Dana Stabenow - Fire And Ice

Moses regarded him impatiently. "Ain't never going to be a good time to make the break, boy. Your situation, painful though it is, aggravating though it is, is familiar to you. You've become comfortable in it. You don't want to make a mess, create fuss and inconvenience. Tell you something." The shaman, if that was what he was, snorted a laugh. "Tell you a lot of things, because I know a lot of things, but right now listen to this." Moses drained his fourth beer, and pointed to it for emphasis. "Life isn't neat. Know why? Because it's run by imperfect people who make messes, who then have to go around cleaning up after themselves." Moses gave Liam a severe once-over. "You're not much of a cleaner-upper, are you, boy?"

Liam could feel the heat rising up beneath his skin. All he could think of to say was "You don't talk like someone raised in Bush Alaska. Where did you go to school?"

"Hah!" Moses said, triumphant. "I can't talk like this because I was raised in a village, is that it? You got a lot to learn, boy, and I'm just the one to teach you. Stick around." He drained his glass with a satisfied smack of his lips, followed by a resonant and contented burp. "But not tonight. Bill! Hit me again!"

"In a minute." Bill took Liam's glass, drained it, and used the thick end to rap the bar, twice, sharp, quick raps, bringing everyone to momentary attention. She bent a severe eye on Teddy Engebretsen, still bound and gagged. He quailed. "Teddy Engebretsen, in my capacity as magistrate of the state of Alaska, I charge you with being drunk and disorderly in public, discharging a firearm within the city limits, and just generally being a pain in the ass. I find you guilty of same. Court's adjourned." She thumped the bar with the glass twice again. "He's all yours, trooper. Legally, anyway."

"What am I supposed to do with him?" Liam said.

Now it was Bill's turn to regard him with impatience. "Toss him in the hoosegow. What the hell kind of trooper are you?"

A magistrate for the state of Alaska didn't need a law degree, didn't need much more than a high school diploma or its equivalent and some standing in his or her community. Official arrest procedures called for the swearing out of a warrant, a reading of rights, an arraignment, a grand jury, a trial, a conviction-all those nitpicky little due-process things required by the Constitution of the United States and affirmed by the Bill of Rights, not to mention two hundred and twenty years of Supreme Court case law. Belief in those things made Liam the kind of trooper he was, but they didn't seem to count for much here and now. "Where exactly is the, er, hoosegow?" he said meekly.

"At the cop shop. Jim Earl'll show you."

"How long do I leave him there?"

"Long as I say so," Bill said.

"Oh."

Moses grinned at him.

It could be worse, Liam thought. At least Newenham's magistrate had taken the Sixth Amendment to heart, if no other. Teddy Engebretsen's trial had been speedy, and it sure as hell had been public.

A dimension beyond sight and sound, he thought, going down the stairs and out to the construction orange Suburban. A dimension known as the Twilight Zone.

Teddy Engebretsen was freed from bondage and deposited safely, if a bit tearfully, in one of the six cells available at the local jail. The dispatcher, a leathery middle-aged woman with a harassed look on her face, tossed Jim Earl the keys while talking nonstop through her headset, something about a joust between two dueling snow machiners on the Icky road. The Icky road? It was the first week of May, and Liam hadn't seen any snow on the ground either from the air or Jim Earl's truck. He decided not to inquire if the Icky road was municipal, state, or federal. Some things it was better he should not know.

Afterward, Jim Earl dropped Liam at his office, where the trooper discovered the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition of the white Chevy Blazer with the Alaska State Troopers seal on the door. Mindful of the scene still waiting at the airport, Liam did little more than toss his bag behind the desk and lock the office door before climbing into the Blazer. The engine turned over on the first try, and he didn't get lost more than two or three times on his way back to the airport.

He arrived at the same time as the ambulance, and made a resolve then and there never to be shot in the line of duty during his posting to Newenham. He checked his watch. It was eight-thirty. Unbelievably, it was only three hours since his plane had touched down. Surely too much had happened to fit into that small a space.

He raised the watch to his ear. The ticking should have reassured him that time was passing with its usual, inexorable forward motion, but it didn't.

Wy was still there, sitting in the cab of her truck. It was drizzling. An older man, unshaven and wearing salt-stained clothes, was talking to her through the open driver's-side door. Wy caught sight of Liam over the man's shoulder as he pulled up next to her. By the time Liam had gotten out the older man was walking away, a pronounced limp in his gait. "Who was that?" Liam said.

She shrugged. "Just another fisherman. Wanted to know what happened."

She couldn't quite meet his eyes, and he regarded her for a speculative moment.

Gary Gruber was still there, too, shivering beneath the eaves of the terminal and gnawing at what might have been a candy bar. People came and went, planes taxied to and fro, and barely a glance was spared for the mound beneath the blue tarp, which seemed to have shrunk since Liam last saw it. It looked very lonely lying next to the little red and white Super Cub, which looked more than a little forlorn itself.

The ambulance was under the command of a single emergency medical technician, a slim, intense young man who introduced himself as Joe Gould. He knelt to inspect DeCreft's body. "Not much to be done here," he observed. "Okay to take the body to the morgue?"

"We've got a morgue?" Liam said.

"We've even got a hospital," Gould said with a cool smile.

"Hold on a second," Liam said, and went to search the Blazer for an evidence kit. It was in a case behind the backseat, and, typically, Corcoran had left no film in the camera inside and no spare rolls in the case. Liam found a yellow legal pad and a pencil he had to sharpen with a pocketknife, andwiththe evenly spaced halogen floodlights around the airport casting long, faint shadows in the dim light drew a rough sketch of the scene, pacing out the distances between terminal, plane, and body before helping Gould zip DeCreft into a body bag and load it into the ambulance. "Have we got a pathologist, too?" Liam asked Gould.

"Not forensic," Gould said, "but cause of death is obvious, and time of death was witnessed, so-"

"It was?" Liam said. "Who by?"

Gould had thin, self-sacrificial features that would not have looked out of place beneath a tonsure, belied by a pair of satanic eyebrows and a sly smile. "Somebody was yelling about it on the radio. The dispatcher picked it up, and passed it on to me."

"When was this?"

"Right about the time it happened, I guess. Ask the dispatcher."

"And you rushed right on over to help out," Liam observed.

The EMT slammed the doors of the ambulance and paused to give Liam a level, considering stare. "Guy walked into a propeller," Gould said. "The initial report from the scene, as conveyed to me by the dispatcher, indicated that the victim was dead before he hit the ground." He had been leaning on the ambulance. He straightened now. "I was delivering a breech baby in Icky at the time." He went around the ambulance, climbed into the cab, and drove off.

"Icky?" Liam said to the air. As in the Icky road?

Nobody answered him, so he fetched a flashlight and a garbage bag from the Blazer and went to inventory the contents of the Super Cub.