They were piling backpacks, folded tents, sleeping bags, and cardboard cartons into two big skiffs. They paused when they saw him. The tallest stepped forward. “Sergeant Chopin?”
“That’d be me,” Jim said, pulling off his ball cap and pushing his fingers through his hair to let the breeze dry off his scalp. It was a warm day, welcome after all the rain. “And you are?”
“Ryan Christianson.”
Roger’s son. They both had the sharp Kuskulana cheekbones, although Ryan was whipcord lean in comparison to Roger’s comfortably padded frame, and his son was maybe two inches taller. His brown hair was a little lighter in color, but he had the same deep-set eyes and the same firm jaw. There was a little acne left over from adolescence but on the whole a handsome boy with the promise of character in his steady gaze and firm chin.
“Dad said you’re to have the use of the skiff for as long as you need it,” Ryan said.
Jim resettled his cap on his head. “He going to be home this afternoon?” Ryan nodded. “Tell him I’ll stop in on my way back.”
“Will do.” Ryan hesitated, then said, “Is it true? Is Tyler Mack dead?”
“Yes,” Jim said.
The emotion that flitted across the boy’s face was fleeting and hard to identify. It might have been fear, or it might have been something else entirely. Jim looked across the river at the Kushtaka fish wheel, sitting just above the first bend south of the Kuskulana landing. Take all of five minutes to get there from where he was standing. “You know him?” he said.
Ryan followed his gaze, and then looked back at Jim. “Everybody knows everybody around here,” he said.
Jim was very conscious of the other boys standing in back of Ryan, their attention a palpable weight. When he looked over at them, inspecting every face one at a time, they met his eyes readily enough, perhaps even with a trace of challenge in their collective gaze. They were united in the way most teenage packs were united, either against his age or his profession or both. “True enough,” he said peaceably, and this time there was no mistaking the relief on Ryan’s face.
“Maybe not by name,” Ryan said.
“But you can tell a Kushtakan from a Kuskulaner,” Jim said.
The pack huddled up and stared out at him from the same inimical face.
“Any of you down here at the landing Tuesday morning? See anything or anyone over at the Kushtaka fish wheel?”
Sidelong glances, followed by a mass shrug. “Any of the rest of you know Tyler?”
“We don’t hang with Kushtakans,” one of the other boys said.
“He was your age. Did he come to school on this side of the river when their school closed?” Silence. “Did you have him in your English class? Pass him a basketball during an away game? I hear you guys have a pretty good men’s team.”
More silence. Officer Friendly wasn’t working.
“The skiff’s rafted third out.” Ryan pointed, all business now. “There.”
He recognized it from the day before. “Thanks.”
The cardboard cartons stacked among the boys’ supplies might not bear close examination, but murder outranked underage drinking every time. He had to climb over two skiffs to get to Roger’s, but at least there wasn’t another rafted off on the other side, so all he had to do was free the lines and go. The 250 hp Mercury Marine seemed like overkill for a river the size of the Gruening, but it, too, was new and started at a touch.
The pack stood watching until he was around the first bend.
The Mercury made short work of the two miles between the Kuskulana and Kushtaka landings. The Kushtaka landing consisted of a small, unimproved gravel bar with half a dozen beat-up skiffs sitting on it, bows in the bushes.
Jim nosed in Roger’s skiff, hopped out, and dragged it up onshore, between two skiffs he recognized as belonging to Pat Mack and Tyler Mack. He fastened the bowline to a convenient bush, taking his time while reinventorying the contents of both skiffs, and then followed the path, littered with garbage, through the clump of willow trees that crowded the edge of the bank. He emerged almost immediately onto a dusty path, wide enough in most places for an ATV in the summer and in winter for a snow machine. Main Street, Kushtaka, Alaska, only titularly USA.
The dozen cabins on either side of the path were small, most of them listing in one direction or another, and none had seen fresh paint in a generation. He wasn’t entirely sure they were all occupied. There were a couple of ATVs that looked as worn out as the houses they were parked in front of. There were no utility lines. The spaces between the cabins were filled with lean-tos and drying racks displaying filets of salmon hung on split tails, exposed flesh glowing like faceted carnelian. It was the most colorful thing in the drab little village.
Barring the small prefab school, standing on pilings at one end of the village, doors and windows covered with sheets of plywood, there were no public buildings, and no commercial buildings, either. In Kushtaka if you wanted five pounds of flour, you got in your skiff and went down the Gruening and then up the Kanuyaq to Niniltna, or downriver and west on Prince William Sound to Cordova. More like, you waited until the fall Costco run to Ahtna.
The Kuskulana store was not an option, not if you lived in Kushtaka.
A very few kids of widely varying ages and heights were shooting free throws through a netless hoop nailed to a wall of the school, on a basketball court consisting of faded lines painted on cracked pavement. A yellowing lace curtain moved but when Jim looked, it had already fallen back over the window.
An old man sat on a straight-backed chair leaned up against the wall of another cabin, smoking. Jim walked over to him. “Uncle.”
The old man exhaled and narrowed his eyes against the smoke.
“I’m Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers,” Jim said, pulling off his ball cap. “I helped Pat with Tyler’s body. I’m very sorry for the trouble that has come to your village.”
The surest way to get people to clam up on you in the traditional villages was to ask questions. Jim didn’t say anything more, just stood where he was, hat in hand, nose into the breeze coming up the river. It brought with it a mixed aroma of diesel exhaust, woodsmoke, and decaying salmon. A dog barked and a gray-striped cat, hair sticking straight out all over its body, galloped around a cabin and disappeared into the grass. A family of goldeneyes made a strafing run over the rooftops and landed somewhere out of sight, setting up a furious quacking. An eagle soaring above provided the reason. From inside the cabin, Jim heard the muted sound of a radio and what might have been Bobby Clark’s voice. Park Air was probably the only contact Kushtaka had with the outside world.
After a while, the old man got up, knees popping, and hobbled into the cabin. Presently he came out carrying another chair and two boat mugs by a finger hooked through their handles. Jim sat in the chair and accepted the mug. “Thank you, Uncle.” Manners were manners, and Jim was experienced enough not to mistake mandatory Bush hospitality for an offer of friendship. It would not do to presume.
They drank. The coffee tasted like it had first been brewed during the Kennedy administration, with more grounds and water added every morning ever since. Jim could feel the old man’s attention, and took another big gulp, suppressing the resulting gag reflex without so much as a single betraying quiver. Not for nothing did they call Alaska State Troopers the toughest of frontier lawmakers.
After a while, a younger man came out of the house opposite and started doing something to the Honda four-wheeler parked outside, which looked like it needed the encouragement. They watched him in silence. Ten minutes later, he got on the ATV and pushed the starter. With reluctance, the four-wheeler allowed itself to be coaxed into life. The man revved it a few times and turned it off. He wiped his hands on a rag and seemed to notice the two of them for the first time. He walked across the road. “Uncle.”
The old man nodded. Maybe he was mute.
The younger man looked at Jim.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are,” the younger man said. “I’m Dale Mack. I’m the chief here.”
If Jim stood up, he would tower over the other man. But if he didn’t stand up, it could be regarded as a sign of disrespect not only of the chief but of his entire tribe as well. He put down his mug and stood up. “Any relation to Tyler?”
The other man gave a short laugh. “We were all related to Tyler.” He ran a hand through a crop of shaggy hair. He was medium height and built like a wrestler without being muscle-bound. There was a sureness when he was in motion that was not quite grace. That certainty reminded Jim a little of Kate.
“You take his body to Anchorage?”
Jim nodded.
“We’ll want it back.” Dale Mack nodded toward the back of the little town, where Jim had seen Kushtaka cemetery from the air. “He’ll rest here with his family.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t know why you had to do an autopsy. Uncle Pat said Tyler tripped over his own damn feet and fell in and got stuck under the fish wheel.” He met Jim’s eyes steadily.
“It’s state law in the case of every accidental death,” Jim said. “And until we get the medical examiner’s report, we won’t know exactly how he died.”
Dale Mack scowled.
“Where is Pat?” Jim said. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“What do you need to know?”
Jim allowed himself to be diverted, for the moment. “More about Tyler, for starters. Did he have a job? Friends? A wife or girlfriend, maybe?”
Dale Mack looked at the old man sitting at Jim’s side. The old man gazed into the distance with a bland expression. “I knew him about as well as anyone in Kushtaka. His only job that I know of here was to clean out the fish wheel holding pen, and half the time he couldn’t be bothered to do that. I hear tell he was working up at the Suulutaq Mine now and then. He hung out a lot with Boris Balluta up in Niniltna.”
Freely translated, Why don’t you go talk to Boris and leave us alone? Jim nodded at the village. “He have a cabin here?”
Dale Mack hesitated, and then gave a surly nod. He led the way to the end of the street and pointed. It was less a cabin than a shed, a lean-to without another structure to lean against. The slanted roof was covered with asphalt shingles themselves covered with moss, and the exterior was T1-11 that had never been painted and was now weathered to a lifeless gray. The homemade door was reinforced with chicken wire and fastened with a hasp and a brass padlock that dangled open. Jim contemplated the padlock for a moment, before removing it and opening the door.
Very little light was admitted through the single very small window on the back wall. Jim pushed the door wide and ducked his head to step inside.
He was surprised at how neat it was. A single bunk carefully made with army surplus blankets on the left. On the opposite wall, a counter made of two-by-fours and a slab of plywood, topped with a sheet of Formica in a faded green pattern. On it sat a Coleman two-burner propane stove and a square blue plastic washbasin. On the shelf beneath, canned goods were stacked with labels facing out. Jim looked, and looked again. Also sorted by kind, peaches, pears, and cherries, green and black and pinto and kidney beans, tomato sauce and tomato paste. Next to them dishes, glasses, flatware, utensils, a cast iron frying pan and a saucepan, all scoured clean.
There was a recliner of venerable vintage against the back wall. Next to it a Coleman lantern hung from a stand handmade from a piece of angle iron welded to what looked like an old brake shoe for a base and what might have been a wrought iron plant hanger welded to the top. A plastic bucket on the floor next to the chair was filled with Playboys, Penthouses, and Hustlers. Jim flipped through them and found an ad torn from a month-old Anchorage paper for the Brown Jug Warehouse in Anchorage.
Behind him Dale Mack sighed and shifted from one foot to the other. Jim ignored him.
Several items on the ad were heavily circled in pencil—whiskey, bourbon, tequila, all hard liquor. Evidently Tyler hadn’t been into beer or wine.
Two plastic bins with snap-on lids under the bed held clothes, most notable of which were a pair of Guess jeans and a couple of Ralph Lauren knockoff shirts. They had been very carefully folded. A third plastic bin contained paperwork. Jim leafed through it. A birth certificate. A high school diploma. A bill of sale for a twenty-two-year-old Dodge Ram pickup. There were some photographs, school photos of Tyler through the years and a couple of him and his extended family, all of them on the river in various skiffs. There was one of Tyler at around age fourteen working the fish wheel. He didn’t look happy.
“Find anything?” Dale Mack said from the door, voice brusque.
Jim sat back on his heels. “Not much. Never find very many real docs and photos anymore, everyone’s gone digital.” Proving his point, he got out his phone and took careful photos of the birth certificate, the diploma, and the bill of sale, and with a mental shrug the few photos as well. He tucked everything back into the bin, replaced the cover, and got to his feet. “Did he have a bank account, do you know?”
Dale Mack snorted. “Might have. So far as I know, he didn’t have anything to put in it.”
Jim thought of the roll of sodden cash he’d found in Tyler’s pocket. “To your knowledge, had Tyler been in a fight recently?”
Dale Mack snorted again. “Tyler wouldn’t have risked bruising that pretty face.”
The other man’s attitude got Jim’s goat, and he spoke a lot more bluntly than was his wont at these kinds of scenes. “Someone took one hell of a whack at the back of his head. The ME will be able to determine a time when Tyler received that wound. I’m not calling it a homicide yet, but you should know it’s a possibility.”
Was it Jim’s imagination, or did Dale Mack’s skin pale beneath its olive tint? Certainly, the scowl that Jim was tending to think was habitual was replaced with something close to apprehension.
A girl appeared behind Dale Mack in the doorway, a slender figure outlined against the sun, a shiny cape of long black hair lifting in the breeze. “Dad?”
Dale Mack turned. “What?”
“Mom says is the trooper coming for lunch?”
“No.”
“Dad.”
“Get on home, Jennifer, tell your mother I’ll be right there.” He turned back to Jim. “You about done here?”
Jim walked outside, pushing Dale Mack out of the lean-to doorway by the sheer mass of his six-foot-four-inch, blue-and-gold-clad presence, and pulled the door of Tyler Mack’s cabin shut behind him. He turned to replace the padlock, after a moment’s inner debate leaving it unlocked, as he had found it. The place could have been ransacked twenty times in the last twenty-four hours, and he’d seen everything there was to see that remained.
He turned and looked a foot down at Dale Mack’s glowering countenance, giving his weapons belt a tug as he did so. “I’m going to talk to a few more people first, I think, Dale,” he said, his voice pleasant, his tone inexorable. “A man is dead. State law requires I investigate the matter fully. I’m sure you understand.”
His manner, while respectful, indicated that he didn’t care if Dale Mack understood or not. Dale Mack hesitated, swore without bothering to lower his voice, turned on his heel, and walked away.
It took a pitifully short time to knock on every door in Kushtaka. The story he met with was everywhere so similar, he could be forgiven for imagining it had been rehearsed by the entire village the day before. Tyler had been dangerously charming and incurably lazy, not a combination guaranteed to make a mother proud, according to one elderly auntie with an acid tongue. He worked at the Suulutaq Mine, except when he didn’t, which was most of the time. His best friend had been Boris Balluta, a childhood relationship and one that the village as a whole considered to have done Tyler no good. “He was such a sweet baby,” one middle-aged woman said, wringing a dishcloth between her hands, and then someone hidden in the dark reaches of the cabin behind her cleared his throat and she paled and with a mumbled apology closed
the door in Jim’s face.
It was with a feeling of the ranks closing in behind him that he climbed back into Roger’s skiff and headed upriver.
Or he would have, if Roger’s skiff hadn’t started to sink out from under him.
Eight
THURSDAY, JULY 12
Farther down the river
The young men had set out downriver in two skiffs loaded to the gunnels with all the essentials. Their plan was to take four days to travel to the mouth of the Kanuyaq, camping nights along the way, drinking, swapping stories, maybe scope out where the moose were congregating in anticipation of the hunting season opening next month. They would arrive in time to work the Monday opener in Alaganik, if there was one.
At least that was what they had told their parents. It was the truth, mostly.
But only mostly.
They left Kuskulana shortly after the trooper departed, the skiffs traveling side by side. Somebody had his iPhone hooked up to battery-powered speakers, and they shouted the lyrics to Maroon 5 and Flo Rida and Neon Trees and Fun from boat to boat. A “Call Me Maybe” cover (Get this net a rollin’ / Reds schooling up the ocean / High boat is what we’re wanting / Where you think you’re going, salmon?) ended in mild hysteria and a near-grounding of one of the skiffs, but by then they were at their first stop and no harm done. The tiny gravel beach was overhung with willow and alder and cottonwood and thickly lined with beach grass. Camouflage from land and river both.
It was also on the wrong side of the river but they pulled in anyway. All the boys but Ryan got into the bigger skiff, taking everything except a single tent, two sleeping bags, and two days’ worth of food and water for two people, plus Ryan’s duffel.
They stood around in awkward silence afterwards. “You sure about this, Ryan?” one of them said in a low voice.
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