Stone Cross is a long way from the road system. They have no armed police force, no ambulance, no hospital, no emergency services should anything go wrong. My deputies will simply be nearby in the event they are needed. They will not be underfoot.”
Markham leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk blotter. “What do you think of this, Deputy Cutter?”
“I agree with Chief Phillips.”
“You would.” Markham gave him a narrow look. “I’ve been on the bench long enough to read people.”
Cutter waited for the rest of it, but Markham seemed to decide against whatever it was he was going to say. Instead, he stood and offered his hand. “Very well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll see you in Stone Cross, then.”
“They’re probably flying out on the same plane you are,” Phillips said.
Markham gave a slow nod, and then sat back down at his desk to resume his reading, glasses perched on the end of his nose. “I see. Not underfoot then?”
* * *
“That wasn’t so bad,” Scott Keen said when they were back in the secure hall, walking toward the Marshals’ elevator.
“You think?” Phillips glanced at Cutter. “You read it the way I did?”
“Yep,” Cutter said. “He’s not putting up much of a fight because he knows I’m not happy about this whole arrangement. I’m thinking he’s going along with it to spite me.”
“If that’s what it takes, Big Iron,” the chief said.
Lola tugged on Cutter’s arm. “Seriously, boss. You gotta tell me about this incident.”
CHAPTER 8
Birdie Pingayak’s chin tattoo sewed her to her past.
In her great-grandmother’s time the indigo lines would have been accomplished with a bone needle and a length of sinew from a bowhead whale. Back then, the ink would have been made from urine mixed with the soot of a seal-oil lamp. Things were different for Birdie. Bone was too porous to sterilize and autoclaves turned sinew to mush. Seal-oil lamps had given way to electricity. And urine . . . well, there were probably better antiseptics out there. Modern methods called for a stainless-steel needle through the skin, pulling a length of sterile floss dipped in commercial tattoo ink.
Telltale dots in the lines beneath Birdie’s bottom lip said her marks were skin-stitched. Tavlugun in her maternal great-grandmother’s native Iñupiaq, Birdie’s chin tattoo was comprised of three pencil-thin lines that ran from the base of her lower lip to the tip of her chin. Parallel, they were spaced a quarter inch apart—the width of the nail on the tattooist’s little finger. The center line was slightly wider than the outer two. It was applied with a technique called hand-poking, which was just what the name implied. Birdie preferred the skin-stitch, but that was just her.
Birdie’s father, and his father before him, were Yup’ik from right there in Stone Cross, but her maternal great-grandmother was Iñupiat from Wainwright, clear up on the Chukchi Sea. The whites called them Eskimos. In some parts of the world, the term was offensive, but here in Alaska they used the term themselves. Birdie never met her great-grandmother, Bertha Sovok Flannigan, but she knew her namesake had been highly regarded for great wisdom and common sense. And Bertha had the same tattoo, and others as well. The stories said she had ornate designs tattooed on the inside of her thighs, so her babies would have something beautiful to look at when they were born. She was a fine woman to emulate, Birdie’s mother had said.
There weren’t many tattoos today, not traditional ones anyway, and not given in the traditional way. But they were common in the old times, before the 1890s when missionaries came to Alaska. The Moravians who arrived in Bethel translated the Bible into Yup’ik, but virtually all the other religions forbade the speaking of Native languages altogether. They banned traditional dancing and drumming—and, instead of the old stories, they preached the Bible, especially Leviticus 19:28. By 1910 almost every indigenous person from Point Barrow to the tip of the Aleutians was Christianized. The old ways shriveled with each successive generation until they were good and dead.
Great-grandmothers had tattoos, grandmothers had rosaries.
Birdie Pingayak saw things differently. In her mind, preaching Leviticus 19:28 was cherry-picking. The same chapter that condemned tattoos talked about animal sacrifice and how a man should cut his beard. The elders who hired her as a teacher didn’t mind the tattoo, or, more likely, they’d grown numb to the sight of it by the time she finished college and applied for the job.
At thirty-one, she was