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· August 20·
CHUKCHI
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ACTIVE STOPPED THE Tahoe and watched from the Chukchi end of the Lagoon Bridge as Tommie ambled out and stopped in the middle.
Two days had passed since his last tour with her, and now her monitor had gone off again. Here he was at two o’clock in the morning, watching her lean on the railing of the bridge where he had been shot, the bridge he had been unable to cross ever since.
She gazed out over the water. A seagull wheeled up, hovered on the west wind, and examined her for a few seconds, then wheeled away and vanished.
She turned and headed for the east end of the bridge, where the road climbed up through a gully to run south past the Bluff Cemetery and, eventually, to curve around and loop back past Tent City and the airport and into Chukchi again.
He eased the Tahoe into Drive and hit the throttle. The Tahoe didn’t move. It only strained and vibrated, and he realized that he had his left foot on the brake. And that it wouldn’t come off. His foot would not let him drive onto that bridge.
The familiar sense of panic knotted his stomach and squeezed his lungs. Before it could explode in his head, he shifted the Tahoe into Reverse and jockeyed the SUV around to point back into town. He waited a minute or two and his vital signs settled back to normal.
He checked his rear-view mirror. Tommie was still headed for the far side of the bridge. What now?
He decided he’d take the Loop Road in the opposite direction from Tommie and meet her somewhere on the far side of the lagoon. Maybe she’d even be in the Bluff Cemetery, digging out another body part from one of the graves, and this maddening case would turn out to be no case at all.
He eased the Tahoe on its way, then made one last check in the rear-view. And there was Tommie, now ambling his way. He stopped, shifted into Park, and watched her come up. When she was near, he opened the passenger door and she climbed in.
“Alipaa,” she said. Then she fell asleep, her chin on her chest.
After seeing Tommie into the care of her husband, Active turned southwest toward the airport. It couldn’t hurt to cruise around a bit, let the bridge stress wear off, and see if anything jumped out at him. An unsecured door, some sign of disturbed soil or brush in a vacant lot, something that wouldn’t look like anything until suddenly it did.
As he approached the airport, a light rain began to fall, misting his windshield and haloing the streetlights. The perimeter fence and the passenger terminal along the edge of the airport came into view and a hazy figure swam out of the murk about thirty yards off. It solidified into a man in a hoodie and a flat-brim cap riding a bicycle through the murk. The tip of a cigarette glowed under the brim of the cap.
All of which could only mean, Active knew, that the cigarette was not a cigarette, but a joint, and the cyclist was Kinnuk Landon.
Active yelped his siren. Landon stopped and straddled the bike, watching him from under the brim of the cap.
Active pulled up to the cyclist, shifted into Park, and stepped out of the Tahoe.
The crown of Landon’s cap, he saw, was emblazoned with “LET ‘EM!” That was Chukchi’s unofficial motto, and Active had always thought it nailed perfectly the amused stoicism with which the Inupiat endured the shaggy disorder of the human condition.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Good to see you.”
“I guess,” Landon said with a wary look. He reached back into his hood and pulled out a tiny tortoiseshell kitten. The kitten glanced at Active, curled into a ball at Landon’s throat, yawned, and went back to sleep.
“This Buster.” Landon stroked the cat. “He’s gonna catch them voles and shrews outta my place, all right.”
Landon had lived with his mother until her death two years earlier. Now he squatted on a vacant lot in a Conex shipping container. How any rodent could find its way into a Conex was a mystery, but Active didn’t doubt that voles and shrews did it. They would colonize any enclosed space that offered warmth or food.
As usual, Landon looked like his lifestyle. The clothes rumpled and muddy in spots, the long black hair stringy and greasy, eyes that always seemed to be saying a silent “arii.”
“Buster, huh?” Active rubbed a fingertip on the silken fur along the bridge of the cat’s nose. “He looks like he might grow into the job.”
Landon took a hit on his joint.
“So,” Active said. “You got anything for me tonight?”
Landon blew marijuana smoke into the night air and scratched Buster behind the ears. “That Walter Charlie come back from Anchorage, all right.”
“Huh. Dealing meth out of his mom’s place again?”
Landon didn’t speak, but raised his eyebrows, yes.
“Aarigaa, I’ll see if we can make a buy.”
“You could keep his Mom out of it?”
“She’s not involved?”
“Nah, she never know nothing what he’s doing. She’s just old aana now, got that arthritis, don’t hardly get around no more, even with her walker.”
“Sure, we’ll protect her,” Active said. “Thanks, Kinnuk, you’re a good man.”
Landon took another hit and held it in for a long time. Buster started to snore, a tiny buzz against the sigh of the west wind and all of the other sounds that came from everywhere and nowhere in the dusk. Droplets of mist sparkled on the stringy hair spilling down his chest from under the flat-brim. “The sky is crying tonight,” he said.
“Yeah, it is,” Active said after a moment of silence. “Listen, you know an old aana named Tommie Leokuk, wanders around at night?”
“I guess I seen her couple times. Green atiqluk, lost her brain?”
“Uh-huh. That’s her.” Active took Landon through the standard interrogatory, with the standard outcome: No, he hadn’t seen Tommie coming out of any buildings, or digging holes in the tundra, or prowling a cemetery. By the time he was finished, Landon was shivering and stamping his feet as he sat astraddle the bike.
Active climbed back into the Tahoe. “You could get in, buddy. It’s nice and warm in here.” Active turned up the fan on his heater to underscore the point. “You should get out of the weather.”
Landon said, “Arii, I don’t wanna talk about nothing.” But he leaned his bike against the side of the Tahoe and climbed into the passenger seat. He took a hit on the joint, eyes straight ahead. The Tahoe filled with the scent of something like burning tundra mixed with rotten egg.
“You can’t smoke in a police vehicle.”
Landon started to pinch the tip of his joint.
“But I’ll make an exception if you blow the smoke out the window.”
Landon put the joint back in his mouth, took another hit, held it, and exhaled into the wet night air.
“How you been?”
“Same I guess.”
“Still driving takeout for the Dragon?”
“Sometimes I guess.”
Active knew that Landon delivered more than fried rice and cashew chicken, but he had long since directed Chukchi Public Safety not to take official cognizance. For one thing, anytime marijuana replaced liquor in a Chukchi house, Active counted it as a gain all around—for his town, for his department, and for the people in the house.
For another, marijuana sales were now legal in the state of Alaska, so Landon’s only real crime was not having a business license.
At least it wasn’t meth. Meth seemed to violate some personal code of Landon’s own devising and thereby made him an invaluable source for the department.
“I can protect Walter’s mom,” Active said. “But I sure wish I could have protected that Annie girl, too.”
“Arii, I told you already,” Landon said. “I never see nothing when she shoot herself.”
“That’s because she didn’t shoot herself and we both know it. It was that Roger guy.”
“Arii.”
“You know what will happen if you don’t voice her out.”
“Arii, don’t say that again.” Landon covered his ears and looked out the window. Buster fell onto his lap and woke up long enough to curl up and go back to sleep.
“I don’t want to see you do it, but one of these days you will.” Active punched up his voice to get past the hands over Landon’s ears. “Because you know it’s not right, that Roger guy walking around like he didn’t do anything wrong and Annie dead like that. And what about her little boy? He’s in foster care in Anchorage, did you know that? He’s gonna be raised by naluaqmiuts and never know his own people, never know where he came from. What kind of life is that?”
Landon hawked, spat out the window, said nothing.
“A good man can’t live with that,” Active went on. “And you’re a good man, Kinnuk. That weight on your heart, it’ll make you take your own life sooner or later, I’ve seen it before. I just hate to see you heading that way. Your mom would, too, if she was still here. You know that.”
“Arii, don’t talk about my mom.”
Active paused. Landon didn’t speak again, but his cheeks were wet.
“So one day you need to tell me what you really saw at that party and take that weight off your heart. Maybe that day is today?”
“I told you, I never see nothing. We’re all in the kitchen drinking beer, I hear the gun, I go in the bedroom, and there she is on the floor.”
“I didn’t believe you the first time you told me that, and I don’t believe you now.”
“All I know is, Roger tell me Annie get the gun and shoot herself before he could do anything.”
“In the chest? Nobody shoots themselves in the chest. They do it in the mouth or the side of the head. I’ve seen it too many times. It’s never the chest. You saw Roger shoot her and you need to tell me about it.”
“Arii, leave me alone.” Landon opened the passenger door and put a leg out.
“Listen, buddy.” Active put a hand on Landon’s shoulder. “How about you go talk to Nelda Qivits? She knows how to take the weight off of a person’s heart. She did it for my whole family, and me, too, when I was having problems back in the day.”
It was true. At various times, Nelda Qivits, Chukchi’s traditional healer, had ministered to all of them with her miracle therapy of talk, sourdock tea, and patient silence. He was pretty sure that, if he could get Landon into Nelda’s little cabin, her spell would work on him, too.
Active looked at the clock on the Tahoe’s dash. It was coming up on three a.m.
“It’s too late to go over there now, but I’ll talk to her, I’ll set it up, then I’ll come find you and take you over there, okay?”
“Arii,” Landon said. “I dunno.”
Which Active took to mean ‘yes,’ because, always before, the answer had been, “No way, man. Roger’s my friend, all right.”
If Nelda could get him to talk, maybe a year-old cold case would crack open and a killer would go to prison. And a good man would be saved.
“Okay, buddy, I’ll let you know,” Active said.
Landon raised his eyebrows, climbed out, returned Buster to the hood, mounted his bike, and pedaled away.
Something was poking Active in the chest. He pushed it away and tried to remember what he was doing before the poke. Was he on the bridge? The poking came again, sharper, harder, so hard it hurt a little, and then Grace’s voice.
“Baby, wake up. Wake up!”
He shook his head and opened his eyes and his gaze bounced around the bedroom in the gloom. A blue-gray midnight glow seeped in through the blinds. The clock on his nightstand said it was half past four. Their phones, tablets, and chargers on the dresser twinkled like a miniature city.
Grace switched on her nightstand lamp. “You were screaming again.”
Charlie started to fuss in the next bedroom.
“‘I’m hit, I’m hit’?”
“Mm.” She raised her eyebrows in the Inupiat yes and waited for him to say something. He didn’t.
“I just wish you could talk to me about it. You’re scaring me to death.”
“I know, but...I just can’t.”
“But why not? I mean - -”
“I don’t know why not. Something just won’t let me.”
“Maybe you should see Nelda?”
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
Charlie began to howl. Grace shot Active an apologetic look, got up, and brought in the baby. She uncovered and hooked him up. He started making what Active regarded as the most contented sound a human could produce. He watched his bird-faced little son at Grace’s breast for a minute or two, then leaned in and kissed her.
“I’m gonna watch TV for a while. I’ll be back in later, okay?”
Grace nodded with a look that said nothing was okay. Then she locked eyes with Charlie and her face relaxed.
He slid from the bed, tiptoed out, and eased the door shut behind him, pushing back on the knots in his stomach and the iron bands around his lungs that meant another panic attack was on its way.
In the kitchen, he poured caffeine-free Diet Pepsi over ice, added two droppers of Orange Midnight CBD oil, and downed half the glass.
Then he swallowed two Ibuprofen and settled on the sofa. He dug the remote out from between the cushions, sucked from the glass through a straw, and found a Golden Girls rerun on the Roku.
He remembered watching the Golden Girls with his adoptive mother in Anchorage when he was a kid and finding it mysteriously soothing, even then. The pastel girls, as he thought of them, living in a pastel world, with thirty-minute problems.
Lucky trotted out of Nita’s room, climbed onto the couch, locked eyes with him, and began licking his cheek with that urgent, anxious expression the dog had in all of their interactions lately. What, Active wondered for the millionth time, did dogs know, and how did they know it? He let it go on for a couple of minutes, then put the back of his hand to his cheek. Lucky went to work on his palm and Active returned his attention to the Golden Girls.
One of them was telling another outlandish story about her hometown in Minnesota, this one about a goat that could predict the stock market. The bridge and the dream started to slide away as he took another pull at the straw. Was it Lucky or the cannabidiol or the pastel girls or the living room with its picture window over the lagoon and the sofa that smelled slightly of the lavender scent Grace wore? Or the stubborn little stain in the fabric that wouldn’t come completely out where Charlie had spit up strained applesauce? Or was it all of that?
Whatever, it was working again. The pain in his leg eased, the fight-or-flight cord stretched almost to the snapping point in his head started to relax, and soon he sensed Grace pulling a blanket over him and kissing his forehead as he drifted off.