Midnight come again (15 page)

It had seemed like a fairly routine operation. The season had started with supplies, groceries, parts and gear coming in, and had progressed to fish going out. There were some special shipments, personal belongings for families moving to or from, a load of liquor for an upriver village that had just voted itself dry to wet for the third time, an unending stream of airplane engines going back and forth to Anchorage for annual inspections. There were the regular shipments of supplies to support those government bureaucracies maintaining a presence in this southwest Alaskan hub; the state courts, the Departments of Corrections, of Public Safety, of Fish and Game. Now and then one of the staties hitched a ride on a pile of freight, not strictly kosher but what the FAA didn't know wouldn't hurt Baird Air.

She looked at her left wrist, which sported a large stainless-steel watch with Russian letters on the face, a gift from Yuri that he'd broken out of the first shipment she had expedited for him. Baird had one just like it, only larger. So did each of the four pilots. Jim would probably be offered one if he were on duty the next time Yuri brought in a consignment. Baird Air treated all its customers as if their goods were on fire and the nearest fire hose was at the other end of a plane ride, but the gifts made Yuri feel that his goods would be handled with extra care. "What the hell," Baird said, admiring his watch, "it ticks."

No, Kate couldn't pinpoint anything out of the ordinary in the day-to-day operations of the air taxi. Baird made money hand over fist, but then a lot went out, too, in maintenance, lease payments on the hangar, mortgage payments on the plane, insurance liability and replacement. He shared, too; Kate was pulling in almost five thousand a month and the pilots more than that.

She didn't want to think about any of this. She didn't want to wonder why Jim was here, she didn't want to speculate over what might or might not constitute a case for him, she didn't want to look at Baird Air's customers as anything but letters and numbers entered neatly on a manifest form. Baird ran an airfreight service out of a Yukon-Kuskokwim hub, paid her to help him do so, provided her with a bunk and meals and didn't hassle her about Mutt. She didn't need to know any more than that. She wanted Jim to go away.

She decided to tell him so.

But when she went to the bunkhouse for lunch at six a. m., he was gone.

From the evidence, he'd showered, changed, napped for a while, and then left. He'd eaten, washing it down with his own coffee.

She hadn't had anything but Hill's Brothers in so long. The bag smelled good. The label identified it as Tsunami Blend, from Captain's Roast in Homer, Alaska. It was ground for cone filter, and Jim had been so obliging as to bring all the fixings with him. She filled the tea kettle from the five-gallon white plastic jerry can beneath the table, and the hot plate brought it to a boil quickly. She put the cone on a mug, a filter into the cone and spooned coffee into the filter with a generous hand. She inhaled the steam rising from the surface. Heaven had to smell like that. Seasoned with a touch of evaporated milk, it tasted ambrosial.

She carried the mug back to the hangar, sat down at the desk and began completing cargo manifests. Mutt woke up and padded in. "Hey, girl,"

Kate said, one hand dropping automatically to scratch behind the big ears.

Mutt leaned up against her, long enough for the warmth of her body to penetrate through Kate's jeans. She'd been doing that a lot lately. Ever since that morning. One hand rubbed absently at the flesh of her right arm. The scar was now only a lump of rough tissue, barely discernable as individual tooth marks.

Her hand dropped. She drained her mug and went back to work.

Mutt went looking for an early morning snack and came back with a tight belly, a satisfied expression on her face and goose down hanging from her chin. The sun shone horizontal rays through the office window, the clear, pale gold of early morning.

Baird showed up at eight with a tray of breakfast burritos, the Cessna landed right after the Here, the phone started to ring and the day began in earnest.

At eight-thirty the pilot of the Here perched a considerable hip on one corner of the desk and bit into his burrito. "God, but the old man can cook. I swear I'd marry him if he ever took a bath."

"Can't you keep the grease off your paperwork, Larry? You know some of this stuff goes to the FAA."

"Fuck the FAA," the pilot said amiably. "You're about to go off duty, aren't you?"

She didn't look up. Completing government forms was an art in and of itself; instructions incomprehensible to anyone who spoke English as a first language, tiny spaces totally inadequate to hold the information required. "Not until noon," she said, as she always did.

"Did I ever happen to mention that I've got an apartment in town?"

"At last count? About one hundred and eleven times." Kate signed Baird's name and picked up the manifest. Fish, fish and more fish, in from Kwingillingok. Plus a baby carriage. A baby carriage? Oh, right, Mrs.

Christian son was sending her daughter's baby carriage to her daughter, who was due any day now. Baird frequently carried things of a personal nature at minimal or no charge. Said it made people who wanted to ship stuff by air think of him first when the time came. Personally, Kate thought he was just a big softy who fell for every sob story laid on him, and she liked him the better for it.

Larry leaned across the desk and touched the scar on her neck. "Well, then, have I ever told you how sexy that scar is?"

"Nope."

He dropped his voice. "It is. Very sexy."

Nothing.

Larry was nothing if not an optimist. "So, I've got a bottle of Jameson's up to the pad, and I was thinking you might like to come on up and help me put some of it away."

"I don't drink."

The pilot stuffed the rest of the burrito into his mouth and leered around it at Kate. "Well then, maybe give me a back rub. I've got a bad back, and I'm a little sore from holding that damn Here up in the air all night."

Kate sat back and looked at him, really for the first time since they had been introduced. He was as wide as he was short, with thick brown curls, velvety brown eyes and what he was sure was an invincible way with women, a delusion common to many men of the air.

"Listen to me carefully, Larry," she said. "I would rather spend the rest of my life at a monster truck rally."

He grinned. It was, in fact, a rather charming, slightly lopsided grin that wrinkled the corners of his eyes into engaging creases and displayed an alarming number of very white teeth. "Well then, why don't we just adjourn to your bunk and fuck?"

It didn't catch her on the raw the way it had the first ten times he'd said it, but neither did she feel any desire to deal with him as gently as she had Yuri. "Tell me something, Larry."

It was a variation on her usual response and he had to hide his surprise. "Anything." Anything that will get you into the sack with me, was what he wasn't saying but what they both knew he meant. Alaskan summers were long of day and long of duration, and wearing on a transient worker with all the normal hormones. It made for brief, passionate and highly unlikely couplings that went south with the birds.

Kate leaned forward and said earnestly, as if she really needed to know,

"You know why men don't suck their own cocks?" His jaw dropped.

"Because they can't."

She leaned back and watched without interest as his face flushed a dark and unbecoming red. He backed up a step, caught his heel on the coffee table and went sprawling on the couch. Kate knew a momentary flash of gratitude to that crusty old RPetco communications operator from whom she had first heard that joke, back when she worked that dope case on the Slope, back when she'd been spending every other week in Anchorage with--she stopped that line of thought with an efficiency all the more ruthless after ten months' practice.

The pilot's mouth opened but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a bray of laughter. They turned to see Baird standing in the doorway, clad in his usual uniform of bib overalls and black rubber boots.

"Give it up, Maciarello," he said to the pilot, still laughing. "You're outclassed, outmanned and outgunned. She ain't interested. I oughtta know." He gave Kate a friendly leer that somehow was not nearly as smarmy or as offensive as Larry's.

She handed him the clipboard. "North Star has another shipment of smoke fish going out this afternoon, and Frank Malone just lost the engine on his Cub. He wants to know if you can overnight it into Merrill instead of International. He's got a mechanic standing by there."

Baird grunted, skimming through the pages attached to the clipboard.

"This ain't a goddamn on-the-ground freight service, it's a in-the-air freight service. We'll land where we got a load to deliver." The crotchets of his reply were immediately nullified when he added, "See if North Star minds picking up their fish at Merrill." Kate nodded.

"Anything else?"

"American Seafoods has a new lidder in Anchorage waiting for a plane, while they've got fish rotting in the hold here and they're having to turn away more because they can't get room on a commercial flight today.

Alaska Airlines has no cargo space available for something of this size until Thursday. American Seafoods wants to know if the Here's available."

Baird grinned. Unlike Larry's, his was downright nasty. "I heart Alaska Airlines. Tell Carl his lidder's got a ride if he's got the price."

"Okay." Kate picked up the phone and made the call.

Baird waited. "That it?"

"Yeah."

He reached his hand inside his bib and scratched. "Hell, you might as well knock off then. Take an extra hour. Get that big bastard out of bed and on the job by noon, though."

Larry Maciarello had been loitering in carefully disinterested fashion near the door. His head whipped around

"You got a guy here?" Kate said coolly, "We all do. New ground crew, name of Jim Churchill.

He'll be working noons to midnights." She nodded at Baird. "See you at midnight."

He winked broadly, and gave the pilot a meaningful nudge that nearly knocked him over. "Sweet dreams."

But Jim's bunk was still empty. There was no sign that he'd been there since he had left it originally. She looked at her watch. Almost eleven o'clock.

This was Chopper Jim they were talking about, the man who rumor said had had more women than Warren Beatty. By repute, Jim Chopin was constitutionally incapable of going without nookie for longer than twenty four hours; he'd probably hit the bars this morning and gone home with the first reasonably attractive woman who would allow herself to be seduced by those come hither blue eyes. Only there weren't any bars in Bering. Bering was a damp town; you could have booze in your house for personal consumption, but you couldn't sell it in quantity, and you certainly couldn't sell it in a bar or buy it in a liquor store.

Where else would Jim go to pick up women? Kate knew herself to be momentarily at a loss. Considering she'd known him for, what, ten, twelve years now? she knew very little about the man. Did he read? What kind of music did he like? She knew him, trusted him, even secretly admired him, professionally. Personally was a whole different ball game.

He'd kissed her once, a couple of years back, when he'd dropped out of the sky into her front yard in his Bell Jet Ranger to warn her about a mass murderer on the loose in the Park. He'd made his interest obvious to her, to everyone, in fact. Even to Jack. Especially Jack, last summer on Alaganik Bay.

Next to her Mutt gave a soft whine. She had to blink to see the big yellow eyes fixed on her face. "It's okay, girl," she said, and had to clear her throat. She fought back the tears, fought back the pain, fought back the memories, and concentrated on what she did know about First Sergeant Jim Chopin, other than the known facts that he was a first-class law enforcement officer and a notorious lecher. The second fact could explain why he hadn't called in his location, but the first negated the second. Undercover, even under the covers, he would have called in. Kate didn't stop to wonder why she knew that.

She had relieved Jim at work. The last she'd seen of him was when he'd pushed her out the door at midnight. She took a longer, more careful look at the bunkhouse.

Jim's duffel was open. She hesitated only a moment before tossing it.

His badge and gun, with two spare clips of ammunition, were wrapped in a Banana Wind T-shirt at the bottom.

The T-shirt was the oddest thing about her find. Badge and gun, he'd never leave those behind, whether he was doing a job without benefit of uniform or not. The T-shirt, though. Banana Wind? Jimmy Buffett? Who'd have thought Chopper Jim could get that mellow?

With a faint shock she realized that yesterday was the first time she'd ever seen Jim Chopin out of uniform. He'd been wearing jeans and a long-sleeved blue checked shirt.

It unnerved her. He wasn't Chopper Jim without the official blessing of the blue-and-gold of his service. He wore the uniform the way a beauty queen wore a tiara, as if he were strutting down a runway, all eyes upon him and some Las Vegas crooner in the background about to burst into song. If he wasn't Chopper Jim, how was she supposed to act around him?

She rewrapped badge and gun in the T-shirt and stuffed it back in the duffel. There were dirty clothes in a Carr's plastic garbage bag, so he had showered and changed. The loaf was the lighter by several slices, coffee grounds were spilled on the table. She checked the square plastic tub she'd been using to wash dishes; a saucer, a knife, a mug. He'd had a sandwich, some coffee, so he hadn't gone anywhere to eat.