“So,” Liam said, entering a note in the case file, “thatwas when you hit him with the sun-dried tomatoes.”
The jar in question was smaller than the jar of artichokes but larger than the loaf of Tillamook, all three lined up on Liam’s desk. Liam liked the look of them. Mrs. Tompkins’ arsenal.
“Yes.” Mrs. Tompkins sat back in her chair, eyes bright with militant satisfaction. She crossed her legs again. For legs with that many miles on them, they still looked pretty good. Liam allowed himself an admiring glance. Mrs. Tompkins smiled at him again.
The phone on Diana’s desk rang. “Excuse me a minute,” she said to Dracula’s bride, who gave the rubber mallet a dismissive wave, and raised the receiver. The steady voice of the dispatcher spoke without haste and to the point. “Okay, we’ll be right there.” She hung up and tried not to sound jubilant when she told Liam, “Sir, somebody tried to rip off the ATM machine down at Last Frontier.”
“Again?” Liam was sorry to end the interview but duty called. “Mrs. Tompkins, we’ve got to go, but I want to say that it’s been a real pleasure. We’ll be in touch.”
“Will I have to testify?” Mrs. Tompkins looked eager to do her civic duty.
The fierce, diminutive woman glowed with family values and middle-class morality and the Boy Scout oath, for crissake, a woman who was every prosecuting attorney’s dream and every defense lawyer’s nightmare. A slow smile spread across Liam’s face. He would love to have her sworn in in front of Bill Billington. It was with real regret that he said, “I doubt it. I have a feeling the public defender will recommend a guilty plea. But I will certainly keep you informed on the progress of the case.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Tompkins fluttered her eyelashes at him, gathered up her bags of groceries and marched out of the post on her first-class legs. Liam thought there ought to be a trumpet playing somewhere in the background, or at the very least, a round of applause.
“Come on, Harvey,” Liam said, “we’ll drop you off at the cop shop on our way.”
“Oh, man, you can’t put me back there! What are the rest of the guys going to say! Knocked on my ass by a little old lady with a bag of groceries! Campbell, come on, man, have some heart!” Then, when Liam uncuffed him from the chair and steered him toward the back door with a determined hand, he shouted, “I want to talk to my lawyer, goddamn it! I’m constitutionally entitled to a phone call!”
In the meantime, Dracula’s bride waited with the calm certainty of one who knew she had eternity at her disposal for someone to put an end to her reign of terror.
“Poor bastard.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Whaddya mean, you guess? He just lost his wife of fifty years a year ago. He’s allowed.”
“Accent on the year ago. He was getting better there for a while; I don’t know why he had to go off the deep end again.” Bill used the bar towel to mop up the vomit around Eric Mollberg’s head where it lay sleeping peacefully on the bar. “I oughta call Liam.”
“Cut him some slack, woman. He’s been picked up on D-and-D twice already this month.”
“Yeah, well. He sits on the city council, for crying out loud.”
“Guys on the city council can’t get blind drunk when their wives die on them? You wouldn’t get blind drunk if I died?”
Bill didn’t have an answer for that, but the fact remained that Eric Mollberg had gone from city father to public nuisance in a downward spiral that had been dizzying to watch. Still, it was something else they could fight about, not that they had lacked for bones of contention to growl over in the past month. The events at Old Man Creek had taken a toll on both of them, Bill because Moses had been shot and Moses because he had lived. Amelia Gearhart had died. Young, wounded Amelia, scarred by neglectful parents, abused by her husband. Moses had been on a fair way to rescuing her, to breaking the cycle of abuse and setting her feet however shakily on the path to a different life, and then she was dead, shot to death by the same man who had tried to kill him, just when she had begun to learn how to live. Bill and Moses had been snapping and snarling at each other ever since they got back.
As testified to by Evan Gray, one of Bill’s regular customers currently seated three stools down. He was also Newenham’s main connection for dope. If you rolled your own, you went to the Moccasin Man (so called because he wore beaded buckskin from head to toe) for the best grade of Thunderfoot from Wasilla or Kona Gold from Hawaii. “Gets kind of tiresome, cleaning puke off the bar,” he said. Evan was also a serious rounder, and he smiled at Bill Billington, happy to give her aid and comfort in her argument with Moses.
Moses Alakuyak, certified Alaskan old fart, only smiled, albeit his nastiest, dirtiest, most spawn-of-Satan smile. “Playing out of your league, sonny. She’d eat you alive.”
Bill’s spine stiffened and she glared at Moses. Never mind that they’d been lovers from the night of the day they had met. When he got proprietary she got her back up.
And even when he didn’t. “I beg your pardon?” she said, her tone frosty.
“You can make your apology horizontally,” Moses said. “Later.”
The other patrons sitting at the bar roared their approval, including the women.
Bill slapped the bar towel down. “That’s it, Alakuyak. Out. Out!”
He repeated his evil grin, only it was a lot more personal this time. He didn’t leave, either, instead swaggering over to the jukebox. Moments later, Jimmy Buffett was singing about a smart woman in a real short skirt. Bill, her eagle’s mane of white hair considerably ruffled, ignored him, and called Liam to come pry Eric Mollberg off her bar.
There was no answer. She left a message that should have melted down the voice-mail circuitry and slammed the phone into its cradle.
“Bad day?”
She looked up to see Wyanet Chouinard regarding her with a sympathetic eye. “Bad month,” she said, casting a sidelong look at Moses, now regaling a tableful of other old farts with some yarn about a duel to the death with a king salmon the size of Moby Dick.
Wy followed her gaze. “I hate men,” she said in agreement.
“Liam?”
“And Tim.”
“What’s wrong with Tim?”
Wy sat on a stool. “Nothing caning wouldn’t cure.”
Bill, startled out of her irritation, laughed. “Ship him off to Singapore, then.” She pulled Wy an Alaskan Amber and set it on the bar in front of the pilot.
Wy took a long pull and said, “I can’t do that. He’d probably start a war, and then I’d have the State Department all over my ass.”
They laughed together this time. “But seriously, folks,” Bill said. “What’s wrong with Tim? Usual teenage stuff?”
“That, too.”
“What else?”
“I’m letting his mom see him. He hates her. And he hates me for making him see her.” Wy took another long, soothing draft of beer, and regarded the mug with a weary kind of satisfaction. “The great thing about winter is that daylight decreases by five minutes and forty-four seconds a day and I can drink earlier every time I come in here.”
“Yeah, you’re such a heavy drinker, Chouinard.”
“Sometimes I wish I were.”
Bill looked at Moses over her head. “No, you don’t.”
Wy sighed. “No, I don’t.”
“How is Natalie behaving?”
“She’s still sober,” Wy said. “She’s staying in town, renting a room from Tatiana Anayuk. Got herself a job bagging groceries at Eagle.”