It lowered the odds that anyone on his team would get a pencil in the eye.
It was still dark, but that rarely helped you tell time in Alaska. In this case, it was early, a little after five a.m. It was still cold enough for a coat, but getting warmer every day, warm enough that the gray mountains of snow – fifteen, twenty feet high – that had been piled up in virtually every Anchorage parking lot and neighborhood cul-de-sac would weep rivulets of dirty water into the streets as soon as the sun came up in a couple of hours.
With any luck, the task force would be done by then, and making ops plans for the next fugitive.
Fugitive work – often simply called “enforcement” – was the sexy side of the Marshals Service. Everybody had to hook and haul prisoners at some point in his or her career. Deputy US marshals – DUSMs – sat in court and listened to attorneys drone on for so long they probably could pass the bar. They took mug shots, rolled fingerprints, conducted strip searches (lift and turn please), met the airlift with van loads of bad guys – but nobody came aboard for all that. You got a job with the Marshals Service because you wanted to work enforcement.
You wanted to hunt.
A good chief deputy spread the wealth. Jill Phillips was one of the best. She made sure every POD – plain old deputy – in the District of Alaska, even the ones who’d just graduated from Marshals Basic at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, had a warrant or two of their own to work.
PODs divided their time between court, judicial protection, asset forfeiture, hurricane aftermath, guarding dignitaries with State at the United Nations General Assembly – pretty much anything the Attorney General decided he or she wanted the Marshals Service to do. Deputies assigned to the Alaska Fugitive Task Force rarely had to dilute their schedule with collateral duties. They hunted. Every day – and many nights. They cornered the name on the paper, took him or her to jail, and then moved on to the next warrant in the stack, all the while trying not to get shot or stabbed by some bad guy’s baby mama.
Cutter mulled over his grandfather’s wisdom as he drove through the backstreets of midtown Anchorage in the gunmetal chill of the predawn darkness. Gravel popped under the tires of his government-issue SUV. It was a Ford Escape – surely a joke from USMS fleet management in DC.
His partner, Deputy Lola Teariki, a Polynesian of Cook Island Maori descent, sat in the passenger seat. She was not a particularly large woman – but her personality sprawled across the inside of the vehicle and took up a lot of space. Still a ways from thirty, she had four years on with the Service. Thick ebony hair piled high on her head in a tight bun, still glistening from the shower after her zero-dark-thirty workout. She and Cutter were dressed alike – navy blue long-sleeve shirts, khaki Vertx pants, and olive drab load-bearing ballistic vests with a five-pointed circle-star badge and police: us marshal embroidered in white across the back.
Gazing out the passenger window, she brooded over something. She’d speak up soon. She always did. Even half-formed ideas seemed too much of a burden for Lola to carry around. She had to get them off her chest. That usually meant telling it all to Cutter, letting him in on what she’d figured out with the certitude that came from her two-point-something decades on the planet… He didn’t mind. She was a good kid. A little blabby, but her heart was in the right place – and she’d sure proved herself. Fit, smart, and hit on by pretty much every male officer or agent who met her, she was tough as an old boot, ready to jump in and go to town when more fragile souls might shy away. She could bat her lashes innocently one minute, then intimidate the hell out of some bad guy when she rolled her eyes and scrunched her nose the next. She called it “going Polynesian-princess to Maori-warrior face.”
For now, whatever notion that was taking shape inside her head was still in its early stages, so she was quiet, allowing Cutter to ponder on his grandfather while he drove the last two blocks to the meeting.
For as long as Arliss had known him, the old man, called Grumpy by most, lived by a certain creed. He called these doctrines his Grumpy Man-Rules, and passed them on to the grandsons he’d raised. Arliss’s brother, Ethan, had gone on to become an engineer. A noble profession to be sure, but a mystery to Grumpy. The old man had been an officer with Florida Marine Patrol. He chased poachers, rescued idiots, patrolled in his airboat to enforce the law on the water – and there was a lot of water in Florida. Arliss had followed, but on the federal side of the business, which riled the old man at first. Still, Grumpy saved back a few of his axioms that had special meaning to someone who carried a badge, even if it was for the feds, who he generally felt were as useless as tits on a boar hog.
Well over a decade in the US Marshals – not to mention Cutter’s time with the 75th Rangers – had borne out the old man’s wisdom in spades.
Cutter made a left.
Lola kept quiet, still forming her notion.
Jarome Pringle’s warrant file said he was harmless, but Cutter knew better. There was no such thing as harmless, not in this line of work.
Cutter mulled over the possible outcomes, letting the chilly wind through his open window hit him in the face, bracing him awake.
Spring in Alaska wasn’t all kite flying and daffodils. Breakup, they called it. As in
