Fire And Ice

FOUR

Teddy Engebretsen was freed from bondage and deposited safely, if a bit tearfully, in one of the six cells available at the local jail. The dispatcher, a leathery middle-aged woman with a harassed look on her face, tossed Jim Earl the keys while talking nonstop through her headset, something about a joust between two dueling snow machiners on the Icky road. The Icky road? It was the first week of May, and Liam hadn't seen any snow on the ground either from the air or Jim Earl's truck. He decided not to inquire if the Icky road was municipal, state, or federal. Some things it was better he should not know.

Afterward, Jim Earl dropped Liam at his office, where the trooper discovered the door unlocked and the keys in the ignition of the white Chevy Blazer with the Alaska State Troopers seal on the door. Mindful of the scene still waiting at the airport, Liam did little more than toss his bag behind the desk and lock the office door before climbing into the Blazer. The engine turned over on the first try, and he didn't get lost more than two or three times on his way back to the airport.

He arrived at the same time as the ambulance, and made a resolve then and there never to be shot in the line of duty during his posting to Newenham. He checked his watch. It was eight-thirty. Unbelievably, it was only three hours since his plane had touched down. Surely too much had happened to fit into that small a space.

He raised the watch to his ear. The ticking should have reassured him that time was passing with its usual, inexorable forward motion, but it didn't.

Wy was still there, sitting in the cab of her truck. It was drizzling. An older man, unshaven and wearing salt-stained clothes, was talking to her through the open driver's-side door. Wy caught sight of Liam over the man's shoulder as he pulled up next to her. By the time Liam had gotten out the older man was walking away, a pronounced limp in his gait. "Who was that?" Liam said.

She shrugged. "Just another fisherman. Wanted to know what happened."

She couldn't quite meet his eyes, and he regarded her for a speculative moment.

Gary Gruber was still there, too, shivering beneath the eaves of the terminal and gnawing at what might have been a candy bar. People came and went, planes taxied to and fro, and barely a glance was spared for the mound beneath the blue tarp, which seemed to have shrunk since Liam last saw it. It looked very lonely lying next to the little red and white Super Cub, which looked more than a little forlorn itself.

The ambulance was under the command of a single emergency medical technician, a slim, intense young man who introduced himself as Joe Gould. He knelt to inspect DeCreft's body. "Not much to be done here," he observed. "Okay to take the body to the morgue?"

"We've got a morgue?" Liam said.

"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."

"Please," she said, and he had no defense against that. His legs offered no guarantee they were going to hold him up, but he managed, staggering a little. He got his jeans back on all right, though it took his shaking hands two tries to get his fly fastened.

She put herself to rights more swiftly, and was in the cab of the truck once more, reaching to close the door. He smacked his palm against the edge just in time. "Don't do this, Wy. Don't walk away from this. Not again. I don't think I can live through it a second time."

In that moment he would have gone down on his knees, and something in his voice told her so. Her hand slid from the keys. Her head drooped forward, to rest against the steering wheel. Her hair, that glorious mane, fell forward to hide her face, and her voice was so muffled he had to strain to hear. "I can't do this, Liam."

"Yes you can," he said, terrified now. "You have to. I need you. I need you, Wy." His voice deepened. "And you need me, too. Hell," he said, with a gesture that included the bench seat, "you may even need me more."

She was silent for a moment, before raising her head and brushing the hair back from her face so she could look at him. In the single floodlight of the terminal building, her face looked bloodless. "It's been almost three years-"

"It's been nothing. It was yesterday." He took a deep breath, fighting for control, fighting for his life now. "It was this morning, goddammit."

She was silent again. He waited. At last she said, her voice low, "Liam, my life has changed. I have-"

"What? What have you got that you can't fit me in around, us in around? What?"

She met his anger with her own, and it was kind of a relief to be fighting again. "I didn't lay down and die when I left, Liam. I moved on, and along the way, I acquired-" She hesitated, and then said firmly, "I acquired some new obligations."

"Obligations? What the hell does that mean?" he demanded, and then added cruelly, "If what just happened in the cab of this truck means anything, it sure as hell doesn't mean another man." She shook her head, and he grabbed her arm. "You were with me every step of the way. You haven't been with anyone else either, have you?" She didn't answer, and he gave her a rough shake. "Have you!"

She slid out of the cab and gave him enough of a shove so that he fell back a step. "No I haven't! So what! It doesn't mean I'm ready to fall at your feet!"

"I didn't ask you to fall at my feet! Share my home, yes! Sleep in my bed, yes! Live with me for the rest of my life, yes!"

She drew herself up to her full height and looked him straight in the eye. "How's Jennifer?"

The breath caught in his throat. When he could speak he said, with difficulty, "Low blow, Wy."

She knew it was, too. Conflicting emotions chased themselves across her face, and it was an obvious struggle before she could settle on sympathy. "I'm so sorry, Liam. When I heard, I almost-but there was nothing I could say that would help then, either." She swallowed hard. "Your boy, Charlie. I know how much you loved him."

"Yes." Liam leaned up against the truck and closed his eyes. Rain fell on his face, cool, clean, oddly comforting. Charlie had loved the rain, laughing out loud as his little wobbly baby legs, unsteady but determined, would stamp through puddles, his tiny baby's grasp hanging on to Liam's for support. Those first few horrible weeks after Charlie's death, Liam had run from the pain of such memories. Now, he welcomed them. For eighteen precious months, Charlie had been a part of him, and beyond that, a part of his life's blood, his promise of immortality.

His hostage to fortune.

No, he wouldn't trade his memories for anything in the world. Not even for the love of the woman standing next to him now.

She swiped at her face with an impatient hand, mixing rain and more tears. "Do you ever think about fate, Liam?"

"Fate?" he said.

"Yes, fate. I give you back to your son, and then fate takes him away. It's almost…"

"What?"

"It's almost like punishment," she whispered.

He turned his head to look at her. "No, Wy. Been there, done that. We didn't kill Charlie. A guy name of Rick Dyson got drunk, climbed in his car, and ran a stop sign at seventy miles an hour. He killed them. We didn't."

Another pause. "How is she, Liam?"

It was his turn for the fight to drain out of him, and he slumped back against the truck. "The same. Day in, day out. Nothing ever changes. She just lies there."

"Did you-how often did-"

"All the time. I drove down to Anchorage every Friday to spend the weekend with her. I read to her. She never was much for reading, but I kept thinking, she's going to hear my voice, she's going to hear me calling to her, she's going to wake up. It's happened before, to other people, why not Jenny?" All the old familiar frustration and guilt and rage welled up inside him and he balled his hand up into a fist and struck the side of the truck, once, twice, three times, hard enough to hurt his hand. "No. Nothing has changed."

"How could you let them-" She stopped, and bit her lip.

"How could I let them transfer me here? I didn't have much choice, Wy. Barton was pretty clear; it was take the posting in Newenham or take a hike." He wiped a hand across his face and it came away wet, mostly from the rain. "I didn't have much left but the job, Wy. I took the transfer. I'll get back as often as I can."

Her voice was a ghost of sound. "I'm sorry, Liam. I'm so sorry."

"So am I."

"Do you ever sometimes wonder…"

He looked at her. "If she won't come back because she knew about us?"

It had been like that from the start, the instantaneous communication, the link between them, one beginning a sentence only to have the other finish it. "Yes," she whispered.

"She didn't know," he said strongly, willing himself to believe it. "She didn't know; she never knew. We were always careful. No one knew."

A stifled sob made him turn. A tear slid down her cheek. "It's the worst thing I've ever done in my life," she whispered. "Sleeping with you when I knew you were married."

He couldn't answer, because he knew she was right. And besides, it was the worst thing he'd ever done, too. He thought of Jenny, laughing, loving Jenny with the light brown hair. She had deserved better.

"I have to go," she said. "It's so late, there's -I have to-" She couldn't or wouldn't finish the thought.

Again, he caught the pickup's door before it could close. "You have to come down tomorrow, and make out a statement."

She stared at him, uncomprehending. "What?"

"You were Bob DeCreft's pilot, Wy. He was your spotter. You would have all the opportunity in the world to sabotage your own plane. Shit, you're probably my prime suspect."

Her voice distant, she said, "You think I killed him, then?"

He wanted to slap the stony expression right off her face. "No," he said through his teeth, "no, I don't think you killed him. I don't think you've got it in you to kill anyone. But I still have to find out who did, and you're an eyewitness to some of his last moments alive."

Her face relaxed. "All right. I'll come down in the morning."

"You don't have to fly?" he said, in belated concern.

"I don't know. I won't know until I check the schedule, see what Fish and Game has decided." She reached again for the ignition.

"We're not done, Wy," he warned her.

She stared out the windshield, delicate profile silhouetted against the merciless rays of the halogen light. "I know," she said finally.

It was enough for now. He closed her door. She turned the keys, the engine rolled over, and she drove away.

Liam, light-headed with a mixture of emotions he could neither separate nor quantify, was in the Blazer with his hand on the shift when he realized he had no place to sleep. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time he'd slept in an office chair. Of course, first he'd have to find the post again before the sun came up.

Sighing, he started the Blazer and put it into gear. As he started along the tarmac, tires hissing through the returning rain, a figure detached itself from the shadow of the terminal and moved down the runway toward the small plane tiedowns. Liam let up on the gas, watching. It was a hulking figure, ogre-like in shape and size, but that could have been the magnifying effect of the dim light. It was moving stealthily, ducking from shadow to shadow, working its way steadily forward.

Liam gave the Blazer enough gas to keep moving, drove around the terminal out of sight and sound of the figure, parked, and hotfooted it to the other side. The figure had vanished into the gloom. Liam walked forward, threading his way between parked planes, ears pricked, eyes roving from side to side. The planes all looked alike to him so he tried not to look at them, tried instead to register what was out of place in his peripheral vision.

He heard a sound like the ripping of fabric. He stopped, the better to hear it. It stopped, too. He waited. There it was again, and he walked toward it. It stopped again, and he stopped again. Footsteps then; careful, quiet footsteps, soles slapping gently against pavement, then crunching against gravel, then pavement again, then a repeat of the ripping sound.

It was coming from very near to where Wy's Cub was parked. Liam moved forward to crouch behind a plane on wheel-floats. He peered around the rudder.

He recognized the little red and white plane as 78 Zulu, but now it looked like the wing closest to him had been through a Cuisinart. Their fabric coverings had been shredded, so that the Dacron hung in thin, ragged strips, exposing the steel tubes beneath. On the far side, a large figure worked at the second wing with what looked like a crowbar, shredding it as well.

As an act of malicious, wanton waste it was enough to take Liam's breath away. It brought him involuntarily to his feet, his head smartly smacking into his hiding place's fuselage with a clang that reverberated down his spine and for a hundred feet in every direction.

All sounds from the Cub stopped.

His scalp had caught some sharp edge. Warm fluid seeped down the side of his face and into his left eye. "Ouch!" He clapped one hand to his head and the other to his holster. "Dammit! Hey! State trooper! Knock that shit off right now!"

The big figure, caught with his crowbar raised over his head, froze in place. And I picked tonight to forget the goddamn flashlight, Liam thought as he stepped unsteadily into the open. "Just hold it right there, mister. Just-shit! Halt, goddammit!"

The figure, moving with alarming speed for something of its bulk, had turned to run. Liam ran after him. "State trooper, I say again; stop or I will shoot!" Which would have been a neat trick with his gun still holstered. Liam unsnapped the cover as he ran, the rain in his face, running into wingtips, tripping over tie-down lines and tie-downs and just generally blundering around like a drunken elephant.

He thudded full tilt around the tail of a plane so yellow it nearly glowed in the dark and caught the merest glimpse of a tall dark monster looming up on his left before the sky fell on him with a thump that caved in the left side of his face. He had a brief flash of jumbled images that included the monster stooping over him, an upraised arm, the claw end of a crowbar; and then things got really weird-the beat of wings, feathered this time, sharp talons and a razor beak, a challenging, inhuman scream answered by a very human shriek of pain, as the menacing hulk looming over Liam was enveloped in darkness.

The rain woke him, a few minutes or a few hours later, beating against his face, soaking his clothes, and forming puddles around his body. He opened his eyes, and found himself staring up at the underside of the yellow plane's right wing. A wind had come up and was driving the rain sideways, causing it to tippety-tap against the aluminum side of the plane.

So far as he could tell, he was alone in the airplane parking lot.

Or not. There was a kind of scraping sound overhead that he first mistook for more rain, but a movement caught his eye and he looked up again, squinting against the rain, to see the head of a raven peering over the side of the wing, its black head gleaming wetly. It looked irritated. It sounded it, too, when it croaked at Liam.

Liam blinked back. The raven gave a sour-sounding caw and launched itself into the air. A second later, it had vanished, black shape into rainy night.

Head wounds were tricky things, he knew. They bled worse than any other injury, and anyone suffering a head injury was entitled to a hallucination or two.

It was either that or he'd wound up in the middle of a science fiction remake of The Maltese Falcon.

The thought surprised him into a laugh, which made his head ache but also propelled him to his feet. He had to lean up against the plane until the wave of dizziness had passed.

He should go the hospital, he thought, have himself checked out.

He should report this incident to the Newenham police.

He should call Wy, tell her about her plane.

Instead he staggered back to the Blazer, fell in, and drove himself to his office, by a miracle finding it on the first try. It looked like the end of the rainbow that night, the one dry place in Newenham he had a key to.

Bad news keeps.

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