Free Murder at five finger light by Sue Henry Page B

terminal at the edge of town.
    Luck and misfortune had brought him there: his luck at catching a mere glimpse of auburn hair when the headlights of a car pulling into the parking lot illuminated shadows at the side of the terminal building; her misfortune in being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which allowed that sighting to happen. There was no doubt in his mind what he had seen from his vantage point at the rail of the ferry, where he had once again stood waiting to watch passengers disembark. Another might have questioned identification based on so little, but long surveillance and more than one such sighting had given Cooper an instinctive ability to recognize the woman he was following.
    How she could be in Petersburg and not on the ferry was a question for which he had no concrete answer. She could not yet have left the ferry at this stop, so the only plausible explanation was that she had managed to elude his surveillance in Ketchikan, left the ship there, and had reached Petersburg some other way, probably by plane to be there so quickly.
    It didn’t matter. A satisfaction lay in knowing he had picked up her trail again—that she had not managed to escape him. So he had gone quickly to collect the duffel he had left tucked in a corner of the observation lounge and joined the few people waiting to leave the ferry. Waiting in line to go ashore had been frustrating, but finally the gate opened and the Petersburg passengers had moved forward, allowing him to all but sprint to the place where he had seen her standing. It had been empty, of course. She had disappeared into the night. If he had been able to see her from the rail in the glare of the ferry and terminal lights, the reverse was true and she had fled. But in a town this size some local resident would have seen her and it remained only for Cooper to find that person.
    He did not expect to see her in the well-lit, cheerful atmosphere of the Harbor Bar, but in such a gathering spot, where he could wait and watch without notice, he might learn something that would lead him to her. The place was clearly a casual after-work hangout, for many of the seats were taken by fishermen and processing plant workers, by themselves, or with their wives and girlfriends. The hum of conversation and crack of pool balls hitting each other on the table filled his ears as he hesitated just inside the door to give the room a sweeping glance. Confident his quarry was, as expected, not among the current patrons, he dropped the duffel and his jacket under the window, where he could keep an eye on them, and crossed to an empty stool halfway along the bar.
    “A shot of Jack Daniel’s and a Bud,” he told the female bartender and, as she turned away, cast a look at the way she filled out the front of her red plaid shirt. Nice hooters, he told himself, allowing his appreciation to slide south when she bent over to pull the beer from a low cooler.
    “Not bad, huh?” A low comment from the man behind the leer on the bar stool on Cooper’s right. “And the legs go all the way up under those jeans.”
    “And how would you know, Perry?” A well-padded woman in coveralls on the left leaned forward to speak disdainfully around Cooper. “In your dreams maybe! You guys never quit, do you?”
    “You’d just bitch about that if we did.”
    “You like to trade places?” Cooper asked her.
    “Naw. You’re better looking than he is—probably more interesting too. I’m Sylvia. You gotta name?”
    But Cooper was already on his feet and switching her blended margarita with the beer and shot the bartender had just delivered.
    “Okay—okay!” She gave him a resentful look. “Sorry to have inconvenienced you.”
    She slid over and Cooper took her abandoned stool, staring straight ahead to discourage further conversation.
    In the mirror behind the bar, he watched Perry hook a sympathetic arm around her shoulders and snuggle her up to him. “Hey, who loves you, babe?”
    Tossing a last