown to gray and thinning, teeth beginning to show the effects of thirty years’ of nicotine, and coffee.

“He okay?”

“Would he be here with me if he wasn’t? Get a grip, Samuel.”

“Sorry, Martha. It’s been …”

“Samuel, Ethan. Ethan, Samuel. Now that that’s out of the way, step back and let us in. It’s cold out here.”

“Sorry,” he said again – and I suspected the word wasn’t part of his usual vocabulary -opening the door a little wider. I followed Mz. M. into a room straight out of my worst memories. I hadn’t been in a gym since high school, and never voluntarily. I wasn’t thrilled to be back.

And the body didn’t help.

“Ethan?”

“Not an accident and not suicide.”

“We knew that,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Now that makes three of us.”

“Christ!” he said. Apparently Samuel wasn’t getting the sort of help he’d expected.

“You call the police?” I knew it was a stupid question. If he had, he wouldn’t have called Martha, and they’d be here instead of us. That would have been okay with me.

“I didn’t think so,” I said when he just looked at me. “Why not?”

For that answer he looked at Mz. Martha.

“Samuel does not care for the local officials,” she said to me. Adding, “Nor do we,” with a look at him.

I wasn’t sure if that was meant to reassure him or to remind me. Most likely both.

“Well, Samuel,” I said.

“Sam,” he said. “You call me Sam.”

I didn’t detect friendliness in the tone.

“Okay, Sam. Who is she?”

He shook his head.

“Not a member?”

“No.”

“If he knew her, he’d tell us,” Mz. Martha said. “He certainly wouldn’t forget her. Given your preferences, Ethan, dear, neither would you.”

She was right about that. The woman was about 5’6”, around 155 pounds, I’d guess, brunette, short-cropped hair, somewhere between 45 and 55, and in very good shape. In every sense of the word.

I wondered if I’d seen her around town, but maybe she just looked like someone I’d wished I seen around town. Either way, I didn’t know her.

“Ideas?” I said.

“Get her to hell outta my gym,” he said.

“Certainly,” Mz. Martha said. “Ethan?”

“Shit,” I said. But saying it wasn’t going to get me off the hook.

I could have argued, but my several months’ experience with Mz. Martha had taught me that that was pointless. I could have refused, I suppose, but that wasn’t going to help either. She’d just find a way to do it herself. And on my mental balance sheet, I still owed her. Always would.

Whatever we did was probably going to screw up anyone catching the killer. Who’s going to solve an unknown murder? I didn’t like that, or being party to it.

“It’s a crime scene,” I said.

“Only until she’s somewheres else,” Sam said. “Not my problem after that.”

“You’re right, of course, Ethan. Moving her will make it our problem.”

“Door locked when you got here, Sam?” I said.

He nodded and frowned.

“Then I guess it’ll stay your problem, moved or not.”

“Samuel cannot afford publicity, Ethan. Not the kind that might spread off-island. Therefore we shall have to accommodate him, but he will return the favor. Without comment or complaint,” she said, when he looked like he was about to protest.

“Very well. We will remove the body and you will cooperate with Ethan while he learns who did this.”

“Him?” Sam said. “Yeah, right.”

“Just because there was a time you could dribble him around this gym like a basketball doesn’t mean he couldn’t           manage you now. He’s handled tougher. If necessary, he could simply call the police and let you stew.

“Shit, Martha.”

Mz. Martha just waited while I hoped I wouldn’t have to try “handling” Sam – looked to me like a good way to get hurt.

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say, just lose the damn body.”

A wise decision,” she said, “though I imagine Ethan would have preferred another.

“Ethan? What shall we do with her?”

Chapter 3

Cutting her up in little pieces and feeding her to the family beagle over the next year flashed through my mind, but Jazz, Mz. Martha’s recently acquired hound, was used to more gourmet fare. Besides, that’d leave me without a murder to solve and I felt a need to offset the guilt I was rapidly amassing.

“Ethan?”

“We can’t leave her anywhere in town, that’ll just get the locals stumbling around muddying things up. Outside the city limits will make it the Troopers’ jurisdiction.”

“Virgil isn’t stupid,” Martha said. Virgil Morgan was a State Trooper recently assigned to Kodiak. We’d been friends some twenty or so years earlier and had just started getting reacquainted around the matter of a murdered minister. And Mz. M. wqs right – he wasn’t stupid.

“That’s the risk,” I said. “He might unravel this faster than we can control it, but he’ll also want it solved. He might, you know, end up helping more than hindering. Hell, if he gets too close, we’ll just throw him Sam.”

Sam just glared at me.

“It’ll be alright, Samuel, he’s joking.”

I wasn’t but I let it go. They’d both be happier with the illusion.

While they silently reassured each other I finally walked over to the body.

She was still looking up with empty eyes and her hands had fallen away from the barbell. She’d seen it coming and fought back, the skin on her palms torn from the bar’s knurling as she’d pushed against the descending weight. The bar and plates added up to 150 pounds, I guessed.

She looked like she could have handled that amount of weight so it wasn’t a training accident.

The woman’s throat was crushed but there wasn’t any blood. That helped, I guess, in terms of concealment. I wished things were messy enough that there was no chance of doing what I was about to.

“Sam? Get me a blanket.”

He nodded and headed for his office. Mz. Martha didn’t smile at me, but her expression conveyed that knowing approval that’d keep me doing whatever she asked.

“Open the car trunk, Mz. Martha. Now. We’re running out of time.”

She hurried out the door and Sam and I lifted the body onto the blanket he’d spread. We rolled her up carefully, and I lifted her gently, carrying her out the door and curling her into the Mercedes’ trunk.

“What…” Sam said.

“No,” I said. “What you don’t know you can’t tell. Martha may trust you, but I sure as hell don’t. Just make sure your customers don’t notice anything different this morning.”

Mz. Martha already had the engine running when I climbed in beside her.

“Where to, Ethan?”

“Where else? Ft. Abercrombe.”

We drove the three miles from town to Ft. Abercrombe State Park in silence and turned off the pavement onto the muddy park access road while I was still trying to figure out what to do. The road, flanked by ancient moss encrusted Sitka Spruce, wound up a steep hill for half a mile before emerging onto a campsite dotted bluff. Around the perimeter stood the remains of World War II era bunkers, observation points, and shore batteries, their concrete slowly disintegrating in the island’s sixty some inches of annual rainfall.

“How about the pill box?” I said, pointing to a fairly intact observation point with a view of Manashka Bay.

“No, Ethan, not that one,” Mz. Martha said. “I have far too many good memories with the soldiers there.”

“If we eliminate every place that conjures up all of your encounters going down Carnal Lane we’ll have to find a different island,” I said.

“There is no need to be crude, Ethan.”

“Okay, romantic trysts then, but there is still some need to get this done before we have any company.”

“No one comes up here this time of year.”

“Assuming no one else has an inconvenient body to dispose of,” I said.

She responded by maneuvering the Mercedes around the campground parking lot and backing up to Site #4, the closest one to the pillbox.

“Have it your way,” she said, “just don’t ask me to help.”

I didn’t. She turned off the motor and handed me the keys, I climbed out, popped the trunk, and lugged the body across the moss and rocks and down the couple of narrow steps to the pillbox’s roughly four foot by eight foot interior. I didn’t feel good about leaving her lying on the icy cement floor even though she was long past caring.

That nauseating feeling was exacerbated by the problem of her attire. It wasn’t going to take genius to figure out that the woman in the workout suit probably didn’t die in a leftover WW II fortification.

“Shit,” I said, compromising things further by quickly stripping her down to her bra and panties.

I rolled the tank top, shorts, shoes, and socks into a wad, stood up and felt Ms. M. behind me.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though not to me. “He can’t fix it, but he’ll find out who killed you and they shall pay for it.”

I’m glad she was certain, cuz I most surely wasn’t.

We made our back to the car without another look. I, at least, had already seen more than I’d wanted to, or would be able to forget.

“Collecting keepsakes?” Mz Martha said, nodding at the clothing collection I’d tossed on the seat between us.

I just stared back and handed her to keys.

“I’d have taken you for more the leaving mementos than taking them sort,” she said.

“Virgil sees a body where it obviously doesn’t belong, and it’s dressed all ready for the gym, he isn’t going to wonder where to start looking.”

“You have a point,” Mz. Martha said, as she started the motor and headed back out of the park. “We’re compounding felonies, aren’t we?”

“Wouldn’t be hard to make a case for us being accomplices after the fact, at least. You know we’re going to have to fix this?”

“Yes.”

“I hope Samuel’s worth it.”

“He isn’t,” she said, as we turned off the gravel access road and back onto Rezanof for the ride back home