Moses busied himself changing into street clothes. “I was in the navy, stationed at Subic Bay. Took my first liberty in Hong Kong. I got up early the first morning, started wandering around, found a bunch of people in a park doing it. Looked interesting, so I went up and talked to the leader afterward. Turns out he’d escaped from mainland China with some American missionaries. He told me what he was doing, the Yang style, and he ran me through the form a couple of times. When I got back to base I looked for a teacher, found one in Manila.” He shrugged.
“What do you like about it so much?”
Moses buttoned his shirt, considering. “I like the control it gives me, and the connection it makes between me and the elements. And,” he added casually, “the voices don’t hassle me so much when I’m doing form. Sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me through the night. What’d you find out about Gary Gruber?”
“How did you—”
“I know pretty much everything there is worth knowing, boy, how many times do I have to tell you? He didn’t kill Bob for Laura, did he?”
“No. Or at least, not entirely.”
“Big wad of cash in his account?”
Liam, who had been trained to talk trooper business only with troopers, and sometimes not even with them, said to this strange old man, “Yeah. Paid in the week before herring. Drawn on Cecil Wolfe’s business account.”
Moses grinned. “Trust Cecil to figure out a way to claim murder as a business expense.”
“Yeah. Nice to know I wasn’t completely off base when I fingered Wolfe for killing Bob DeCreft.”
“Even you have to get something right once in a while,” Moses agreed.
“I took too long to get there, though. I was so afraid Wy was guilty I couldn’t see my way clear to who was. And I should have known Wolfe would never have done it himself. Didn’t fit the pattern. He sent Mulder to wreck Wy’s plane, the rest of his crew to sink McCormick’s boat and beat him up. The only time he took direct action was when he shorted Wy on her check, and he knew he was safe enough there because she wouldn’t be able to complain without explaining why she’d been shorted. If she did that, she’d never get hired by another herring fisherman ever again.”
Moses finished changing clothes and in the process from sifu back into shaman. “He might not even have meant to kill DeCreft. He might have just wanted to scare him. Maybe let DeCreft know that Wolfe knew DeCreft was spotting for two.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Liam said, reluctant to concede Wolfe even a negative virtue.
“Doesn’t matter what he meant.” Moses cocked an eyebrow. “Could have killed Wy as easy as Bob.” He stared hard at the horizon before delivering judgment. “In a way, you could say Cecil killed himself. He set the process in motion—he bribed Gruber to sabotage the plane, DeCreft gets killed, Cecil takes advantage of his death to rape Laura, Becky finds out and kills him. Yeah, you could say he killed himself.”
You could, Liam thought, if you ignored the fact that Wy and DeCreft had been double-crossing Wolfe to begin with. “Anyway, Gruber had been on Wolfe’s payroll for a long time. I had them pull Gruber’s account for the last couple of years. When he first came to Newenham to spot herring, he was spotting for Cecil.”
Moses nodded. “Figures.” They sat in silence for a moment. “So the way it looks, Gruber being in love with Laura Nanalook and all, Wolfe paid Gruber to do what he wanted to do anyway.”
“It looks like it. They’re both dead, so we’ll never know the whole story.”
“We won’t miss em, either one of them.”
From the tall white spruce across the road, a big black raven croaked agreement. Looking up at him, Liam thought he looked like the angel of death, shiny and black and so very well fed. “Three deaths the first week I’m in town,” he said. “People are going to think I’m a blight on the community.”
Moses grinned. “Sorry, boy, you just ain’t that powerful. Or that important,” he added with a bark of laughter.
Again the raven echoed him, with a sound eerily similar to Moses’ rusty laugh: caw, caw, caw.
“That damn raven—what is he, your familiar or something?” Liam said irritably. “I see him everywhere you go.”
“No you don’t,” Moses said testily, “you see him everywhere you go. He’s not mine, he’s yours.”
“What?”
Moses got to his feet and dusted off the seat of his pants. “He’s yours. He looks to you. Poor bastard.”
Liam didn’t know who Moses was referring to, him or the raven.
Moses leveled an admonitory finger. “You watch out for him—he’s a trickster, like all of his kind. He’ll bring you the sun and the stars, but you give him a chance and he’ll steal your woman away, too. Why didn’t you kill him?”
“What?” Liam said, off balance. “Who? The raven?”
“The man who killed your wife. Why didn’t you kill him?”
The shaman’s eyes were bright and penetrating. Liam felt pinned to a board, with no means of escape but the truth.
Well, what was the truth? He wasn’t sure he knew anymore, and he’d been there. “I suppose you mean when I arrested him, after he got out.”
“Six months he did,” Moses said. “For driving drunk and killing your son and putting your wife in the coma that eventually killed her. You must have been mad.”
“Mad?” Liam turned the word over in his mind. “Mad? I don’t know. I couldn’t believe it when I pulled him over and ran his plates. I couldn’t believe it was him. And then when I walked up to the car, and saw him. He knew it was me; he recognized me from the courtroom.” He paused. “He started to cry, and beg.” He looked at Moses. “He opened his door and fell out onto the road and crouched down on his knees, shivering and sobbing, snot running from his nose.”
“And drunk,” Moses said.
“And drunk,” Liam said. “I wasn’t mad, I was disgusted. I wanted to kill him, all right. I wanted to pull out my gun and put him out of his misery.”
“He probably did, too,” Moses said. “Better you didn’t, though.”
Liam looked at him. “Thanks, Moses,” he said with real gratitude. “You’re the first person to say that to me. Everybody else seems to think Dyson should have been shot while resisting arrest. You should see what it’s like when I go into headquarters. There isn’t a trooper I know who can look at me without contempt.”
“Bullshit,” Moses said bluntly. “You did what was right, for you, for Dyson. Even for Jenny and Charlie. Don’t matter what anyone else thinks, boy, only you. And your shoulders are big enough to carry the load. So carry it.”
The old man stamped off to his truck. The engine turned over and the window rolled down. “Remember,” the old man shouted. “Raven’ll steal your woman and everything else that matters along with her, but only if you let him.”
He slammed the truck into first. “Don’t let him!”
The truck lunged off down the road, leaving Liam sitting on the steps, staring up at the raven, eyes bright with malicious knowledge, beak sharp and polished, ebony feathers smooth and gleaming.
“So?” he said. “Mind telling me what I do now?”
It croaked at him.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
The next Liam Campbell novel is available now. Turn the page for a preview…
Acknowledgments
About Dana Stabenow
The Liam Campbell Series
The Kate Shugak Series
Also by Dana Stabenow
An Invitation from the Publisher
—
What's next for Liam? So Sure of Death.
Here’s how it begins:
So Sure of Death
“Now, there is the sound of someone not flying his own plane.”
“Shut up and breathe.”
Wyanet Chouinard sank obediently into a modified Horse Stance as the float plane roared overhead. She was a grown woman, the owner and proprietor of her own air taxi service
and the mother of a soon-to-be-adopted son. She didn’t have to take orders from anyone, but she would from this one old man.
The old man was Moses Alakuyak, short, thick through the chest and shoulders, with his Yupik mother’s brown skin and flat cheekbones and hints of his unknown Anglo father in his height, in the high bridge of his nose, the roundness of his eyes, the suppressed curl and color of his hair. Some called him a shaman. Some called him a drunk. On occasion, he was both, and neither.
This morning he was a teacher of tai chi, a sifu, and he demanded his student’s full attention and submission. He got it, too, the little despot, Wy thought without rancor. He was standing to her left and a step behind. She could feel his eyes on her, checking the level of her hands, the depth of the cup of her palms, the tilt of her chin, the angle behind her bent knees, the straightness of her spine, the focus of her eyes.
“Lower,” he said. “How’n hell you supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles for the real work if you don’t push them in Horse Stance?”
She made a silent and anatomically impossible suggestion as to where he could put his Horse Stance, and bent her knees, which after ten minutes were starting to tremble, to a deeper angle. Her center of gravity seemed off, and she swayed back an inch or so. There. She was supposed to feel the balls and heels of her feet rooted to the earth, the crown of her head suspended from a string. Root from below, suspend from above. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids lowered, her gaze unfocused on the horizon.
The sneaky little son of a bitch waited until she was completely engrossed in the first position of the Yang style of tai chi chuan before he brought out the big gun. “How long you gonna wait before you talk to Liam again?”
She couldn’t control the start his words gave her, but she could—and did—bite down on her verbal response. She said nothing, trying to recapture the peace of mind that had been hers only moments before.
“It’s going on three months, Wy,” Moses said. He stood upright and walked around to face her. “Too stubborn, is that it? Too damn proud to make the first move?”
She stayed in position, staring straight ahead as if she could bore through his skull with her eyes. If only.
He waited. He was good at it. It was six a.m. on a sunny Sunday morning in July. The birds were singing or honking or chirping or croaking. At the foot of the cliff the massive Nushagak River moved by with stately unconcern. Wy had a six-week contract to fly supplies into an archaeological dig ten miles west of Chinook Air Force Base. Moses had volunteered to take Tim to his fish camp upriver for the silver run, away from the rough crowd of boys he had fallen in with during the school year. He’d learn to run a fish wheel, salt eggs, fillet and smoke salmon and, she hoped, realize what a rush it was to earn money of his own. Best of all, he’d be out of the reach of his birth mother, who was prone to fly in from Ualik and, after a night at the bars, shove her way into Wy’s house and demand Tim’s return, even if the last time he’d been in her custody he’d wound up in the hospital, broken, bruised and bleeding.
All in all, the next month looked positively rosy, especially when she compared it to the previous three years. She was marginally solvent, content in her work and her family, and if the lawyer handling Tim’s adoption called a little too frequently for more money, it was summertime and the flying was frantic. She could hear the cash register ringing on every takeoff and the cash drawer sliding out on every landing.
So what if it was three months since she’d spoken to Liam Campbell? There were other fish in the sea, and in particular, there were a whole hell of a lot of other fish in Bristol Bay, with and without fins. The small voice that pointed out that she had allowed only Liam to swim up her stream and spawn could and would be ignored. She was content. She used the word like a mantra. She didn’t need anything more—or anyone else—to complicate her life.
Wy became aware that her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and made a conscious effort to relax.
Moses, naturally, persisted in attempting to suck the well-being right out of her. “You want him. He wants you.” Her sifu snorted. “And it sure as hell ain’t like you’re getting it anywhere else.”
“I have Tim to consider.” Her voice had a pronounced edge to it.
Moses pounced. “Give your menfolks a tad more credit than that, Wy. Liam’s a grown man, and he had a son of his own. He knows how to handle kids. And as for Tim, hell, having a man—the same man—around on a regular basis would be a new experience for him. Would teach him all men don’t get drunk and hit. A good thing for him to learn, I’d ’ve thought. Of course, that’s just me.”
Wy felt her teeth clamp together again. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh, really? How did you mean it, exactly?”
Her neck got warm. “I meant that I have to look good to the adoption board. They look at your lifestyle, at your habits.”
“Ah.” Moses gave a judicious nod. “I see. So the adoption board won’t let kids go to prospective parents who have the audacity to have healthy, normal lives of their own.”
The warmth seeped from her neck up into her cheeks.
Moses’ eyebrows, thick and black, rose into interrogatory points. “Anything to say about that? Besides ‘I’m sorry for trying to bullshit you, Sifu’?”
She hadn’t.
“Good,” he said briskly. “On your feet.”
She rose shakily to her full height, five feet eight inches; five inches taller than Moses, not that it ever seemed like that much of an advantage. Her dark blond hair, streaked with gold by the summer sun, had come loose from its ponytail. Thankful to have something to do with her hands, she made a business out of tying it up again. That done, there was nowhere to run. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and sought refuge in work. “I’ve got an early morning flight, I’d better get going.”
“You said some harsh things to each other in May,” Moses said to her retreating back. “Hurtful things. Especially you.”
That did it. She spun around, her face furious with anger, shame and guilt. “I handed him my heart and he ate it for lunch. I am not on the dinner menu!”
Pleased with what she felt was a splendid exit line, she turned to march up the stairs and into her house.
From behind her she heard Moses’ voice, acerbic and irascible as always. “How about dessert?”
The slam of the door was his answer.
The old man sighed and shook his head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”
He waited for the voices to kick in. For a change, they didn’t. Mostly they were insistent, forceful, regular spiritual bulldozers, determined to make him a legend in his own time.
He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked at the beach below, strewn with boulders and tree trunks, the occasional fifty-five-gallon drum, the odd Styrofoam cooler. It wasn’t that far down, but far enough. He could shut the voices up for good. That option had always been open to him, from the time he first heard them when he was twelve and they made him tell his mother that his father was going to kill her. She didn’t listen, of course, no one ever did, but that didn’t make the voices let up any.
They seldom told him anything straight out, though, and they had a marked tendency to be both insistent and peremptory. Sometimes he wondered if, in seventy-eight years of a very full life, he had perhaps acquired enough wisdom to make his own judgments, his own rulings, his own estimates of what kind of trouble his extended family, stretching from Newenham to Nome, needed his help to get out of.
Not that anyone ever looked happy when they saw him coming. Foresight, the open eye that looked inward to the future, was more of a curse than a blessing. Uilililik, the Little Hairy Man who snatched up children and took them away, never to be seen again, was more welcome in the villages than he was.
He thought of Cassandra, and sighed again. Doomed forever to tell the truth, and equally doomed forever to be disbelieved. She’d died young. Lucky for her. He stepped back from the edge of the cliff, from the
fifty-foot drop to the vast expanse of southward-moving water. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
As he walked around the old but well-maintained house set twenty-five feet from the cliff’s edge, he thought about the float plane on a short final for the elongated, freshwater lake that served as Newenham’s seaplane base. Wy had been right; that had definitely been someone not flying their own plane. There was no need to be at full RPMs on final; it didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise and move up the time for an overhaul. Hell, there was no need to be at full RPMs after takeoff, or at least not for long. Once the plane was in the air the pilot should back off on the throttle and the prop pitch. If he didn’t, the mini-sonic booms generated by the tip of the prop exceeding the speed of sound were enough to rattle windowpanes for a mile in every direction. The sound was a dead giveaway that the guy or the gal on the yoke didn’t have to pay to fix his or her own engine. Or had enough money not to care about maintenance costs.
But this pilot—ah, now, this pilot. Moses smacked his lips and grinned. There had been a gold shield on the pilot-side door, bright with gilt. Wyanet Chouinard might fancy herself content with her life, but she was about to receive a first-class wake-up call. Good.
Meanwhile, he squinted at the sun. Seven-thirty, he estimated, give or take five minutes. “About time for a beer.”
He might not be able to drown the voices, but he could and would drown them out, at least for a time.
· · ·
He heard Charlie crying and sat up to go to him. A solid object whacked him in the forehead. “Ouch! Shit!”
Liam Campbell sat in the narrow bunk, rubbing his head. While his vision cleared, he remembered that he was still sleeping on board a twenty-eight-foot Bristol Bay gillnetter that had seen better decades. Since moving onto the Dawn P, he had begun to think longingly of his office chair, which had served as his bed for the first month of his posting to Newenham, in spite of the fact that the chair had a tendency to roll out from under him at three in the morning. At least his office had a higher ceiling than the low bulkhead on this frigging boat. And it didn’t smell like an old, wet wool sock.
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