The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young Page B

still at least partly murder business. I was giving the Inuvik CBC number to the operator, praying that Maxine would answer on the first ring, which she did. “I’m off to see the wizard,” I said. “If you hear anything meaningful from your million sources, will you call me in Sanirarsipaaq? Either the hotel or the detachment.”
    She laughed. “Million sources, sure,” she said.
    I trotted out to catch up to the pilot. “Sorry about that,” I called, tucking my head down against the driving snow and taking two steps to his one. “I saw the sheriff, court clerk, court reporter, crown attorney, defense lawyer go out, some others with them, but I must have missed the judge. Didn’t know I was the last.”
    Letting me go up the Citation’s steps first as if otherwise I might disappear on him, he growled, “That’s what they all say.”

 
Chapter Four
    As soon as we had reached cruising altitude and the Supreme Court people had settled into their various ways of passing the time, Mr. Justice Charles Ferguson Litterick, fifty-five, known in the trade (to crooks, lawyers, court officials, and police) simply as Charlie, ambled back toward me from his seat by the flight deck. He had been away from the western Arctic for a year, working in Ottawa as an adviser on land claims matters. I’d read in
News/North
about him coming back by choice, saying in an interview that this time he was here for keeps and Ottawa could find its way out of its own tangles. He had a shock of thick white hair, black eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a limp that, as he once explained in a bar association speech, had been caused by jumping out of a second-story window to get away from an angry mob of defense lawyers.
    This Citation seated eight comfortably, four to a side. The triangular spaces between each set of back-to-back bucket seats had doors and were used as lockers for inflight supplies. The charter companies were responsible for stocking serve-yourself in-flight food and drink, as ordered by the client.
    â€œWell, now,” said the judge to no one in particular, bending to open the locker door he’d been heading for, “I wonder what we have here?” He pulled out a six-pack of Heineken and put it on the floor. Reaching farther, he produced cans of Coke and 7-Up and packaged sandwiches, put all beside the six-pack, and eyed rather longingly a small box packed with a couple of dozen minis of vodka, Scotch, rum, rye, gin, plus a few liqueurs; but he settled for a beer and offered me one, which I accepted.
    â€œAnyone else for beer or pop?” he called along the cabin.
    There was some desultory reaction. Cans were passed. He sat on one of the seat arms near me as we opened the beers. “You seem to have a lively one going at Sanirarsipaaq.”
    I nodded, swallowing my first mouthful.
    â€œTough about your mother,” he said. “How is she?”
    â€œStill fairly frail. Not quite out of the woods yet.”
    â€œShe got any idea who she saw, the guy that ran her down?”
    That touched what had become my raw nerve. “No. And I sure as hell don’t want anybody to get the idea that part of her recovery might be to remember who it was.” I paused, then told him about my worry on that score, and the guard I’d had posted.
    His quick shrewd glance into my eyes told me that he understood. I knew that now, when that particular point came up in the legal fraternity—did she or didn’t she see anybody she knew?—Charlie would shoot it down.
    We sipped our beer. I’d been in his court from time to time and we’d had a few drinks together here and there across the north. This happened usually in privacy, in a hotel room or an aircraft. There are very few bars in the north outside of Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Iqaluit. Even if there were, we try to discourage the idea some people have that the police and courts are one and the same