Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  In spite of the larger crowd, Kate was hitting her stride as Bill’s new barmaid. She got fewer drinks mixed up, she lost Bill less money making change, she didn’t drop any glasses, and when Mac McCormick and John Kvichak, who had tried to make time with her the night before and who, born optimists, renewed their suit this evening, instead of calling up Mutt she laughed at them. This made everyone else at their table laugh, too, and her tips went up accordingly.

  She just had to pick Mutt’s fights, she told herself smugly on her way back to the bar. While she’d been busy at the tables, Oren Grant had come in and taken up residence in a back booth. By the time she brought him his manhattan, he had been joined by a woman a little younger than he was and with enough of a likeness between him and Tina and the photograph in the hall that Kate identified her as Evelyn, the youngest daughter of Finn and Tina Grant. She waved Kate down and ordered a beer. Delivery interrupted a low-voiced argument. Oren’s face was flushed, Evelyn’s like stone. As Kate approached the table, she heard Evelyn say, “There’s nothing we can do about it, Oren. It’s her decision. She’s the wife, she’s the heir, she gets to say.”

  “Don’t you get it, Evelyn?” he said. “Jesus, you want to have to earn your own living?”

  “At least I can,” she said, her voice rising.

  Kate set the beer and the glass down and beamed around the table. “May I get you anything else?”

  Oren looked away, red faced. Evelyn shook her head, expression smooth. “No, thanks, we’re fine.”

  Kate smiled back, taking a quick, assessing look at the other woman. About Tina’s height, same lean build, same strong jaw. She wore jeans and a dark green sweatshirt advertising ALASKA SHIP SUPPLY in Dutch Harbor.

  Kate had one of those, too, from another undercover job on a crabber out of Dutch that had nearly gotten her killed, not to mention eaten by king crab. Getting tossed in a chest freezer was an amateur effort, by comparison.

  When she got back to the bar, the little demon from this morning’s workout had arrived, and judging by the lip-lock he laid on Bill, they were in something of a relationship. Evidently they hadn’t received the memo on no sex after sixty.

  He pulled back and looked down at Bill’s face and growled deep in his throat.

  “Jesus, Moses,” the young fisherman sitting on the nearest barstool said, “get a room.”

  Moses looked at him and grinned, and it was an evil, dirty, low-down, nasty kind of grin. “When’s the last time you got laid, Teddy?” The kid turned brick red. Moses booted him off his stool and took his place. A beer appeared magically in front of him and he drained it in one long swallow. Another appeared. Same. A third.

  Kate, fascinated, paused in loading her tray to watch. He slammed the third empty down on the bar and looked at her. “You know he didn’t do it, right?”

  It was the same thing he’d said to her this morning, and she didn’t know what it meant now any more than she had then. “Who didn’t do what?” she said.

  He looked disgusted and didn’t answer.

  She boosted her laden tray and made for the farther corners of the bar. If she stayed out of reach, maybe Mein Führer wouldn’t force her to do ninja stuff again.

  Somehow she knew that was a forlorn hope.

  This tray went to a crowd of people in their twenties who were getting louder with every round. Kate spotted Tasha Anayuk in the mix, flushed, heavy eyed, barely able to sit upright. The lout sitting next to her probably wasn’t a lout when he was sober, but he wasn’t sober now and he was all over Tasha, putting his hands in places that, Kate firmly believed, shouldn’t see the light of day unless said places were behind closed doors or on the Playboy channel.

  But Tasha was of age, and she didn’t even recognize Kate when Kate set her beer down in front of her. The night went later, more people came in and got louder and drunker, and there were a couple of incipient fights that broke up when Kate called Mutt in to consult. One look from those intent yellow eyes, and the immediate leak of testosterone through the combatants’ pores was almost visible. That look helped close the bar down, too, when Bill called for closing time and nobody wanted to go home. When the door shut behind the last of them, Bill said to Kate, “That dog alone is worth every dime I’m paying you.”

  “You’re paying me?” Kate said before she remembered that Moses was still at the bar, not anywhere near as under the weather as he should have been, given his astonishing rate of consumption. He did have his head on the bar, though, cradled in his arms, and his eyes were closed. Maybe he had finally passed out.

  “Don’t worry,” Bill said, “he already knows.”

  “Did you tell him?” Kate was disapproving.

  “No, I didn’t tell him,” Bill said. “He knew anyway.”

  Moses raised his head. His eyes were dark and deep and infinitely knowing, and Kate had the feeling that they could see right through her.

  “You know he didn’t do it, right?” he said for the third time.

  * * *

  They got back to the apartment over the garage a little after midnight, Kate opening the door and standing back to let Mutt go in first. All clear, and she went inside and stripped down to her skin and took a long, hot shower. Waiting tables was a lot more physical than she had ever guessed. No way was she rubbing that smell off on the sheets, no matter how short a nap she was allowing herself.

  Which was two hours. At 3 A.M. her internal clock kicked in and she woke instantly, her eyes wide open, aware of who and where she was and what happened next. It was a great gift and she knew it, especially after waking up next to Jim Chopin off and on for the last three years. Jim was not a morning person. He still had a hard time remembering who she was at first sight, at least until the first quart of coffee went down. The first six or twelve times she’d taken offense, until she realized that, in the immortal phrase of Robin Williams, Jim just wasn’t in his body yet.

  She allowed herself five seconds’ worth of regret that she was alone in her monastic little twin bed, and then she got up and dressed, long johns, lined jeans, and three layers on top with her jacket over all. Chemical warmers went under her toes and inside her gloves, and she broke out the balaclava. If Moses, that cryptic little bastard, was going to make her dance around like a goddamn ninja, she might as well look like one, too. She pulled her headlamp on over the balaclava and adjusted the wide woven elastic band around her head until it felt marginally more comfortable than a bustier.

  You know he didn’t do it, right? His face had twisted every time he said it, as if it was painful to get the words out, and that thousand-mile stare of his made her uneasy every time he turned it on her. She wished she knew what the hell he meant.

  No, she didn’t, she told herself firmly. She had a job to do, a pro bono one, true, but a job nonetheless. Time to get on with it. “Ready?”

  Mutt danced in place. Ready.

  There was a lot more traffic out on the streets of Newenham than there had been that day, or even the night before, everything well lit by the half moon hanging overhead, light reflecting off the snow with enough wattage to read the newspaper by. Evidently the party hadn’t stopped when Bill closed the bar, and now, at three o’clock, things weren’t even beginning to wind down. Pickups, ATVs, snow machines with belts kicking up sparks on patches of intermittent pavement, it was a city-size traffic jam. A ring of vehicles sat on an empty corner, noses pointed at a crowd around a burn barrel, which contained a blazing fire. A boom box was blaring out, if Kate was not mistaken, the last cast album from Glee. Well, at least it wasn’t rap. Bottles were being freely passed and Kate caught a whiff of the noxious evil killer weed as she went by.

  She might also have caught a glimpse of a white Chevy pickup parked discreetly around a corner, and approved. No point in causing a fuss unless Campbell absolutely had to, but also no point in not being on or near the spot if trouble did break out. There were a lot of people in town with a lot of money to blow and many of them were young people, al
ways a 911 call in the making. She remembered yet another undercover case in the oil fields of the North Slope of Alaska, where she’d watched a game of check poker, the hand of poker the check number, seven players and winner take all. Each check had been about twelve hundred dollars, a week’s work at that time. And the losers had groaned and drunk some more.

  She wondered if any of that was going on in Newenham this evening. Not even the most dedicated drinker could put away thirty thousand dollars of alcohol in one evening, but one bet and he could wake up as broke as he’d been the previous morning. Without much conviction, she hoped that the local Native association, having given so freely with one hand, might also be patrolling for abuses in connection with that giving with the other. But she didn’t see any sign of it.

  She went through town, repressing her Protector of the Small reflex every time she saw someone too drunk to walk, maintaining a decorous pace so as to attract no undue attention. Bundled up as she was, she doubted she even looked female, which in present circumstances she thought a very good thing. At the stop sign to the river road, another four-wheeler shot out of nowhere, precipitating a drastic swerve that dumped Mutt off the back of Kate’s ATV, and vanished at speed up the street. From the fleeting glimpse she caught, Kate could find it in her heart to forgive the young man’s erratic driving, given the young woman straddling him and all. A young woman who was not wearing an amount of clothing adequate for the ambient temperature, in Kate’s opinion, but it was none of her business. Mutt, ruffled, spoke her mind in their receding direction, and jumped up in back of Kate again.

  The hinterlands dividing Newenham and Eagle Air’s operation were also much more lively this morning. There were a couple of bonfires with people gathered around, more couples in clinches in what shadows the half moon allowed, and a couple of sporting events, one a race between an ATV and a snow machine. The snow machine won, but only because the ATV disappeared into the ice of a small pond that was part of the course. Kate slowed down, but rescuers appeared and hauled him out, stripped off his soaking pants and parka then and there, and repackaged him in various volunteered articles of clothing. After which they all returned to the bonfire for another round.

  The good news was that no one paid any attention to her. She was just another shareholder rejoicing in her dividend. She was a little concerned that the revelry might extend to Eagle Air, that she might arrive to the sight of a shivaree in progress, but when they poked a cautious nose up over the edge of the gravel pad, all was calm. Security lights shone from every corner of hangar and office, but no lights from any of the hangar or office windows. She circumnavigated the gravel pad once just in case, before leaving the four-wheeler at the base of the pad in back of the hangar.

  She pulled out an enormous pair of heavy gray wool socks and pulled them over her boots so her soles wouldn’t squeak on the snow. The edge of the pad was about twenty yards from the hangar’s back wall. She and Mutt crept up over the edge onto the pad and inveigled themselves across the hard-packed snow and into the shadow of the building.

  Kate leaned against the metal siding, waiting for a siren to go off or someone to shout “Halt, who goes there?” When nothing happened she tried the back door, a windowless metal slab of formidable solidity. It was locked. No reason it should be that easy. She and Mutt apparitioned around the building to the front door. Amazingly, like Tina’s front door, like Tina’s office window, like Tina’s garage, like the old hangar at the Newenham airport, like Kate’s apartment, it was unlocked. It seemed to be something of a meme. “Mutt,” Kate said, her voice the barest whisper, “guard.”

  Mutt’s “Whoof!” was the bare minimum of sound. She floated soundlessly over the tarmac to where the base office intersected the hangar, where the edge of the roof and the location of the moon allowed a corner of gray shadow almost exactly the color of Mutt’s coat, and took up station. If you didn’t know she was there, you would never have seen her. Kate’s hand stilled on the doorknob, watching, and she thought that if Mutt’s IQ got any higher, Kate might have to abdicate as the senior partner of the firm. She laughed beneath her baclava and eased inside.

  There was a night-light on the wall, a tiny bulb behind a small, elegantly wrought glass leaf. She waited, listening. There was no sound. She went around the edge of the room, the better to avoid creaks in the floor, just in case. She opened the door she had seen Tina go through the previous afternoon, and stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her. It was a heavy wooden door with heavy brass fittings and a lever handle, precision machined, and it slid shut with barely a click. There was a great deal to be said for sparing no expense on construction, especially from the burglar’s point of view.

  She leaned against the door and played her pencil flash around the room. No chest freezers. It did have corner windows, the one behind the desk facing the hangar. She went softly around the desk to investigate. The windows were vinyl sliders, with two locks, top and bottom. They unlocked as smoothly and as silently as the window opened.

  No alarm whooped. She waited. There was the faintest of rustles in the shadow opposite, followed by the drift of a lupine specter in her direction. “Guard,” Kate whispered. She didn’t hear anything but she knew Mutt had assumed the picket position beneath the window.

  She turned and surveyed the room. The desk was right in front of her so she put away the pencil flash and clicked on her headlamp and started there, coming up empty for the most part, finding only office supplies, pads, pens and pencils, a half-empty box of printer paper. There was a handful of the small Swiss Army knives in various colors scattered in the top drawer, the ones everyone in Alaska used to have in their pockets before 9/11 and TSA put a stop to it. These had been embossed on one side with the Eagle Air logo. Giveaways, no doubt. There was a box of .30-06 cartridges, six missing, and a ziplock bag holding some commemorative coins, their tarnish proclaiming them either pure silver or fake gold. There was a desk diary for that year that she opened hopefully, only to find it blank. Well, Finn had died on December 11.

  A power cable came up through a hole in the desk but there was no computer. The computer in the office of Grant’s house had been a laptop. Tina probably brought it back and forth.

  The bank of file drawers against the wall were the inevitable next step, and revealed a day-to-day record of operations of Eagle Air, Inc., going back over two years, dating from shortly after the purchase of the air base. One entire set of drawers was devoted to computer printouts of flight plans that went back thirty years, back when Eagle Air was Bristol Bay Air and, before that, Arctic Air Express. Kate flipped through them rapidly. They were organized into monthly logs. The early logs were filled in laboriously—and for the most part illegibly—by hand, the Bristol Bay Air flights printed out on—Kate squinted in the light of her headlamp—what she thought might have been a dot matrix printer. It made her eyes hurt just to look at them. Eagle Air logs were crisp and professional spreadsheets, printed out on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pieces of paper, every number neatly centered in its column, each column equidistant from its neighbor, all columns neatly centered on the sheet. Kate gave a silent cheer to Hewlett-Packard and the invention of the ink cartridge.

  She concentrated on Eagle Air Inc. and the last three years. Flights incoming listed a preponderance of company jets registered in names even Kate recognized, most of them right off the Forbes and Fortune 500 lists. Kate’s lips pursed in a silent whistle. Finn Grant may have had some cause for Eagle Air’s luxurious furnishings and gourmet foodstuffs. You couldn’t expect the boards of directors of Exxon Mobil and Berkshire Hathaway to sleep in bunk beds with no mattresses and eat out-of-date MREs bought in odd lots on the Internet. It was how many Alaska outfitters treated their clients. Not that they charged them any less.

  She passed the membership of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association in quick mental review, and an involuntary grin tugged at her lips. She’d like to see someone serve Harvey Meganack First Strike Rations.r />
  The flight plans out listed three main locations as destinations, Zion River Lodge, Four Lake Lodge, and Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge. The records for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge stopped abruptly two years before, which would have been when McGuire invested in Eagle Air in exchange for deed and title to Outouchiwanet.

  She closed the drawer and looked around for a map. It was on the wall next to the door, a big USGS 1:63,360 topographical map, reproduced, Kate discovered, on a metallic sheet set in a heavy wooden frame mounted directly on the wall. A cluster of magnets clung to one corner, and two bright blue plastic metal circles marked the locations of the two lodges Finn Grant had still been operating at the time of his death. The two remaining lodges and Eagle Air, Inc., formed a sort of scalene triangle stood on its longest point, with Eagle Air at the bottom and Zion River and Four Lake at top left and top right, respectively. She looked for Outouchiwanet Lodge and found it tucked into a bight in the side of Three Lake. Judging by the elevation markers on the contour lines surrounding the bight, Outouchiwanet had some spectacular view, always assuming sunlight ever got down in there to illuminate anything.

  Interesting country north of Newenham, four long lakes, named, imaginatively, One, Two, Three, and Four south to north, each running east–west, stacked parallel one on top of the other. The mountains between them formed a formidable ridge between the Nushugak River delta and the Yukon–Kuskokwim River delta. Anyone who spent his adult life flying in and out of that kind of terrain, with all the attendant terrors of schizophrenic Alaskan weather thrown in, without incident until his untimely death, had seriously mad skills in the air. She remembered the guy in the bar comparing Finn Grant’s personality to his flying ability.

  Which made his overlooking even so little a thing as a loose nut on the oil filter of his Cub that much less likely, she thought. There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots. Chaos theory be damned, old pilots got old by not making mistakes like that.