Fathers and sons, she thought.
There oughta be a law.
She was unaware that she’d said the words out loud until Special Agent James Mason said, “Against what?”
“Many things,” she said, recovering. “Many, many things.”
“There already are,” he said. “And speaking as a member and on behalf of the law-enforcement community, I have enough laws to make people mind already. My old man used to say that every time Congress enacted another law, they took another little piece of our freedom away.”
“Sounds like a right-wing reactionary to me.”
He laughed. “It’s early,” he said, reaching for his jacket. “You’re at the Bay View Inn.”
“Yes.”
“So am I. I’ve got a bottle in my room. Want a drink?”
She looked him over with care. He met her eyes without guile, something to mistrust in any member of any law-enforcement agency. “Sure,” she said.
After paying his tab Liam paused at the chess table. “Get the hell outta my light,” Clarence said. Eric Mollberg had gone to the bar for a refill. Moses looked up and growled, “What?”
“Do you know who did it?”
Moses moved his last pawn to the last row and exchanged it for his queen.
“Do you?”
“Check,” Moses said. Clarence swore loudly.
“Goddamn it, old man,” Liam said.
“Goddamn it, yourself,” Moses said. He reached for a bottle of Oly and flatfooted it. “Beer!” he bellowed, and behind him Liam heard the bar cooler open. “I don’t know,” he said finally, glaring up at Liam, who seemed to have planted himself like a rock.
“You’d tell me if you did.”
“It doesn’t work like that. You’ll find him.” He tried for one of his fallen-angel smiles, not quite succeeding. “Besides, you’re not a believer, boy. What you doing bothering the old shaman when you know you’re going to do whatever the hell you were going to do in the first place? Go on home. She’s waiting for you.”
“I am.” Liam didn’t move.
“Go on, then! Quit interfering with my chess game.”
Clarence gave a sudden cry that sounded just like the cackle of a raven, and moved his rook. “Checkmate.”
“Fuck,” Moses said.
Clarence sat back in his chair and looked up at Liam beneath shaggy brows. “You talking about Lydia?”
Liam shifted his gaze from one side of the table to the other, and nodded.
“You should have seen her when we was all young,” Clarence said. “That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.”
Moses uttered a sharp bark of laughter. “Including you.”
“Including you,” Clarence retorted. His beady little black eyes sparkled and he all but smacked his lips. “Those were the days. Get hold of a truck and drive your girl and your friends and their girls to Icky and have an all-day party on the beach at One Lake. You remember that party out the beach that one summer?”
Moses grinned.
“Yeah,” Clarence said. “I see you do. Bet Leslie and Walter and Silent Cal and Stan do, too.”
“Stan’s dead.”
Clarence frowned. “Stan’s dead?”
“Going on five years.”
Clarence was outraged. “Goddamn! How’s a man supposed to get drunk with his friends if they keep dying on him!”
“What about Lydia at the beach?” Liam said.
Moses and Clarence got matching faraway looks on their faces. “We went up to the fish camp used to be at Icky.”
“Wasn’t Icky,” Moses said. “The fish camp was out the end of River Road.”
“It was up Icky way, this fish camp,” Clarence said, glaring. “A bunch of the guys and the girls in the school. We took some beer, and somebody had some records and had figured out a way to run a record player off his pickup battery. We stayed up there two days and two nights, dancing and singing and laughing and pulling fish out of the river.” Clarence looked at Moses. “Remember the eagles?”
Moses nodded. “Couple eagles sitting in this cottonwood snag, old Silent Cal got too close and one of those eagles hoisted up its tail feathers and shot a stream of yellow shit straight into old Silent Cal’s face.”
Both old men shook with remembered glee, until Liam was afraid Clarence at least might go off into an apoplexy.
“I think he thought he was going to get lucky that night,” Clarence said, mopping his eyes. “But his girl wouldn’t have anything to do with him after that.” He winked at Liam. “Not to say she didn’t get lucky herself.”
Moses leaned forward and leveled a forefinger. “Clarence, you are a dirty old man.”
“I wasn’t then.”
Again both men fell into choking fits.
“When was that?” Liam said.
“Oh, hell,” Clarence said, knuckling his eyes. “Long time. Long time ago. Before the war.”
“Not long before,” Moses said instantly.
“Long time before,” Clarence said, glaring.
“We weren’t that old long time before the war, old man.”
“Set up the pieces; we’ll see how old I am!”
Liam left them to it.
December 15, 1941
Its cleer but god its cold they say its thirty-seven below the coldest in twenty-five years. Our mechanic Billy hes from Duluth in Minnesota hes a good guy he lost a filling the other day just by breathing in. He can only do a twenty-minute shift and even then he has to work in mittens. It took him two hours to replace a plug yesterday.
Haven’t written for a while because we spent a week tdy flying out of Anchorage One day we went to Adak to pick up eighteen patients. 1250 miles and usually eight to ten hours flying time. There was a front hanging off Umnak and it was rough as hell. The nurse was a pistol she piled blankets all over the patients to keep them from bouncing around and give her parka to another. Roepke brought us down to 50 feet. Everybody puked. He brought us back up to thirteen thousand and the cabin temperature dropped to twenty below but at least it smoothed out. He put her down at Naknek in a forty mile an hour crosswind he had to really crab her in. Man that was no fun. While we were on the ground another Gooney crashed and burned on landing. The crew got out okay. We overnighted. The whole flight took two days two hours and ten minutes.
Came back to find a letter from Helen. She lost the baby. Says shes sick and needs money to pay the hospital.
Went to Petes for dinner when we got back. Hes a good guy knows not to talk to much. Wanted to know about Krasnoyarsk and what it looked like and how many people lived there. Told him it looked like Nome.
Diana Prince caught a call just as she was headed out the door at the end of the day. Someone had made a charge of child abuse against Bernadette Kusegta, who ran a small day-care center out of her home. The complainant, one Gloria Crow, accused Bernadette of interfering with her three-year-old daughter, Tammie. Kusegta, plump and attractive, with her black hair permed into a mass of large curls, looked white beneath her brown skin. She sat, unmoving, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the large room decorated in primary colors. It was heaped with toys and books, and a small inflatable swimming pool filled with about four inches of water sat on the floor, one lone rubber duck floating in the middle of it.
“Well, go on, arrest her!” Crow said. “What are you waiting for?” She was slender and sharp-featured and vibrating with rage.
“When did you see the marks, ma’am?” Prince said.
“Tonight! When my baby came home! She was crying and holding her bottom!”
“Did she say that Ms. Kusegta had hurt her?”
“No, but who else could have done it? Go on, arrest her! She hurt my baby!”
“You said, ‘When your baby came home,’ ma’am. From that, I’m guessing you didn’t go get her.”