“You know, Alex, they have a bottle of 1971 Pouilly Fuissé, and tonight you can drink white wine without having to keep looking over your shoulder.”
I nodded to the waiter; he nodded back and went to fetch the bottle. So, Angie did know I was an unforgivable bumpkin for drinking the wrong wine, and she hadn’t said a word. I really appreciated that. I once had a fling with an actress in New York who would have thrown a tantrum, caused a scene, and refused to eat with me. I was giving Angie points for being much more the sophisticate.
Our waiter poured a sample and I deferred it to Angie. She sipped and smiled. How could she not? The only wine in the world better than a 1973 Pouilly Fuissé is the 1971. He poured and left in search of our lobsters.
“Total bust getting into the freight records? You were gone so long I thought you must have made it. I pictured you as their new night janitor.”
“Pretty close. I’m on the payroll, today and tomorrow, and I had the records all to myself, but there weren’t any late shipments, going or coming. Someone was there late for some other reason. All we have to do is figure it out.” We both sipped and both smiled. “By the way, I work again tomorrow, approximately noon until six. What say we decontaminate the pickup and retrieve your canoe, if it hasn’t already been liberated?”
She nodded and scooped her glass out of the way. The waiter set down trays with our lobsters and local potatoes, baked and stuffed. If you know The Broiler’s lobsters, then you know why there was no more conversation, and why we were miserably full but still smiling when we drove back to the hotel and crawled upstairs to our room.
I looked that pickup over like a Missouri farmer about to buy a mule. One advantage of machines from the Eighties is that you can look up from underneath and see past the engine. I opened the passenger door rather than the driver’s and leaned over to pop the hood latch. The engine was clean. Angie was in the house packing more clothes because she had decided to go back to work. There was nothing we could think of that she could do, at least at the moment, and she didn’t want to spend any more time sitting in a hotel room thinking.
There was no traffic on the road. The camp robbers were squawking and arguing, but not concerned with trespassers. I went inside, borrowed a flashlight and looked up under the dash, nothing strange. I shoved the key in the ignition, gritted my teeth, and turned it. It was anticlimactic. The rusty old engine just coughed to life.
To get to Badger Loop Road, we had to drive back through Fairbanks and out the Richardson, so Angie drove the Dodge back to town, parked it at the hotel, and joined me in the pickup.
The canoe sat right where we’d left it, paddles underneath, shotgun still wedged inside. We balanced the canoe on the cab, tied the ends to the front and rear bumpers, and delivered it back to the riverbank behind the cabin. I couldn’t quite part with the shotgun. You just never know when you’ll need to shoot a pheasant, or an assassin.
“How about an old towel or something to wrap it?” Angie seemed to concur. She went inside and came back with Turk’s blanket and a box of number six shot.
“Alex, this is too weird. There isn’t a safer or more peaceful spot on earth, and you’re hoarding guns like it was Washington, D.C.” By
hoarding
, she meant the pistol that was in my belt. “When is it going to end?”
“It’s going to end when we find who killed Stan. We have to believe they still plan to kill us. The strange part is that we don’t know who
they
are, they may not know who
we
are, or at least what we look like, and we’re hunting each other. They do know this pickup, so let’s get it stashed back at the airport.”
We stopped in town, Angie followed me to the airport in the Dodge, and we put the pickup to bed in its nest beside the Sea Airmotive hangar. I transferred the shotgun to the Dodge trunk because it wouldn’t fit under the seat. It wasn’t handy, but it felt good to know it was there.
“You sure you want to go to work this afternoon?”
“Yeah, I think so. You’re going to be flying late again tonight?”
“Probably about five-thirty or six. I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
“Good. I’ll walk back to the hotel when I get off. I may not stay at the station too long, but I don’t want to spend the afternoon alone.”
“Okay, but do stay wide awake. I really don’t think any bad guys know you by sight or where you work, but they will be trying to find out, so watch it. Check the street before you open the door, jaywalk across Second and cut through the drugstore to Third. If anyone seems the least bit interested, lose yourself in the biggest crowd you can find. Call the cops if you even get a premonition….”
“Been watching too much television? Aren’t you going to lend me your pistol?”
“Do you want it?”
“No, I’m being facetious. Don’t worry about me, Alex. I’ll be careful, but I’m not hiding under beds just yet.”
“Might not be a bad idea.”
***
When I walked into the office at noon, Celeste gave me a friendly smile, flashing bright blue eyes and those fetching dimples under her platinum blonde pageboy. Apparently we were now old friends. She picked up her phone, punched two digits, and Freddy came from his office.
“So, what did you think of the Otter?”
“I’m taking it back to Bethel with me. I’ll just leave the Cessna 310 parked in the spot and you probably won’t notice the difference. Sorry about the cops last night.”
“Hey, no problem. That’s what I get for hiring criminal types. Come on back to the office a sec. Reginald wants to say hello.” He raised the hinged section of counter for me to slip through. We passed the fateful warehouse door to the first office on the left. Freddy tapped on the door and opened it.
I finally remembered the connection that had eluded me when I went to sleep during the newscast. Reginald Parker was running for governor, and he was also the owner of Interior Air. His office was dark paneled opulence, thick blue carpet, leather-upholstered furniture arranged around an eight-foot mahogany desk. Reginald reigned with a multi-line phone on his left, a scrimshawed walrus tusk penholder on his right, and behind him a framed picture of him shaking hands with Richard Nixon. A rollaway near his left elbow held a computer with a twenty-one inch monitor and a pullout drawer for the keyboard.
“Hey, Alex, I heard you were in town for a couple of days. No problems, I hope?” He stood with amazing alacrity for a six-footer who weighed two hundred fifty pounds, and reached across the desk for a handshake. It’s not that we’re such good friends, we’d spent just three days flying together. The handshake was part of his gubernatorial persona. So were the dark blue pinstriped suit, his movie hunk profile, and the abundant razor-cut salt-and-pepper hairdo.
“Nah, just a little R&R, and stopped by for a busman’s holiday.”
“Busman?”
“Am I mixing metaphors? Don’t bus drivers go for bus rides on their days off, or is it postmen who take walks? How is the campaign going?”
“Ask me the day after the election.” He motioned Freddy and me toward two chairs and sank back into his own. He turned to impress Freddy with what good buddies he and I were.
“Freddy, you should have seen the way we blitzed the Bethel area. We hit eighteen villages in three days, and everyone loved me. Lot of the credit goes to Alex because he’s some kind of hero down there and when we showed up together, they thought he was endorsing me. You
are
endorsing me, Alex?”
“It was my very great pleasure.” That was true in a way. The blitz
was
a great pleasure. Twenty flying hours and ten hours standby in three days had me feeling so rich that I took Connie into Anchorage for the weekend. That was one of the times she might have considered marrying me if Vicki hadn’t sent me off to Kodiak for three days, starting Monday morning.
“Well, we sure impressed the Eskimos. I’m really counting on the Bethel vote.”
He impressed the Eskimos all right. He tossed out Athabaskan words from the interior Indian language in the heart of the Yupik-speaking Eskimo nation. If I’d been endorsing him, I would have told him to stay in Bethel and make his pitch to Chief Eddy Hoffman because Chief Eddy decides how the Yupik Nation votes.
Reginald’s phone rang and he picked it up. Freddy and I stood while Reginald said “Hello? Just a minute.” He stood for another handshake, complete with a clap on the elbow. “See you at the polls.” He turned back to the phone and Freddy and I fled.
I ducked back through the counter. “Otter ready to travel?”
“Yep, she’s loaded. Seven hundred pounds over, but the plane doesn’t mind if you don’t.”
“Hey, beggars are remarkably compliant. Any special instructions?”
“Nope. Be sure to buzz the camp when you get there because it’s three miles from the camp to the landing spot and no phones. I did put in a request for a check. I figured four and a half hours yesterday and six today, but the check won’t be ready until day after tomorrow. It comes from the accountants in Anchorage. Can I loan you a couple of hundred to tide you over?”
“Nah, I’m okay for a couple of days. The crunch will come when I try to leave town.”
“Okay, just remember, fly low and slow.” He tossed me the key ring and turned back to his office.
If the Otter was overloaded, it not only didn’t mind, it didn’t notice. My route was over the White Mountains, which mostly top out around thirty-five hundred feet, then over a hundred miles of Yukon Flats to the Endicott Mountains. Atigun Pass is the entrance to the Endicotts, part of the Brooks Range where several peaks reach for eight thousand feet. I ran on up to ten thousand for engine efficiency and speed, and tuned in the non-directional beacon at Fort Yukon.
That was the proverbial “hours of boredom” part of flying, but it was spectacular. Snow was creeping down the mountains, valleys still blazing with fall colors, lakes and rivers sparkling silver in sunshine. The satin-smooth turbines could lull a chap to sleep. I noticed that the Hobbs meters for both engines read three hundred thirty hours, so that was the newest plane I’d ever flown. Bushmaster tends to pick up bargains from stateside companies that go broke. The low engine hours were impressive because I had put on four of them. Planes that size are normally flown up from the factory in Toronto, so that was another twenty hours.
I stayed at nine thousand feet, passed the patch of rocks and dirt that Freddy was calling the runway, and flew over the camp. I didn’t want to turn a heavy airplane around in the narrow valley and I wanted to be going downhill toward the runway when I buzzed the camp, not uphill with a need to climb. I pretty nearly took the roof off the bunkhouse, but it wasn’t a satisfying buzz. With reciprocating engines, you drift down over your target and gun the engines to rattle the windows. The turbines just whined a little louder.
The Otter bumped and squatted over the rocks and rubble, but stopped halfway down the strip, where the road from camp abutted. I got out to stretch and stroll, but the air was bracing. It was pristine though, crystal clear, and utterly silent. There’s something about the massive mountains that puts men and their little concerns in perspective. If there was an odor, it was new snow. The white line was working its way down the peaks toward the pass, and I spotted several Dahl sheep at the edge. Sheep are supposed to be camouflaged white, but actually next to the new snow, they had a yellow tinge. Perhaps they’ll blend better in a few weeks.
Two pickups and a two-ton flatbed rattled over the rocky road, and half a dozen men had the plane unloaded in ten minutes. I stood close enough to supervise because I didn’t want them knocking off any doors or railings, but they were good. A foreman signed my sheet and the trucks trundled away. I fired the engines to shatter the stillness but only produced the buzz of those incredibly quiet turbines.
I tied the plane down at ten after six, but the lot was almost deserted. Just one long black Cadillac sedan, a maroon Mercedes almost as long, and my little green rented Dodge were left in the lot. The office door was locked, so I used my key and snapped on the lights in the main room, but the light was on in Reginald’s office and his door was open.
Freddy had left a filled-out flight ticket on the counter again. I entered my six o’clock arrival, signed it, and slipped through the drawbridge to put it on Celeste’s desk.
“Hey, Alex, I want you to meet my campaign manager.”
Reginald came out of his office, followed by an even more Italianate figure. He wasn’t as large as Reginald, but he was a hefty specimen, the type who must spend all the time when you’re not watching him in the gymnasium.
This guy was smooth, suit and haircut just a little better than Reginald’s, black hair slicked back, olive complexion.
“Dave, this is Alex Price. Alex, Dave Marino is my campaign manager.”
We shook hands. He had a grip like a steel claw, no warmth, but I was watching his eyes. He was good, no flinch if the name Alex meant something to him, but his irises snapped up one notch. Those eyes were cold, impenetrable, and I wondered if I was seeing the wolverine Stan had described. I couldn’t decide if he recognized the name Alex from the CB conversation. Reginald was prattling on.
“Alex is our ambassador to the Eskimos. I’m sure we can count on their vote.”
Didn’t this guy know anything about Alaska? Sure, the Yupik Nation around Bethel may be over half the Eskimos, but they do not socialize with the Inuit to the north or the Aleuts south of them. It’s only been a hundred years since the borders were armed and raiding parties hunted each other like wild animals.
I tried a more acceptable response than my thought. “Yeah, Reginald really impressed the Eskimos. I’m sure they’re in the bag.”
“You’re just visiting for a few days?” Dave asked.
“Yep, our busy season starts in a couple of weeks when the Kuskokwim starts to freeze. We get swamped from the time villagers can’t use boats until they can use snow machines. Meantime, it’s a nice change to see mountains and trees instead of flat tundra, and it’s a chance to visit old friends.”
Dave was inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if the
old friends
remark registered or not, but I had the feeling that I was playing poker with a pro. Tension was in the air, and the more I studied Dave’s eyes, the more they looked like wolverine.
“Care to join us for an aperitif?” Reginald invited.
“I’d love to, but I have dinner plans with friends.” I checked my watch and winced. “In fact, I’m late. Nice to have met you.” I aimed that remark at Dave. He nodded.
“See you at the polls.” Reginald dismissed me with a casual gesture and I hiked for the Dodge.