The bay doors were thrown open by a medical officer in full hazmat ensemble, and Slater leapt out. He held up a hand to help Nika to disembark but she was already jumping out on her own.
She called out “Ray!” to a man wearing a police parka and a sheriff’s badge a few yards away, but her face mask made it impossible to be heard. Pulling it away for a second, she called out again, “Ray! Did you find them?”
Standing on the ice with legs spread wide apart to keep his balance, he called back, “Not yet.” As instructed, he was wearing his own mask and gloves, too. “I went out to the Vane house, but Charlie said they weren’t there.”
“We both know that Charlie Vane couldn’t tell the truth if he tried.”
“I hear ya, Mayor. But I haven’t got a warrant to search the place, and nobody’s seen Harley, or Eddie for that matter, for the past few days.” Gesturing at the oil truck deployed from the company that employed Russell, he said, “And Russell hasn’t shown up for his job, either.”
“He won’t be,” Nika said, soberly. “He’s dead.”
“What did you say?”
She pointed to the cargo bay, where two Coast Guardsmen, also suited up, were removing the body bag.
“He was found on the island. The wolves got him.”
The sheriff, even from half a dozen yards away, was plainly pole-axed.
“Keep him on ice, and keep the bag sealed,” Slater interjected, before turning back to Nika and saying, in a low voice, “Maybe we should take that drive now.”
“Sure,” she said, knowing full well what he meant. Taking care not to slip on the ice, and under the puzzled eye of the sheriff and his deputy, Nika led Slater over to the municipal garage at one end of the rink; the last time she’d been in here she’d been parking the Zamboni. Now she went right past it, along with the snowplows and the garbage truck, and stopped beside Port Orlov’s one and only all-terrain ambulance.
“Get in,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat, as he raced around to the passenger side. “Where to first?”
“Harley’s place.”
“Buckle up,” she replied, rolling down her window and putting the car into gear.
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.”
The ambulance bucked as it hit a series of potholes, and she gripped the wheel with her latex gloves more tightly. “The Vane family,” she summed up, “has an uncanny talent for destruction.”
Slater, staring off into the inky blackness, wondered just how deep that talent ran. Even if he found Harley, would he be able to reason with him? If he still had the vials from the freezer in the lab, not to mention the scroll and the icon, would Slater be able to explain to him the mortal danger in which he had placed himself as a result? Would he be able to convince him that no further charges would be leveled against him — that his very identity would be concealed — if he would just relinquish this lethal booty? Slater was well aware of the catastrophe this entire mission had become, but if he could simply contain the danger before it went any farther, it might provide a decent grace note to end his public career on. He could still hear his ex-wife’s voice in his head, all those times she had tried to talk him into a nice, quiet, suburban practice, treating allergies and scraped knees, but the idea was still anathema. He wanted his work to matter in the world, to feel that he was doing something valuable and needed and worthwhile.
For a long stretch now, there had been no signs of habitation at all, just a lonely road that had gradually wound its way back down toward the jagged coastline. Snow and sleet, blown all the way from Siberia and across the Bering Sea, slashed against the windows. It was hard to imagine the zeal that must have driven that tiny Russian sect, over a hundred years before, to make that same journey across this icy strait and settle on a forbidding bit of foreign land, a place they dared to rename after their patron saint, St. Peter.