“Oh, is that so?” Marcus shot an accusing glance at Smoot. “So you’re the one who just cost me two hundred and fifty pounds?”
“Oh, thanks again, Allie, my love. I’ll probably nae make it home in one piece now.”
Everyone laughed as they backed away and rose from the table to leave.
“Well, let’s head home then,” Barclay said, “We’ve got PT in the morning at oh-six-thirty. Johnson, you’ll be meeting our captain and the lieutenants at the session. We’ve also got a colours sergeant to frag on the way back to the base.”
“Don’t even try it, you young’ns. This old man’ll kill you with both hands tied behind my back, by the mighty blast of a Guinness fart from hell.” He paused for a moment, then added, “On second thought, I’d better put me hands in front. No need to burn me own flesh.”
They roared with laughter as they left the pub and made their way down the dimly lit street to the main gate.
Chapter 7
Fairbanks Northstar Borough
Public Safety Building
December 18th
02:12 Hours
Trooper Lonnie Wyatt sat in her tiny cubicle in the Public Safety building with her digital voice recorder on the desk. A white wire ran from the small device up to the earbuds inserted in her ears. She listened carefully as she wrote up the details of her interviews with Charlie Bannock and Linus Balsen, and of the findings at the substation, in her full report. Several times in the process, she had to rewind as her mind drifted on an ebb tide of near exhaustion. Once the typing was done, Lonnie printed out the pages and digital pictures she had snapped at the power substation on the office’s color laser printer, attached them to the paperwork, and put it all in an interoffice memo envelope.
A numb tiredness tingled in her cheeks. Her eyes felt puffy as she walked down the hall to Commander Stark’s office and slid the package under his door. She straightened and stretched her stiff back, sore from hours of driving. Lonnie looked forward to getting into her soft, warm bed for the sleep she so desperately needed.
She started back to her cubicle to log off the computer for the night. Before she took two steps, Marsha Klein, the third-shift dispatch supervisor, called out her name.
“Lonnie? Trooper Wyatt? I have some information Glenda said to pass on to you if it came across.”
Lonnie turned her sunken and darkly shadowed eyes up to see the heavyset forty-something dispatcher waddle quickly up to her. Marsha came to a stop, then inhaled deeply to catch her breath from the exertion.
“Yes, ma’am, what is it?” Lonnie asked.
“Glenda told me that if the whereabouts of a TVEC truck, number forty-eight, were discovered, to let you know.” Marsha gulped a lung full of air, and pushed her thick, black plastic-rimmed glasses up on her nose with her forefinger. “Well, FPD just found it about twenty minutes ago in the Alaska Fitness Club parking lot on South Cushman. They said a witness, the night manager of the place, saw two men get out of it and into a dark green or black Chevy Blazer, then head toward town. FPD has details on the second vehicle. Seems the witness owns one just like it and thought his was being stolen, until he saw the license plates. We have a good ID on the Blazer. FPD is following up with a warrant search right now.”
“Oh, God!” Lonnie’s eyes widened with concern. “Who’s the officer being sent out? We have to stop him until he gets good backup. These guys are potentially armed and dangerous.”
“Oh!” Marsha’s eyebrows raised quickly above her glasses. “Oh my! It’s Officer Beed. I’ll tell FPD dispatch to call him right away.”
Marsha ran down the hall as fast as her legs could carry her back to the dispatch console. She plugged her headset into the panel and radioed the city dispatcher before sitting down. Marsha spoke in the ubiquitously calm manner that good dispatchers always use on the radio. She told the voice on the other end to warn Officer Beed that the men he was going after were armed and dangerous and to wait for backup.
The city dispatcher, still housed in the old City Public Safety building two blocks away, pressed the radio key to the officer’s frequency.
Officer Jimmy Beed was a tall, thin, twenty-seven-year-old War on Terror veteran who became a cop after he returned from his second tour in Iraq three years earlier. Closely cut, red hair rimmed the bottom edge of the dark blue baseball cap he wore with the word POLICE in yellow embroidered lettering across the front.
Beed’s face was long and narrow, with an almost stretched appearance accentuated by high cheekbones, large ears that stuck far out from the sides of his head, and bright red eyebrows above hazel eyes. His defining feature was the very large Adam’s apple that jutted wildly from above the collar of his police uniform. This part of his anatomy often drew the attention of whomever he was talking to as it slid up and down whenever he swallowed or cleared his throat. In the Army, the thick bit of cartilage had earned him the nickname “Gollum”.
Beed stood on the landing of a modest rental house on Gradelle Avenue, on the west side of the city. The surrounding neighborhood was primarily full of family homes, but there were also numerous college students who rented houses in the conveniently located area. The University of Alaska Fairbanks was less than a mile away. Beed had graduated with the Class of ’98 from West Valley High School just down the road from the house. A previous tenant
