Harley dropped the phone on the mattress and lay there for a while. Why did Charlie always get to call the shots? It couldn’t be because he was in a wheelchair; it had been like this his whole life. Angie had told Harley he should just leave Port Orlov and start over someplace where his brother couldn’t boss him around. And he was starting to think that, dumb as she was, she was right about that much. If this graveyard gig worked out, and the coffins did contain valuable stuff, then that just might be his ticket to the good life in the Lower 48.
He wouldn’t even give his brother his phone number.
Getting up, he stumbled around the trailer, looking for some clean clothes — or clothes that would pass for clean — and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a proper brush. The floor was ankle deep in detritus — beer cans, cereal boxes, martial-arts magazines — and all of it was bathed in a faint violet glow from the snake cage on the counter next to the microwave. Glancing in, he saw Fergie curled on the rock, and he said, “You hungry?” He couldn’t remember when he had last fed her, so he opened the freezer and took out a frozen mouse — it was curled up like a question mark in a plastic baggie — and nuked it for about a minute. Once he had left one in too long and the stench had made the trailer unlivable for a week. He’d had to move back home with Charlie and the witches, and that was so creepy he couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bathsheba, in particular, kept turning up outside his door on one dumb pretext or another.
The trailer was parked about a hundred yards off Front Street, between the lumberyard and a place called the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe. Harley had never asked anybody if he could park it there, and nobody had ever told him he couldn’t. That was one thing that you could say for Alaska — the place was still wide open.
But freezing. Even though the Yardarm was only a few minutes’ walk away, by the time he got there his ears were burning from the cold, and he had to stand in the doorway soaking up the heat. The usual crowd was around, Angie was carrying out a tray of burgers and fries, but some things were different: there were two guys at the bar he had never seen before — real straight-arrow types, still in their Coast Guard uniforms — and over in the far corner, Nika Tincook was at a table with two other men he’d never laid eyes on. Four strangers in one night, in a bar in Port Orlov — that was positively breaking news.
On her way back to the kitchen, Harley snagged Angie by the arm and said, “What’s up?”
“Harley, don’t do that here — the boss is watching.”
But he couldn’t fail to notice that her eyes had flitted in the direction of the two Coast Guard dudes, one of whom had glanced back.
“Who are they?”
“Pilots.”
“I can see that.”
“Were you just handling those dead mice again?” she said, wrinkling her nose. She brushed at the place on her arm where he’d been holding her.
“What are they doing here?”
“You got me. Why don’t you ask them?”
She pulled away and went back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Harley, hoping nobody had noticed how she shrugged him off all of a sudden, sauntered over toward the bar and eased himself onto a stool near the Coast Guardsmen. Engrossed in their own conversation, they didn’t acknowledge him in any way.
He ordered a beer and then, leaning toward them, said, “Never seen you guys around town.”
“Just passing through,” the one with the blond crew cut said, but without turning around.
“On that chopper that flew in?”
The red-haired one — who’d been checking out Angie — nodded warily.
“Oh yeah? If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the job?”
“Routine,” the redhead said, and when Harley looked over at the crew-cut guy, he, too, just stared down into his nearly empty mug and said, “Training mission.”
Then they kind of closed up like a clamshell, talking to each other in low tones, and Harley felt like a horse’s ass sitting there on the stool next to them. But he wasn’t about to get up and leave right away because that would make it look even worse. Instead, he sat there and finished his beer, trying to draw the bartender into conversation about the latest Seahawks game. But even Al was too busy to talk.
There was a boisterous laugh from the rear, back near the pool tables, and Harley saw it was from the husky guy in glasses, the one sitting between the tall, thin guy and Port Orlov’s illustrious mayor, Nika. Harley had never had a thing for native chicks — he liked leggy blondes, even if they were fake blondes like Angie — but for Nika, he had often told his pals Eddie and Russell, he would make an exception. She couldn’t have been more than five-three, five-four, with big, dark eyes and hair as black as a seal. But he loved the way she was built — trim and hard, and when the weather was good and she went around town in just a fleece jacket, with her long hair loose and whipping in the wind, he had to admit she got him going.
After putting away one more beer and hanging out by the jukebox like he cared what played next, he meandered back toward the pool tables. Selecting a cue from the rack, he pretended to be checking its tip and its straightness, and then, as if offhandedly, noticed Nika sitting a few feet away. “Hey, Your Honor,” he said, facetiously.
“Harley.”
“Want to run a few balls with me?”
“Another time.”
He was debating what his next move should be when the tall guy, with the remains of a burger and fries on the plate in front of him, saved him the trouble. “Is that Harley as in Vane?” he asked.
“The one and only. Accept no substitutes.”
“Frank Slater,” he said, rising enough to extend a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you. I heard about your ordeal.”
“Yeah, that’s what it was, all right.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he said, pushing out an extra chair. “I’m a doctor — it’s in our nature.” This was too good to be true, Harley thought, even if Nika did look like she was going to shit a brick. Harley turned the chair around so that he could lean his arms on the back as he sat down.
“This is Professor Kozak,” Slater said.
“Prof.” When they shook, the guy’s grip was like a vise — not like any professor’s that Harley’d ever heard of. Had to be a Russkie.
“I’m glad to see you look completely recovered,” the doctor observed. “No residual effects then?”
“Nah, I’m okay,” Harley said, though if the guy had asked about any mental effects, he could have told him a different story. Every time he closed his eyes, he had a nightmare about being chased by a pack of black wolves, only they all had human faces.
“You know, there’s something called PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — and it can hit you days, weeks, or even months, after something like what happened to you.”
Harley had seen enough TV shows to know all about it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard.”
“I just wanted you to keep it in mind,” he said, “and let you know that you should see someone if you start having some problems dealing with the fallout. It would be completely normal if you did.”
Harley snickered. “Yeah, okay. If I start freaking out, I’ll just go and see one of the shrinks we don’t have, at the hospital that doesn’t exist.”
The doc nodded, like he knew he’d just made an ass of himself, but at the same time Harley felt this weird urge to take him up on the offer and get some of this crap off his chest — to tell him about the dreams of the wolves and the sight of somebody with a yellow lantern. It wasn’t like he could confess any of it to Russell or Eddie — they’d just tell him to have another beer — and even Angie would think he was acting like a pussy.