Bluetick Revenge (24 page)

What would be the most productive use of my time? I could check the bars, place an ad in the paper, maybe even tap into whatever
criminal/biker community there might be in Anchorage, but that sounded like a lot of work.

How was she getting around? She couldn’t have rented a car; that would have required a credit card, and the feds could trace
credit cards. For that matter, how did she get to Alaska? I knew she had been at the airport, but if she had taken a commercial
flight, she would have had to present a driver’s license or some other form of identification, and she was smart enough to
know that. It seemed reasonable to assume she had flown in on a private plane. That was a manageable project. If I could find
out how she had gotten to Anchorage, I might find out what she had planned to do when she arrived.

I looked at my watch. It was 7:45.1 drank the second beer, then climbed under the covers and went to sleep.

I
T WAS DARK WHEN
I awoke, but the digital clock told me it was eight-thirty. I enjoyed a hot shower, then walked out into the lobby. Fred
was gone, but there was a fortyish blonde in a sweatshirt sitting next to the wood stove, drinking coffee and reading the
morning paper.

“Morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” she said. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Help yourself.”

I poured some coffee into a mug, with a little cream, and sat down in the chair beside her.

“Are you Fred’s wife?” I said.

“Sister,” she said. “My name’s Renee. I live here too.”

“My name’s Pepper.”

“What brings you to Alaska?” she said.

“I always wanted to freeze my ass off in total darkness, and I had a little free time this week, so I figured what the heck.”

“A sense of humor. I like that in a man.”

“Yeah, sometimes I laugh my ass off at myself.”

“We are intrigued by the fact that you paid cash and didn’t want to fill out a registration form.”

“Don’t be. I’m just looking for a friend who might be in some trouble. If anyone else is looking for her, I don’t want to
be the one that leads them to her.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“No, she’s too low-maintenance for me.”

“Usually men complain about women who are high-maintenance.”

“There’s got to be a happy medium,” I said. “What do you do?”

“I’m a bush pilot, but I don’t get much business this time of year, so I help keep Fred in line and I read a lot. What do
you do?”

“I’m a freelance investigator,” I said. “I used to practice law, but I decided there had to be an easier way to make money.”

“Do you want to go out to dinner tonight?” she said. I guess she wasn’t big on segues.

“I’m sort of involved with someone,” I said.

“Just dinner,” she said.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Okay, let me know when you’re ready. Ring the bell if nobody is here.”

I filled my coffee mug again and started heading for my room. “Come to think of it,” I said, “you might be able to help me.
I think the person I am looking for flew into Anchorage on a private plane. I’d like to find the pilot. He or she might know
what my friend planned to do in Alaska. Do you have any suggestions on how I might go about it?”

“Have you got a picture of your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Go get it. I’ll scan it in and we’ll send it out on the pilots’ List-serv.That covers just about everyone with a pilot’s
license in Alaska.”

“You just saved me a lot of phone calls,” I said.

While my photo of Karlynn was circulating in cyberspace, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I had my copy of Bugg’s address
book with me, and it suddenly dawned on me that I could use the computer shared by Fred and Renee to seek information about
the name and address associated with each number in the book.

One by one I conducted a Google search on each phone number in Bugg’s book. Some queries produced no results, but others did.
Within a few hours I had names and addresses to associate with many of the phone numbers. I didn’t know what I would do with
them, but part of being a good investigator is getting as much information as you can. Some may turn out to be irrelevant,
but some may be highly relevant. You never know.

It took several hours to check every number in Bugg’s book, and in the process I determined that not all the numbers in the
book were phone numbers. Telephone numbers in the United States consist of seven digits or ten digits. But some of the numbers
in the back of Bugg’s book consisted of eight or nine digits, and those had no initials. What was up with that?

Fred’s sister checked her e-mail around noon, but so far nobody responding to the message she had sent out on the pilots’
Listserv had seen or heard of Karlynn.

With nothing else to do, I took an afternoon nap—a treat we rarely get to indulge these days. It wasn’t hard to fall asleep.
It was already dark.

Renee was one of the few people in Anchorage not driving an SUV or a big truck. She drove a small truck. But it ran and it
got us to the restaurant she had selected just fine. It was a steak house, much like a steak house in any other American city,
but more expensive and less formal. A steak house with a dart board.

A waitress in jeans came to our table. Renee ordered beer, so I did too. Renee had replaced her sweatshirt with a red flannel
shirt and had traded her jeans for tan corduroy slacks. It looked as if that was as dressed up as anyone in Anchorage was
going to get.

“What made you decide to be a pilot?” I asked.

“My dad was a bush pilot,” she said. “I’ve never imagined doing anything else. Fred has a pilot’s license, too.”

“You said you don’t get much business in the winter?”

“Not too much. A friend of mine flies for an air ambulance service. Sometimes I fill in for him.”

“A jet?”

“A Learjet Thirty-five. Ever flown in a private jet?”

“Yeah. A friend of mine in Denver runs a charter service. He makes a lot of money flying corporate executives around. His
name is Jeff Smart.”

The waitress arrived with our beers. No glasses, just two cold bottles of beer. She asked if we wanted to order dinner. Renee
suggested the elk steak, so that’s what I ordered.

“Do you have children?” Renee asked.

“Two dogs,” I said. “Do you?”

“Two boys. One lives in Seward with his dad; one lives in Juneau. So tell me about this woman you’re sort of involved with.”

“She’s a math professor. She’s teaching in China for a year.”

“How’s that working out?”

“It was working pretty well until she went to China.”

“Long-distance relationships are hard,” she said.

“We spent some time together at Christmas, and that was nice. But she wants to adopt a little girl from China and I’m not
sure that’s what I want.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I’m still trying to sort it all out.”

“I married young,” she said, “but my children were a blessing. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Were you ever married?”

“Came close once.”

“Want to throw some darts?” she said. Renee knew how to change topics in a hurry.

“Sure,” I said. She led me to a little corner near the bar, where there was a dartboard set up. We each asked the bartender
for another beer.

“I should tell you that I’m really good,” she said.

“We’ll see,” I said.

She was really good. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “you throw harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. Did you see
the way the bartender was looking at you?”

“I don’t know why,” I said, “but that does make me feel better.”

My elk steak was medium-rare and covered with sautéed mushrooms and some kind of mushroom sauce. It was delicious.

By the time we finished dinner we had each consumed three beers, and that’s a lot for me. I was feeling good. Renee drove
us back to the motel. Fred was there watching a bass-fishing program, which struck me as odd because the nearest bass was
probably two thousand miles south of Anchorage. Renee walked behind the counter, disappeared from sight for a few seconds,
and came back out with two more bottles of beer.

“Let’s go down to your room,” she said.

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“Afraid I’ll get you drunk and take advantage of you?”

“I’m afraid I would enjoy it,” I said. “But I don’t think I’d feel too good about myself in the morning.” She stood there
for a few seconds, still holding the two bottles of beer.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. Then she turned and walked behind the counter.

It’s a good thing I had the self-discipline to say, “Just walk away, Renee,” because Jayne called me on my cell phone a half
hour later. I told her I was in Alaska and what I was doing there. She brought me up to date on her experiences in China.
Eventually we got around to talking about our relationship.

“I love you,” she said, “but I am serious about this adoption. I want to do this. And I’m not going to wait forever.”

“How long are you going to wait?” I said.

“I don’t know. How long are you going to continue to think about it? At some point you have to make a decision.”

I
HEARD SEVERAL LOUD KNOCKS
on my door. “Wake up, Clark Kent,” said Renee. “We’ve got a lead on your friend.”

I hopped out of bed in my boxer shorts to open the door. She handed me an e-mail she had printed. I read it:

Renee:

I flew this woman from Juneau to Anchorage a few days ago. She told me she had taken the ferry from Bellingham. Hope this
helps. Don’t know if I can provide much more info, but give me a call if you want to talk.

Dan Montgomery

Juneau Air Charter Service

I glanced at the digital clock. It was seven-thirty. I looked at Renee and said, “It’s morning, right?”

“It’s morning,” she affirmed. I handed the e-mail back to her.

“Do you know this guy?” I said.

“Sure. Diving Dan has been around a long time.”

“Diving Dan?”

“He’s not a believer in gradual descents. He flew A-tens in the air force. That’s what they use to attack tanks and—”

“I know what an A-ten is.” Every Marine knows what an A-10 is—even the lawyers. “Do you think he’d be up now?”

“He’ll be up,” she said.

I showered, got dressed, and called Diving Dan from the phone in my room.

“How did she pay?” I asked.

“Cash. Didn’t seem like she was hurting for it.” Maybe she really had taken half a million dollars from Bugg, as Livingston
had suggested, then given roughly three hundred thousand to Matt for safekeeping and kept the rest.

“How did you hook up with her?” I asked. “Why didn’t she take the ferry all the way to Anchorage?”

“All I know is, she was in Juneau when I found her. She was at a McDonald’s and had a map of Alaska spread out in front of
her. She looked out of place, so I asked her if I could help. Next thing I know, she’s my copilot.”

“Did she say anything about where she was going?”

“Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“She’s going through some hard times,” I said. “Did she say anything at all about where she was going or why she was in Alaska?”

“She was pretty tight-lipped about that,” he said. “I got the impression she’d been around the block once or twice and just
didn’t trust people.”

“You guys must’ve talked about something,” I said.

“She had plenty of questions about Alaska. What are the best jobs, where are the best places to live, stuff like that. She
even asked me if motorcycles were big up here and were there any outlaw gangs.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her lots of people in Anchorage and the coastal areas like motorcycles in the summer. No outlaw gangs that I know
of, maybe some wannabees. ’Course, there are some places up here, like Barrow, where are there damn few motorcycles because
you can’t drive there. And even if you could, only an idiot would ride a motorcycle in Barrow. Even in the summer it doesn’t
get above forty degrees there.”

“You told her that?”

“What?”

“There are no motorcycles in Barrow.”

“Something like that. I don’t remember my exact words.”

In sharing my Alaskan adventures with Karlynn, I had described Barrow as the “flattest, whitest, most desolate place on earth.”

It made sense.

The fact that Karlynn might be in Barrow was not good news. It wasn’t good news, because I knew it would be thirty degrees
below zero and windy as hell. And it wasn’t good news, because my mother lives there.

I asked Renee to fly me there, but she said I’d be better off taking a commercial jet. They do better in the cold and wind,
and on a jet I could get there in about three hours.

The flight on the 737 wasn’t bad until we started to descend; then the wind just buffeted the hell out of the aircraft. It
felt as if God were playing air hockey and the jet was the puck. I don’t remember what time we landed. I had more or less
lost track of time. It was dark, cold, and forty-four feet above sea level. That was all I needed to know.

I took a taxi to the government-built housing my mother lives in. The taxi was a big Chevy Suburban. My mom works as a nurse
for the U.S. Public Health Service. Why the U.S. government built a hospital three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle is
best left to historians, though I suspect it had something to do with white guilt. The locals were doing just fine until the
white man showed up.

My mom’s apartment building sits on concrete pillars because it was built on tundra. If you are going to erect a building
in Barrow, you are pretty much stuck with tundra. The tundra softens up during the summer, but the pillars allow the building
to sink a little during the thaw without turning your first floor into a basement. They also serve another purpose—they prevent
the polar bears from climbing in through your bedroom window and eating you.

Mom was waiting for me when I knocked on her door, as was Scamp, her nuclear powered Jack Russell terrier. I had called from
Anchorage to give her the good news about my visit. She gave me a hug, offered to cook me something, and did all the things
mothers do. I removed my parka, hat, and gloves and stared out the window. Her apartment had a great view of the ocean, except
that the ocean was frozen solid and it was pitch black outside.