Northern Lights

cheek, smearing blood. Then she grinned and blew him a kiss.
     
     
    THEY SAID IT WAS FORTUNATE no lives had been lost, and injuries to civilians, while plentiful, were mostly minor—broken bones, concussions, cuts and bruises all caused by falls and panic.
    They said property damage wasn't extensive, broken windows, windshields, a street light. Jim Mackie, with considerable pride, told the NBC affiliate reporter he was going to leave the bullet holes in his pickup.
    They said, all in all, it was a hell of a climax to Lunacy, Alaska's May Day Parade.
    They said a lot of things.
    Media coverage turned out to be more extensive than the injuries. The violent and bizarre capture of Edward Woolcott, the alleged killer of Patrick Galloway, the Ice Man of No Name Mountain, was national fodder for weeks.
    Nate didn't watch the coverage, and settled for reading reports in The Lunatic.
    As May passed, so did the interest from Outside.
    "Long day," Meg said as she came out on the porch to sit beside him.
    "I like them long."
    She handed him a beer and watched the sky with him. It was nearly ten and brilliantly light.
    Her garden was planted. Her dahlias, as expected, were spectacular, and the delphiniums speared up, deeply blue, on five-foot stalks.
    They'd reach taller yet, she thought. They had the whole summer, all those long days washed with light.
    The day before, she'd buried her father, at last. The town had come out for it, to a man. So had the media, but it was the town that mattered to Meg.
    Charlene had been calm, she thought. For Charlene, anyway. She hadn't even played to the cameras but had stood—as dignified as Meg had ever seen her—with her hand gripped in The Professor's.
    Maybe they'd make it. Maybe they wouldn't. Life was full of maybes.
    But she knew one sure thing. Saturday next, she would stand out here, in the light of the summer night, with the lake and the mountains in front of her, and marry the man she loved.
    "Tell me," she said. "Tell me what you found out today when you went down to talk to Coben."
    He knew she'd ask. He knew they'd talk it through. Not just because of her father. But because what he himself did, who he was, mattered to her.
    "Ed switched lawyers. Got a hotshot from Outside. He's claiming your father was self-defense. That Galloway went crazy, and he feared for his life and panicked. He's a banker, and he kept banker's records. He's saying he won the twelve thousand that suddenly showed up in his account in March of that year, but they'll have witnesses that say different. So it won't fly. He says he had nothing to do with the rest of it. Absolutely nothing. That won't fly either."
    There was a cloud of mosquitoes near the edge of the woods. They buzzed like a chain saw and made him grateful for the bug dope he'd slathered on before coming outside.
    He turned his head to kiss her cheek. "Sure you want to hear this?"
    "Keep going."
    "His wife's turned inside out, so she's spilled enough to rip his alibis for the time of Max's death and Yukon's. Put that in with the yellow spray paint in his tool shed, and Harry stating Ed bought some fresh meat from him the day we had our little encounter with the bear. Weave it all together, you've got a tight little net."
    "Added to all that is the fact that he held a gun to a tourist's head, shot a state cop and our chief of police." She gave his biceps a quick kiss. All of which," she added, "was caught for the record by the NBC cameraman." She stretched, one, long, sinuous move. "Great TV. Our brave and handsome hero shooting the bastard's leg out from under him, while he himself was wounded—"
    "Flesh wound."
    "Standing that bastard down like Cooper in H igh Noon. I'm no Grace Kelly, but I get hot just thinking about it."
    "Gosh, ma'am." He slapped at a sparrow-sized mosquito that got through the dope. "It wasn't nothing."
    "And I looked pretty damn good myself, even when you sent me to the damn sidewalk."
    "You look even better now. The lawyers will try to work it . . . diminished capacity, temporary insanity, but . . ."
    "It won't fly," Meg finished.
    "Coben'll wrap him up—or the DA will. Got their teeth in it now."
    "If Coben had listened to you, you'd have wrapped him up without all that show."
    "Maybe."
    "You could've killed him."
    Nate took a small sip of beer and listened to an eagle cry. "You wanted him alive. I aim to please."
    "You do please."
    "You wouldn't have done it either."
    Meg stretched out her legs, looked down at