Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“He did.” Jim’s voice had a smile in it. “Was a time you’d have been happy about that.”

“That was then, this is now. I made it back up to sergeant, that’s good enough. I don’t want to deal with the politics. Hey, you get that school of yours up and running?”

“It’s up, I don’t know how well it’s running.”

“Pretty cool, though.”

“If I can make it go how I want to, yeah.”

“I hear Kate finally took down Erland Bannister.”

“Well, he died on her before she could put him back in jail, but yeah. We’re all good here, Liam. Why are you in Blewestown?”

“Barton says the drug trade has moved into the lower Kenai hard, manufacturing and distribution. He wants me to clean it up, like we did in the Valley.”

“He wants to ride you into headquarters on a wave of trophy shots.”

“I think so.”

A brief silence. “And?”

Liam shook his head. “And I haven’t been here a week and the local PD chief schooled me on exactly and precisely where I’m allowed to serve and protect, and the local judge warned me off using excessive force. Plus I got a dead archeologist, murdered last Monday night or thereabouts, and the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, also murdered, that Brillo says has been lying where I found it for thirty plus years.”

A brief silence. “Anything else?”

“The whole place feels off. I think it’s partly because Blewestown is the whitest town I’ve ever been in in Alaska. Everybody’s white here, Jim. Except for my administrative aide. Whom Barton hired before I even got here, FYI.”

“Yeah, she’s probably spying on you for him.”

“Be my guess. The only other Natives I’ve met are her parents who, I’m overjoyed to relate, are involved in my murder case, and I had to get Wy to fly me across the Bay to meet them. Newenham was majority Yupiq. It looked like Alaska. This place looks like, I don’t know. Idaho. You know. If Idaho wasn’t landlocked.”

“How is Wy?”

“Fine. She sold her air taxi in Newenham. She’s figuring out what she wants to do next.”

“She keep both planes?” A pilot’s question.

“Yeah. She meant to sell the Cub but when it came right down to it she couldn’t.”

“Don’t blame her. Got a place to live?” Jim had thoroughly enjoyed the story of Liam’s Progress through Newenham housing.

“Yeah, a nice one. Local guy built it for his wife and two kids. Kids are gone and he opened a brewpub in town and moved in over the shop. For sale by owner, saved us a ton of money. Got a hell of a view. I can’t get too close to the edge of the yard because we’re right on the bluff that backs up the town and it is seriously all downhill from there.”

Another slurp. “How far away are you from retirement?”

“Two years.”

“You can always pull the plug. I haven’t looked back.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Liam said. “The thing is, I don’t know what the hell else I’d do if I did. All I know is I don’t want to live in Anchorage, and I sure as hell don’t want any job that involves interacting with the goddamn legislature.”

“You can always say no.”

“You’ve met John Barton, right?”

A laugh. “Yeah. Still. You’re a grown ass man, Liam. Figure out what you want and make your own damn decisions.”

If only I knew what that was, Liam thought after he’d said goodbye and hung up.

Nineteen

Friday, September 6

WY SPENT THE MORNING UNPACKING, and then made a trip to the grocery store. There were two in Blewestown and neither of them was AC, a nice change from Newenham, where, like almost everywhere else in Alaska that was not on the road system, the Alaska Commercial Company had a lock on the sale of groceries.

It amused her to stand in line and eavesdrop. The cashiers seemed to know all the customers, the customers appeared to be all local all the time, and they were united in their joy at the end of tourist season and the beginning of the school year. She was picking up the local vernacular, too. For starters, almost none of the locals called Blewestown “Blewestown”. It was the Bay, or Baytown, or B-town, or, sometimes, Chungasqak. This last was employed with the emphasis that Alaskans in general used in calling Denali Denali and never McKinley, an Outsider who’d never even been to the state. She resolved to look up the meaning of “chungasqak” as soon as she got home, and Kapilat, Engaqutaq, and Chuwawet while she was at it. There was no one here to discourage her from learning the local Native language, so why not?

In even more thrilling news, there was also an honest-to-god bookstore—she parked in front and peered into the windows to be sure—and she took careful note of their hours. The last time she’d lived in a town with a bookstore she’d been in college.

When she got home she did another round of form on the deck just because she could. The deck here had fewer nail pops and warped boards and so was less prone to trip her up during Fair Ladies Work at Shuttle. She showered and dressed, and thought about going down to Blue Sky Air and introducing herself. She felt strangely reluctant to do so, and wondered at herself.

Maybe it was that she’d never had a vacation before. Her adoptive parents had been very strict about earning one’s way in life and she’d been brought up to work. In college she’d always had full time jobs between semesters, and after she’d started Nushugak Air she was determined never to turn down a job. Summers were naturally her busiest season, what with flying fishermen and processor workers back and forth, the occasional flightseeing charter, and that one year she herring spotted for that asshole Cecil Wolfe. But fall kept her hopping, too, hauling hunters into and out of their camps and lodges. Winter, although the dark reduced flying hours, still saw an increase in local travel, school trips, shopping trips, basketball games, any distraction to hold off cabin fever. It was great for business, especially since in her Cub she could get into and out of the most rudimentary strips. It made hers the go-to flight service for a lot of folks between Newenham and Togiak, which was what she’d been aiming for, and helped her pay off both aircraft in record time, another goal. Wy hated owing money.

And regular customers could be very unforgiving. If you missed a pickup or a drop-off, it didn’t matter if you had a perfectly valid excuse, like a hundred year storm blowing in off the Bering, or someone else pranging their plane at the Newenham airport and halting all air traffic for hours. If someone in Port of Call missed their Alaska Airlines flight in Newenham because you didn’t pick them up on time, you could kiss that customer and all their future revenue goodbye.

Put it all together and owning and operating an air taxi made the prospect of time off a joke. This was a new experience for her and she didn’t know quite what to do with herself.

Fortuitously, at just that moment the phone rang. It was Liz at Sunset Heights. “Sybilla wanted me to call to make sure you were coming to lunch today. Noon.”

“I thought that was tea on Sunday.” Wy could almost hear Liz shrug. “Tell her I’ll be there.”

It was an hour until noon and she decided to drive down to the airport and check on her aircraft. Both were snug at their tie-downs, and she took the time to give them a critical once-over. After the trip from Newenham the Cub was coming up on its annual inspection. The Cessna had another six months to go. It was time to replace the headsets and both could use new paint.

She saw someone working on the engine of a red and silver Beaver in front of a large empty hangar and walked over to introduce herself. She’d had her fill of shoveling snow off two sets of wings, and if she could find someone to paint her planes she’d need a place out of the weather for the paint to cure.