Fire and ice (10 page)

Newenham was the largest city in southwest Alaska, and the staging area for the biggest salmon fishing fleet in the world. "Wait till you see, Liam," she said, shaking her head. "In a couple of months you'll be able to walk across Bristol Bay without getting your feet wet, there will be so many boats on it."

He was satisfied to listen, happy just to savor her presence, but duty called, and reluctantly, he answered. "Let's get your statement down while you're here."

"All right," she said equably, and followed him inside.

She talked, he typed, once he figured out how to turn the post's computer on. There were another few blasphemous moments while he figured out how to turn the printer on, too, after which minor victory of man over machine he fed the form in, hit the print button, and had her sign the result.

"That wasn't so painful," she said, handing back his pen.

"No." He knew something that was going to be, though. He filed the form, stalling for time.

She noticed. "What's up? Is there something wrong, Liam?"

He sat back in his chair, raising a hand to smooth his hair, touching gently the lump over his left ear. "Yeah, there is. I'm sorry as hell to have to tell you this, Wy, but something happened after you left last night."

She stared at him, puzzled. "At the airport? What do you mean, something happened? Oh."

Something sure had, but it wasn't what either of them were thinking of. He watched the rich color run up beneath her skin, and images of the moments in the front seat of her truck caused his own inevitable response. He had a man dead, probably murdered, and all he could think of was the next time he'd get Wy in bed. So much for duty.

"Yes, something happened." He drained his cup and rose to his feet. His headache was only a remembered throb, easily ignored, and he knew a moment of gratitude to the Alaskan Old Fart. Might be something to this tai chi stuff. "Let's take a ride out to the airport."

The damage looked far worse in the full light of day.

The little plane's wings were shredded, long tails of stiff red fabric fluttering in the slight breeze coming off the bay. The steel tubing beneath was clearly visible. She looked all the more pitiful sitting between 68 Kilo, the faded but neat Cessna 180 on her left, and the Super Cub with the brand-new teal and green paint job on her right, which planes Liam was able to identify because their manufacturers had been thoughtful enough to stencil make and model on the side in nice black letters.

Wy was out of the Blazer before it had come to a complete stop. Liam followed more slowly. When he caught up, she was running her hands over the frame, partly in a search for further damage, and partly, he thought, in a soothing, healing motion, as unthinking as it was useless. He looked once at Wy's face, and then away again.

It was early enough that the damage had yet to attract a crowd. He was glad, for her sake.

She stood back finally, face set, hands hanging at her sides.

"I'm sorry, Wy," Liam said. "I tried to stop him."

Her head snapped around. "You caught the son of a bitch?"

"I tried," he said, and sighed, one hand going to his head. "He brained me with a crowbar and took off."

"What?" A hasty step had her peering up into his face. "Are you all right?" Her hand followed his to his head. "Liam! There's a big bump there!"

"I noticed." Gently, he removed her hand. "It's okay--he didn't hit me hard enough to break the skin, and it doesn't feel like anything's broken." His smile was crooked. "Believe it or not, I think the tai chi helped a little. It hardly hurts at all now."

Her hand dropped slowly to her side. "Good. I'm glad. I'd hate to think that you got hurt protecting--" She looked again at the Cub, and whatever she had been going to say died.

"How much to fix it?" he said.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "Five grand, average. Maybe more, maybe as much as seventy-five hundred."

"For both?"

She almost smiled at his naivete. "Each."

"Jesus." He took a deep breath, let it out. "So, ten thousand dollars. How long will the plane be out of commission?"

She shrugged. "The work will take a week a wing. Maybe more." She looked around as if just waking up from a bad dream, only to find the bad dream reality. "Are any of the other planes--"

"No, Wy," Liam said, sadly but firmly. "No. This wasn't random. This wasn't a bunch of vandalizing brats out to see how much havoc they could wreak in one night. I saw him sneaking around and I followed him. He headed straight for your plane. This was directed at you, and only at you. And now you're grounded for, what, a minimum of two weeks? I don't know much about it, but I know the herring fishing season is short." He raised an eyebrow.

She nodded numbly. "Days. Hours. Minutes even, sometimes."

"I thought so. Since this is the plane you spot in, the damage pretty much puts you out of the running for this herring season, doesn't it?" She nodded again. "So, who doesn't want you spotting, Wy?"

"You mean--?" He raised an inquiring eyebrow, and she said forcefully, "No, Liam. No. No way."

"No?" He gave her a long, thoughtful look. "How much herring did you help catch last year?"

"It doesn't matter," she flared. "I can't think of a pilot in the world who would do this to another pilot. Besides, if they were after me, why didn't they go after my 180, too, just to be on the safe side." She indicated the blue and white plane sitting next to the Cub, wings intact.

"Maybe because I got here before they could," he said, and added, "Doesn't have to be only the wings they went after. I'd have your mechanic check it out, stem to stern or whatever you call it on a plane, before you go up in her again."

"No," she said, but she had weakened.

"It doesn't have to be another pilot who did it, either," he said inexorably. "Could be a fisherman, and in that case he might not know about your other plane, he may only have seen you up in the Cub. He may only have her tail number. Did you spot last year from the 180? The last opener?"

She was shaking her head back and forth. "No, Liam. No way."

"Uh-huh," he said, unconvinced. He thought about it, and added, "Well then, who else have you pissed off lately?" She said nothing, staring at the Cub with a dumb misery that struck to his heart. "Wy, dammit!" He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her once, roughly. "Don't you get it? Maybe it was only bad timing that that prop caught Bob DeCreft upside the head. Maybe it was meant to catch you."

She shivered beneath his hands, andwitha slight shock he knew he had not been the first to realize this. "Wy, dammit! What have you been up to? I can't help you if you lie to me, or hold back! Tell me what's going on!"

She opened her mouth to reply, maybe even with the truth, which was why it was especially annoying when the mayor's orange Suburban raced around a corner and swooped to a screeching halt. Jim Earl stuck his head out the window. "Get in the truck, trooper--somebody's been shooting up the post office!"

"This is getting to be a habit, Jim Earl," Liam said, letting Wy go reluctantly. "The post office inside the city limits?"

"Of course! What of it?"

"So you should call the local police."

"I did, goddammit! They ain't none of them available. Roger Raymo's tracking down Bernie Brayton, who some damn fool in Eagle River let loose of before his sentence was up, and Cliff Berg's wife flat won't wake him up! Come on!"

Liam, in what he considered to be the voice of sweet reason, said, "So why don't you wake him up?"

"Because the last time I tried she met me at the door with a loaded twelve-gauge is why. Now will you goddammit get a move on!"

Liam paused, one hand on the door of the Blazer, and looked at Wy. "Can you grab a ride back to your truck?"

She nodded.

"Okay." Still, he hesitated, while Jim Earl rolled his eyes and muttered beneath his breath. "I'll see you later."

She was silent for a moment, thinking over the implied question in his words. At last she said, "All right."

"I'll call. We have phones here, don't we?"

She recovered enough to make a face. "Of course we have phones here, Liam. We've even got cable."

"Just like downtown," he said. He let go of the door and walked back to her, ignoring Jim Earl's impatient snort. "I'll catch the bastard who did this, Wy. I promise." He put a hand beneath her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. "If you'll help me."

"You're still outta uniform, trooper," the mayor said disapprovingly through his open window.

"You're right, Mr. Mayor, I am," Liam agreed cheerfully. He climbed into the Blazer. "Lead the way," he called out the window, and waved to Wy as he drove off. In the rearview mirror, he watched Wy's figure grow smaller and smaller, standing forlornly next to the tattered remnants of her Super Cub.

The post office was a one-story building out of the same mold as every other post office in the Alaskan Bush: a shallow, corrugated metal roof, a sloping ramp leading up to the front door, the Alaska and American flags flying out front (the Alaska flag flying a little higher than the American), banks and alcoves of keyed boxes with metal doors, and a small room at one end with a counter dividing it. There were six or seven people inside. One of them greeted the mayor with relief. "Jim Earl! Dammit, when do I get to mail my package!"

It was the grandmotherly type from yesterday's flight. Today her eye shadow was forest green and her lipstick cranberry red. Her brassy blond hair was piled into a beehive and she was tapping very long, very pink fingernails against a fearsomely taped cardboard box sitting on a high table opposite the counter.

"Now, Ruby, you just hold your horses," the mayor ordered. "We've had a shooting, and we need to clear that up before we open the post office for business again."

Ruby grumbled. "I thought neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night stayed the mailman from his appointed rounds."

"That oath doesn't say anything about bullets, now, does it?" Jim Earl demanded. Ruby subsided, but not graciously.

Jim Earl led Liam through a door behind the counter. The room was an office, containing a desk, two chairs for visitors, and a row of filing cabinets. There were two people already in the room. The one window looked out on the work space of the post office, and Liam peered through it with interest.

The innards of the post office consisted of one large, continuous room full of conveyor belts and gray plastic carts overflowing with piles of white envelopes. A man in a post office uniform shirt loaded a pile of green duffel bags into one of the carts. At one counter a woman sat, running envelopes from another cart through a machine that looked like it was canceling their stamps. A second woman stood at another counter behind the side of the post office boxes the public never sees, throwing mail into the boxes so rapidly that her hands were a blur. Ruby would have felt reassured if she'd seen that it indeed appeared to be business as usual, come rain, snow, sleet, or bullets.

The rear wall had garage doors, and one of them was open to reveal the maw of a freight igloo sitting on a trailer hitched to a semi, into which the man in the post office uniform shirt, now operating a forklift, hoisted a pallet with packages strapped to it. The sun shone so brightly through the gap formed between the igloo's end and the garage door that man, forklift, and pallet seemed to vanish into outer darkness once they had rumbled across the knobby steel runners laid from building to vehicle.

The most interesting thing about the window Liam was looking through was the bullet hole in it. Two of them, in fact, neat holes that had left equally neat starbursts behind in the thick glass pane. He bent to look more closely. "Thirty-caliber, I'd guess," he said, straightening.

"Well now," Jim Earl said, "You don't have to sound so awful goddamn cheerful about it, do you?"

Developing a habit where you showed up after all the shooting was done was definitely something to cheer about, in Liam's opinion, but he kept it to himself.

"This here's the postmaster," Jim Earl said, indicating the man behind the desk. "Name's Richard Gilbert." He failed to identify the woman standing off to the side.

Richard Gilbert was a thin, short man wearing a white uniform shirt, a pair of dark blue uniform pants, and thick-soled black loafers. There was a not very bloody crease across his upper left arm, and his long, narrow face was contorted with rage.

"Mr. Gilbert," Liam said. "I'm Sergeant--I'm Trooper Liam Campbell. Do you know who shot you?"

"Of course he knows who shot him, you damn fool," Jim Earl barked.

Liam looked at Jim Earl, and back at the postmaster. "Might this person have a name?"

"Of course he's got a name--everybody's got a name," Jim Earl said.

Still patient, Liam said, "And this name might be?"

"Oh," Jim Earl said. "That'd be Kelly McCormick."

The mayor looked at Liam expectantly. To the postmaster Liam said, "Mr. Gilbert, did you see Mr. McCormick shooting at you?"

"Of course he did!" Jim Earl's bark was back. "Shot at him right through that loading door there."

Liam looked at the loading door blocked by the igloo on the trailer backed up to it. The man in postal uniform was piloting another palletful of mail on board. "Was the van there at the time?"