by Stan Jones
He passed over the folder. “Until next time.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Friday, April 11
ACTIVE WALKED DOWN two flights of stairs to the ground floor of the public safety building and out into the brilliant April sun. He fumbled through his parka pockets for the mirror sunglasses essential to survival this time of year and slipped them on as he climbed into the new Chevy crew-cab that had come with the new job.
One thing he had to give Chukchi was April. The village might have winters that lasted most of the year with months of near-continuous darkness and a relentless west wind that blew for weeks on end, but then would come April.
There was no better day in life than a fine Arctic day in early April, for his money. The snowdrifts were still intact and they incandesced like titanium in the sun. Daytime temperatures soared up near plus twenty, so warm you could leave your parka unzipped in the sunlight. Even at night, the mercury didn’t drop much below zero.
He started the Chevy, drove west on Church Avenue to Beach Street and turned north along the seawall being built to protect the village from the Chukchi Sea.
At the south end of Beach Street was Chukchi Region Inc.’s newly renovated Arctic Inn, modern as anything in Anchorage, right down to an espresso stand, free wifi, and rooms with pay-per-view porn and professional sports on cable.
After that came a stretch of log cabins crumbling back to nature, some with caribou antlers lining the eaves as had been the custom until a few years ago. In front of the old cabins, cars, trucks, outboard motors, and snowgos rusted away—slowly in the dry, northern climate—in their effort to return to iron ore. A few were draped in abandoned mattresses, soggy and mildewed in summer, hard-frozen under the snow in winter.
The north end was marked by the towering cranes of the Chukchi docks, where everything that sustained the village arrived if it wasn’t so urgent it had to come by air.
Beach Street was, in its way, a museum of Chukchi’s past and present. Even its future, if you counted the near-complete seawall on along the shore.
The ice of the bay was still solid in front of the village. Kids and aanas jigged for tomcod fifty yards offshore, and farther out, a snowgo headed inland with a dogsled-load of family and gear. Most likely, Active figured, they were in pursuit of the fat white sheefish that schooled up under the ice around the mouth of the Katonak River this time of year.
Grace’s house was far up the street, almost to the docks. It shared an alley with the high school where her father had been a teacher, then principal, until her mother had shot him to keep him from molesting Nita, the daughter he had sired by Grace.
Active blinked behind his mirrors to clear away the story, so dark and immense that to survive it was, he had come to understand, the central effort of Grace Palmer’s life. Her job, she had explained, was to get up every day and go out and play a normal woman and not let her past suck her down like the cold restless current always at work under the sea ice.
As he pulled up at the Palmer house, he saw Grace at work with a power drill on the clapboard wall beside the front door. He rolled down his window and leaned out to watch. She hadn’t noticed him yet, probably because the drill had drowned out the sound of his arrival. She bit her lower lip and squinted in concentration.
The sun that angled in from the southwest picked out auburn highlights in her hair—he’d never noticed those before—and, when she turned just the right way, brushed the corners of the foxlike eyes behind her sunglasses. He honked the Chevy’s horn. She didn’t react. He turned on the siren for a couple of hoots. She lowered the drill and turned and pulled out earplugs.
“Hey, baby!” they said at the same time.
He left the pickup, and climbed the steps to the deck. “What’s all this?” he said before he noticed the sign that leaned against the wall.
She stepped back and they looked at the sign together: Chukchi Region Women’s Crisis Center.
“Pretty nice, huh? The kids from the high school shop class brought it over a couple hours ago.”
“Pretty nice, all right,” he said. “And not a moment too soon. The ribbon-cutting still on for next week?”
She nodded. “Yep, Friday. I’m just about packed up and ready to move out of this place to live in sin with my favorite cop.”
“Here’s to sin,” he said.
She gave him an elbow in the ribs and a kiss that was pretty long and hot for a public venue like the front steps of her home. But when he put some pelvis into it she stiffened and pulled back. “Maybe when I’m out of this house.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “And hoping.”
“I know, baby. Fingers crossed.” She opened the door and waved him in like an usher. “Come on, dinner is ready.
“Sonny!” she yelled when they were inside. “You staying for dinner?”
“Sorry, Gracie, I gotta bounce,” said Sonny Johnson, Active’s half brother, as he came out of the back room where the center’s computers lived. “But your new network’s set up. All secure and everything like the government wants. You can tell them to test it now.”
“Thanks, again, it would break us trying get somebody up from Anchorage to do this. Sure I can’t pay you? The center does have some money for this kind of stuff.”
“Nah, that wouldn’t be right, charging family.”
“Not even a sheefish dinner?”
“Arii, I got basketball practice, all right. But I think Mom’s got some, too, for when I get home. Hey, Nathan, how you doing?” Sonny extended a fist for the bump that was replacing Chukchi’s customary single-pump handshake among the younger generation.
Active bumped. “Not bad for a cop. You?”
Sonny shrugged and opened the door. “You know. It’s Chukchi.”
“Bounce? Where do they learn to talk like that?” Grace said as Active shut the door.
“TV, the Internet, the gym, Eskimo soul travel, who knows?
He followed her toward the kitchen, enjoying the view as her backside rolled in her jeans and hoping this latest move to escape her own story would pan out. She had donated the house she’d inherited upon her mother’s death to the new borough to serve as the women’s shelter, then gotten herself hired to run it and wangled a state grant to buy the house next door for an annex and set up a network of smaller crisis centers in the villages. Now she and Nita were moving into the house he’d rented on the lagoon behind town till they could buy or build one of their own.
She pulled a pair of sheefish salads from the refrigerator and set out a stack of pancake-sized pilot bread saltines, plus a Diet Pepsi for him and a pot of green tea for herself. He dropped his briefcase onto a chair and himself into another.
“Nita still at school, is she? I don’t see any mac and cheese on the table.”
“Mm-hmm,” Grace said around a mouthful of pilot bread. “Study group for a big social studies test.”
“On a Friday afternoon? Her zeal is commendable.”
“There’s a cute boy in it.”
Active raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“A wise mom knows when not to ask.”
“Ah.”
Grace paused with a forkful of salad halfway to her lips and looked at the sea of packing boxes around them in the kitchen and in the hallway outside the door. “With any luck at all, that sign out front and what’s happening to this house will make the son of a bitch spin in his grave.”
Active nodded, then brooded. It had to be healthy for Grace to get out of her father’s house, at least at night when they’d be together in the new place on the lagoon.
And if she spent her days inside the house, helping women who were victims of men like her father, that had to be healthy, too, right?
Then why did it feel so unhealthy? The unprocessed rage behind that last remark, maybe. Make the son of a bitch spin in his grave. A remark triggered, to all appearances, by his mention of Nita.
“What?”
He started, a little. “What wha
t?”
“What’s on your mind, duh.”
“Oh, I had a mildly interesting conversation just now, is all.”
“How interesting, exactly?”
“There’s good news and bad news.” He shrugged.
“Stop that! Stand and deliver, Chief Active.”
He grinned. “It seems the governor wants me.”
Her eyes widened. “And that’s the good news or the bad?”
“Bad, I guess. It seems she heard my radio interview with Roger Kennelly and now she wants me to be the next director of the state troopers.”
“Jesus! That woman!”
In Active’s experience, no one in the state was neutral on its governor. Alaskans, particularly female Alaskans, either loved or hated Helen Mercer. Grace fell with great passion into the latter camp.
Active himself was the only exception he knew of. He neither hated nor loved the governor. Rather, he regarded Mercer, with her incomprehensible charisma and the passions it aroused, as one more dangerous natural phenomenon. Like rotting sea ice under a snowgo or deteriorating weather in mid-flight in a Bush plane, Helen Mercer was something to be accepted and coped with. Especially since the run for vice president on something called the Free America ticket that seemed to have stuck her manic personality in permanent overdrive.
“Yes, that woman,” he said. “But the good news is, I may be able to get out of it.”
“Hurray for that. I don’t wanna move to Anchorage. Do you wanna move to Anchorage?”
“Some days I think about going back there,” Active said. “It still feels more like home than this place, sometimes.”
Grace’s face registered such alarm that Active grinned and said, “But not on a sunny day in April. Who could want to leave the Arctic on a day like this?”
Grace rolled her eyes. “You said you might be able to get out of it?”
“She wants me to be her bodyguard while she’s here to cheer Brad on in the Isignaq 400.” He fished Carnaby’s green folder out of the briefcase and laid it on the table.
“Hah!”
“Hey, there’s nothing funny about the 400. It’s a grueling test of man and mutt.”
“And a few women!”
“All right, a grueling test of man, mutt, and maiden. But it’s still not funny.”
“The ‘hah’ wasn’t for the race. It was for the hype that she’s coming here to cheer Brad on. She hasn’t been back to Chukchi more than twice since she got elected governor. She’s only here now so she can announce for president. Right in her home town, and right on the basketball court where she starred as a student and coached as a teacher.”
“What? Where did you hear—wait a minute, you’ve been reading the blogs again!”
“Busted.” She hung her head in mock shame. “They get things right, sometimes.”
“Yeah, and if you put a million monkeys at keyboards, they’d eventually write all of Shakespeare. Not to mention ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ probably. But that doesn’t mean Helen Mercer’s going to run for president. Not after what happened the last time she tried national politics. She’d have to be…”
“Crazy? You were going to say ‘crazy,’ weren’t you? But you stopped because you know she already is, don’t you?” Grace beamed in triumph.
“No, I got some pilot bread stuck in my throat is all. I think I need a drink.” He gulped at the Diet Pepsi. “Now, where were we?”
“You were going to explain why you have to guard Helen Mercer’s body, which I’m sure you don’t mind one bit, right?”
“Why, whatever do you mean?” he said. He wanted to keep it light, but there was no light in Grace’s face.
“You don’t find her attractive?”
He tried to think over the din of alarm bells going off in his head. Finally, he thought he spotted a way through. “Actually, I find her terrifying.”
Grace nodded. “I’ve heard she fires people on the slightest whim. And not just from bloggers.”
He nodded. “That one does seem to be true.”
“Anyway,” Grace mused, “how big a deal can the bodyguard thing be? She spends some time in the state building here, makes a few public appearances, does a meet-and-greet at the mushers’ banquet after the race, hands out the trophies, and she’s outta here, right?”
She caught the look on his face. “No?”
“Not quite.” He tapped the briefing folder.
She cocked her head and shot him the stink eye. “OK, what?”
“She’s chartered Cowboy Decker so she can follow the last two days of the race from the air.”
“And you’ll be riding along with them?”
Active cleared his throat. “I will, yes.”
“And do I recall correctly that this race includes overnights in the villages along the route?”
“It does, yes.”
“And the governor will be overnighting, too?”
“She will, yes. But only once, at Isignaq village, which is the last mandatory rest stop in the race.”
“And will she be sleeping with Brad?”
“I understand he prefers to sleep in a tent among his dogs.”
“And the governor?”
“I don’t believe the governor sleeps with the dogs, no.”
“So you and the governor will be overnighting together?”
“Of course not,” Active said. “I mean, we’ll be together in the sense of being in the same village at the same time. But not in any other way, of course. She’ll be staying with a minister and his family. Cowboy and I will be sleeping at the school. And, anyway, I’m a happily committed guy. And she’s a happily married woman.”
“Hah!” Grace said. “They’re filing for divorce any day now. You should read the blogs.”
Active shook his head. “No doubt I should. Be that as it may, she asked me to be her bodyguard and I don’t think I can refuse. Half my budget comes from the state.”
“But why you? Isn’t this a trooper job?”
Active took Grace through the butt-watching incident and the other intricacies of the governor’s toxic relationship with the Alaska State Troopers. “You see now? All I have to do is flunk my tryout without making her so mad she cuts my budget, then things will get back to normal and I won’t have to go to Anchorage.”
“OK, fine.” She picked up the three quarters of her salad not eaten, covered it in plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator. “You do as you think best. I’ll be fine, just fine. Right here, all by myself, getting us moved into the new place.”
What now? Should he try, “You’re cute when you’re jealous”? No, probably not. Then he remembered. “There is some good news, actually.”
Grace eyed him with a skeptical expression. “Yes?”
“It seems she heard me mention our plan for the village crisis centers on the radio and is highly supportive.”
Interest and suspicion wrestled for control of Grace’s expression. “Seriously?”
“So she said.”
“So if I loan you to that woman for a few days, I get funding for my crisis centers?”
“I could even ask her about cutting the ribbon at your women’s shelter next week.”
“You know,” Grace said after some reflection. “Life’s a bitch. And then one gets elected governor. And you have to be nice to her.”
Grace cleaned up the lunch things at the sink. Forks rattled, plates clanked, water ran, she said nothing. And her body language wasn’t good.
“So,” he said. “We all right? If not, are we gonna be?”
“Watch yourself around her,” Grace said after a long thoughtful silence. “She may have summer in her eyes, but that heart is pure winter.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Saturday, April 12
“GRACE, TOO? I thought it was just my wife.” Cowboy Decker closed the access panel on the engine cowling of one of Lienhofer’s Cessnas and muttered “Oil’s good, anyway.” The west wind flipped the panel back up. He swore, caught it, slap
ped it down again, and pushed on it with both gloved hands till it latched, then pulled the rear edge of the greasy orange engine cover back into place over the panel.
“Yep, Grace, too,” Active said. “She actually used the f-word.”
“Not ‘fine’.”
Active raised his eyebrows in the Eskimo yes. “Three times.”
“The most terrifying word that ever came out of a woman’s mouth,” Cowboy said. “Linda used it right before I left. ‘Fine, then. Fly all over the country with that woman if that’s what you want.’ ”
The pilot checked the power cord for the electric heater he had put inside the engine compartment the night before. “Guess we better leave it in there for now. Pretty damned cold for April.”
Cowboy was right about that. Ten below, with maybe twenty-five miles an hour of wind off the Chukchi Sea. A chill factor of minus forty, according to the morning report on Kay-Chuck.
It was so cold that even Cowboy had dressed for it. He wore the usual Ray-Ban sunglasses and ball cap, but his trademark leather bomber jacket was nowhere in sight. Instead, he was bundled up in Sorel boots, insulated rust-colored Carhartt overalls, and an oil-stained green parka patched in several spots with shiny gray duct tape. Heavy mittens dangled at his side on lanyards; he had flipped them off to use the woolen gloves he wore underneath when he checked the oil in the Cessna. Active was dressed to match, except that his overalls were green RefrigiWear, his parka was red, and he wore a fur hat with ear flaps instead of a baseball cap.
Cowboy turned and surveyed the sky east of the airport for sign of the Alaska Airlines jet that would deposit the governor’s staff in Chukchi. There was no evidence of a Boeing 737, only the morning sun clearing the horizon.
“Late as usual,” Cowboy grunted. He never missed a chance to show his contempt for the nitwits and incompetents who operated major airlines and big jets, particularly the pilots.
“Maybe if we handcuffed ourselves together and left the key with Grace or Linda,” Active mused. “Then we could vouch for each other. The women would have to believe us.”