Harley was hungry, too, and after everything he’d been through, even the shit in the can tasted great. That must be how the Army got away with it. Drop a guy into some desert foxhole, and he’ll eat anything, and be grateful for it.
The rosary was lying over by the wall, and Harley couldn’t help but relive the disappointment he’d felt when they’d finally busted into the coffin. Eddie had been afraid to reach in, so it had fallen to Harley again to take the damn thing out. He’d tried not to look at the face of the corpse this time; the last thing he needed was to be haunted by yet another figment of his imagination, like that guy in the sealskin coat. He’d felt around on the upper body and the face and the neck, checking the fingers too for rings, but this was the only thing he could locate or pry loose. Even the string of beads hadn’t come easy; it was as if the corpse was fighting to hang on to it.
When they were done, Harley had shoved the shards of the coffin back into the grave, then covered up the hole with dirt and snow again. He hoped it would snow some more during the night to further conceal his tracks.
Russell belched and popped the top on another beer. Harley was starting to think that the three cases might not last long enough, after all.
Of course it was an open question how long Russell himself would last. The guy was like a ticking bomb ever since he’d come back from the penitentiary, and Harley just wanted to make sure that he was well out of range of the explosion when it happened.
Chapter 27
Standing with her back to the door, Nika fished out her flashlight and played the beam around the interior of the abandoned church. The place was so dark that the light could only penetrate a few small feet of the space at a time. Making things worse, everything was at a slight angle, so that she felt as if she were on a boat listing to one side at sea.
Testing the floor carefully, she advanced a few feet toward some wooden pews. Between them, there was a narrow stretch where the boards weren’t too badly warped and the pews might afford some protection from drafts. For a second, she reconsidered going back to the mess tent, but the thought of giving up on her mission, not to mention listening to Kozak snore all night (and there was no way he wasn’t a snorer) stiffened her resolve. She took off her boots and wrapped her fur coat around them to make a pillow, then unrolled her sleeping bag and slithered down into it.
Even for someone long accustomed to acting as the mayor, tribal elder, Zamboni driver, and general factotum for a whole town, it had been a particularly hard day, and although she couldn’t have predicted that she’d be sleeping in the ruins of an old Orthodox church that night, it wasn’t the first time she’d wound up bunking down under strange conditions. As an anthropologist specializing in the native peoples of the Arctic climes, she had slept in igloos she’d carved herself, in shelters made from walrus gut and caribou hides, in long-abandoned iron mines that had once been blasted from the frozen soil. This was hardly the worst spot she’d ever been in.
But it might have been the eeriest. In fact, she still had that uneasy sensation she’d had ever since setting foot on the island. At first, she’d attributed it to the awkwardness of the situation between Dr. Slater and herself; he’d resisted her coming along, but now that she was there, he seemed to feel that he had some special duty to watch over her. The last thing she’d wanted was to add to his burden—the expedition alone was plenty of responsibility for one man—but she also had to admit that a part of her rather liked it. She was so used to taking care of things herself, whether it was a fishing dispute down at the dock or a municipal shortfall, that she’d forgotten what it was like to have someone else looking out for her. She’d been a lone wolf so long, it was nice to come across another of the breed.