"Is there a female in the Park that doesn't go weak at the knees at the sight of that guy?" Jack said from behind her.

"Not a one," Kate said cheerfully, and walked down the strip.

Jack, who had been expecting her answer to be, "One. Me," followed, disconcerted. What he was feeling was written plainly on his face, and she took care to keep her head turned away from him so he couldn't read her expression, which would call for retaliation big-time Jack style.

"Where's the Cessna?" she asked Jim as they walked up

to the plane. He shrugged. "I wasn't familiar with this strip, and there wasn't a beach around here long or flat enough to take her. And you know how the state frowns on employees dinging its property. I met George dropping off fish at the airport, so"

Alaska pilots never wrecked planes, Kate remembered. They dented them, they dinged them, she'd even heard one pilot say he had pranged one, but they never, ever wrecked them. It was the difference between pilot error and calculated risk, another had told her. And of course no one ever admitted to pilot error, either.

"Besides," he added, "it's after legal twilight."

Hadn't stopped George, but then the pilot could fly in and out of most Bush strips blindfolded. "How'd you know where we were?" She looked at George.

George Perry was a tall thin man with a long thin face in perpetual need of a shave, wearing his habitual oil-stained overalls. "You weren't on the Freya. We flew over and asked Mary. Old Sam was there, and he pointed up the creek, so we figured you were at fish camp."

"And there you were, and in all your splendor, too," Chopper Jim observed. He might have ideas about Kate himself, but he was never needy enough to be jealous of another man's good fortune.

Or at least that was the attitude he was trying to project. Jack read something else in the gaze regarding him steadily from beneath the brim of the trooper hat, something perhaps only another man interested in Kate Shugak would see. "Up yours, Chopin," he suggested amiably.

Jim eyed Jack's six feet four with a speculative glance that took in the other man's ruffled hair and misbuttoned shirt and traveled on to the T-shirt that bore signs of being hastily stuffed back into the waistband of Kate's jeans. He reminded himself he was in uniform, and sent Jack a bland smile.

"What have you got, Jim?" Kate said, impatient with pissing contests of any kind, whether she was first prize or not.