Some sourdoughs joked that there were only two seasons – winter and July. A native of Florida and lover of all things to do with the sea and beach, Cutter found the Great Land pleasant – mostly. He loved the fall, enjoyed the summers, found new things to learn in the austerity and bitter winters of the Interior. But breakup… there wasn’t much to like about slop and slush and windshields that you could never get clean.
The light was good, though. By mid-May the sun would rise in Utqiagvik – or Barrow – and wouldn’t dip below the horizon again for eighty-four days. Anchorage wasn’t as drastic. Here, they gained something like five minutes a day until they had about twenty hours of light.
Cutter was the supervisory deputy over enforcement in Alaska, which meant he ran the task force. He chose which paper the teams worked, approved the operational plans, and kicked the biggest ones up to the chief for her check before anyone kicked a door. Safety for all members of the task force fell to him. It didn’t matter if they were deputies like Lola Teariki, officers detailed from Anchorage Police Department, Alaska State Troopers, or other feds from DHS or ATF. Cutter led from the front – which often meant getting out of the way and letting his guys do their job – another thing Grumpy had taught him.
A thick head of perpetually mussed blond hair put Cutter at little over six-three. He steered clear of weights for the most part, staying in shape with running, push-ups, pull-ups, and swimming – plus a little work on the heavy bag every couple of days. With a fighting weight of two and a quarter, he was only just able to wedge himself behind the wheel of the midsize Ford SUV when he wore all his tactical gear. In his early forties, Cutter had yet to hit the metabolic wall that caused so many of his peers to turn into Deputy Donuts instead of the lean machines they’d been out of Marshals Service Basic.
He was lucky in that regard. The rest of his life—
“We need a new name, Cutter,” Lola said, shattering the silence. The weight of her idea had grown too heavy for her to bear alone. Her father’s Kiwi accent sharpened Teariki’s vowels and chased away her Rs when she was tired, turning “Cutter” into Cuttah.
They were too close to the meeting point to get into a long conversation, which is why he humored her. “A new name for what?”
Lola yawned, big, like a lioness. “For the Alaska Fugitive Task Force. AFTF is stuffed as far as acronyms go. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It’s too early for this, Lola,” Cutter said, driving over a bump of old snow as he took a corner.
“Hear me out, boss.” Teariki patted the console between them. “A good acronym says something about what it stands for – like the FIST operations the Marshals Service used to do back in the day. Fugitive Investigative Strike Team. Now that’s got verve.”
Cutter shrugged. “How about the FALCON roundups.”
Lola scoffed, making a buzzer sound. “Lame! Federal and Local Cops… I don’t even remember. On Nightshift…? No, also stuffed. The acronym should at least make sense.” She folded her arms over the front of her ballistic vest and stared out the windshield at the darkness. “I’ll keep thinking on it.”
“You do that,” Cutter said, making another turn down a dark street toward the rally point, where his team would link up with two uniformed Anchorage police officers.
The smell of new birch and cottonwood buds on the cold air pinched his nose as he drove. There were other odors too, coming through the open window, less pleasant. Anchorage was a city of over 60,000 dogs. Which was all well and good. Cutter liked dogs. But not every owner was responsible, and that many pups left behind a lot of little melting land mines as the snows receded.
Another reason not to like breakup.
One of those sixty thousand dogs woofed somewhere down the block, grumbling at the chill.
Another SUV was already parked along the road ahead, along with two marked APD cruisers.
Cutter pulled in behind the SUV, two blocks east of Jarome Pringle’s residence.
It was time to not get stabbed in the eye.
Chapter 2
A part from being a tall, fat white guy who spoke with a distinctive Jamaican patois, Jarome Pringle seemed an unremarkable fugitive. The task force had dealt with him before. He’d been no problem – but in that instance, they’d snatched him out of a vehicle on a traffic stop. This time, they were going into his house, or more accurately, his new girlfriend’s house.
Cutter had chosen the edge of this vacant lot for a quick briefing. It was near an Anchorage green belt of birch and spruce trees that ran along Chester Creek, but far enough away that no one at Pringle’s could hear vehicle doors shutting in the predawn darkness. Cutter killed the headlights and reached between the center console and his seat for his Battle Board.
The dome light remained off when he opened the door – anything else was a recipe for getting shot.
Lola arched her back, stretching, hands pressed flat on the Ford’s headliner in another long, feline yawn.
“You got the warrant file?”
“Got it,” Cutter said.
He held up the multi-cam Battle Board – essentially a ballistic nylon folder with a clear Plexiglas face, under which he’d slipped a map of the neighborhood and a hand-sketched floorplan of the house.
He’d marked up the map and floorplan with a grease pencil to aid in the briefing he was about to give the two Anchorage police officers who were there to help with the early-morning arrest. He’d gone over everything with Lola and
