“I think I might have something here,” Bowen said, holding up a training schedule for a fight gym in Spanish Harlem. There was a phone number scribbled on the back as well as the cost of a cot and showers. He showed the flyer to Garcia who read it over before passing it to Thibodaux.
“You think it could be that easy?” she said. “Surely he would run further than Harlem.”
Nikka’s head snapped up when she heard the mention of Harlem. She’d not been able to see what they were looking at, and it had taken her by surprise.
“He’th not thtupid enough to go there.” She twisted sideways, trying to conceal the blotches on her chest that were a sure indicator that she was upset. “It ith next plathe anyone would look for him.”
Thibodaux rolled his good eye, grinning now that he once again had hope for catching Petyr the Wolf. “Yeah, and this is the first. And he sure enough showed his brilliance by not showing up here.”
Chapter 26
The Piper Cherokee jumped off the gravel runway and banked to the left, with Lovita bringing it around to the north as she climbed.
A shaken Adam Henderson had promised to take care of the wounded Russian until Quinn could make contact with a passing airplane or pick up a signal with the satellite phone and get more authorities out to the lodge. Corey Morgan stood on the porch and held himself up against a log pillar as he watched his would-be girlfriend fly away.
The wind had died down but the boiling storm loomed like a black wall to the north, throwing the vast tundra below into muted shadows. A drizzling rain, pushed ahead in advance of the larger storm, streamed along the airplane’s windows and peppered the dozens of tiny, unnamed lakes. A small herd of about forty or fifty caribou strung out in a long line were moving at a good trot along a gravel moraine that formed a natural highway on the boggy tundra.
“Enukin are real you know,” Lovita said, turning to face Quinn as she flew. With her big green headset and dyed orange hair, the little woman looked pretty impish herself. “They’re strong enough to lift a whole caribou over their head and run with it. My friend Jason’s a bush pilot and he’s seen it happen — caribou traveling along the tundra on their sides…”
“I’m not arguing with you,” Quinn said. Running through plans and possibilities of the pending confrontation with Volodin and what had to be a box of deadly nerve gas, little imps were the furthest things from his mind.
Lovita’s shoulders relaxed when Quinn didn’t call her crazy. “You guys should try some of my akutaq,” she said, changing the subject. She leaned forward and gave one of the gauges a little tap with the tip of her finger. “I picked the berries and caught the caribou myself.”
Quinn couldn’t help but smile in spite of the situation. He’d always liked the way Alaska’s Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimos referred to hunting as catching instead of killing. Caribou and seal were caught the same way you caught a fish. And he’d eaten enough traditional Native dishes to know there wasn’t much that went unused. From fish eyes to seal guts, most of any animal could be turned into what someone somewhere considered a delicacy.
Lovita licked her lips and looked sideways to wink at Quinn. He caught the glint of something in her eyes that he couldn’t quite make out. If she’d been any other person, he would have said it was worry, but Lovita wasn’t the type to fret over much. “Man that bou had some nice backfat,” she said. “Whiter than Crisco—”
Beaudine’s muffled voice interrupted her. She’d forgotten to put on the headset again. Instead of taking his off, Quinn pointed at the set hanging off a bungee above her armrest.
Lovita fell silent waiting for Beaudine to speak. Quinn pressed his nose to the window, studying the terrain below. They followed the twisting silver snake that was the Kobuk River. Row after row of oxbow lakes, left isolated when the river had changed its meandering course, bracketed the slow moving water in countless parentheses of green and gray. Beyond the river the tundra turned to forest, and the forest rose into green hills that nestled into the lap of the Kobuk Mountain Range a dozen miles to the north. Lone spruce trees shot upward spirelike, here and there, from thick stands of willow. They dwarfed their tiny tundra cousins and choked the riverbank in thick green and yellow.
“What do we do when we find them?” Beaudine asked once she’d situated her headset.
“We’ll find a place to land,” Quinn said, scanning the water for any sign of Volodin or a boat.
“Are there any?” Beaudine asked. “Places to land, I mean.”
“A few,” Lovita said. “Not right here on the river, though. We’ll have to go up and look around some when we spot them.” She gave the temperature gauge another tap and then looked at Quinn. “You want to try the radio again?”
“Whoa,” Beaudine said. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Depends,” Quinn said, twisting in his seat to look out Beaudine’s window. “If you think it’s a brown bear sow with a couple of two-year-old cubs, you’d be right.”
“She looks like she could take care of our Dr. Volodin problem,” Beaudine said under her breath.
Quinn shrugged. “We’re part of the food chain up here.”
He keyed the radio mike and tried to hail a passing plane, with negative results. No one else was foolish enough to be out with the approaching storm.
Lovita tapped the gauge harder this time — the way pilots did when they sense something is wrong but don’t want to believe it.
Quinn snapped the mike back in its clip on the console. “Okay,” he said. “You’re about to knock that gauge through the firewall. Want to tell me what’s up?”
“We’re runnin’ a little hot,” Lovita said, chewing on her bottom lip the way she did when she held something back.
“Hey,” Beaudine said, her voice buzzing as she pressed her face against the window. “I see them. I see the boat!”
“Keep an eye on them,” Quinn said, eyes still fixated on Lovita. “How hot?”
“Just touchin’ the redline,” Lovita said through clenched teeth. She shot a worried look at Quinn, the thin vertical lines of chin tattoos quivering slightly as she spoke. “But the needle’s still climbing.”
“What do you think it is?” “Quinn asked.
“Engine’s not getting’ enough oil,” Lovita said.
Quinn’s ears began to pop as she put steady backpressure to the yoke, adding just enough power to keep them climbing.
“I need to climb higher,” she said. “Look for a place to set us down if it doesn’t correct itself.”
“Wait. What?” Beaudine poked her head up from the back seat. “What has to correct itself? Why are you taking us higher if we need to land?”
A sudden thought crossed Quinn’s mind. “Could you have been unconscious long enough for someone to mess with the engine?”
Lovita began to chew on her lip again. She said nothing, nodding instead as she took the plane up through four thousand feet.
Beaudine pounded on the backseat. “Somebody better tell me what’s goin’ on!”
Quinn rummaged through the pocket in the door beside him, finding the chart for the area he believed they were flying over. He unfolded it while he spoke, knowing it would do no good to scold Lovita now. She needed all her attention to fly the airplane.
“Any ideas of where to put down?” he asked, running a finger over the paper chart.
Left hand on the yoke and right on the throttle levers, Lovita scooted forward in her seat. She peered over the console, then glanced back and forth out the side windows. She looked incredibly small in her oversized pink fleece jacket, like a child in charge of the airplane — and all of their lives. But as small as she was, she was handling this emergency like someone with twice her flying experience.