Kindle Edition
Amazon
Island Books
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: B&H Publishing
ISBN-10: 1934733938
Type: Fiction
ISBN-13: 9781934733936
Four young strangers to each other in Seattle are thrown together as each uncovers a part of a potentially dangerous logging project. Soon they are working together just to stay alive.
As winter rains erase a mild Seattle fall, a normal-looking logging project reveals the danger lurking within it. Key Flanerty sees strangers in the shadows, reminders that there are those who could be hunting down an old tape recording. Crash Davies tries to help, but complicates the situation with his curiosity. Gary Seasons and Laura Dickens work on environmental issues for state agencies, and soon are investigating a proposal that looks suspiciously like a previous disaster. Behind it all, a ruthless money man pulls the strings. Lives teeter on the outcome and not all will escape the watery show-down alive.
Excerpt
Second Growth
By
Charles B. Neff
In the following pages you will meet:
Key Flanerty, nightclub employee, blogger
Crash Davies, educated drifter
Gary Seasons, state employee, former professional football player
Laura Dickens, state employee, MBA
Walt Vickers, Former CEO, Aerosteel Corporation
Curt Longcart, owner of Longcart Motors
Suzanne Bickers, actress
Bill McHugh, policeman from Swiftwater, WA
Clif Lerman, Longcart Motors employee
Flora Hayes, childhood friend of Key
Jim Purgis, plant manager, Aerosteel Corporation
Jeff Winter, legislative aide
Rick Groff, forester
Derek Bowman, Iraq war veteran
Rory Edwards, former accountant at Longcart Motors
Grant Tomson, Seattle investor and developer
OCTOBER 31
Grant Tomson observed the face in the mirror, still not able to get used to the fact that it was his own. His black hair hadn’t lost its sheen, and his dark brown eyes, almost black from some angles, looked back with the haughty detachment he’d taught them to reflect. The beard was another matter, too wiry. Gray was creeping in too early for a super-fit man who hadn’t yet reached the downside of 40. If he were back in Seattle, he would have shaved it off, or at least dyed the offending bristles.
But he wasn’t in Seattle. After his brother’s death and some official suspicion that he’d been involved, he recognized that his public presence needed a vacation. He could have holed up in his penthouse apartment but chose instead to disappear entirely for a few months. That decision gave him a double reward: temporary isolation from the daily pressures of the business world, plus a thumb in the eyes of media outlets who felt robbed of the opportunity to keep up a drumbeat story about him. The disputed legacy of his lake property and the speculation about his brother’s death had both faded as topics of public lust.
The cabin, 150 miles northeast of Seattle, was adequate. It belonged to one of his occasional employees, a man who brought him food and other supplies, and who appreciated what would happen to him if he told anyone where his boss was staying. His hide-out was the opposite of luxury, but well-enough built and insulated, with a reliable generator so he could count on Wi-Fi to keep him connected to his Seattle office most of the time. Only one person there, plus one other elsewhere, received his calls and knew how to reach him.
Boredom was his biggest enemy. He had books as an escape, and could go for long hikes to keep himself in shape. But they were not enough.
Had he stayed in Seattle, he would have had trouble anyway making new business deals until public memories about his past were erased. Meanwhile, his next play was well underway. Not much more could be done about it until some political issues were sorted out.
For the moment he needed to concentrate on what he’d always had trouble with: being patient. He’d just have to suck it up. But not without keeping close tabs on one loose end.
A tape recording made eight years ago was still out there. He’d left it alone until internet traffic gave him a hunch where it might be. By process of elimination, the hunch had grown to near certainty.
He’d be patient in every other way, but not about the location of that tape and how to get his hands on it.
Now.
***
Midnight. Key Flanerty caught herself in mid-stride, doused her flashlight, and dropped into a crouch against the low growth at the edge of the trail. On this late October night, the temperature had dropped into the mid-forties, and she fleetingly wished for the light jacket she’d left at home. Her eyes didn’t adjust right away to the sudden darkness, and when a branch cracked nearby, it sounded like a gunshot. Her heart was a bass drum in her ears, and pressure built in her lungs. She fought against the cry that would burst out if she wasn’t strong enough.
She had no other defense than to listen. Knowing the location of a stalker would be her only edge. When she could no longer hold it, she let her breath out gradually, a small amount passing pursed lips. Another wait and then a little more, until she heard only gusts of wind in the firs and the occasional vehicle climbing or descending in the night. The street they were on was hidden behind a thick wall of trees, but she could visualize its path up from the Sound, past the Aerosteel mill, past homes and apartment buildings to the junction area of West Seattle.
It’s Halloween, she suddenly remembered. She’d seen reminders everywhere on the way home—lighted yard decorations and, even at that late hour, some teenagers still on the streets in costume. But that fake spooky shit had nothing to do with her mood. Her imagination sometime had a life of its own.
The rest of her brain began to work and she allowed first the possibility, then the probability, that what she heard was only a branch breaking off in the wind. She saw those dry branches each time she passed through this rare remnant of the forest that had once been here. This whole area would have looked like the woods where she grew up. She knew all about forests and their noises, and still her immediate reaction had been that someone was out there, looking for her.
Why? Could it be the old tape, the one her father gave her? For the past couple of years she’d gradually forgotten about it. Then, over the last two weeks, she thought she’d seen faces that stared at her a little too long. Or a shadow that stayed still and then moved away furtively. She’d given those signs only passing attention, figuring she was tired and must be imagining things. But maybe not. Her fear could also be a delayed reaction to hearing about her dad’s death a month ago. She’d been away from him for almost four years. Suppose someone had finally forced him to reveal the existence of the tape, and now they were hunting her?
She rose and cautiously moved along the trail. Few people even knew this path existed. It snaked around the bases of medium-sized evergreens and exited into an overgrown clearing with a dark, almost formless shape at its center. Steps led up to a door. She opened the double locks with two different keys, yet hesitated about going in. Her inner voice was speaking again: You’ve forgotten to be careful. You’ve gotten soft.
She sat on a small bench by the door and concentrated on what else she might hear. Was it time to run again?
That’s what she’d always done. It was the only dependable defense. Even as a small girl she’d learned to run into the woods when her six older brothers started a teasing game that soon turned to dangerous roughhousing. She was by far the smallest, but no one looked out for her. Okay, her father did, but he was gone most of the time. Her mother couldn’t care less. Never did, never would. Her friend Flora cared and understood, but she couldn’t help; she had problems of her own.
Then her dad had put her in danger by entrusting her with that tape. So running away was the only answer. She moved here to Seattle, and she got used to being safe. But she might be dangerously wrong.
And she realized, uneasily, her father hadn’t explained everything. All he said was that a new logging job had come up, and someone wanted him to work on it, but he wouldn’t—not after what had happened “the last time.” She pressed him, but he refused to say more. By then he’d been out of work for two years, and times had been hard for the family. In the end, he’d given her the tape, told her to guard it, and all but pushed her out the door.
She knew he really didn’t want to do that. He was the only person in her life who was close to her, the only person whose orders she would follow without question. She’d never traveled far from her rural home town before and, where Bellingham seemed large, Seattle was huge and overwhelming. At first she’d depended on instinct for protection. But instinct turned to habit, and habit gradually took her farther and farther away from wariness.
Now she was really cold. She rose from the bench and entered the house. By feel, she walked farther into darkness. Her groping hand found and turned the knob of an interior door. Behind that door, stairs led downward. With a practiced move, she took two steps down, closed the door behind her, and flicked a light switch.
In the large basement she entered, she could finally relax. A big table filled its center, most of its surface cluttered with computers and their peripherals. Industrial shelves with manuals, printouts, and additional hardware ran along one wall. A good quality couch, the newest item in the room, sat beneath blacked-out basement windows. A hot water heater and a furnace took up one corner, and a small cooking area huddled in another. The other spaces were behind two closed doors: a small bathroom with a shower, and a former storage room barely large enough for a double bed.
Key dumped her knapsack and got ready for bed. But finding sleep wasn’t easy. Her dad’s death intruded again, and the new jolt of seeing Crash Davies at the bar immediately made it worse. She’d caught sight of Crash through the pass-through opening from the bar’s small kitchen. It seemed unlikely he had noticed her. But had he? What did she really know about him? Enough to trust him any more than anyone else?
There was no answer to that last question, even though she kept scratching it like a scab until the thoughts she’d had out in the woods returned. Crash was just an old detail. The real issue was whether her Seattle string had run out, as everything inevitably did. Tomorrow she’d think about running again.
Exhaustion finally let sleep in.
***
Crash Davies adjusted the sleeping bag so his shoulders were covered. In the dark early morning, he luxuriated in a state of drowsiness. As wakefulness slowly took hold, he assessed his situation, including what it might mean that he’d seen Key Flanerty at his gig last night.
The gig itself was nothing special. The drummer and lead guitar were on time, but since he and his bass guitar were playing with the D-Crabs for the first time, it took a while before the trio got in sync.
The crowd had been typical, too—laid-back Seattle, casual in dress and expectation. He’d seen many of the same people at the wine- or beer-themed bistros scattered over Capitol Hill, in Belltown and, more recently, at venues farther south. They were light years removed from the high-octane techies who frequented other types of places, especially in Bellevue—or, as he called it, Microsoftville. He liked to think that the spirit of Grunge still lived in the souls of the people he played for. For sure, he wasn’t any Kurt Cobain, but Kurt’s crowd, like the one tonight, probably lived with the same simple rule: When the music started, it started, and it ended when it ended. No other explanation was necessary.
That was the attitude he’d eventually adopted for everything: Take life as it comes. Do what you think is interesting, instead of what other people tell you to do. He’d tried that standard outwardly-driven path and finally decided it wasn’t for him. Just wait for the next gig—musical or something else—and get what you can from what comes along. That way you can follow your curiosity when it calls.
Even though he’d been at it for a couple of years, he was still experimenting with that lifestyle. He’d come to think of it as changing from a guided missile into a butterfly. Weird comparison, he knew. An English teacher would probably red-pencil it, but it felt accurate. His parents had been too involved in their own work to give him much direction. They did buy him opportunities: education, summer trips, internships. As a teenager, he began to wonder if he’d missed something. After three years in two colleges, he decided that that question was worth answering, and he’d been wandering ever since.
Life became a string of short-lived samplings. He had little trouble finding part-time jobs, like his present one as a janitor in an art glass studio. He had technical skills that always surprised his employers, and they often tried to keep him on the payroll. But his curiosity had a time limit, and he moved on. The only constant was music. He liked the loose structure of the musical community, the chance to observe oddball patrons, and the music itself. If the gig was a bad one, he could simply decide not to play with that band again. There were always other bands, and never enough bass players.
Along the way, he’d met a few interesting people. He liked the glass artist he worked for now. Earlier, when he had a job installing audio systems, he’d met some of the new high-tech millionaires. They were a mixed bag in person, some accessible, others withdrawn, and a few insufferably entitled.
One job was particularly memorable. He’d installed a really good sound system in a modest home in north Seattle. The owner was a former football player, though he hadn’t identified himself that way. Crash put together pictures he’d seen in the Seattle Times and on TV with the lithe, dark-haired client who towered over him, and the name on the contract clicked: Gary Seasons.
He might be recalling that particular job because of the news piece he’d watched yesterday. Seasons had just been named to a new position with some environmental agency. And another stray linking fact returned: Seasons’ cell number. After the area code, the numbers were the same as Crash’s birthday, 4/08/1994
This brief focus on Seasons disappeared quickly. Seeing Key was another matter entirely. The image of her last night was imbedded in his brain. He wasn’t sure why. Knowing her and having her disappear so abruptly was the one exception in an otherwise satisfying pattern of acquaintances and departures. Key had fascinated him when they met. Her looks and expressions. Even the way she kept blowing him off. He’d watched her in the student boarding house until she left after only a month. Then she was gone, and a hole in the smooth fabric of his existence appeared. He didn’t exactly miss her, but he wondered frequently about her constant air of watchfulness that sometimes looked like fear.
It had to be her he saw at the pass-through behind the bar. He wasn’t sure until he caught the familiar watchful expression. During the rest of the gig, he kept looking for her, trying to pretend he wasn’t doing so. His subterfuge must have succeeded, because the Key he knew would have dropped everything and left if she’d found anyone crowding her.
He felt torn. Should he let things be? Finally drop his curiosity about Key? Or try to renew a connection with her?
Later he’d think more about that. Meanwhile, his memory returned to her small face and worried eyes one more time before he dozed off again.
NOVEMBER 2
Laura Dickens awoke with a mental image of bearded Professor Williams. She hadn’t thought of him in years. Why now? She knew the answer.
Williams had been her advisor, an academic who didn’t fit the mold of his colleagues. Their world was one of statistical studies and the science of forestry. Williams knew the academic sources, but he also knew the industry from early years as a logger. She imagined his voice now.
“You want my advice, choose any ecological field except logging to build your career around. Logging’s a sump hole, with a gravitational pull of its own. If it were only trees, you’d be fine. But it isn’t. It’s big business, with practices you don’t want to know about. It’s also a tough business. Loggers don’t like outsiders, and they like to settle things physically, out of sight, in the woods.”
He thought a bit more and offered final advice.
“Some other field of study will make your life easier.”
So what had she done? Ended up with a job that would put her right in the middle of a hot logging controversy at Isadka Valley. But no matter. It was just one more challenge, and she fed on challenges—especially physical ones. She’d said exactly that to Professor Williams, and he’d looked at her with a knowing smile, half skepticism and half pity. Good to be reminded of his admonition, but why should this situation be any different from the many others she’d met and mastered?
On the farm where she grew up, she chose the chores that were the hardest, that would immerse her in the challenge of completing, or, better yet, mastering. At the University she found rowing, a sport she’d never tried before but excelled at as if born to it. It was ordered and demanding, and came with the ultimate ending point: pure physical exhaustion. Then you started over.
True, she was about to enter the second half of her twenties with not much heft to her resume and only a small savings account, the remainder of what her parents left her when they died. She had a college degree in forestry and an MBA. She’d found no promising jobs in the forestry sector—it was actually shedding jobs as it introduced new technologies and restructured ownership. The MBA she’d added as insurance was useless in a recession. When her mother got sick, and she had to go back east of the Cascades to care for her, the only work she found was with an outdoor recreation company that itself was having trouble. So she abandoned the east side.
Luckily, back on the west side, in Seattle, she found a temporary job at the State Department of Natural Resources. And she found this apartment—if you could call it that. Small living quarters like these began to exist in Seattle about the time she finished at the University. Now, they were concrete and glass weeds sprouting all over the city. If she rose from where she sat on a convertible couch and took four steps past a coffee table and one upholstered chair, she could put her hand on the front door. Add a tiny kitchen area and a sleeping loft, and she had, in 400 square feet, everything she needed. But not what she craved: empty walls where she could hang outdoor equipment.
That thought brought her up short. Face it—you don’t need day dreams. You need to get to work. Use the cramped apartment as motivation to get something better. Whether or not the new job seems challenging enough, just do it.
She stood and looked over the tops of the shorter buildings in the surrounding cityscape. The tips of the Cascades rose above their roofline, and she fixed her sight on an approximate point where the interstate crossed Snoqualmie Pass, going toward the east side of the state. Less than fifty miles beyond that stood the house where she and her family had lived. Life there felt more fulfilling, a simple existence that generated its own sense of purpose. Rowing had its satisfactions, but it was never a purpose—and once you won a race or ended a season, that was it. Her last season had ended five years ago. Since then, she’d never paused, and therefore not yet discovered why she was working so hard or for what.
It dawned on her that it wasn’t the apartment or the technical nature of new and unfamiliar duties that fueled her unease. She knew she’d plow ahead, regardless. But she needed to give more attention to what she wanted in the long run.
Today’s office work would be no help in that regard, just more paper pushing. But tomorrow sounded interesting. Because a colleague was sick, she would make a field visit to the Isadka Valley site. She was well aware that logging was coming under greater scrutiny for its environmental impacts. And newer concerns about population spread and logging practices were growing, especially how those practices impacted people’s safety.
The Isadka Valley project could be a real chance to get an oar in. She’d give it her all and deal with obstacles as they came up. Energy and determination would win out. Thanks for the dream reminder, Professor Williams, but I can handle this. And maybe I’ll discover what that dream was about, or dream something else.
With that mindset, she headed to work.
***
As Gary Seasons walked into the Seattle Seahawks’ training facility on Lake Washington, he couldn’t take his mind off the email that had popped up this morning. He hadn’t wanted to open it. It might bring back memories of the days when he lived an isolated existence with his mother and his brothers and sisters. When he lived a life just barely above subsistence level. A time he would rather forget. But he had to see what the email said.
On the surface, the request was straightforward.
Been a while. How about a visit? Free any afternoon next week. No agenda. Be good for us to get together. Let me know. Curt
He’d had stared at the screen, trying to read what was behind the words. Nothing from Curt Longcart was ever straightforward. Any truth was always a mixture of what you saw or heard and what you wished you hadn’t.
For a moment, he wondered if Curt’s email could have anything to do with a project at Isadka Valley he was assessing as part of his new job. Out of curiosity, he had looked up the origin of the name. Turned out it meant “family haven” in the Lushootseed language, so it might have been a settlement near where his own forebears lived.
Curt once had a minor interest in logging projects but supposedly had gotten out of them. Suppose he hadn’t? And why would he be concerned about the new assignment of his former employee, anyway?
An enthusiastic voice pulled Gary away from that line of thought.
“Hey Chief Hawk, how’s it goin’?”
Gary glanced over and recognized the man as one of several people who often clustered near the entrance to the Seahawks’ training area. Fans congregated at any Seahawks event, togged out in team gear, trying to get the attention of their favorites.
Gary waved at the fan. He owed him that much. It was three years since he’d worn a player’s jersey, but here was a guy remembering him. He was also a guy who, along with thousands of others, had earned Gary a lot of money.
Chief Hawk. He used to hear that nickname often, now seldom. Some reporter had coined it, and it stuck. Not all that imaginative, but it was popular. Never mind that he’d grown up some distance south of his tribal home on the Skagit River. Or that his nearly full-blooded Mountain Salish father had disappeared early, and that his part-Indian mother was vague about her origins. Tribal heritage wasn’t big at home. But to the locals, he was an “Indian kid” who, as he advanced in football, became “that local Indian phenom” and eventually “Chief Hawk.”
Today he was at the training facility, along with other ex-players, to remember a former teammate who had been killed by a drunk driver. Gary had been closer to Ernie than most of the others had, finding an unexpected connection with a tee totaling devout Georgia cracker. They lost contact after Gary left the Hawks, and Ernie wore the jersey for another two years. But he felt he owed Ernie his presence at a team meeting to honor him today. Naturally, the coach used the occasion, and Ernie’s name, to fire up desire for another championship. But at least he did it tastefully.
Gary left as soon as he could and drove up I-405 and across Lake Washington on I-90. Shutting out the partial view of downtown Seattle that peaked above the residential ridge in front of him, he reflected on the contrast between life on the field and off the field. Then, every detail of his life had been attended to by someone else. Today it was all up to him to succeed in a new job. No coach, no playbook—only expectations that, with little guidance, he’d figure out what needed to be done.
He reached an established building just north of Pioneer Square and took an elevator to the sixth floor. The sign on the door looked freshly painted and read “O.P.U.S.: ONE PUGET SOUND” with “The Puget Sound Commission” in smaller letters below. Inside, one large room held a conference table with seats for sixteen. Beyond it, a door was open to a small office with two desks. One was his, the other was for a secretary to be named later.
He had a small pile of documents to review. Nothing important yet. Most likely a test that someone designed to see what kind of output he was capable of. That pile would grow a lot larger as the commission got down to work.
He straightened, swiveled his chair, and took in the downward view across rooftops to the Sound. A ferry was docking, a sight repeated every hour on the hour, except early and late in the day when the turnaround was faster. Less frequently, he caught sight of the Sounder commuter train as it left downtown Seattle for its trip on to Tacoma. Beyond was the northern tip of West Seattle and, in the distance, Kitsap Peninsula and the Olympic Mountains.
The view was a pleasure, but no real escape from the words on his computer screen. That early morning message from Curt Longcart crowded his consciousness again.
It had been more than ten years since he worked regularly at Longcart Motors. That is, if sitting around in the showroom could be called work. All Curt really wanted was a customer magnet, and he got that with the name recognition provided by an Indian high school football star. Gary winced at the memory of the awkward conversations he was expected to have with strangers. That awkward feeling had never disappeared, though he memorized the act. After a while, pretending interest and repeating the same words over and over got to be something he could do without noticing. He only had to haul out the old act when he did PR for the Seahawks.
When he was cut from the Hawks, Curt stopped calling so much. Sure, he’d invite Gary to ceremonial openings, and Curt still occasionally used old pictures of him in TV spots, but there were no more references to “my good friend Gary.” During his last visit, Gary saw that most of the football memorabilia celebrating his career was no longer on display.
So why a meeting now? Could it have anything to do with those other conversations years ago, the ones they kept quiet? Curt had given financial support to Gary’s family. To the extent that this assistance was public at all, it was tied to Gary’s “job.” But the real money—much more than his reported salary from Curt—went directly to a bank account in Gary’s mother’s name. Had the true numbers been known—the unreported deposits, the hundred dollar bills passed with a handshake, the free servicing of a “loaner” car, the clothes delivered without a return address—they would have been subject to investigations by high school sports associations and, later, by the NCAA.
Curt never used the gifts as leverage, not overtly. After Gary made it with the pros, he began to forget that heavy weight hanging over his head. Now he wondered if it hadn’t been there all along.
No matter how he looked at it, he came to the same conclusion: His best bet was to call Curt and get past whatever it was he wanted. There was no other way to find out what was really going on.
Tomorrow he’d call the private number he still remembered.
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