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 st
ood 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.
Boyd steered Kate through the crowd to a table, acquired chairs by a feat of sheer legerdemain, and held hers for her with an inviting smile.
She smiled back. If she didn’t get away from Boyd soon, it was going to wear out and she’d have to replace it. “Order me a beer and a burger?” she said. “I’m just going to go freshen up a little.”
Boyd raised his voice to be heard over the crowd. “She going with you?”
Kate swiveled, saw Mutt a pace behind, and batted her eyelashes. “You know how us girls are. We can never go to the bathroom alone.”
Boyd’s laughter followed them into the john, a four-holer that showed the same attention to cleaning and maintenance as the bar. Of course there wasn’t a back door.
Kate went into one of the stalls. There was a full roll of toilet paper. It was the best that could be said.
A pair of giggling girls came in as she emerged from the stall. Both of them reapplied their makeup while exchanging less than complimentary notes on the last five men who had propositioned them. She took her time drying her hands, and was rewarded when one of the bartenders came in. A stocky white woman of middle age, she had muscular arms and a firm belly beneath a knotted bar towel. “Hey,” she said to Kate.
“Hey,” Kate said.
“Nice dog.”
“Thanks.”
“Wolf?”
“Only half.”
“Jesus,” said the other woman with neither surprise nor fear, and without much emphasis, either. She went into a stall. Kate waited. The bartender came back out and went to one of the sinks. She wore a T-shirt with three-quarter sleeves. When she reached for the soap, the sleeves pulled up enough for Kate to see bruises that looked as if they’d been left behind by someone grabbing her arms above the elbows.
The woman saw her looking and pulled her sleeves back down. She pushed the soap dispenser, squirting soap into her hands.
“What’s your name?” Kate said.
“Jean.”
“Hi, Jean, I’m Kate.”
“Nice to meet you, Kate,” although Jean didn’t sound particularly excited.
“I wonder,” Kate said. “Is there a back way out of here?”
An experienced bartender, Jean didn’t ask why Kate needed a back door, especially with Mutt for a bodyguard. She turned off the faucets and reached for a towel. “Outside, go to your immediate left, follow the wall past the men’s all the way to the back, right around the corner, left through the storeroom. There’s a gray steel door. Should be unlocked.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Not the first time you’ve given those directions.”
“Won’t be the last in this bar, either,” Jean said. She pitched the crumpled towel in the garbage, and left.
Kate waited until there was a crowd of people between the restroom and the table where Boyd sat, and slipped out. Jean’s directions were foolproof. A minute later they were on the outside of the storeroom door.
Kate grinned down at Mutt. “Solidarity, that’s what I’m talking ’bout.”
Mutt, just glad to be back on honest dirt, give an enthusiastic sneeze of agreement.
Twenty-five
JANUARY 21
Adak
The bar wasn’t far from the docks. Kate and Mutt dodged a few forklifts and a couple of trucks, picking up a smattering of wolf whistles and not a few offers of marriage along the way. They passed a gear shop and Kate went in and bought a navy blue hoodie in men’s large with an unobtrusive Adak Fisheries logo on one shoulder, and a pair of thick wool socks, also in men’s large.
When she came out again the sun was sliding down the horizon, casting conveniently long shadows. Kate found one next to a tottering stack of battered wooden totes that smelled of fifty years’-worth of pollock. It was a peek around a corner from a full view of the freezer trawler where they’d dropped off the Cessna’s cargo. Kate was relieved to find it still there.
She cast a quick glance around at the other docks. One of the processors was gone, and it looked like the cutter was preparing to get under way. Gigantic frozen bricks of processed seafood and shellfish were being unloaded from the other trawlers. They were settled on trailers and towed off to the warehouses, Kate guessed to wait on a container ship that would ship it to market.
She ducked back around the totes and pulled the hoodie over her jacket and tied the hood around her face so that only her eyes and nose showed. It hung down to her knees, and she pulled the hem in a little, too. She looked down at herself, satisfied. With the bulk of jacket and jeans beneath it the hoodie was voluminous enough to totally desex her. In a town where gender alone brought more attention that the traffic would bear, the more people who didn’t notice she had breasts, the better.
The large navy blue socks she pulled on over her boots. The cursory glance she had been allowed of the freezer trawler had told her that the crew wasn’t all that keen on maintenance and she wanted to be sure of her footing on the slimy decks when she went aboard. The rough wool should take care of that nicely, as well as muffle her steps.
Her biggest fear was that Boyd would show up on the dock looking for her, but the sun dropped below the horizon with no sight of him. The tide was coming in, and she had watched the superstructure of the freezer trawler slowly rise next to its mooring. There were no lights on in the wheelhouse, but then there usually weren’t, the watch saving its night vision for the depth and radar screens, electronic charts and the LED readouts packed into most bridges. If the ship had any kind of a responsible captain, there should be at least one person on watch 24/7, but if Kate were lucky, the rest of the crew was onshore. She might even have had her ass pinched by one of them on her way to the bathroom at the Aleutian Sports Bar and Grill.
She waited until it was full dark, huddled next to Mutt on a none-too-clean and not-very-thick pad of old cardboard boxes. Mutt, always and ever a direct-action kind of girl, was being very patient with all this lurking around. “Good girl,” Kate said softly. She squeezed the arm around Mutt’s neck. “Stay,” she said, and got to her feet.
Mutt got to her feet, too.
“No,” Kate said, putting as much force into her voice as she could without raising it. “Stay, Mutt. Stay.”
Even in the dark and in the shadow of the stack of totes, Mutt’s yellow eyes took on a stubborn sheen. “I mean it, Mutt. Stay.”
She waited until a forklift rumbled by and emerged from behind the totes in its wake. She walked down the dock—head down, brisk, assured stride—past the trawler. She didn’t see another boat parked past the trawler, but she was counting on whoever was on watch on the trawler not to look twice at her if she didn’t look like a girl and did look like she knew where she was going.
No one hailed her. She walked all the way down the dock to the end and found a ladder and started down it until her head was beneath the level of the dock. If someone was watching, with any luck they’d think her boat was too small to show, although if they’d thought about it for five seconds, they’d know it was high tide.
She counted to a hundred, one-Mississippi at a time, feet braced between a rung and the stringers. She’d pulled the hoodie’s sleeves down over her hands but the steel felt cold through them and even through the soles of her boots, and the air was colder even just those few feet closer to the water.
No one yelled or came to peer over the edge of the dock where she had last been seen. When she finished her
count, she climbed until just her head was just above the edge of the dock.
There was no movement on the trawler, no new lights. She climbed up the rest of the way and walked down the dock, keeping as close to its edge as she could without tripping on a cleat and pitching over the side. The last time she’d gone overboard in the Gulf of Alaska at this latitude she’d been wearing a survival suit. She didn’t care to repeat the experience a second time, with or without one.
When she got to the ladder that led down to the trawler she stepped on it without looking around and made her way down without haste. She stepped over the gunnel and onto the deck and proceeded to the rear of the house, the place she figured she was least likely to be seen by the casual eye, either from the dock or the wraparound windows of the bridge. The harbor was almost flat calm. A mooring line rubbed against a piling, a block rattled as the deck shifted, and there was as always the soft sound of water slapping against the hull, but the seagulls had headed for the barn long since and the rest was silence. Kate was grateful for the forklifts and tugs on the docks. With more luck, they would cover any inadvertent noise she made.
Or not. She heard a thump and looked up to see Mutt’s head peering inquisitively over the roof of the superstructure.
“Mutt!” she nearly shouted, and just barely didn’t.
The head disappeared. There was another thud and Mutt’s head peered over the aft deck of the house.
Kate was furious, in part because she couldn’t vent it in the pile of language that was backing up behind her clenched teeth.
There was the merest echo of paws on steel grating stairs, a small pause, and Mutt’s nose poked cautiously around the side of the house.
Kate glared at her.
Big yellow eyes blinked owlishly back.
There had been a moment late last fall when Kate and Mutt had had it out over who did what job in the partnership, and just how far backup went. Mutt had won that argument, with a pretty bold line drawn beneath it, too.
Restless in the Grave Page 28