A taint in the blood (5 page)

With commendable resolution he ignored the little voice in his head that told him it had already been tried. The summer was strewn with the corpses of women who had heard on the Bush telegraph that Chopper Jim Chopin was once again open for business. The problem was that none of them seemed to hold his interest past "Hello."

He spoke abruptly, hoping to divert her attention. "Have you talked to Dan lately?"

This would be Dan O'Brien, chief ranger for the Park, avowed Park rat, and longtime friend of Kate's.

She didn't exactly cease and desist in giving off pheromones, but he did sense a certain alertness that hadn't been there the second before. "Somebody's been trapping brown bears," he said, his voice still sounding hoarse to his own ears.

"Have they," Kate said, letting her eyes linger on his lower lip. She touched her own with her tongue.

He took a deep breath. "Yes, they have. Dan has found a dozen carcasses all over the Park. He says whoever it is is using cable snares."

Kate abandoned her vamp stance for a moment. "Gutted?"

"Yeah."

"Gallbladders removed?"

"Yeah."

She swore.

"Yeah," he said.

"You know who it is," she said.

"Of course I know who it is," he said, annoyed. "So do you, and so does Dan. Knowing and proving are two different things, as you also know very well."

She smiled at him again. "You want me to help you prove it, or you want me to stop it? Which are also two very different things."

"If we never had this conversation, I want you to stop it," he said. "If we did, I need evidence."

"Why don't you find some?"

"I could," he said, his jaw tight. "If I wanted to track down a judge who is most probably pulling kings out of a river somewhere in the Bush on the other side of the state at the moment. I could put together some kind of probable cause and get him to issue a warrant. And then of course I'd have to go out and serve it, and do a search, and make a list of all the property taken into evidence, and photograph the scene before and after, and put him under arrest, and transport him to Tok, because they still haven't shipped the goddamn bars in for the cells in my brand-new Niniltna post, and all this would take me probably two days!"

His voice had been rising steadily throughout this peroration. He glared at her.

Kate laughed. It even sounded like genuine humor, as opposed to a come-on. "Okay, I'll talk to him. Now, you can do something for me."

He stiffened. "What?" he said warily.

She laughed again, and the siren was back. "Relax," she said, still laughing, "I need a trial transcript."

He was hugely relieved and at the same time bitterly disappointed. "Give me a name."

"Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff."

"Got a date?"

"How about a year? Count back thirty years."

He stared at her. "Jesus, Shugak, we were barely a state thirty years back."

"And I don't want microfiche, I want it printed out on paper. I don't think they were doing tapes back then, but who knows. I want a transcript, something I can read."

"It'll cost you."

"Not me. My client."

"You've got a client?"

She nodded. "I'm headed into Anchorage in a couple of days."

He couldn't stop himself from saying, "How long you going to be gone?"

She smiled. Oh yeah, the siren was most definitely back. "Just long enough for you to miss me some more."

Suddenly, the real Jim Chopin stood up. He stepped forward and bent down until the brim of his cap nearly touched her forehead. "I already do."

In real life, this was Kate Shugak's cue to back off, to give ground, usually with dignity, sometimes in a hurry, and always with attitude.

She didn't move. She didn't even blush. Instead, she leaned into him until the brim of his cap did touch her forehead, and said huskily, "There's a cure for that."

The mouse roared and he was outbluffed into an undignified retreat. "Yes. Well. I'll get to work on that file. You get to work on our alleged poacher."

"I want that file by tomorrow," she said, raising her voice as he started the engine.

He raised a hand in acknowledgment without looking around.

She watched him vanish into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Who knew chasing Jim Chopin would be so much fun?

She climbed the stairs and went into the living room. Johnny looked up from the couch and scowled at her. She halted in midstride. "Does it bug you?"

"What?"

"Jim and me." She didn't elaborate, but Johnny was going on fifteen and extremely intelligent.

"There is no Jim and you."

She grinned. "Not yet."

His frown deepened. "He's not good enough for you."

"Absolutely not," she said cheerfully. "No one is."

"What about Dad?"

She sat down next to him and looped an arm around his neck. "He almost made the grade."

The frown eased. "Only almost?"

"Well," she said. "I really am something, after all."

He was forced to laugh. "You sure are," he said, and protested the headlock and the noogie she gave him.

"We'll drive into town tomorrow, get you registered for school."

He was not displeased by this news, as Vanessa Cox was in town, living with her adoptive parents, Annie and Billy Mike. "You gonna get that woman's mom out of jail?"

Kate felt for the check crumpled in her pocket. "I'm going to try. I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'm going to succeed."

"You'll do it," Johnny said with boundless faith. "You always do.".....

That earned him another noogie, arid he squealed and wrestled free. "Where am I staying while you're gone?"

"I figured Auntie Vi's. She's got the room, and it's close enough for you to walk to school."

"Okay."

She gave him a suspicious look which he met with a bland stare. "I think it stinks that your love life is better than mine," she said.

He blushed beet red, and she laughed.

Bright and early the next morning, they climbed into the cherry red pickup and lurched back up the twenty-five miles of road into Niniltna. The road ran through the heart of the Park, 20 million mostly pristine acres extending from the Canadian border on the east to Prince William Sound in the south to the TransAlaska Pipeline in the west to the Glenn Highway in the north. Plus maybe a little extra all the way around. It was sparsely populated, the biggest town being Ahtna, which technically wasn't even in the Park but which was the market town for everyone who lived there—Park rats, rangers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, farmers, mostly Native and Anglo, living in tiny villages at the confluences of rivers, on land homesteaded by great- and great-great-grandfathers when the federal government strove to justify the expenditure of $7.2 million to purchase Alaska from Russia by offering incentives to Outsiders in the form of free land. This free land was far north of the fifty-three, but it was free, and in spite of the frosty latitude, a few thousand took the feds up on it. A few thousand more stayed on after the gold rush in 1898, and a few thousand more stayed on after World War II, and a couple of hundred thousand more after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Most of them stayed around long enough to put in their twenty and then decamped with their pensions to Arizona and Hawaii.

Fortunately, Kate thought as the truck lunged into a pothole and lunged out again, most of the six hundred thousand plus people living in Alaska today didn't live in the Park. Nope, most of them lived in Anchorage.

Oh. Wait. She was going to Anchorage.

The sun always seemed to shine when she had to leave the Park. The Quilaks loomed less menacingly on the eastern horizon, the spruce, aspen, birch, cottonwood, alder, and willow never seemed more lush and profligate, everywhere she looked an eagle or a raven or a Canada goose was taking wing. Which reminded her: She needed a new shotgun; she'd look around for one in Anchorage. Moose with their sides bulging from a summer's browse ambled across the road looking like a filled freezer. A freezer being something else she could get in Anchorage.

She thought of the last time her meat cache had been knocked over, and the labor that had been required to put it back up again. To the uninitiated, it might look like Kate was turning her back on decades of tradition, but it wasn't disloyalty. It was progress. Her father had always been for progress. At least she thought so, being as how he'd died when she was seven, and while she had many memories of her father, that wasn't necessarily one of them.

A freezer. What would Emaa have said?

Kate hoped her grandmother would have hated it. She hoped Emaa would have said disapprovingly, "A cache was good enough for your father, Katya, and it was good enough for me." But even though she hoped it, she wouldn't have bet on it since Emaa's house had been the first one in the village wired for electricity.

She laughed suddenly.

"What?" Johnny said.

"Just promise me you'll never become a professional againster," Kate told him.

He gaped at her. "A what?"

"Never mind," she said, and they pulled into the schoolyard.

They emerged an hour later with a fistful of papers, which Kate immediately consigned to the glove compartment. "Or a school administrator," she said, and they drove to Auntie Vi's and knocked on the kitchen door.

Auntie Vi opened the door and promptly closed it again.

Kate sighed. "Auntie, open up. I promise not to cook anything or wash anything or fix anything." She eyed the porch roof. "Or take a paintbrush to your soffits," she said in a much lower voice.

The door opened again. "What you here for, then?"

Kate nodded at Johnny, duffle in hand. "I need a place to park the kid for a week or so."

An arm reached out, snagged Johnny by the collar, and hauled him into the house. The door closed firmly behind him.

"Thanks, Auntie," Kate said to the door.

Mutt was already in Johnny's seat when Kate got back to the truck. "At least you still love me," Kate told her.

"Woof," Mutt said consolingly, and Kate drove to the airstrip. George was gone, and so was the Cessna. Okay, it was another twenty miles to the Roadhouse. When she walked in, Bernie hid the bar rag.

"It's okay," Kate said, "I'm looking for information, not Mr. Clean."

"And no more counselors. I'm not sharing with anybody else how I feel. Is that clear?"

"It’s clear."

"I don't want to hear any more about that goddamn house, either," he said menacingly, or as menacing as Bernie Koslowski, the mildest of the race of mild-mannered ex-hippie draft dodger-saloonkeeper-basketball coaches could get. "We built it. You're living in it. Deal with it."

Kate patted the air with her hands. "I come in peace for all bear kind."

He examined her suspiciously, and when she made no sudden moves toward the push broom, he relaxed, sort of. "Bear kind?"