Better To Rest

“I know those guys, Dad,” Liam said evenly. “They’re on call for rescues all over the state. I don’t think they’re going to volunteer their crews and their equipment to recover bodies that have been lying there for sixty years. We’re coming up on storm season. They’ll have plenty of work on their hands rescuing the living.”

Charles’ eyes narrowed. “Those guys who came busting up on the four-wheelers when we were out at the wreck…”

“What about them?” Liam said, wondering where this was going.

“They were treasure hunting.”

“They said they were caribou hunting.”

“Crap. They knew about this gold coin and they went looking for more where it came from.”

Liam couldn’t deny it. “So?”

“So if we don’t get that wreck out of there you’re going to start losing Newenhammers who think there might be gold in them thar hills.”

Liam remembered the slab of ice that had nearly killed him and Wy the previous morning. “You’ll lose just as many going after it.”

“Not if I round up good equipment and good equipment operators. Leave it to me.” Charles stood up and threw down a couple of bills. “Excuse me. I’ve got some calls to make.”

The three of them watched him stride out the door. When it closed behind him, Liam looked at Mason and said, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I don’t,” he added when he saw Liam’s skepticism. “My boss heard about the wreck and called the commander out on Elmendorf. The BOC told him that Colonel Campbell was flying in. My boss asked him to ask Colonel Campbell to let me hitch a ride to Newenham. He said okay. I have to say we were all a little surprised. I mean, the United States Air Force doesn’t exactly hand out rides on an F-15.”

“So the inference is he wanted you here. Why?”

Mason was using a french fry to mop up the last drop of steak juice and was very intent on the job. “He said that co-operation between federal organizations was essential to the smooth working of government, and that he was happy to be able to contribute to it, in however small a way.” He met Liam’s eyes with a bland expression in his own.

“What can you do here?”

“Not much,” Mason said. “I don’t have a lot of authority over the sixty-year-old wreck of a military plane. If it was sabotaged, or the flight was in any way related to espionage of some kind, then I could step in, maybe. And only maybe.” He smiled. “In Alaska the FBI is more concerned with Russians importing underage girls who come thinking they’re going to be part of an ethnic dance group and who wind up shaking it down in the strip clubs.”

“Were you on that case?” Jo said.

“From the start.” Mason didn’t sound happy about it.

“Were the girls in on it?”

“The older one, the twenty-year-old, maybe. The two younger ones, no way.”

“Are they still in jail?”

Mason winced. “We prefer to call it protective custody.”

“Waiting on the INS?”

“That, and the fact that we need them to testify against the guys who brought them into the country.”

Liam reached for his wallet. “I’m due home.”

“Give Wy my love.”

“Where’s Gary?” Liam said, suddenly noticing her brother’s absence.

“Relax,” Jo said. “He’s doing some patchup work for a guy he knows in Ik’ikika.”

Liam tried not to show his relief.

She waited until he was inches from a clean getaway. “What’s going on with your father, Liam?”

“I know as much as you do, Jo. And sometimes I think,” he added, a trifle grimly, “a lot less.”

“Man,” she said.

“What?”

“Sons and their fathers.”

“What about them?”

“Tell the truth. You guys just sit around thinking up ways to fail each other, don’t you?”

“Go to hell,” Liam said, and marched to the bar, wallet in hand.

Jo watched him go, admiring the straight spine that managed to broadcast every ounce of the offended dignity that he was feeling.

Fathers and sons, she thought.

There oughta be a law.

She was unaware that she’d said the words out loud until Special Agent James Mason said, “Against what?”

“Many things,” she said, recovering. “Many, many things.”

“There already are,” he said. “And speaking as a member and on behalf of the law-enforcement community, I have enough laws to make people mind already. My old man used to say that every time Congress enacted another law, they took another little piece of our freedom away.”

“Sounds like a right-wing reactionary to me.”

He laughed. “It’s early,” he said, reaching for his jacket. “You’re at the Bay View I

“Yes.”

“So am I. I’ve got a bottle in my room. Want a drink?”

She looked him over with care. He met her eyes without guile, something to mistrust in any member of any law-enforcement agency. “Sure,” she said.

After paying his tab Liam paused at the chess table. “Get the hell outta my light,” Clarence said. Eric Mollberg had gone to the bar for a refill. Moses looked up and growled, “What?”

“Do you know who did it?”

Moses moved his last pawn to the last row and exchanged it for his queen.

“Do you?”

“Check,” Moses said. Clarence swore loudly.

“Goddamn it, old man,” Liam said.

“Goddamn it, yourself,” Moses said. He reached for a bottle of Oly and flatfooted it. “Beer!” he bellowed, and behind him Liam heard the bar cooler open. “I don’t know,” he said finally, glaring up at Liam, who seemed to have planted himself like a rock.

“You’d tell me if you did.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You’ll find him.” He tried for one of his fallen-angel smiles, not quite succeeding. “Besides, you’re not a believer, boy. What you doing bothering the old shaman when you know you’re going to do whatever the hell you were going to do in the first place? Go on home. She’s waiting for you.”

“I am.” Liam didn’t move.

“Go on, then! Quit interfering with my chess game.”

Clarence gave a sudden cry that sounded just like the cackle of a raven, and moved his rook. “Checkmate.”

“Fuck,” Moses said.

Clarence sat back in his chair and looked up at Liam beneath shaggy brows. “You talking about Lydia?”

Liam shifted his gaze from one side of the table to the other, and nodded.

“You should have seen her when we was all young,” Clarence said. “That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.”

Moses uttered a sharp bark of laughter. “Including you.”

“Including you,” Clarence retorted. His beady little black eyes sparkled and he all but smacked his lips. “Those were the days. Get hold of a truck and drive your girl and your friends and their girls to Icky and have an all-day party on the beach at One Lake. You remember that party out the beach that one summer?”

Moses gri

“Yeah,” Clarence said. “I see you do. Bet Leslie and Walter and Silent Cal and Stan do, too.”

“Stan’s dead.”

Clarence frowned. “Stan’s dead?”

“Going on five years.”

Clarence was outraged. “Goddamn! How’s a man supposed to get drunk with his friends if they keep dying on him!”

“What about Lydia at the beach?” Liam said.

Moses and Clarence got matching faraway looks on their faces. “We went up to the fish camp used to be at Icky.”

“Wasn’t Icky,” Moses said. “The fish camp was out the end of River Road.”

“It was up Icky way, this fish camp,” Clarence said, glaring. “A bunch of the guys and the girls in the school. We took some beer, and somebody had some records and had figured out a way to run a record player off his pickup battery. We stayed up there two days and two nights, dancing and singing and laughing and pulling fish out of the river.” Clarence looked at Moses. “Remember the eagles?”

Moses nodded. “Couple eagles sitting in this cottonwood snag, old Silent Cal got too close and one of those eagles hoisted up its tail feathers and shot a stream of yellow shit straight into old Silent Cal’s face.”