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Neither noticed when Mutt’s head whipped around. “Johnny’s a gift. Jack left me the best part of him. ” Old Sam grew more forbidding. ” “No! No,” Kate said. ” Mutt’s eyes, fixed on the edge of the woods, narrowed, and the hair on her back began to rise. Again, nobody noticed. “It’s the job then,” Old Sam said. “It’s not the damn job, Uncle,” Kate said. ” He squinted down at her, steady dark eyes on either side of a hawk nose, that and his height handed down through four generations from a Norwegian whaler on his mother’s side, brown skin already darker from a day in the spring sun inherited from a series of Native ancestors starting with Park rats—and if you went back far enough there was probably some Inupiat and Yupik in there somewhere, too.

Maggie’s mouth turned down at the corners, and she tossed the blue jacket with the Alaska State Trooper insignia on a chair. Hurled it, more like. Mutt, standing on Kate’s right, cocked an apprehensive ear. ” Translated, this meant Sergeant Jim Chopin had taken the first opportunity that came his way to dump leading the parade off on Maggie Montgomery, his clerk, dispatcher, and warden. ” “He went up with whoever it was that came whining into the office,” Maggie said. She wasn’t in a good mood.

I would have reported it,” he said again. ” She looked at him in amazement. It could not possibly be that Old Sam of all Park rats was going to try to justify his behavior, and to someone fifty years his junior at that. And then he broke out the uncle grin, one part Gabriel to nine parts Beelzebub. ” Kate’s search for words adequate to the purpose was futile and brief. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. There was never any getting one up on the old man. ” Old Sam raised a critical eyebrow. “You’re crankier than usual, girl.