Bad Blood (26 page)

They had almost enough energy to smile.

She packed their trash into her pack. “Take my shotgun,” she said. “You’ll need a firearm for basic protection, and not just from the wildlife. Many people get themselves lost in the woods on purpose, so they can do whatever they want.” She thought of Crazy Emmett, and Father Smith, and Liam Campbell’s chilling stories about Clayton Gheen. “Be careful. Don’t just blindly trust the first person you meet. Or the second.”

They gave sober nods. They were so damn young.

“Canadians have strict laws about firearms, but you’ll be in the YT. They’re good people there. Almost Alaskans. Find a place that feels friendly, with as large a population as you can stand because it’s always easier to hide in a crowd, and settle in. Work for cash. Stay off the grid as long as you can, and when you’ve absolutely positively got to get that driver’s license, make sure the paperwork will stand up.”

She pulled out an envelope full of twenties and fifties she’d brought from her stash at home. “Take it,” she said when Ryan would have waved it off. “American cash works everywhere, and no matter how self-sufficient you are, there will be some situations where only cash will do.”

“We’ll pay you back,” Jennifer said.

“No,” Kate said. “You won’t.” She nodded at the envelope. “There’s a name and a phone number in there, too. Make sure the first two words you say are my name or he’ll hang up. He can set you up with documents. He won’t be cheap, so hold off on that until you’ve got some money saved.”

“Will he barter?” Ryan said.

Kate shrugged. “You can ask. He’s pretty capable his own self, and a mean, nasty, suspicious bastard besides. He doesn’t put it past you or anyone else to hide a black helicopter under his woodpile.”

She rose to her feet. They followed and shouldered into their packs, fastening chest and waist belts and pulling ball caps down over their eyes.

“We’ll pay you back,” Jennifer said. “Someday, somehow, we’ll pay you back.”

“No,” Kate said with more force this time. “No, you won’t. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t e-mail, don’t wire money, don’t mail it. Most of all, don’t get caught. If you get caught, you’re on your own. I’ve just aided and abetted in a felony escape. I’m trusting you not to bring that home with you.”

“It was an accident,” Ryan said.

“I believe you,” Kate said, and she mostly did. “But Rick Estes’s death is the third in a row, and Jim Chopin is not going to stop until he finds out why those three men died, and how. He can’t. He swore an oath.” Her expression was stern and inflexible. “And your villages need some sense shook into them anyway.”

“Good luck with that,” Ryan said.

Jennifer nodded, her eyes shadowed. “Kushtaka is dying, Kate. You know how, when you land the fish, it beats itself against the beach, trying to get back in the water? It doesn’t go peacefully. That’s Kushtaka.”

“And Kuskulana…” Ryan looked despairing. “My folks won’t be happy until there’s cable TV in every house.”

“And a liquor warehouse on every corner?” Kate said.

Jennifer looked at Ryan.

“Mitch and Kenny Halvorsen,” Kate said. “They were running a bootlegging operation out of Mitch’s crawl space.”

Ryan’s eyes met Kate’s and fell. He gave a reluctant nod.

“Who killed Mitch?”

“We all thought he was fishing down Alaganik,” Ryan said, choosing an oblique answer. “Dad went up to check on his house while he was gone, and he saw that the hatch on the crawl space was nailed down. He thought that was odd, so he pulled it up.”

“Why did he leave Mitch there?”

“He had to talk to Mom. She’s the chief.”

“And what did the chief decide?” Kate said in a very dry voice.

“Mom said Chopper Jim could tell if we moved the body, and that before we called him, we had to get all that booze out of there.”

Kate remembered the marks of multiple boxes in the dust.

“Before we could, Kenny came home from Bristol Bay. It’s where he has his permit. He went to Cordova first, looking for Mitch. When he couldn’t find him, he came home. And then when he found Mitch, before anybody could stop him, he called Chopper Jim.”

“Who killed Tyler Mack? Kenny?”

A short silence fell. “Tell her,” Jennifer said.

“He’s my cousin, Jennifer,” Ryan said.

She held his eyes. “No,” she said gently. “That’s what she’s been trying to tell us. He isn’t your cousin anymore.”

They stared at each other while Kate waited.

“Tell her,” Jennifer said again.

Ryan swallowed hard. Kate appreciated how much a betrayal this was, given the years Kuskulana had invested in him keeping his mouth shut, so she didn’t push.

“We met that morning at the landing,” he said in a low voice.

“I came up the river in my father’s skiff,” Jennifer said. “Tyler came up the river right behind me.”

“Did he see you?” Kate said.

“I don’t think so,” Jennifer said, “but I don’t know for sure.”

“He didn’t yell or anything?”

“He wouldn’t,” Jennifer said. “He would have held it over me, used it to get something he wanted.”

Kate stared at her, not hiding her suspicion.

“No,” Jennifer said. “No, Kate.”

“What?” Ryan said.

“We did not kill Tyler,” Jennifer said.

“Huh?” Ryan said. “No, we sure as hell did not! We beached Jennifer’s boat and we went to a little clearing around the point, on Cataract Creek side. That’s when we saw him.”

“Saw who?”

Even then, it was hard for him to get the words out. “Kenny.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was in his skiff, floating down the creek toward the river. He must have hidden it there.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. We didn’t know what he was going to do, so we kept quiet. If we’d known…” He hesitated, and Jennifer took his hand and held it in a firm grip. He gave her a grateful glance and looked back at Kate. “He beached his skiff way down at the end of that gravel bar the Kushtaka fish wheel is on. He snuck up on Tyler when Tyler was pitching fish out of the holding pen. He had a piece of rebar.” He stopped.

“Tyler didn’t hear him?”

“I wish,” Ryan said, his face gray. “If we’d known, we could have done something, anything—”

“It happened so fast,” Jennifer said. “We didn’t even have time to shout.”

Kate looked at her, and she wondered. If Tyler Mack had seen Jennifer meeting Ryan, and if Jennifer knew Tyler had seen them, then Tyler Mack dead might have been more desirable to Jennifer than Tyler Mack alive.

“This shit has to stop,” she said, more to herself than to them. She looked up. “In the meantime, you two need to get down the trail. Do not be in a hurry. Down is always the most dangerous part of a hike.”

“Kate,” Ryan said.

“Get going,” she said.

Jennifer walked a few steps, and turned. “Can I at least call my dad? Someday?”

Kate took two giant strides forward and grabbed Jennifer by the straps on her pack. “And what happens when he knows you’re alive? If they’ve found your daypack and seen the marriage certificate, he already knows you’re married to Ryan, a Christianson from across the river, a Kuskulaner, a tribe he’s been raised to hate. And how long before he finds out what really happened on the beach that night, and what happens then?”

“It was an accident,” Ryan said.

“What happens when they find out what happened at Kuskulana?” Kate said. “When Roger and Carol find out their precious only child married one of those backward Macks from the wrong side of the river, the village where they won’t let the women hunt and fish and where they let the school die because they couldn’t keep their young people home?”

“But—”

“Open warfare,” Kate said. “The Kuskulanans will blame you for this elopement, Jennifer. The Kushtakers will blame Ryan. Don’t you think they already hate each other enough?”

Jennifer’s eyes were full of tears.

Kate released the girl and stepped back. “I told Anne to stop at Scott’s on her way back to Cordova. He’ll sink Ryan’s skiff with your belongings on board somewhere on the river it’s sure to be found. If you’re lucky, if everybody’s lucky, they’ll think you drowned.”

Jennifer leaned her head on Ryan’s shoulder, and, again, he rested his cheek on her hair.

“You’re gone,” Kate said. “You can’t call. You can’t write. You can’t e-mail, you can’t text, you can’t IM, you can’t post a comment on the Kushtaka homepage, always assuming they ever put one up. You can’t ever come back.”

She looked at Ryan. “Unless you want to come back with me now and surrender to Sergeant Chopin.”

Tears ran unchecked down Jennifer’s cheeks, and Ryan looked ten years older than he had the moment before.

“Running now means running forever,” Kate said.

“Decide.”

Twenty-three

SUNDAY, JULY 15

Kushtaka

Jim took Roger’s newly re-surfaced skiff downriver without asking, noting only that Roger had already bought a new outboard, a twin of the first. No money problems for the Christiansons, that was for sure.

Kushtaka looked as harmless as ever, a tumbledown little Alaskan village eroding quietly into its own past.

Appearances could be deceiving.

Jim thumped on the door of Pat Mack’s cabin. “Pat! It’s Jim Chopin.”

He felt the sensation of thirty pairs of eyes on his back.

“Pat, open up. I’ve got some questions that need answers.”

Dale Mack came out of his cabin and stood there, his hands on his hips, glaring at Jim. At least he wasn’t carrying a weapon.

The door creaked open and Jim turned to see Pat Mack standing there. He looked tired. “Got some questions, Pat,” Jim said. “You can let me in or I can take you to the trooper post in Niniltna. Your choice.”

It was a big gun to bring out on a village elder. Jim had worked hard to forge relationships with Park rats so that if they didn’t feel friendly toward him at least they were tolerant of his presence.

Today, he really didn’t give a shit.

Pat hesitated for what felt like a long time, before stepping back and allowing Jim to enter.

Inside, the cabin was divided by a wall. A door in the middle of it looked into a small bedroom with a bed consisting of a mattress and box springs on the floor and a dresser built of Blazo boxes, open ends out. The outer room was where Pat lived. It resembled Tyler Mack’s tar paper shack in nearly every detail, except Jim was pretty sure there was insulation in these walls. The woodstove was lit and the room was stiflingly hot. Jim removed his cap.

Pat sat down in the room’s only chair, an old wooden rocker pulled up close to the stove. He picked up a mug and used it to gesture to the dented old coffeepot on the stove. “Help yourself, if you’ve a mind to.”

“Thanks.” Jim looked around and found a step stool and hauled it over to sit down. One was not blunt with elders, unless one had a wish to be summarily and comprehensively ignored, but the last three days had rendered Jim beyond common Park politeness. “Tyler drowned in that fish basket, Pat,” he said, “but he went into it alive. Unconscious, but alive.”

He watched Pat’s face carefully. One of the rockers squeaked as Pat shifted in his chair, but that was all the reaction he got.

“His killer hit him first, in the back of the head, using a piece of rebar.”

Squeak.

“I saw that piece of rebar in Tyler’s skiff, Pat.”

Squeak.

“Was it the murder weapon?”

Squeak.

Jim could feel his temper fray at the edges. “Was the rebar what jammed the fish wheel so the basket Tyler was in would stay underwater? Did you wash it off and put it in the skiff? To wash away any evidence I might find? Like all those skiffs washed the beach clean where Rick Estes was killed?”

Squeak.

“Goddammit, Pat!” Jim said. He could hear his voice rising and fought to bring himself under control. “I know all you Kushtakers think you’re living out the moral precepts as set forth by Don Corleone, but this shit has to stop. Three men are dead. You and I both know more will die if we don’t stop this now.”

The door opened behind them. “That’s enough,” Dale Mack’s voice said. “You come on outta there, Sergeant Chopin.”

Not Chopper Jim, not Jim, not even the more casual Trooper, but Sergeant Chopin. Jim looked down at the mug turning between his hands and resisted the impulse to look around to see if Dale Mack had gone for his rifle. “Why don’t you come in here instead, Dale,” he said to his mug.

There was a long silence, broken only by the squeak of Pat Mack’s rocking chair.

But Dale Mack did come in. He stood next to Pat Mack, arms folded, face set. “Got nothing to say to you.”

“Got something to say to you, however,” Jim said, setting the mug on the floor and rising to his feet. “I’ve just been up to Kuskulana. I know the Halvorsens were bootlegging booze and dope out of Mitch’s crawl space. I’ve talked to Boris Balluta and I know he and Tyler were going into competition with them, and that Mitch caught them thieving his stock and that he got killed in the fight that followed. For whatever reason, Kenny didn’t find his body for two months. My guess is when he did, he came across the river and killed Tyler in revenge.”

The round black-and-white clock on the wall had a minute hand with a hushed click as it moved from second to second. In the silence of the room that followed, each click sounded like a rifle shot.

The sectarian nature of life along this part of the river had hardened its inhabitants into a silence that would not be broken. Boris had talked only because he was from Niniltna, where family feuds were settled by the aunties before they ever really got started. There were advantages on occasion to having the might and majesty of the law seconded by four tough old birds who knew where all the bodies in the Park were buried, and who weren’t afraid to remember the burial locations when it was necessary.

Kushtaka and Kuskulana had no such human brake pedals, unfortunately, and worse, they had raised their children to believe that vengeance was theirs.

“Okay,” Jim said heavily. “I didn’t expect to get any answers by coming here, and I wasn’t disappointed. What the hell, maybe I just wanted you to know I’m not so stupid as to not notice all the non-clues you were so determined to leave behind.”