a Night Too Dark (2010) (9 page)

Kate smiled down at Jim. Just like that, Jim got hard. And she knew it, he could tell by the deepening indentations at the corners of that wide, full-lipped mouth. “Jesus, woman,” he said. If he wasn’t flustered, it was as close as he ever got.
“What can I say,” she said, “I have special powers.” He was pulled to a sitting position with a fistful of shirt and she climbed aboard. She settled into the saddle and looped her arms around his neck, her eyes laughing down at him.
He could feel the heat of her through her clothes, through his, and he fairly wallowed in her scent, a combination of wood smoke, a faint tang of verbena from the soap she used, and today the yeasty smell of bread. “Jesus, woman,” he said again, or mumbled it into her neck. The line of her scar brushed his cheek and he pulled back to trace it with his lips.
She shivered against him, her head falling back. “Possibly we should take this upstairs.”
“Possibly we should.” He was pulling her T-shirt free of her jeans.
“I mean before the kid comes out and catches us going at it on the couch.”
“Yeah.” Her breasts were firm and warm, the nipples hard against his palms.
“Might give him ideas.”
“That’d be bad.” He slid his hands down to her hips and pulled her tight against him. God, even through two pairs of jeans he could feel how ready she was for him.
She pulled back to look at him through her lashes. “And you know how much I hate being interrupted in my work.”
“Me, too.” He hooked an arm beneath her butt and got to his feet, and Mos Def serenaded them with “Destination Love” all the way up the stairs.

Five

Jim went whistling off to work the following morning, the spring back in his step and the sparkle back in his eye. Kate tried not to sigh as she watched him go, escorted to his ride by his other love slave. Mutt stood and watched, abandoned in the clearing, tail slowing in sorrow as the Blazer drove into the trees and out of sight.
He was such a cliché, tall, blond, blue-eyed, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, a real California boy. You expected him to get out the surfboard any minute, if not for the blue-and-gold uniform and the ball cap with the seal of the Alaska Department of Public Safety on it. And the gun on one side, the bear spray on the other, and the handcuffs tucked into the back of his belt. Not to mention the indefinable air of authority, the confident, easy stride, the quick reflexes at need, the sudden, unexpected strength of body and mind.
The seductive smile that was a weapon all on its own.
No, her own sense of well-being could not be denied, now could it. She laughed a little at herself. Was that all it took, a little “How was your day, dear?” and some great sex? They hadn’t even bothered to come back downstairs for dinner. Jim had made them an enormous
breakfast, eggs, chicken-fried caribou steak, gravy, and most of one of her loaves of bread, which had risen to alarming heights by morning, baked quickly in a hot oven, sliced too soon, toasted and slathered with butter. Nectar and ambrosia, he’d said. Manna from heaven, she’d said. Oho, so I’m heaven, am I? he’d said, and the food cooled on its plates while he demonstrated.
“So, did the earth move?” Johnny said next to her, making her jump.
She laughed but she blushed a little, too. “None of your business.”
He mock grumbled around the kitchen. “Didn’t even get any dinner last night. I’m a growing boy, I’m starving, do I have to stay starved?”
She opened the oven and pulled out a full plate that had been keeping warm against this moment. “I’ll make you some toast while you get started on this.”
“That’s more like it.” He carried the plate to the table and dug in.
They cleaned up, got dressed, and headed for town. Kate dropped Johnny at the school, one week to go before summer vacation. He hesitated with his hand on the open door. “So, we can apply for the job?”
She nodded.
“And you’ll tell Old Sam?”
“No. You’ll do that yourself.”
“Dang,” he said. “Worth a try.”
“Would have thought less of you if you hadn’t,” she said. “Later.”
The Chugach Air Taxi hangar itself hadn’t changed at all. It was the activity in and around it that made the scene look like a stop-motion video by Dinah Clark.
The hangar, a square box two stories high, had a much smaller box attached to its front right corner. A black, hand-lettered sign on a white background read OFFICE over the door of the small box, and
on the wall of the big box overhead a larger, fading sign, CHUGACH AIR TAXI SERVICE, INC.
The hangar doors were open, revealing not the familiar Cessna 206 nor the equally familiar Piper Super Cub but instead a de Havilland Single Otter. Kate looked closer. No, her eyes did not deceive her, it was in fact a turbo.
Nearby, a de Havilland Beaver on wheels was warming up, with a pilot she’d never met giving her the once-over through the windshield. From where she stood, it looked like every seat was full.
She went into the hangar and found George, tall, skinny, shovel-shaped unshaven jaw, lank dark hair thinning out on top. He still looked like George in oil-stained striped overalls and a greasy pair of Sorels. What didn’t look like George was the rectangular piece of electronic equipment sprouting from his right ear. It bristled with knobs and dials and extruded an antenna from one end.
“Yeah,” he said into it, “yeah, I know, but I need you now. Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it, just get here tomorrow.” Mutt trotted forward and shoved her head beneath his free hand. He looked down, saw her, and then looked around for Kate. “Okay? Good. I’ll see you on Thursday. Gotta go.” He pressed a button. “Hey, Mutt.” A rough scratch behind the ears had Mutt’s tail wagging. “Hey, Kate.”
“Hey, George.” She nodded at the device. “Is that a satellite phone?”
He looked at it, too. “Yeah.” His expression was somewhere between proud and sheepish.
She raised her eyebrows. “Just like downtown.”
“Listen, Kate,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. I need to talk to you about something.”
“What?”
“We need cell phone service in the Park.”
“You been talking to Dan O’Brian?”
“Who? No, I been talking to everyone, and we’re all saying the same thing.”
Kate had a cell phone. She’d bought one in Anchorage a couple of years before. It worked in Anchorage. It didn’t work in the Park. She tried to remember when she’d seen it last, and came up blank. “I’m sure that as soon as AT&T figures out how to make a cell phone system pay for itself in the Park, they’ll be knocking at the door.”
“They are knocking,” he said. “Didn’t Demetri tell you?”
“No.” Other than the quick glimpse she’d caught at the café the day before, she hadn’t seen much of Demetri lately, and never long enough for serious talk. This time of year he was usually up at his lodge in the Quilak foothills, getting ready for the summer influx of fly-in trophy fishermen. She wondered, not for the first time, what the lodge was pulling down every year. Demetri had had some big names up there, names even Kate, lacking satellite television and Internet access, recognized, including movie stars, rock bands, business moguls, European royalty, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and those among the rich and famous whose main purpose in life seemed to be getting on the covers of
Us
and
People
. Clients in those zip codes didn’t go anywhere on the cheap.
George flapped his hand in front of her face. “Hello? Anybody in there? ACS Alaska told Demetri that they’re working on a plan to put a cell tower in every village along the river from Ahtna down to Chulyin, and from there hopscotch them overland to the mine.” He held up his sat phone. “I can’t keep up with the business on this thing, Kate, everybody I need to keep in touch with has a cell phone.”
Behind them the Beaver roared down the runway and lifted ponderously into the air, on a heading south-southeast.
A four-wheeler with a tow hitch was pulling the Otter out of the hangar. She had seen neither four-wheeler nor driver before. “Impressive.”
“You have no idea,” he said. “Can’t hardly find Otters anymore,
single or twin. Everybody’s got them working, there just ain’t any for sale. I had to fly to fucking Finland in February to find this one.”
“Finland?” Kate said.
“Well, actually, Cameroon.”
“Cameroon?” Kate said.
“Well, by way of Paris,” George said, and spoiled his deprecating tone with a wide grin.
“George,” Kate said, “what the hell have you been up to?”
“No,” he said, in a manner that could only be described as coy, “that should be, ‘George, where the hell have you been?’ And the answer is almost all the way around the world.” He grinned again. “And in a hell of a lot less than eighty days.”
“I didn’t even know you’d been gone.”
“I was only gone a week, in February, just long enough to track this puppy down and arrange for it to be brought back.”
“Is it a turbo?”
“Yup.” He didn’t bother hiding his pride. “Came home by way of the shop in Vancouver.”
“Going turbo, isn’t that kind of expensive?”
“It sure as hell is,” he said. “It’s run me a million and a quarter so far.”
“I didn’t know you had that kind of cash.”
“I don’t. I got a loan.”
“Global Harvest?” she said, not really guessing.
He looked a little furtive, and then decided to confess straight up. “Yeah. Mandy said they want to buy and hire local as much as they can, so I went into Anchorage to talk to Bruce.”
“Bruce O’Malley?”
He nodded, looking almost happy, something of a triumph for a guy whose natural gloom rivaled Abraham Lincoln’s.
Bruce O’Malley was the chief executive officer of Global Harvest
Resources Inc. In January, with much fanfare, he’d bought a building in downtown Anchorage and opened what would, he claimed, be the headquarters of the Suulutaq Mine. “The buck doesn’t go to Houston,” he said, beaming at the television cameras, which clip Kate had viewed on YouTube on Bobby’s computer. “It stops right here in Anchorage, Alaska.” He’d moved his family to Anchorage, too, enrolled the kids in local public schools, and it was rumored that he was about to declare his intention of becoming an Alaskan citizen, to the extent that he was even going to turn in his Texas driver’s license in exchange for an Alaskan one.
“At least GHRI is putting their money where their mouth is,” Kate said. She was aware even as she spoke that she was damning with faint praise.
“It’s been a godsend, Kate,” George said, and he was dead serious now. “As you well know, the population in the Park has dropped every year for the past five years. For a while there I was scared I was going to lose the mail contract, because the volume of mail was dropping like a rock right along with the population.”
Alaska, because of the remote location of so many of its communities, lived and died by air mail. The U.S. mail contracts were all too often what kept the wolf from the Alaska air taxi door.
“You know how the Postal Service likes to contract for larger aircraft because they get a lower rate for bypass mail. I was really sweating out the last negotiations, I thought for sure they’d award the contract to Bill Taggart at Ahtna Aviation because he runs Caravans. And then they discovered the gold.”
“And O’Malley rode in like a white knight.”
He met her eyes without flinching. “Pretty much. I’m self-employed, Kate, just like you. I don’t have health insurance and I’m not Native, so if I get sick I lay down and die. I don’t have a retirement plan, so about all I have to count on is Social Security, which is a joke.”
This was inarguable and they both knew it. “We should have gotten jobs with the state,” she said.
He snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, right, like anyone in Juneau in their right mind would hire us to put out the trash.”
“ ‘Anyone in Juneau in their right mind’ is an oxymoron anyway.”
“Or just a moron,” they both said together, and laughed. A safe moment to change the subject. “Got something going out to Suulutaq?”
He looked at the Beaver on the horizon. “You just missed it. Gold shift crew change.” He nodded at the Otter. “Blue shift is headed for town.”
Indeed, the young men waiting to board the Otter looked thirsty and horny. She saw a Kvasnikof and a couple of Moonins in the bunch who until now had been able to afford the trip into town only when they settled up with the fish processors at the end of the salmon season. She didn’t even want to think about the kind of trouble they could get into going into town twice a month year round with money in their pockets.
A man in a flight jacket, someone else Kate had never met, came up to George with a clipboard. George scanned, nodded and signed, and handed it back. They both watched him trot out to the Otter and climb into the pilot’s seat, and the engine begin to whine.
“Well, hell,” Kate said. “I need a ride out to Suulutaq. Jim needs me to talk to some people out there.”
“Well, hell,” George said with another grin—it seemed to be his expression of choice nowadays—“if it’s on the state’s dime I’ll fire up the Cessna and take you out myself. They got good Danish in the mess hall.”
“Where’s the Super Cub?”
“I sold it.”
George disappeared into the office, leaving Kate gawping after him.
George Perry was a Bush pilot. Bush pilots didn’t sell Super Cubs. They just didn’t.
“You sold your Cub?” she said when he came outside again.
“Yeah, there’s a guy in Ahtna who’s been after it for years.” He looked at Kate and registered her shock. “It didn’t fit into what the business is becoming, Kate. What I’m looking for now is another Single Otter. Maybe two, with one of them dedicated full time to freight runs running direct between Anchorage and the mine.”
“Jesus, George,” she said, caught between respect and dismay. “Coming on pretty strong, aren’t you?”
“The mine needs a lot of air support,” he said, “and it’s going to need a lot more, especially since you won’t let them build a road. Okay by me,” he said, waving off her inarticulate protest, “but if I can’t supply said air support, they’ll go looking for someone who can. I can’t serve both the mine and the Park on the equipment I have. I got a chance for the big time here, Kate, and I’m going for it.”
She digested this while he preflighted the 206, parked in the weeds on the other side of the hangar from the office. Sitting there in the shadow of the building, the Cessna looked a little forlorn, if not downright unloved, and seemed to perk up at being called back into service. George waved Kate over and they climbed in, Mutt jumping into the back, which had been stripped of its other four seats. She sat with her head between the two humans, ears pricked forward in anticipation. The Cessna started at once and without further ado George rolled out onto the runway and lifted into the air. Half an hour later they were touching down at the Suulutaq Mine.
Kate had been to Suulutaq the previous winter, when it was the scene of a homicide involving a couple of Park rats. At that time, it had been covered by twenty feet of snow, which had almost buried the white ATCO trailer with the gold stripe around the edge of the roof. There had been a couple of other outbuildings that only just qualified as sheds, and an orange wind sock on a pole sitting at the end of which, if you looked hard, you could see the faintest simulacrum of an airstrip outlined on the surface of the snow.
This insignificant little outpost had been dwarfed first by the high, wide valley in which it squatted, and second by the Quilak Mountains, two rocky, out-flung arms of which embraced the valley and which permitted only the narrowest possible opening in a pass to the west that tumbled down a precipitous slope leading to the eastern edge of the Kanuyaq River. This remote location was accessible in winter by snow machines and in summer by four-wheeler and year-round by airplane, so long as said airplane was equipped with tundra tires. There was no road.
And there wouldn’t be, Kate thought now, looking down as George made a slow right bank over the now almost unrecognizable location. Not if she, as chair (interim) of the Niniltna Native Association, had anything to say about it. Dan and George were both right about that, even if she’d never say so out loud.
Last winter the camp had been virtually deserted, the lone employee on site a caretaker, whose isolation was alleviated only when his week was up and the alternate caretaker arrived for his shift. Or when someone was poaching game at the head of the valley, where the Gruening River caribou herd wintered.