A deeper sleep by Dana Stabenow

an added bonus was that Auntie Balasha gave him a little less hell than he was expecting when she heard of the incident.
     
    Martin vanished into the woodwork, probably fearing what would happen when Kate heard. Howie remained distressingly visible. Howie Katelnikof, Louis Deem's boon companion, Willard Shugak's in loco parentis, and Jim Chopin's ever-present thorn in his side.
     
    Louis Deem was bad because he was good at it and because he enjoyed it. Willard was bad because he was FAS and incapable of making even one good decision unless it was by accident. Howie was bad because he was lazy, because it paid better than straight work, and because somebody had once told him that girls went for bad boys. He was similar enough to Louis that the girls were initially interested, but that interest always wore off fast. One of life's losers, that was Howie Katelnikof, and the sad thing about Howie was that he knew it. It was one of the reasons he'd hooked up with Louis Deem, his cousin, his idol, his mentor, and his meal ticket, from whom he'd absorbed just enough gray matter wherewithal to make beer money screwing over everyone who didn't get out of the way first. The bootlegging operation was a classic example of Howie's entrepreneurial skills. He had just enough brains to acquire product and hire staff, but then he parked the operation on a road providing direct access to a trooper post, and the staff he hired had shoe sizes bigger than their IQs. Jim suspected that Louis Deem's delusions of invulnerability were starting to rub off on his henchman.
     
    Not that Deem was looking all that deluded lately.
     
    In February, two snow machiners were stranded on one of the Quilaks' minor peaks in the middle of a raging storm. They had no survival gear and no radio and it was only a miracle that another snow machiner in the area had seen them and reported their location to Dan. Dan called Jim, and together they called out the Llama high-altitude rescue helicopter, which swooped in to pluck up the morons during a momentary lull.
     
    Their chief concern, they explained earnestly to Jim, was the recovery of their snow machines. "Jesus Christ," Dan said when Jim reported this, "they were highmarking in a place we told them not to go, right when a ballbuster of a storm was coming in off Prince William Sound, which we also told them. You'd think they'd be happy just to be alive."
     
    When the storm blew itself out, Jim had to fly to Chistona on one of a wearying number of domestic assault cases that winter, all of them involving alcohol, and he did a flyby of the area in question. "Not much point in it," Dan said when Jim told him what he was going to do, and Dan was right. Even in the aftermath of the storm, the vultures had managed to strip both machines of anything of value. The tracks were gone, the cowling with the instrument panels gone, the engines, the seats, the shocks, the skis, the treads, all gone. One of them looked like someone had tried to tow it behind another snow machine. It was lying in a narrow canyon in a heap of broken metal. The other sat where it had been abandoned, minus even its gas tank.
     
    "What's left isn't worth fifty bucks," Jim told Dan when he got back to the Park. Dan relayed the news to the owners, who weren't happy, but as they were home in Anchorage by that time Dan didn't really care, and truth to tell neither did Jim. Dan was right. The snow machiners were lucky to be alive. Still, Jim harbored no doubt that they'd both be back in the Park the following winter pursuing their death-defying hobby of extreme snow machining. With any luck, they'd get themselves killed before they had a chance to procreate. The gene pool needed all the help it could get.
     
    As for where the parts had wound up, Jim had a mild hunch that a search of the Deem homestead would provide a few leads. If only a hunch was sufficient cause for Judge Singh to issue him a search warrant.
     
    In March, Kate—in the employ of the