“Thanks,” she said with real gratitude. She drank deeply and set the glass down, putting her head back and closing her eyes.
His strayed down to her massive belly. “You sure it’s not twins?”
“I’m sure,” she said without opening her eyes.
“Dad’s thrilled, I’m sure,” he said. “This time maybe he’ll luck out and get a son who isn’t afraid to fly.”
“Maybe,” she said, “except she’s a girl.”
“Oh.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Liam.”
“You could have said good-bye,” he said. “Hell, you could at least have resigned so I could have got someone in to take your place. John Barton kept saying you’d be back, there was no point in sending someone to fill your slot. The local cops resigned in a body when Jim Earl cut their pay again. It’s been a little frantic out around these parts.”
“I know. You’re right. But your father—”
“Yeah, I know, Colonel Charles Campbell, USAF, not just a man but a god.”
“He’s a brigadier general now.”
“Oh,” he said for the second time.
He waited for more, but she had closed her eyes again, and she looked so exhausted that he forbore from further recriminations, at least for the moment. “You can have Tim’s bedroom, second door on the right after the bathroom. Wy’s in the air. I’ll leave a message on her voice mail so she knows you’re here.”
“She going to be as happy to see me as you are?”
If he had stayed with Diana he was going to keep asking questions and she really didn’t look up to giving him the answers, so he’d shelved family, for the moment, and gone back to work. After all, it wasn’t like he wanted to talk about his father. Most of the time he worked at not even thinking about him.
Artie Diedrickson, now. Artie Diedrickson was a bit of a boob.
Boobs, like water, tend to find their own level. That level usually included alcohol.
He poked his head in at Bill’s. She was there but he didn’t see anyone else of interest. He waved and left.
He went by the other bar. No luck there, either.
At the liquor store next to the AC he went in to talk to the clerk, Sally. She was a fifty-five-year-old matron with a plump figure and a flirtatious eye, who appreciated being chatted up by a good-looking man in uniform. Liam leaned against the counter and smiled down at her. “Hey, Sal.”
She fluffed up her tightly permed hair. “Hey, Liam.”
“How’s business?”
She fluttered her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “Less boring, now that you’ve dropped by.”
Liam had no problem with putting a little zing into someone’s step, so long as everyone concerned understood that his wedding ring wasn’t merely for show. Five minutes give-and-take and he was the happy possessor of the information that Teddy Engebretsen had come in around noon and paid cash for six cases of beer. “We make all that crowd pay cash now,” Sally said, crossing her arms and leaning on the counter, so as to display her substantial bosom to effect.
“Wise decision,” Liam said, and threw in an appreciative glance, just for extra.
* * *
Forget it, Liam, he thought, it’s Delinquentville.
The tiny community huddled in a hollow between two small hills, off a road which was off another road which was off the road to the airport. The road had a name but no one remembered it, because the street sign marking the intersection never lasted more than twenty-four hours after the city put up a new one, and after a while the city decided to spend its money elsewhere. Delinquentville (so christened by Liam shortly after his arrival in Newenham) was a collection of ancient log cabins, broken-down trailers and gear shed lean-tos, awash in a sea of stuff that had been too good to throw away for a hundred years, which by now had deteriorated to junk that wasn’t worth the effort of throwing away. It was a fine distinction, but it was one of the few the residents of Delinquentville were capable of making.
Pushki and alders threw up sprouts from piles of cement blocks and rusty car bodies. Scrub spruce clustered around the perimeter, leaning in over the jagged line of roofs as if to eavesdrop on the latest get-rich-quick schemes. Dogs chained to doghouses outside and house dogs inside set up a continuous howl that competed with the blaring of Coldplay, Lady Gaga, and Lil Wayne.
Here was gathered every Newenhamer who’d ever been thrown out by his wife, his mother, or his girlfriend. Herein dwelt the deadbeat dads, the incurable drunks, the serial adulterers, the petty thieves, the liars, the losers, and the louses, the unlucky, the unloved, and the unemployed. If your stepfather had harried you out of the house after he married your mother, if your girlfriend dumped you for another and vastly inferior guy, if the skipper had kicked you off your boat, not for showing up drunk but for your inability to do your job in that condition, you were sure to find a roof and a meal and sympathy in Delinquentville.
Delinquentvillers were overwhelmingly male in gender, although females were always welcome as visitors. One or two had tried it on a permanent basis, though not for long. Karl Marx would have approved, as Delinquentvillers practiced a communal lifestyle, albeit an involuntary one. Beer in particular was regarded as community property whoever brought it home.
On the whole, Liam was with Marx, although for different reasons. Delinquentville’s existence meant he knew right where to go whenever Brewster Gibbons called to report that someone had tried to abscond with the Last Frontier Bank’s ATM machine. It was a frequent enough occurrence that Liam was pretty sure Brewster had Liam’s cell on speed dial.
Teddy Engebretsen had at one time been son-in-law to Mayor Jim Earl. A year after Liam’s arrival on the scene, the mayor’s daughter discovered that she had been deceived in her chosen spouse and had flounced out of Newenham on her father’s dime. Jim Earl had evicted Teddy from the house he had bought the newlyweds, with an enthusiasm that had launched Teddy all the way to the tumbledown shack Liam was parked in front of now. And Teddy Engebretsen was one of Artie Diedrickson’s many boon companions in downward mobility.
Liam got out of the truck and closed the door softly. As yet no one had looked out a window to see the trooper approaching the door. From behind it blared the sounds of Bon Jovi, which sort of surprised Liam, because that was almost like real music. He pulled his ball cap down tight on his head, shifted his belt so that his weapon was prominently displayed, although he did not unsnap the flap on the holster. There were plenty of weapons in Delinquentville but they were for the most part hunting rifles, and while Liam didn’t delude himself that anyone was going to be happy to see him, he couldn’t imagine a time when a Delinquentviller would draw down on him. Shiftless sad sacks they might be, but they were not in general predisposed to violence.
He knocked. He had to knock twice before anyone heard him over Bon Jovi’s exhortations to keep the faith. “It’s open! Wouldja just come the fuck in?”
He knocked a third time. “Jesus, you deaf? Just a fuckin’ minute, wilya?” Footsteps tromped toward the door. Teddy opened it, and gaped at him, the trooper in his resplendent blue-and-gold uniform, perfectly tailored, excruciatingly tidy, a joy to behold.
Except, perhaps, for the occupants of Delinquentville. There was a single moment of electric silence, and then it was like the house exploded.
“It’s the trooper!”
“Shit!”
“Run for it!”
“Get the fuck out of my way!”
Someone dived through a window without bothering to open it. Someone else kicked the boom box, and Bon Jovi scratched to an abrupt mid-wail halt. Liam heard a body crash against what had to be the back door. A toilet flushed, and someone screamed, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing!”
“Jesus, are you deaf, man, it’s Campbell!”
“Fuck!”
Teddy had vanished. Liam decided that even that hard-ass Fourth Amendment magistrate, Bill Billington, would say the open door qualifie
d as an invitation to enter, and strolled inside. “Yoo-hoo,” he said. “Anybody home?”
The main room of the cabin was totally trashed, empties all over the floor, World of Warcraft still running on the television, the sickeningly sweet smell of marijuana just beginning to dissipate. The furniture looked like Teddy had harvested it out of the municipal dump. Liam would not have subjected the seat of his immaculate uniform pants to that kind of abuse, not that he’d ever been invited to.
A movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Artie Diedrickson bolt toward the back door. Liam caught him by the scruff of the neck two steps shy, and had the cuffs on him when Leon Coopchiak slithered out of the kitchen in what he no doubt thought was unobtrusive fashion and made for the same back door. He was more successful than Artie, he made the door and was through it before Liam could catch him.
“Shit,” Liam said. The last thing he wanted was a foot chase.
He went through the door, which was probably not his brightest move ever—What if one of these yo-yos did actually have a gun on him and was drunk enough to use it?—and stumbled into the obstacle course also known as Teddy’s backyard. A smokehouse made from an old refrigerator tilted west with what might have been a homemade still tilting east next to it. Behind them was a greenhouse cobbled together of extremely used corrugated plastic, with a lot of green plants inside that he was certain were not tomatoes. He was fleetingly relieved not to see anything that resembled a meth cooker.
There were plastic paint buckets and empty Chevron fifty-five-gallon drums and a heap of broken-down chain saws and a dogsled in some indeterminate stage of repair. There were two snowmobiles and three ATVs and what might possibly have been the remains of an old U.S. Army jeep that Bill Mauldin had driven back from Italy after he won his Pulitzer in World War II. As many pieces as it was in, it could also once have been a Sherman tank, or possibly a baby carriage. Three dogs of indeterminate heritage were standing on top of the doghouses they were chained to, barking hysterically.
Leon was scrabbling over a rusty oil tank in a direction apparently chosen at random. The sun hadn’t filtered through this mess in months and possibly years, and a nice thick layer of ice covered the ground. Liam in pursuit hit a patch of it at a dead run. It retaliated with concentrated malevolence and slid his feet right out from under him. Yelling and waving his arms, he slid into a pile of rotting lumber with nails sticking out of it, avoiding multiple impalements by inches, only upon recoil to kick over a burn barrel with a fire burning brightly inside it. It spilled in his direction and he jumped back and tripped over a pile of rusty rebar and angle iron and stepped into a bucket of white paint, open for some reason, covered with a thin layer of scum and pine needles. Kicking his foot free of the paint bucket he lost his balance and crashed into another barrel, this one with the top cut off. It was full of used oil. The edge was jagged and sharp so he threw both arms around it to catch his balance, just in time for it to rock back in his direction and slosh a gallon of the stuff in his face and down the front of his uniform.
He gave it a vigorous shove in the opposite direction and bent over, hands on his knees, coughing and hacking and heaving to get the oil out of his mouth and nose. He stood up and wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. He looked down at the length of his previously immaculate, superbly tailored self. His right foot was wet to the knee with white paint. The oil ran down his leg to join it.
Sally wouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near her.
The dogs had stopped barking. In the subsequent stillness, a raven cawed, loud and mocking. He looked up and saw it sitting in the top of a spruce tree, peering down at him. It clucked and clicked its beak, conveying a vast and unmistakable amusement.
“All right,” he said. “That is just about enough.”
He turned on his heel and took off after Leon.
Twenty-four
JANUARY 21
Adak
It wasn’t until they were almost over Unimak Pass, the steaming cone of Mount Shishaldin passing on their left and the Aleutian Islands stretched out before them like a string of irregularly shaped pearls draped over a curve of deep blue velvet that Kate remembered the last time she had flown this same airspace, in an even smaller plane. Jack Morgan had been her pilot then, Jack Morgan, her onetime boss, her best friend, her lover, five years dead now.
The pain of her loss had once been so debilitating that she had had to leave the Park for a place that held no memories of him. That pain no longer brought her to her emotional knees, but she was conscious of his absence. She thought she always would be, and she thought it wasn’t a bad epitaph.
Almost with his last breath he had commended his son into her care. She remembered Johnny’s voice on the phone. Did anybody get any pictures? She turned her face to the window so Boyd wouldn’t see her grin. Jack Morgan was gone, but he had left her wonderful memories, everlasting gratitude, and a made-to-order son.
She saw the faint outline of her own face in the Plexiglas and her grin faded.
It really bugged her that Gabe McGuire in person reminded her so much of Jack. Movie stars should stay up on the movie screen where they belonged, one giant step removed from anyone’s real life.
It bugged her even more that McGuire could quote Jimmy Buffett verbatim.
“Great view, huh?” The voice over her headset crackled.
She resumed her most come-hither smile and turned back to Boyd. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she lied.
“Yeah, well.” Boyd shrugged. “Lucky on the weather.”
“No kidding,” she said, “you can practically see over the horizon. I’ve spent a lot of time on boats—and planes—but I don’t remember a time when the Earth seemed quite so round to me.”
He looked at her, his expression appraising. He didn’t say anything but Kate got the distinct impression that she’d passed some kind of test. Whatever happened to guys who just wanted a brainless bimbo for a one-night stand?
He’d passed his own test. She had enough experience in the air that she knew a good pilot when she saw one, and Boyd qualified. He was one of those people who didn’t just climb into an aircraft, he put it on. The rudder pedals became an extension of his feet, flaps and ailerons extensions of his arms and hands. They had lifted off from Eagle Air with no unseemly amount of excess throttle, and when they reached altitude Boyd leveled off and throttled back and kept her there without seeming to think much about it. In spite of the fact that he had obvious hopes when he’d invited Kate for the ride-along, there was no slap-and-tickle or insinuating mention of the Mile-High Club once they were airborne. He was a pilot, he was on the job, and he could wait for the payoff until he got them safely down on the ground again.
Kate admired good pilots, partly because the histories of aviation and Alaska were so entwined, and partly because like most Alaskans she’d spent so much time sitting to the right of them. It was a pity, because every instinct she had told her that Boyd Levinson was as bent as they came.
“What are we hauling?” she’d asked him, looking over her shoulder at the lashed-down rubber totes as she climbed in.
“Spare parts for processors who deliver to Adak,” he said glibly.
The distinct smell of machine oil in the air of the cabin was recognizable to anyone who had ever been forced to help Old Sam dismantle the kicker on the Freya before the fishing season started, so Kate was willing to believe there were moving metal parts in the sealed rubber totes. She smiled at him, and he smiled back and changed the subject. “What do you do?”
“Right now?” she said. “Bartend. Before? I worked on a processor ship out of St. Paul.”
He looked over his shoulder at Mutt, and raised an eyebrow.
“She came later,” Kate said.
“Tough job,” he said, “fish processor. Especially for a woman.”
Kate didn’t take offense. He was right. “No kidding,” she said. “It’s mostly guys on the crew, and not very evolved guys at that. Yo
u were a bitch if you didn’t and a whore if you did. Good money, I managed to build up a little stash, but I was glad to get off.”
He smiled at her again. “I’m pretty evolved.”
She smiled back. “I noticed.”
His smile widened into a grin. So did hers, which, although he didn’t know it yet, didn’t mean quite the same thing.
Normally, he explained, he had an iPod hooked into the airplane’s sound system, and listened to podcasts like Planet Money and Rush 24/7. She understood the implication and endeavored to be at her wittiest and most sparkling. It wasn’t that difficult, as again, like most pilots with that many hours, Boyd had led an interesting life. The army had taught him to fly, and he explained, he’d been career.
“So you retired?” she said, adding mendaciously, “I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough.”
He preened a little. “I retired, all right, just a lot earlier than I expected to.”
“Why?”
He made a minute adjustment to the throttle. “I don’t know. I guess if I had to put a finger on one thing, it’d be Iraq Two. But for real, it probably started with Afghanistan.”
“You didn’t … approve?” Kate said delicately.
“Above my pay grade,” he said. “I took an oath. Not up to me to approve or disapprove.” He moved his shoulders, as if trying to shrug off the subject, and failed. “I’m all for making the world a tyrant-free zone, but really, what the hell was the point?” He shook his head, unconscious that he was repeating words said by another vet months before and hundreds of miles away.
There was an edge to Boyd’s voice detectable even over the headphones. Kate wondered how much that edge had to do with the cargo in back, which with every passing mile she was becoming more certain was not spare parts for fish processors. “Buy boys big toys, they’re going to find a way to play with them. Only solution is not buying the toys in the first place. I don’t see that happening any time soon.”
“No.” He smiled at Kate. “You see the last Star Trek movie?”
Restless in the Grave Page 27
