Breakup (8 page)

This could have been me.

She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of the backwater to be snatched into the swift, midstream current and washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before anyone would have known, if ever?

Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds, she estimated, standing six to eight feet.

The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.

She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.

She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker, white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.

"Oh great," Kate said before she thought. "Mandy is going to kill me."

George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.

Two circumstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.

One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the 4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pass had missed and which the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at touchdown.

Two, Ben Bingley was barfing down the back of his neck at the time.

Kate drove up with the Bakers and the bereaved husband in time to see the red and white two-seater pull sharply to the left, losing its center of gravity just long enough to lean over and catch the ground with the tip of the left wing. Newton and inertia took care of the rest as the plane completed a snap roll so perfect it would have brought tears to the eyes of a n Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn't been performed at zero altitude.

In short, the plane flipped over and pancaked flat on its back. Under the beneficent rays of the spring sun, the surface of the airstrip had been reduced to a foot of packed snow, submerged beneath an inch of water, providing a marvelous surface for a nice long gliding slide. Five-zero Papa slid very well indeed, on a direct line heading for Mandy's truck as it pulled to a halt in front of the post office. It was a combination skid and spin; in fact 50 Papa was going around on its back like a slow top for the second time, the ripping sound of tearing wing fabric clearly audible to the stupefied witnesses in the cab of Mandy's truck, just as the plane ran into them. Kate looked down, fascinated, as one wing slid smoothly between the front and back tires, and looked up just in time to see the wheel of one landing gear hit the top of the driver's- side door with a solid thud that shook the cab and rattled the passengers in it, although not as much as the grizzly had done earlier.

The window bowed inward but did not break. There was the unmistakable groan of bending metal, though. Kate, a little lightheaded, thought that Mandy might not notice the dented bumper and the clawed finish and the need for a front-end alignment on her brand new truck after all.

Her second thought was to wonder how full the Super Cub's tanks were, one of which was at present resting directly beneath her ass.

Foolishly, she grabbed for the handle and shoved. The door, the right gear of the plane jammed solidly against it, unsurprisingly did not budge. "Out!" she roared. "Out! OUT! OUT!" Mr. Baker fumbled with the passenger door and stumbled to the ground. Kate, not standing on ceremony, shoved Mrs. Baker and the husband out after him and scrambled out herself to run around the truck. She sniffed, tense. No smell of gasoline.

She went around to the Cub's right side and squatted to fold up the door. A smell hit her in the face like a blow, powerfu l enough to knock her on her butt. It wasn't gasoline, it was vomit. She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, muffled her face with a sleeve and spoke through it. "George, are you okay?"

George looked at her, still suspended upside down in his seat harness, bits of brown something spattered across the back of his head and neck. "I hate breakup," he said.

"Never a dull moment," Kate agreed.

A rustle and the snap of a buckle came from the seat behind him. "No!" George said. "Ben, don't-"

But Ben did, releasing the buckle on his seat belt. He fell heavily on his head and shoulders against the ceiling of the fuselage. A cry of pain and some futile thrashing around followed, after which George contributed some acerbic commentary, because he now could not slide his seat back to get out. Matters did not improve when Ben threw up again.

"AUGGHHH!" said George. He braced his feet up against the dash, reached for the lever and shoved with all his might. The seat slid back and hit Befi in the butt. Ben tumbled backwards in a corkscrew somersault into the pile of U.S. Postal Service mail sacks that had been piled on the floor in back of his seat and were now piled on the ceiling. It was too much for him and he threw up for the third time.

George braced himself on one arm, popped his harness buckle and was outside and on his feet a moment later. Thin-lipped and furious, he addressed the area in language suitable to the situation. George was an ex-helicopter pilot who had learned his trade under fire in Vietnam and perfected it on the TransAlaska Pipeline before deserting the rotor for fixed wing and starting an air taxi in the Park. He was also one of five ex-husbands of Ramona Halford, the right-wing state senator representing the area of Alaska that included the Park, which all by itself had been an education in expletive deleted.

Over his shoulder, Kate caught sight of the widower, staring down into the bed of the truck at the body, cocooned in a blu e plastic tarp. A few feet away stood the Bakers, color back in their faces and by the wideness of their eyes evidently improving their vocabulary with George's able assistance.

Cravenly, Kate ducked down again to help Ben Bingley out of the plane. This wasn't easy, as Ben had heard George's lengthy and comprehensive address and somehow received the impression that George might hold him in some small measure accountable for the ground loop. He was of course absolutely innocent of anything of the kind, but he had decided he would stay in the plane for a while, like maybe until George went home, or perhaps left the Park forever.

So he held on to the back of the pilot's seat, refusing to let Kate pull it forward, until she had to kneel down in the slush. The aroma of beer-based puke was gagging and Kate lost her temper. "Ben, stop being such a big baby and get your ass out of this friggin' plane."

Ben was more scared of a mildly pissed Kate Shugak than he was of George Perry at full volume and he wavered. "You promise you won't let him hurt me?"

"I'll kill you, you stupid little shit!" George said from above.

"I promise," Kate said, more temperate now. Somebody had to be. "Come on out, Ben."

"I don't know," Ben said doubtfully, "he sounds awful mad."

"He's just shook up from dinging the plane. Come on out, Ben."

"I'll rip your fucking guts out and use them for crab bait! "

"Maybe you could just bring me a beer," Ben said hopefully.

"I'll feed your sorry ass to the first bear to come down the pike!"

Kate winced, and was glad that in her current position she couldn't see the expression on her three passengers' faces.

George ran out of breath and threats and Ben finally did come out, standing so as to keep Kate between himself and the enraged pilot at all times.

Kate began negotiations toward a truce and was making some headway when Ben's wife appeared on the airstrip. It became immediately apparent that he had way worse problems to deal wit h than a plane wreck, an enraged bush pilot and vomit down the front of his shirt.

Cindy had left the house without her jacket but not without her 9mm Smith and Wesson, which she held in a business-like grip with the business end pointed at Ben.

"Whoa!" George said, startled out of his wrath.

"You little prick," Cindy said.

"Now, Cindy," Kate said, eyes almost crossed on the barrel beneath her nose, trying to see if the pistol was loaded. She could tell it was an automatic, but the way Cindy kept waving it around she couldn't tell if there was a clip in the butt Might be one in the chamber anyway, so she wasn't safe whether she could see the clip or not, and stopped trying.

"Now, honey," Ben said, peering fearfully over Kate's shoulder.

"I hate breakup," George said.

"Get out of my way, Kate!" Cindy snarled. "That son of a bitch stole the kids' quarterly dividends and probably drank up every last damn dime! Why the hell don't you people do something so he can't get his hands on the money!"

"I'm not on the board," Kate said.

Cindy dismissed this spineless and specious attempt at diversion with a contemptuous wave of the pistol that brought George into the line of fire. George took a hasty step backward, slipped and sat down hard in a puddle. "You're Ekaterina's granddaughter, you say jump, they say how high, who cares about titles! How am I going to feed the kids until the salmon start running? Huh? How?"

Kate had no answer for her, and Cindy's smoldering gaze fixed upon her cringing husband. "I told you, Ben, I told you if you ever did that again I'd kill you!"

She meant it, too. Bang! went the pistol. The bullet went into the driver's side door of Mandy's truck with a clang, missing the right tire on the Super Cub by an inch.

Definitely loaded, Kate thought, orchestrating a graceful swan dive.

"Hey!" George roared indignantly. "Watch out for my goddam plane!"

Bang! went the pistol again, and George decided better the Cub than him and dove after Kate.

Ben was left standing all alone, a sickly smile spreading across his face. "Now, honey-" he began. Bang! went the pistol again, and he broke and ran. Bang! Bang! and Cindy took off in pursuit.

Their thudding footsteps faded, followed by some crashing of brush and yelps of pain. Kate, sandwiched between the Cub's wing and the pickup's differential, raised her head to survey the area. Nobody shooting in her immediate vicinity. This was good. She looked over at George. His eyes were squeezed shut and he'd managed to jam himself almost all the way beneath the truck, the bed of which had been ventilated at least twice that Kate could see from her prone position. Kate wasn't worried. At this point Mandy would barely notice the bullet holes.

"So, George," she said, "you think we should go after them?"

"Nope," George said, opening his eyes.

"Me neither," she decided. It was breakup, and she had nineteen other things to do without adding the arbitration of Ben and Cindy Bingley's marital spats to the list.

Bang! went the distant sound of the pistol a sixth time.

Especially when Cindy was so well armed.

George gave a long, shaky breath and climbed to his feet. "She's empty, now, anyway."

"It was an automatic," Kate said, wriggling free and standing up. Her Nikes were wet, dammit. Kate hated getting her feet wet. It ranked right up there with turning her back on a bear.

Three more shots sounded in rapid succession, followed by a whoop of triumph from Ben, a snarl of frustration from Cindy and the snapping of tree limbs. "Now she's empty," Kate said, relieved.

"Unless it was a staggered clip," George said. "Staggered clips have fourteen rounds."

"Shit," Kate said, with feeling. They both listened intently, bu t there were no more shots. Kate bent to brush ineffectually at the mud clinging to her knees. "Let's just hope she didn't have a spare clip."

"Gee, thanks for sharing, Shugak. You're always such a comfort to me."

"Mr. and Mrs. Baker?" Kate said belatedly. "Are you all right?" There was no immediate answer. Alarmed, she started around the truck, where she found Mr. and Mrs. Baker and the widower seated in a row on the ground. The widower's hands were over his ears, Mr. Baker's over his eyes, Mrs. Baker's over her mouth. Kate, reprehensibly, laughed.

Mr. Baker sensed movement and uncovered his eyes. He blinked up at Kate, rose a little unsteadily to his feet and assisted his wife to hers. Kate rearranged her face into a solemn expression and waited for it. It wasn't long in coming. "Are you quite all right, Ms. Shugak?"

"Quite all right, Mr. Baker," she replied, with admirable gravity. "And yourselves?

"Oh, quite," he said. He brushed at his once impeccably creased chinos. The seat was soaked through to where you could see what he was wearing beneath. Boxers. Only in Boston. "Who, may I ask, was that most extraordinary young woman?"

"Ah," Kate said. "That was Cindy Bingley."

"And the young man was her husband."

"Yes."

"Who appears to have committed some sort of transgression."

Kate was beginning to be amused. "Some sort."

Mrs. Baker weighed in. "She certainly seems to have a temper."

"She certainly does," Mr. Baker agreed, and if Kate was not demented, there was even something approaching a twinkle in his eye.

That was it? Evidently that was it. Kate didn't see any wounds or blood, and by this time they had acquired an interested crowd, everyone from inside the post office as well as most of the residents of the village and a few AWOL high school students, abou t three hundred in all and all clustered around George's pancaked plane.

There was much shaking of heads, a great deal of sagacious commentary, which Ceorge bore with gritted teeth, and a few offers of real help, which Kate promptly accepted on his behalf. They slid the plane sideways until the wing was free of the truck, and George, outrage evident in every line of his thin, angular body, marched off to fetch the crane truck while the rest of them unloaded everything they could out of the plane.

Between the crane and a dozen willing pairs of hands, the plane was right side up again thirty minutes later. "Thanks," George said in a gruff voice. The prop was bent into an artistic curve but the wing tip wasn't and nothing else looked much hurt, although Kate knew that the bent prop alone meant a complete teardown of the engine. George was a certified A and P mechanic, but it wasn't much consolation, as he would be spending a lot of hours on the ground when he should have been in the air making money.

Everyone in the crowd was thinking the same thing, and Demetri Totemoff cleared his throat. "George, you need a plane to keep the business going. I'll trade you hours on my 172. It's got the Lycoming conversion, so you can get in and out most of the places you do with the Cub."

George's expression lightened. "When's your annual due?"

"September."

"What about you? What will you be flying in the meantime?"

"The Tripacer's at Tyson's in Anchorage. He says the annual's done and the plane's ready for pickup. You know that cantankerous bastard, he wants it off the lot yesterday. We could take the 172 in, I can fly the Tripacer back, and you can take the 172."

George considered. Demetri was proposing an hour of maintenance in exchange for every hour in the air, the bulk of which would not be payable for another five months, and he could wor k on the Cub when he wasn't in the air. "Deal." He stuck out his hand. "Thanks, Demetri."

They shook on it. Kyle Kirkus, one of the schoolteachers who had only been in the Bush since the school year began the previous September, blurted, "You're going to loan him your plane? He just wrecked his own!"

Demetri looked at Kirkus with his usual impassive stare and said flatly, "At this moment, George is the safest pilot in Alaska."

Kirkus looked around for support, found none and wandered off, shaking his head.

The Cub was rolled across the airstrip to George's hangar, the rest of the crowd following with the seats. Once inside, it became obvious that the inside of the Cub and its seats were in urgent need of immediate swabbing down, preferably with an ammonia- based, industrial-strength cleaner, but this task the helpers seemed to feel George was capable of handling on his own, and scattered for home.

Kate crossed the "Strip and discovered that the Bakers had wandered into the post office, presumably to see if the same wanted posters hung on the walls there as in the post office on Beacon Hill, although now that she thought of it, she was pretty sure the Bakers didn't do anything as plebeian as post their own mail. The widower stood next to the truck, staring vacantly off into some never-never land, surrounded by several villagers who had by some subtle osmosis become aware of the bear attack and clustered around in an awkward attempt at condolence.

She headed up the single road that connected the houses of the village to the riverbank. The NorthCom shack was fifty feet up from the Niniltna school, and it was just that, a shack made of plywood stapled to a two-by-four frame and covered with tar paper. Behind it stood a 112-foot steel tower surmounted by a satellite dish.

Inside, unfinished interior walls leaked pink insulation all over the plywood floor and a tiny woodstove burned red-hot. A counte r divided the work space from the living space, if you could call one room with a camp cot and no running water living space. The work area was a counter with a bank of electronic gear stacked on it, surrounded by a litter of notepads and a scattering of ballpoint pens. A thin curtain of faded, fraying flowered cotton divided the two. The air was redolent of hot grease. "Mel?" Kate said. "You in here?"

A head crowned with shaggy dishwater-blond hair poked around the curtain. "Well, hey, Kate, how you doing?" The rest of his slight frame, clad in jeans and bright red aloha shirt, followed, one hand holding a plate of chicken-fried caribou steaks. Kate's mouth watered. She must have looked extremely needy, because Mel grinned and held out the plate.

Melvin Haney was young, the only kind of people Northern Communications, Inc., could bribe to stay this long at remote Bush earth stations with their primitive living conditions, although working a month on and a month off eased the pain somewhat. So did the salary, which astronomical sum Mel considered barely adequate compensation for having to use a chemical toilet he had to empty himself. A graduate of East High in Anchorage, where he'd spent a thoroughly enjoyable five years majoring mostly in trouble, his father, a NorthCom executive, had given him a choice: the job in Niniltna offering the Park population communication with the outside world via satellite, or a one-way ticket Outside. Mel had been to Disneyland, and after one look at the L.A. freeways had decided that while Outside was a nice place to visit, no sane person would want to live there. To his own surprise and to his father's amazement he had proved a success at the Niniltna site, and the rest, along with a succession of girlfriends provided by Kate's extended family, was history.

Kate liked him, scrawny, cheeky little squirt that he was. "Hey, Mel," she said, around a mouthful of steak. "Good stuff."

"The best." A generous and kindhearted young man, he put the plate on the counter between them. "What can I do you for?"

"You can marry me if you can cook this good," Kate mumbled around another mouthful.

"Nah," he said, snagging his own steak before they were all gone. "I know you, you'd be the jealous type, you wouldn't let me play the field."

"True." She swallowed. "Can you raise the trooper's office in Tok?"

"Really, Kate." He licked his fingers and did his best to look hurt. "I can raise the Viking Lander on this thing if I have to."

"You've been spending way too much time with Bobby Clark," Kate said.

Mel laughed and didn't deny it. "What's going on?"

"Bear attack up to the mine."

He made a face. "Is it bad?"

"She's dead." Remembering how dead, Kate lost her appetite and shoved the plate of steaks to one side.

"I'd call that bad, all right," he said soberly. "Who was it?"

"Don't know. EveVi if I did know her, I probably couldn't say now." In answer to his look, she added, "There's not much of her face left."

He shuddered, and moved to adjust a switch on a bank of electronic equipment. He punched some numbers into a keypad and gave her the handset. It rang twice before the other end picked up. "Alaska State Troopers, Tok."

Kate recognized the voice. "Elaine, this is Kate Shugak in Niniltna."

"Well, hey, Kate. Long time no see. You survive the winter okay?"

"The winter was fine. I may not make it through breakup."

"Oh, yeah? What's up?"

"Bear attack. One woman dead."

"They're up, are they?"

"They're up and grouchy," Kate said. "Can you tell Jim to rod on over here with a body bag?"

"Wasn't he just over there picking up another body?"

"Yes."

"Breakup," Elaine said. "Hang on." She muffled the receiver for a moment before coming back on. "He's on his way, Kate. Don't you just love this time of year?"

"I downright adore it, Elaine. Tell Jim I've got the remains rolled in a tarp in the back of a truck parked on the Niniltna airstrip next to the post office."

"Okay. He'll be there inside the hour."

Mel accepted the handset and signed off. "Want me to call Dan O'Brian next?"

In Alaska, every accidental death required an investigation and an autopsy, and the ones involving close and fatal encounters with wildlife usually involved a fish hawk or a ranger as well. "Might as well."

She visited with Mel for a while before returning to the airstrip. In the post office she checked her mail, avoided looking at the ubiquitous piles of tax forms stacked on the counter and went back outside in time to see Dan's Super Cub lining up on final. He landed, taxied to the head of the runway and got out. "Just couldn't wait to see me again, could you, Kate?" he said cheerfully.

"It's not pretty," she warned him as he began to unroll the tarp.

"It never is," he agreed, but when the body was bared the muscles in his face shifted. Kate watched him in silence. She had been too preoccupied with her own problems that morning to take a good look at him, which was a shame, because the view was not bad.

Armed with a degree in forestry, Dan O'Brian had come into the Parks Service by way of the Everglades in Florida, where he discovered an aversion to snakes, and Volcanoes National Park on Hawaii, where he discovered an even greater aversion to lava.

He transferred to Alaska just in time for the d-2 lands bill, which doubled the size of the Park. He'd been chief ranger fo r fourteen years, steering a course between the Scylla of the rights of the Natives and homesteaders and miners around whose property the Park had been created, and the Charybdis of his responsibilities as custodian of twenty million acres of public property. He succeeded so well that not once had he ever been shot at on duty, which had to be some kind of record for a federal employee in the Alaskan bush. Off duty was another matter. As much of a skirt chaser as Chopper Jim, he was less successful at it, and thus less irritating to local husbands, but they couldn't shoot at a state trooper. A park ranger made a not disgraceful second-best.

About the time Kate started comparing the blue of his eyes with the blue of Chopper Jim's, she came to her senses and pulled herself together. She'd always had a healthy respect for the sexual urge but fantasizing over a man she'd known as a friend for more than fourteen years veered dangerously close to the ridiculous. She was angry with herself, and deep down, a little afraid. Control was very important to Kdle Shugak, and over the last two days control seemed to be slipping from her grasp.