Arrow's Rest

Joel Scott

Description

A nautical thriller for readers of Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins. Wooden sailboats shouldn t play with steel yachts. When his lover s sister is the latest victim in a series of sadistic assaults, Jared Kane sets out to find the guilty party. His search leads him into a tangled network of sex, power, and religion connecting high political office in the city to a secretive sect in the B.C. wilderness. The crimes seem connected to an exclusive yacht club in Vancouver s West End, where Jared is able to moor his old wooden sailboat, Arrow, so he can infiltrate the elite. Jared s friend Danny MacLean has no qualms about fleecing the club s privileged members and joins Jared in the pursuit. Tracking their quarry on a long chase up through the furthest reaches of the Salish Sea, Arrow and her crew pay a tragic price for resolution in the bleak waters of Desolation Sound.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773056968
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Arrow’s Rest
Joel Scott






Contents Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Epilogue About the Author Copyright


Prologue
The Prophet sat at his desk sorting through the mail that the girl had just brought in. Amy: thirteen years old and just budding out. She waited nervously by the door, conscious of the old man’s gaze.
He opened the hand-addressed envelopes first; they’d hold the monthly tithes. Small amounts, sometime only one or two hundred dollars, but they added up. There were fewer of them every year now, but still enough to keep the commune going. He’d been worried after that last spate of bad publicity following the convictions, but to his surprise it had resulted in a large donation coming in from a fundamentalist group in Utah who believed his sect had been discriminated against. The unexpected windfall had allowed them to enlarge the barn and increase their dairy herd quota. Mysterious ways , the old man thought.
He signed some brief thank-you notes for some of the larger tithes, addressed their envelopes, and motioned Amy over. He held onto them for a moment as she took them and their hands touched and he smiled as she attempted to pull away. She’d be a spirited one. Another six months. Some things were worth waiting for. He released his grip on the letters, and the girl bolted for the door.
He turned to the rest of the day’s post. There was the usual junk mail filled with false promises and things that no one needed, and the begging letters from people who thought the church was a soft touch, and, at the very bottom of the pile, the quarterly report from his local lawyers. A stiff greeting followed by some housekeeping couched in legalese he didn’t fully understand but gathered meant that all was well. And then he saw the handwritten note from Ammon, the lawyer’s clerk who’d been raised here in Plentiful.
Dear Jeremiah,
I hope this finds you well. I’m afraid I have some bad news. The firm received a phone call from an Abbotsford lawyer’s office yesterday regarding a property that had been forwarding a large annual tithing cheque for deposit to the church account. The payment was cancelled by Elizabeth Kane from Abbotsford immediately prior to her decease and the subject property willed to her grandson, Jared Kane. The firm will be sending you a copy of the new will and associated documents by the end of the month, but I thought you’d want to know immediately.
Yours sincerely,
Ammon
Jeremiah reread the note, blinking rapidly as his fury mounted. He could barely recall the woman, Betsy, a titmouse, but he remembered her husband well. A righteous true-believer who paid his tithes in good times and bad and had promised him his holding would be left to the church when he passed. Unconditionally. Jeremiah had been notified of his death and knew his widow was in poor health. He had been counting on the sale of their property. One last remaining quarter section of land was still held by an outsider in the heart of the church’s holdings here in Plentiful, and the money from the Abbotsford farm was going to get it for him. He had boasted about getting that final piece of land, and his rivals would be quick to attack him if he didn’t deliver. There were factions in the commune who resented him, chief among them the younger men who coveted the power and rights which were his due as the prophet. How in God’s name had that frail old woman managed to spite him? She hadn’t even raised her eyes from the floor of the old house the last time he’d made the rounds of his disciples.
And that reprobate she’d willed the property to? The old man had left his grandson with the commune one summer to school him in the ways, and he vaguely remembered a pale, insignificant youngster who didn’t get along with the rest of the class and had required constant discipline. And hadn’t one of his wives told him that he’d served time in jail a few years back? He was almost certain of it. And now he was just going to walk in and take the church’s rightful property? This was not right. It could not stand!
But what to do? He couldn’t risk seeking help from the council; his position could be in jeopardy if word leaked out about difficulties with the Abbotsford farm. They might even call for a leadership vote, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could survive that. He didn’t have anybody in Vancouver he could call on with confidence. One of his wives thought she had seen Jimmy on TV giving a speech at some do in the city a while back, but he hadn’t spoken to his son in decades, not since that East Texas whore had run from the commune with him and those boys of hers. It had been a bad business back then and he might have overreacted. But when Ella — that was her name, he suddenly recalled — had told him Jimmy was twice the man he was in bed, he’d gone crazy. Might have done some serious damage if her two boys hadn’t jumped in.
Well, it was all water under the bridge now. At the time he’d thought good riddance to the lot and never tried to contact his son to patch things up. It wasn’t what he did. But the boy had shown a lot of promise and could have been a big earner for the church. He had spoken a few times in the tent on the road that last summer and had got people up jumping and crying on their way to pulling out their chequebooks. Some of them had even called him the Preacher. He had the true gift. It sounded like he was doing pretty well for himself now, maybe it was time to give him a call and settle things between the two of them. They’d never gotten along back then, too much alike perhaps, but that was a long time ago and things had changed for both of them. Maybe his son could help him out here. Another possibility was the commune in Arizona that had taken the last two child brides. The cross-border trafficking charges arising from that had eventually been dismissed but there had been some hefty lawyers bills and a lot of bad publicity for Plentiful. His American counterpart Karl, a tall bearded man in a business suit with a cold smile and flinty eyes, had helped out with the legal costs and said he owed Jeremiah. Maybe now was the time to call in that debt.
His thoughts were interrupted as a cup of coffee was brought in and set down on the desk in front of him. It smelled delicious, as did its bearer, Lucy, the saucy young one with the knowing eyes. Perfume was forbidden in the commune, but there was a musky personal scent attached to her that stirred him. Every so often a girl came along who didn’t fear him, maybe even looked forward to her initiation, and he felt that she might be one of these. He thought of them as his Delilahs, sent from God to test him. He didn’t know which one he was looking forward to more, Amy or Lucy. Sugar or spice.
Jeremiah roused himself and began writing a letter, slowly and carefully printing each word and checking his spelling in the old dog-eared Webster’s dictionary that sat on the corner of the desk. One of his many daughters would gladly have sent an email, but he didn’t trust any one of them to keep silent. They were relentless gossips. He finished the letter and placed it in an envelope and copied out Karl’s address from a business card he took from a drawer. He looked up and Lucy smiled and a thrill ran through him.
“Ask your mother to look up an address for me, will you, sweetheart? Jared Kane is the name, shouldn’t be more than one of those. In Vancouver I understand. And fetch me some American postage.”


Chapter 1
The man in the mask laboured on, his mind detached from his thick body as he toiled in long, swinging thrusts that slammed the woman’s head into the teak headboard in a steady hammering rhythm of lust and pain. He had readied himself for her earlier that evening, his phone shut off and the messages all on hold as he punished his body relentlessly, lifting weights, running in place, doing push-ups and chin-ups, gasping and sweating until his veins popped blue and swollen and he had to stop for lack of breath and buildup of lactic acid.
When he was like this he could endure forever, the exercise and the alcohol and the drugs joined in an unholy communion that raised him above and beyond the labouring body that worked and sweated for the elusive orgasm that would release him into that semblance of normality he put on each day like a cloak.
Not yet though. Only a faint glimmering promise at the edge of his consciousness. Perhaps another ten minutes, perhaps another thirty, it made no matter. Like everything else in his life, it had to be struggled for. Nothing came easy. And if he ever even thought about it, that was the way it ought to be. In another place and time he was a respected man, but that person had left after the first bottle, and what remained was mindle