Chapter 42
Cutter and Lola found an out-of-the-way spot on the walkway behind Sockeye Sam’s curio shop to watch passengers disembark the ship and stand in the sun. Sunshine was always at a premium in Southeast Alaska, and neither of them wanted to waste a minute of it. `
In addition to being the first stop for many visitors coming up from Seattle, Ketchikan was also first in rainfall for the state, getting over a hundred and fifty inches a year.
Locals called it liquid sunshine. Overcast and rainy more often than not, when the sun did come out it was dazzlingly clear, with cleaner air than Cutter had ever breathed. Today was one of those days.
Cutter preferred not to exchange words with Joellen, and the best way to make that happen was to stay hidden while he watched her get off the ship.
The Polar Star loomed large in front of them, like one of the towering white apartment buildings that lined Miami Beach, except bigger and on its side. Passengers crowded along the rails, huddling in fleece jackets despite the relatively warm day.
Cutter picked out his ex-wife almost immediately as she made her way down the ramp surrounded by a mob of fellow cruisers.
Wide-eyed and slightly wobbly on land, the group looked like aliens disembarking on a foreign planet.
Oohs and ahhs rose above their excited chatter.
Always a clotheshorse, Joellen wore white capris and a tailored oxford blouse, pink to match her terry-cloth ballcap.
Cutter hadn’t thought about it in years, but he remembered now that the only time she ever wore a hat was when she wasn’t pleased with her haircut.
Big Hollywood starlet sunglasses rounded out her outfit.
“You’re right,” Lola whispered, more than a little awestruck. “She could be Mim’s very tan sister. I hate her.”
“Just watch the crowd behind her. Keep an eye out for—”
“That no-neck dude in the black polo shirt?” Lola said. “Thirty feet to the rear. I can tell from here that guy’s all steroids and mirror-muscles. He’s locked in on something ahead of him. My money’s on your ex.”
“Got him,” Cutter said.
The ramp brought Joellen and the rest of the passengers within twenty feet of Cutter and Lola. No-Neck juked back and forth in the press of bodies, working his way forward like a salmon swimming upstream. Now and again, he’d come up on tiptoe and crane his neck to keep his quarry in sight.
Joellen continued toward the wharf, disappearing for a short moment as she passed behind the curio shop. Cutter matched her pace, using the building as a shield. He reached the far corner just in time to watch her pop out on the other end.
Lola nodded south along the waterfront to where the other ships were berthed. “She’s heading toward the main docks,” Lola said. “An excursion maybe.”
“Maybe,” Cutter said. Rainforest tours, Misty Fjords, and most of the other shore excursions departed directly from the wharf.
“I hope she’s going zip-lining,” Lola said. “That’s on my bucket list.”
“We’re not going zip-lining,” Cutter said.
Joellen made her way up the sidewalk above the Tongass Trading Post parking lot, passing the pickup-truck-size wooden carving of an eagle called Thundering Wings.
Tlingit peoples had called the area around Ketchikan Kitchsk-hin.
It meant Kitch’s Stream but sounded much like the Tlingit phrase for Thundering Wings of an Eagle.
Joellen paused to study it for a few seconds, then walked on, bypassing the buses and signs advertising excursions.
She crossed Front Street and headed up Mission toward downtown.
Cutter’s money was on the falls. She’d always liked waterfalls and would have done her research before getting off the ship.
There was a good one within walking distance on Creek Street.
Plus, the salmon were running, jumping the rocks and putting on a show like something straight out of National Geographic.
Lola glanced up, impatient, a racehorse in the gates. “Shouldn’t we follow, Boss?”
“Hold up a sec.”
The crowds thinned some on Mission Street as small groups broke away for the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show and various other tours.
No-Neck had crossed on the far side of the street, slightly behind but paralleling Joellen. Cutter waited a beat, scanning the crowd. The big guy appeared to be alone. If he had backup, they were better at blending in.
Who was this guy? Someone out for revenge?
That didn’t track. If anybody wanted to get back at Joellen, they would have done it in Miami.
A jealous boyfriend? That was more likely.
Maybe this was her most recent shipboard fling.
She did have a way of getting under a man’s skin.
Cutter was certain of that. Still, he had to admit he’d not been a joy to live with either.
Lola looked up, eyes blazing, ready to step off the curb.
“Now?”
No-Neck picked up his pace.
“Now,” Cutter said.
Joellen felt the itch of eyes on the back of her neck as soon as she crossed the street.
She stopped in front of one of the countless shops selling Tanzanite jewelry and scoured the street behind her in the reflection of the store window.
Nothing. People passed in groups, gawking at the scenery or studying their phones so as not to get lost—a real feat because the city was squeezed between the mountains and the ocean.
Beyond that, at least some part of a cruise ship was visible from nearly every street.
A potbellied man with boat shoes and a flowered island shirt explained Ketchikan history to his wife and two other couples, loud, like he wanted to make sure everyone around got the gift of his intellect.
No one gave Joellen a second look. She chided herself for being such a moron and took a minute to study her own reflection.
The weather was far warmer than she’d expected, and the stupid terrycloth ballcap was fast giving her sweaty hat hair.
It was no wonder Minnesota Steve had run off.
A smiling salesman from the Tanzanite store stepped out to ask in an Indian accent if she saw anything in the window she liked.
She looked at her ratty hair again and shook her head, laughing.
“Afraid not.”
She walked on, stopping long enough to take a selfie with the WELCOME TO KETCHIKAN sign that arched across Mission Street.
She felt the eyes again about the time the three-story Chief Johnson’s totem pole hove into view at the end of the block.
She wasn’t afraid of someone attacking her.
There were too many people around for that.
But then, she’d sat through enough court hearings to know crazies attacked people all the time in public.
Ahead, the loudmouth explainer told his wife about the Kadjuk—a mythical bird carved atop the fifty-five-foot red cedar totem pole. …
Joellen threw periodic glances over her shoulder as she walked.
Arliss always said you could tell a lot from the whites of a man’s eyes even from a distance.
A muscular guy in a black polo shirt turned away quickly when she looked at him.
He stood directly across the street at the corner of a blocky building that was only slightly less pink than Pepto-Bismol. The federal building.
A chill ran down her spine. Panic gripped her throat. She’d been right. Someone was following her. But why? She’d seen this guy before. He’d been loitering on the deck the night Minnesota Steve disappeared.
Joellen ducked into a little bookstore on the corner of Totem Way to gather her thoughts. The sign on the door said the place was called Parnassus. The mountain where the Greek Muses lived. Perfect. She could use a little inspiration about now.
She had a fleeting thought about calling Arliss but cursed herself for being so dense. Arliss was a thousand-some miles away in Anchorage. What the hell was he supposed to do?
No. Joellen would pull up her big-girl shorts and go talk to the guy. They were in the middle of town. He wasn’t going to do anything.
It seemed like a good plan, but when she came out of the bookstore, the man in the black polo was gone.
Joellen cursed again, face flushed as pink as her stupid hat. This guy probably just recognized her from walking past on the top deck last night. That didn’t mean he was following her.
Determined to see her waterfall, she fell in with a dozen Red Hat Ladies walking toward Creek Street. Her pink ballcap drew nods of approval from the silver-haired women. She was, after all, still under fifty.
Of the nearly million and a half tourists who visited Ketchikan each year, almost all of them found their way to Creek Street.
The historic boardwalk that ran from the city’s small boat harbor inland alongside Ketchikan Creek housed restaurants and curio shops.
No coffee table book about Alaska would be complete without a shot of the brightly colored buildings perched over the quiet little salmon stream.
Family friendly now, Creek Street was at one time home to bars, card houses, and brothels.
The sign in front of Dolly’s, a two-story frame house the color of key lime pie, proclaimed it a place where more men than fish came upstream to spawn.
A collective gasp carried through the crowd along the boardwalk.
Joellen followed their gaze over the wooden railing to the pool below.
It was low tide, crowding hundreds of dog salmon, making them easy prey for two fat harbor seals that slid gracefully through the dark water.
Already full to bursting, the seals nibbled and toyed with the flashing silver bodies, bumping them like a cat might bump a mouse, forcing the shoals to turn back and forth, glinting in the sunlight.
The natural show alone was worth the price of the cruise.
With this many salmon, the falls were bound to be as packed with fish as the boardwalk was packed with tourists.
Joellen could only watch seals chase fish for so long. She turned to move on and caught a glimpse of the guy in the black polo loitering by the T-shirt shop in the next building up the boardwalk.
This time she didn’t hesitate.
The man looked casually away, toying with some kind of branch or stick a child had probably left behind. Nothing to see here.
She pushed her way through the crowds, calling out when she was still ten feet away.
“Hey!” she barked. “Don’t you move!”
The man smirked and hooked a thumb toward his own chest. “Me?”
“Yes, you,” Joellen said, close enough that the overpowering smell of AXE body spray nearly felled her. She’d been around middle schoolers who were more self-aware.
The milling crowd shoved her toe to toe with the guy. Too late to back down now. “You were on the top deck of the ship last night!” she snapped. “Why are you following me?”
She stepped sideways as another flock of tourists jostled their way past, this time pushing her against the wooden rail rather than her stalker. Ketchikan Creek flowed between scattered boulders fifteen feet below.
“You got a pretty inflated opinion of yourself, lady,” the man said. Brave words, but he bounced the piece of stick on the railing like a club. His eyes shifted right and left. Was he looking to escape or on the verge of braining her? It was bigger now that she was close.
The man sneered. “I got better things to do than follow your fat ass around.”
“Oh, you’re following me,” she said. “I know it and you know it.” Seething now, she decided to go for the jugular. “And I am absolutely positive you know exactly what happened to my date last night.”
All the color drained from the man’s face.
He swallowed hard, shifting on his feet.
“You don’t know shit.” Still holding the club, his free hand shot out, snakelike, grabbing her around the shoulders and drawing her in tight against his chest. Joellen squirmed and struggled to get away, but he was too strong.
She’d not expected him to get physical in the middle of a crowd.
To passersby, they probably looked like a couple—maybe in an argument, maybe goofing around.
“You bitch!” The whispered hiss came across as that of a terrified child—all the more dangerous.
Regaining her senses, Joellen stomped hard, sliding the edge of her shoe down the man’s shin to connect with his instep.
She swung her fist at the same time, backward into the man’s unprotected groin.
Yowling in pain, he dropped the stick, loosening his grip long enough to slap her hard across the face.
Her ballcap fell to the boardwalk. Rattled, she tried to jerk away, attempting to gain some distance.
It was no use. This guy was just too strong.
Somewhere on the boardwalk, a woman screamed.
A male voice barked a warning, but the man in the black polo shook her like a rag doll.
Joellen hit the rail hard with the point of her hip. Off balance, she thought she was going over the edge—but a strong hand grabbed her by the arm and hauled her back. She screamed, striking blindly.
“Jo! Stop!” a familiar voice said.
She turned, nearly fainting with relief.
“Arliss?”