Bad Blood by Dana Stabenow

a little lighter in color, but he had the same deep-set eyes and the same firm jaw. There was a little acne left over from adolescence but on the whole a handsome boy with the promise of character in his steady gaze and firm chin.
    “Dad said you’re to have the use of the skiff for as long as you need it,” Ryan said.
    Jim resettled his cap on his head. “He going to be home this afternoon?” Ryan nodded. “Tell him I’ll stop in on my way back.”
    “Will do.” Ryan hesitated, then said, “Is it true? Is Tyler Mack dead?”
    “Yes,” Jim said.
    The emotion that flitted across the boy’s face was fleeting and hard to identify. It might have been fear, or it might have been something else entirely. Jim looked across the river at the Kushtaka fish wheel, sitting just above the first bend south of the Kuskulana landing. Take all of five minutes to get there from where he was standing. “You know him?” he said.
    Ryan followed his gaze, and then looked back at Jim. “Everybody knows everybody around here,” he said.
    Jim was very conscious of the other boys standing in back of Ryan, their attention a palpable weight. When he looked over at them, inspecting every face one at a time, they met his eyes readily enough, perhaps even with a trace of challenge in their collective gaze. They were united in the way most teenage packs were united, either against his age or his profession or both. “True enough,” he said peaceably, and this time there was no mistaking the relief on Ryan’s face.
    “Maybe not by name,” Ryan said.
    “But you can tell a Kushtakan from a Kuskulaner,” Jim said.
    The pack huddled up and stared out at him from the same inimical face.
    “Any of you down here at the landing Tuesday morning? See anything or anyone over at the Kushtaka fish wheel?”
    Sidelong glances, followed by a mass shrug. “Any of the rest of you know Tyler?”
    “We don’t hang with Kushtakans,” one of the other boys said.
    “He was your age. Did he come to school on this side of the river when their school closed?” Silence. “Did you have him in your English class? Pass him a basketball during an away game? I hear you guys have a pretty good men’s team.”
    More silence. Officer Friendly wasn’t working.
    “The skiff’s rafted third out.” Ryan pointed, all business now. “There.”
    He recognized it from the day before. “Thanks.”
    The cardboard cartons stacked among the boys’ supplies might not bear close examination, but murder outranked underage drinking every time. He had to climb over two skiffs to get to Roger’s, but at least there wasn’t another rafted off on the other side, so all he had to do was free the lines and go. The 250 hp Mercury Marine seemed like overkill for a river the size of the Gruening, but it, too, was new and started at a touch.
    The pack stood watching until he was around the first bend.
    The Mercury made short work of the two miles between the Kuskulana and Kushtaka landings. The Kushtaka landing consisted of a small, unimproved gravel bar with half a dozen beat-up skiffs sitting on it, bows in the bushes.
    Jim nosed in Roger’s skiff, hopped out, and dragged it up onshore, between two skiffs he recognized as belonging to Pat Mack and Tyler Mack. He fastened the bowline to a convenient bush, taking his time while reinventorying the contents of both skiffs, and then followed the path, littered with garbage, through the clump of willow trees that crowded the edge of the bank. He emerged almost immediately onto a dusty path, wide enough in most places for an ATV in the summer and in winter for a snow machine. Main Street, Kushtaka, Alaska, only titularly USA.
    The dozen cabins on either side of the path were small, most of them listing in one direction or another, and none had seen fresh paint in a generation. He wasn’t entirely sure they were all occupied. There were a couple of ATVs that looked as worn out as the houses they were parked in front of. There were