Fire And Ice

"You'd lose that bet," Liam said, swallowing. "I had one just as good yesterday." Bill bristled, and Liam held up one hand, palm out. "From here, Bill, takeout."

Still suspicious, Bill said, "Takeout? I don't do takeout."

"You don't?" Wy had told him she'd gotten the burgers at Bill's.

"Hell no. Too much trouble, and I hate those plastic containers-they take a million years to decompose, and we've fucked up the environment enough for one lifetime as it is. 'Course," she added, "you bring your own bag, I'll wrap your order up in tinfoil." She rubbed her chin and added meditatively, "Although I've been thinking about charging a fee for the tinfoil." She fixed him with a severe look. "Tinfoil ain't cheap."

Liam remembered the greasy brown paper shopping bag Wy had produced, and breathed again. If Wy was buying burgers at Bill's, she wasn't anywhere around when Bob DeCreft walked into the prop of the Cub. He wanted Wy's alibi to be ironclad, impenetrable, intact. More than that, he didn't want to think that she'd lied to him within minutes of seeing him for the first time in over two years.

Although everybody lied, he knew that. It was the first rule any cop learned on the job. And it would have been easy enough for Wy to cut the p-lead and leave Bob DeCreft to his fate. It was what someone had done, after all. Yes, Wy had had all the opportunity in the world, and since she did most of her own mechanical work, the means as well. And motive? No. He didn't, wouldn't, couldn't believe it. He said, "Bill, do you know Wy Chouinard?"

"Of course. Pilot. Nice gal. She's Moses'-" She paused. "She's one of Moses' students."

Liam wondered what she had been going to say. "Did she order a couple of burgers yesterday?"

She eyed him. "What is this, an interrogation? Yeah, she was in, ordered two cheeseburgers, two fries, two Cokes; she brought an NC shopping bag with her. We visited some over the bar while she waited. She told me there was still a chance Fish and Game was going to declare an opener so they were going back up, and I told her all about the Mystic Crewe of Barkis." She cocked an expectant eyebrow, but he didn't bite, and she sighed. "Anyway, that New Orleans sure is one hell of a party town. Christmas, Mardi Gras, Strawberry Festival, Jazz Fest. The Neville Brothers come from New Orleans, did you know that?"

"All I know about New Orleans is that in 1814 we took a little trip."

Bill wrinkled her nose. "Joh

"Really?"

Bill's blue eyes narrowed. "You ever hear of the Neville Brothers?"

"No," Liam admitted.

Bill muttered something uncomplimentary under her breath and marched over to the jukebox, the very set of her shoulders indicating she was on a mission from Jelly Roll Morton his own self. A coin rolled into a slot and the sweet, sad strains of "Bird on a Wire" rolled out.

"Nice," Liam commented when the song was done.

Bill rolled her eyes and heaved an impatient sigh at his lack of enthusiasm. "Nice, the man says. Nice."

Liam liked classical music, its intricate melodies and rhythms, its careful crafting, its honest passion. Je

Short of a parish priest, who was bound to an inconvenient confidentiality by oath, a local bartender was more privy to more information on the native population than anyone else. Liam had cultivated bartenders in other towns, and had found them to be a source that never failed, and a much quicker route to the information he needed than going through more conventional cha

"Bob DeCreft," she said. She sighed. "Poor old Bob." She gave Liam a sharp glance. Save for the man with his head pillowed in his arms in the front booth, the man with the Rainier bottle still pressed to his face, and the dulcet tones of Aaron Neville, they were alone in the bar. "You here to pump me for information, is that it, Liam?"

Liam smiled at her. "As much as I can get," he agreed. "That, and food-that's all I want you for."

She laughed, throwing her head back and displaying a set of teeth that were just saved from being perfect by overlapping incisors that made her look faintly vampirish.

Which, now that Liam thought about it, would explain that air of eternal youth.

"Bob DeCreft," she said, meditatively. "He moved here, oh, about five, no, six years ago now, I think it was."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "Why does anyone move to Newenham? Why did you? Starting over is a time-honored Bush Alaska tradition." Liam tried not to squirm beneath the penetrating look she shot him. "You're pissed at me, aren't you?" she said suddenly. "For blabbing your story out in the bar yesterday?"

Liam said nothing, examining the glass of Coke in his hand with an air of total absorption.

She pointed her finger at him. "Best thing I could do for you. No sense in trying to make a secret of things in the Alaskan Bush, Liam."

"Five people died on my watch," he found himself saying. "Never mind they shouldn't have been driving on the Denali Highway in February in the middle of a thirty-below cold spell with no survival gear and three little kids. Never mind they should have checked the level of antifreeze in their car before not doing any such thing. Two troopers under my command ignored two calls-not one but two -alerting our post reporting those folks missing. Maybe we could have got to them in time, maybe not. Fact is, we didn't, they died, and I was in charge." He looked Bill straight in the eye, unsmiling. "I'm about as white as you can get without bleach. So were the two troopers who missed the calls. The family that died was Athabascan, from Fort Yukon. You know how hard it is to get the villagers to trust us in the first place, Bill. How much harder is it going to be for me with the villagers around here, coming in under that kind of cloud?"

"Exactly why I told your story," she replied promptly. "You think the news didn't get here before you did? The Bush telegraph is better than smoke signals or jungle drums any day. It wouldn't have been long before everybody knew it. If you'd tried to hide it, there's some would have used it against you. Best to have it all out in the open."

Liam said nothing, and Bill heaved an impatient sigh. "Give them a chance, Liam. I meant what I said yesterday-you do your job right, that's what they'll judge you on."

"Even the villagers?"

"Especially the villagers," she retorted. "The Yupik have a strong sense of family, and an even stronger sense of community. The ones that aren't head down in a bottle, which is about half of them, are firm believers in law and order; in fact, they generally try to dispense it themselves through their village councils. When the councils fail, they'll call you in. They'll do everything they can to avoid it, but when the elders can't resolve the problem, or when the offense is just too much for the village to stomach, they'll call you in. You'll be their last hope, their last resort. They want to trust you. They want to believe that you'll do right by them."

"If you say so."

"I do say so," Bill said, "but I can tell that the only way you're going to be convinced is to see for yourself. You will. Anyway," she said, jumping back to the original subject in a way that he would come to recognize was characteristic of her conversation, "I could go outside and throw a rock and be guaran-damn-teed to hit somebody who got sick of their spouse, their marriage, their job, their home, or all of the above, and subsequently got on a plane going north and got off here, ready to start over."