As she pulled out of the garage, the sheriff scooted in front of the headlights, holding up his hands. “Hey, hang on, where you going with that?” he shouted, holding the mask away from his mouth. “Nobody’s supposed to be going anywhere tonight—those are orders.”
“The mayor is exempt,” Nika called out, swerving around him and heading past the corner of the community center. For a second, the deputy held up his shotgun, as if waiting for instructions to shoot, but the sheriff just stood there, hands on his ample hips, unsure whose authority won out in a situation like this.
Front Street was deserted, the few fishing-gear shops and the grocery closed up tight. Even the Yardarm was dark. The old totem pole, teetering to one side, loomed ahead. Slater looked at its grinning otters and snarling wolves with a new understanding. There was nothing like a trip to St. Peter’s Island to broaden your horizons.
With a deafening roar, the chopper, fully fueled again, soared over their heads, red lights blinking, as it headed east … carrying its precious, and endangered, cargo.
“Will she make it?” Nika asked.
And this time Slater didn’t know how to reply; he had thoroughly briefed the chief medical officer on board, and Dr. Levinson had prepared the team in Juneau. But there was no knowing. “I hope so,” he finally said.
In the meantime, all he could do was keep a close watch on Nika.
Turning the ambulance into the driveway between a gun shop and a lumberyard, she said, “Harley lives in that trailer out back.” A violet glow could be seen between the tangled slats of the window blind. “He’s probably feeding his snake.”
Climbing out of the ambulance, she bounded up the steps to the door, banged loudly with the flat of her hand, then leaned over toward the window and peered inside. Slater, standing with one foot in the car and the other out, pulled the mask away from his mouth and took this chance to gulp the fresh night air. The thermals and hazmat suit he was wearing were plenty warm for the car—too warm, in fact—but even after a minute or two outside, the Alaskan cold could start to penetrate them. When Nika turned around, she was shaking her head.
“Eddie’s place next?” he asked.
“Eddie’s mom’s a meth head. Nobody hangs out there, not even Eddie.”
“And you say that this Charlie Vane is a liar.”
“True enough,” she said, getting back behind the wheel, “but I never said he was a good one.”
Backing up onto the empty street, she took a right at the edge of the lumberyard and headed down a dark, bumpy track no longer lined with any stores or commercial establishments. This one was just a back road dotted with an occasional shack, slapped together out of weathered planks and tar paper, or a mobile home parked up the hillside. Old wooden meat racks leaned between dilapidated sheds and piles of firewood. On the way, Nika elaborated on Charlie and his church of the Holy Writ.
“And you say he’s actually got followers?”
Nika shrugged. “Online, I guess you can find all types. Charlie did even better, though. He managed to convince those two women you saw at the memorial service—Rebekah and Bathsheba—to come and run his household for him.”
She tapped the brakes as a large, black object lumbered across the road. As the moose languidly turned its head, the headlights made its antlers and eyes shine. For a creature of such size, the legs looked too spindly and the knobby knees downright fragile.
“He needed them,” Nika said, picking up speed again once the moose had moseyed down an embankment, “since his accident.”
“What exactly happened?”
Nika reiterated enough of the family history—sunken crab boats, a hundred petty-theft charges, the tragic but harebrained attempt to run the rapids at Heron River—to give him a renewed sense of who he might be dealing with. “But he still gets around pretty well—he’s got his wheelchair, and a four-wheel-drive van that’s been totally retrofitted with hand controls and an eight-cylinder engine. The only thing that surprises me is that he hasn’t cracked it up yet.”