Since any mention of Kate under whatever alias instantly raised Jim’s blood pressure twenty points, he ignored Baird’s comment and dutifully made out the deposit slip, totaling it twice because he didn’t believe the sum the first time. Baird stuffed slip and checks into the bib pocket of his filthy overalls and promptly forgot about them.
He would not think of Kate, not yet. He banished her completely and ruthlessly from his mind until he had time to deal with the fact of her presence—here, in Bering, at Baird Air for crissake, his employer for the duration of his TDY or until he uncovered the nefarious plot allegedly being brewed by the Russian Mafia on Bering’s front doorstep. The way he felt right now, this minute, he’d have it cleaned up and the perps in custody within twenty-four hours, no matter how unlikely he considered the possibility that Gamble’s assessment of the situation even approached accuracy. Russian Mafia in Bering. Christ.
He could feel the rage coming back in a great wave and he knew it had little to do with Russians or the FBI. He choked it back, not for the first time that day, and not for the last.
Fortunately, the job kept him busy, frantically so. Business at Baird Air was conducted at full speed and top decibel. Baird was everywhere, yelling, cursing, pushing Jim out of the way, shoving him in closer, head beneath the cowling of the Cub, fueling up on the wing of the DC-3, disappearing into the open maw of the Herc, backing up the forklift at full throttle, the warning beep ringing off the metal interior of the hangar and threatening its already perilous list.
In direct contrast to the aforementioned seedy appearance of the rest of the operation, the planes looked and sounded as if they were in excellent condition, well maintained and, if the affectionate slap he saw Baird give the flank of the Herc was any indication, well loved. The pilot in him approved.
He was awed by the Herc, an aircraft surrounded by myth. Viewed from one angle, it looked like a flying wing, from another like a pregnant whale. The Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft had been in production since 1956 in various incarnations. Originally designed as an assault troop transport, over the years they had been adapted for search and rescue, fire fighting and midair refueling. Hercs were the planes the National Weather Service flew into the middles of hurricanes to gauge the strength and direction of the storms, from the hurricanes’ very eyes.
A Herc was also one helluva freight hauler. Jim paused in his work to watch the rear of the Herc open up like a clamshell, the bottom half forming a ramp so Baird could drive forklift after forklift loaded with frozen salmon into the bowels of the plane. Baird was very careful with the forklift then; it never came within sneezing distance of the fuselage on either side.
Baird’s care extended to his tools, as Jim discovered when he went in search of a screwdriver. The tool crib was in the northwest corner of the hangar, the tools clean and oiled and very well organized in the multiple drawers of tall red metal tool cabinets, three of them. Every drawer had the names of the tools inside written on the front. There were also several parts lockers; they too were labeled and organized within an inch of their lives.
The roar of a jet on takeoff drew him to the door, and he looked out to see a 737 with no markings but black tail numbers too far away to read lift off from the end of the runway. No windows, had to be a freight plane, and one of the shorter, stubbier ones, too, probably a 200. Another plane was already taxiing for takeoff. He’d never seen so much air traffic in and out of one airport before in his life, not even at Merrill Field in Anchorage on a CAVU summer day. Or maybe it was just the variety of aircraft. On that first day he saw a Lockheed Electra, an old Connie, two other DC-3s, four Beavers, three on floats, seven twin Otters, although they all wore the same logo and in ten hours he could have seen the same one more than once, a couple of Navaho Apaches, two more 737s, one all-freight 727 and three all-passenger Fairchild Metroliners.
That didn’t even count the small planes, the Cubs and the Cessnas and the Lakes and the Stinsons and some models he didn’t recognize and wasn’t sure should be in the air they were so old. Once he thought he saw an open-cockpit biplane, although he was squinting into the sun at the time.
The pilots were on the ground long enough to drop one load and pick up another, and the engines never stopped running. Baird Air employed four pilots in all. The Cub pilot was a dour, angular man in his fifties who wore a cowboy hat that made him six inches taller than his already six feet. He introduced himself as Shep Whitfield, but Baird called him Tex. The Herc pilot, one Larry Maciarello, was five feet two, weighed at least two hundred pounds, looked like Pooh Bear and left a trail of M&M wrappers in his wake. The DC-3 pilot never stopped moving long enough for Jim to get a good look at him, much less catch his name, but the license posted in the office showed it to be Calvin Kemper. He only saw Ralph Whitmore, the Cessna pilot, from the back as he was trotting down to the dock to take off again. No one took a second look at Jim; Baird’s shouted introductions were usually productive of nothing more than a hand cupped behind an ear, a puzzled look, a dismissive shrug, and a shouted “Later!
The noise was loud and continuous, the already almost unendurable roar of planes on constant takeoff and landing reinforced by the music blaring out of tape decks and radios, by the screaming of thousands of birds, by backup signals beeping and heavy equipment loading and unloading freight and ferrying it from pickup to flatbed to hangar to yard to plane. The smell of fuel exhaust was constantly in his nostrils, the whine of engines constantly in his ears, and both seemed prepared to go on around the clock.
At eleven that night he was in the hangar strapping more boxes to yet another pallet when his stomach growled loudly enough to be heard in Anchorage, or at least loudly enough to be heard over the noise outside. Baird, glaring at a freight manifest that wouldn’t total, eyes narrowed against the smoke curling up from his stogie, looked up, startled. “Jesus! Dinner! I completely forgot!”
He climbed into the bright orange Chevy pickup with the flaking orange-and-white company logo on the side and was gone. By the time Jim finished strapping the pallet he was back, driving the pickup right into the hangar, bringing lasagna and green beans and salad in Styrofoam containers, one quart of Cherry Garcia, another of lemon sorbet (“That’s mine,” Baird growled) and a body bag in the back of the truck.
Jim, busy wolfing down the lasagna, which was amazingly good, thick, meaty, hot and loaded with cheese, didn’t notice the body bag at first. It was only when he finished and went to stuff the container into an overflowing garbage can that he glanced casually into the truck bed. It halted him in his tracks. “What the hell—”
He wheeled around. “Baird, is that what I think it is?” he demanded, pointing.
His voice was stern enough to raise Baird’s eyebrows. “It’s a body, what of it?”
“Whose body? And how the hell did it get to be in the back of your pickup?”
Baird grunted, shifted his stogie from the right corner of his mouth to the left, his chaw from his left cheek to his right and spat. The tobacco stains on the floor of the hangar were overpowered by years of spilled oil, but not by much. “Not that it’s any of your business, bub, but the Herc’s going on to Anchorage this morning at two A.M., and the last Alaska Airlines jet left at nine. We’re taking the body in for them.”
“For who?”
“For who? For the goddamn state, who else. Everybody who dies accidentally in Alaska has to get autopsied, and we don’t got us a corpse doctor here in beautiful downtown Bering.” He spat again.
“Why isn’t there a uniform with it?”
Up went the eyebrows again. “A uniform? You mean like maybe a cop?”
“No shit like maybe a cop,” Jim said, feeling his neck go red. He’d been looking for an excuse to lose his temper all day, and here was a dandy one, cut, dried and delivered to his doorstep. “There is such a thing as chain of evidence, you can’t just—” He shut up, suddenly conscious of Baird’s increasingly suspicious stare and well aware of already having said far to
o much.
“Chain of evidence,” Baird said, still staring. “What are you, some kind of defrocked lawyer?”
Jim was spared the necessity of answering by the arrival of a white Ford Suburban bearing the shield of the Alaska State Troopers. With more haste than grace he retreated into the rear of the hangar and busied himself with the arrangement of boxes in a tote, which required him to be head-down in the tote the whole time the trooper was there. He was supposed to make contact, but not here, and not now.
Baird’s voice growled something, a female voice answered, crisp and confident and self-assured. The door to the Suburban slammed and the engine started. He stood up in time to see it drive away.
Baird was looking at him. “You want to tell me what all that was about, boy?” he said, mildly enough.
Jim tried for a rueful grin. “Nope.”
It didn’t work. Baird’s eyes narrowed to tiny creases, lost between those pendulous cheeks. “Not running from the law, are you?” He paused, and added, “Churchill?”
Jim shook his head. “No, sir, I am not,” he said definitely.
Baird stared a moment longer, then shrugged. Jim had proved himself a hard worker. Besides which, he could add. In Bush Alaska in the summertime, that was more than enough to set the price of an employee far above rubies. The only real requirement was a pulse, and was frequently the only requirement a prospective employer could hope for. Over the years Baird had had his share of deadbeats on staff. He’d managed to acquire himself a live one here, and he wanted to keep him, and if that meant looking the other way when the law was around, he was okay with that. “Good to know,” he said, dismissing the subject, and put a period to it by pretending to examine the paperwork on the transport of the body left behind by the trooper.
Jim came up behind him and read over his shoulder. Yeah, the standard form for shipping a body to the lab. Baird’s greasy thumb was over the first part of the name of the deceased; it was the second half that held him transfixed. He took a deep breath, and with studied indifference said, “Who is this guy, anyway? What happened to him? What did he die from?”
Baird finished writing out the waybill and scribbled his signature at the bottom. “Fell off a boat tied up to the dock down on the river. One of them processor boats, so the deck was pretty high up. Trooper said his head looked like a squashed tomato. Yuk.”
He separated the copies of the waybill and thumbed the clip on the clipboard. Before the copy of the waybill covered it, Jim saw the name typed on the form in full.
He removed the clipboard from Baird’s hands.
“What the—”
“I just want to look,” Jim said, and again there was that unconscious authority in his voice that comes only from years on the job. It silenced Baird. He watched Jim read through the form once again.
No witnesses were listed, but then they wouldn’t be, this wasn’t an incident report. All it said was that the body of one Alex Burinin, having died an accidental death, was being released into the custody of the medical examiner for confirmation of cause of death, signed off by Trooper M. Zarr.
He unzipped the bag, ignoring Baird’s protest, and looked at the face. All dead faces looked like something out of Madame Tussaud’s, waxen and lifeless, soul and spirit on their way to somewhere else, but Jim recognized the features from the mug shot in the file Gamble had shown him, in spite of the fact that the top of the skull had been flattened to his eyebrows, forming such a beveled crown that comparisons to Frankenstein were irresistible. Someone had very kindly mopped up the blood, revealing a nose like the beak of a vulture, eyes set deeply into dark-skinned sockets, a chin so weak Jim was surprised he hadn’t grown a beard to hide it; a chin, again according to Gamble’s files, Alexei Burianovich had made a career out of disproving.
He zipped up the bag and turned to Baird, ready with an innocuous explanation of his interest, when he saw Kate standing in the open hangar. She looked tense, and tired, as if she hadn’t had much sleep. Too bad.
Mutt stood next to her, shoulder to knee. They were a pair, a duet, a unit entire unto themselves.
He realized he was staring, and made a business out of fussing over the body bag’s zipper.
Baird noticed, and looked around. “Hey, Sovalik.” He looked at his watch, surprised. “God damn, is it midnight already?” He shook his head and offered a grin. “Time flies when you’re having fun, don’t it? Churchill?”
Again with the slightest hesitation before the name, Jim noticed. Damn it all anyway, he wasn’t a day on the job and his cover was already compromised. It was all Kate’s fault, he thought, and the rage came back as if it had never been away.
“Well,” Baird said cheerfully, taking no notice of either the red creeping slowly into Jim’s face or Kate’s silence, “I’m going to go catch me some Z’s. You hand over to Kathy, she’ll show you the bunkhouse. You’re due back on duty at noon. Don’t be late or I’ll fire your ass.”
This was a threat so hollow the words rang off the insides of themselves, but no one said so. Jim helped him move the body to a pallet, and Baird climbed into the pickup and was off without further ado.
Kate stood where she was, silent, still enveloped with that eerie patience. She could wait for him to talk first, she could wait for doomsday to arrive. No hurry.
Yes. An entirely different Kate Shugak.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t like her much, either, at the moment.
“The Cub’s at the tiedown outside,” he said curtly. “The Cessna’s overnighting at Russian Mission; they’re scheduled to take off for Kaliganek after daylight, then back here. The DC-3 is in Dillingham, and the Here’s inbound from Aniak and scheduled to make a fish run to Anchorage for Northwest Packers at two A.M.” He nodded at the truck. “Got a full load, including the body.”
“The what?” She peered down at the body bag as if she had never seen one before.
He handed her the clipboard. “I’m assuming you know the drill.”
“Yes, I—What the hell are you so pissed off about?” she demanded, her voice rising, and for the first time there was a hint of the old Kate Shugak in it. “I don’t owe you any explanations. I don’t owe anybody any explanations, but I especially don’t owe one to you.”
He stared intently over her head at a section of hangar wall with nothing of interest on it but a calendar featuring Miss Socket Wrench in a provocative pose with a three-sixteenth box end. “Where’s the bunkhouse?”
A brief silence. “This way.”
They detoured through the office to pick up his duffel bag. He tripped over the coffee table again; she avoided it with the habit of long practice and led him around the side of the hangar to yet another ramshackle building that was little more than a plywood and two-by-four shack with two bunks, a table and a stove. So far as utilities went, there was electricity, and that was all there was. “Is there a shower?”
She jerked her head. “There’s a community shower up at the terminal. Say you work for Baird and they won’t charge you.” She gestured at the shelves on the wall above the table. “There’s fixings for sandwiches, the hot plate for coffee or soup. There’s a water faucet the other side of the hangar. You know where the outhouse is?” He nodded. “Okay, that’s everything, I guess. You—”
“Fine. Thanks. Good night.” He more or less shoved her outside and shut the door in her face.
An hour later he’d showered, shaved and eaten a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. He brewed a cup of coffee and stretched out on the left top bunk to drink it. He finished the coffee, read ten pages of the latest John Grisham thriller without retaining a word, and turned off the light.
Half an hour later he turned it back on. He was too physically exhausted to relax—he hadn’t done this much manual labor since the physical training at the trooper academy—and it didn’t help that the Herc was taxiing up to the hangar, its low-throated, wallowing roar rattling the tin on the roof. His bunk was too short, too, and it was too light out.
The sun wouldn’t be up until five-thirty, but it never got very dark at this time of year, and there were no curtains on the bunkhouse’s windows, although they were dirty enough to block out most of the light.
It didn’t help either that the woman he had last seen ten months before, bruised and bleeding and cradling the body of her dead lover in her arms, was working a hundred feet from where he lay at this very moment, evidently whole and sane and very much all right in spite of the fears of family and friends. Why this should irritate him more than he was already he didn’t know, but it did and he embraced it with enthusiasm.
Until he discovered to his fury that he had an erection. Son of a bitch.
“Where were you when I needed you?” he demanded, looking at his lap. “Where were you when Carroll was in my office? Where were you on the plane in? Where were you at goddamn Alaska Geographic?”
The hell with this. He bounced to the floor and yanked his clothes on and slammed outside with no very clear idea of where he was going. Kate was loading a pallet with the body bag strapped to it into the Herc. Mutt was asleep with her nose under her tail on a rug in front of the office, and Jim took advantage of the noise of the Herc’s engines to slip by unnoticed.
A rutted gravel road led around the lake that served as a seaplane base, unsignposted and, if the grass growing in the ruts and the occasional mudhole that had been reclaimed by the surrounding swamp were any indication, underused. It looked neglected and abandoned. It suited his mood exactly, and he set off, seeing how far his legs could stretch. After a hard day’s labor, it felt good to move without bending, stooping, lifting heavy objects, or needing to dodge out of the way of Baird’s unpredictably driven forklift.
The sky was that pale mauve that characterized Arctic summer nights at the more southerly latitudes, where the sun actually went down for a few hours. The horizon stretched on forever, unsettling to a man used to mountains taking up more than their share of sky. He passed a small clump of alders, a lone diamond willow. The rest of the landscape was covered in tall grass, where it wasn’t a lake or a marsh, or a stream draining one into the other, or both into the Kuskokwim.
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