Shaman Pass (7 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

HARRIMAN’S TRADING POST FRONTED on Beach Street. It was a long, narrow, low-roofed building of weathered gray clapboard, sagging into the permafrost with age.

Its proprietor, Tim Harriman, was the last of the old-time white traders, Silver said as they walked up to the door and stooped to enter. “Wife’s dead, kids in Anchorage and Seattle, no reason to be here except he’s got no place to go,” Silver said. “Missed too many planes, I guess.”

Harriman proved to be a tiny man with white hair, patches of frosted crabgrass for eyebrows, and diamond bristles on his cheeks and chin. He wore a red flannel shirt, rust-colored Carhartt jeans with suspenders, and reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He reached over to a television behind the counter and turned off CNN as they came in.

The walls and shelves were a wild jumble of clothes, boots, fishing gear, tents, stoves, nuts, bolts, ivory carvings, Eskimo masks, baleen baskets, boom boxes, CDs, rifles, shotguns, ammunition, candy, pop, snacks, and a few staples that didn’t need refrigeration. The place smelled of old things, dank earth, raw furs, seal oil, and dried fish—the Bush.

“Tim, you know Nathan Active with the troopers?”

Harriman put out a liver-spotted hand and nodded vigorously. “I do now, Jim. Pleasure to meet you, Trooper Active.”

Active took his hand and said, “Mr. Harriman.”

“Tim, call me Tim, everybody does.” Harriman pulled open a drawer and laid the amulet on the counter, along with the picture Silver had circulated to Chukchi’s merchants. “I reckon this is what you came for. Knew it the minute I saw it.”

Active and Silver bent to study the object. It was a shiny brown oval about the size of a cookie. An owl’s face was carved on the side Harriman had turned up. Just above that, a small hole was bored through the piece.

Active glanced at the picture and back at the amulet. “That’s it, all right.”

Silver nodded.

“Tell us about Lemuel Bass,” Active said.

Harriman looked at Silver. “I thought you were working the museum burglary, Jim.”

“You hear about Victor Solomon?”

Harriman nodded. “Killed at his sheefish camp with a harpoon is what they said on Kay-Chuck.” He tapped the picture, which showed Uncle Frosty’s harpoon as well as the amulet. “This harpoon?”

“Uh-huh,” Silver said.

“That would explain why the troopers are interested, I guess.” Harriman gave a satisfied chuckle. Active supposed an old man might feel that way, pleased and reassured, when he found his wits still worked.

“Did the boy say how he got the amulet?” Active asked.

Harriman shook his head. “He just rode up on his snowgo and came in and said he wanted to trade it for Pokémon cards.”

The trader waved at a glass case of the cards on the countertop. “Damned rubbish I have to sell now. It used to be that everybody in town would come in for whatever they forgot to order on the summer barge. ‘If you can’t find it at Harriman’s, you’re better off without it.’ That was my motto. But now, well, there’s Arctic Mercantile and air freight and . . . shit, we might as well be living in Anchorage.”

He stopped and shook his head. “You know how to tell if you’re old, Trooper Active? It’s when you start to find your past more interesting than your future.”

“The past is the only thing you can trust,” Active said. “It won’t change on you.”

Harriman stared at him and so did Silver.

“The only thing you can trust!” Harriman said. “I like this boy, Jim.”

Silver shrugged. “He’ll do, I guess.”

“An eight-year-old driving a snowmachine?” Active asked. “There was no adult along?”

“Naw,” Harriman said. “Lemuel’s been driving by himself a couple years now. Smart little squirt. Guess that’s why he took off when I told him I had to make a call, then I’d get him his Pokémon. Yelled,
‘Arii!’
and tried to grab the amulet back, but I beat him to it.” He gave the satisfied chuckle again.

“He comes in a lot?”

“Mostly in the summer,” Harriman said. “See, the Basses live in a kind of camp on Lemuel’s mom’s Native allotment up by the mouth of the Katonak. Stay out there most of the year, except when Johnny brings ’em all into Chukchi for the summer. Then they live in Tent City out at the north end of the spit. Johnny does some stevedoring for Chukchi Lighterage and I think he runs a net in the commercial chum salmon fishery, too. That and the state Oil Dividend and welfare is about all they need to get by.”

“Johnny Bass? That’s Lemuel’s father?”

Harriman nodded.

“And Lemuel buys a lot of Pokémon?” Active asked.

“He’s kind of addicted, I guess. I don’t know where he gets the money, but whenever he has any, he comes in for more Pokémon. Sometimes he brings in stuff to trade, but I don’t take it unless he’s got a note from his mom saying it’s not stolen.”

“Did he have a note this time?”

“Nope, but I wouldn’t have taken this amulet in trade regardless, because of Jim’s picture.” Harriman tapped it again.

Active dropped the amulet into a baggie and zipped it, just in case someone other than Tim Harriman and Lemuel Bass had left fingerprints on it. “What kind of snowmachine was he driving?”

Harriman wrinkled his brow in concentration and looked vacantly at a spot on the ceiling off to his right. “It was red and it was old,” he said finally. “A Polaris, maybe.”

“Thanks, Mr. Harriman,” Active said.

Harriman nodded. “Let me know how it comes out, will you?”

Active started to leave, then turned back to the counter. “What exactly did Lemuel want?”

“Eh?” Harriman looked puzzled.

Active pointed at the Pokémon display on the counter.

“Ah.” Harriman opened the case and took out a foil packet. “I believe this was the next addition to his collection.”

“I’ll take it.” Active studied the packet. A grumpy-looking pale green dinosaur glared from the cover. He paid Harriman for the cards and pocketed them beside the amulet.

“What about this Johnny Bass?” Active asked when they reached the street. “It’s not a local name, right?”

“Definitely nonlocal,” Silver said. “An import from Oregon, I think it is. Basically trailer trash, as far as I can tell. Came up with the air force just before they shut down the old radar station, liked the country, and hung around when he got out. Married one of the Kimball girls and moved up onto her allotment.”

“Ever been in trouble?”

Silver shrugged. “He’s been investigated a couple times, but never busted.”

“Investigated? For what?”

“Theft. Johnny, by reputation, is in the salvage business. Seems he finds a lot of abandoned stuff on the ice, along the trail, along the river. He salvages it and takes it back to camp, either uses it himself or sells it to someone who happens by and needs an ice auger, a couple of jerry jugs, a camp stove, whatever.”

“And sometimes the stuff’s not altogether abandoned?” Active asked.

“Supposedly,” Silver said. “Twice he’s been accused of pilfering stuff out of people’s camps, that I know of. We city cops handled a complaint last summer when the Basses were living up at Tent City. Supposedly stole a boom box from one of his neighbors, but nobody saw him do it and we never found the boom box.”

“You said it happened twice?”

“I don’t know much about the other one. That one was a trooper case last wint—shit! I think it was Victor Solomon who made the complaint. Claimed Johnny snuck up in the night and stole some sheefish from his camp on the ice. Maybe he went back for another load this year and Victor caught him.”

“Yeah,” Active said. “And he just happened to be carrying the harpoon he had burgled out of the museum, with which he promptly stabbed Victor, and then left behind the selfsame sheefish that were theoretically the object of the whole exercise.”

Silver grimaced. “You’re right, it makes no fucking sense whatever.”

“Not a bit,” Active said. “But we gotta talk to the guy. He ever been violent?”

Silver slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. The women’s shelter tried to get us to charge him with knocking his wife around up in Tent City last summer. Then they both sobered up and she wouldn’t sign a complaint. Same old shit. It makes you tired sometimes.”

Active nodded. “So you up for a run out to his camp?”

Silver frowned. “I could send Alan Long. I gotta help burn down a house this afternoon.”

Now it was Active’s turn to frown.

“An old BIA
*
house,” Silver explained. “The fire department is burning it so they can practice putting it out, and we gotta do crowd control, keep the kids from turning themselves into frankfurters.”

“Does Alan know the way to Bass’s camp?”

“I think so,” Silver said. “He hunts rabbits up there sometimes. It’s about four or five miles past Victor Solomon’s sheefish camp. You can’t miss it.”

An hour later, Active was bouncing over the sea ice on the Ladies Model, following Alan Long’s Ski-Doo north along the line of spruce saplings set into the snow as trail markers. Active looked for Victor Solomon’s tent when they passed the spot, but saw no sign of it. That reminded him he had told Darvin Reed and Willie Samuels to bring in the dead man’s camp. He made a mental note to get after them if it hadn’t been delivered when he got back to the village.

A few miles farther on, Long stopped at a fork in the trail. Ahead, the route swung northeast to follow the shore of Chukchi Bay as it curved inland.

To their left, the Katonak trail wound off through a series of low, brushy islands marking the mouth of the river. Long pointed up the left bank, which started as flat tundra, then rose to culminate in a hundred-foot cliff a mile or so upstream.

“Johnny’s camp is in the woods this side of that cliff,” Long said. “It’s hard to spot from here but—there, Active, see that smoke?”

Active peered into the whiteness and thought perhaps he did see a wisp of gray rising from the spruce forest ahead. “Has Johnny Bass got dogs?”

Long nodded. “Lot’s of ’em, last time I was by there.”

Active grimaced. “No hope of a surprise visit, I guess. We might as well take the snowmachines in.” He pulled the Smith & Wesson from its holster and dropped it into the pocket of his parka.

Long had a rifle slung across his back. He unslung it and checked the action, then laid it across the seat of his Ski-Doo and sat on it. He noticed Active staring. “It’s how we do when we’re caribou hunting,” Long said. “Best place for a rifle if you have to get to it quick.”

Active felt himself tightening, his armpits heating up under his parka.

“Look,” he told Long. “We don’t push this. We’ve got a murder suspect who presumably knows we’re coming, probably a bunch of kids and their mother in there, maybe some in-laws— this has hostage crisis written all over it. First sign of trouble, we cool it and you go back to town for reinforcements, yes?”

“Unless we’re being fired on,” Long said.

Active nodded. “We defend ourselves, but we still back off if we can’t talk Bass into surrendering.”

They started the machines and followed the trail up the Katonak until a line of snowmachine tracks arced off to the left toward the smoke of Johnny Bass’s camp. They gunned their engines, shot up the riverbank, and in another hundred yards found themselves in the middle of Bass’s dog yard. On all sides, huskies erupted from their oil drums, shipping crates, and doghouses and set up the cacophony Active had expected, lunging at the two strangers till their chains jerked them up short.

Active backed off his throttle and motioned Long to come abreast as they eased slowly along the path through the dog yard toward what must be the Bass house. At first, it appeared to be a sprawling tent made from blue tarps, a metal stovepipe at the back sending up the feather of gray they had seen from the river. Two boys and a husky pup were building a snow fort when Active and Long came up, but they hustled inside when they spotted the two cops.

The tundra in front was littered with red, white, and blue Chevron fuel cans, an undetermined number of plastic jerry jugs, four round white propane tanks clustered in the snow, plastic cars and sleds and guns left out by Bass’s kids, a cord or two of spruce firewood stacked against the wall of the blue-tarp house, an immense heap of beer cans, a Johnson outboard engine mostly buried in snow, and two snowmachines: one dead, up to its handlebars in snow with two rusted Chevron cans standing on the seat, the other an old red Polaris. A well-beaten path led to an outhouse squatting a few yards into the spruces.

Active and Long headed for the flap where the two boys had disappeared into the tent. Before they reached it, an Inupiat woman came out dressed in sweatpants and an old parka, a baby of a year or so perched on her right hip and sucking on what appeared to be a bottle of orange soda pop. The woman’s hair was stringy and greasy, and approximately a third of her teeth were gone. She was about forty pounds overweight, had a bruise along her left cheekbone, and looked to be about forty years old, but it was hard to be sure. Maybe she was a used-up thirty. It seemed likely that marriage to Johnny Bass would accelerate the aging process in a woman.

She looked at the two men in their uniforms and frowned. “That Johnny never do it,” she said, bathing them in beer breath.

“How do you know why we’re here?” Active asked.

“I don’t know anything,” the woman said. “But whatever you’re here about, Johnny never do it. He never do nothing.”

“Then he can tell us himself. Will you ask him to come out?”

“He’s not here. He’s go out to check his snares with Billy and Gene.”

Active peered around the camp. It could be true. The only dogsled in sight was mostly buried in snow and had no hitch on the front. It was hard to imagine life in camp without a functioning dogsled, so maybe Bass really was away. “You mind if we come in and look around, then?”

She frowned again. “I don’t think Johnny would like it. You come back tomorrow, he’ll be back then, all right.”

Alan Long spoke up. “Well, if he never do nothing, then he won’t mind if we come in, ah?” He pushed toward her and she stepped back a pace.

Active looked at Long, surprised by the mocking Village English. He looked back at the woman, who seemed a little frightened now. She shrugged, turned, and disappeared inside.