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right stopped sucking his bottle long enough to insert, “She should have asked me, man. I’d have taught them the trade for free.” He went back to nursing and the narrator took over.
    “See, the thing is, if Oley can’t convince the DA he didn’t know the girls were in the closet, we won’t see him no more for prob’ly twenty years.”
    Stan gave me the elbow and extricated himself from the confab. “Hey, Alex, we’re late. We’d better hit the road.”
    “Right.” I stood and Satch materialized in front of us. I did the math, dropped a twenty on the bar. “Round for our buddies here. Sorry fellas, gotta split.”
    Stan strode toward the door. I was right behind him but Jody caught me in the doorway with a bear hug and stood on tiptoes for a kiss. “My motor’s in overdrive, big boy. I get off at three.”
    “Right, thanks.”
    Stan was crunching across the gravel toward his pickup, but Jody was glued to my arm. “You won’t forget?” She strained up for one more kiss, booze, tobacco, chalk-flavored lipstick, and tongue like an agitated snake.
    “Sure, I’ll tattoo three o’clock on my forehead.” I shook her off and started after Stan. I had ten feet to go and was already reaching toward the door when Stan started his engine. The door shot toward me, knocked me halfway back across the lot, and a belch of flame felt like it seared off my face.

Chapter Two
    I must have been out for a while. I found myself sitting on the gravel, leaning against the rough logs beside the step. The lot was full of noisy people milling around, cop cars and a fire truck rotated red-and-blue flashes across the scene. Stan’s pickup was a smoldering wreck. I couldn’t even look at it.
    My head was in black fog but struggling out, and the first cogent thought was, Angie . I suddenly had the feeling that I needed to get to her, fast. I wobbled to my feet. Everything was sore but apparently nothing was broken. The crowd had its back to me so I slunk behind them to my pickup, using the logs for support. My forehead felt wet. I swiped it with the back of my hand and it came away bloody, but sticky and congealed, not flowing.
    The engine started on the first revolution, and I turned left on the Steese. I burned the new paving, fishtailed onto Hot Springs Road with a shower of gravel, and blasted into the hills. I didn’t know why, but the feeling that I needed to get to Angie was a palpable presence, and it was shoving down on the gas pedal.
    Angie is spawn of the Kuskokwim, specifically the Demoski clan from Crooked Creek. She grew up in a one-room log cabin with the smell of the river always with her and counting the seasons by its changes. By the time she was ten years old, she was braced in the back of a riverboat, helping to pull in driftnets full of salmon. The river was in her blood, and probably a lot of her blood was in the river. She grew into a tall, slender figure with flowing black-silk tresses from her Athabaskan Indian ancestors, but a touch of Russian genes had softened her features into that classic beauty you see in magazine ads for tropical vacations. She’d been waitress and maid at the lodge in McGrath the summer Stan had filtered the black sand and rubies, but barely a thimble full of gold, out of Alexander Creek.
    Instead of camping on the creek as usual, Stan had headquartered at the lodge, borrowed a riverboat, and commuted to his digs. I figured at the time that Angie had a lot to do with that. When they met in Fairbanks that winter, maybe by design, they melded like gold to mercury. Stan forgot about prospecting and worked odd jobs around Fairbanks. Angie was obviously the best thing that ever happened to him.
    Their cabin site in the woods was probably picked because the Little Chena River came right to their backyard. The Little Chena isn’t much, compared to the Kuskokwim, but it is a river. It marks the seasons with freeze-up and break-up, and is home to grayling and seasonal salmon.
    The pickup