Dana Stabenow: Fire And Ice

The first book in the Liam Campbell series, 1998

My thanks again to my father, Don Stabenow, always my first and most important resource, and who has certainly never ever been quoted verbatim in any of my books, goodness me, no, and to Pati, for the drunk shaman, and to Sifu Marshall V. Clymer, for his years of skill and kindness, and to John Evans of the Dillingham Police Department and Dyanne Inglima Brown of the Alaska State Troopers. They can be the cops on my beat any day.

Liam boarded first and watched the rest of the passengers troop down the aisle. It was a full load, a disparate group that he had already typed and cross-matched with their potential for future crime.

There was the Alaskan Old Fart, short, dark, a grin one part mean to two parts pure evil, who had poacher written all over him. There was the tall man with a shock of white hair and his green-eyed daughter, who would both of them have helped the Old Fart skin out whatever he took whenever he took it, but only so much as they could use in a winter. There was the Moccasin Man, tall, loping, clad in fatigues and beaded buckskin moccasins with matching belt pouch that Liam instantly pegged for growing wholesale quantities of marijuana in his back bedroom, and the Hell's Angel, Moccasin Man's sidekick, barrel-shaped beer belly, black leather boots with a shine on them to match the one reflected by his shaved, bullet-shaped scalp with a meth lab in his spare room. The Flirt, on the other hand, should have been arrested for incitement to riot the second after she'd stepped out in public that morning: she wore a red silk shirt with no bra beneath it and a long skirt that accentuated the deliberate sway of her very nice ass. Moccasin Man had demonstrated an immediate and obvious admiration for that sway, and had been granted the privilege of escorting the Flirt to her seat.

The rest of the manifest wasn't as interesting. There was the Bush couple, a nondescript husband and wife who looked like card-carrying members of the proletariat who took their seats and melted into the bulkhead. They were followed by a family of five, white father, Yupik mother, and three small children, one still nursing, a tall, spare, grizzled man who had looked long and hard at Liam and who had almost spoken to him in the terminal but then appeared to think better of it, a plump woman who just missed being grandmotherly by two streaks of ice blue eye shadow and a slash of maroon lipstick, and the airline's station manager for King Salmon, who curled up in the frontright-hand seat and promptly went to sleep, snoring loudly enough to be heard over the engines.

Liam envied him deeply. He himself was occupied with holding the fourteen-seat Fairchild Metroliner up in the air by the edge of his seat as they rose smoothly over Knik Arm and banked south down Cook Inlet. It was half past three o'clock on the afternoon of May 1. Breakup was late, temperatures still dropping to or below freezing at nights, stubborn ice ruts refusing to melt from the roads, snow clinging obstinately to the Chugach Mountains. It wasn't the only reason Liam was glad to be leaving Anchorage behind, but it would do, and it was almost enough for him to forget that he was ten thousand feet up in the air.

Almost.

Within minutes they were out of the low-lying clouds clustered over the Anchorage bowl, and mountains Denali and Foraker loomed up on the right. Foraker looked like a square, stolid Norman keep, and Denali like a home for gods. Susitna and Spurr were beneath them, the Sleeping Lady undisturbed beneath her lingering white winter blanket, Spurr worn down to three or four lesser peaks by an average of one eruption per decade. Redoubt, a once perfect cone blown to a shark's tooth, barely registered through the window before the plane banked right and southwest. Liam swallowed hard.

Now it was the Alaska Range, an entire horizon filled with sharp, unfriendly peaks, and no place that he could see to land safely. But there was for a miracle little turbulence, and the smooth ride and the drone of the engines eventually dulled him into an unexpected, uneasy doze, where his subconscious, that sly, slick bastard, was lurking, loitering with intent, just waiting to raise his viperous head and hiss a reminder that Liam had yet to call his soul his own. A jumbled mass of images fast-forwarded in front of him: laughing, loving Jenny with the light brown hair, his father's implacable eyes, Charlie's gap-toothed grin. Alfred and Rose, faces dull with grief and despair. That old black Ford sedan stuck on the Denali Highway, the bodies huddled together in the backseat for a warmth that failed them in the end. The disappointment and determination on John Barton's face. Dyson groveling on his knees, begging for his life.

She was there, too, of course, the brown-eyed, blond-haired witch. Once again she turned and walked away, down the street, around a corner, and out of his life, and once again the grief of parting jerked him up in his seat with a jolt, heart pounding, palms sweaty, the loss as sharply felt as if he had suffered it yesterday. They were descending, and the clouds had closed back in and brought turbulence with them. Liam looked out the window, where a thin line of frost was forming on the leading edge of the wing, and he welcomed the distraction the terror of the sight brought him.

He watched the line of frost attentively, until they came out of the clouds at seven thousand feet and it vanished and the Nushagak River and Bristol Bay came into view. To Liam it looked like the approach to heaven, an image enhanced by the golden rim of sunshine shining through the gap between the clouds and the vast expanse of gray water that took up the whole southern horizon.

Ten minutes later they were on the ground, at the end of a paved runway six thousand feet in length; plenty long enough for 737's loaded with herring roe and salmon, the reason for the city of Newenham's existence, the raison d'etre of Bristol Bay, and, at least indirectly, the cause of Liam's new posting.

Congratulations, he thought. You're a trooper. Again. He'd removed his sergeant's insignia from his uniform before he'd left Glenallen, and had it cleaned twice to fade the marks where it had been. With luck, no one would know. His uniform was packed in a bag stored in the hold. All the pictures on the news had been of him in his uniform; he wanted to avoid recognition for as long as possible.

The Metroliner turned off onto the taxiway. In a voice that carried to the back of the cabin, the pilot said, "What the hell!" and they screeched to a halt, the engines roaring a protest. Everyone was thrown forward against their seat belts, and some who had unbuckled too soon found their faces right against the backs of the seats in front of them. By the time Liam got his heart restarted, the pilot had shut down both engines and the copilot had the door open and the steps let down. Liam unbuckled his belt with shaky hands and was on the ground right behind him.

The Newenham airport was ten miles south of Newenham proper, forty miles short of Chinook Air Force Base. It was of recent construction, not five years old, and replaced the previous airstrip, which, if it had held true to old-time Bush construction, would have run either parallel to or right down Main Street, where people could step out their front doors and onto a plane. Nowadays they built Bush airstrips ten to fifty miles away from the town, forcing everyone to buy cars to get back and forth.