Midnight come again (10 page)

Now he wasn't just angry, he was enraged.

He marched through the door, forcing Kate and Mutt both to give way before him, and strode into the hangar to glare from side to side, barely taking in the boxes, pallets and totes of freight stacked everywhere, the large, walk in cooler in one corner filled with wet lockboxes, the approaching roar of a taxiing aircraft.

He turned to look at her, very much under control, at least for the moment. "I are a ground crew and I cain't even spell one," he observed in an even tone he congratulated himself on. "You going to give me the rundown on this job, or what?" Yes, I said.

I know what they have done.

--The Last Wolf Jim distinctly remembered "forklift operator" printed in the job title slot of the form he had filled out in Anchorage, and he did operate the battered old propane-powered forklift from time to time.

When he could be spared from loading and unloading the Piper Super Cub, the Cessna 206 on floats, believe it or not the DC-3 and, holiest of holies, the C-130 Hercules when they roared up, he was set to weighing freight, packing totes and pallets, making out waybills and load manifests, loading freight that had come in into the backs of pickup trucks, unloading freight to go out from the backs of other pickup trucks, answering the phone and the radio, entering times and locations for freight to be picked up and delivered on a grubby chart on the wall of the hangar, taking telephone reservations, and trying to satisfy Yupik callers who spoke little English and had no patience with those unfortunates who spoke even less Yupik.

He looked for Kate to handle the last of those calls, but she had long since disappeared, back to the bunkhouse, he presumed. Fine. Good. Let her keep her distance. Let her get on the next plane out of here. Let her get off in Anchorage, or better yet, Seattle, or best of all, Etadunna, Australia. Good for her to move her sweet little ass as fast and as far out of range of the toe of his boot as she could get it. The metal banding he was currently winding round a loaded pallet twisted and snapped like a splinter of wood. He took a deep breath, removed the mangled end from the bander, and started over.

During a rare lull in the day's activities he did point out to Baird the check on the office desk and mentioned the date on it, keeping his voice offhand. His new boss grunted and spat, picked up the pile and rifled through it impatiently. He handed Jim half a dozen pieces of paper, which proved to be checks totaling over thirty-six thousand dollars, some of which had been cut in March. Baird saw Jim's expression and said defensively, "Well, hell, starting with herring I just don't have time to catch up on every little thing there is to do around here. Write me up a deposit slip and I'll take ' down to the bank. I'd have Sovalik do it but she's even worse at bookkeeping than I am."

Since any mention of Kate under whatever alias instantly raised Jim's blood pressure twenty points, he ignored Baird's comment and dutifully made out the deposit slip, totaling it twice because he didn't believe the sum the first time. Baird stuffed slip and checks into the bib pocket of his filthy overalls and promptly forgot about them.

He would not think of Kate, not yet. He banished her completely and ruthlessly from his mind until he had time to deal with the fact of her presence--here, in Bering, at Baird Air for crissake, his employer for the duration of his TOY or until he uncovered the nefarious plot allegedly being brewed by the Russian Mafia on Bering's front doorstep.

The way he felt right now, this minute, he'd have it cleaned up and the perps in custody within twenty four hours, no matter how unlikely he considered the possibility that Gamble's assessment of the situation even approached accuracy. Russian Mafia in Bering. Christ.

He could feel the rage coming back in a great wave and he knew it had little to do with Russians or the FBI. He choked it back, not for the first time that day, and not for the last.

Fortunately, the job kept him busy, frantically so. Business at Baird Air was conducted at full speed and top decibel. Baird was everywhere, yelling, cursing, pushing Jim out of the way, shoving him in closer, head beneath the cowling of the Cub, fueling up on the wing of the DC3, disappearing into the open maw of the Here, backing up the forklift at full throttle, the warning beep ringing off the metal interior of the hangar and threatening its already perilous list.

In direct contrast to the aforementioned seedy appearance of the rest of the operation, the planes looked and sounded as if they were in excellent condition, well maintained and, if the affectionate slap he saw Baird give the flank of the Here was any indication, well loved. The pilot in him approved.

He was awed by the Here, an aircraft surrounded by myth. Viewed from one angle, it looked like a flying wing, from another like a pregnant whale.

The Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft had been in production since 1956 in various incarnations. Originally designed as an assault troop transport, over the years they had been adapted for search and rescue, fire fighting and midair refueling. Hercs were the planes the National Weather Service flew into the middles of hurricanes to gauge the strength and direction of the storms, from the hurricanes' very eyes.

A Here was also one helluva freight hauler. Jim paused in his work to watch the rear of the Here open up like a clamshell, the bottom half forming a ramp so Baird could drive forklift after forklift loaded with frozen salmon into the bowels of the plane. Baird was very careful with the forklift then; it never came within sneezing distance of the fuselage on either side. Baird's care extended to his tools, as Jim discovered when he went in search of a screwdriver. The tool crib was in the northwest corner of the hangar, the tools clean and oiled and very well organized in the multiple drawers of tall red metal tool cabinets, three of them. Every drawer had the names of the tools inside written on the front. There were also several parts lockers; they too were labeled and organized within an inch of their lives.

The roar of a jet on takeoff drew him to the door, and he looked out to see a 737 with no markings but black tail numbers too far away to read lift off from the end of the runway. No windows, had to be a freight plane, and one of the shorter, stubbier ones, too, probably a 200.

Another plane was already taxiing for takeoff. He'd never seen so much air traffic in and out of one airport before in his life, not even at Merrill Field in Anchorage on a CAVU summer day. Or maybe it was just the variety of aircraft. On that first day he saw a Lockheed Electra, an old Connie, two other DC-3s, four Beavers, three on floats, seven twin Otters, although they all wore the same logo and in ten hours he could have seen the same one more than once, a couple of Navaho Apaches, two more 737s, one all freight 727 and three all-passenger Fairchild Metroliners.

That didn't even count the small planes, the Cubs and the Cessnas and the Lakes and the Stinsons and some models he didn't recognize and wasn't sure should be in the air they were so old. Once he thought he saw an open cockpit biplane, although he was squinting into the sun at the time.

The pilots were on the ground long enough to drop one load and pick up another, and the engines never stopped running. Baird Air employed four pilots in all. The Cub pilot was a dour, angular man in his fifties who wore a cowboy hat that made him six inches taller than his already six feet. He introduced himself as Shep Whitfield, but Baird called him Tex.

The Here pilot, one Larry Ma- ciarello, was five feet two, weighed at least two hundred pounds, looked like Pooh Bear and left a trail of M&M wrappers in his wake. The DC-3 pilot never stopped moving long enough for Jim to get a good look at him, much less catch his name, but the license posted in the office showed it to be Calvin Kemper. He only saw Ralph Whit- more, the Cessna pilot, from the back as he was trotting down to the dock to take off again. No one took a second look at Jim;

Baird's shouted introductions were usually productive of nothing more than a hand cupped behind an ear, a puzzled look, a dismissive shrug, and a shouted

"Later!

The noise was loud and continuous, the already almost unendurable roar of planes on constant takeoff and landing reinforced by the music blaring out of tape decks and radios, by the screaming of thousands of birds, by backup signals beeping and heavy equipment loading and unloading freight and ferrying it from pickup to flatbed to hangar to yard to plane. The smell of fuel exhaust was constantly in his nostrils, the whine of engines constantly in his ears, and both seemed prepared to go on around the clock.

At eleven that night he was in the hangar strapping more boxes to yet another pallet when his stomach growled loudly enough to be heard in Anchorage, or at least loudly enough to be heard over the noise outside.

Baird, glaring at a freight manifest that wouldn't total, eyes narrowed against the smoke curling up from his stogie, looked up, startled.

"Jesus! Dinner! I completely forgot!"

He climbed into the bright orange Chevy pickup with the flaking orange-and-white company logo on the side and was gone. By the time Jim finished strapping the pallet he was back, driving the pickup right into the hangar, bringing lasagna and green beans and salad in Styrofoam containers, one quart of Cherry Garcia, another of lemon sorbet ("That's mine," Baird growled) and a body bag in the back of the truck.

Jim, busy wolfing down the lasagna, which was amazingly good, thick, meaty, hot and loaded with cheese, didn't notice the body bag at first.

It was only when he finished and went to stuff the container into an overflowing garbage can that he glanced casually into the truck bed. It halted him in his tracks. "What the hell--"

He wheeled around. "Baird, is that what I think it is?" he demanded, pointing.

His voice was stern enough to raise Baud's eyebrows. "It's a body, what of it?"

"Whose body? And how the hell did it get to be in the back of your pickup?"

Baird grunted, shifted his stogie from the right corner of his mouth to the left, his chaw from his left cheek to his right and spat. The tobacco stains on the floor of the hangar were overpowered by years of spilled oil, but not by much. "Not that it's any of your business, bub, but the Here's going on to Anchorage this morning at two a. m., and the last Alaska Airlines jet left at nine. We're taking the body in for them."

"For who?"

"For who? For the goddamn state, who else. Everybody who dies accidentally in Alaska has to get autopsied, and we don't got us a corpse doctor here in beautiful downtown Bering." He spat again.

"Why isn't there a uniform with it?"

Up went the eyebrows again. "A uniform? You mean like maybe a cop?"

"No shit like maybe a cop," Jim said, feeling his neck go red. He'd been looking for an excuse to lose his temper all day, and here was a dandy one, cut, dried and delivered to his doorstep. "There is such a thing as chain of evidence, you can't just--" He shut up, suddenly conscious of Baird's increasingly suspicious stare and well aware of already having said far too much.

"Chain of evidence," Baird said, still staring. "What are you, some kind of defrocked lawyer?"

Jim was spared the necessity of answering by the arrival of a white Ford Suburban bearing the shield of the Alaska State Troopers. With more haste than grace he retreated into the rear of the hangar and busied himself with the arrangement of boxes in a tote, which required him to be head-down in the tote the whole time the trooper was there. He was supposed to make contact, but not here, and not now.

Baird's voice growled something, a female voice answered, crisp and confident and self-assured. The door to the Suburban slammed and the engine started. He stood up in time to see it drive away.

Baird was looking at him. "You want to tell me what all that was about, boy?" he said, mildly enough.

Jim tried for a rueful grin. "Nope."

It didn't work. Baird's eyes narrowed to tiny creases, lost between those pendulous cheeks. "Not running from the law, are you?" He paused, and added, "Churchill?"

Jim shook his head. "No, sir, I am not," he said definitely.

Baird stared a moment longer, then shrugged. Jim had proved himself a hard worker. Besides which, he could add. In Bush Alaska in the summertime, that was more than enough to set the price of an employee far above rubies. The only real requirement was a pulse, and was frequently the only requirement a prospective employer could hope for.

Over the years Baird had had his share of deadbeats on staff. He'd managed to acquire himself a live one here, and he wanted to keep him, and if that meant looking the other way when the law was around, he was okay with that. "Good to know," he said, dismissing the subject, and put a period to it by pretending to examine the paperwork on the transport of the body left behind by the trooper.

Jim came up behind him and read over his shoulder. Yeah, the standard form for shipping a body to the lab. Baird's greasy thumb was over the first part of the name of the deceased; it was the second half that held him transfixed. He took a deep breath, and with studied indifference said, "Who is this guy, anyway? What happened to him? What did he die from?"

Baird finished writing out the waybill and scribbled his signature at the bottom. "Fell off a boat tied up to the dock down on the river. One of them processor boats, so the deck was pretty high up. Trooper said his head looked like a squashed tomato. Yuk."

He separated the copies of the waybill and thumbed the clip on the clipboard. Before the copy of the waybill covered it, Jim saw the name typed on the form in full.