Of all the seedy, lowlife-infested Canuck borderbars he had ever entered, this Hoser Tavern took the griddlecake. The bartender had a profile like the Alaskan Coastline with a half-smoked cigar sticking out of Anchorage. To his left, a drunken silver-haired sot was coming on to a one-legged transvestite with a Maple Leaf tattoo on his right arm. Two inbred slobbering sycophants in toques were trying to talk a bear into driving them home. It was the grimmest environment Madison had submerged himself in since the refueling ship ran aground on a coral reef in Cam Ranh Bay, and Blake had been dispatched to patch the gash with a canvas tarpaulin and a fistful of dry wall screws.

"What'll ya have, eh?" said the leering bartender, his good eye impaling Madison with a stare as hard and pointed as a rusty ice pick.

"Four Roses neat," said Madison. He peeled a Fifty out of his money clip and slid it through the thick film of beer, peanut husks, and bear slobber that coated the bar top like Elmer's School Paste. "Keep the change."

"Mighty big tip for a guy in a Sears polo shirt," said the bartender with a grin that made Ernest Borgnine look like the Mona Lisa. "Last tip I had this big was when Alan Thicke was stuck in town 'ere wit a broke fuel pump on his Jaguar and he come in 'ere tryin' to score some Ecstacy. You a druggy too?"

"No. I'm a drunk. But what I need is information. I'm looking for a one-armed lumberjack named Pierre Benoit. My last address for him is a cabin twelve miles north of here along Saltwater Creek."

"Then go there. But you better take some artillery."

"Been there. Nothing but a slab foundation with some black timber leaning on it. Still smoking. I want to know where he is now."

"I'm right 'ere, Monsieur Deeck."

Before Madison could spin around on his barstool, Benoit had caught him across the bridge of the nose with a fist like a bag of gravel. Madison was aware of the noise it made as the punch landed...it sounded like a watermelon rolling off a flat bed truck and hitting the highway.