On impulse, he picked up his cell, opened his contacts, and tapped on one. The contact picked up after the first ring. “How you doing, Dumbledore?” he said.
“Fuck off, Campbell.”
Something inside him relaxed at the sound of that deep, assured voice. “Hey, Jim. Where are you?”
“In the Park. At home.” There was a woman’s voice in the background. “It’s Liam.”
“Is that Kate? Tell her I said hey.”
“Liam says hey. Kate says hey back, and are you calling from Newenham?”
“From Blewestown, actually. On Chungasqak Bay.”
Liam heard what he assumed was coffee pouring, followed by a slurp. “Never been there, but I hear it’s scenic.”
“It is that.”
“You and Wy there on vacation?”
“No. They opened a post here and Barton asked me to take it on.”
“Huh. I thought he was pretty happy with you in Newenham.”
Liam sighed. “I think he’s trying to move me closer to Anchorage.”
“He did.” Jim’s voice had a smile in it. “Was a time you’d have been happy about that.”
“That was then, this is now. I made it back up to sergeant, that’s good enough. I don’t want to deal with the politics. Hey, you get that school of yours up and running?”
“It’s up, I don’t know how well it’s running.”
“Pretty cool, though.”
“If I can make it go how I want to, yeah.”
“I hear Kate finally took down Erland Bannister.”
“Well, he died on her before she could put him back in jail, but yeah. We’re all good here, Liam. Why are you in Blewestown?”
“Barton says the drug trade has moved into the lower Kenai hard, manufacturing and distribution. He wants me to clean it up, like we did in the Valley.”
“He wants to ride you into headquarters on a wave of trophy shots.”
“I think so.”
A brief silence. “And?”
Liam shook his head. “And I haven’t been here a week and the local PD chief schooled me on exactly and precisely where I’m allowed to serve and protect, and the local judge warned me off using excessive force. Plus I got a dead archeologist, murdered last Monday night or thereabouts, and the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, also murdered, that Brillo says has been lying where I found it for thirty plus years.”
A brief silence. “Anything else?”
“The whole place feels off. I think it’s partly because Blewestown is the whitest town I’ve ever been in in Alaska. Everybody’s white here, Jim. Except for my administrative aide. Whom Barton hired before I even got here, FYI.”
“Yeah, she’s probably spying on you for him.”
“Be my guess. The only other Natives I’ve met are her parents who, I’m overjoyed to relate, are involved in my murder case, and I had to get Wy to fly me across the Bay to meet them. Newenham was majority Yupiq. It looked like Alaska. This place looks like, I don’t know. Idaho. You know. If Idaho wasn’t landlocked.”
“How is Wy?”
“Fine. She sold her air taxi in Newenham. She’s figuring out what she wants to do next.”
“She keep both planes?” A pilot’s question.
“Yeah. She meant to sell the Cub but when it came right down to it she couldn’t.”
“Don’t blame her. Got a place to live?” Jim had thoroughly enjoyed the story of Liam’s Progress through Newenham housing.
“Yeah, a nice one. Local guy built it for his wife and two kids. Kids are gone and he opened a brewpub in town and moved in over the shop. For sale by owner, saved us a ton of money. Got a hell of a view. I can’t get too close to the edge of the yard because we’re right on the bluff that backs up the town and it is seriously all downhill from there.”
Another slurp. “How far away are you from retirement?”
“Two years.”
“You can always pull the plug. I haven’t looked back.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Liam said. “The thing is, I don’t know what the hell else I’d do if I did. All I know is I don’t want to live in Anchorage, and I sure as hell don’t want any job that involves interacting with the goddamn legislature.”
“You can always say no.”
“You’ve met John Barton, right?”
A laugh. “Yeah. Still. You’re a grown ass man, Liam. Figure out what you want and make your own damn decisions.”
If only I knew what that was, Liam thought after he’d said goodbye and hung up.
Nineteen
Friday, September 6
WY SPENT THE MORNING UNPACKING, and then made a trip to the grocery store. There were two in Blewestown and neither of them was AC, a nice change from Newenham, where, like almost everywhere else in Alaska that was not on the road system, the Alaska Commercial Company had a lock on the sale of groceries.
It amused her to stand in line and eavesdrop. The cashiers seemed to know all the customers, the customers appeared to be all local all the time, and they were united in their joy at the end of tourist season and the beginning of the school year. She was picking up the local vernacular, too. For starters, almost none of the locals called Blewestown “Blewestown”. It was the Bay, or Baytown, or B-town, or, sometimes, Chungasqak. This last was employed with the emphasis that Alaskans in general used in calling Denali Denali and never McKinley, an Outsider who’d never even been to the state. She resolved to look up the meaning of “chungasqak” as soon as she got home, and Kapilat, Engaqutaq, and Chuwawet while she was at it. There was no one here to discourage her from learning the local Native language, so why not?
In even more thrilling news, there was also an honest-to-god bookstore—she parked in front and peered into the windows to be sure—and she took careful note of their hours. The last time she’d lived in a town with a bookstore she’d been in college.
When she got home she did another round of form
