“Oliver,” a voice said, and Kate looked up, to behold a man with more and bigger teeth than JFK, all of them switched on. Looking into that smile was like staring through a dark night into headlights turned on bright.

“How the hell are you?” Smiley Face said, beaming down at both of them, and without waiting for a reply, he added “Who’s your friend?”

Oliver’s face took on an even more dour cast. “Kate Shugak, Bruce Abbott.”

“Ah,” Bruce Abbott said, nodding wisely. “Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter. I heard your speech at AFN a couple of years back. Rousing, I thought.”

“You didn’t think I went over the top on the fish farming,” Kate said, sitting up and looking anxious.

He extended a hand and she put hers into it, which allowed him to pat it reassuringly. “Certainly not. We must protect our wild stock at all cost if we are to maintain the reputation for quality Alaska salmon enjoys. Not to mention a healthful subsistence lifestyle for the Native peoples.” He affected a shudder. “Nasty stuff anyway, farmed salmon. Dry, they have to dye it pink, diseased, tasteless. Your points were well taken.”

Interesting, Kate thought, especially since her impromptu speech had begun with a story about a moose kill and she hadn’t said a word about farmed fish. She beamed a smile at him that rivaled the brilliance of his own. Oliver made a sound in the back of his throat and stood up. “Take my seat, Bruce. I need a drink.”

He walked away before Bruce could answer. “May I?” Bruce said.

“Certainly,” Kate said, patting her hair and maybe fluttering her eyelashes a little. What the hell, give ol‘ Bruce a thrill while she figured out what the hell the governor’s chief of staff had to say to little old Kate Shugak from the Park. “We’ve met before, you know,” she said in breathless, confiding accents. She leaned forward and looked at him with wide, admiring eyes, or what she was hoping might be a close approximation thereof.

He looked astounded. “No,” he said in a tone of nattering disbelief. He gave her the once-over and flashed his teeth again. “I’m sure I would remember if we had.”

He’d been in some kind of supervisory position with the Department of Corrections at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility, back in the days when Kate used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney. She had never liked the glad-handing, brownnosing little prick from the first time she’d watched him oil his way out of responsibility for the prisoner suicide that had happened on his watch. It had never been made officially known, but the employee grapevine said that he’d had his feet up on his desk, reading the newspaper instead of watching the monitors in the mods, one of which was trained on the suicide’s cell. The dead guy had been put on a suicide watch, too, so it wasn’t like Bruce Abbott wouldn’t have known the guy was at risk.

Kate decided that now was not the time to remind Bruce Abbott of past misdeeds. She smiled instead.

Under the influence of those admiring eyes, Bruce puffed out his chest and started dropping names. Every sentence began ‘The governor said to me“ and every other sentence began ”And then I said to the governor“ and all of their conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to the political high and mighty, both state and federal. Any local contacts, it went without saying, were dismissed as being too paltry even to mention.

Kate threw in a couple of bright-eyed “Reallys!” and one “Fascinating!” and stifled a yawn, but his acute political instincts told Bruce he was losing his audience. He switched on his smile again. “You’re being spoken of in high places, Kate. I may call you Kate?”

Something told her that what Bruce Abbott said next would turn out to be why she had been invited to this party. “Really,” she said. “I can’t imagine what anyone in the governor’s office might have to say about little old me.”

His eyes narrowed fractionally, and for a moment she thought she might have overdone it. But his smile switched on again, brighter than ever, accompanied this time by a fruity chuckle. “Oh, I didn’t mean to mislead you, Kate. Not necessarily the governor’s office, but certainly at high levels.”

“Really,” she said for what felt like the seventeenth time. The secret to a successful interrogation was to make the suspect do all of the talking. She would not ask what “they” had been saying about her. Besides, Bruce was dying to tell her, and why should she thwart him, poor man?

Realizing she was about to doze off with her eyes wide open, she pulled herself together.

“Yes, you have been mentioned as quite the little up-and-comer,” Bruce said.

“Have I?” Kate said. “Really, I can’t imagine why. As you know, Bruce, I’m not in politics myself.”

“Not everyone can be,” he said earnestly, “some just don’t have the gift for it. But we need you out here, too.” A gesture encompassed the greater part of the Great Unwashed, of which Kate presumed he meant she was a voting member. Not that she’d voted for his boss, but she didn’t find it necessary to say so at this very moment. She batted her eyelids again. Her eyes were drying out from trying to keep them open.

Bruce smiled and patted her hand again. “Yes, being Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter, well, that certainly puts you first on any list.”

“I’m on a list?” Kate said, suddenly wide awake.

He beamed his teeth at her. “Of course you are,” he said warmly, “and first on it, like I said.”

“For what?” Kate said, and kicked herself for asking.

He smoothed the lapel of his jacket. “As I’m sure you know, the Alaska state troopers are opening a new post in Niniltna. You live there, I believe?”

“I do,” Kate said.

“And of course you used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney.”

“I did,” she said.

He smiled some more. “The Department of Public Safety is thinking of assigning a VPSO to Niniltna.”

She stiffened, enough so that he noticed. “Are they?” she said. The words were bitten off more than spoken.

“Indeed, yes,” he said, looking a bit bewildered, clearly not expecting hostility as a reaction to his good news.

He was easy to read. Jobs of any kind were scarce in the Alaskan Bush. Surely she knew what this meant? A monthly salary, in a village with only two others, the trooper and the postmaster. Medical insurance, workman’s comp, a retirement plan. He couldn’t understand her lack of enthusiasm, or for that matter the complete absence of overwhelming gratitude that he had come to expect from these little chats. The current governor of Alaska was a past master at the art of patronage, and Bruce Abbott the designated dispenser thereof. It was a job he clearly enjoyed, and now Kate was ruining it for him.

She took pity on him, in spite of the anger building beneath her breastbone. He was just a go-fer, after all, a yes-man, a beck-and-call boy who only implemented the decisions made by the people in authority. He would never wield that authority himself, but credit where credit was due, he would never want to. He was a round peg in a thoroughly round hole, he’d found his niche, and he knew it. “I appreciate the thought, Bruce, but I really wouldn’t be the right person for the job.”

Bruce didn’t just look disappointed, he looked aghast. It might have been the first time anyone had ever turned down the governor’s offer of a job. “But-but the salary. The-the benefits,” he said, actually stuttering. “Oh, if you’re worried about the time it would take you to go through the academy in Sitka to qualify, I’ve been instructed to tell you that in your case, because of your training-we’ve been told you did a year at Quantico right after taking your degree in social justice from UAF-and your experience on the job-your record is, hell, it’s flawless-well, after all that, the state would be willing to waive the academy requirement. We don’t have that many people of your caliber available, Kate.”