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· August 26 ·
NOME
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ACTIVE PRESSED HIS back against the plastic chair, stretched out his legs, massaged his aching thigh, and looked out the window of the Nome passenger terminal at the early morning light as he checked in with Grace.
Then he massaged his aching neck. Every hotel in Nome had been booked, and he had wound up spending the night on a bunk with no pillow in one of Chief Kalamarides’s jail cells.
“That’s right, sweetie,” he said into his phone. “A whole extra day here, no seats till tonight.”
“Oh, no,” Grace said.
“Yeah. So I’ll see you about eight-thirty.”
“You need me to pick you up?”
“No, I’ll get a cab or call Danny. Give Charlie and Nita a hug for me, ah?”
His last words were drowned out by the baby screaming in the background. He thought he heard her say “Gotta go” and he managed to get in a “Miss you, sweetie” before she disconnected.
An entire day to spin his wheels in Nome, when what he needed was to get back to Chukchi and relax with a dose of Grace and the kids, with some reminder that the world still held at least a little love.
Maybe there was someplace within walking distance to get a decent cup of coffee. Then maybe some time with the Nome phone company to see if that’s where Shalene had her account, then start working out the logistics of getting up to the Slope to talk to her employer. He stood and shouldered his bag.
“Hey, Nathan!” A familiar voice boomed across the room from behind him.
Active swung around. The owner of the voice wore aviator glasses, a leather bomber jacket, a Lienhofer Aviation ball cap cocked back on his head, and a big grin.
“Cowboy!” He stepped toward the pilot and his longtime friend with hand outstretched. “What are you doing here?”
“Workin’, of course.” Cowboy Decker pumped Active’s hand. “How the hell are ya? It’s been too damn long!”
“Since right after Charlie was born.” Active flashed back to the time before that, last year, when he had been shot and Cowboy medevacked him out of Chukchi in weather that no one else would fly in. If not for the pilot’s near-supernatural way with an airplane, he probably wouldn’t have been around for the birth of his son.
“How ya been, buddy?” Decker boomed.
“Not bad. You?”
“Oh, you know, keeping busy, staying out of trouble. Mostly.”
“Coming in or heading out?
“Out. Dropped off a passenger from Fairbanks with a load of mining gear and I roll in forty-five minutes on the second leg of my run. Are you working a case down here?”
“Yeah, and now I’m stuck here. The morning jet was all booked up so I can’t get home till tonight. Too bad you don’t have time for a cup of coffee. Be nice to catch up a little.”
“Well, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news,” Cowboy said. “I’ve got an extra seat if you want to leave now. But I’m not going to Chukchi. I’m taking a couple of safety inspectors up to Prudhoe.”
“Seriously? I have to go up there on this case. I’ll just make the trip sooner rather than later.”
Cowboy clapped Active on the shoulder. “All right. Let me finish my paperwork.”
“And let me give Grace and the office a heads up.”
He stepped away to a quiet corner beside a Coke machine, checked in with Lucy, then called Grace at the women’s shelter and broke the news that probably he’d be a day late, not a few hours.
“Oh,” she said. “All right.”
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Other than missing you, yeah.”
“Sorry, sweetie, it can’t - -”
“- - be helped. I know.”
“When this case is over, we’ll have Cowboy drop us somewhere up on the Katonak and we’ll kill some grayling, okay?”
“You kill them. Charlie and Nita and I will pick blueberries.”
“Love you, sweetie.”
“Love you, keep safe.”
Cowboy came over as he rang off. “Time to saddle up,” he said.
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ACTIVE GAZED OUT AT the snaking rivers, tundra prairie and gray talus slopes of the Seward Peninsula as Cowboy climbed out of Nome and pointed the Lienhofer Navajo northeast for the two-hour trip to the epicenter of the North Slope oilfields. It was late August now, and the lowlands were starting to rust toward autumn. The ridge tops were still snow-free but, any day now, they would begin to dust with white.
“How’re Grace and Nita and the little man?” Cowboy asked from the pilot seat.
“Everyone’s good,” Active said into his headset. “Chronic exhaustion since Charlie showed up, but at least he’s healthy and happy. It won’t be long before we’ll be hiring you to haul us out into the country for some fishing and berry-picking.”
“And how’s the four-legged menace?”
“Lucky? He’s in dog heaven as long as he’s on Nita’s heels.”
“Great. I’ll have to swing by sometime soon, have a visit. How about you? You doing okay with...you know, everything?”
How long would he have to keep answering that question? Active shifted in his seat and glanced at the two passengers behind them to make sure they didn’t have headsets on.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m done with the physical therapy. The leg’s healed as best it can. Ninety percent functionality. I’m fine.”
“How about your head?”
“My head?”
“How are you mentally?”
So even Cowboy was getting all touchy-feely now? “I’m good,” Active said. “And thanks again for getting me out of Chukchi in that weather that day, by the way.”
“No prob,” Cowboy said. “It’s what I do.”
Active was silent, hoping they were done. Then he found himself talking again. “I do think about it now and then, of course, but I don’t dwell on it. I mean, we can’t change what’s behind us. The best thing is to move on, right?”
“Not dwelling is not the same as dealing.”
“Thanks, Oprah, but I have a real shrink. Department protocol.”
“Well, that’s good, unless you’re just going through the motions. You know when I crashed at Isignaq a few years back?”
Did he know? The crash had killed Grace’s aunt and triggered a long series of events that climaxed with Grace’s being charged with murdering her father to keep him from doing to Nita what he had done to her. She had been cleared, but Active, in his deepest heart, still wasn’t certain she wasn’t guilty. He shook his head to clear it all away.
Cowboy was still talking.
“I had flashbacks for months,” he was saying. “I started second guessing myself every time I climbed in a plane. I thought I might have to hang it up. But I powered through it and here I am.”
They were over a cloud layer now, a sea of luminous white surf rolling off to a bright blue horizon.
“Powered through it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do I recall that included three months when you didn’t fly anything but a barstool in Nome?”
“All part of the healing process. Maybe you should try it.”
“I don’t think so. Can we give it a rest now?”
“Sure.”
An awkward silence ensued. Cowboy finally cleared his throat. “So, what’s this case you’re working on have to do with Nome and the Slope?”
“We found the body of a young woman in Tent City a few days ago.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that on the radio. Chukchi girl?”
“No, Nome. We got an ID yesterday. I talked to her family last night.”
“Did they know anything?”
“Nope, and didn’t seem to care much. She was working for North Slope Environmental Services when she turned up dead. I’m going up there to see if the company can fill in any of the blanks.”
“Talk about a target-rich environment. Those people are tripping all over each other twenty-four/seven for weeks at a time. They eat, sleep, work, shit, shower, and shave within inches of each other. A lot of ’em are banging each other or at least trying to. It’s hard to keep anything secret in that fishbowl.”
“Like Chukchi, except more so.”
“Yep. So how was she killed? Kay-Chuck didn’t say.”
“This is not for public consumption, but it appears she was stabbed, then dismembered.”
“Ah, a crime of passion. It’s always the same. If it’s not money, it’s love or sex.”
“Which do you think, love or sex?”
“Same difference. Like I said, buddy, a target-rich environment. Target-rich.”
Active closed his eyes and let the drone of the engines take him under. The next thing he felt was a jolt as Cowboy dropped the Navajo’s landing gear and entered the traffic pattern for landing at the Deadhorse airport.