Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery Read Online Free Page A

desk. “Pays good. Good weight. Good client. Could be the start of something profitable, you know what I mean?” She raised her eyebrows and nodded, as if waiting for him to agree.
    “What’s the catch?”
    She cleared her throat. “Alaska,” she said.
    Hunter moved closer to the fan. The Alaska Highway was hard on trucks. Hard on trucks and on truck drivers.
    “Haven’t you got anyone else for that run?”
    “Like I said, Hunter, this client could be a money maker. I need an experienced, reliable driver with a reliable truck. You’re not only reliable, you’re the most respectable looking driver I’ve got. Besides, you told me once that you used to live up there. You’ll know your way around.”
    “What is it? The load?”
    “Some kind of mining machinery. Guess there’s still gold up there.” El raised her eyebrows again, her mouth frozen in a hopeful little smile.
    It had been over twenty years since Hunter had been north of the 60th parallel. He didn’t think of those days often, but when he did, he felt real affection for the Yukon and a cautious nostalgia for the time he’d spent there in his first years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. How would it feel to go back? he wondered. It might be a mistake. “Where in Alaska?”
    El’s smile widened. “He said it was somewhere around Fairbanks. You know the area?”
    “Yes, I know Fairbanks.” He had done a lot of exploring during his years in the Yukon. Those were the days – the early 70s – when ‘going for a drive’ was still a common form of recreation. The best drives were those that he and a fellow RCMP rookie took together. He and Ken Marsh had been through the depot in Regina together – the Mounties’ boot camp – and became close friends. Some of the ‘drives’ up north lasted for days. Whitehorse to Dawson was over 300 miles, Dawson to Fairbanks was almost 400 miles, Whitehorse to Skagway a mere 100 miles or so. And there weren’t a whole lot of towns in between, just miles of unpaved road, trees stunted by the long cold winters, limitless wild vistas fashioned out of earth, rock and water that took your breath away and were sparsely inhabited by tough, sometimes dangerous creatures, both animal and human.
    “You’ll take it?” asked El.
    Hunter took a deep breath and gazed out the front window toward the street. The air above the asphalt shimmered in the heat. The north had been good to him. He had been young and strong and they felt they would live forever, he and Ken. The north must have changed in the past twenty-five years, and he wondered how much. He’d like to see it again, and now was as good a time as any.
    He nodded.
    “Good man,” said El. “Go home and pack, and be back here by four thirty.”
    “You betcha,” he said, and headed out the door.
    “Wait,” she hollered. “Wait, you shithead.”
    He turned and glared at her. She was half way out of her chair, glaring back at him.
    “Please,” she said, with a phony smile that lasted less than a second.  “Release the fuckin’ fan.”
     
     
    Hunter knocked on the front door of the house he lived in, on a residential slope below Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver. He rented a suite in the basement – a modest but comfortable one-bedroom suite with a bachelor’s kitchen and back door entrance – from a retired medical doctor named Gord Young. Gord was a widower, and shared the upstairs with his bachelor brother, John, who spent most of the summer at Eagle Bay on Shuswap Lake. Hunter had seen his landlord’s Siamese cat sunning itself in the backyard so he knew Gord was home.
    The old man opened the door and invited Hunter in. He was barefoot and wearing baggy denim shorts and a white tee shirt with blue bicycles silhouetted across the chest.
    “Can’t stay,” said Hunter. “Just wanted to let you know I’ll be out on the road again for a couple of weeks, if you could bring in my mail.”
    “Where are you off to now? Back to