Restless in the Grave (35 page)

The pain of her loss had once been so debilitating that she had had to leave the Park for a place that held no memories of him. That pain no longer brought her to her emotional knees, but she was conscious of his absence. She thought she always would be, and she thought it wasn’t a bad epitaph.

Almost with his last breath he had commended his son into her care. She remembered Johnny’s voice on the phone.
Did anybody get any pictures?
She turned her face to the window so Boyd wouldn’t see her grin. Jack Morgan was gone, but he had left her wonderful memories, everlasting gratitude, and a made-to-order son.

She saw the faint outline of her own face in the Plexiglas and her grin faded.

It really bugged her that Gabe McGuire in person reminded her so much of Jack. Movie stars should stay up on the movie screen where they belonged, one giant step removed from anyone’s real life.

It bugged her even more that McGuire could quote Jimmy Buffett verbatim.

“Great view, huh?” The voice over her headset crackled.

She resumed her most come-hither smile and turned back to Boyd. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she lied.

“Yeah, well.” Boyd shrugged. “Lucky on the weather.”

“No kidding,” she said, “you can practically see over the horizon. I’ve spent a lot of time on boats—and planes—but I don’t remember a time when the Earth seemed quite so round to me.”

He looked at her, his expression appraising. He didn’t say anything but Kate got the distinct impression that she’d passed some kind of test. Whatever happened to guys who just wanted a brainless bimbo for a one-night stand?

He’d passed his own test. She had enough experience in the air that she knew a good pilot when she saw one, and Boyd qualified. He was one of those people who didn’t just climb into an aircraft, he put it on. The rudder pedals became an extension of his feet, flaps and ailerons extensions of his arms and hands. They had lifted off from Eagle Air with no unseemly amount of excess throttle, and when they reached altitude Boyd leveled off and throttled back and kept her there without seeming to think much about it. In spite of the fact that he had obvious hopes when he’d invited Kate for the ride-along, there was no slap-and-tickle or insinuating mention of the Mile-High Club once they were airborne. He was a pilot, he was on the job, and he could wait for the payoff until he got them safely down on the ground again.

Kate admired good pilots, partly because the histories of aviation and Alaska were so entwined, and partly because like most Alaskans she’d spent so much time sitting to the right of them. It was a pity, because every instinct she had told her that Boyd Levinson was as bent as they came.

“What are we hauling?” she’d asked him, looking over her shoulder at the lashed-down rubber totes as she climbed in.

“Spare parts for processors who deliver to Adak,” he said glibly.

The distinct smell of machine oil in the air of the cabin was recognizable to anyone who had ever been forced to help Old Sam dismantle the kicker on the
Freya
before the fishing season started, so Kate was willing to believe there were moving metal parts in the sealed rubber totes. She smiled at him, and he smiled back and changed the subject. “What do you do?”

“Right now?” she said. “Bartend. Before? I worked on a processor ship out of St. Paul.”

He looked over his shoulder at Mutt, and raised an eyebrow.

“She came later,” Kate said.

“Tough job,” he said, “fish processor. Especially for a woman.”

Kate didn’t take offense. He was right. “No kidding,” she said. “It’s mostly guys on the crew, and not very evolved guys at that. You were a bitch if you didn’t and a whore if you did. Good money, I managed to build up a little stash, but I was glad to get off.”

He smiled at her again. “I’m pretty evolved.”

She smiled back. “I noticed.”

His smile widened into a grin. So did hers, which, although he didn’t know it yet, didn’t mean quite the same thing.

Normally, he explained, he had an iPod hooked into the airplane’s sound system, and listened to podcasts like
Planet Money
and
Rush 24/7
. She understood the implication and endeavored to be at her wittiest and most sparkling. It wasn’t that difficult, as again, like most pilots with that many hours, Boyd had led an interesting life. The army had taught him to fly, and he explained, he’d been career.

“So you retired?” she said, adding mendaciously, “I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough.”

He preened a little. “I retired, all right, just a lot earlier than I expected to.”

“Why?”

He made a minute adjustment to the throttle. “I don’t know. I guess if I had to put a finger on one thing, it’d be Iraq Two. But for real, it probably started with Afghanistan.”

“You didn’t … approve?” Kate said delicately.

“Above my pay grade,” he said. “I took an oath. Not up to me to approve or disapprove.” He moved his shoulders, as if trying to shrug off the subject, and failed. “I’m all for making the world a tyrant-free zone, but really, what the hell was the point?” He shook his head, unconscious that he was repeating words said by another vet months before and hundreds of miles away.

There was an edge to Boyd’s voice detectable even over the headphones. Kate wondered how much that edge had to do with the cargo in back, which with every passing mile she was becoming more certain was not spare parts for fish processors. “Buy boys big toys, they’re going to find a way to play with them. Only solution is not buying the toys in the first place. I don’t see that happening any time soon.”

“No.” He smiled at Kate. “You see the last
Star Trek
movie?”

They flew on, the conversation ranging from the relative merits of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
(“
DS-Nine
didn’t really get rolling until the war with the Dominion started,” Boyd said) to the best way to cook moose backstrap (“Sear it on all sides in a hot and I mean hot cast-iron frying pan,” Kate said, “finish it off in the oven, and serve it with a raspberry vinegar sauce”).

They had a bit of a headwind at altitude and it was almost four hours before they came around Cape Akuyan and descended over Kuluk Bay before touching down in Adak. It was a little after two in the afternoon. The thin, bright rays of the arctic sun outlined all the bays and bights that cut into the coastline of the island and lit up the lakes scattered haphazardly across its interior. Mountains rose up in an ice-clad spine. At the lower elevations, the snow cover was patchier than she’d imagined. There were no trees.

She wondered if the view was much changed from when Old Sam and One-Bucket McCullough had served here during World War II, first recruits for Castner’s Cutthroats, and had to blink away unexpected tears.

The town of Adak was a revelation. For one thing, she couldn’t believe how large it was, bigger than Cordova and Ahtna combined. Two runways, both two hundred feet wide and over seven thousand feet long, formed the western and northern boundaries, with a little spillover. From the air it looked like there were more miles of road on this one island than could be found in all the rest of Southwestern Alaska combined. Three massive docks extended into the water, each long enough to host an aircraft carrier. A line of equally massive warehouses extended shoreward from each dock, and each warehouse looked individually capable of storing supplies enough for several fleets. Which, Kate supposed, they had been designed to do. It had originally been a navy base.

The roads were for the most part empty of traffic, and very few of the uniformly prefabricated buildings looked occupied. Indeed, as the Cessna lost altitude and Kate got a closer look, many of them appeared one small step up from abandoned.

Understandable, she thought. Days like today had to be very rare at any time of the year, and short of the occasional birder in pursuit of a glimpse of the whiskered auklet, she couldn’t see casual visitors contributing much to the island’s economy. Especially when the airfare alone set you back a minimum of twelve hundred dollars round-trip. And nobody sane bought a ticket to Adak one-way, or anywhere on the Chain, for that matter.

Boyd put them down with nary a bump about halfway down runway 05 and taxied to the south end, coming to a stop in front of an enormous hangar. “I’ve had rougher elevator rides,” Kate said, and his answering smile nearly outshone the sun. Pilots were so easy when you knew how.

He unbuckled his harness and opened the door as a man in a large truck with a canvas top on hoops that looked like it might have the Dirty Dozen in the back pulled around to the side of the plane. The driver got out as Boyd was climbing down to the pavement, a small, wiry man wearing Carhartts and a knit watch cap. His arms were so long, he looked like Reed Richards. He regarded Kate without favor. “Who’s this?”

“A friend,” Boyd said, “relax.”

The man looked over his shoulder, and his face lost color. “And what the fuck is that?”

Boyd followed his gaze and shook his head. “I still can’t believe I let you talk me into bringing her along.”

Mutt shouldered past Kate and leaped down to the pavement. Kate gave Boyd a slow, up-from-under smile, not quite fluttering her eyelashes. Boyd swallowed, and even Mr. Fantastic was not entirely unaffected. “Love me, love my dog.”

She watched as they opened the cargo doors of the aircraft and began shifting the rubber totes from the plane to the back of the truck. They looked heavy. She offered to help and was turned down, brusquely by the simian and more graciously by Boyd. She and Mutt wandered around the corner of a nearby hangar and found a quiet corner to drop her jeans. Four hours on an airplane with no bathroom tested even the best bladders.

She came back around the building to peer through the cracks of the door on the immense hangar nearby. It was larger than the one at Eagle Air that currently housed Gabe McGuire’s Gulfstream. It was also empty of anything but a stack of pallets, a couple of sets of block and tackle, a pile of bungee cords, and some coils of half-inch polypro, suitable for lashing down cargo.

“Kate!” She looked around and saw Boyd waving at her. “Want to take a look at the town?”

“Sure!”

Mr. Fantastic appeared to be arguing vociferously with Boyd, and broke off only when she and Mutt approached.

“Aw, relax, Shorty, wouldja?” Boyd said. “I told you, she’s a friend. It’s a long damn flight from Newenham, a man could stand some company once in a while.” To Kate, Boyd said, “Mutt will have to ride in the back.”

It was a struggle for Kate not to volunteer to ride in the back with Mutt, not to mention all those nice totes, whose lids were held on with duct tape. The Swiss Army knife in her pocket pressed against her hip in a meaningful way. She gave Boyd a sunny smile. “No problem. Mutt, up!”

Mutt took the tailgate in a single bound, Kate was escorted to the cab, there to take up the middle position between Shorty at the wheel and Boyd on the window. Shorty started the engine, muttering darkly beneath his breath.

He knew two speeds, fast and stop. The roads were, astonishingly, paved, which made the ride smoother than it could have been. “That used to be the McDonald’s,” Boyd said, pointing. He thudded against the passenger-side window when Shorty yanked the truck around a corner. “And there, that’s the bowling alley. They just rebuilt it a while ago, pretty good food. That used to be officers’ country over there, see? The Native corporation rents out beds there. We’ve got a nice apartment on lease. Clean sheets, stocked refrigerator, hot shower.”

Boyd smiled down at her. Kate smiled back. She may even have snuggled up against him, just a little, to keep hope alive. She was going to dash it soon enough.

They bounced off the road and through some buildings and emerged on the longest, widest continuous dock Kate had ever seen, connecting the three deep-sea docks she had seen from the air. Compared to the rest of the town, the dock was jumping. Three fish processors were in port, along with two hundred-foot crabbers and a U.S. Coast Guard cutter,
Munro,
a 378-foot white hull with a landing pad for a helicopter on the aft deck.

The ship they stopped next to was a rusty freezer trawler two hundred feet in length, with a crane mounted behind the house. The crew was on the alert for them, and moments after they’d arrived had the crane in motion and a pallet swung onto the dock. Boyd and Shorty stacked the tubs on the pallet and lashed them down and they were climbing back into the truck half an hour later. “Isn’t there even any paperwork?” Kate said in an awed voice.

Boyd slung a casual arm around her shoulders. “All taken care of in advance, Kate. Now, how about a well-earned drink at the end of a long day?”

They pulled in front of the Aleutian Sports Bar and Grill, a long, low dive of a place that put Kate forcibly in mind of a bar she’d been in in Dutch Harbor, over six years ago now. That bar had been cut into the rusty hull of a beached trawler, but the clientele in Adak looked exactly the same. It was mostly men, young men, young fishermen to be exact, and very few women. The very few women, mostly locals, mostly Natives, were each virtually under siege by the many young men, none locals, none of them Native, and many of them Russian. One girl who didn’t even look of age to Kate’s critical eye had six drinks lined up in front of her. Another was starfished against a wall, serving as the beautiful assistant for a pair of knife-throwing fishermen. To Kate’s relief, a harassed-looking bartender disarmed the fishermen before the first knife was thrown. Another girl occupied the middle of the dance floor, getting down and dirty to an ear-banging number by Katy Perry and Kanye West, of which alleged music Kate would have remained thankfully ignorant were it not for Johnny’s dogged determination to bring her musical tastes into the twenty-first century. The girl stood at the center of six, no, seven fishermen, a big enough circle that she was managing to avoid full frontal contact with any of them. Safety in numbers. Smart girl.

A few hard-eyed white women, older than the locals (by older, Kate judged them to be in their late twenties), she identified as professionals. Kate got her own share of attention just by stepping in the door. The noise was earsplitting, the air was filled with cigarette smoke, and the floor was greasy underfoot. Mutt demonstrated her displeasure by laying her ears back. Feet that might have stepped on ordinary paws just naturally levitated out of her path.