Fire and ice (9 page)

And besides, it had been a very, very long day.

FIVE

There was a thump at the door. Liam, asleep in the office chair with his feet up on the desk, started awake. The chair rolled back and Liam slid off the seat and crashed to the floor. "Ouch! Goddammit!" His head gave a tremendous throb and then settled into a steady ache just above his left ear. He raised an investigatory hand. The wound was swollen, but less so than when he had come in last night. The cut on the crown of his head was better, too; still tender but crusted over.

He shoved the chair away from him and it went, casters protesting creakily. He rose almost as creakily to his feet, rubbing at the small of his back. He stretched, popping his joints, and gave a mighty yawn, in the middle of which someone thumped on the door again, the same bone-jarring thump Liam recognized as his original alarm clock.

Without waiting for an invitation, the door swung back on its hinges. In the door stood a man it took Liam a few befuddled moments to recognize. It was the Alaskan Old Fart, the drunken shaman, Moses Alakuyak. The shaman stared at him, hands on his hips.

"Well?" Liam said testily. He wasn't a morning person.

"Well," Moses said, emphasizing the word with awful sarcasm, "get your ass out here. It's late--we've got work to do." And he vanished.

Liam blinked once, then felt around for his watch. The little red numbers blinked back at him --6:00 A.m. His teeth were furry, he'd had maybe five hours' worth of uneasy sleep perched on his makeshift office chair bed, and he needed to pee.

"Get out here, dammit!" Moses' voice barked. Liam considered his alternatives, and then braved the shaman's displeasure by relieving his most pressing problem in the bathroom.

He examined himself in the mirror. His hair covered most of the damage. He splashed cold water on his face, drank about a quart of it straight from the faucet, noticing a faintly sulfuric taste, and filled up the bowl to sluice the blood out of his hair. There was a roll of paper towels on the back of the toilet; he used those to dry off.

"Goddammit," the shaman bellowed, "get your goddamn butt out here before I lose my goddamn temper!"

He could always arrest Moses for disturbing the peace, Liam thought hopefully. And then bethought himself of Bill's burgers. Given the obvious relationship between Bill and Moses, it would behoove him to stay on Moses' good side. Or at least that's what Liam told himself. He took a deep breath and stepped out on the porch.

The Newenham troopers' post was one small building consisting of an outer office, an inner office, a lavatory, and two holding cells. The right side of the building was surrounded by a paved parking lot enclosed by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Current occupants included a rusted-out white International pickup, a brand-new Cadillac Seville, and a dump truck. Liam hadn't had time yet to look at the files and see why they had been confiscated.

He could probably make a fairly accurate guess as to why the truck and the Caddy were there (Dwi for the one, drugs for the other) but the dump truck had him stumped. What could you do with a dump truck that was criminal? Haul toxic wastes, maybe, but that would be a federal offense. Wouldn't it? He made a mental note to look up the relevant statutes.

The Newenham post sat on a side road a few blocks from downtown, a stand of white spruce crowding up against it, brushing the corrugated steel roof with long green branches. The road was paved, and there were five parking spaces in front of the building, what looked like a warehouse on one side, and a vacant lot on the other. Beyond the vacant lot was the city dock, and beyond the dock the mouth of the Nushagak River and the entrance to Bristol Bay.

Something was wrong. It took a minute for Liam, balancing uncertainly on the top step, to realize what it was. "Hey," he said. "It's not raining."

Liam was a tall man, six foot three inches, and where he stood his hair nearly brushed the eave of the building. From directly overhead he heard a loud croak, followed by a rapid clicking and another croak. He looked up and recoiled to find himself nose to beak with a raven-sleek, fat, with utterly black feathers that shone in the morning sun with an iridescent luster. He was either the same raven Liam had seen outside the bar the day before, or its twin. He was perched at the very edge of the roof, talons curled around it, peering down at Liam with a bright, intelligent, speculative gaze that knew far more about the human race than any member of a winged species had a right to.

"Wait a minute," Liam said. There had been a raven, hadn't there? The night before? He reached up and touched his wound, or wounds. The hell with it--he must have been more out of it than he'd thought. And after two cracks on the head a man was entitled to a few delusions.

That thought, too, had an uncomfortable echo.

"Well, come on," Moses bellowed, "quit lollygagging around; get your ass down here."

Liam looked from the raven to the shaman, standing in the exact center of one of the empty parking spaces in front of the post. In the distance a truck engine turned over, the generator on a boat kicked in, a small plane took off, a seagull screamed. But right here, right now, it was still and silent --no traffic on the street, no voices. Just the shaman, the raven, and Liam.

Giving the raven a wary look--that beak looked sharp--Liam descended the steps. "What's going on, Moses?"

Moses ignored him. He was dressed in a frogged jacket with a mandarin collar and pants whose hems were secured with cloth ties a little above his ankles. Jacket and pants were made of black cotton; his shoes were black canvas slip-ons with flat roped soles. His expression was serious, even solemn, and his eyes were not, so far as Liam could tell, even a little bit bloodshot.

"Get over here," Moses ordered.

Not only was Liam not a morning person, he hadn't had any coffee yet, but despite this he found himself complying, standing an arm's reach away from the old man, facing the same direction. Moses fixed him with a bright, knowing gaze that reminded Liam uncannily of the raven's. "Put your feet a shoulder width apart, toes turned out. Feel the connection of the earth to your heel, to the ball beneath your big toe, and the ball beneath your little toe." Looking up, he caught Liam gazing at him, brow furrowed, and said impatiently, "Well, come on. It's called a Modified Horse Stance. Bend your knees, get into it."

Not sure why, Liam obeyed. The old man bent over to push Liam's right toe a little in, his left toe a little out, and both knees into a deeper bend. "I want to see a plumb line from your knees to your toes. All right. Now, picture the crown of your head held up by a string. Let your whole spine hang from that string. Fix your feet to the ground, heel, toe, and toe; hang your spine from the sky. Root from below, suspend from above."

The old man walked around Liam twice, examining the trooper's stance with a critical eye. "All right, I suppose that's about as good as we can expect for the first time." Liam began to straighten up, and Moses said, "Where do you think you're going?"

Dutifully Liam sank back down, and over the next half hour Moses began to teach him the rudiments of the first two movements of what the old man finally deigned to tell him was tai chi ch'uan, an ancient Chinese physical discipline based on a form of martial arts known as soft boxing. Those first two movements were called Commencement and Ward Off Left, and consisted of shifting weight from one leg to another, the turning of the torso, and the forming and unforming of the hands and arms into a ball, all beneath the sardonic supervision of the raven, who occasionally added a click of reinforcement to one of Moses' brusque commands from the low branch of a white spruce. The spruce was, evidently, a better spot from which to oversee than the roof of the post.

The Alaska State Troopers require their officers to be physically fit, and Liam was. He could run two miles barely breaking a sweat, he could pull himself over a six-foot fence and hit the ground running, and at the end of the obstacle course he could pull out his weapon, put the barrel in the cardboard circle, and hit what he aimed at without touching the sides of the circle. He ate right most of the time, he worked out, he didn't indulge in too much of anything. Except perhaps Glenmorangie, but that wasn't overindulgence, that was the stuff of life. Even at the bottom of the pit, after Wy's farewell, Charlie's death, Jenny's coma, the debacle at Denali, his demotion, when the future looked as bleak as an Arctic landscape and hope that things would ever get better was long lost to him, he had regulated his health and his fitness. Sometimes it was all he had left to hang on to.

So, if he wasn't precisely hale and hearty, which implied a certain optimism of outlook, he was capable of vigorous exertion in the fulfillment of his duties. It was a matter of common sense, as well as pride. No cop wants to lose a footrace to a bad guy, and he or she definitely has no wish to be forced into going back to the cop shop and admitting to it.

This was a different kind of activity. This required control, focus, discipline, and the kind of dedicated concentration Liam had hitherto given only to the pursuit of criminals and the opposite sex.

And, while it didn't completely cure it, it made his headache recede somewhere to the back of his mind, turning the pain into something he could deal with or ignore, as he wished.

At the end of an hour, Moses grunted a grudging satisfaction with Liam's progress and ordered a by now profusely perspiring Liam back into the modified horse stance. "Stay," he commanded, and Liam stayed while the old man changed into jeans and flannel shirt.

"Er, you want to use the john in the office?" Liam said, thighs trembling, sweat running down his spine.

"What for?" Moses said, with what appeared to be genuine surprise. He packed his tai chi uniform into his truck, a red Nissan long bed with a white canopy on the back, both colors nearly obscured by a thick layer of mud. He walked around Liam one more time, muttering a disapproving comment here, giving a nudge there, standing back finally with a dubious nod. "Best that can be hoped for, I guess. All right. I'm going for coffee."

He climbed into his truck and drove off.

Liam continued to stand there. Five minutes passed. Ten. His shins began to hurt. Fifteen, and his thighs began to vibrate like the wings on a mosquito. Liam could practically hear them humming. After twenty minutes the raven gave a nasty cackle and flapped off toward the river, probably for breakfast, the lucky bastard.

A truck came down the road and stopped somewhere behind Liam. A door slammed, steps approached, the heavenly smell of coffee teased his nostrils. "He's not coming back, Liam," Wy's voice said.

Liam stayed in position. "What do you mean? He said he was going for coffee."

"He didn't say he was bringing any back, did he?" she said. "I ran into him at the espresso stand in NC. He told me he'd been giving you your first tai chi lesson, and I knew what that meant." A cup, a grande by the size of it, appeared in front of his face like an apparition. "He does this to all his beginning students. Come on, come out of it. Stand up, if you can. Slowly."

Liam came up out of it, slowly, and on trembling legs tottered over to the steps, there to subside into a weak pile. He accepted the cup of coffee and sipped it gratefully, savoring the first swallow with closed eyes. "Hey," he said, opening them and smiling at Wy, "you remembered. I like a little coffee with my cream. Good coffee, too. I was worried if I'd find any here."

"Oh yeah," Wy said. "Alaska is getting to be as bad as Seattle--you can't walk a quarter of a block without bumping into an espresso stand."

Liam stared at her for a moment and said finally, "I fail to see the problem there, Wy." She laughed, and he knew a warm feeling around his heart. He could still make her laugh.

She seemed relaxed this morning, in a determined kind of way. Dressed in tennis shoes, jeans, and a green and gold University of Alaska hockey sweatshirt, her dark blond hair picking up highlights from the rising sun, she was willing to meet his eyes, if fleetingly, and was capable of casual small talk, if somewhat constrained and never anything verging on substantial. By merely existing on the planet she tempted him in a thousand different ways, but this morning she was excruciatingly careful, doing nothing overt to provoke. He followed her lead, content for the moment to tuck away the memory of their hasty coupling the night before. He would not forget it, though, and knew she wouldn't, either. The reckoning on their relationship, whatever it was and wherever it was going, had only been postponed.

His transfer had come through so hastily that he knew very little of Newenham or Bristol Bay beyond what everyone knew--fish, fish, and more fish-and he had yet to sift through whatever information Corcoran might or might not have left behind. He asked Wy for a rundown now, he admitted to himself, as much to hear the sound of her voice as to gain information on his new posting. His new home, it turned out, had a population of two thousand in the winter, five thousand in the summer, state and federal government providing most of the year-round jobs. It was the headquarters for three national parks, one state park, four game preserves, a dozen wildlife refuges, and a federal petroleum reserve that had yet to be tested. The population of the town itself ran about three-fourths white, one-fourth Native, mostly Yupik, with some Inupiaq transplants from up north, some Aleut transplants from down south, and one lone Tlingit family that got sidetracked during a move from Sitka to Nome back in the fifties, homesteaded a hundred and sixty acres twenty miles up the Icky road, and never left. "It makes for a lively time during the quarterly meetings of the local Native association," Wy said.