Restless in the Grave by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online Page B

wealthy. While Finn Grant’s death had sent a lot of business his wife’s way, her air taxi was still barely self-supporting. Not to mention the kid they had in trade school.
    He yawned again, his jaw cracking this time. Over a third of the Newenham population was under eighteen, which didn’t make his job any easier, the hormonally challenged being terminally and all too often fatally prone to acts of stupidity.
    There was also the problem of village flight, people leaving the villages for the big city in hopes of finding a job so they could feed their kids. The population of Newenham had increased by almost five hundred over the past two years, to almost twenty-five hundred in the last census, which made Newenham city-sized in Alaskan Bush terms. Most of them were Yupik and a lot of them were living out of town on Native allotment lands, which put them outside the city limits, which meant they didn’t have to pay city taxes but also meant they couldn’t vote in city elections. This had incurred a lot of acting out on property both civic and private. That this was the outward adolescent manifestation of a lot of inward adult resentment, Liam was well aware.
    He did his best to stay the hell away from local politics, but there was no way he could avoid the fallout from all of the above in the form of domestic disputes, alcohol-related abuse, the blood feuds that went back generations, and the usual civic disharmony on a scale that was, so far, mostly misdemeanor, and mostly manageable. But if Hizzoner and His Eminence didn’t get their acts together, soon, Liam was going on strike.
    He topped a small rise and pulled over to the side of the road, and checked the rearview mirror. No traffic for the moment. He rolled down the window and took a deep, invigorating breath of cold, clean winter air.
    A raven croaked at him from a nearby treetop, and he looked up to meet a cocked head and a beady black eye.
    “Don’t even think about it,” Liam said.
    The raven looked at him out of his other eye and gave a mocking series of throaty croaks and clicks.
    “I mean it,” Liam said.
    The raven must have decided Liam meant it because he spread his wings and dropped off his branch to do a death-defying strafing run over the top of Liam’s vehicle, before vanishing over the trees on the opposite side of the road.
    Close encounters of the Corvus corax kind. To this was he reduced. Liam rubbed his hands hard over his face and looked at the view.
    Newenham sprawled up and down forty square miles of riverbank, about a thousand buildings, twenty-five hundred people, three fish processors (couldn’t really call them canneries anymore), a town hall, a courthouse with its very own public prosecutor and public defender, two cop shops (one of them vacant except for two dispatchers working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week and who knew how long that would last), a hospital, and what Liam thought had to be a contender for the title of world’s largest boat harbor. From this vantage point, it sprawled along the waterfront the way the town sprawled along the riverbank, a veritable floating forest of masts and booms and flying bridges surrounded by two immense gravel arms, breakwaters separated by an entrance that looked minuscule even when you were on a boat going through them. Liam heard tell that time was, most of those boats had been hauled out of the water every year before winter ice could crush their hulls into matchsticks. The harbor hadn’t frozen once since he’d been assigned here. Nobody bad-mouthed global warming around Newenham.
    At Newenham the incoming tide mixed with the outflowing snowmelt and the Nushugak River was wide enough to require a clear day and a squint to see from one side to the other. It was here that another, smaller river whose name was lost to the ages had provided rich provender for the Yupik who had worked seasonal fish camps there. In 1818 the Russians showed up, established a settlement, and called it