A Cold-Blooded Business (21 page)

Rough hands woke her what could have been minutes or days or years later. Her mouth tasted like the inside of a litter box and her head felt roughly the size of Seattle. Something struck her shoulder hard enough to penetrate the fog and she gave a low cry of pain. "Shut up," someone snarled, and pulled on her hurt arm. Her feet dragged over snow too quickly to get the soles down and in working order, and her shins banged into something sharp. "Ouch," she said indignantly, and fought to raise her head and open her eyes.

Toni on her right, Jerry on her left, they were dragging her up a flight of metal stairs. Her head fell back and she saw stars, and wondered for a moment if they were a product of her head wound.

Head wound. How had she hurt her head? Why did she feel so cold? Why were Toni and Jerry dragging her up these stairs? Where did these stairs lead? "Where are we?" she tried to say, but her tongue was so swollen she couldn't get the words out.

A door opened and light streamed out into the night along with a wall of sound. Kate greeted it with positive relief. Only one place on the noisy Slope was this noisy. "Skid 14," she said, proud she could get the words out. "We're at Number Three. How come?"

The scream of natural gas at six hundred pounds psi drowned out her words, and she watched, brow furrowing, as Jerry and Toni dumped her limp body in one corner and stood erect to yell at each other. Again, Kate could hear nothing but the gas moving through the overhead pipes.

She blinked, watching the argument with a sort of divine detachment.

There was a problem here, she could acknowledge that much, but she wasn't absolutely certain it was her problem, and she was willing to wait for further data before doing any serious theorizing.

Jerry yelled again, his expression desperate. Kate, watching dispassionately, thought he might start to cry. Toni yelled back, her usually serene face twisted into such an ugly mask that even Kate in her disengaged state found it disturbing. Toni screamed out a final word, took Jerry in both hands and pushed. With the momentum of the shove he almost ran out the door, right past Kate, his face turned away from her.

Kate watched Toni reach over a pipe and give a small valve two twists before following Jerry.

The door closed behind them and Kate was left alone. "Me and Skid 14," she said. "A match made in heaven." The gas screamed overhead.

Something clanked. Something else started a rapid knocking sound. Her eyes wandered until they encountered a sign, a sign she had seen before.

"Caution," it read, "S0204 may be present." Or no, it read, "Caution!

S0204 may be present!" Odd how much more urgent the message seemed when she added the exclamation points.

An alarm went off somewhere. Kate turned her head to locate the source of the new noise and banged her head against the yellow plastic casing of a Scott Air Pak. "Ouch," she said reproachfully. "Stop that."

Another alarm went off, a third, and lights began to flash. It triggered something in the back of Kate's mind, sent a shot of adrenaline through her nervous system, woke Sleeping Beauty to a kiss of death.

Automatically, without stopping to think of why or how, with swift, un fumbling movements as if she'd done it every day of her life instead of once during orientation, she opened the Scott Air Pak, pulled out the self-contained breathing apparatus and donned it.

With her first breath her head began to clear, but her body was still being fought over by one self that wanted to drink hard, drive fast, chase men and shoot the pope, and another, more fuddled self that stubbornly insisted she listen to it, that something was wrong, that she had something important to do. She inhaled again, because it seemed like a good idea and because it was something she was capable of doing. The Air Pak was an escape unit. She had five minutes, that was all. The second voice gained in volume and urgency. Kate fumbled for a hand hold, sent stern, specific mental commands to feet, ankles and knees, and by dint of strenuous effort, intense willpower and a minor miracle found herself on her feet.

She paused in momentary self-congratulations until her eye caught sight of the valve Toni had turned. Valve. Toni. Had. Turned. Valve.

Turned. Alarms. Flashing. Lights. Her scattered consciousness coalesced into three separate pictures, one after the other, the first of the alarm board in the Communications Center, the second of the alarm board in Skid 7, the third of the alarm board in Skid 18. But no, Skid 18 was gas only. Or was it?

The voice raised itself to a shriek of warning that spurred Kate to stumble out the door, catching the tank of the air pak on the door frame, tripping on the top step and plunging headlong down the flight of stairs, catching herself on the railing at the last minute before she plowed up a foot of snow with her nose. Or rather her face mask.

She felt rather than heard the door swing shut behind her.

Shielded by the modules from most of the exterior lighting around the center, Kate slumped down on the bottom step and pulled the mask free. She was in shirt and jeans and safety boots and nothing else, it was late March on the Slope, which meant spring was weeks and even months away, and yet she didn't feel cold.

The little voice whispered to her, warning her that this wasn't right, she should get inside now, that even if she didn't feel cold she was anyway, that people had died of hypothermia with more on. People like her mother. Also someone might come through the door at the head of the stairs at any minute, and if she didn't want to be swept into the role of sabotage suspect she should get the hell out of there.

The little voice was growing more articulate by the moment, and was accompanied by a return of physical function, so the process of getting to her feet was less laborious than before. Walking, too, seemed less of an effort, and she moved, one halting step at a time, one piling at a time, under the module and out the other side. She peered around, squinting as if that might bring her eyes into better focus, trying to find a landmark. There it was, the glow of the most brightly lit and tiniest building on the pad, the guard shack. Fixing that glow with a stare, because if she blinked it might disappear, she plodded slowly toward it, now that she was out from under the module foundering over the odd drift, but always moving steadily and inexorably toward that glowing spot of bright promise.

It was a toss-up who was more surprised when she fell in the door, the guard or Kate. He sat on his stool, gaping, as she picked herself up off the floor. She opened her mouth and paused, afraid her tongue might not have caught up with the rest of her body. "Childress," she managed finally to gasp. She was beginning to feel the cold, or rather the tingling that invaded her body that told her she had been very cold and in the warmth of the guard shack was now starting to thaw. "Call him."

His mouth closed with something of a snap and an expression of disgust crossed his face, one she remembered from the mop girl at Mcdonald's.

"You're drunk. Who are you? Who's your supervisor?"

With a spurt of anger she lunged for the phone. "Goddamnit," she snarled, as out of patience as she was out of strength. She grasped the receiver and enunciated each word with great care. "I'm an undercover investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney. This is an emergency.

Call your security chief." "You are drunk," he said, his eyes running over her contemptuously.

"You people will find it, won't you, even on the Slope." He gave a snort of disgust and reached a hand out to dial.

Rage, Kate discovered, was a great restorative.

She knocked him off his stool, picked him up by his shirt front and slammed him against the wall. "Stay put, don't move, or I will hurt you," she said through her teeth. The combination of the torn, husky growl of voice and his first sight of the ugly, twisted scar on her throat froze him momentarily, long enough for her to punch up an access line to Anchorage and dial Childress's home number.

It picked up on the second ring. "Childress? This is Kate Shugak."

"Shugak! What the hell is going on, it's three o'clock in the fucking morning! What--"

"Shut up. I need you on the Slope. As soon as you can get here. And tell this kid to do what I say."

His voice sharpened. "Have you found the dealer? Who is it? What--"

"Childress!" Kate bellowed. "Somebody just tried to kill me and I don't have time for explanations! Just tell this kid to do what I say and get your ass up here!" She thrust the receiver at the guard, whose eyes were huge and his face paper-white and Kate only hoped he wasn't going to faint.

"Mr. Childress? This is the security guard at Production Center Three.

I--" He listened, his eyes going wider. "Yes sir. Yes sir.

Yes sir. Nossir. Yes sir. Yes sir." He hung up and turned to her, an expression of awe on his face. He put out his hand and deepened his voice. "My name's Poss. Dave Poss." Oh, fuck, Kate thought, I've just acquired me a British Secret Service wannabe. The pounding in her head increased. Her mouth was bone-dry.

"Have you got something to drink?"

Mute, he held out a cup of cold coffee. Grateful, she drank it down without a whimper. He watched her, the rudimentary beginnings of a pencil-thin mustache, the Boston Blackie kind, twitching with excitement.

She put the cup down. "Thanks. Okay." With the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes she tried to think. "Okay," she said again. "Do you know, has there been anything out of the ordinary happen inside the center this morning?" "Has there ever," he said, "there was a leak in Skid 14 thirty minutes ago. We had enough bells and lights and sirens go off to make you think it was the Fourth of July."

"Is anybody likely to check up on you for a while?"

"No." He sounded faintly disgruntled. "Everyone else is in Skid 14. I have to stay here, make sure no one gets on the pad who isn't supposed to."

She frowned. "Is this the first time you've seen me tonight?"

He looked taken aback. "It's the first time I've seen you ever."

Kate painfully followed this statement to its logical solution. "So there is another way to get on this pad?" He looked wary. Kate looked at the phone. He sighed. "Sure.

There's the access road to A Pad, that leads to the spur road that runs between Checkpoint Charlie and GPS ."

"Okay," Kate said for the third time. "Can you get me back to the Base Camp without going through any checkpoints, without anybody seeing either of us?"

His eyes fired. "I can try."

"Okay," Kate said. She felt like a parrot, repeating the same words over and over again. "Okay. Get me back to the Base Camp without being seen."

It took them an hour to get back to the Base Camp, a trip that yesterday had taken Kate twenty minutes in the bus. Most of the time she spent crouched beneath the dash on the passenger's side of the security Suburban. Dave Poss by way of a disguise had donned a Raiders cap with the brim pulled low, with the result that every time Kate looked up from her cramped position she thought she was hallucinating again, this time entertaining visions of Daffy Duck. Daffy Duck at the wheel of a green Suburban with the words

"RPetco Security" painted two feet high in bright yellow paint on the doors was almost more than Kate's rubbed-raw senses could handle.

But not quite. Poss crept up on the Base Camp like the Japanese crept up on Pearl Harbor; secretively, stealthily, almost hitting a Stores forklift whose night shift driver gave a cheery wave and yelled an even cheerier, considering Dave had nearly sideswiped him into a pile of well casing, "Hi, Dave!"

"Hi, Mike!" Dave yelled back. He caught his breath, and looked down at Kate guiltily. "Sorry."

"Drive by the safety module," Kate growled in response. Poss did so.

"See anything?" Kate said in a low voice.

"No," Poss whispered. "All quiet on the northern front."

"Keep going around to the front. Drive by the bull rail Do you know what the PR van looks like?"

Poss was hurt. "Of course."

"Is it there?"

The Suburban lurched into a hole and out of it again, banging Kate's head against the dash. "Yup. Plugged in right where it's supposed to be."

I'm on call tonight, Jerry had said as he walked away from the pinochle table. Kate's head throbbed with the effort to think. "Okay," she said finally, "take me around to the administration annex. The outside door."

"The cleaning crew might be in there."

"I'll have to chance it."

A few moments later Poss drew up in the shadow of the building, the passenger side door a baby step from the bottom stair. Painfully, Kate uncurled herself from beneath the dash. "Okay, here's where I get out.

You"--a finger stabbed for emphasis--"you get back to Three and stay put and keep quiet until the day shift shows. After that, go back to your room and wait there until either I call or Childress does. What's the extension in the guard shack?"

"Four-three three-three."

"Four-three-three-three. Good. Okay, you got it?"

He hesitated. "What if someone finds out I was gone?"

"Refer them to Childress."

He looked at her, all youth and gung ho and sap rising. "Shouldn't I come with you? You don't look so good, maybe I--"

"No!" The last thing Kate needed was an underfoot puppy. He would have protested. She held up one hand. "What did Childress tell you?"

He looked mutinous. "What did he say?" Kate repeated, feeling like his mother.

"To do what you said," Poss said sulkily, feeling like her son.

"All right. Go. And for chrissake go back the short way this time in case I need to call you."

Kate heard the Suburban's wheels spin as she mounted the stairs. This door was not a safety door and did open from the outside; Kate opened it and stepped in, halting as the door closed silently behind her on its hydraulic catch. She held her breath, straining to hear movement inside the building.

There was none. She must have missed the cleaning crew. Good. Moving swiftly, with almost all her agility and grace restored and spurred by an ever-increasing sense of rage, she made her way through the annex and into the garage. The garage gave on to the front entrance and the security desk, but she kept her back turned and her head averted as she climbed the stairs. When she reached the first landing she risked a glance back. The guard had his feet propped on the desk, his head resting against the back of his chair, his eyes closed and his mouth open. If he wasn't sleeping he was dead. Good again, either way. She padded silently up the rest of the stairs.