Midnight come again by Dana Stabenow Page A

Jim," he muttered as the Ranger lifted off and headed high, fast and northeast for Tok.
    "Just bring her home." He don't talk right, don't Know when to sit down, get up. He make too much talk talk.

    --Gisakk Come, He Go We'll have to go in without her," Gamble said.
    "What do you mean we, white man?" Jim said. "I'm the one you're asking to go into a Bush village--"
    "Over five thousand population," the FBI man protested. "That isn't exactly a village."

    "--with no backup, not even the local cops--"
    "Some of the local cops may be in on it. We won't know which ones. We can't risk it, not right away, not until we know more."

    "--undercover--"
    "The uniform does have a way of alerting certain people to the presence of a police officer, now, doesn't it?" The FBI agent gave Jim a benign smile and folded his hands over his belly, a comfortably plump little shelf at odds with the thin torso, the stick legs and the spindly arms.
    The toupee was such a mismatch that at first Jim had thought Gamble was wearing a beret.
    Gamble wasn't much over forty-five, but he worked at projecting the benign air of an elder statesman. Jim decided that if Gamble patted him on the shoulder, he would bite Gamble's hand off at the wrist. In the meantime, he continued enumerating his objections in a pleasant voice.
    "--all because some informer who once helped you catch a Russian smuggling nesting dolls--big bust, that, by the way, really help the climb up the old promotional ladder--anyway, a Russian smuggling nesting dolls into the country tripped over his own feet in the Anchorage International Airport and says he saw some Russian bad guy getting on a plane for Bering?"
    "And we don't know how long he'll be there," Gamble said, pouncing. "He won't leave until the money dries up, that's for sure, and that means he stays until the last dog is up the river. That gives us what, five, six weeks?"

    "More like eight or ten, the run's later on the Yukon and the Kuskokwim.

    And you don't even know what this alleged bad guy is up to, by the way.

    If anything. For all you know, he might have gone straight."

    This was the lamest of Jim's arguments against and they both knew it.
    The Fibbie was tactful enough not to point it out, but then he wanted something and it behooved him to be diplomatic.
    They were sitting in Jim's office at the trooper post in Tok, a sleepy little town of twelve hundred hardy souls whose only reason for being was that it sat at the crossroads of the Glenn and Alaskacanada Highways. It was the last stop out of Alaska, sitting sixty-odd miles from the Canadian border as the crow flies, longer by road. Jim had been stationed there for the last ten years, and he knew his posting better than the back of his own hand; every little town, village and homestead, every mayor and village elder and all the girls most likely to. He was on a first-name basis with every bootlegger, every dope dealer, dope grower and dope peddler. He knew who leaned toward fishing behind the markers or up a closed creek, or toward commercial fishing a subsistence site and selling the catch to an Outside buyer on the side. He knew who took bear in season and out, and who flouted the wanton waste law by harvesting only the gall bladder for sale to Asian smugglers.
    The Park rangers were assured of backup when they called him in to arrest some guide who, after twenty years of holding a license, still couldn't manage to follow the game laws. Village elders knew he would fly in at the first call when trouble got too big in the villages for the village public safety officer to handle, and that he could and would shoulder the weight when the family and friends of the arrested gathered to boo and hiss, in a way their local police never could. The Pipeline operators knew he would be there when some welder got drunk and hijacked a Cat with intent to bulldoze an entire pump station, or took off in the pump station manager's Suburban on a trajectory for the Calgary Stampede. He