Maggie nodded, her face grim. “And those are only the ones we caught.”
“I haven’t been in town for a while,” Kate said. “This happening a lot lately?”
Maggie pushed back from her desk and scrubbed her hands over her face. She looked tired and exasperated. “Since May, it’s been like someone has been parachuting the stuff in. The cells have been full since June, and as soon as we ship the miscreants off to Judge Singh in Ahtna, they’re full up again.”
“Any ideas on who’s bringing it in?”
“The usual suspects deal retail, not wholesale.”
“So, somebody new.”
“Somebody new to the business,” Maggie said. “Not someone new to the Park. Moving that much product requires resources. Staff. Storage. Transportation.”
“Oh,” Kate said. “So not just cocaine.”
“No, indeed,” Maggie said, “booze, too. A lot of booze.” Her gaze went past Kate to the map on the wall. It was a large-scale topographical map of the Park, every physical detail faithfully rendered and including every village of one or more people and every known airstrip. “Sooner or later, someone will talk, or someone unexpected will flash out with a lot of money. We’ll get them, Kate.”
Eventually, Kate thought. In the meantime, the Niniltna trooper post was running a B and B for drug users. It was only a matter of time before one of the dealers got greedy and started cutting the cocaine with Alka-Seltzer Plus or some equally ostensibly harmless over-the-counter drug and Park rats started stroking out.
* * *
Back at the Riverside Cafe, Laurel said, “You know, I never made all that much money before the mine went in, and I love what it did for my bank balance, I really do, but I’m beginning to wonder if the trade-off in drunks and highs are worth it. When you get a chance, tell Jim I said so, would you?”
Kate said she would, not that Jim had a magic wand to make everything all better, and she and Anne settled into a booth. During Kate’s absence, Paul and Alice had also found their way to the Riverside. Paul was still studying his map with a frown of concentration, and Alice was looking at the cappuccino in her hand with an expression of outright incredulity.
“When was the last time I saw you?” Kate said.
“Three years,” Anne said promptly. “I was spackling your Sheetrock. Is the house still standing?”
Kate smiled. “It is, and I love it even more now than I did when you built it for me.” Anne had responded to Dinah Clark’s call to action when Kate’s cabin was torched and she and Johnny had been left with shop, outhouse, greenhouse, and cache, but no beds. Park rats current and former, friends of Kate going all the way back to college, ex-clients, and people she had met during some of her cases in Anchorage had rallied with tools, supplies, transportation, heavy equipment, and sweat equity to effect a house-raising in three days.
“You were still grieving over your cabin then,” Anne said.
“That pretty much went down the flush toilet the first week,” Kate said.
Anne laughed. Her skin had a healthy tan, her eyes were bright, her hair gleamed.
“You look,” Kate said, “terrific. Are you in love, or what?”
Anne laughed again. “No. I mean, yes, I guess.” She took a big bite of one of Laurel’s plain cake doughnuts. “Yumm,” she said thickly.
“I know,” Kate said. “Best cake doughnuts this side of the Girdwood Y bakery. Well, don’t leave me hanging. Do the girls like him?”
The girls being Anne’s twin daughters, who had to be, what, fourteen years old now.
“It’s not a guy,” Anne said, swallowing. “I guess … I guess it’s flying.”
“You’re in love with the Tri-Pacer?”
Anne chuckled. “I just might be, at that.” She brushed crumbs from the front of her denim shirt and straightened her shoulders. “Allow me to introduce you to the new flying pastor for the Park.”
“Well.” Kate sat back in her seat and thought about it. “Been a while since the Park had a flying pastor.”
“About fifteen years,” Anne said, “since Father Frank pranged the parish Beaver down at Chulyin.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, remembering. “I’d forgotten about that. Didn’t I hear he’d been drinking?”
“He was always drinking,” Anne said. “Nobody minded that so much, because he was a damn good shepherd to his flock. But they were really annoyed with him when he totaled their aircraft.” She smiled. “Why they’re making me buy mine.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “They fronted the purchase price, I’m buying it back out of my salary. Okay by me, I’d rather be flying—and maintaining—my own plane.”
The smile spread across her face, and Kate saw again how, well, happy the Presbyterian minister looked. “I never knew you wanted to learn how to fly,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” Anne said, “like only since the first time I ever got on a small plane. There was no point in talking about it, because I figured I could never afford it.”
An old story, although Kate had noticed that Alaskans who wanted to learn to fly usually found a way. It was an instantaneous and lifelong addiction. Before long, when people asked Anne Flanagan what she did, she’d answer, “I’m a pilot.” Minister would be just an addendum.
Kate did not say that, however. “What’s the actual job like?” she said instead, curious. “Do you fly and preach every day? Do you get days off? How many people do there have to be assembled before it’s worth it for you to fly in?”
Anne drained her mug and Laurel brought a refill just so she could loiter around to hear the answer. She might even be a potential member of the congregation, although Kate knew enough about Laurel’s personal history that she took leave to doubt the possibility. “One person who needs me is enough for me to stop. One or a dozen or a hundred, it’s all the same. No flyover country in the Park, not for me. The circuit can last anywhere from a week to ten days, then I fly back to Cordova for a week.”
“So week on, week off,” Kate said. “More or less.”
“Like working at Suulutaq,” Laurel said.
“It can be,” Anne said. “This time of year especially. There’s almost no one left in the villages, they’re all out fishing. I’m guessing winter will be a lot busier.”
“Where do you meet?” Laurel said. “Somebody’s house?”
Anne nodded. “If they don’t have a gym.”
“Do you preach every time?”
“Sometimes they don’t need a sermon,” Anne said. “Sometimes they need some family counseling. Sometimes they just want to talk about faith, and life, and…”
“And if God sees the little sparrow fall,” Kate said.
Anne grinned, remembering, like Kate, the first time they had met. It had been, Kate thought, a total-immersion experience.
Anne’s grin faded. “I was so sorry to hear about Old Sam.”
It was going on a year, and the words still put a lump in Kate’s throat. “He is missed,” she said softly.
Anne reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. Kate wasn’t much for outward shows of affection, but this, from this woman, she would take as Old Sam’s due. “He liked you, a lot,” she said.
“I know,” Anne said. “I was proud he did. He didn’t like everybody.”
The remark surprised a laugh out of Kate. “He sure didn’t.” She willed the tears from her eyes. Laurel watched, fascinated, until Kate glared at her and she remembered that there was something she had to check in the kitchen. “The girls okay with this?” Kate said. “How are they, anyway? What are they now, fourteen?”
“Lauren and Caitlin? Fifteen. They’re good. They stay in Cordova with their grandmother while I fly the circuit.”
“They still packing lightsabers?”
Anne laughed. “I’m either happy or sad to report that they’ve graduated to phasers and photon torpedos. They’ve been watching all the Star Trek series on DVD. Lauren keeps running into doors. I d
on’t know if she really expects them to slide open, so much as she thinks they ought to in a better organized universe.”
“Ah,” Kate said. “TOS or TNG?”
Anne laughed again. “They love Voyager for Janeway and Nine, but they were both DS9 girls from the first year. Everyone’s using iPads in DS9. I think they’re both geeks for life.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I’m due in Double Eagle this evening for a christening, and then Kushtaka tomorrow.”
“Kushtaka?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Jim’s down there. Been an accident of some kind.”
“Somebody hurt?”
“He wasn’t specific,” Kate said, crossing her fingers beneath the table. “But there is trouble.”
Anne frowned. “Good thing I’m already scheduled there, then.”
She said it utterly without ego or vanity. Anne Flanagan was in service to the community and it wasn’t about her; it was about the people on her pastoral circuit. Kate had to admire that, even if she was never going to attend one of Anne’s services. Although she might do that one day, too, because what Anne said about faith would be a lot different from what Pastor Seabolt in Chistona said about faith. Kate was certain any god Anne paid homage to would be a lot more accepting of the various, beautiful, and new flavors of people. She might even have a sense of humor, too.
She drove Anne back to the airport. As the minister preflighted and did the walkaround, one of George’s Single Otter turbos took off for the mine and a small white private jet touched down and rolled to a stop in front of his hangar.
Anne paused, following Kate’s gaze. “What is that, a G2?”
“Beats me,” Kate said.
Her clipped tone made Anne give her a quizzical glance, which narrowed when a tall man with thick white hair and jeans that looked tailored to fit disembarked from the jet. He caught sight of them, waved, and jogged across the airstrip.
In the cab of Kate’s pickup, Mutt sat up, ears cocked and yellow eyes fixed on the oncoming figure.
“Stay, Mutt,” Kate said.
“Kate?” Anne said in a low voice.
“Kate,” the man said jovially, coming to a stop in front of them, hands in the pockets of an elegant olive green safari jacket that Anne estimated probably cost as much as her Tri-Pacer. “And this is?” He smiled at Anne, and she had to admit it was a very nice smile, white even teeth in a tanned face filled with interesting lines. He walked like a much younger man, but up close she could see he was older than she’d first thought.
“Anne Flanagan,” she said, and wondered at the faint sense of uneasiness she felt in his presence.
“Ah yes,” he said, holding out his hand, “the new flying pastor?”
“Why, yes,” she said. His grip was hard and firm and meant to leave an impression. “I’m sorry, we haven’t met, have we?”
“Erland Bannister,” he said, and the faint sense of uneasiness jolted into full-blown alarm. She recovered almost immediately but he had seen, and his smile widened. “I see you’ve heard all about me, Reverend Flanagan.” He turned that smile on Kate. “Yes, well, you might like to consider your source.”
Kate’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t offer her hand, and she didn’t say anything, but something in the steady gaze of those hard hazel eyes caused some of the self-satisfied assurance to fade from Erland Bannister’s smile. Anne, watching, had the breathless feeling of sharpened weapons ready to be drawn on a moment’s notice, with no quarter asked for or given.
She knew the story, of course. Everyone did, or a version thereof. Some years before, Kate had hired on to look into a suspicious death in Erland Bannister’s family, which had resulted in a nearly successful attempt on Kate’s own life and in Erland’s incarceration at the maximum security facility in Spring Creek. Owing to Erland’s seemingly limitless resources, he’d stayed there for only two years before the courts set aside the verdict on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. He was released and the district attorney’s office, seeing the writing on the judicial wall, had declined to prosecute the case a second time. About the only consolation the friends of Kate Shugak could take was that declining to prosecute was not the same as being released without a stain upon his character.
In other words, if it looked like a skunk, if it smelled like a skunk, if it walked like a skunk, it probably was a skunk. Anne wondered what said skunk was doing in Niniltna. She also wondered why he was so au courant with Park affairs that he knew who she was.
A question for another day. She said briskly, “Well, I’ve got to hit the road.”
Erland broke off the staring match first and said courteously, “Certainly, Reverend.” He raised two fingers in a salute. “Kate,” he said, and turned and walked back across the airstrip.
“What the hell was that?” Anne said in a low voice.
“Well,” Kate said, “it wasn’t Justin Bieber.”
Both women started to giggle, more from a relaxation from tension than out of mirth, but Erland heard them. He didn’t look around or pause in his stride, but even at that distance, Kate could see his neck reddening. Erland Bannister enjoyed a joke as much as anyone, just so long as the joke was never on him.
Anne looked at Kate and raised an eyebrow. “Anything you want to tell me?”
Kate watched Erland walk around his jet. “You already know everything there is to know.”
Anne snorted. “Sure I do.”
She climbed into the Tri-Pacer without further conversation. The engine twitched into life, and the nose pulled down as the prop accelerated into a blur. Anne waved at Kate, pulled the little aircraft around, lifted off neatly on a southeasterly heading.
Kate climbed into her pickup and stared at Erland’s jet.
She liked Anne Flanagan fine, but Niniltna and the Park had been blessedly—she smiled at her choice of adverb—blessedly free of the taint of religious controversy for most of her life. Niniltna had to be the only village of its size in Alaska without its very own Russian Orthodox, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches. Ahtna was a big enough town that it had at least a minimum complement of every denomination from atheism to Zoroastrianism, but in Niniltna, the one organized congregation met at the Roadhouse, and not too regularly, mostly because of simple logistics. The Roadhouse had begun life a century ago as an actual roadhouse, a waypoint on the stampeders’ trail between the Port of Cordova and Interior Alaska. It was fifty miles from Niniltna, the road was not maintained, in winter it was virtually impassable until the snow machines had beaten it into at least a semblance of flat, and lately falling spruce trees were a real hazard at any time of year. It didn’t make for regular meetings of the congregation.
Ulanie Anahonak, the token right-wing nut on the Niniltna Native Association board, had been bemoaning the lack since she’d been sworn in, so far without much success. Most Park rats operated under the theory that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe bringing back the flying pastor was the thin end of the wedge.
Kate stared at Erland’s jet as if trying to see through the fuselage, and wondered who had really bankrolled Anne Flanagan’s Tri-Pacer.
Act III
Seven
THURSDAY, JULY 12
Anchorage
At the same moment Anne Flanagan’s Aviating Evangelist Piper Tri-Pacer was taking off from Niniltna, Jim Chopin was landing his Alaska Department of Public Safety Cessna 180 in Anchorage, where he unloaded Tyler’s body into the back of an ambulance. He spent the night at the Merrill Field Inn, had pie for breakfast at Peggy’s Airport Cafe, called the ME to make sure the body had arrived at the right lab, and was leveling off on a northeasterly heading, adjusting for drift under the influence of a twelve-knot tailwind, when his cell phone played a short burst from Lenny Kravitz’s “Lady.”
Where are you?
He texted back.
Ten minutes out of Anchorage. OTG Niniltna in a couple of hours. You?
Her:
Home. Who died?
He was only surprised she hadn’t heard yet.
Tyler Mack.
Seconds passed.
Accident or on purpose?
On purpose.
Sure?
Pretty sure. Waiting on the ME.
Coming home?
Going straight back to Kuskulana.
Crap. Later then. Horny.
He laughed.
Me, too.
He was in a much better mood when he landed in Kuskulana than when he had departed the day before. It didn’t last long.
Kuskulana was a lot like Niniltna in structure, albeit higher in elevation. There was, incredibly at any time of year but particularly in summer, an air of bustle about it, two new houses going up at opposite ends of the village, an extension going onto the two-year-old store that would double its size. It didn’t have a hotel yet, but Jim saw five B and B signs between the airstrip and the creek landing, and Kuskulana hosted one of the brand-new cell towers that had sprung up overnight like mushrooms between Ahtna and Cordova.
The landing, at one time nothing more than a wide spot on the river, now boasted a mooring slip, a twenty-five-foot wooden float topped with open metal grating. Pilings had been driven through open squares in the four corners so that the slip would rise and fall with the rise and fall of the water on the river. It sat lengthwise against the bank and was reached by a metal gangplank, attached to a flight of wide, sturdy stairs made of treated wood posts and more metal grating, attached to more pilings that climbed the cliff to the plateau. The wood of the pilings gleaming with tar that had yet to turn brown from time and weather, and a pile of construction material, two-by-fours, twelve-by-twelves, angle iron, rebar, a couple of leftover Permafloats, some broken concrete blocks, were piled neatly beneath the gangplank out of the reach of the river. This far upstream, the Gruening River was too shallow for fishing boats, but every second Kuskulaner had his own skiff, and that de facto presupposed the existence of the upriver equivalent of a small boat harbor.
There was a cluster of young men at the landing when Jim stepped off the gangplank. In their late teens, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, most of them looked familiar enough that Jim knew he’d seen them in aggregate at a basketball game or a potlatch in the Niniltna gym, but none of them were so familiar that he’d ever arrested them for vandalism or underage drinking.
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