The door opened behind him and he looked up to see James Perry silhouetted against the gray fog. The big Eskimo took a quick look around the room, and then stepped up beside Quinn. His face was turned down in a somber frown.
“Waqaa, cousin.” He gave the traditional Yup’ik greeting, voice drawn with pent-up worry. “You good?”
“Hey,” Quinn nodded. “I’m fine. Looks like they knocked April around pretty good, though.”
Kneeling, Quinn used a fillet knife to finish cutting away the duct tape on the girl’s wrists and ankles. He helped her into a sitting position with her back against the tubs.
Swaying when he tried to stand, he reached out to Ukka for support. The adrenaline dump from his coldwater swim and subsequent fight behind him now, he began to shiver uncontrollably.
April John’s two younger sisters poured in through the open door, scooping her up amid a shower of grateful tears and hugs for both her and Quinn. They whisked her away with a nod, getting her out of the place that had only moments before had been her prison.
“We got some bad news,” Ukka said, as Lovita Aguth-luk, his twenty-two-year-old niece, stepped through the door behind him. Dressed in a pink fleece sweater that was three sizes too big, she was a breath over five feet tall with long peroxide orange hair and a row of piercings festooning the top of each tiny ear. Her grandmother was from Kotzebue and she honored the older woman with a traditional Inupiat facial tattoo — three simple parallel lines, green and pencil thin, that ran from her lower lip to the bottom of her deeply tanned chin. On some women, such a marking might be considered a job stopper, but Lovita had the cultural background to make it attractive. Her fleece was grimy at the cuffs from fishing and gathering wood for the stove in her small shack in Saint Mary’s. Any money she got was spent on airplane fuel and there were few clear days when she could not be seen drilling holes in the sky between Mountain Village and Saint Mary’s in her ratty old Super Cub. She hauled whatever anyone would pay her to haul to support her flying habit and build time behind the stick.
“What is it?” Quinn asked, steadying himself on the cleaning counter. He wasn’t sure he could handle much more at the moment.
Ukka looked at his niece. “Tell him what you saw.”
“A plane full of these guys landed in Saint Mary’s about half an hour ago,” she said in a husky voice that sounded like she’d smoked two packs a day for twice her lifetime — which wasn’t far from the truth. She was trying to quit and now had a wad of punk ash — leaf tobacco and a type of burned tree fungus — snuff beneath her lower lip. “They were going from house to house looking for you when I left, but I’m pretty sure they’re getting ready to come this way.”
She handed Quinn a tall plastic tumbler full of hot liquid, placing it carefully between his trembling hands to make sure he didn’t spill it.
“How many?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “As soon as I saw them, I jumped in the Cub and headed this way to warn you.”
Quinn nodded in thanks. He started to put the mug to his lips but raised a wary eye. He knew Lovita had a stomach of iron. She’d talked all spring about her favorite dish, called “stinkhead” — a concoction of fermented salmon heads that had been left in a grassy pit for a period of days. An ardent traditionalist, it was impossible to know what sort of ancient hunk of mystery meat she might throw into a soup or stew.
“It’s coffee,” she grunted. “We need to hurry.”
Quinn took a tentative sip, grimacing at the syrupy sweetness.
Lovita gave a half smile. She wasn’t much of a smiler, but when she did, it brightened the entire room. “I put lots of sugar in it to help your body warm itself.” She handed Quinn a roll of dry clothes. “We gotta go now.”
Nodding, Quinn handed the coffee to Ukka. Lovita turned her back while he slipped out of his sopping wet pants. She’d brought him a black wool sweater that zipped up the front and a fresh set of khakis.
“I didn’t want to go rootin’ around in your stuff for your tighty whities,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go commando.”
Quinn shot a glance at Ukka, who shrugged.
“I don’t know where they learn that stuff all the way out here,” the Eskimo said.
“I got satellite,” Lovita said, her voice even more gravelly than before. “Anyway, hurry up. I’ll step outside while you change.”
“I think she has a little crush on you,” Ukka said.
Quinn steered the subject in a different direction. “If they’re leaving Saint Mary’s now,” he said, pulling the sweater over his head, “they’ll be here in—”
“Ten minutes,” Ukka cut him off. “We know. That’s why we need to haul ass.”
Once Quinn was decent, Ukka looked over his shoulder and flicked his hand to summon his daughter Chantelle, who stepped through the door carrying Quinn’s Lowa boots and a rolled pair of wool socks.
“Lovita said she couldn’t find his underwear,” she said. “I could have brought his underwear if I woulda known.”
“Will you girls forget about his underwear,” Ukka bellowed. He looked at his watch. “It’ll take us five minutes to get to the airport. That’s cutting it pretty close.”
Lovita poked her head in behind Ukka.
“I’m going,” she said. “It’ll take me a minute or two to get the plane ready.”
Quinn dropped the boots on the floor and sat on an overturned fish tub to pull on the socks. He looked at the young pilot with a wary eye.
“The weather isn’t too low to fly?”
“We got no choice.” She shrugged, her neck disappearing down the oversize fleece like a turtle’s.
“She’s right,” Ukka said. “We’ll get rid of the bodies, then handle these new guys when they land. But who knows how many more are right behind them? It’s been a great visit, but you gotta get outta here before someone gets hurt.”
Quinn laced up his last boot and walked outside behind the others. Cold drizzle hit him in the face. Heavy curtains of fog obscured all but the base of the Azochorak Mountain to the west. The white crosses in the cemetery that had been visible when he’d entered the river were now gone.
Quinn took a lungful of air and let it out, able to see his breath. “You really plan to fly in this muck?”
Lovita nodded. “I can sneak out just off the deck and try to stay under the clouds.”
“Try?”
Lovita ignored him. “Weather’s better over past the Kilbucks.” Her voice was matter-of-fact as if she flew in this kind of soupy fog every day. “It’s not good, mind you — but it’s a damn sight better than this.”
Chapter 15
Kim Quinn saw the man with the flap of blond hair again as they exited the mall. He was standing next to the Metro entrance between the taxi road and the main thoroughfare of Hayes Street. Worried over why someone might be following her, she’d talked Mattie out of dinner at Johnny Rockets and decided to go straight back to their hotel room. Jericho’s parents were there — Pete Quinn would know what to do.
Kim tried to tell herself a life with Jericho had made her paranoid. But there was definitely something wrong. This guy had ignored her when she’d almost run into him. He hadn’t given her a second look — which was virtually unthinkable. Kim had always been proud of her legs. The one that she had left was well worth gawking over — and the metal one drew even more stares, even from polite people who were usually more startled than anything. The fact that this man hadn’t paid her any attention set off an alarm in her head.
Over the span of their marriage, Jericho had droned on and on about how she should trust her instincts. Go with her gut, he said. Her gut told her the man with the flap of blond hair was dangerous.