Page 111 of Enforcer
Just wonderful. “Hank’s murder is one of the cases I’m here to investigate.” The most important one, and her main reason for heading to the small town. Another chill clacked down her spine. Why had she left the gun in the pack?
Brock yanked the levers back, and the craft lifted unsteadily into the air. A gust of wind hit them, pushing them sideways. Dark clouds rolled in from the east, visible from their vantage point off the ground. “At the moment, an old death is the least of your worries.” He yanked the stick, and the plane continued to bump through the air, climbing higher.
“Hank died about a year ago. That’s not an old death.”
Brock grunted. Again. “A year is an eon when you live in the middle of nowhere.” A gust of wind shoved them to the side.
“Maybe, we, well, should we wait until the storm passes?” she whispered, even her lips trembling.
Another wind gust slashed them, and he tightened his hold on the stick. “The storm never passes, sweetheart. Not in Knife’s Edge.”
She started to ask more questions when a large facility to the east caught her attention. A massive antenna field, satellite dishes, and grids of transmitters spread out from a sprawling concrete building and covered at least fifty acres. “What in the world is that place?”
“S.I.S,” he answered, spelling out the letters and almost sounding casual. “We call it SIS, and it’s just a governmental research facility. They study the ionosphere.” She turned to him again, nodding to keep him talking. He sighed but appeased her. “They only let the mail and supply plane that comes twice a month in the winter land on their runway—when it can get in. Sometimes it can take months with our weather. I’m surprised you haven’t heard the conspiracy theories about that place that run the gamut between manipulating the weather to mind control experiments. It’s all bunk. The facility just conducts research. So they say.”
She shifted to look out the window. “Can we fly closer?”
“No. Restricted airspace, except for their own supply plane.” He made another adjustment. The wind battered the small craft.
“Restricted airspace in the Alaskan wilderness? I do love a good puzzle.” She had to figure out this one.
“That isn’t a puzzle, and it’s not what you’re here to do,” he said mildly.
Interesting. Was that a warning? She switched topics to throw him off-balance. “Who do you think murdered Hank Osprey? He was your guardian, right?”
“Yes, and nobody murdered him. Nobody wanted Hank dead.” Brock’s tone remained calm, but tension showed in his firmer grip on the stick.
Oh, he definitely knew more than he let on. “Don’t you want to know for sure? I will find out what happened.” Whether Brock and his town liked it or not, she excelled at digging for the truth—and this marked her last chance to keep her job. She couldn’t give up.
Brock gave one of those grunts she couldn’t decipher. “That’s your choice.” His face might as well have been carved from the jagged rocks around them. “Hold on. We have to drop fast. It’s going to be a rough landing.”
