Midnight come again (11 page)

He removed the clipboard from Baird's hands.

"What the--" "I just want to look," Jim said, and again there was that unconscious authority in his voice that comes only from years on the job. It silenced Baird. He watched Jim read through the form once again.

No witnesses were listed, but then they wouldn't be, this wasn't an incident report. All it said was that the body of one Alex Burinin, having died an accidental death, was being released into the custody of the medical examiner for confirmation of cause of death, signed off by Trooper M. Zarr.

He unzipped the bag, ignoring Baird's protest, and looked at the face.

All dead faces looked like something out of Madame Tussaud's, waxen and lifeless, soul and spirit on their way to somewhere else, but Jim recognized the features from the mug shot in the file Gamble had shown him, in spite of the fact that the top of the skull had been flattened to his eyebrows, forming such a beveled crown that comparisons to Frankenstein were irresistible. Someone had very kindly mopped up the blood, revealing a nose like the beak of a vulture, eyes set deeply into dark-skinned sockets, a chin so weak Jim was surprised he hadn't grown a beard to hide it; a chin, again according to Gamble's files, Alexei Burianovich had made a career out of disproving.

He zipped up the bag and turned to Baird, ready with an innocuous explanation of his interest, when he saw Kate standing in the open hangar. She looked tense, and tired, as if she hadn't had much sleep.

Too bad.

Mutt stood next to her, shoulder to knee. They were a pair, a duet, a unit entire unto themselves.

He realized he was staring, and made a business out of fussing over the body bag's zipper.

Baird noticed, and looked around. "Hey, Sovalik." He looked at his watch, surprised. "God damn, is it midnight already?" He shook his head and offered a grin. "Time flies when you're having fun, don't it?

Churchill?"

Again with the slightest hesitation before the name, Jim noticed. Damn it all anyway, he wasn't a day on the job and his cover was already compromised. It was all Kate's fault, he thought, and the rage came back as if it had never been away.

"Well," Baird said cheerfully, taking no notice of either the red creeping slowly into Jim's face or Kate's silence, "I'm going to go catch me some Z's. You hand over to Kathy, she'll show you the bunkhouse. You're due back on duty at noon. Don't be late or I'll fire your ass."

This was a threat so hollow the words rang off the insides of themselves, but no one said so. Jim helped him move the body to a pallet, and Baird climbed into the pickup and was off without further ado.

Kate stood where she was, silent, still enveloped with that eerie patience. She could wait for him to talk first, she could wait for doomsday to arrive. No hurry.

Yes. An entirely different Kate Shugak.

He didn't like it. He didn't like her much, either, at the moment.

"The Cub's at the tiedown outside," he said curtly. "The Cessna's overnighting at Russian Mission; they're scheduled to take off for Kaliganek after daylight, then back here. The DC-3 is in Dillingham, and the Here's inbound from Aniak and scheduled to make a fish run to Anchorage for Northwest Packers at two a. m." He nodded at the truck.

"Got a full load, including the body."

"The what?" She peered down at the body bag as if she had never seen one before.

He handed her the clipboard. "I'm assuming you know the drill."

"Yes, I-- What the hell are you so pissed off about?" she demanded, her voice rising, and for the first time there was a hint of the old Kate Shugak in it. "I don't owe you any explanations. I don't owe anybody any explanations, but I especially don't owe one to you."

He stared intently over her head at a section of hangar wall with nothing of interest on it but a calendar featuring Miss. Socket Wrench in a provocative pose with a three sixteenth box end. "Where's the bunkhouse?"

A brief silence. "This way."

They detoured through the office to pick up his duffel bag. He tripped over the coffee table again; she avoided it with the habit of long practice and led him around the side of the hangar to yet another ramshackle building that was little more than a plywood and two-by-four shack with two bunks, a table and a stove. So far as utilities went, there was electricity, and that was all there was. "Is there a shower?"

She jerked her head. "There's a community shower up at the terminal. Say you work for Baird and they won't charge you." She gestured at the shelves on the wall above the table. "There's fixings for sandwiches, the hot plate for coffee or soup. There's a water faucet the other side of the hangar. You know where the outhouse is?" He nodded. "Okay, that's everything, I guess. You--"

"Fine. Thanks. Good night." He more or less shoved her outside and shut the door in her face.

An hour later he'd showered, shaved and eaten a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. He brewed a cup of coffee and stretched out on the left top bunk to drink it. He finished the coffee, read ten pages of the latest John Grisham thriller without retaining a word, and turned off the light.

Half an hour later he turned it back on. He was too physically exhausted to relax--he hadn't done this much manual labor since the physical training at the trooper academy--and it didn't help that the Here was taxiing up to the hangar, its low-throated, wallowing roar rattling the tin on the roof. His bunk was too short, too, and it was too light out.

The sun wouldn't be up until five-thirty, but it never got very dark at this time of year, and there were no curtains on the bunkhouse's windows, although they were dirty enough to block out most of the light.

It didn't help either that the woman he had last seen ten months before, bruised and bleeding and cradling the body of her dead lover in her arms, was working a hundred feet from where he lay at this very moment, evidently whole and sane and very much all right in spite of the fears of family and friends. Why this should irritate him more than he was already he didn't know, but it did and he embraced it with enthusiasm.

Until he discovered to his fury that he had an erection. Son of a bitch.

"Where were you when I needed you?" he demanded, looking at his lap.

"Where were you when Carroll was in my office? Where were you on the plane in? Where were you at goddamn Alaska Geographic?"

The hell with this. He bounced to the floor and yanked his clothes on and slammed outside with no very clear idea of where he was going. Kate was loading a pallet with the body bag strapped to it into the Here.

Mutt was asleep with her nose under her tail on a rug in front of the office, and Jim took advantage of the noise of the Here's engines to slip by unnoticed.

A rutted gravel road led around the lake that served as a seaplane base, unsignposted and, if the grass growing in the ruts and the occasional mudhole that had been reclaimed by the surrounding swamp were any indication, underused. It looked neglected and abandoned. It suited his mood exactly, and he set off, seeing how far his legs could stretch.

After a hard day's labor, it felt good to move without bending, stooping, lifting heavy objects, or needing to dodge out of the way of Baird's unpredictably driven forklift.

The sky was that pale mauve that characterized Arctic summer nights at the more southerly latitudes, where the sun actually went down for a few hours. The horizon stretched on forever, unsettling to a man used to mountains taking up more than their share of sky. He passed a small clump of alders, a lone diamond willow. The rest of the landscape was covered in tall grass, where it wasn't a lake or a marsh, or a stream draining one into the other, or both into the Kuskokwim. What was that illness when you were afraid to go outside your own home? He remembered reading a story once about a woman who hadn't left her house in twentyone years. They'd given it a name, interviewed doctors, sounded Greek--agoraphobic, that was it. Why agoraphobic? The Agora was an area of shops in Athens dating back to classical times. He'd traveled in Europe the summer after he'd graduated from college, a gift from his parents, relieved that their son had made it through school without their having to pick up child support as an additional expense. He remembered the women of Greece fondly. One minute you were looking at a statue carved two thousand years before, the next you saw the model for it strolling down the street with that marvelous Hellenic arrogance that says, "We were building the Parthenon when you were chipping out arrowheads and don't you forget it." Greek women brought that arrogance to bed with them, where it said, "Okay, show me what you got, I dare you." Jim dared every chance that came his way.

Yes, there was something special about the women of Greece, something extra, a bonus. Of course, there were more than a few Alaskan women you could say that about, too. He immediately thought of the five-foot package of dynamite back at the airport, and tripped over a rock thrown up by the gravel fill of the roadbed. He caught himself and swore. A goose, species unidentified but about the size of a Stearson, exploded out of a hummock of grass two feet to his right, honking angrily. When Jim got his heart restarted, he moved on.

Slowly but steadily, he left the hum and bustle of the municipal airport behind, and so it was with annoyance that he heard the buzz of something airborne nearby. He saw the plane soon after he heard it; small, single-engine, a Cub, he thought, although the engine sounded thin and tinny. It was red with white letters, and as he watched, it climbed, stalled, dipped a wing, dropped into a brief spin, leveled out and gained speed to climb again.

Jim disapproved. There wasn't enough light at night for acrobatics, not even in Bering in July. There was a pilot who was just sitting up and begging for a crash.

The Cub banked right and dipped below the tops of another cluster of alder trees nestled into a bend in the road. Jim quickened his step, rounded the trees and saw that he'd been right, the plane was on a short final to the gravel road that looked more like a controlled crash than a landing. It bounced twice, hard, before giving an almost perceptible shrug and settling down on the ground, rolling out to a stop, not five feet from his toes.

He looked down at the plane. It was a Cub, all right, but the wingspan was only three feet wingtip to wingtip.

"I'll be damned," he said. It was a model aircraft with a working engine, ailerons, rudder, rolling tires that were miniature tundra tires if he was not mistaken, the whole nine yards. If it were life-sized and it was September, he could have climbed in and headed out in search of caribou. He crouched down to examine it more closely, astonished by the accuracy of the detail.

Hasty feet thudded up the road, and he looked up to see a girl approaching at a trot, a control box clutched in one fist. Eyes wide, out of breath, she skidded to a halt on the loose gravel ten feet away.

They stared at each other. "Hello," Jim said finally.

She said nothing.

Jim nodded at the Cub. "Nice plane."

Silence.

Jim squatted on his haunches, elbows on his knees, hands dangling, and did his best to look harmless. "You build it?" He dusted off his best smile.

She moved forward a step, pulled closer either because of his charm of manner or because she was afraid he might steal her airplane.

"My name's Jim," he said, and held out a hand. "I'm a pilot, too."

Later, when he got to know her better, he would realize that it was the

"too," the implied equality, that had brought her the rest of the way.

She stopped on the other side of the Cub and squatted down in an imitation of his stance.

"What's your name?" he asked, letting his hand drop.

She gave his question the same careful consideration he would learn she gave all questions put to her. "Stephanie," she said at last. "Stephanie Chevak." Her voice was a mere whisper of sound he had to strain to hear.

"Jim," he repeated. "Jim Cho--Churchill." He held out his hand again, and after a moment she took it, obviously unaccustomed to the gesture but equally obviously determined to meet him courtesy for courtesy. Her hand was tiny in comparison to his, and felt a little sweaty against his palm. Her fingernails were clipped short and grimy, her fingertips callused. She worked with those hands.

She was Yupik, round-faced with narrow brown eyes tilted toward her temples and a ponytail of long black hair. Her skin was a smooth, dark gold in color, her cheekbones high and flat. Her chin was pointed and very firm, and Jim had a suspicion it would grow more so with age. Kate had a chin like that. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

She wore a kuspuk made of blue flowered corduroy trimmed with white rickrack, over a pair of faded blue jeans with nothing left to the knees and a pair of hightop Reeboks with heels that lit up every time she put her feet down. They glowed now, a neon pink that would have looked more appropriate on a cafe sign in Anchorage flashing

"Eats! Eats! Eats!"

She put her hands on the leading edge of the model's wings and with great care turned the red model airplane belly up. There was a square of black plastic cut into the belly. Stephanie ran her hands down the fuselage and pressed a corner of the plastic. It popped open to reveal a lens.

"A camera!" Jim said, surprised.

She looked at him, her expression unsmiling but not unfriendly.