So Sure Of Death

by Dana Stabenow

  Wy didn't know who was more surprised, herself or McLynn. “It works!” she said involuntarily. “You cranky old bastard, it actually works!” She looked at McLynn, who still couldn't figure out how he'd lost his weapon, and smiled at him. He fell back a step at the sight of that smile, and it widened. “God, I wish Moses could have seen that.”

  “It's okay,” a weak voice said from the door of the one tent left standing. “I did.”

  Wy looked over to see Jo, bloody and maybe a little bowed, but otherwise conscious and back in the world.

  It took them an hour of making wider and wider circles in the air before they found him, and that only after they'd spotted two other boats and come down to find they were the wrong ones. TheBay Roverwas on a south-southwesterly heading, throttles all the way out. “How are we for gas?” Liam said.

  Prince's voice was grim over the headset. “There is no av gas in Kulukak, so our nearest refueling is Togiak or Newenham.” Her eyes narrowed as she checked the dials. One readout didn't please her, so she flicked the plastic cover with her finger. That must have helped because her brow cleared. “Depends on where he's going, sir,” she said. “We're good for another hour or so.”

  Liam didn't inquire into the “or so.” He'd always found ignorance an enormous comfort in the air, and he saw no reason to change that now.

  “What do you want me to do?” she said.

  “We might as well tell him we're here.”

  She looked apprehensive. “You're not going to jump out of this plane, are you, sir?”

  “You're not going to make me jump off the float again, are you, Prince?” he replied. “Just lose some altitude, make a couple of passes, let him know he's not alone.”

  “He's got a rifle, sir.”

  He couldn't believe he'd forgotten that little detail. He blamed it on his headache, a repetitious thud that seemed to harmonize with the noise of the engine. “Okay, one quick pass, close enough for him to see us, and then climb to a safe distance.” What was a safe distance? Liam wondered. Depended on the kind of gun Larsgaard had, he supposed. Ah well, anything for the cause of justice.

  In a steep dive the Cessna fell from a thousand feet to one hundred. The engine roared, and the pain in Liam's head increased. The bow of the boat flashed by and they were climbing again, the engine flat out and Liam's aches and pains with it.

  “It looks like he's headed there,” Prince said, pointing.

  Liam squinted against the sun. As usual, the fog had been left behind in Kulukak, clearing to blue skies as soon as they were out of the little bay. It was noon straight up, and the rays of the sun threw everything into bold relief against the darker blue of the water. There were half a dozen main islands in the Walrus Islands group, High, Round, Crooked, the Twins, Black Rock and even Summit, although Summit was a lot closer to the mainland. It looked as if Larsgaard was heading for one of the smaller ones. “This is a game sanctuary,” he told Prince. “Off limits to just about everyone.”

  “Why the hell would he come here? He has to know he can't get away.”

  “Did you see that walrus head on the wall of Larsgaard's kitchen?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of his friends told me that he's been hunting since he was a boy. He's been here before, knows the territory, which we don't.” Liam tried to remember past the thumping in his head; someone had been talking to him about the Walrus Islands just recently. The plane hit an air pocket and his head bobbed forward and for a moment it felt as if the dense matter behind his forehead was going to detonate. Wy. Her smart-ass suggestion for their first date. “There's a big, wide beach where all the walrus haul out. That's where the hunters go for harvest. That's where he'll be. Can you land?”

  “Easily,” she said. “It's like glass.”

  “We got enough fuel to get back with all three of us on board?”

  She flicked one of the dials again. “Yes.”

  They kept their distance, close enough to be in visual range but far enough to be out of gunshot. Sure enough, theBay Roverdropped anchor off a dark-sand beach sandwiched between sheer vertical cliffs of rock the same color. One side of the beach, the one with the most sun, was strewn with big brown bags.

  “What are those-” Liam started to say, and then he realized. They were walruses, hundreds of them, packed tightly one against the other across the sand, asleep in the sun, their ivory tusks gleaming white, their taut hides a golden brown. “Jesus.”

  “I hear they can weigh up to a ton and a half each,” Prince said.

  They looked bigger than that to Liam, but he had no more time to marvel. “He's launching a small boat!” Prince shouted, and pointed.

  The tiny figure of a man jumped nimbly from deck to rubber raft. He was carrying something that could have been a rifle, but the raft didn't have a kicker, so he was going to have to row, which wouldn't leave any hands free for shooting. “Put her down,” Liam said. “Can you taxi into the beach?”

  Prince put the Cessna into a sharp left turn, banking so she could inspect the water close to the beach for any hidden rocks and reefs. Liam's head hurt too much for him to be afraid, but his ears did pop in protest. “Yeah, I think so. Here we go.” She brought the Cessna around and set her down in a soft kiss of a landing. She taxied straight into the beach, but wasn't quick enough to beat Larsgaard, whose raft was already sitting at the edge of the tide, empty.

  Liam stepped out on the float, drew his weapon and walked forward to hop onto the beach. Footsteps in the sand led from the beached raft directly toward the herd of walrus. They looked like they were sleeping, the whole bunch of them, soaking up rays. There was some twitching and grunting but for the most part they seemed dead to the world. He approached them cautiously, his headache forgotten. They were enormous creatures, all fat and fur and tusk.

  A breeze came up. Liam was downwind. “Jesus!” he said again, this time for a different reason. The smell of ammonia was overpowering. They were sleeping in their own piss; a lot of it, judging by the smell. A three-thousand-pound beast would generate a lot of waste. Instantly his eyes began to water and he blinked them furiously, trying to see.

  He heard someone say something that sounded like, “Tookalook.”

  Through a blur he thought he saw a small figure slip between two enormous ones and he started forward involuntarily.

  “Asveq!” someone yelled, and Liam threw himself to the sand when a rifle went off. He rolled sideways and of course now his face was right in the sandy residue of urine and feces, and his eyes were tearing so badly he couldn't see at all. He couldn't seem to catch his breath, either, and it didn't help that the sound of the rifle shot had woken up the walrus. All of them.

  A roar sounded right over his head and he looked up, blinking the tears away to see a bull rear up, tusks that must have been two feet long at present arms. Down they came, straight toward him, in a slashing move that would have splattered him all over the beach if he hadn't pushed himself away, scuttling backward on hands and feet like a crab. At the same time something swept down on ebony wings, straight into the face of the walrus.

  The whole herd was up now. Their grunting roars of protest were deafening. On his feet, Liam was dazed and disoriented. He still had his weapon but what good would a little popgun like this be? The bullets would be lost in all that blubber. He wiped his arm on his sleeve in time to see a walrus lumber toward him, probably the same one, tusks raised again. No, this one had a tusk broken off halfway up, leaving a jagged point that looked even more threatening than a whole one. He thought Prince yelled something but he couldn't hear what. He saw what he thought was Old Walter in the middle of the herd, standing still, watching him. Down the tusks flashed; again he avoided them by the merest inch. He thought he saw the dark-winged shadow diving at the walrus for the second time, and the walrus dodging out of the way of its wickedly curved beak.

  Prince yelled again, and Liam blundered backward until he ran into her. They both sat down heavily in the sand, and watc
hed as the river of brown fur poured into the water, yipping and barking and growling and roaring defiance. A moment later there was nothing left but roiled sand and glassy water and blue, blue sky.

  “He's gone.”

  “He must have been flattened by the herd.”

  “I don't see anything, do you?”

  “No.” She swept the beach with the glasses. When no walrus popped up from behind a rock, she ventured forward to explore the beach where Larsgaard and the walrus had been. When she came back she said, “Okay, this isn't weird or anything.”

  “No sign of him?”

  “None.” She paused, and said doubtfully, “You don't think they ate him, do you?”

  “I think they mainly eat fish and shellfish.”

  “Oh.” Nobody said anything for a while. “Well, he's gone.”

  “He's gone,” Liam said. He got to his feet. “And so are we. Let's head for home.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Their dinner date had been postponed a week and changed to a picnic on the beach. They were one short, as Tim was long gone up the river with Moses, but as Wy was guiltily aware, they didn't even miss him.

  “I was so smug,” Liam said, regarding the hot dog he held suspended over the flame with a critical eye. The raven croaked agreement from a convenient spruce branch on the cliff. “I had them both, both perps, locked up in the local jail. Petla was as good as convicted, and I didn't think twice about walking into Larsgaard's house. I didn't think for a moment Larsgaard Junior didn't do it. Sure, there were things wrong with his story, but hell, he had means, motive, opportunity.”

  “So did I, in May.” Her smile was tentative, as if she wasn't sure it was permissible to joke about that yet.

  He grinned at her. “Yeah, but you I'm hoping to get back into the sack at some point. I couldn't put you in jail.”

  She laughed.

  “Besides, Larsgaard had even confessed, for crissake.”

  “True.”

  “And then there's Frank Petla.” He looked at where the bandage showed beneath the arm of her T-shirt. “He was there, he had a gun, he was in possession of goods stolen from the scene, including the murder weapon, he'd assaulted two people in fleeing said scene, what more could I want?”

  “Yeah, well, Frank kind of set himself up for that.”

  “Still,” Liam pulled his hot dog out of the fire, decided it didn't pass and put it back. “So after we got back to town and find Don Nelson's real killer in your custody, I went after Dick Ford again. I found him this time, up in Icky helping Aneska Ugashik fillet her salmon so she could hang it. He tells me he loaned his four-wheeler to Frank Monday morning, and then he tells me that he was fishing the same section of river Frank was over the weekend, Cache Creek, and Frank was out there all day both days, and Charlene was right, he didn't kill Don Nelson.”

  “He shot McLynn. He hit Diana.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Don't make excuses for him, Liam. He's already made enough of them for himself.”

  “You know who I think of when I think of Frank Petla?”

  “Who?”

  “Tim.”

  “Tim?” Wy ruffled up. “He's nothing like Tim, he-”

  “I didn't mean it like that. I meant, Tim gets a chance. You gave him a chance.”

  “Charlene and Peter gave Frank a chance.”

  “Yeah. Well. Maybe if they'd gotten to him sooner. Or for longer.”

  “Maybe.” She didn't sound convinced. She'd taken a liking to Diana Prince, and she didn't take kindly to Frank shooting her. “Are things back to normal now?”

  He thought about the nine funerals in Kulukak, the plain coffin shipped home to Seattle. “It is for us. Not for others. But yeah, for us, I think so.”

  “Is your father gone?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The raven let loose with a series of calls that sounded like one big, continuous belly laugh.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  Liam thought back to two days before, two weeks after Don Nelson had been found dead on the site of the old dugout. “So you had the wrong man,” Charles had said.

  “The wrong men,” Liam had said equably.

  Charles shook his head. “Sloppy.”

  “Fairly,” Liam agreed. “Must be hereditary.”

  “I beg your pardon?” There was frost on Charles's vowels.

  “I called your office. At Hurlburt Field.”

  “Really?” Charles examined the contents of his glass with interest. “Why, when I'm right here?”

  “You are no longer assigned to Hurlburt. You up for promotion, Dad?”

  Charles laughed it off. “I'm always up for promotion.”

  Liam had heard that kind of laughter before, the laughter of military officers trained to support one another in life-and-death situations and yet oh so aware that a misstep here, a missed salute there and you were retiring at your present rank. It was sharply edged, competitive laughter that gave no quarter and had nothing to do with humor. “Sure you are. You've been a colonel now, what, five, six years? About time to move up, isn't it? What's next? Major general?”

  “Brigadier,” Charles said involuntarily. His mouth snapped shut and formed a thin line.

  “That's right, brigadier,” said Liam, who had remembered that perfectly well but had wanted to see if Charles would jump at the bait. “Means you're off active flight duty, right, your next promotion?”

  He waited with every outward sign of being willing to wait until this time next year for Charles's answer, until his father said reluctantly, “Not necessarily.”

  “Yeah, but you'll be flying a desk sooner or later, so it makes sense that you'd already be looking for a job that suited you. So then I called your new office.”

  Charles frowned down at his plate, disconcerted by Liam's sudden change of subject. “How did you get the number?”

  “Innate charm,” Liam replied. “Also hereditary. You're working on some kind of Superfund cleanup task force, aren't you, Dad? In fact that's the real reason why you're here. Not to facilitate turning redundant Air Force buildings over to the local community, but to hide a toxic waste site.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about. I've got to get back, anyway.” Charles pushed his plate away and half rose to his feet.

  “Sit down, Dad.” Charles had sat down, had glared at Liam from the other side of one of Bill's booths where they were hav- ing a meal before Charles shipped out. “Don Nelson had it all down in his journal. He found your dump site. He went down to the river below the dump site and smelled fumes, so he figured it was leaking. He wrote to a reporter for theNews.” A good one who could be your worst nightmare, Liam thought, and wondered why he hadn't said it out loud.

  “I had a friend do some searching on the Net for me. Fuel spills into fresh water are less publicized than ocean spills, although spills into fresh water are way more destructive. Freshwater is more sensitive to a spill than salt water, plus people and other mammals drink fresh water, and birds nest in it, fish lay eggs in it, mosquitoes give birth in it, like that. And of course the fish eat the larvae and the birds eat the fish and the people eat the birds and pretty soon you've got toxic poisoning of human beings, never mind the environment. Did you know,” he added parenthetically, “that human beings are inedible? It's a fact. We sprayed DDT all over the place for years and it got into the food chain and now we're inedible. I ought to find that comforting, but I don't somehow.”

  Maria stopped by with another round of drinks. Charles flashed his automatic smile. Maria wilted a little, rallied and moved on to the next table.

  “You get the idea, Dad,” Liam said. “You spill petroleum or petroleum by-products into fresh water and it gets into everything from the algae up.” He took a bite of cheeseburger. “You want to know the worst kind of fuel spill there is?”

  Charles, busy with his own burger, didn't reply.

  “I'll tell you,” Liam said. “Light refined products. Keros
ene. Gasoline. Jet fuel. It spreads like that”-he snapped his fingers-“and it soaks right into the ground. No surface tension to speak of, like crude oil has. Specific gravity is way lighter than crude, and viscosity… well, hell, jet fuel hasn't much more than lighter fluid. The fumes evaporate, there isn't any residue, you'd hardly know it was there.” Liam dug into his fries. “Until it starts showing up in your drinking water as benzene. A known carcinogen. Cancer-causing substance,” he added helpfully.

  “I know what carcinogen means,” Charles snapped.

  Liam wiped his mouth with a napkin and leaned forward, speaking in a low voice. “Good. Because I want you to know just what it is YOU'VE BEEN DOING OUT ON THAT FUCKING BASE!”

  There was a reasonable lunch crowd at Bill's that day, and conversation stilled for a moment when Liam's roar echoed around the room. But people were eating and drinking and talking and laughing, and Jimmy was singing about fruitcakes strutting naked through the crosswalk in the middle of the week, so it was only a momentary lull. Bill eyed Liam narrowly before deciding to let it ride and returning to her New Orleans guidebook. It was open to the section on graveyards, which in New Orleans, she had informed everyone the previous day, were a tourist attraction.

  For his part, Liam felt another root send out tentative tendrils into Newenham ground. He wouldn't have put it in quite those words, but he was rallying to the defense of his new home. He was telling his father, Air Force Major Charles Bradley Campbell, You may not shit in my nest. He let his voice drop back to a normal tone. “You've been burying fifty-five-gallon drums of byproducts, haven't you? I saw all the heavy equipment at the base. Thought it was mostly there for snow removal, and it probably was, to begin with.” Liam ate a fry with more relish than he was feeling. “Why, Dad? Do you make general quicker if you don't go to all the time and expense of disposing of toxic waste in an environmentally acceptable manner?”

  Charles wiped his hands on his napkin and folded it precisely in fours. “You said there was a journal?”

  “Yeah, there's a journal.”