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Revenge River
Revenge River
Revenge River
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Revenge River

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Kyle McKinley is a painter with an international reputation. He spends his summers at his cabin and studio on a northern New Brunswick salmon river and his winters in deep south Texas. Marcel Latour is the prison escapee who has vowed to find and kill McKinley, who was responsible for his capture following his brutal murder of a young Aboriginal woman, Mary Paul. The action takes place over a number of days as Latour makes his way from Ontario to New Brunswick and plays out against the backdrop of a violent anti-fracking protest at a remote northern fracking camp. Revenge River's other main characters are RCMP Sergeant Marie Arsenault and McKinley's pal, former US Army Ranger Peter Paul, brother of the murdered Mary. The people and cultures of the region provide a rich backdrop for these exciting events.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateMay 18, 2016
ISBN9781483570518
Revenge River

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    Book preview

    Revenge River - Graham MacDermott

    51

    PROLOGUE

    The sheriff ’s van was barely visible, although it was only a few yards off the road, stopped along the side of a drainage ditch. There was water in the ditch and the usual garbage one finds in ditches everywhere: beer cans, plastic grocery bags and takeout coffee cups. The deputy shoved the gearshift into park and leaned across to the man in the passenger seat. There were little engine pings when he turned off the ignition and the smell of gasoline fumes mixed with the wet ditch smell and bird songs.

    You never said nothin’ about killing Frank. You were supposed to just slug him and cuff him and throw him out somewhere. Jesus Christ, you drove that pen right into his fucking throat. I mean, Jesus Christ, that wasn’t the plan.

    The man in the passenger’s seat was staring down at the van floor through this. He seemed to be intently studying a stain on the floor mat. He lifted his head and turned slowly to look at the deputy. His eyes were cold and his face like cement, except for a slight tic in the corner of his left eye.

    Shut the fuck up, Kelloway. Get out of the van. We’ll settle up, and I’ll be gone.

    Kelloway opened the door and stepped out, not as self-assured or cocky now but still trying to control the situation. Maybe change his tone a little bit but try to hold the rough edge. Okay, the deal was ten grand. I need to know it’s in there. Show me something. I don’t see no bank anywhere near here. Where’s my money? I’ve risked a whole lot for you now I’m up to it in a murder rap. Jesus Christ.

    The other man didn’t seem to hear or at least wasn’t paying attention to the deputy. A car sped by on the nearby highway. It was the first since they had gotten out of the van. They couldn’t see it from where they were; it sounded closer than it was.

    I told you to open an account at the President’s Choice, and when I was clear the money would be there. You know that. Five’s in there already, just like I said it would be. You know that ’cause you probably already spent it. I got the account number, right? Relax. Stick with the plan.

    CHAPTER 1

    The river’s source was a large lake that lay toward the upper end of the Appalachian range that stretched up from southern Georgia and finally petered out completely in Newfoundland. The river flowed west and south for some three hundred and fifty kilometres and ended its own identity as a tributary of the much larger Saint John. Once one of North America’s great salmon rivers, its currents had carried countless generations of First Nations people, loggers and sports fishermen who in years past flocked there by the hundreds each season from the US and Europe. These wealthy sports returned with their families and friends year after year, staying in the same great lodges that lined both sides of the river. Strong bonds of friendship developed between guests, lodge owners and staff. Favorite guides worked for the same outfitters for years on end, and the exploits of some became legend along the river. From the late 1800s and through the first half of the twentieth century, they were the lifeblood of the river valley and its scattered towns and villages. Only a small handful of these once great enterprises still existed.

    The river narrowed into a gorge just before spilling into the Saint John, and that was the site of a large Maliseet First Nations community. These people had harvested the river for trout, salmon and eels and scoured its banks for fiddleheads, spruce roots and ash for paddles, canoes and axe handles for over ten thousand years. Deer, moose, beaver and rabbit filled their winter larder, and the hides warmed and protected them in their wigwams through the long winter months. Their men had guided sportsmen on the river for generations.

    On a gentle bend of the river some forty kilometres north of the village of Milltown, the heavy forest reached down to the river’s edge, and in a perfect clearing on the eastern bank sat Spruce Lodge, one of the last of the great hunting and fishing camps. The lodge was surrounded by hemlock, maple, pine and tamarac and was built of giant pine logs. A great front porch of hewn timber planks painted deep forest green offered a stunning view of the mighty river. In its heyday, a camp manager, three cooks, five cookees, a maid staff of six and twenty licensed guides saw to the needs of those wealthy and demanding American and European sports. Depending on the season, they fished the private river ponds and hunted bear, moose, deer and fowl.

    It was salmon season now, and while the river’s heyday might be gone and the staff greatly reduced, Spruce Lodge, through innovative advertising and the online endorsements of countless delighted guests, continued to thrive.

    On this Thursday afternoon, two men were sitting on that porch. One of them was the lodge owner, Cecil Robertson, and with him, looking like he just stepped out of an L.L.Bean catalogue, was Edwin P. Culligan III. His summer home was several kilometres farther up the river. Edwin was the great-grandson of Matthew Culligan, the founder and first president of Culligan Machining of Boston, the largest machining parts manufacturer and distributor on the Atlantic seaboard. The firm’s pedigree dated from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. Edwin was an avid outdoorsman. Portly but robust, he had fashioned himself after two of his heroes: Teddy Roosevelt, whose son Archie once hunted on this very river, and Ernest Hemingway, who did not. He wore the full Hemingway beard, and his fondness for good single-malt and rich food was no secret. Ed sat on numerous boards and chaired several of them. He was the president of his local country club and there were growing rumours of a probable Senate run. Ed was a Democrat.

    Cecil and Ed were in an animated conversation. Cecil was a big man by any standard. He carried two hundred and forty pounds of rock hard muscle on his six-foot-five frame. Blue jeans, a white T-shirt and moccasins made up his usual summer wardrobe. The men were sitting on two of six handmade maple rockers. The chairs were sturdy and heavily varnished and had been part of the lodge décor for several decades. From the front of the porch, the lawn sloped gently to the river’s edge, where a dozen overturned Miller canoes, constructed just miles from the lodge, rested on racks, and a half dozen fourteen foot aluminum Princecraft Fisherman outboards snuggled against a floating dock awaiting their next clients. Fifteen-horsepower Mercurys provided the power for the boats, while the green canvas, square-back canoes were propelled by smaller six-horsepower Mercs and, more often, long poles. With the pole, the guides, standing in the stern, pushed the canoes up river and into connected brooks where beaver colonies conducted their daily enterprise and giant trout lurked beneath rotting waterlogged tree trunks. At this time of year, the air was alive with clouds of black flies and the drone of mosquitoes. Summer was taking its all-too-short grip on the river. Soon the chirp of crickets and then, later in the summer, the unmistakable call of the cicadas would fill the sweet-smelling air.

    Kyle McKinley had known both men for years, and as he approached the shore in his jon boat and killed the motor, Cecil waved him up to the porch. It was just past four, and time, by McKinley’s code, for the first drink of the day. It was pretty obvious that both men had good head start on him. McKinley’s little cabin, far less pretentious than the ten-thousand-square-foot lodge but quite adequate for his needs, was another mile upriver and on the opposite side. In addition to the eleven-hundred-square-foot cabin, he had a somewhat smaller studio with good north light. That was important, because Kyle McKinley was a painter with agents in Toronto and Houston, Texas, and painters loved the north light. When guests visited, depending on the number, he sometimes slept in the studio. Before he became an internationally recognized artist, he was a cop, an RCMP officer for fifteen years, six of them as an Emergency Response Team sniper/observer and the last five in plainclothes. Those were the rough years and the reason he got out and decided the winter months would be best spent in South Texas, far removed from freeze-up, biting wind, slippery roads and mountains of snow. McKinley loved the southern Spanish culture and climate every bit as much as he did his northern river in the summer. He thought of both places as home and spent equal amounts of time in each.

    What’s it going to be, Kyle? Cecil was out of his chair and leaning over the rail as McKinley secured the jon boat and started up the lawn. Have to confess that we’re into the Scotch a bit early today. We’re chewin’ on a little problem, pal.

    Scotch sounds fine, McKinley said as he stepped lightly onto the porch. Water, no ice and maybe a beer to chase that along. He was a Scotch man in Canada and more for the bourbon when he was in Texas. His hard-drinking days were long gone, along with his first and only wife. He mostly sipped on beer now, domestic in the summer, Mexican in the winter. He was a fan of good wine and maintained a modest collection at the cabin and in the south.

    Cecil yelled Kyle’s request through the screen door, and the drinks were promptly delivered by Jose, one of the three kitchen staff members. Cecil’s wife, Bunny, the brains behind the whole operation, was a short, vivacious brunette, who clients and locals swore was the finest cook on the entire east coast.

    The beer is ice-cold, Mr. McKinley. Just the way you like it. I took it right from the back like you showed me. Coldest place in the fridge.

    Jose, how many years have we known each other? It’s Kyle, not Mr. McKinley. Jose, a Mexican, had been a summer and fall employee at the lodge for twelve years. Cecil and Bunny had been flying him up from Reynosa, along with two of Jose’s cousins, Arturo and Alejandro. Finding local kitchen wait staff and cleaners had become increasingly difficult in this part of the world. It was Kyle’s suggestion that the solution might well lie south of the border. Increasingly, Mexican migrants were supplying the workforce on farms and resorts across Canada, just as they had been doing in the US for a very long time. Jose and his cousins, however, were not illegal aliens. They worked at Spruce Lodge with approved visas, and they contributed to the community. The suggestion had worked out just great, and Jose and his cousins had almost become part of the Robertson family.

    It is difficult for me to call such a famous artist by his Christian name. But I will continue to try. Jose turned and from his side of the screen door said, Thank you, Mr…. I mean Kyle. The guy was always in a good mood, and everything seemed to strike him as funny. He was laughing as he returned to the kitchen.

    Kyle took a sip of the Scotch, twelve-year-old Glenlivet, and then a long pull on the icy beer. A mighty fine combination, he thought. He remembered how he used to love the sensation of ice-cold beer and peppermint schnapps. He sometimes lately noticed he was thinking more about booze than he had in many years.

    So…what’s the big problem you’re both so concerned about? He had noticed from the river that only three of the lodge’s boats were away from the dock. Earlier in the day, on the way downriver, he had heard Bunny’s float plane take off. It still wasn’t back.

    Bunny flew three guests out this morning. They were supposed to stay for a week, but they’ve gone home two days early. Believe it or not, Kyle, they got spooked, Cecil said. Bunny had had her commercial and floats endorsement for years and routinely picked up guests in Fredericton, Boston and Bangor. They had bought their 1967 Cessna 182 Skylane about five years before. Being able to offer fly-in service to guests added additional cachet to their operation.

    Spooked? What do you mean by spooked? Kyle asked.

    Edwin had been quiet since McKinley’s arrival, other than the usual pleasantries. Now he waded in. First Nations issue, Kyle, he said. Some of those damned self-styled warriors are pulling the old ‘This is our river’ game again. Troublemakers with too much time on their hands, if you ask me. What’s really a piss-off is they are laying claim to Sission Pool again. One of the very best fishing spots on the river.

    Sission Pool had been deeded to Cecil’s father by the provincial government some sixty years before. Private pools along the river, always the prime salmon pools, used to be owned by the lodges along the river and sometimes even by American and European conglomerates. The practice no longer existed, and almost all of the prime sites were once again held in trust by the government for public use.

    I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary on the river lately, McKinley said. I guess a few of those fracking trucks headed north. You know, the ones they call thumper trucks. They’re a pretty ordinary sight around here these days. Got to admit I’ve been pretty busy at the cabin crating some new pieces to go to Toronto the first of the week. McKinley’s Toronto agent had arranged a summer exhibition that promised strong sales. He was counting on that, since funds were running a bit lower than usual. He wasn’t broke by any means, but he’d had to replace all the appliances in his southern condo and install a new a/c system the past winter. He did want to take a whole year off from painting before too terribly long and do that trip to New Zealand that he had been promising himself ever since reading a piece in National Geographic when he was just a kid.

    Edwin said, The three guys Bunny flew out this morning were fishing the bank at Sission Pool yesterday morning when that fucking Don Mahoney, pardon my French, and three of his henchmen walked in from the road. They had a sign to post, and they had guns. Can you imagine, walking around in New Brunswick carrying guns? ‘No fracking way’ signs. ‘Not on our fracking land’. You know the kind of stuff. They told Wally and the guys to pack up and get off the river. It was Indian land, they said, and they were posting it as such. They actually threatened the guys with physical harm. Wally said they had nothing to do with the fracking company and were just here to catch-and-release, but he figured they were pretty damn serious, especially when that damned Donald Mahoney jabbed his finger into their guide’s chest. It was Danny Pictou, by the way, not a guy easily scared. Danny turned around and told Wally and the boys to pack up. Said they were headed back to the lodge. Danny’s not normally a guy to back down, but he’s got no interest in getting on the wrong side of that crew. I guess he figures it’s just not worth it.

    Wow, McKinley said. I knew the road blockade that Mahoney’s guys had up just north of Milltown last week pissed more than a few people off. Lasted a few hours and had the logging truck boys more than a little hot under the collar. Lots of threats, swearing and horn honking, but nothing like what’s been happening farther south. Kyle doubted very much if Mahoney had ever really given much thought to the pros or cons of shale fracturing. It probably just seemed to be a good front for his general rabble-rousing. He was far more thug than environmentalist. A couple of reserves farther south had truly taken on the anti-fracking battle. Trouble had been escalating there for months and showed no sign of letting up. It was on the news almost every night.

    Well, if this kind of bullshit keeps up, my business and the reputation of this entire river is going to suffer. You could hear the anger and frustration in Cecil’s voice. I told Wally I was going to call the RCMP. He said do whatever you want, but we want no part of this kind of crap. Wally said they came here to fish not to be hassled by leftie protesters or First Nations radicals.

    Cecil told Kyle he hadn’t called Steve Sutherland yet but was going to get him to drive up if there was any more shit from Mahoney. He told him he asked Danny what Mahoney had said to him on the river, but all he said was he figured things were going to get rough around here.

    He high-tailed it for the Narrows last night and said he might be back next week and he might not. He’s got to live on the reserve and doesn’t want any trouble for him or his family. I can understand where he’s coming from, but I need him back. He’s the best we’ve got, and the other guides look up to him, Cecil said. He took a bigger than usual slug of the Scotch.

    Jose had just brought Kyle a second Moosehead when they heard the 182 coming in from the south and beyond the tree line. "C-QDAX was painted in yellow and red with black trim and letters. It was old, but Bunny kept it looking like it just left the Cessna factory. The river was wide and straight in front of the lodge, and there was a perfect ripple as she turned final and dropped the Skylane onto its floats as gentle as a butterfly lighting on a flower petal. As she taxied up to the floating jetty, Cecil set his glass on the railing and ran down to meet her.

    Ed whistled softly and said, That is some woman!

    Bunny gave Ed and Kyle a wave as they walked up the incline of the lawn. She and Cecil were holding hands. They were a fantastic team, the giant man and the petite and beautiful bush pilot. She was wearing one of the blue Magellan fishing shirts Kyle had brought her back from Texas. Her favourite beat-up Texas Rangers ball cap with its well-curved brim was anchored in place by her long brown ponytail. Aviator-style sunglasses dangled on a line from her neck. She wore blue canvas tennis shoes over bare feet. It was still early summer, but she looked tanned and very healthy. Some woman indeed!

    What’s a girl got to do to get a beer around here? Just as she said it, Jose was back on the porch with a Moose lite. Heard you coming in, señora, he said as he removed the lid. Bunny liked to drink her beer directly from the bottle and would have nothing to do with beer in cans. She always maintained it didn’t taste right. Kyle understood that but never liked drinking from the bottle. He preferred his beer in a glass and had a pretty good collection of them. His favorite was a Montreal Expos glass. Now there was a ball team.

    Oh, I see, Bunny said as she took the bottle from Jose. I’m away for the day and you all seem to have nothing to do but sit on the porch and drink. Did the AV fuel arrive today, hon? I need to top-off before another flip. Cecil told her Craig had been there shortly after she left in the morning.

    I wrote the cheque and put the receipt on your desk. I’ll fill the Skylane up before dinner, he said. Bunny handled the finances, not Cecil. She kept meticulous records and kept track of every cent that came in and went out of Spruce Lodge. Cecil’s job was to do all the maintenance, inside and out, pick up the supplies and keep their guests entertained and happy. He was good at all that.

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