Meghan adjusted her ski cap and felt the cold air clawing at the skin of her pinky finger from the tear in the glove.
She didn’t turn around when Lester’s heavy boots crunched in the snow, and his nylon insulated pants rubbed together when he ran to catch up.
Chapter Twenty
Singleton’s tracks wound through town like a drunken pirate treasure hunt. She made turns and stops, and the whole time while walking as Singleton, debated with herself about the current events.
Meghan and Lester followed the trail by design and obligation, but they already knew where it led. Along the way, Meghan snatched up crumbled $20 bills lying in the snowy path. Singleton’s pocketful of money was a lot fuller when she started the journey and possible escape.
Neither of them used flashlights, relying on the ambient town lights attached to random utility poles and porch lights on quiet, sleeping houses. They eventually reached the blue house.
Singleton’s tracks started at the stairs, and the broad digging and rolling in the snowdrifts around the front of the house. By the look of the area around the property, it had a lot of activity. As if people started with snow angels and snowmen but stopped short. The divots in the drifts weren’t from fun and play; it had to do with people fighting, beating on each other until one of them relented. Meghan saw pockets of black among some of the ice and snow chunks. Blood looked black in the dark against the snow.
Meghan and Lester crouched behind the combination tire wall and snow berm.
“I don’t hear anything,” Lester whispered. Their prior visits had music and noise. At one-thirty in the morning on a weeknight, it was dark and quiet. The porch light got knocked out or broken. The curtains over the living room windows stopped any light inside the house from slipping out.
“If the front door’s unlocked, we go right in,” Meghan said.
Lester hooked Meghan’s elbow before she moved away too fast. She slipped and dropped to her knee in the deep drift.
“Listen, so far, we’ve been lucky. Anyone of those kids might have a hunting rifle or a handgun.”
“You got your taser, right?” Meghan asked. She understood Lester’s view. “The best we can hope is a bunch of drunk kids in there. But I’ve got to do something.” Meghan sighed. A ball of steam rolled out of her mouth and covered Lester as she faced him. “I’m sorry about what I said. I know you’re not a coward. I don’t want you to think that. I know you’re scared about getting shot. So am I.”
Lester nodded. “I’d like us to spend Christmas with our families, Meg. Just be careful.”
He let go of her arm and followed Meghan to the steps. She saw the bottle of cheap whiskey lying in the snow. Meghan pointed it out to Lester. The 750ml plastic bottle of whiskey was the top choice for bootleggers in the area. Easy to purchase by the case in Anchorage, bottles of gut-rot whiskey cost $10 in the city and went for $300 a bottle in rural Alaska.
Seeing the empty bottle in the snow told Meghan she hadn’t cracked the bootlegging ring yet.
Megan turned the doorknob, kept her head low, and pushed open the door. She hesitated to enter the house. Her heart hammering, she felt sweat turn cold on her face in the 9°F.
As she ascended the front steps, Meghan palmed the canister of pepper spray she carried since the day she took the job as police chief. Other than the single taser the city issued, pepper spray was the only weapon available to village public safety officers. She hoped the propellant still worked. Meghan treated the canister like a weapon, cleaning the nozzle routinely. An unclean weapon caused law enforcement officers fatal mistakes. It didn’t help that Meghan brought an aerosol can to a gunfight.
Immediately, she saw the body lying on the couch. In the dark of the house, the air ripe with tobacco and marijuana fumes. Meghan smelled hints of sick as she entered the living room.
Willie Ortega, twenty-three, lay on the couch. His face and feet hanging out from under the heavy blanket, he was too drunk to notice them. More wads of $20s covered the coffee table and floor. Another empty bottle of whiskey lay discarded by the sofa.
Meghan and Lester crept deeper into the house. Flashlight out, pepper spray forward, her boots scrubbed heavily across the thin runner rug in the hallway. She knew they appeared as noisy prowlers. It was unavoidable.
One bedroom, Meghan counted two bodies in bed and another one on the floor in a sleeping bag.
The second bedroom had two people in bed together. She counted three more bottles of whiskey. Everyone was asleep, not dead, presumably drunk — no visible hunting knives or rifles. Meghan saw a group of young people who had a party that went too far.
“Everyone up!” Megan shouted. She kicked the bed as Lester switched on the lights. He left Meghan in the second bedroom, returned to the first, and rattled the bed after turning on the lights.
It took eighteen minutes to get everyone into the living room. Meghan immediately noticed that their prime suspect wasn’t among the people in the house.
“Where’s Norman?”
“He left,” Jack Boyd said. Cocky and self-assured, his performance wasn’t a highlight. Not while wearing lime green flannel pajama pants and a teal sweatshirt.
Diana Franks sat between George Hudson and Willie Ortega on the sofa. The three of them guilty and drunk. Both parts weren’t equal, and some more than others. Hudson’s head rested on the arm of the couch. He fought to keep open his eyes. Lachlan and Marie Bear sat on the floor in front of the sofa. The siblings were
