Free Overfall by David Dun

off,” she said, rolling onto her back, “perhaps you could let me know.”
    Sam allowed himself a smile. “I’ve got to coat these wooden matches in wax. We’ll need them.”
    “You need to sleep if we’re going to run.”
    “This cabin isn’t that far from the inlet and there is smoke. The scent could carry.”
    “I don’t know anybody over on Windham except Nutka that knows about this place.”
    “We can stay awhile.”
    “Promise me you’ll let me buy you a new boat and that you’ll keep quiet about this.”
    “Nobody kills Harry and walks; they don’t blow up my boat without hearing from me.”
    “Please help me.”
    “Tell me what we’re running from.”
    She didn’t answer, and he hoped she would sleep. Although he was used to celebrities in general, this one at this time was a pain in the ass. The last thing he needed was somebody to take care of, a mission—especially when the mission involved a strong-willed actress who did what she damn well pleased. He wanted a drink in the way he used to want a drink. The way it was after his son died.
    The mind was a peculiar thing, capable of rebuilding and renewing itself without necessarily growing a lot of new cells, just new pathways through the old cells. With some patience and a fair degree of effort, he had been reorganizing his approach to living. Life had become well ordered with his return to his roots.
    One part of his beginnings involved his father, a man who had made nature a challenge and man a conqueror. It was a one-dimensional worldview that Sam could never fully understand, much less put a name to.
    All that had changed when Sam found his mother and his grandfather, Stalking Bear. Until his death, his grandfather had been his pipeline to his heritage; these days it was his mother and Kier, his cousin. Sam saw himself as the strangest of paradoxes: fascinated and nourished by the old of the Tilok past, but made rich, and by some calculations successful, in the technology-driven world of supersleuthing. Although he retained only remnants of his professional life, it was that life that had bought him his freedom in more ways than one. Of course it had also bought him his son’s death. Now, apart from his involvement with the Tilok, his days were mostly workouts and the usual sailing routine of reading, hikes, maybe a little flirtation with the tourist ladies, and exploration of ancient native sites and landmarks throughout the British Columbia coast and Vancouver Island.
    It had been months since the last time he had seriously wanted a drink. The good in his old personality, the keen instinct, the incredible memory, his ability to organize had all remained. But the cravings and the restlessness, the need for alternate kicks of booze and adrenaline had finally left him. Before the moment he decided to go pull Anna from a rock, skydiving or rock climbing and other artificially created risk was all he needed. An annual near-death experience wasn’t a requisite for life.
    But from the moment this woman had fallen into his world, he felt like a guy with something big to do.
    He tried to tell himself that his feelings for Suzanne, the only major love of his life, were like the populist love for Kennedy that may have grown considerably once the president was dead and gone forever. Nevertheless Sam persisted in his nearly sacred feelings toward the memory of Suzanne. Further complexity came when he tried to unravel Suzanne’s and his son’s deaths. Maybe to his poor mind, honoring his son somehow went hand-in-hand with preserving his feelings for Suzanne, for whom his son had died.
    He looked at Anna as she slept.
    Occasionally, Sam became possessed of an urge to uninhibited, screaming copulation, distinguishable from the urge to make love, but during the year since Suzanne’s death there had been only an occasional warm body from women who wanted a bump in the night before Sam sailed on. As to serious romance, there hadn’t been a whiff.
    Of