“Of course.” They exchanged numbers.
“Thank you. You’ll be in state for the foreseeable future?”
She smiled but she didn’t call him on it the way Len had. “I will.” She waved a hand at the surrounding house. “This is my home, Sergeant. My permanent residence. I travel all over the state and Outside and overseas as well with my job, but I always come home again.”
“Thank you,” he said again, touching the brim of his cap. “I’ll be in touch.”
She smiled into his eyes. “I’m looking forward to it.”
On the whole, he thought, as he turned the key in the ignition, he preferred flirting with Sybilla Karlsen.
His phone buzzed with incoming text.
Just turned the corner at Cook’s Point. Ten minutes out.
It was after four and he felt he’d put in a hard day’s work. He texted back a thumbs up and headed into town.
She had brought takeout from Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage. As a bonus, she hadn’t brought Jo back with her. “I think she means to hound Brillo about the autopsy.”
Excellent news on many different fronts. Brillo was generally impervious to pressure but Jo was her own PSI of power tool. Liam might get results sooner than he’d hoped for. Plus, the best pizza in the world. Plus Wy.
But after dinner he felt a little restless, unable to concentrate on the book in progress, which was a shame because it was Simon Winchester’s Pacific and like all Winchester’s books informative and challenging and in some unspecifiable way he felt reading them made him a better law enforcement officer. Nevertheless, tonight he couldn’t track. He closed it and said, “Want to go for a ride?”
Wy, who was reading what looked like a space opera on the other end of the couch, looked up and smiled. “Take a look around your new domain?”
“Not exactly.”
They piled into his pickup and wandered around, first downtown, which existed largely between two parallel main streets, Sourdough and Cheechako, with others, all of them named for trees, intersecting them both perpendicularly. “Almost a perfect grid,” Wy said.
The few restaurants still open were closed for the day, as were the coffee shops. Wy made sure to point out the bookstore, and they took note of the building supply store and the mini-mall that ran from a hardware store on one end to a quilt shop on the other. “We might never need to order anything by mail again,” Wy said.
“Yeah.” Liam headed back up Alder, crossed Sourdough, and continued up the face of the bluff, which remained paved all the way to the top, but with a steady increase in switchbacks that became more acute the higher they went. “I’m getting seasick,” Wy said.
The road emerged at the edge of the bluff to intersect with another two-lane road that ran along the edge in either direction. The street sign said Heavenly View Drive, and it wasn’t wrong, which they knew since they lived on it. “Right or left?” They had yet to explore beyond their new house in that direction.
“Left is home.” Wy pointed up the Bay. “Right.” That way she could admire the view, and he wouldn’t have to endure the occasionally straight drop off the edge of the road. At least not until they drove back this way to get home.
The road had no shoulders but fortunately very little traffic. Driveways led to everything from log cabins covered in moss to McMansions that looked as if they’d been airlifted in from Orange County. He instructed Wy on the meaning of “dry cabin”. She shuddered. “I lived my first year in Newenham with an outhouse. Don’t ever want to do that again.”
“Never had to, never want to. Ahah.”
“Ahah what?”
He slowed, checked for traffic, and turned left on Baranov Avenue. “Ahah, this is the street Judge DeWinter lives on.”
The surface was dirt and the sides were lined with an impenetrable hedge of alders that in places met overhead to form a tunnel. Roads with names like Shelikov and Rezanov appeared and disappeared along with the houses built on them. At one point the road went down one side of a steep if brief canyon, crossed a one-lane steel bridge with no railings over a dry creek bed, and climbed back up the other side. The landscape opened suddenly on what appeared to be a—yes, it was, a junk yard. There were dozens of cars, a black Ford F-150 with its cab smashed almost flat onto the seat, a gray Impreza with a crumpled hood and four flat tires, an old station wagon with wooden doors, and more of the same. The vehicles, if they could still be called that, were parked haphazardly on both sides of the road, leaving barely enough room for him to creep by. More had been dumped on the side of the road and left long enough to sprout fireweed through the broken windows.
“They better never have a fire at the end of this road,” Wy said.
Liam thought of Chief Rafferty, and wondered if she’d ever been back here. Maybe she should pay it a visit. Maybe someone should tell her she should.
A two-story house with a flat roof and plywood siding stood adjacent to the junk yard. There was a soggy-looking couch next to a tire swing hanging from a deck that protruded from the second story, and an American flag over one window. On that deck stood a skinny guy in a MAGA cap taking a leak. He saw them and waved hello with his penis, creating a sparkly arc that showered the pit bull barking ferociously at them from the yard below.
“Ew,” Wy said.
Liam slid past, just managing not to scrape the paint from the driver side of his pickup or to do a ditch dive off the other side of the road. The road began to incline and about ten yards down the alders closed in
