Nuuk is the local's name for this place, and even though it isn't pronounced exactly the same, this time of year it looks like it has been nuked by a snow-based fission bomb, at least to me. 

Like most people who do what I do for a living, I am from Texas by way of Lousiana, and I need some snakes and some big mosquitoes and some wet, dirt-smelling heat to feel at home. Here there are about 50,000 people living on the world's largest island, bigger than the entire U.S. Most of it is ice, and this is the biggest town. 14,000 thousand people and shrinking, and I didn't want to be on the last dog sled out of town.

Almost all the big buildings are gray concrete square blocks, for public housing. As the cops marched me and Dirty Dick out the door, I shivered in the frozen black air and kind of hoped Rommell was holed up in one of them and not frozen stiff in an ice pile somewhere at the end of a skinny dark street. He ran out without his parka. Even an asshole like him deserved a better fate.

Dirty Dick, all six foot four and skinny of him, shambled along in front of me, with two cops in the lead and one bringing up the rear, limping hard, and giving off very pissed vibes.

 Snow tornadoes swirled and danced on top of the black ice that paved the street. No cars, and no people. I knew some of the little stores along the road were actually painted cheerful colors, but at night they all looked gray-brown. In the fall and winter, it is almost always some level of night here.

The Government building suddenly loomed in front of us, looking like a giant concrete coffin with little long, thin windows in it.

Now let me say, Dirty Dick didn't have hygiene issues, it was just his name. We were Doodlebuggers, seismic exploration workers, marine version at the moment, and most people like us had colorful, or insulting and sometimes accurate nicknames, although some were misleading, and some understatments.

Dick was originally from somewhere in the Middle East. Doodlebuggers, especially of the seagoing sort like us, are gypsies. We were salt dome searchers, runaways, really bad husbands, whoredogs, intermittent drunks, semi-suicidals, sometimes low level CIA informants, and generally miscreant society misfits. Doesn't matter if we were from China, Europe, the U.S., Australia or wherever, you don't ask each other personal questions and you don't make good, long term friends.

 I have had shipmates (we don't actually know shit about sailing ships) eaten by sharks, thrown in prison in brand new African countries, disappear forever in whorehouses, and throw off all their clothes and go native in Sumatra, but you don't talk much about it. The turnover on crews is shockingly low, under the circumstances. Everyone has someone or something to forget or hide from.

Dirty Dick was no different. I had no idea how he got his name, but I was sure his name wasn't Dick, much less Dirty. He rarely talked, and when he drank, he talked less. He didn't drink very often, but when he did, it was always until tears ran down his face, and then he would stand up and leave. Always alone. I never saw him with a woman, or even a man, if you know what I mean, and I bet you do. He never laughed or even smiled, but he was smart and worked hard. 

He was sort of a hack scientist, or electrical engineer, really, and he ran navigation equipment.

See, when you are on the greasy gray ocean looking for where oil might be way down below, you really have to know exactly where you are, really exactly, all the time. If your data tells the drilling guys to drill right here, and they spend a couple hundred million bucks, and you are off a little bit, they drill up water, and they get really truly pissed off. The greasy grey ocean all looks alike, at least on the top side, which is all I hope to ever see. So navigation, and knowing you marked a spot within a couple feet is seriously important. Dick could do that. It took enough equipment to fill half a single-wide trailer, and he could make it work and fix it when it broke.

Dick only wore sandals, everywhere, even in the North Sea, except here because you just couldn't, and there were no toe-donors. His boots hurt his feet, and he walked like it. We went slow. I felt like the scenery looked.

We took turns going through the revolving door until we were all standing in the lobby. It was spotless, spare and gray, gray desks, chairs, tile, the whole thing. No one was there, but it was midnight on a Friday, after all. "This way, please," said the blond police officer, shrugging off his parka. His uniform name tag said "Hanson." 

We followed him to an elevator and rode up one floor. No one spoke or looked at each other in the elevator, possibly because everyone was stunned by the Muzak cover of what I am ashamed to admit I recognized as an ABBA song.  It drove us out of the elevator and into the police headquarters. Officer Hanson nodded at the ancient cop behind the gray front desk. He looked like an a squinty-eyed Fred Flintstone. "Please have a seat," he said, pointing at a row of new but uncomfortable gray straight-backed chairs. 

We all sat, me and Dick with a cop on each side. They kept their parkas on, but Dick and I took ours off and held them in their laps. 

Hanson lifted the pass-through at the front desk and disappeared through a door in the back. I looked around. Dirty Dick looked down, like he might cry, which was pretty much his routine anyway. The cops on either side of us looked straight ahead. They looked so much alike I thought they might be brothers. "Nice to be warm again," I said to the one next to me. He ignored me and looked as the wall across the room.  I followed his line of sight. There was nothing on the far wall but a framed poster that looked like a government announcement in what was no doubt Danish.  

I fidgeted. No one else moved at all. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere but I didn't see one. The Inuit cops were statues and Dirty Dick Abdallah stared at his hated boots like he owed them money. A police radio squawked painfully now and then with bursts of gibberish. I couldn't see where it was coming from either. Dick and I jumped every time it happened, but the cops on either side of us never moved a muscle. 

All of a sudden, Officer Hanson appeared. He pointed at me and Dirty Dick with two fingers of one hand, like when you give the evil eye or make the sign for "speak with forked tongue." I had never seen anyone do that before. Then he moved his hand to gesture us up, and into the maw of the police hive. "This way."

I elbowed Dick to look up, and stood, holding my hand up with my pointer and pinkie up and the rest closed and said, "Hook'em Horns." I couldn't help it. He looked confused, and then not happy, and said, "Now, please." We got up and followed him through the desk gate and down a narrow gray hall. Officers Mutt and Jeff brought up the rear.