The Dead List Read Free

banks of the Fraser River. The sound of the rushing water drowned out the traffic noises from the highway. An eagle flew overhead toward the trees and made that strange sound that only eagles seem to make – its high-pitched wail piercing above the noise of the river.
    He brushed the dirt off a large boulder and unfolded his map, tracing his fingers along the lines. If he headed south, a two-hour drive would take him into Vancouver, the largest city in the province, or if he forked off in the other direction he’d be right at the US border. His guidebook told him that north of Hope lay the tourist-friendly towns of the interior with their wineries and lake districts. Like Vancouver, those were towns with too many people – areas he knew he’d never visit. Hope sat miles away from them, surrounded by logging camps and farmland. The camps sounded like the mines from back home. The handwritten notes in his guidebook stated that local men and women typically worked for several months at a time at the hazardous profession, earning large sums of money. Then they came back to town where they’d pay a few bills, leave some money with their families, and blow off steam in the local taverns. Later he’d learn that some of those loggers lived in houses like the ones on the street where the man lay dead. They’d stay in rented houses along Cobalt and the neighboring streets during the winter before returning to work in the logging camps in the spring.
    He didn’t hear about the pilgrimage until he’d been in town for a couple of months. If he’d known, it might have altered the initial feeling of relief he experienced when he first sat by the river. He was trying to stay invisible and fit in at the same time. One of his fellow officers told him about the annual springtime event. A famous actor had shot a movie in Hope twenty years ago, and every year since then, for one week, fans from all over the world descended on the little town, revisiting the settings where scenes from the movie had been filmed. They visited the site where the gas station was blown up, the wooded area where the disgruntled Vietnam veteran, who was the main character, ran away to, and the place where the old courthouse from the movie – the actual courthouse of the town – still stood. Each year there was a rumor that Sylvester Stallone, the actor who played the main character, would attend the gathering. He never came, but the rumors always surfaced, and fans were sure this would be the year. Movie buffs from Sweden, Australia, Great Britain, and across the border from the United States all visited, and that’s what concerned Drake. It wasn’t just the strangeness of the whole subculture of fans; he could deal with that. There were too many of them. He’d moved to Hope to hide, not to be confronted by someone who might remember.
    There were two different groups of fans. The more civilized of the two camps spent time posing in front of the movie’s landmarks while talking to each other about their favorite scenes. They could often be overheard reciting dialogue they’d memorized or attending screenings at the local theater where the film was played almost continuously. The less-civilized of the two groups were there to get drunk. Some would wait until the evening, but for others the drinking took place all day long.
    The pilgrimage was a boom to the local economy, and there was often pressure on the police officers to overlook certain incidents. Public drunkenness was deemed acceptable during the one-week period unless it got out of hand. On occasion some of the men reenacted fight scenes from the film, and it sometimes ended in arrests and a trip to the small hospital. Once when a couple of combatants had seriously injured each other, they had to be air-lifted out to the neighboring town’s hospital for emergency surgery. The first time Drake was called out to deal with some of the troublemakers, he discovered how passionate the participants really