Summer at the King Ko Inn was in high gear. We were running full and with all
the hours I worked between waiting tables and bookkeeping, I began to squirrel
away a decent pile of cash. With room and board provided and my shopping fetish
forced into a holding pattern (the nearest Macy’s sat a thousand miles away,
give or take), I did what everyone else there did. Work, read, play pool at the
bar, and when you could stand the craziness no longer, consume copious amounts
of alcohol.
Now, let me say for the record, the crew at the King Ko were pretty
well-behaved. We were all there for the same reason and that was to work hard
and make money. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have a little fun once in
awhile. And that same motto held true for the transient fishing industry
workers.
I’ll be honest here and tell you there were a few bar fights. After being
cooped up on a fishing boat for weeks, a body tended to get a little rowdy with
a need to let off steam. Most of them were harmless enough, but once in a while
you’d get a baddy that pulled a knife. Enter Dan, our resident maintenance man
and self-appointed protector of all King Ko beaver girls. He had an impressive
steely disposition and a mean right-hook. To watch him disarm and disable anyone
foolish enough to brandish a weapon, well, it was a sight to behold.
Under Dan’s watch nothing ever got out of hand. That is, until the day big
trouble checked into the King Ko. It came in the form of a twenty-something man
with a leather briefcase and a clean-cut appearance. Not an image normally
associated with trouble, but what we didn’t know at the time was that his
briefcase held enough cocaine to light up a city the size of Anchorage. Worse
than that, he’d been helping himself to liberal amounts of the pulse-popping
drug.
So the guy stayed in his room a full day and no one saw him. When he emerged
just before noon the next day, Jenny, the little maid from Guatemala, was the
first to encounter the cammo-wearing higher-than-a-kite drug runner. She said he
looked like he’d spent more than one day blowing through his cache. His hair
stuck out at odd angles, his eyes were wide and dilated, but it was the
mega-sized pistol he carried in his jittery hand that alarmed her the most.
She was walking down the hallway with an armload of towels when he met her at
a corner and their conversation went something like this –
“You work here?” he asked her.
“No, sir!”
“This place sucks,” he sneered. “The room sucks. The curtains are ugly.
Someone’s gonna pay.”
Excuse me? The curtains are ugly? I later took offense to that remark. After
all, I spent many a long hour cutting up old bedspreads to make those snazzy
curtains and they certainly were NOT ugly. But I stray from my tale.
Jenny beat a hasty retreat straight for manager’s office where I and a few
others were working. We immediately called the local sheriff, but what were we
to do in the meantime? This wasn’t a scenario ever played out in the small town
of King Salmon. No one wanted to meet up with this guy, but for the safety of
all, word needed to get out. So we deputized a tag team. Fortunately luck was
with me and I managed to avoid Trouble, and the Inn quickly became a ghost town
as people scattered. Eventually I ran into Jenny again and together we raced
outside and around the building toward the back, running into Dan along the way.
He yelled for us to get to the safety of the Beaver Hut and we didn’t slow down
until we got there.
Three more joined us in the dubious safety of the Hut. Clueless to the danger
we gathered around the lone window in my room, one that directly faced the
laundry room door of the Inn. When Dan and John, the Inn’s manager, burst out of
that door, we stared as they ran down the side of the King Ko toward the front.
And Dan had a gun.
Strangely enough, that’s when fear hit me. The danger just went from surreal
to very, very, tangible, and as we stood at that window and watched, I again
wondered at my sanity for coming to Alaska. But the minutes ticked by and
nothing happened, then both of the town’s police cars arrived. Next thing I
knew, the grounds were crawling with armed men and they were positioning to
surround all the exits.
By this time Mr. Drug Runner had worked up a head of steam at his lack of
success in finding anyone who claimed to work at the Inn. He was prowling the
halls and made his way toward the back, where Murphy’s Law had him exit the
building from...the laundry room door.
He spotted the police and in a last-ditch defiant stand he raised his gun,
only he aimed it right at the Beaver Hut!
“Hit the floor!” I yelled, expecting a barrage of gunfire any second.
The meaty thud as five people slammed into the trailer floor probably
distracted him, along with the foghorn police were using to inform him that he
was surrounded, to give up and drop the gun to the ground.
The sight of so many guns pointed his direction must have pierced his cocaine
induced haze for he gave up without a fight. After a few seconds of quiet, we
jumped up to the window again and watched the drug runner get handcuffed and
hauled off. When the coast was clear we emerged from the Hut, shaken but pumped
up on adrenaline.
Which served us well that evening, because the entire town turned out at the
Inn wanting to hear details of the arrest. Both the restaurant and bar were
crazy busy and we told the story over and over. Jenny was heralded a hero, for
keeping her cool and getting away to call for help. Dan was applauded for
keeping the drug runner moving in circles until the police got there, and we all
were congratulated on our role in the drama.
Me, well I learned something valuable that day. Adventure is not without
risk, but the reward is so incredibly awesome. Whether you’re merely going
someplace you’ve never been before, or facing the wrong end of a gun-toting
felon, the feeling of being really alive is amazing. The world seems brighter,
the air more potent. And though I’ve never desired to face down lethal criminals
since that day, I do still crave adventure and actively seek it out.
So the moral of this story is – be careful what you wish for. Or, choose your
adventures wisely because you never know what fate has in store.
But that’s the fun of it, right?
