Restless in the Grave (6 page)

“Nice, huh?” George said, looking behind her from the doorway. “Grumman Gulfstream Two.”

“A corporate jet?” Kate said.

“Yeah. Some Suulutaq bigwigs. Frank took ’em over to the mine in the Beaver this morning.” George, tall, thin, a cavernous face with a five o’clock shadow present at eight o’clock in the morning, looked just a little smug. “Good thing we got the runway paved last fall.”

Yet another example of Suulutaq’s largesse, and it grated on Kate, but only a little. Maybe when the city of Niniltna finally incorporated, they could start charging landing fees.

“You getting in or not, Shugak?” he said impatiently.

Kate got in and sat down across from Campbell. Mutt padded in behind her and lay down in the space between the pilot’s seat and the rest of the passengers. George put on his headset, and the turbine engine started to whine.

The last thing Kate saw as they taxied away was the sexy little corporate jet lording it over the end of the runway. When the Otter turned for takeoff, the sun finally tore free of the clutch of the Quilaks and escaped to the sky, and a shaft of light caught the engine facing Kate, illuminating its identification number. The first letter was a C.

Interesting, Kate thought. All U.S. tail numbers began with an
N. C
for Canada, maybe? Global Harvest Resources, Incorporated, was an international conglomerate, and Canada was the world’s third largest producer of gold. Maybe they were in town to investigate the possibility of investing in the Suulutaq. Make sense if they wanted a piece of the action going on next door.

George turned the Otter loose and they lifted up off the end of the newly paved runway, and it was with no little relief that Kate left the newly minted international gold capital of North America behind, at least for a while.

Watching from the ground, Jim remembered the view of Kate following Liam Campbell into the plane, and wondered how smart he’d been to send her off with a man whom he knew from personal observation was irresistible to the ladies. There had been some brisk competition for the fairer sex between the two of them, that wild time in the Valley.

His gaze followed the Otter until it was out of sight.

Six

MONDAY, JANUARY 18

Newenham

Newenham was the largest city in southwestern Alaska, the market town for the dozens of tiny, mostly Yupik Native villages surrounding it for hundreds of miles in every direction. Some of them had begun as fish camps, where the Natives went every summer to catch their year’s supply of salmon, either to eat or to sell it for money to buy fuel.

Other villages got their start as remote canneries back in the day, when Bristol Bay salmon went into a can instead of being flash frozen and shrink-wrapped, and when by law you could fish for them only from a sail-powered boat. Some began as mining camps for gold, platinum, or coal, and some as fuel stops and mail and freight dumps for the Alaska Steamship Company. A few were the result of adventurers looking for a place far enough away from the madding crowd to put down a quiet root and prosper on the 160 acres of land provided for in the Homestead Act.

Very few were viable in the long term due to a lack of anything remotely approaching a year-round industry. Salmon were being farmed now in Europe, Canada, and South America in quantities and at a price that had severely impacted Alaska’s wild salmon catch, and the nascent ecotourism industry was barely worthy of the name. Especially since that determinedly sole-source provider, Finn Grant, had bought up everyone else in the flightseeing, fly-in fishing, and big game hunting business. With his death, tourism out of Newenham was at a standstill.

First and foremost, Newenham was the regional market town. In winter on snow machines and four-wheelers, in summer on boats, year-round in airplanes the villagers came to Newenham to buy groceries and supplies, get their eyes checked and their teeth fixed, visit relatives, stand trial, fly to Anchorage to go to the AFN Convention in October or to catch another plane to Hawaii for spring break in March.

But Newenham wasn’t only their market town, it was also the headquarters for three national parks, four national game preserves, a dozen wildlife refuges state and federal, and an offshore petroleum reserve, access to which had been stymied in a series of court decisions over the fifty years since statehood. It was also the seat of the regional government, state judiciary, and state law enforcement. Although the latter had lately been reduced to a sole-source provider, one Sergeant Liam Campbell.

Liam yawned and steered his vehicle back over to the right side of the road. He couldn’t remember one single night’s uninterrupted sleep in the past year. This could not go on. It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to himself, but this time, dammit, he meant it. Mayor Jim Earl was going to have to find the wherewithal to hire some city cops, and Major John Dillinger Barton, the Lord High Everything Else of the Alaska State Troopers, was going to have to chisel enough funds out of the state to assign Liam at least one more trooper. Two would be better and three ideal, but he’d take what he could get. If he were closer to retirement, he could really make a statement and threaten to quit over it, but he liked his job and he wasn’t independently wealthy. While Finn Grant’s death had sent a lot of business his wife’s way, her air taxi was still barely self-supporting. Not to mention the kid they had in trade school.

He yawned again, his jaw cracking this time. Over a third of the Newenham population was under eighteen, which didn’t make his job any easier, the hormonally challenged being terminally and all too often fatally prone to acts of stupidity.

There was also the problem of village flight, people leaving the villages for the big city in hopes of finding a job so they could feed their kids. The population of Newenham had increased by almost five hundred over the past two years, to almost twenty-five hundred in the last census, which made Newenham city-sized in Alaskan Bush terms. Most of them were Yupik and a lot of them were living out of town on Native allotment lands, which put them outside the city limits, which meant they didn’t have to pay city taxes but also meant they couldn’t vote in city elections. This had incurred a lot of acting out on property both civic and private. That this was the outward adolescent manifestation of a lot of inward adult resentment, Liam was well aware.

He did his best to stay the hell away from local politics, but there was no way he could avoid the fallout from all of the above in the form of domestic disputes, alcohol-related abuse, the blood feuds that went back generations, and the usual civic disharmony on a scale that was, so far, mostly misdemeanor, and mostly manageable. But if Hizzoner and His Eminence didn’t get their acts together, soon, Liam was going on strike.

He topped a small rise and pulled over to the side of the road, and checked the rearview mirror. No traffic for the moment. He rolled down the window and took a deep, invigorating breath of cold, clean winter air.

A raven croaked at him from a nearby treetop, and he looked up to meet a cocked head and a beady black eye.

“Don’t even think about it,” Liam said.

The raven looked at him out of his other eye and gave a mocking series of throaty croaks and clicks.

“I mean it,” Liam said.

The raven must have decided Liam meant it because he spread his wings and dropped off his branch to do a death-defying strafing run over the top of Liam’s vehicle, before vanishing over the trees on the opposite side of the road.

Close encounters of the
Corvus corax
kind. To this was he reduced. Liam rubbed his hands hard over his face and looked at the view.

Newenham sprawled up and down forty square miles of riverbank, about a thousand buildings, twenty-five hundred people, three fish processors (couldn’t really call them canneries anymore), a town hall, a courthouse with its very own public prosecutor and public defender, two cop shops (one of them vacant except for two dispatchers working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week and who knew how long that would last), a hospital, and what Liam thought had to be a contender for the title of world’s largest boat harbor. From this vantage point, it sprawled along the waterfront the way the town sprawled along the riverbank, a veritable floating forest of masts and booms and flying bridges surrounded by two immense gravel arms, breakwaters separated by an entrance that looked minuscule even when you were on a boat going through them. Liam heard tell that time was, most of those boats had been hauled out of the water every year before winter ice could crush their hulls into matchsticks. The harbor hadn’t frozen once since he’d been assigned here. Nobody bad-mouthed global warming around Newenham.

At Newenham the incoming tide mixed with the outflowing snowmelt and the Nushugak River was wide enough to require a clear day and a squint to see from one side to the other. It was here that another, smaller river whose name was lost to the ages had provided rich provender for the Yupik who had worked seasonal fish camps there. In 1818 the Russians showed up, established a settlement, and called it Rika Redoubt. Twenty years later the Russian Orthodox Church followed, establishing a mission and building a church that still stood, if a little tentatively. In 1897 the U.S. Army Signal Corps brought in a telegraph line, in 1903 the Alaska Steamship Company added Newenham to its western route, and in 1905 the first Alaska Packers salmon cannery opened its doors, followed by a rush of others, all Outside interests. Alaska Natives were catching their own fish during the summer months and too busy to work for anyone else, so the canneries brought in crews from Mexico and China and the Philippines. At one time, according to Moses Alakuyak, the drunk shaman who was older than god and the generally acknowledged patriarch of Bristol Bay, not to mention Liam’s father-in-law, there had been nine salmon canneries operating in Newenham.

Which might go a long way toward explaining why the salmon population was not what it once was.

Something flashed in the sun, the window of a pickup moving in his direction. Wouldn’t do to have the state trooper, the law of the state made manifest, found pulled over only to admire the view. And dozing off while he was at it. Liam shook himself out of his drowse and started the engine and went on into town.

Most of Newenham was built off one main road, variously known as the main road, the airport road, the lake road, and the Icky Road. The road went north, along the riverbank, passing the Anipa Subdivision five miles out, the airport ten miles out and turning inland to end forty miles later on the shore of One Lake in the village of Ik’ikika.

The road also went south along the river, twenty-five miles to Chinook Air Force Base, or it had until the winter the senior senator from Alaska lost a twenty-year congressional battle and the base was closed. Everything movable was loaded onto barges and towed around the Aleutian Peninsula through Unimak Pass to Dutch Harbor, where it was loaded on a container ship headed south. What was left now belonged to Finn Grant’s estate, and on the plane home Saturday Liam had heard a rumor that Angayuk Native Association was negotiating terms for lease or sale of the property. Two very nice paved runways in prime condition came with it, not to mention a barracks big enough to sleep fifty and administration and support buildings to go along with them, so it would be a very attractive property to someone with a use for it.

Which only opened up motive for another couple of hundred people, all of them Angayuk shareholders, he thought gloomily.

The town’s only supermarket appeared on his left. Alaska Commercial Company, known locally as the AC, had the usual full parking lot, with the expected congregation of kids playing hooky standing around the door, smoking cigarettes, playing grabass, and killing time. He slowed down as he drove past, letting them see him and returning look for look.

Next to the AC the liquor store opened up. Out of habit Liam checked the clock on the dash. Eight
A.M.
on the money. Martha Pauk was first in the door, followed by Jimmy Creevey and Manuel Chin. It would be two more long hours before Bill’s Bar opened up, and they couldn’t wait.

He thanked his lucky stars yet again for being posted to a place with only two bars and one liquor store, unheard of in Alaska for a city this size unless the community had by a miracle voted itself dry. Jim Earl and the town council kept a death grip on liquor licenses, and no amount of encouragement from the Alaska liquor lobby was going to shake a fourth license loose. The only way somebody could open a new bar was if Bill or whoever owned the other bar this month died and the new business bought or inherited the old business’s liquor license. Bill’s bar was never a problem, partly because of the .30-06 she kept behind the bar and partly just from sheer force of personality.

The other bar—Seaside Inn? Breeze Inn? Dew Drop Inn? He honestly couldn’t remember what it was called at present—was a dive that had changed hands twice and possibly three times since Liam’s arrival four years before. It never seemed to become stable enough to become a base of drinking operations for reliable patrons like Teddy Engebretsen and Kelly McCormick and Johnny Kvichak, so it was no wonder it kept going out of business in the same location.

Besides, everybody went to Bill’s. Bill never watered down her drinks, Jimmy Buffett and the Neville Brothers were always on the jukebox—nowadays on the SoundDock—and if on that rare occasion someone was clueless enough to cause a ruckus, why, it so happened that Bill Billington was also the Newenham magistrate. It had a calming effect on the customers, while in no way dissuading them from having a good time.

Of course, the downside of only two bars was nine churches, but half of them were teetotalers, and Liam was professionally in favor of teetotaling. Sobriety cut down the workload, especially in rural Alaska.

Personally, he liked his Glenmorangie straight up. Probably a throwback to his Scots ancestry. Bill kept a bottle behind the bar just for him, and even if the hamburgers hadn’t been the best in town, that would have been enough to guarantee his loyalty. Besides, he liked a quiet drink in good company as much as the next man, and Bill took misbehavior in her bar personally, especially when said misbehavior resulted in destruction of property. It was widely known that in her magistrate persona she could get a little punitive in her sentencing. It had a bracing effect on her patrons’ manners.