Fire and ice (7 page)

"We've even got a hospital," Gould said with a cool smile.

"Hold on a second," Liam said, and went to search the Blazer for an evidence kit. It was in a case behind the backseat, and, typically, Corcoran had left no film in the camera inside and no spare rolls in the case. Liam found a yellow legal pad and a pencil he had to sharpen with a pocketknife, andwiththe evenly spaced halogen floodlights around the airport casting long, faint shadows in the dim light drew a rough sketch of the scene, pacing out the distances between terminal, plane, and body before helping Gould zip DeCreft into a body bag and load it into the ambulance. "Have we got a pathologist, too?" Liam asked Gould.

"Not forensic," Gould said, "but cause of death is obvious, and time of death was witnessed, so--"

"It was?" Liam said. "Who by?"

Gould had thin, self-sacrificial features that would not have looked out of place beneath a tonsure, belied by a pair of satanic eyebrows and a sly smile. "Somebody was yelling about it on the radio. The dispatcher picked it up, and passed it on to me."

"When was this?"

"Right about the time it happened, I guess. Ask the dispatcher."

"And you rushed right on over to help out," Liam observed.

The EMT slammed the doors of the ambulance and paused to give Liam a level, considering stare. "Guy walked into a propeller," Gould said. "The initial report from the scene, as conveyed to me by the dispatcher, indicated that the victim was dead before he hit the ground." He had been leaning on the ambulance. He straightened now. "I was delivering a breech baby in Icky at the time." He went around the ambulance, climbed into the cab, and drove off.

"Icky?" Liam said to the air. As in the Icky road?

Nobody answered him, so he fetched a flashlight and a garbage bag from the Blazer and went to inventory the contents of the Super Cub.

There were a handful of candy wrappers, two maps of Bristol Bay, five small green glass balls Liam recognized as Japanese fishing floats, a walrus tusk broken off near the root, a survival kit, two firestarter logs, two parkas, two pairs of boots, a liter-sized plastic Pepsi bottle half full of yellow liquid, a clam gun, a bucket, three mismatched gloves, and three handheld radios, which to Liam seemed a bit redundant. He put everything into the garbage bag and tied the neck into a firm overhand knot, then set it to one side on the tarmac.

He stuck his head back inside the airplane to make sure he hadn't missed anything. He reexamined the control panel. To his deliberately uneducated eye, it sported the usual array of dials, knobs, bells, and whistles. He pointed. "What's that?"

Next to him he felt Wy start, and smiled grimly to himself. Good. She should know by now that he was still as acutely aware of her presence as she was of his, that he could have told her the instant she stepped from the truck, that he had known to the inch how close she was standing next to him now.

"It's a radio," Wy said.

"I can see that much," Liam said. "Why is it bolted to the bottom of the control panel instead of being built in like the other one"--he pointed--"and why does it look so much newer?"

He turned to look down at her, and again surprised that look of fear on her face. It vanished, but he had seen it, it had been real, and he knew a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"It's a special radio. I installed it at the request of the skipper who heads up the consortium I spot herring for."

"What's so special about it?"

"It's scrambled. So if anybody stumbles across our channel, and I'm telling the skipper where I spotted a big ball of herring, nobody else can understand what I'm saying."

"I see. I suppose there's a descrambler on the skipper's end."

"Yes."

Liam pointed at the garbage bag that held the Cub's inventory. "Then why these other three radios?"

"Backups."

Again, she couldn't quite meet his eyes. Liam waited, but she didn't volunteer any further information. He looked at Gruber, who had materialized on the other side of the strut and who was engaged in wiping his runny nose on the sleeve of his brown jacket, jaws champing again at a wad of bubble gum. He blew a bubble that broke with a splat against his nose, and he slurped it back into his mouth.

"Want me to take that?" Wy said from Liam's other side, and he turned to see her indicating the garbage bag.

"No problem," he said, "I've got it."

He walked over to deposit the bag in the passenger seat of the Blazer, and as an afterthought locked the doors. It was evidence of a sort, after all, although he didn't have a clue yet as to just what it was evidence of, other than a serious sweet tooth and bad housekeeping. Back at the plane, he said to Wy, "Can you lock this thing up?"

"She should move it out of here," Gruber said. "It's kind of in the way."

"Have you got a tie-down?" Liam said. Wy nodded at the apron. "Okay, let's do it."

Wy walked around him to the tail of the plane, picked it up, and began towing the Cub toward the section of the apron she had indicated. Liam and Gruber caught up to help, but the little plane was so light it wasn't really necessary.

Wy's tie-down was some distance down the commercial side of the Newenham strip, off the main taxiway and behind three rows of other small planes. The tiny square of tarmac was at the very edge of the pavement, with a building the size and shape of an outhouse placed on the gravel directly behind it. Looking around, Liam saw other little houses lining the strip like so many miniature garages. Wy's was painted powder blue, and Wy towed the Cub to the tie-down in front of it.

The tie-down itself consisted of two small hoops of bent metal rod set into the pavement. A length of manila line, black electrician's tape sealing the ends, was fastened to each hoop by an eye sealed with more electrician's tape. Liam threaded one length of line to the matching fastening on the right strut, Wy elbowing Gruber aside to do the other.

Liam ducked out from beneath the wing. "At least I can do that much," he said, and smiled at her.

She almost smiled back, and he rejoiced silently. This time he wouldn't back down, he wouldn't walk away. Not this time.

She gestured at the prop. "Can I wipe that down?"

Liam turned. The rain had pretty much washed the prop clean. "You sure it's okay?"

"I disconnected the mags."

"I thought I told you not to mess with it while I was gone," he said in a long-suffering voice. He looked at Gruber. "I thought I told you to keep everyone away from it."

Gruber shifted his gum. "Well, yeah, but, you know. I mean, it's her plane."

Liam suppressed a sigh. "So, can I clean the prop?" Wy said.

"Sure," Liam said. "You can steam-clean the interior if you want. Doesn't much matter now." He hung back, Gary Gruber a silent ghost at his elbow, watching as she fetched a rag from the powder blue shack and carefully cleaned the propeller blades. "Wy?"

She stiffened. "What?"

"What and where is Icky?"

He could almost see the tension leaving her body. "It's what the locals call Ik'ikika. It's a village about forty miles north, on the shore of One Lake."

"You can drive there?"

She nodded. "It's a dirt road, but it's passable. Mostly."

Thinking of the roads he had traveled in Newenham made him think that this was a matter of opinion.

"I've got to get home," she said, and turned abruptly to walk back to her truck.

"Me, too," Gruber said, and made a vague gesture with one hand. "Anything you need, officer."

"Yeah, thanks," Liam said, eye on Wy's retreating back. "If you could come into the office tomorrow, we'll type out your statement and you can sign it."

By the time he caught up with Wy, she was almost to her truck. He caught her elbow. "What's your rush?"

She pulled away. "I have to get home. I'm late already."

Gruber passed them like a gray ghost and vanished into the terminal. A moment later all the halogen lamps but one went out, a door slammed, and they heard the sound of a vehicle starting and fading into the distance.

"Don't you need to call your boss?"

"I already did. Fish and Game never did call an opener. Lucky for me."

Liam gave her a sharp look. "How? I thought you didn't leave the airport."

"I used one of the handhelds in the plane."

He found relief in a small eruption of temper, all the sweeter because he'd been sitting on it for three hours. "Goddammit, Wy, I told you not to go anywhere near that damn plane!"

She glared at him. "We both went, Gary and me both, when I explained to him what I needed to do. I had to disconnect the mags anyway."

He was skeptical, and sounded it. "You can reach the Bay from one of those handhelds here on the ground?"

"I called the processor in the harbor," she said, looking suddenly weary, as if all the fight had gone out of her. "They relayed the message."

"Who is he? Your fishing boss?"

"Cecil Wolfe. He owns the Sea Wolfe. With an e."

"Tell me you're kidding."

She shook her head, the trace of a very faint smile lighting her face. It was as rapidly gone, and she turned again to the truck.

"Wy, wait." Again he caught her arm.

"What, Liam?" she said, and this time the weariness was in her voice. "What more do you want?"

"This," he said, goaded, and reached for her.

Her lips were soft and cool, her face and hair damp from the rain. At first she braced her arms against his hold, murmuring a protest, and in the next instant she was clinging fiercely, returning kiss for kiss, caress for caress.

An exultant thrill raced up his spine when he realized she was just as hungry, just as needy as he was. Her skin ... he'd never been able to get enough of that smooth, warm skin. He bit the pulse at the base of her throat. She opened her legs and slid her hands down over his ass, arching up to rub against him. Her head fell back and a purr rippled out, a sound that seemed to trigger the animal in both of them. They stumbled against her truck, parked just outside the circle of pale illumination cast by the light mounted on the terminal wall. It was the only light, the low-lying rain clouds blocking the setting sun. The deepthroated rumble of a pickup could be heard, but it stopped before it got too close. The last plane had taken off an hour before, and the airport was shut down for what remained of the night. The twilight of an Arctic spring evening closed in around them, and all sense of time and place was lost.

He shoved a rough hand beneath her shirt; her legs came up to wrap around his hips. Somehow she fumbled the door open and they fell onto the bench seat. Liam hit his elbow on the dash, Wy her head on the steering wheel, and neither of them noticed. "Hurry," she whispered frantically, "hurry, hurry, hurry." He felt her hands at his fly and reached for her zipper, opening it and stripping her of jeans, underwear, shoes, and socks in one sweep. The smell of her was so strong and so tantalizing that he would have buried his face in it if she hadn't pulled him up by his hair. He reached for her braid and freed it, burying his face in the resulting curls with an inarticulate murmur. He had never forgotten her smell, intrinsic to her, rich, spicy, infinitely arousing.

Her legs encircled him again and she wrapped a hand around his cock and he almost came then and there. "No! Don't you dare!" She guided him to her and he almost came again when he felt how wet she was. He hung over her, drenched with sweat, trembling with need, waiting, and she dug her nails into the base of his spine and arched up. With one thrust he buried himself inside her, and it was all he remembered, all he had dreamed of, all he had ever wanted. Thirty-one months of wanting and not having had built to this, and he couldn't wait, not one minute, not one second more. "I'm sorry, Wy," he muttered, "I'm sorry," and he thrust, once, twice, three times and that was all it took, it boiled up out of him in a scalding flood and into her, and dimly he felt her nails dig deeper into his back, her legs tighten around his ass, her back arch so powerfully it raised them both off the seat, heard her voice cry out his name, and knew with a dim rush of pride and pleasure that she had come with him, that he had not been cast up on the beach alone.

It was a long, long journey back, and when he made it, he became slowly aware of the separate sensations of the now slack embrace of her legs, the rise and fall of her breast beneath his, the tickle of her breath against his ear, the seep of fluid out of her and over him. He wanted to reach down and rub that fluid into her skin, marking her with the smell and taste and touch of him. The need to put his brand on her became too powerful to resist, and he turned his head to nuzzle beneath the hair on her neck. He bit her, at first softly, and then harder, knowing a fierce and proprietary joy at once again being able to stake a claim. He had Wyanet Chouinard in his arms again, and never had his world seemed so rich with promise. He wanted to shout for joy. He wanted to weep with relief. He wanted to shake his fist to the sky and curse God for taking her away. He wanted to get down on his knees and thank Him for bringing her back. He wanted nothing more and nothing less than to lie in this woman's arms for the rest of his life.

It wasn't long before he noticed that these feelings of joy unconfined might not be returned. She was trembling, and when he raised his head he saw tears sliding fast and hot down her face. "What?" he said with quick dismay. "Don't," he said, when she tried to shove him off. "Wy, don't."