Midnight come again Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrug, as if trying to wriggle out from under something, and failing. "You know how it is when Kate walks into a room, Jim. Snap, crackle, pop, sometimes you've got to duck, the sparks are so big and so fast. She's alive, you know?"

    "And she's not, now?"
    The shoulders hunched, against the blow of Chick's own words. "No snap, no crackle, no pop, no sparks at all. She's pulled the plug, Jim." He rubbed his hands down his thighs, as if the friction might warm them, and shoved them into his jeans. "She's not even angry, you know? Kate's always pissed off about something. Not now." He paused, thinking over his words. "She doesn't care enough to be angry."

    They stood in silence for a moment. Jim moved first, pulling his hat back on and squaring it away. "Thanks, Chick." "Jim." He paused, door open, and looked over his shoulder. "Yeah?"
    Chick Nayokpuk, more popularly know by his world class dog-team driver sobriquet, the Billiken Bullet, was a rotund little man with a rotund little personality to match, but today his round smiling face had hardened into something approaching severity. "We gonna get '?"

    "We already got ', Chick. They aren't going anywhere."

    "Trial still on for September?"
    "September 23." "Good," Chick said. "First time I been sorry we don't have the death penalty."

    "You're not the first person to have said that."

    Chick nodded, face still set in severe lines. "Good to know." He met Jim's eyes. "Too bad you can't just turn ' loose in the Park." Jim smiled, this time a thinning of his lips with no humor to it.
    "Really too bad." He raised his hand in a semi salute. "Take care, Chick."

    "Find her, Jim," Chick replied. "Find her, okay?"
    Jim nodded and drove off, Chick staring after him in the rearview mirror until hidden by the curve of the road. Gone the voices, singing.

    --The Light on the Tent Wall A couple of birds were serenading each other in the trees when Jim came down the path, but he didn't know anything about birds and so could not identify them. There was a rustle of undergrowth here and there as some small mammal heard him and moved unhurriedly out of range. There were salmon still up the creeks and hunting season was two months off; there was no need to rush. Summertime in Alaska and the living was easy. The trail ended in a clearing a hundred feet across, and Jim paused on the edge of it, trying like hell to look at the scene through the eyes of a trooper.
    Instead, all he saw was history, the history of a woman whose life could stand as metaphor for the last thirty-five years of the history of the place in which she lived. She had been born Native and raised white, giving her a foot in both worlds. It had cursed her with perspective.
    Perspective was a quality essential in seeing things clearly for what they were, but not so good when it came time to take sides, to commit to family or, as in this case, tribal loyalty. As her grandmother would have been the first to tell her, and probably had on occasions too numerous to mention. Kate would never tell. Whatever problems Kate had had with Ekaterina would go with both of them to their graves.
    Jim Chopin was a state trooper, by virtue of his profession trained and dedicated to the gathering and evaluation of information. He knew a good deal more about Kate Shugak than most people, far more than she would have been comfortable with had she known.

    Her father had been an Aleut fisher, and a veteran of Castner's Cutthroats, a specially trained commando unit that had fought in the Aleutians during World War II. After the war there had been few villages left standing to go back to, and like many other Aleuts, including his mother, Ekaterina Shugak, he had moved north to the Park, although it wasn't a Park then, just a big chunk of land, owned by the federal government, that at that time wasn't being watched too closely. So people moved in, Aleuts, miners, trappers, hunters, fishers, even a few misguided folks who gave farming a try and almost