So Sure Of Death

SEVEN

The borrowed Super Cub, a two-seater with more wing than fuselage, looked familiar. “Didn't we spot herring in this puppy three months ago?” he wondered out loud.

Without answering, Wy pushed the pilot's seat forward on its tracks. Liam wedged himself into the seat behind, disposing his long legs in the limited space as best he could. “You sure the dentist from Anchorage isn't going to show up on the next Alaska Airlines jet and want to go fishing?”

“You want to get to the dig or not?” she demanded.

“I want to get to the dig,” Liam said meekly.

“Fine.” Wy climbed into the front seat and pulled it forward, which helped. This craft had no matching headsets, and Liam watched as she fastened the fold-up door and started the engine. Her fat braid hung down the back of her seat, curls escaping around her hairline and from every plait. She wore her hair long, she had told him, because it was easier to care for. Wash-andwear hair, she had said, laughing at his intent expression as he used a blow-dryer to tame his own thick pelt.

He tried not to remember what her hair looked like loose on a pillow, a mass of blond-brown curls that wrapped around his fingers with a life all their own. He was still trying when they took off, so that he barely noticed when they became airborne, one good use his obsession with her served.

He approved of the thought the old ones had put into siting Tulukaruk, on a bluff where what looked like half a dozen streams joined before heading southeast into the Bay. Easy to defend, and an escape route if defense proved inadequate. Food and water plenty to hand, in the form of those selfsame creeks and the salmon that swam up them to spawn. The Natives were still waiting for them, at sites like this one, all over the Bay and the Delta. The fish fed their families and their dog teams. When the dog team was replaced by the snow machine, fish sold to Outside processors paid for their gasoline.

The last two years hadn't been good ones. Some people said it was the trawlers, the ones with nets a mile long, dragging the bottom of the north Pacific Ocean and hauling up every species, endangered or not, in its way to the surface. Some said it was El Niño, causing an increase in the ambient temperature of the Gulf of Alaska and moving new species north, as witnessed by the tuna caught off Kodiak Island for the first time last summer. Some said it was nature, and the cycle of life. No one really knew.

Some fishermen were selling up and moving Outside. Others were taking odd jobs, working construction in Anchorage or Prudhoe Bay, enrolling in computer classes, doing anything to maintain their families until the next big run came in.

As they approached the bluff and the remains of the tiny settlement, Liam wondered why its inhabitants had left. Had the salmon deserted them, too? Or had they been chased off by another, bigger, stronger clan who wanted the site for their own? Had thegussukbrought annihilation in the form of measles or influenza? He remembered reading in Alaska history class about the great flu epidemic of 1919, as terrible in Alaska as it was worldwide, how it had wiped out entire villages.

He saw Wy's cub, 78 Zulu, on the ground at one end of the bluff, and nearly swallowed his tongue. “We're going to land there?” he managed to croak.

She ignored him. They circled once over the camp and what Liam saw made him forget his fear for the second time. “Hey!”

“I see her!” Wy yelled over the sound of the engine. She banked to line up with the edge of the bluff and throttled back so far Liam thought the engine had died. They touched down lightly and rolled to a halt. Liam was out of the plane the instant it stopped moving and his longs legs ate up the ground between the bluff and the tents in seconds.

He knelt next to Prince, who was lying on her back, half in and half out of one of the tents, her hat a few feet away. “Prince? Diana?” He felt her throat for a pulse, and was infinitely relieved when it thudded against his fingertips.

Wy went past him and bent over the man.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes.”

Prince's eyes opened. “Whozzit?”

“It's Liam Campbell, Diana, and Wy Chouinard. You're at the village site with… ah…” He looked at Wy for help.

“Professor McLynn,” she said, and helped McLynn, groaning, to a sitting position. The left shoulder of his khaki shirt was stained with blood, which did not obscure the neat hole through his sleeve.

Prince sat up on her own. Her hand went to her head and she groaned. “Damn. I have got the worst headache.”

She reached up. Liam caught her hand. “Let me look.”

The hat and her thick hair had cushioned most of the blow, but there was a goose egg, swollen and tender, swelling her scalp. “Somebody clobbered you a good one.” He sat back on his heels. “What happened? Can you remember?” Head injury was frequently associated with short-term memory loss; he hoped that was not the case here.

He watched her struggle to regain some kind of composure. “I don't know. Wait a minute.” She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again. “There was a four-wheeler. When we landed.”

“Where?”

She pointed with a shaking finger, and he got up and walked around the tent. There were fresh tracks, but no four-wheeler. He returned to Prince. “How long ago?”

She looked at the no-nonsense watch with the large round face and the big numbers strapped to her left wrist. “I don't… Fifteen minutes. Thirty. Maybe an hour? We were late getting off from Newenham, I had to preflight the Cub.” Prince sighed, looking suddenly tired, and closed her eyes. “We saw the four-wheeler from the air. He was hiding inside the tent. He clobbered me with something, I don't know what. Felt like a sledgehammer. That's all I remember.”

There wasn't any point in asking her if she recognized the guy; she was too new to the area. McLynn might have, though. “Mr. McLynn?”

The man's voice was faint but definite. “Professor McLynn.”

“Professor McLynn, did you see who shot you?” McLynn muttered something inaudible. “I beg your pardon?”

McLynn opened his eyes and shouted, “Miserable grave robber!”

“Did you see who it was, sir? Did you recognize him?”

Wy pressed him forward to glance down at his back, and he gave an involuntary, pain-filled groan.

“Wy? How's he look?”

She was shaken but her voice was firm. “He's only creased. He can make a fist. He's not bleeding much anymore. His skin is clammy and his pulse is fast but steady.”

“You have a first-aid kit in the plane?” She nodded, and got it. Between them, they patched McLynn's shoulder and Prince's head. Liam closed the kit and stood up. “Wy?”

She looked up from helping McLynn to a seat on a log. “What?”

“Get in the air and start circling the area. Look for a four-wheeler heading away from here. Don't try to stop them, just figure out where they're going.”

Prince got up and moved forward slowly. “It's all right. I can secure the scene. Go with her, sir.”

He gave her a sharp glance. “Are you sure?”

“I'll be all right. I'll secure the scene.”

For the fifth time that day Liam got into an airplane. This time his rage eclipsed his fear of flying, and he waited almost impatiently for Wy to climb into the front seat and start the engine.

Diana Prince was an Alaska state trooper. Nobody, nowhere, nohow assaulted an Alaska state trooper and got away with it. Liam wanted this perp's scalp, and he wanted to be the one personally to take it. “Come on,” he barked. “Let's get the lead out.”

Wy let down the flaps and pushed in the throttle and the Cub shot off the edge of the bluff, dropped a little and then grabbed for air and soared. “Don't get too high,” Liam yelled. “Make a circle close in first. Then move out, a little at a time. I don't want to miss anything.”

She nodded and banked left. Liam set his teeth and held on to his seat and stared out the left window. The area beneath them unfolded like an uneven patchwork quilt made of silver and green. Sections of river, flashes of streams, glints of lakes alternated with stands of cottonwood, poplar, aspen, birch and evergreen. Diamond willow bordered swamp, swamp edged lakes, lakes flowed into streams and rivers, and, “There!” In a move reminiscent of their experiences herring-spotting the previous spring, Liam hit Wy on the shoulder and pointed. “Right there!”

A four-wheeler trundled over the top of a rise in front of them. Wy dropped down to a hundred feet and roared right over the top of it. The driver cast a white-faced look over his shoulder and gunned the motor.

“Do you know him?” Liam yelled. Wy shook her head. “Go around again!”

She nodded to show she'd heard, and banked left to make a wide circle around the man on the fleeing four-wheeler.

Liam unsnapped his holster and pulled his weapon with his right hand. With his left he reached for the fastening on the door, folding the top half up until it latched against the underside of the left wing. Below, brush and trees and ponds and streams slid past at an unhealthy rate of speed.

Wy's head jerked around, even as they regained level flight. “What the hell are you doing, Campbell?”

“Find me a lake in front of him. Drop down as low as you can without landing and throttle back as far as you can without stalling!”

“Liam-”

“Just do it!”

She twisted her head enough to see his weapon, a ninemillimeter automatic, now stuffed into a gallon-size freezer Ziploc bag he'd pulled from the box of essentials she kept in back of the passenger seat, including a roll of duct tape, which he used to tape the bagged pistol to his right hand. With his left hand he folded down the bottom half of the door. Wind and the noise of the engine howled through the plane.

“No!” Wy shouted. “Liam, you can't! Don't-”

“You're working for me, Chouinard! Find me that goddamn lake or I'll jump right here!”

Her hands moved and the Cub took a nosedive, this time the throttle going back so far he thought for a fleeting moment she'd cut fuel entirely. They dropped to fifty feet above the deck, drifting above the ground like a kite.

Liam was terrified and furious and grimly determined. If all they did was follow, either the four-wheeler or the Cub would run out of gas. If it was the four-wheeler, the Cub still had no place to land nearby and the driver could disappear into the brush. If it was the Cub, the four-wheeler could make its escape while they were refueling in Newenham. A man was dead and two people had been assaulted, and Liam simply couldn't take the chance that the man on the four-wheeler, at the very least a material witness and at most the perpetrator himself, would get away.

He tossed his hat behind his seat, grabbed with his left hand for the handhold on the interior fuselage above Wy's head and twisted around to extend his left foot between the edge of the fuselage and Wy's seat, over the side, feeling for the tiny, treaded step bolted to the strut. He couldn't find it at first, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He forced himself to look down, spot the step and guide his toe to it.

A quick look at Wy showed him a pulse thudding at the side of her neck, her lips pulled into a snarl. Her hands were clenched on the yoke, and her eyes glanced from the dials on the control panel to the terrain below like someone watching a tennis match. His body weight hanging off the left side of the plane threw the trim out of kilter, and the muscles of her wrists stood out in an effort to hold the Cub to its slow turn.

She glanced in his direction and saw him looking at her. She unclamped her jaw long enough to shout over the sound of the wind roaring through the cabin, “If the fall doesn't kill you, Campbell, I will! Lake coming up! I'll count down from five! Jump on my mark!”

He nodded, all the response he was capable of, and settled his right foot on the edge of the fuselage where the door folded down. His left hand gripped the handhold like grim death and his right, awkwardly because of the pistol taped to it, grasped the edge of the door opening.

“When you jump, don't just fall, push yourself away! I'll bank right! Do you understand?”

He nodded.

She trimmed the plane, adjusted the throttle, checked their airspeed, ran a swift calculation for drift. “All right! Five!”

His fingers tightened.

“Four!”

The plane hit a bump and his right hand jerked free. The right side of his body swayed away from the fuselage, his hand flailing wildly for a grip, his body throwing the aircraft even further out of trim because of the wind resistance. Wy cursed and banked a short, hard right, and Liam fell forward, grasping at the doorframe. He'd just gotten hold of it again when his right foot slid off the edge. The entire weight of his body was supported between his left hand on the handhold and his left foot on the strut step.

The plane, mercifully, leveled out. “Three!”

The four-wheeler passed beneath them, the driver a transitory impression of black hair and faded blue plaid, hunched over the handlebars, driving desperately toward an escape that just wasn't in the cards.

“Two!”

Liam looked over his shoulder and wished he hadn't. They were skimming maybe twenty feet above the surface now. A clump of white spruce jumped out in front of them and Wy swore, and the Cub hopped up and over like a startled rabbit. Even at their reduced pace their airspeed felt entirely too fast for comfort, and like warp nine for someone about to jump.

“One!”

Liam summoned up every ounce of courage he had and tightened muscles he didn't even know existed. A flash of silver glinted ahead.

“MARK!”

He closed his eyes and pushed, the hand with the gun in it knocking awkwardly against the side of the plane. The Cub fell away from him as if slapped aside by his thrust alone, and he had just enough time to hear the roar of the engine as Wy shoved the throttle all the way in.

She'd brought the Cub so low he didn't have time to curl into a protective ball, and his back hit the water with a loudsmack!He froze, more at the shock of impact than at the temperature of the water, which seemed almost lukewarm compared to his imagining. The reason became clear when he brought his legs down and touched bottom almost immediately. Shallow waters, even shallow waters in Alaska, had warmed up by the third week of July.

He stood up and his head broke water. The lake came to his chest. An explosion of sound he momentarily mistook for the Cub crashing came from the opposite end of the lake, and he turned to see a terror-stricken moose crash through the brush and vanish into the undergrowth.

His hearing was a little watery. He slapped the sides of his head to clear his ears, and was rewarded by the irritated buzzing of the Cub. He looked around and found it making a tight circle in the air just over a knoll to his right. He waved reassurance, and the Cub waggled its wings and pulled out of the circle to head back in the direction from which they had come, an arrow pointing his way.

Liam took a step forward and found the bottom of the little lake, barely a hundred feet across, rich with mud and rotting vegetation that clung lovingly to his feet. He slogged out eventually. The edge of the lake was not an improvement, a soggy marsh interspersed with pools of water and grassy hillocks.

He plodded grimly on until he reached the top of the knoll Wy had buzzed, where the ground was comparatively drier. The sound of the plane was nearer now, as was the sound of the fourwheeler, and his head cleared the top of the fifty-foot summit to see the Cub make a very low pass over the four-wheeler, only missing the driver's head with the gear by inches. The fourwheeler swerved and almost overturned and then straightened at the last possible moment.

The Cub came back for another pass, and this time, by god, she clipped him, the gear catching one of the handlebars with a thump. This time it was the Cub that wobbled off.

“Wy!” Liam roared, angry and terrified. “Goddamn it, be careful!”

Wy steadied the Cub, banked right and came back for a third pass. The driver of the four-wheeler pressed his chest to the gas tank and opened the throttle up as far as it would go. It hurtled up the slope of the knoll Liam was standing on and directly at him.

“Christ!” Liam yelped, and leapt to one side.

The man at the controls opened his eyes, saw Liam, let out a terrified yell and tried to swerve, but it was too late. Man and machine missed Liam with a foot to spare, and flew over the top of the knoll. They parted company about halfway down and crashed separately into the other side. Liam regained his feet and took the hill back down in giant steps, reaching the man as he got to all fours, shaking his head.

“Halt!” Liam said, and pointed his nine-millimeter.

The pistol was still in its Ziploc bag, still duct-taped to his hand. The man, revealed to be young and Yupik, looked at the gun, looked at Liam and got to his feet to run.

Liam had had just about enough of jumping out of planes and out of the way of oncoming four-wheelers, and he wasn't about to go haring after someone through the Alaskan Bush, especially in July. The mosquitoes had already formed a fierce cloud around his head. He felt for the trigger and fired a round skyward through the plastic. The resulting boom echoed for miles. “You run, by god, I'll shoot your ass off,” he said, and he meant it.

The young man surrendered.

It was a full fifty-two minutes before the four-wheeler rumbled up the slope and onto the surface of the Tulukaruk bluff. Liam was driving. The previous driver was sitting behind, cuffed to the freight rack over the rear wheels. He was a chunky man who looked like he was in his early thirties, with golden skin scarred with acne, shoulder-length black hair that would have been beautiful if it had been washed anytime in the past month, and black button eyes that seemed unable to focus properly. He had a wispy mustache that made him look like a youthful, Yupik version of Wyatt Earp.

Liam was carrying a rifle in the crook of one arm, steering with the other. His brand-new uniform was damp and mud-streaked, there were strands of goose grass adorning his person and he had at least a dozen welts on his face and neck from mosquito bites, but he was at peace with his world.

That lasted as long as it took for him to pull the four-wheeler to a halt in front of the service tent. He dismounted, and Wy took three steps forward, made a fist and hit him in the gut with all the not inconsiderable force in her five-foot-eight-inch, 135-pound frame.

“Oof!” With a look of astonishment, Liam backed up a step and sat down hard on the four-wheeler seat he had just vacated.

“Hey,” Prince said, eyes blinking open. She was sitting on a deck chair retrieved from inside the tent, one hand holding her head up. McLynn, his arm bound, appeared to be dozing in his chair.

“You suicidal son of a bitch!” Wy said, eyes blazing. “That is the last time you go up in a plane with me, I don't care how much the frigging state is paying! You could have been hurt! You could have beenkilled!” She wound up and hit him again, this time her clenched fist hitting him flush on the nose, and he was so befuddled he went backward ass over teakettle to fall heavily on the opposite side of the four-wheeler.

“Hey,” the man cuffed to the back of the four-wheeler said, “fight!” He peered around himself with shortsighted eyes.

Prince rose to her feet, shaky but determined. “All right, that's enough.” She managed to grab hold of one of Wy's arms.

Wy, unheeding, continued to shout, the volume steadily increasing. “You've got a death wish, fine, throw yourself off the deck of that derelict you're sleeping on! Jump in front of a truck! Get yourself shot by some drunk in a bar, I don't care!”

Liam raised himself to his knees. He gulped in a welcome breath of air and felt his belly. It was sore but it was still there. He tried hard to keep the grin from spreading across his face, and failed. “And to think I wasn't sure you cared.”

It only fanned the flames. “You miserable prick!” She actually came around the four-wheeler and pulled back her foot to kick him, and was thwarted only when Prince caught both her arms this time.

“All right,” Prince said, probably as sternly as she could with her head beating like a tomtom. “That's enough.”

Wy wrestled free and would have clocked her, too, if Liam hadn't managed to get up and catch her fist in one hand. She tried to kick him in the shins then, which he thwarted by catching her foot and holding it in the air. He shook his head at Prince when she made as if to grab Wy from behind. “Stop it, Wy,” he said, his firm tone belied by the grin, which had managed to spread all over his face and whose beam could probably be seen from orbit. “You hit her and you're assaulting a police officer.” The grin widened impossibly further. “Hit me again, and it's a lover's quarrel.”

She was visibly trembling with rage, a thing Liam had read about but never actually seen. “Fine,” she said. He had her by her right hand and her left foot, and she had to give a little hop to maintain her balance. Tight-lipped, she said, “Will you please let go of me?”

“Certainly.” All the same, he took a cautious step backward before he did. She turned and marched off to the borrowed Cub, parked precariously near the edge of the bluff and bearing all the signs of a hasty exit. She unfastened the cowling and became preoccupied with the engine, which Liam had reason to know was already in perfect shape. Her own Cub was parked more decorously at the opposite end of the makeshift airstrip.

He managed to get his grin under control before he returned to the tent area, and humor vanished as soon as he stepped inside the far tent and saw Don Nelson's body. He crouched next to it, elbows on his knees, hands dangling. Rigor had gone off; the joints were loose. Lividity was fully established. A rough guess would put Nelson's death somewhere in the past two days, sometime over the weekend, probably. Judging from the amount of blood at the scene, he'd been killed where he'd been found. The sooner they got the body to the M.E. to narrow it down, the better. It was hot, probably seventy-five, eighty degrees inside the tent, and even now the corpse was deteriorating. The smell wasn't as bad as it had been on board theMarybethia,but it was bad enough, and it would grow if the body was left there much longer, the decay that caused the smell taking precious evidence along with it.

Nelson's mouth was partly open. Liam leaned forward and pulled down gently on the jaw. There appeared to be a hole at the back of Nelson's throat, which would confirm what Wy had told him about Nelson's wound. It was too dark to make out details. He never carried his flashlight in the summertime, damn it.

“Here,” Prince said from the tent flap, handing him hers. Of course she would be wearing a full belt.

He thanked her and clicked it on. The light revealed a horizontal and surprisingly neat wound at the back of the throat. He peered beneath the skull and saw the exit wound, partially hidden by lividity and the hair at the base of the skull. It looked as if the weapon had been wider at the entry point and narrower at the exit. Rough marks not unlike that of an open hand planted palm down smudged the skin of Nelson's forehead and eyes.

“Looks like a knife wound, all right,” Liam said, getting to his feet. “And then somebody pulled it out.”