Read Shaman Pass for Free Online Page B

were, she told him with a huge smile, so they drove to the Arctic Dragon in the trooper Suburban.
    After they ordered—Szechuan beef for him, teriyaki salmon for her—he sketched the Victor Solomon murder for her. That was one of the advantages of having a dispatcher for a girlfriend. You could discuss cases with her. Plus, Lucy was a lifelong resident of Chukchi. She normally knew more about a breaking case than most of the cops in town, including himself.
    “Do you know either of them?” he asked when he was finished. He dipped a spoonful of the Arctic Dragon’s miso soup and waited for her reaction.
    She frowned for a moment, then squinted a no. “Not really. Victor lived alone and didn’t have many friends that I ever heard of, except maybe a few at church. I think maybe he was too mean to have friends. And Calvin only moved down here from Ebrulik a couple years ago. I don’t think I ever met him.”
    She giggled, covering her mouth in that way she had, her loveliness momentarily distracting him from what she was saying. “But I did dispatch on him a couple times. Like when he put the seal oil in the tour buses. Aqaa! ”
    Active refocused and grinned. That was another word in his small but growing vocabulary of Inupiaq. It meant “Stinky!”
    “So Victor went to church?” he asked.
    She nodded. “All the time, pretty much. He was Catholic, a parish deacon, I think.”
    Active frowned. “Hmph.”
    “What?”
    “I’m surprised to hear he was so churchy.”
    “Why?”
    “He sounds a little un-Christian. Had no friends, always called Calvin anaq .”
    “Is that why Calvin killed him?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you think your grandmother knew him?”
    “Aana Pauline? I don’t know, she goes to the Friends Church and they don’t mix with the Catholics too much. But I could ask.”
    He lifted his eyebrows and they moved on to a discussion of that night’s dinner.
    She would be in class at the community college when he got home from work, but she would leave something in the oven for him. Pauline had traded some mittens she made for half a caribou and the roast was from that. It would still be hot when he got there, and he could eat that, but he had to promise to eat some salad with it. He bobbed along pleasantly on the flow of her chatter, then lifted his eyebrows again when she was done.
    As always, he felt slightly guilty about the marriage-like state they shared. He was getting what a man normally got out of marriage—sex, food, and laundry. But she was not getting what a woman normally got: commitment, children, and financial support.
    He gazed out the Dragon’s picture window, which overlooked Beach Street and Chukchi Bay. Under the bright, hazy sky and a dim red eye of sun, the west wind was still rolling in. It must have picked up a little—now it was sweeping before it a thin layer of snow that undulated over the sea ice like fog.
    It was not exactly the imbalance in the relationship that made him feel guilty, he thought as he watched the snow ripple toward them. It was his knowledge that she disliked this imbalance, but was too uncertain of his affection to challenge it.
    “What?” she was saying when he came around to the conversation again.
    “Nothing. I very much enjoy your company, is all.”
    “And I love you,” she said.
    He had no comeback to this, so he smiled and busied himself with his Szechuan beef. Lucy lowered her eyes and concentrated on the last bites of her salad, then started on the salmon.

CHAPTER SIX
    “ IT’S JIM SILVER.”
    Active struggled to swim up from his recurring bullet dream and take the phone he sensed had trilled a few seconds earlier. But he drifted down into it again, jerking the trigger of the useless gun pointed at the shadowed figure coming at him with a butcher knife. The knife was hard to see this time, though. Perhaps it was something else, a—
    Lucy Generous poked him in the shoulder with the stubby antenna of the cordless. “Wake up.