The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young

ago. Well. We still got one chance.” He picked up his phone and dialed. “Shit. Busy.” Immediately he began to dial again. “If this works it’ll be very sudden. Get your luggage into the hotel lobby. I’ll call you there in a few minutes.”
    The hotel was only a minute or two away. I was in the lobby checking out when the desk clerk said, “Matteesie, call for you,” and passed me the phone. It was my friend the dispatcher. He’d known when he spoke to me that a Cessna Citation had been chartered to fly the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories out to begin a trial in Cambridge Bay starting tomorrow morning. What he hadn’t known was whether there was a spare seat, or someone he could bump. Whatever he’d done, there was room for me. The Citation would drop the court in Cambridge but couldn’t go on with me to Sanirarsipaaq because it had to head back right away for another charter somewhere else. It was due to leave in less than an hour. I should get to the airport right away. He gave me all that very fast.
    â€œIt’ll be a tight squeeze at Cambridge,” he said, “but I’ll get on to First Air to hold their Sanirarsipaaq flight there for you.”
    â€œThanks, pal.”
    â€œNo problem.”
    Some busy guys are like that. Work their ass off and then shrug. All in a day’s work.
    I passed the phone back to the hotel clerk, thinking. Buster had asked me to call him back. In case it took time to track him down I’d be better calling from the airport. If I didn’t get him from there I could call from Cambridge Bay.
    On the taxi ride to the airport I pored over again in my mind what I knew of the case so far, coming to admit that the stakes were partly personal, even a lot personal. I’m normally objective about my work, but I had a totally unobjective hatred for whoever hurt my mother. The murders weren’t all that nice, either, and I would pay attention to that, but also I wanted to look into the eyes of whoever had knocked my mother on her back ninety bloody years of living after she’d been born in an igloo on the shore of Herschel Island. My intent did not involve beating hell out of someone. If it came to that, I might get the hell beaten out of me, which would be counterproductive. I wanted it to be cold turkey, looking into guilty eyes, letting whoever it was known that retribution would be swift.
    Not a hell of a lot to ask. Especially when I knew deep down that if my mother’s frail condition had got worse and she had not lived, I might be tempted to kill whoever was responsible. Tit-for-tat murders do not all happen in Northern Ireland, or in the hills of Kentucky. Blood feuds were part of many an Inuit settlement’s past.
    The Citation was on the tarmac. Its pilot, a fit-looking middle-aged man with silvery hair under his cap, was watching for me in the terminal. Somebody else (it turned out to have been Erika) had been bumped from the flight, Buster’s emissaries being very high in the priority line. “The court hasn’t arrived yet,” the pilot said crisply. “When they get here follow them out right away and we’ll go. Weather is chancy as hell around Cambridge right now.”
    I went to the pay phone and called Buster. Old Ironsides said she’d find him. A minute or two later Buster came on.
    â€œMatty! Look, I have something else to tell you. Might be important. Our press relations officer has had a lot of calls from media people in the east asking who they can call in Sanirarsipaaq for an update on those murders. He’s been giving out the detachment’s phone number because as we both know, some officers on the scene like to get their own names in the paper. This morning one of the reporters called Sanirarsipaaq with questions about shamanism. He specifically asked Bouvier about a rumor that the murders had a shamanistic connection. You know reporters. Two