Though Not Dead (55 page)

And so she very, very slowly extracted the map from the inside pocket of her parka. She held it out to him.

He stepped forward, reaching for it with his free hand. She watched the barrel of the pistol. His hand closed around the map and the barrel dropped, and in that same moment she took a step forward and grabbed the wrist of his gun hand in both of hers. She took another step, turning her back to him, and bent over, bending her legs, pulling him with her.

He was taken by surprise and lost his balance. He started to fall on her. As he did, she straightened her legs with a snap, still holding on to his wrist. His arm acted as a fulcrum and he made an almost perfect somersault, landing on his back with a thud that shook the cave.

Through all this he managed to hang onto the pistol. It went off, a big boom in a small room, followed by the sound of ricochets, two, three, it might have been four. Kate stood there, petrified, afraid that her impromptu plan was going to lead to an impromptu death.

Which it almost did, because the bullet’s multiple impact caused mini-landslides all over the interior surface of the cave. Rock fell behind her, to her left, pieces fell from the side of the tunnel where it led into the cave. More rock fell from the roof, filling the air with dust and their hoods and hair with grit and sand and pebbles. This was more than Erland was paying Bruce for and he let out a sound somewhere between a yelp and a squeal and was up and hobbling for the entrance.

Kate paused long enough to scoop up the heavy rock and stuff it in the pocket of her parka, where it knocked heavily against her knee as she ran down the tunnel. The rumbling falls of rock grew in size and strength and intensity behind her until it sounded as if the entire side of the mountain was caving in. Just short of the tunnel’s mouth she was enveloped in a cloud of dust that stung her eyes and obscured her vision. She threw out her arms so that her fingers grazed the tunnel’s walls and flung herself forward with such impetus she almost walked off the edge of the cliff face.

She stood there, coughing and blinking. When her vision cleared she saw that Bruce had regained the foot of the wall and was scrambling into snowshoes.

“Dumb fuck,” she said. “Who shoots off a gun in a cave? You could have gotten us both killed.”

He heard her voice and cast up one haunted glance before heading down the canyon at a spanking pace. Kate paused for a moment to admire his form. If Bruce Abbott could run on snowshoes, he was a lot more competent in the backwoods than she had previously supposed.

Kate removed the rock from her pocket, set it just inside the adit, and kicked some rockfall over it. Bruce had been in such a hurry he hadn’t bothered to pull the eyebolts or untie the line. She took her time coming down. There was only one way out of the canyon, and if it came to that she could find him in Anchorage. She knew who he was working for, and what he wanted. Even if he went to ground, Max had baited him into a trap for her once, and she had no doubt that he could do it again. She strapped on her own snowshoes and followed at a more leisurely pace.

She made the cabin in good time and found Mutt in a considerable state of excitement but still on guard. “Good girl,” Kate said. “Must have been torture for you when you heard him go by.”

Mutt gave a half shake that was the equivalent of a shrug. It’s what we professionals do. Kate surveyed her three prisoners. “What the hell am I going to do with the three of you while I go catch me another bad guy?”

They offered her no suggestions. In the end, she tossed everything that might be conceivably used for a sharp edge into a garbage bag and nailed the door of the cabin shut behind her. “Oh, stop whining,” she said. “Ben’s got one hand free, there’s enough wood to see you through the night, and I left you the fire extinguisher in case you somehow set yourselves on fire. I’ll try to be back to get you before then.”

She dumped the garbage bag into the trailer, which she did not hitch to her snowgo. She’d topped off the fuel in the Arctic Cat when she arrived, and this time no one had put a bullet hole into the tank. More fool them. The engine started at a touch and Kate grinned at Mutt, who was quivering with eagerness to see some action. “Let’s blow this pop stand, girlfriend!”

Mutt leaped up behind her and Kate hit the gas.

She took the first dogleg with caution, making sure Bruce wasn’t waiting for her with a baseball bat, and found instead his tracks, and another snowgo, this one the Ski-Doo Rev XP Herbie had told her about, which undoubtedly belonged to one of the parties presently incarcerated in the Canyon Hot Springs Correctional. At a guess she’d say Pete. A lawyer could conceivably afford this sled, a journalist never. She almost missed the snowgo belonging to the second party, another Ski-Doo, although this one was so old it was nearly an antique. Had to be Ben’s. It had been pushed into a clump of thick brush. If it had snowed a little between the time he had parked it and the time she had seen it, it would have been invisible.

She continued. Bruce was in headlong flight. There were some corners where he only left the track of one ski in the snow. “Moving at a pretty good clip,” Kate said over her shoulder to Mutt. “I wonder if he knows how he’s going to get out of the Park?”

She laughed and hit the throttle as they came down into the last straight stretch before the last dogleg and leaned into the turn.

Not so dumb, after all, Bruce Abbott, because that’s where he was waiting for her, not with a baseball bat in hand but a solid piece of deadfall about an inch in diameter. He timed it pretty well, too, so that she ran right into the swing he was bringing forward with both hands.

He was partially foiled when it caught the top of Kate’s windshield, which deflected his stroke. It wasn’t enough to miss her entirely, but it allowed her to take the brunt of the blow across her top of her head, which was covered with her parka hood, which further cushioned the blow.

Not, however, enough that she wasn’t flung backward from her snowgo, carrying Mutt with her. She landed on Mutt, hard, the breath knocked out of both of them.

She lay on her back, still conscious, blinking up at the sky, and then was shoved to one side when Mutt scrabbled out from beneath her. She barked at Kate—
Get up! Get on your feet, soldier!
—and made an abortive leap toward their attacker. Kate could hear the engine of his machine roar to life and the machine head away at full throttle.

Mutt leapt back to her side and barked right in her face.
Get up! The bad guy’s getting away! I could be tearing him a new asshole and here you are lazing around on your back! Get UP!

Amazing the articulation and eloquence Mutt could achieve with one sound.

“You know what?” Kate said to the cold gray sky overhead. “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Her head was starting to hurt. Again.

Mutt wasn’t having any of it. She sank her teeth into the sleeve of Kate’s parka, set her hindquarters, and began to pull. Kate slid willy-nilly across the snow in brief, powerful tugs.

“Mutt,” she said.

Yank.

“Knock it off.”

Yank.

“Just give me a minute. I’ll be okay.”

Yank.

“Mutt.” She didn’t even have the wherewithal to summon up a good bellow.

Mutt, with quicker recuperative powers, had no such problem. She dropped her mouthful of parka long enough to bark another command.
Shut up and breathe!

This time she grabbed the leg of Kate’s bibs and hauled.

This time Kate just went with it, watching the clouds sail by overhead, and the occasional alder limb revolve, bumping over hummocks covered with ice, sliding between overhanging bushes that dropped snow on her face, becoming a little too well-acquainted with the edges of rocks. “Ouch,” she thought she said once.

The sky steadied and she realized that Mutt had hauled her to where her snow machine had stopped. Amazingly, the engine was still ticking over. With Mutt on his tail, Bruce hadn’t had time to grab the key or disable the engine. Kate even found a moment to be grateful that his pistol had been buried in the cave-in.

Mutt let go of the leg of her bibs and pounced on her head, using her teeth to pull Kate’s hood back, after which she gave Kate’s face a thorough washing, in between minatory yelps and yips. Kate got tired of the yelping and yipping a lot sooner than she tired of the tongue bath, soon enough to discover that her arms still worked. She shoved Mutt off her. “It’s okay, girl. I’ll be okay.”

Mutt wedged her snout under Kate’s shoulder and shoved. She managed to sit upright. The earth took a revolution around the sun at a heretofore unheard-of pace.

Kate closed her eyes, which were starting to feel a little puffy. When she opened them a moment later, the world and she were both a little steadier, enough so that she could rummage in her pack, which was still on her back, for a bottle of water. She emptied it and felt the better for it, enough so that she could hoist a leg up over the seat of the snowgo.

There, she had handlebars to hold her up.

She felt her face. There was a lump coming up on her forehead, right at her hairline. “Goddammit,” she said, and felt a surge of rage, which filled her with a probably illusory energy. “I was just getting over the last set of black eyes.”

Mutt barked.

“All right,” Kate said, “get on.”

This time she kept the throttle all the way down, and if anyone had been inclined to try to follow her tracks they would have seen that on this trip down the mountain her snowgo was more often airborne than it was earthbound. She took the straight path wherever and whatever it offered. If there was a ledge she jumped it, if there was a field of moguls she flew from top to top barely touching their crowns. She barreled through blueberry bushes and willow thickets alike, she frightened the life out of three peacefully browsing moose, and she saved an entire colony of shrews from the excavations of an arctic fox when she scooped him up with her front left ski and bore him a quarter of a mile before he finally regained enough sense to roll off. There must have been times, she thought later, that her speed had achieved something that could have launched her into low earth orbit. Certainly she had set some kind of land speed record that Arctic Cat would forever mourn they had not been present to record. Those parts of her face exposed to the wind felt frozen solid. She could hear nothing but the roar of the engine, and she could feel nothing but the pressure of Mutt against her back, teeth locked in a death grip on a mouthful of parka so she wouldn’t fall off.

The edge of the high had moved far enough north that the setting sun was framed between horizon and the edge of the clouds the high was pushing northwest. Between its blinding rays, the new head wound, and the lingering cave dust, Kate’s vision wasn’t what it should have been, and she didn’t acquire Bruce as a target until he was ten miles out of Niniltna. He had the faster vehicle but she was the better driver, and it took her only five more miles to close to within a hundred feet. He knew they were there and hunched down behind his handlebars, but he was getting all he could get out of his Polaris and he lost even more ground by panicking.

Kate drew up slowly, inexorably, level with his snowgo. “Go!” Kate said, and Mutt sprang, aiming straight for him.

He hauled on his handlebars and veered right. Mutt missed him by inches. She was going so fast her momentum sent her skidding for fifty feet before she managed to scramble up and give chase. In the meantime he’d straightened out and was back on course for Niniltna, the tiny houses of which were just now becoming visible against the snow. Kate didn’t know what he thought he was going to do once he got there.

She pulled out the line she had taken from the cliff face and stuffed in the pocket of her parka. There was one slip knot left in the end of it. She needed her right hand for the throttle. She tugged off her left mitten with her teeth, tossed it over her shoulder, and pulled the slipknot loose and large and let the loop dangle from her left hand.

She was coming up on Bruce’s left now, pushing him off course, into the path of Mutt, who was coming up on his right, a flattened, elongated gray shape skimming over the snow. All his concentration was on Kate so he didn’t see Mutt until the last minute, and when he did he pulled instinctively to his right to avoid crashing into her.

Kate, teeth bared in a grin savage with joy, dropped the loop around his shoulders. She whipped the loose end of the line quick around the handlebars and grabbed the handlebars in both hands and braced herself as her snow machine passed his.

Behind her there was a yell and her whole snowgo seemed to halt in midair, the engine revving to the decibel level of a 737 as the track revolved with nothing to push against. There was a loud thud when Bruce hit the ground, followed by another as the Arctic Cat hit the snow again in something approximating a controlled crash.

Kate ran at full throttle all the way to town and right down the main street, Bruce Abbott yelling and cursing at the end of the rope, dragging him past the Grosdidiers’ clinic, past Auntie Edna’s house, past the Riverside Café, past Bingley Mercantile, around the corner and up the hill past Auntie Joy’s and Emaa’s and Old Sam’s.

All the way to the trooper post, where she slowed down and pulled in and finally, at last, let the Arctic Cat’s engine die.

Mutt came trotting up to take Kate’s temperature with her nose and give her a hearty Well done! lick, before taking up station next to Bruce, who was still cursing.

Kate dismounted and straightened her back, a little surprised that she could. She looked up at the porch, where an astonished Maggie stood staring down at her.

Kate pushed her hood back.

“Jesus,” Maggie said, and actually took a step back.

Kate couldn’t imagine what she looked like, but knew the grin she gave Maggie was lopsided in the extreme.

“I ride an old paint, I lead an old dan,” she said, and laughed.

1965

Amchitka

Sam was in Kodiak for the Good Friday Earthquake, in the middle of delivering a load of king crab to Whitney-Fidalgo. He heard yells on the dock. When he looked out of the wheelhouse to see who’d fallen overboard, he saw instead the massive wooden dock rippling like waves, first in one direction and then in other. It looked like the piano keyboard in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.