Midnight come again by Dana Stabenow Page A

drill."
    "Yes, I-- What the hell are you so pissed off about?" she demanded, her voice rising, and for the first time there was a hint of the old Kate Shugak in it. "I don't owe you any explanations. I don't owe anybody any explanations, but I especially don't owe one to you."
    He stared intently over her head at a section of hangar wall with nothing of interest on it but a calendar featuring Miss. Socket Wrench in a provocative pose with a three sixteenth box end. "Where's the bunkhouse?"

    A brief silence. "This way."
    They detoured through the office to pick up his duffel bag. He tripped over the coffee table again; she avoided it with the habit of long practice and led him around the side of the hangar to yet another ramshackle building that was little more than a plywood and two-by-four shack with two bunks, a table and a stove. So far as utilities went, there was electricity, and that was all there was. "Is there a shower?"
    She jerked her head. "There's a community shower up at the terminal. Say you work for Baird and they won't charge you." She gestured at the shelves on the wall above the table. "There's fixings for sandwiches, the hot plate for coffee or soup. There's a water faucet the other side of the hangar. You know where the outhouse is?" He nodded. "Okay, that's everything, I guess. You--"
    "Fine. Thanks. Good night." He more or less shoved her outside and shut the door in her face.

    An hour later he'd showered, shaved and eaten a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. He brewed a cup of coffee and stretched out on the left top bunk to drink it. He finished the coffee, read ten pages of the latest John Grisham thriller without retaining a word, and turned off the light.

    Half an hour later he turned it back on. He was too physically exhausted to relax--he hadn't done this much manual labor since the physical training at the trooper academy--and it didn't help that the Here was taxiing up to the hangar, its low-throated, wallowing roar rattling the tin on the roof. His bunk was too short, too, and it was too light out.

    The sun wouldn't be up until five-thirty, but it never got very dark at this time of year, and there were no curtains on the bunkhouse's windows, although they were dirty enough to block out most of the light.
    It didn't help either that the woman he had last seen ten months before, bruised and bleeding and cradling the body of her dead lover in her arms, was working a hundred feet from where he lay at this very moment, evidently whole and sane and very much all right in spite of the fears of family and friends. Why this should irritate him more than he was already he didn't know, but it did and he embraced it with enthusiasm.

    Until he discovered to his fury that he had an erection. Son of a bitch.

    "Where were you when I needed you?" he demanded, looking at his lap.
    "Where were you when Carroll was in my office? Where were you on the plane in? Where were you at goddamn Alaska Geographic?"

    The hell with this. He bounced to the floor and yanked his clothes on and slammed outside with no very clear idea of where he was going. Kate was loading a pallet with the body bag strapped to it into the Here.

    Mutt was asleep with her nose under her tail on a rug in front of the office, and Jim took advantage of the noise of the Here's engines to slip by unnoticed.

    A rutted gravel road led around the lake that served as a seaplane base, unsignposted and, if the grass growing in the ruts and the occasional mudhole that had been reclaimed by the surrounding swamp were any indication, underused. It looked neglected and abandoned. It suited his mood exactly, and he set off, seeing how far his legs could stretch.

    After a hard day's labor, it felt good to move without bending, stooping, lifting heavy objects, or needing to dodge out of the way of Baird's unpredictably driven forklift.
    The sky was that pale mauve that characterized Arctic summer nights at the more southerly latitudes, where the sun