Killing Grounds Read Online Free PDF

time, they emptied the hold, and when the last fish had gone and the hold had been hosed down and the hatch covers replaced and the Freya had been refueled and moved to her slip in the small boat harbor, the heart beat on beneath the rays of the rising sun. Fishermen and beach gang and fuelers alike were awed by it, by the sheer force of nature it personified. They moved around it, careful not to touch it, speaking in whispers.
    Kate carried the sight of it with her to the chart room bunk, which probably accounted for the jangled state of her dreams.
    Although even that was better than lying awake worrying about the boy on Meany's boat, or the expression on Auntie Joy's face as she looked at Meany, to which Kate could still put no name.
Chapter 3
    She woke next morning to sunshine and the smell of coffee. Old Sam was gone, but he'd left the pot on the stove. Mutt was stretched out on the focsle, basking in the morning sun, the remains of what looked like the knee joint of a humpback whale lying next to her. With some trepidation, Kate sidled up to the starboard galley door and eased it open a crack to peek around the jamb. No halibut heart, and the gunnel was scoured clean. Old Sam must have taken it uptown with him for show-and-tell over the bar. Immensely relieved, Kate closed the galley door firmly behind her.
    It was a long, narrow room the width of the beam of the ship, less the deck space between bulkhead and gunnel on both sides. A bench ran along the forward bulkhead, with a table bolted to the deck in front of it. The opposite bulkhead was lined with sink, cupboards, stove and refrigerator, this last a modern-day concession to the finicky habits of Old Sam's sissy deckhands (this said with a choleric eye rolled in Kate's direction). He still grumped about missing the cooler that had hung next to the starboard-side door, the one he had used for thirty years, and the cupboard and counter space usurped by the refrigerator. Rectangular windows lined the forward bulkhead sill to sill, letting in a lot of light and satisfying Old Sam's inquisitive eye with a 180-degree view of his surroundings.
    The immaculate room was trimmed with wood varnished to a deep chestnut glow. An old oil stove, polished to a dull black shine, put out a steady wave of heat and caused the kettle sitting on top to give a low, comforting whistle. Kate poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down with her feet up on the seat to take advantage of Old Sam's view.
    The harbor was still and quiet in the early-morning hours, the fishermen sleeping off the last period. Boats were rafted two and three together, leaving barely a skiffs width of water between the slips. Transient parking was, as usual, empty of so much as a kayak, nine hundred feet of vacant slip space. This while the rest of the harbor was jammed to the breakwater and the fishing fleet jostled for moorage.
    Kate detected the fell hand of Shitting Seagull.
    She looked up. The harbormaster's office, a small, neat house sitting on the edge of the fill just before the dock and ramp that led down to the harbor, seemed deserted.
    But then maybe Gull was only luring potential offenders into a self-incriminating complacency.
    Behind the small boat harbor was the town of Cordova. Perched at about one o'clock on the curve where Prince William Sound met the Alaska coastline, it was a stair-step settlement built of wooden clapboard houses, many of them on pilings pounded into the sheer side of the steep coastline. Cordova had once been the southern terminus of the Kanuyaq River & Northwestern Railroad, a hundred-mile track that carried copper ore from the fabulous Strike It Rich lode in the Teglliq Foothills from 1911 until 1936, and many of the buildings looked like they dated from that time.
    The town's tiers culminated in the twenty-two-hundred-foot peak of Mount Eyak, a sharp point that contrasted with the rounded peak of Mount Eccles, a whole hundred feet higher. Between them the peaks guarded a