Restless in the Grave (34 page)

The door opened and he looked up, only to be turned into a pillar of salt.

Ex-trooper Diana Prince, his onetime subordinate, was back.

And by the look of the medicine ball–sized belly that preceded her through the door, not alone.

“If it isn’t the Wicked Stepmother,” he said.

His cell phone rang, lately an unusual occurrence. Newenham’s local populace had pretty much given up on expecting a uniformed response for anything less than murder.

But this time he knew who it was without even looking at the display. Eyes on Diana Prince, who looked untidy, overweight, irritable, and oddly out of uniform, he answered. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

There was a rich chuckle in his ear. “Hey, son.”

“Let me guess why you called,” Liam said. “My status as an only child is about to change.”

He hung up without waiting for a reply. “The last person I expected to fall for my father’s bullshit was you,” he said.

Prince, a onetime lithe, black-haired beauty with electric blue eyes, waddled to a chair and didn’t sit so much as fall into it. “Don’t rub it in.”

“Oh, I think I will,” Liam said.

“I need a job, Liam,” she said. “And a place to stay.”

*   *   *

He drove back out to Leon’s house. Nobody was home this time, which at least saved him from another beatdown by a Newenham woman, who seemed to be collectively honing their skills in the art today.

He sat in his truck, tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel.

He’d dropped Diana off at home, where at least she’d have a comfortable chair with a place to put her feet up, which looked like they needed it. The sides of her shoes had been slit to allow for expansion. “Your feet look like they belong to Henry the Eighth.”

She cast him a look of acute dislike.

He brought her a glass of ice-filled orange juice.

“Thanks,” she said with real gratitude. She drank deeply and set the glass down, putting her head back and closing her eyes.

His strayed down to her massive belly. “You sure it’s not twins?”

“I’m sure,” she said without opening her eyes.

“Dad’s thrilled, I’m sure,” he said. “This time maybe he’ll luck out and get a son who isn’t afraid to fly.”

“Maybe,” she said, “except she’s a girl.”

“Oh.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Liam.”

“You could have said good-bye,” he said. “Hell, you could at least have resigned so I could have got someone in to take your place. John Barton kept saying you’d be back, there was no point in sending someone to fill your slot. The local cops resigned in a body when Jim Earl cut their pay again. It’s been a little frantic out around these parts.”

“I know. You’re right. But your father—”

“Yeah, I know, Colonel Charles Campbell, USAF, not just a man but a god.”

“He’s a brigadier general now.”

“Oh,” he said for the second time.

He waited for more, but she had closed her eyes again, and she looked so exhausted that he forbore from further recriminations, at least for the moment. “You can have Tim’s bedroom, second door on the right after the bathroom. Wy’s in the air. I’ll leave a message on her voice mail so she knows you’re here.”

“She going to be as happy to see me as you are?”

If he had stayed with Diana he was going to keep asking questions and she really didn’t look up to giving him the answers, so he’d shelved family, for the moment, and gone back to work. After all, it wasn’t like he wanted to talk about his father. Most of the time he worked at not even thinking about him.

Artie Diedrickson, now. Artie Diedrickson was a bit of a boob.

Boobs, like water, tend to find their own level. That level usually included alcohol.

He poked his head in at Bill’s. She was there but he didn’t see anyone else of interest. He waved and left.

He went by the other bar. No luck there, either.

At the liquor store next to the AC he went in to talk to the clerk, Sally. She was a fifty-five-year-old matron with a plump figure and a flirtatious eye, who appreciated being chatted up by a good-looking man in uniform. Liam leaned against the counter and smiled down at her. “Hey, Sal.”

She fluffed up her tightly permed hair. “Hey, Liam.”

“How’s business?”

She fluttered her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “Less boring, now that you’ve dropped by.”

Liam had no problem with putting a little zing into someone’s step, so long as everyone concerned understood that his wedding ring wasn’t merely for show. Five minutes give-and-take and he was the happy possessor of the information that Teddy Engebretsen had come in around noon and paid cash for six cases of beer. “We make all that crowd pay cash now,” Sally said, crossing her arms and leaning on the counter, so as to display her substantial bosom to effect.

“Wise decision,” Liam said, and threw in an appreciative glance, just for extra.

*   *   *

Forget it, Liam,
he thought,
it’s Delinquentville.

The tiny community huddled in a hollow between two small hills, off a road which was off another road which was off the road to the airport. The road had a name but no one remembered it, because the street sign marking the intersection never lasted more than twenty-four hours after the city put up a new one, and after a while the city decided to spend its money elsewhere. Delinquentville (so christened by Liam shortly after his arrival in Newenham) was a collection of ancient log cabins, broken-down trailers and gear shed lean-tos, awash in a sea of stuff that had been too good to throw away for a hundred years, which by now had deteriorated to junk that wasn’t worth the effort of throwing away. It was a fine distinction, but it was one of the few the residents of Delinquentville were capable of making.

Pushki and alders threw up sprouts from piles of cement blocks and rusty car bodies. Scrub spruce clustered around the perimeter, leaning in over the jagged line of roofs as if to eavesdrop on the latest get-rich-quick schemes. Dogs chained to doghouses outside and house dogs inside set up a continuous howl that competed with the blaring of Coldplay, Lady Gaga, and Lil Wayne.

Here was gathered every Newenhamer who’d ever been thrown out by his wife, his mother, or his girlfriend. Herein dwelt the deadbeat dads, the incurable drunks, the serial adulterers, the petty thieves, the liars, the losers, and the louses, the unlucky, the unloved, and the unemployed. If your stepfather had harried you out of the house after he married your mother, if your girlfriend dumped you for another and vastly inferior guy, if the skipper had kicked you off your boat, not for showing up drunk but for your inability to do your job in that condition, you were sure to find a roof and a meal and sympathy in Delinquentville.

Delinquentvillers were overwhelmingly male in gender, although females were always welcome as visitors. One or two had tried it on a permanent basis, though not for long. Karl Marx would have approved, as Delinquentvillers practiced a communal lifestyle, albeit an involuntary one. Beer in particular was regarded as community property whoever brought it home.

On the whole, Liam was with Marx, although for different reasons. Delinquentville’s existence meant he knew right where to go whenever Brewster Gibbons called to report that someone had tried to abscond with the Last Frontier Bank’s ATM machine. It was a frequent enough occurrence that Liam was pretty sure Brewster had Liam’s cell on speed dial.

Teddy Engebretsen had at one time been son-in-law to Mayor Jim Earl. A year after Liam’s arrival on the scene, the mayor’s daughter discovered that she had been deceived in her chosen spouse and had flounced out of Newenham on her father’s dime. Jim Earl had evicted Teddy from the house he had bought the newlyweds, with an enthusiasm that had launched Teddy all the way to the tumbledown shack Liam was parked in front of now. And Teddy Engebretsen was one of Artie Diedrickson’s many boon companions in downward mobility.

Liam got out of the truck and closed the door softly. As yet no one had looked out a window to see the trooper approaching the door. From behind it blared the sounds of Bon Jovi, which sort of surprised Liam, because that was almost like real music. He pulled his ball cap down tight on his head, shifted his belt so that his weapon was prominently displayed, although he did not unsnap the flap on the holster. There were plenty of weapons in Delinquentville but they were for the most part hunting rifles, and while Liam didn’t delude himself that anyone was going to be happy to see him, he couldn’t imagine a time when a Delinquentviller would draw down on him. Shiftless sad sacks they might be, but they were not in general predisposed to violence.

He knocked. He had to knock twice before anyone heard him over Bon Jovi’s exhortations to keep the faith. “It’s open! Wouldja just come the fuck in?”

He knocked a third time. “Jesus, you deaf? Just a fuckin’ minute, wilya?” Footsteps tromped toward the door. Teddy opened it, and gaped at him, the trooper in his resplendent blue-and-gold uniform, perfectly tailored, excruciatingly tidy, a joy to behold.

Except, perhaps, for the occupants of Delinquentville. There was a single moment of electric silence, and then it was like the house exploded.

“It’s the trooper!”

“Shit!”

“Run for it!”

“Get the fuck out of my way!”

Someone dived through a window without bothering to open it. Someone else kicked the boom box, and Bon Jovi scratched to an abrupt mid-wail halt. Liam heard a body crash against what had to be the back door. A toilet flushed, and someone screamed, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing!”

“Jesus, are you deaf, man, it’s Campbell!”

“Fuck!”

Teddy had vanished. Liam decided that even that hard-ass Fourth Amendment magistrate, Bill Billington, would say the open door qualified as an invitation to enter, and strolled inside. “Yoo-hoo,” he said. “Anybody home?”

The main room of the cabin was totally trashed, empties all over the floor,
World of Warcraft
still running on the television, the sickeningly sweet smell of marijuana just beginning to dissipate. The furniture looked like Teddy had harvested it out of the municipal dump. Liam would not have subjected the seat of his immaculate uniform pants to that kind of abuse, not that he’d ever been invited to.

A movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Artie Diedrickson bolt toward the back door. Liam caught him by the scruff of the neck two steps shy, and had the cuffs on him when Leon Coopchiak slithered out of the kitchen in what he no doubt thought was unobtrusive fashion and made for the same back door. He was more successful than Artie, he made the door and was through it before Liam could catch him.

“Shit,” Liam said. The last thing he wanted was a foot chase.

He went through the door, which was probably not his brightest move ever—What if one of these yo-yos did actually have a gun on him and was drunk enough to use it?—and stumbled into the obstacle course also known as Teddy’s backyard. A smokehouse made from an old refrigerator tilted west with what might have been a homemade still tilting east next to it. Behind them was a greenhouse cobbled together of extremely used corrugated plastic, with a lot of green plants inside that he was certain were not tomatoes. He was fleetingly relieved not to see anything that resembled a meth cooker.

There were plastic paint buckets and empty Chevron fifty-five-gallon drums and a heap of broken-down chain saws and a dogsled in some indeterminate stage of repair. There were two snowmobiles and three ATVs and what might possibly have been the remains of an old U.S. Army jeep that Bill Mauldin had driven back from Italy after he won his Pulitzer in World War II. As many pieces as it was in, it could also once have been a Sherman tank, or possibly a baby carriage. Three dogs of indeterminate heritage were standing on top of the doghouses they were chained to, barking hysterically.

Leon was scrabbling over a rusty oil tank in a direction apparently chosen at random. The sun hadn’t filtered through this mess in months and possibly years, and a nice thick layer of ice covered the ground. Liam in pursuit hit a patch of it at a dead run. It retaliated with concentrated malevolence and slid his feet right out from under him. Yelling and waving his arms, he slid into a pile of rotting lumber with nails sticking out of it, avoiding multiple impalements by inches, only upon recoil to kick over a burn barrel with a fire burning brightly inside it. It spilled in his direction and he jumped back and tripped over a pile of rusty rebar and angle iron and stepped into a bucket of white paint, open for some reason, covered with a thin layer of scum and pine needles. Kicking his foot free of the paint bucket he lost his balance and crashed into another barrel, this one with the top cut off. It was full of used oil. The edge was jagged and sharp so he threw both arms around it to catch his balance, just in time for it to rock back in his direction and slosh a gallon of the stuff in his face and down the front of his uniform.

He gave it a vigorous shove in the opposite direction and bent over, hands on his knees, coughing and hacking and heaving to get the oil out of his mouth and nose. He stood up and wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. He looked down at the length of his previously immaculate, superbly tailored self. His right foot was wet to the knee with white paint. The oil ran down his leg to join it.

Sally wouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near her.

The dogs had stopped barking. In the subsequent stillness, a raven cawed, loud and mocking. He looked up and saw it sitting in the top of a spruce tree, peering down at him. It clucked and clicked its beak, conveying a vast and unmistakable amusement.

“All
right,
” he said. “That is just about
enough
.”

He turned on his heel and took off after Leon.

Twenty-four

JANUARY 21

Adak

It wasn’t until they were almost over Unimak Pass, the steaming cone of Mount Shishaldin passing on their left and the Aleutian Islands stretched out before them like a string of irregularly shaped pearls draped over a curve of deep blue velvet that Kate remembered the last time she had flown this same airspace, in an even smaller plane. Jack Morgan had been her pilot then, Jack Morgan, her onetime boss, her best friend, her lover, five years dead now.