“Wind ’er up, we’re good to go.”
Lester nodded and leaned back. The engines, which had never been all the way shut down, began to whine louder.
“Welcome aboard,” McGuire said. “Our flight time to Newenham will be one hour and forty minutes. We have six emergency exits, four window exits, the forward door and the aft baggage door.” He pointed. “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop out of the overhead. Put yours on first before helping anyone else. There is a life vest under each seat and two life rafts under the couch. Please read the safety briefing cards.” He pulled one out of a seat pocket and held it up. He made eye contact with each of his passengers, even the ones in handcuffs. “Everybody fasten your seat belts. It was a little bumpy coming in but nothing to worry about.”
“Make one hell of a flight attendant,” Kate said, not quite under her breath.
He ignored her, and nodded at Shorty and Boyd, already strapped into the last row, Mutt sitting guard between them. “We have any problems, you’re responsible for getting them out,” he said to Mason.
Mason nodded. “Understood.” Mutt wagged her tail.
“You two,” McGuire said to Shorty and Boyd. “You want to make a break for it, wait till we’re back on the ground. Start anything in the air on my plane and I promise you you will have the privilege of personally experiencing downward velocity at thirty-two feet per second, without benefit of aircraft. Understood?”
Boyd and Shorty nodded, dazed expressions indicating they thought they might have somehow wandered into the middle of a major motion picture.
“Let me take that,” McGuire said to Jean, and buckled her pitiful amount of luggage into an empty chair. Jean stared up at him, rapt. “Here, let me help you with that,” he said, and buckled Jean in, too. He eyeballed everyone one more time and nodded. “You saw the head on the way in. I’ll tell you when it’s okay to use it. There are soft drinks in the cooler”—he pointed again—“help yourself.”
“Sorry, how long to Newenham again?” Kate said.
“An hour and forty minutes.”
She had to grin.
“What?”
She nodded at Boyd, who scowled. “Took us four hours in the other direction yesterday.”
“Smaller plane?”
“Much.”
He smiled. “Sometimes it’s good to be king.”
He went forward, and everyone in the passenger section craned their necks to watch him climb into the right seat, including Kate and Mutt. Except Mason, who was thumbing notes on his smartphone.
They taxied out onto the runway, the engines wound to a scream, and the craft lunged forward as if launched from a pad at Cape Canaveral. They were airborne and climbing steeply a few seconds later. Maybe it was the size of the plane that gave the illusion of excessive speed, but Kate felt she had never slipped the surly bonds of earth more rapidly. Through her window she watched Adak drop away.
She felt a touch on her elbow, and looked around.
“I didn’t think I’d ever get out of that shithole,” Jean said. “I owe you.”
Kate shook her head. “Paid in full.”
The other woman was still a little befuddled. “Doesn’t seem like enough.” She ran wondering hands over the cream leather arms of her chair. “I’ve never been on a plane before in my life.”
Kate, that compleat Alaskan, was incredulous. “Where are you from, anyway?”
“Anacortes. I came up on a crab boat. The skipper, he seemed to think … Anyway, I jumped ship in Adak.” Her smile was more a grimace. “Been trying to get out ever since.”
“How long were you stuck there?” Kate said.
“Eighteen months, thirteen days,” Jean said. “And about twenty hours.”
Kate took note of the averted eyes, the tightened mouth, and let it be. Jean hadn’t struck Kate as the victim type, but then she’d met a lot of women in Jean’s situation who fit that description, both personally and professionally. “I don’t know that you’ll like Newenham any better than Adak, but it’s closer to Anchorage and cheaper to get out of.” She paused, thinking. “If you feel like staying, I might have a job for you.”
Jean looked around again at that. “You’re kidding.”
“No guarantees, but I think so. It’s bartending, something you know how to do. Pay’s not bad and the tips are good. Boss seems like a good person, a little cranky, but fair. Her boyfriend—” She rolled her eyes. “He’s obnoxious but good entertainment value. No promises, but I might also know a place for you to stay, too.”
Jean’s eyes filled with tears, embarrassing them both. Kate turned in some haste and tapped Mason on the shoulder. When he looked around she jerked her thumb at the front row. He followed her and took the seat across from her, and they put their heads together. “A few things you should know,” she said, and filled him in on the events of the past week, including two instances of B&E, which she thought was deserving of some praise for her candor, considering the Fifth Amendment and all.
The special agent did not appear to share her sentiments. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.
“Then don’t,” she said. “I hear the rule on this aircraft is no fighting at forty-five thousand feet.”
He was steaming. “You do understand fruit of the poisoned tree, right?”
“I’m a private investigator,” she said. “It was mostly a favor for a friend of a friend, and all I did was follow my nose. I wasn’t looking for an international arms-smuggling ring. It’s just what I found.”
“What about him?” He nodded toward the cockpit.
“Campbell wouldn’t have sent him if he thought he was involved.” Kate thought about it. “Or maybe he would. So what? We needed a ride. We got one.”
Twenty-nine
JANUARY 22
Newenham
An hour and forty minutes to the second later, they touched down at the Newenham airport. Mason spent the first part of the flight trying to bring Kate to an appreciation of the error of her ways, and abandoned the attempt only when she pretended to doze off in her very comfortable chair. Mason sighed and moved to the rear of the cabin, where he played Let’s Make a Deal with Boyd and Shorty.
She did fall asleep then, and didn’t wake up until McGuire touched her shoulder.
“What?” She blinked around. “We’re there? Wow. I didn’t even feel us land.”
McGuire’s smile was beatific. Kate looked at Lester, standing behind McGuire, and said, “If I’d known you were going to let him fly, I’d have spent the entire flight holding the plane up in the air by the seat cushion.”
“When you know Gabe better, you’ll know nobody lets him do anything,” Lester said.
“Sadly, I have no intention of getting to know him better,” Kate said, and brushed past both Lester and the twinkle in his eye.
They were parked in front of Finn Grant’s old hangar. Campbell was waiting. So was the ninja master, with his truck, Kate hoped only for the necessary extra transportation services.
Kate heard the scraping sound of a hangar door opening, and turned to see Tina Grant standing in the opening, Oren Grant standing at her shoulder. She thought she saw a third figure in the shadows behind them, probably Fred. On the facing wall between the door and the roof, the Bristol Bay Air Freight logo was still faintly visible beneath the overlay of the more flamboyant Eagle Air’s.
She nudged Mason. “Grant’s wife and son. And brother back of them, I think.”
Boyd and Shorty were being put into Campbell’s vehicle. They didn’t yell to Tina and Oren for help, and Tina and Oren didn’t come bustling out to offer any.
Mason turned his back to the hangar and spoke to Campbell in a low voice. “You got anybody at the terminal will tell you if any of the Grants buy a ticket out of town? Or roll out an airplane, I hear nearly everyone in the family’s a pilot.”
“I can make a call,” Campbell said. “But the only Grant pilot left is Evelyn, and she’s in
the hospital.”
“What about Fred?” Kate said.
Both men looked around. “Finn’s brother,” Kate said.
Campbell looked chagrined. “Forgot about Fred.” He shook his head. “Everybody always forgets about Fred.”
“Look pretty foolish if the whole family was in on it and we let them get away.”
Campbell sighed. “Okay. I’ll make a call to Naknek, too, just to be on the safe side. Fred lives in Naknek, although he’s been in Newenham every other day since his brother died. I know the trooper there pretty well, and he owes me a couple.”
“Thanks, Liam.”
“You two do know each other,” Kate said. “How?”
They got into Liam’s vehicle without answering and drove off.
“Irritating,” McGuire said.
Kate jumped. “Could you at least clear your throat or something to let me know when you’re standing right next to me?”
“How else am I supposed to find out anything, you being so forthcoming and all?” he said.
“Nothing you need to know,” Kate said, and started for Moses’ truck. Jean was already sitting in it, and Mutt was in the back.
McGuire caught her elbow, bringing her to a halt and, did he but know it, lucky to escape with his hand still attached. Kate did not take kindly to being manhandled. “I just let you thumb an eight-hundred-mile lift,” he said mildly, although his eyes were beginning to spark. “I figure the least you can do is be civil to me.”
“I am civil to you,” Kate said.
It surprised a laugh out of him. “God help me if you ever start being rude.”
“Mr. McGuire,” Kate said, “I appreciate the ride, really, I do. We would have been stuck in Adak for four days waiting on the next commercial flight, or the next Coastie Herc, whichever came first, if you hadn’t flown down to pick us up. Either way, it would have been a much slower and much less comfortable ride. But I’m not going to be here much longer, and there isn’t much point in furthering a friendship that isn’t going to last a day longer than necessary.” She started toward the truck again.
McGuire caught up and stood in front of her, forcing her to a halt. “Okay,” Kate said, glad to feel her temper flare, “just who the hell do you—?”
“You wanna know what I think?” McGuire said, leaning down so that their noses almost touched. “I think you’re terrified. I think you’re just as attracted to me as I am to you, and because you think of me as a face on a magazine cover, and in spite of that self-confidence you clank around in like a suit of armor, I think you don’t know what to do about it. So you act hostile so I won’t make any moves and you don’t have to deal with it.”
She looked him firmly in the eye and said what she should have found a way to insert into their first conversation. “Mr. McGuire, flattered as I am by your star-studded attention, as any red-blooded American female would be, I’m in a relationship.”
His eyes stared into hers. She set her teeth and wouldn’t blink no matter how much her eyes stung.
He straightened up but he didn’t move away. “So you say,” he said.
Nothing got Kate’s back up faster than when she was accused of lying. Especially when she was telling the truth.
She was pretty sure.
She marched around him and over to Moses’ pickup and wrenched open the passenger-side door. Mutt was already in the back. Jean took one look at Kate’s set expression and scooted over to the middle of the seat, saying absolutely nothing that might direct any of that her way. Moses, looking his usual pissed off, said, “You done playing patty-cake with the movie star?”
Thirty
JANUARY 22
Newenham
They took Jean to Bill’s, who raised an eyebrow at Kate. “Nice to see you alive.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, “sorry about that. Things, well, escalated. Also, I quit.”
“Really,” Bill said. “You’re done here? That didn’t take long.”
“I think so,” Kate said.
“You don’t sound all that sure.”
“I’m sure,” Kate said firmly. “This is Jean, by the way. She’s an experienced bartender, and she needs a job.”
Bill looked Jean over. “You going to stick around a little longer than my last hired help?”
Jean blinked, and was hired.
“The bones are restless,” Moses said, taking a stool.
Kate looked at him.
“The bones out of the grave,” Moses said. “They’re coming up the cellar stairs.” Somewhere between the airport and Bill’s, his usual irritable attitude had vanished, to be replaced by what appeared to be resignation.
Bill’s cornflower blue, impossibly young eyes went wide. Jean was uncomprehending but frightened anyway. Even Mutt’s ruff went up a little at his words. Kate was the first to recover enough to speak. “I don’t know what you mean, Uncle,” she said, and only the two of them were conscious that this was the first time she had accorded him the honorific.
He looked at her. “You can ignore them for only so long, but sooner or later, they will pull the door open and get out.” He looked at Bill. “I need a beer, babe. I need a lot of beers.”
Without a word Bill went behind the bar, opened the refrigerator, and started lining them up.
“Okay if I borrow your pickup, Uncle?” Kate said to his back. “I won’t be long.”
He waved his hand without turning around.
Kate touched Jean’s arm. At the door, Kate realized that Mutt wasn’t with them and turned.
The 140-pound half wolf–half husky was standing on her hind legs, her forepaws on Moses’s stool, her nose pressed against his cheek, a low sound that was neither whine nor growl rumbling up out of her breast. Across the bar, Bill watched both of them with a bleak expression.
“Mutt,” Kate said.
Mutt waited a moment longer and then gave Moses a big, juicy lick up the side of his face, provoking a roar of profanity that was almost Bobby-worthy.
Satisfied with having made her presence felt, Mutt romped across the floor and shouldered her way out the door.
Kate’s eyes met Bill’s.
If she was not mistaken, the older woman’s eyes were filled with tears.
* * *
The apartment over the Grant garage was a palace by comparison to the hovel Jean had been sharing in Adak. “The rent’s paid up through the end of the month,” Kate said. “So is the ATV.”
Jean’s tongue became unstuck long enough to say, “What about the landlady? Is she going to be okay with this?”
Kate thought about Tina Grant, the wealthiest woman in Newenham, the woman with the dead daughter, the dead husband, the daughter in the hospital, and the worthless son. “Long as you pay her in cash.”
Jean was almost inarticulate with gratitude. “I don’t know when I can pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “I’m going to be reimbursed for my expenses.” She hoped. She stuffed her few belongings in her pack. “The ATV’s parked under the stairs, the keys are on the hook here.”
“Hey,” Jean said.
Kate stopped on the stairs, hand on the doorknob.
“It was bad in Adak,” Jean said. “Really bad.”
“I had a feeling,” Kate said.
“I owe you,” Jean said.
“You owe yourself,” Kate said.
Kate pulled up at the trooper post and Mutt, remembering good hunting from the last visit, vanished once more into the underbrush in pursuit of the not-so-elusive ptarmigan.
Inside, Campbell and Mason were interrogating Boyd. She dropped her pack in a corner and perched on the vacant desk.
Boyd, sweating profusely, was loud and repetitive in denying any knowledge of the contents of the totes. “They were sealed when they were loaded onto the aircraft in Anchorage,” he said. “All Finn hired me to do was fly the plane from Anchorage to Adak, with a fuel stop in Newenham.”
“Where did the load originate?” Mason as
ked.
“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “My job was to haul the freight from Anchorage to Adak. That’s all.”
“Were you going to be flying the bigger planes when Grant bought them?” Kate said. “And didn’t you tell me yesterday that you were a partner in Eagle Air?”
Boyd wouldn’t look at her, and didn’t answer.
“What bigger planes?” Mason asked.
“The girl, Tasha Anayuk, out at Eagle Air, told me yesterday that Finn was buying some bigger planes. She didn’t get more specific.”
Everyone looked at Boyd. This time he gave Kate a look that should have turned her into a crispy critter on the spot and said, “I want a lawyer.”
Kate laughed. “You need one.” She looked at Mason. “Finn Grant has been shipping stolen American arms and selling them to buyers in Asia. He started out small, perfecting the route and proving he could deliver.” She glanced at Boyd. “From what Boyd let drop, the pilots he hired were mostly ex-military, disillusioned with the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they had any qualms, pretty sure they went away when he offered them an ownership stake in the company. I’m guessing there was a pretty nice profit-sharing plan.”
“Bitch,” Boyd said.
Kate beamed at him. “My middle name.” She looked back at Mason. “He bought Chinook Air Force Base with an eye toward making large deliveries on big planes. The bigger the plane, the more cargo he could ship, and the more cargo, the higher the profit margin. It’s simple economics. Also, and what I think would have been more important to him, the bigger the plane, the longer the range. It would also mean he could lift the arms from a base, say on the West Coast, Washington, Oregon maybe, direct to Newenham, thereby bypassing Anchorage altogether. Anchorage, as it does, playing host to way too many nosy federal agents, FBI, U.S. Customs, like that.” She paused, and added, “If you aren’t already, I’d be looking for a base of operations on the West Coast. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just a big warehouse on a commercial airport with enough traffic for Eagle Air flights not to cause comment.”
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