Midnight come again (31 page)

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Was she?

Bird calls began to sound, chirps to song to honks, but not the one she was listening for.

Birds know their own place.

She was five steps from the outhouse when somebody threw a blanket over her head. "Hey!" Her shout was loud and immediate and completely muffled by the blanket.

She fought, kicking, struggling. A rope was thrown, fastened tight.

"Mutt!" she tried to yell, and then somebody unloaded a ton of bricks on her and she knew no more.

She woke up in the bed of a pickup truck.

At least that's what she thought it was when it bounced over a rut and tossed her a foot in the air. She came down hard with her head jammed into a corner and her shoulder against something that felt uncomfortably like the fender of a wheel well.

She was glad that her head was jammed into a corner because it felt only tentatively attached to her body and might otherwise have fallen right off her shoulders. There was a dull, insistent pain making its presence known to someone, somewhere, but her most pressing concern was her need to breathe. The blanket over her head was smothering her. Her hands had been bound to her side beneath it, pulling her elbows into the indentation of her waist, a natural curve between breasts and hips that resisted efforts to inch the rope up or down.

She was still fighting it when the driver of the truck slammed on his brakes and she slid forward into the cab, hard. She was still dazed when the tailgate went down, although she could hear that he had left the engine running.

Hands grabbed her feet and she resisted the instinctive urge to kick. It hadn't helped last time, and her only advantage might be in leading her captor to believe that she was still unconscious. So far as she could tell, straining her ears, there was only one person.

She was thrown unceremoniously over a shoulder in a fireman's lift. The breath went out of her in a whoof, the pain that had been happening to somebody else was not so distant anymore and she was unable to restrain a faint groan. She gritted her teeth and counted as the man carrying her walked, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven steps in all. There was a grunt, a shift of weight and she fell backwards, knocking her right shoulder on something round and hard and landing on a surface softer than the truck bed but which knocked the breath out of her just the same.

Which was fortunate, as she couldn't move or exclaim as she felt hands at the rope binding her arms. There was a moment of clarity, of realization. He was untying her. This was it, her chance for escape. Her breath returned and she fought to hide it though her lungs were starving for oxygen.

Throughout her captor remained silent, no word, no sound, and for some reason his silence told her that she was about to die. The realization steadied her, cleared her head, and she didn't move as the rope and the blanket were stripped away. She kept her eyes closed, and let herself utter an artistic little moan when she was hauled upright to sit behind a steering wheel. So that was what had hit her right shoulder when he'd dropped her. She was in the cab of the pickup.

He draped her limp body over the steering wheel, and reached around her for the gearshift.

She beat him to it, sitting upright, throwing in the clutch and slamming the gearshift into reverse. Only there was no clutch, and no reverse; the goddamn thing was an automatic.

Hands grabbed her again. Somebody swore roughly in Russian and she turned to see her friend Yuri, her midnight caller, her Snerts opponent, her genial host on board the Kosygin, face creased in an open-mouthed snarl that made him almost unrecognizable.

Still, she couldn't help herself, she paused for one stunned second.

"Yuri? Not you!" He hit the side of her face hard with his fist. Her ears rang. He launched himself into the cab and they grappled, struggling. He was bigger and stronger than she was, but she was more frightened, and more angry. His hands came around her throat. She kept her hands on his wrists, ignoring the steadily tightening pressure as her right foot fought for purchase against the dash. She felt a knob break off beneath her sole, concentrated on finding a surface her foot wouldn't slip on, and then straightened her right leg with an abrupt movement.

It didn't have the force she had hoped for because the steering wheel was in the way, but it was enough to send him off balance and staggering backwards. His hands loosened from her throat but didn't let go, dragging her with him. She didn't let go of his wrists, either, using her body weight to keep him off balance. She sagged to the ground and if he didn't quite fall forward he could not stand straight up, either.

And then Mutt landed on his back, a hundred and forty pounds of rage and fangs. She sank her teeth deep into the back of his neck and he screamed, a hoarse, horrible scream, and let go of Kate to reach back to try ineffectually to push Mutt away. She let go of his throat to bite one of his hands to the bone. He screamed again. Somehow he managed to shake Mutt off and stumble to his feet. Kate, on her knees and gasping for breath, pulled herself to her feet. The hour before dawn had come, bringing with it enough light to see everything clearly. There was no trace of the husky in Mutt now; she was all wolf, long, slender legs on tiptoe, ruff extended, long, sharp teeth bared, a steady, rumbling growl emanating from deep in her breast. She looked like the lupine version of Satan incarnate; murderous, deadly, relentless. Judgment had been rendered, sentence passed, and there was no appeal. Next to Mutt, Yuri looked like an amateur, and he knew it.

Terrified, mesmerized, he backed away. Mutt stalked forward, matching him, step for step, crabbing sideways the way wolves do when they're going for the kill. Kate tried to say something, tried to call Mutt off, but Yuri's hands had been too strong and too effective and nothing emerged but a weak croaking sound. She tried again. "Mutt. Mutt!"

Mutt either didn't hear her or didn't want to. She continued to shadow Yuri, who was too terrified to turn his back and run. He continued to back away, one careful, trembling foot feeling behind him at a time.

He stepped back once more and his expression changed to surprise, and then panic. He lost his balance, waved his arms in a futile attempt to get it back, and suddenly, he was no longer there.

With a howl of rage Mutt sprang after him.

Galvanized, Kate scrabbled to her feet and staggered after them.

The road ended abruptly, in a cessation of the gravel pad that was twenty feet thick and so made a steep twenty-foot-slope down which to fall. Clumps of alders and thin-boled birch grew here and there, a few poppies, some Alaska cotton and of course tall stalks of the ubiquitous fireweed.

Yuri was lying at the bottom of the man-made bluff, Mutt standing over him in stiff-legged outrage, growling out her resentment at being balked of prey.

Yuri's head lay at an odd angle from the rest of his body. Sightless eyes stared at the sky. He was quite dead. elusive as quiet steps at midnight

--Drumbeats Somewhere Passing Mutt squatted over Yuri's body, cut loose with a stream of urine, kicked a contemptuous pawful of dirt over him and bounded up the bank. She jumped up to place her paws on Kate's shoulders, anxious eyes staring into Kate's own. A steady, worried whine had replaced the menacing growl.

"It's okay, girl." The words came out in a croaking whisper. "It's okay." She let her forehead rest on Mutt's shoulder, and they stood there, leaning against each other.

The truck was still running.

Kate didn't know when that fact impinged upon her consciousness, but it brought her back to herself with a start. Mutt's paws dropped down to the ground, and she padded after Kate as she walked to the cab.

Standing on the ground next to it was a bottle of Windsor Canadian, the seal unbroken. So that was how she was supposed to go out, just another drunken Native boosting a truck, wrecking it and getting herself killed for her pains. Happened all the time, all over the Bush. What could be easier?

She couldn't have said why the realization made her literally shake with fury, but shake with fury she did. "Mutt," she said, her voice a little stronger now. "Up." With one leap Mutt was up and over the side of the bed. Kate picked up the blanket and the rope and tossed them in after her, along with the bottle of whiskey, and closed the tailgate.

She was physically unequal at present to the task of bringing Yuri's body up the bank, and besides, the idea of a few carnivores nibbling on him as he waited to be retrieved was attractive in the extreme.

The truck was registered to someone named Paul B. Malloy, presumably the man Yuri had boosted it from. The tank was half empty, but roads leading from Bering never led far, and she turned it around and started back.

She drove very slowly and very carefully, negotiating every bump in the road as if it were Denali. The journey seemed to take hours, when in reality it was only twenty minutes. She'd been gone from the hangar for less than an hour.

She parked the truck very painstakingly indeed in front of the office door, descended from the cab with exaggerated care and walked slowly and precisely back to the bunkhouse. She even knocked on the door. She had to knock twice before he answered it.

"Kate!" she heard somebody say, and suddenly what little strength she had left in her knees gave out.

Arms caught her, and she was vaguely grateful. "Thank you," she said politely. "You know, I think I need to sit down now."

Jim had lain awake for some time, puzzling over the accounts Kate had given him. He had debated whether he should go down to the docks in search of Carroll and Casanare to pass this information on, and had decided almost immediately against it. Carroll and Casanare were fixated on the idea that the Russian Mafia was preparing to turn western Alaska into a funnel for the importation of illegal arms and parts thereof to domestic terrorist groups within the United States. He would need more evidence if he was going to change their minds.

When he showed them the processors' bank accounts, he would have to tell them where he had gotten them, and they were already more than willing to lock Kate up as an accomplice to the Russians.

He wondered about Yuri again. Old, young? And just how friendly had he and Kate been?

He wondered then if he should seek out Mary Zarr and offer her the apology she so richly deserved.

In his life he had never treated a woman so shabbily.

Yes, he thought of himself as a cocksman; yes, he'd had a weather eye out for the girl most likely since he was fourteen and had been deflowered lustily and most enjoyably by the girls' Softball coach at the Y. He loved women, all women, short, tall, fat, thin, old, young; he did not discriminate. He loved everything about them, the shapes of their bodies as well as the convoluted workings of their minds. He loved the chase as much as he loved the culmination of the chase.

His problem was that he had a short attention span, as the first women in his life had pointed out to him, with emphasis. He made up for it with a combination of truth and good manners; telling the first and displaying the second.

Telling the truth entailed never making promises he knew he wouldn't keep.

Good manners included waking up next to the same woman you'd gone to bed with the night before, remembering her name, and thanking her in word and deed for the privilege.

He'd failed Mary on all three counts.

He was pretty certain she would throw any apology right back in his face. He was also convinced that she ought to be allowed the opportunity. It was only fair.

He must have fallen asleep worrying about it, because the next thing he knew was the knock on the door. He answered it and barely caught Kate before she fell on her face. He carried her to her bunk and laid her down. "No," she said, trying to sit up. "That makes the world go around." He propped pillows between her and the wall. "What the hell happened to you?" he said, more shaken than he wanted to admit.

And then he had to stop, because the memories slammed into him like a blow. They were separate, and then there were so many of them all at once that they jumbled against each other, jostling for attention. They were continuous, repetitious, vivid and immediate. Kate, bleeding and oblivious, Jack's body cradled in her arms. A rusting trim line too far above the water. Dark, cavernous, echoingly empty rooms, one after the other. A mutter of some foreign tongue. Carroll and Casanare and, yes, and Gamble in his office in Tok. In his hospital room in Bering. No, not Gamble in Bering, Mary Zarr. The missing smell of fish. The smell of missing fish? Incongruously, his mother and father, side by side in their matching La-Z-Boys in front of the thirty-two-inch television set.

He looked at Kate. There was dried blood on her neck behind her ear, and bruises on her throat. "What happened?"

"Somebody tried to kill me." Her voice was hoarse, more so than it usually was.

"Who?"

"Yuri."

"Yuri? Yuri the deckhand off the Kosygin Yuri? The one who's been visiting you nights?" She nodded.

"What did you do, beat him at Snerts?"

"Very funny," she croaked.

"Why'd he try to kill you?"

"I don't know. He didn't say, and I was too busy fending him off to ask him," she said, with a returning spark of her old spirit. "Could I have some water?"