by Stan Jones
The problem was money. It took money to bring in undercover agents and maintain them in Chukchi long enough to get the confidence of the bootleggers and make the buys needed to make a case. Traveling on Carnaby’s frequent-flyer coupons and staying with Ed and Carmen would leave a thousand dollars lying around loose, and the Super Trooper had no doubt already figured a way to slide it into undercover operations without attracting the notice of the bean-counters at headquarters in Anchorage.
“All right, I’ll go. When is it?” Active pulled his notebook from a hip pocket.
“Next week. The eleventh through the fifteenth. You can have Evelyn make the arrangements.” Carnaby looked out at the secretary again. “And God help anybody who screws them up.”
Active wrote the dates in the notebook. “OK, anything else?”
“Now I’m feeling guilty, beating you out of your per diem.” Carnaby stuck the computer training spreadsheet back in its place, then squared up the stack. “You could take some leave after the class if you want. Spend a little time with your family down there, catch up with some of your old pals, decompress a little from Chukchi. You’ll be surprised how much you need it after - - how long you been here?”
“Two years, about.”
“And when was the last time you were out?”
“Last summer, I guess.”
“Yeah, but that was to testify in that cocaine trial that got moved to Anchorage, right? That wasn’t a real vacation.”
Active shook his head. “I don’t enjoy relaxing all that much.”
“Well, you should learn. You’ll burn out, you don’t kick back once in a while. We’re at full strength now, so this is a good time to be gone.”
“I’ll let you know.” Active left Carnaby’s office and walked back to his own, turning it over in his head. What if he invited Lucy to come too? That should please her. If she could be pleased by anything he did these days.
CHAPTER FIVE
He called her at midafternoon, and gave up after ten rings. If she was there, she wasn’t interested in talking.
He drove to Pauline’s cabin after work and knocked on the door. No answer there either.
He turned on the stoop and looked up and down Beach Street for a moment, as if the answer might be caught in the afternoon sunlight bouncing off the sea ice. Nothing in sight but some high-school boys in a pickup basketball game on a vacant lot that had dried out early, and two girls too young to drive tearing past on a Honda four-wheeler. Finally he shook his head and returned to the Suburban.
He realized where she was when he pulled up at the tiny, plywood-sided house the Troopers rented for him and saw that the kunnichuk door was ajar, as was the door beyond it into the house proper.
On spring days, she liked to open up the bachelor cabin, as everyone at the Trooper offices called the place, and let in the sun and the breeze off the ice. It cleared out that lived-in-too-long smell a place got from being sealed up all winter. Through the open kitchen window he caught a side view of her, working at the sink.
He supposed coming over to make dinner was her way of apologizing without having to bend her pride and say the words. But, as always after one of their fights, he wasn’t quite sure what he should say. He still didn’t know by the time he had parked and walked inside, so he sniffed loudly and said, “What smells so good?”
She turned from the makings of a salad in a big bowl on the drainboard and said, “That’s sheefish. Martha brought it over.”
“I thought so.” The sweet white meat of the big bottom-feeder that people caught through holes in the ice had become one of his favorites during his time in Chukchi.
She bent and looked through the window in the oven door, then straightened. “I guess your stepfather was out this past weekend. It’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.”
The afternoon sun caught her through the kitchen window and he was amazed again at her loveliness. She was dressed in white jeans and a short-sleeved white T-shirt that contrasted dazzlingly with her brown skin and the thick black ponytail hanging down her back.
And her face, that impossible study in reflected diagonals: mouth curving up at the corners, upturned almond eyes, slanting brown cheekbones. He had often tried to memorize Lucy’s face, but he could never call it up at will. Instead, it would come to mind of its own volition, especially when he was out in the country, admiring some white fold in the winter mountains or a thunderhead mushrooming up from the inland hills on a summer day.
“What is it?” she said and he realized he was staring in silence.
“Twenty minutes?”
She cocked her head and smiled and put her hands on the edge of the sink behind her, pulling the T-shirt tight across her front. “Why, are you too hungry to wait?”
Obviously, she had caught his drift. Or maybe he had caught hers. With Lucy, he never knew if he was one step ahead or three steps behind, but he suspected it was usually the latter. Now it didn’t matter because he saw they both had the same idea about how to make up.
He walked over and slid his arms back through hers and cupped her buttocks, pulling her against him as hard as he could. She gave a little moan that was not so much the voice of passion, he thought, as of relief or welcome or homecoming. Then he covered her mouth with his own, feeling at that moment that he wanted to inhale her and keep her safe inside him for a while.
He felt her arms come off the sink and wrap around his neck, so tight it hurt a little. Then her feet came off the floor and her legs wrapped around his waist and he walked her into the bedroom exactly that way.
“My God,” she said from beside him a few minutes later. “I never, like that …”
“Yeah, I know.” He was studying her belly now, running his fingers over the smooth mound of flesh just below her navel.
“I would have taken them off, you didn’t have to …”
It had been the white cotton covering that little hillock, that and the glimpse of pubic curls through the fabric, that had caused him to rip her panties off.
Not that he had planned it that way. He had intended a more gradual unveiling, sliding the panties slowly past the swell of her hips, over first one knee and then the other, then down the slender brown calves until she was free.
But watching her pull the T-shirt over her head, then free her breasts from the bra, then tug off her jeans, had been all he could handle. When he saw the panties and put his hand inside and felt her hot, slick, inner flesh grip his fingers, that had been it—without conscious thought, he had grabbed the waistband and yanked and then they were just a wisp of cloud in his hand.
“They were so white against your skin, I’m sorry …”
“Don’t be. I’m not. It was like, it was like … I don’t know what it was like. They were old, anyway.”
“I’ll buy you some new ones.”
“Never mind, I just won’t wear any when I come over.”
And somehow that set them off again and suddenly he was on top of her again and in her again, her so female and smelly and slippery from the first time that he was screaming out loud before the second time was over and she was laughing or crying, he wasn’t sure.
They fell apart gasping. She threw her arm over her eyes and he watched her breasts heave as her breathing slowed.
“Mmmm,” she said finally. She rolled to face him, and nipped his bare shoulder. “That was a ten.”
“A twenty. Two tens.”
She giggled and said “Mmmm” again and snuggled up against him, her body wet and warm and utterly relaxed now. He worked his arm under her head, so that her cheek was on his chest.
“I have to go to Anchorage for a while.”
“Mmmm” she said. Then he felt her stiffen. “When? Why?”
“Monday,” he said, and explained about Peer Instruction Training and how he’d be saying with Ed and Carmen to build up the Chukchi detachment’s budget for undercover work against the bootleggers.
“So you’ll be back Friday?” He fe
lt her relax again. “You want me to stay here and watch your place? And make sure you feel welcome when you get home?”
“Actually, I was thinking I might stay down there and take some leave. You want to come down and spend a few days in Anchorage together?”
“And stay with Ed and Carmen?” He could hear the unease in her voice. She had never met his adoptive parents.
“Well, you’d be in the guest bedroom.” He pulled his arm from beneath her head and rolled on his side to face her. “But it’s right next to my room and it has a queen-size bed and the springs don’t squeak and neither do the floorboards in the hall and I’ll oil the hinges on the doors.”
She smiled. “Well, maybe I could … no, I can’t. I have finals coming up. How long will you stay?”
“A week, I suppose. Carnaby says I’ll burn out if I don’t take a vacation.”
“A week isn’t much of a vacation.”
“Well, I’m not much for vacations.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Visit Dennis Johnson, I guess. Maybe play some hockey if he’s still on a team. Hang around headquarters a little, see what’s posted on the job-announcements board.”
She pushed herself up onto an elbow and gazed down at him with a serious expression. “Will you look for Gracie Palmer?”
“Not really. It’s a case for the city cops down there. I’ll probably nudge Dennis to poke around a little so I’ll have something to report to her father when I get back, that’s about all. Except ..”
“Except what?”
“It is odd nobody’s seen her in three years. You’d think somebody would have run into her and it would have gotten back to the Palmers.”
“Maybe she died.”
“Maybe. But then the Palmers would have heard from the cops for sure. Unless she was a Jane Doe. They get two or three bodies they can’t identify every year in Anchorage.”
“That’s sad.” She rolled off her elbow and onto her back. “You die and nobody knows you and your people never hear what happened.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll check with the Jane Doe guys down there, show them Grace’s picture.”
Lucy was silent for a long time. The only sound in the house was the trickle of his leaky toilet. “So you will look for her.”
“Only a little.”
She was silent again, so he poked her in the ribs with his elbow. “You think I shouldn’t? Jason Palmer sure seemed torn up about it.”
“Do what you feel is right.”
“I don’t know.” He locked his hands behind his head. “Maybe I’ll ask Martha if I should. She knows the family, she knew Grace when she was in high school.”
She sat up with a lurch, her eyes blazing. “Of course Martha will tell you to look for her!”
“What?”
“That Martha … oh, never mind!”
Now her eyes were squeezed shut, with tears trickling out. Two crying spells in one day was a lot, even for the new state of their relationship. “Are you having …”
“No, it’s not PMS!”
“You’re not …”
“No, I’m not pregnant!” She rolled off the bed, gathered her clothes from the floor, and stamped out of the bedroom. A moment later, he heard the bathroom door slam and the water come on.
He pulled on his pants and walked to the bathroom door as he buttoned his shirt. “What is it? Look, tell me the problem.”
Silence.
“Look, the sheefish is going to burn.”
“Turn it off. Even a man should be able to do that.”
He walked into the cramped kitchen and shut off the oven. As he turned back to the bathroom, Lucy emerged, fully dressed and wearing the coldest face he had ever seen on her. She grabbed her jacket off his sofa and went out through the kunnichuk without a word.
He hurried to the door and shouted at her back. “Let me drive you home.” She didn’t stop or turn, so he hopped after her in his bare feet.
He caught up to her and pulled at her arm. “Well, at least let me put on some shoes so I can walk you home.”
“No!” She jerked her arm away and kept walking.
He stood there until she was thirty feet away, then, lacking a better idea, started to follow her.
She turned, picked up two rocks, heaved one with an awkward girl’s throw, and missed him by ten feet. “Stop following me or I’ll call the police.” She threw the second rock, missed again, and picked up a third.
This was ridiculous. If he kept following, she’d keep throwing rocks and eventually hit him. She might even flag down a cop if the Chukchi Police Department happened by on patrol.
At a minimum, he’d take a merciless kidding for becoming part of Chukchi’s street theater. At worst, the police might actually investigate him in connection with a domestic disturbance. It would be on the police blotter on KCHK, his mother would hear, Patrick Carnaby, Evelyn O’Brien … He turned and started toward his house.
When he reached the kunnichuk, he stopped and looked once more at the stiff little figure in white hurrying up the sunlit street, paced by a long afternoon shadow. So much pain in the world, and so little he could do about it, especially the part he caused himself.
PART II
ANCHORAGE
CHAPTER SIX
After the starkness of the Arctic, springtime in Anchorage was like a splash of the tropics when Active landed there three days later. His eyes fed on the luxuriance as he drove in from the airport in a tiny rented Neon, the cheapest car Avis offered, in honor of Carnaby’s scheme to pilfer travel money from the Peer Instruction Training budget for use against the Chukchi bootleggers.
Even Spenard Road, a meandering track through Anchorage’s tenderloin, was ablaze in green. Birch, spruce, aspen, mountain ash, all bursting out in bud and leaf, yellow dandelions popping up along the shore of Lake Spenard, long new grass springing up from the shoulders and medians and any other unpaved patch where soil, sun, and rain could mingle.
It all seemed to bespeak a kind of chlorophyll-drenched tumescence, which perhaps explained the two hookers in hot pants loitering at a bus stop in the morning sun outside a strip club called the Illusions.
Their eyes flicked over his car and apparently recognized it as a rental. One gave a “pull on over” wave while the other turned sideways and threw back her shoulders to show off her profile. He wondered about hookers who could get themselves out on the street so early on a Monday and also who the clients would be at that time of day. How many commuters wanted to start the work week with oral sex in a Spenard parking lot?
He thought of pulling over, listening to their pitch, and then showing them his badge. But he couldn’t think of a good punch line to cap the stunt and they probably knew the Troopers didn’t work Spenard anyway, so he just waved and drove on.
Peer Instruction Training was not at the rambling old plywood Trooper headquarters on the east side of town but rather in a fancy downtown hotel owned by a Native corporation from the southwest part of the state. He supposed the choice of venue was connected with the fact that the current governor was a Democrat who had slid into office by under a thousand votes statewide, thanks to his margins of up to ninety percent in the Native villages of the Bush.
No doubt the Democrats would lose control someday, and then classes like this would move to a more Republican venue, such as the hotel a few blocks west owned by a former Republican governor.
He parked the Neon and walked into the hotel and climbed a jade staircase to the mezzanine. There a sign told him the class was in the Sheenjek Room. The Sheenjek, he seemed to remember, was a river that ran south out of the Brooks Range somewhere east of Chukchi.
He found the Sheenjek, collected a blueberry muffin and a black coffee from a table at the back, and took a seat just as the instructors introduced themselves to the class.
At first he had some hope that the day would be entertaining, if not instructive. Something was obviously going on between the two instructors, identifi
ed by their badges as Neil and Christie, from Microsoft’s customer-training division. But what?
They exchanged meaningful glances as Neil started the laptop hooked to a projector. There was a balletic avoidance of contact as Neil started the PowerPoint program and laid out his notes beside the mouse and Christie dug the Peer Instruction Training handouts from a big, black travel case and distributed them to Active and the other students.
Then Neil touched Christie’s arm, pointed at something on the screen, and began to explain it to her. Christie bent toward him, bared her teeth, and hissed something in his ear. He shut up and looked straight ahead and Active thought the tips of Neil’s ears were turning red as Christie walked to the door and dimmed the lights.
She waited a moment, frowned, waited a little more.
“Neil, if we could have the first slide now?” The disgust in her voice was undisguised.
Neil jumped and did something to his laptop. The PowerPoint logo vanished from the big screen at the front of the room and the first Peer Instruction Training slide replaced it. It consisted of the words themselves and a cartoon of a young black executive showing a young white executive how to do something on a computer-—how to use PowerPoint, it appeared.
Active sighed and settled back into his chair. PowerPoint presentations were the most potent soporific that human ingenuity had ever devised, in his experience, and he resigned himself to the probability of getting little more than nap time out of the classes unless Neil and Christie actually came to blows.
Well, he could study the handouts later for the gist of Peer Instruction Training, and wing the rest when he returned to Chukchi and actually had to use it on Patrick Carnaby, Evelyn O’Brien, and the rest of the Trooper staff.
Christie was welcoming them to the class now, Neil dutifully clicking through the introductory slides.
The Nerd and the Cheerleader, Active finally decided, that was the problem between Neil and Christie. Christie was a creamy-skinned blonde, not gorgeous, not cover-girl material, but certainly all one could reasonably expect in a teacher of computer classes.
