Whisper to the Blood (18 page)

The trees lining the road blurred, the stars overhead were a silver smear
against the black sky. They met no traffic along the way, and in Niniltna Dinah
slowed down just enough to take the turn for the road leading downriver that
led to the Roadhouse and then opened up the throttle again. Kate stuck to her
tail like a burr, Mutt holding the shoulder of Kate's parka in her teeth to
maintain her balance. The two miles between the village and the turnoff at
Squaw
Candy
Creek
passed in a blink
and then Dinah was negotiating the trail that led to her and Bobby's house.
Kate saw with dismay that Bobby's truck wasn't outside.

They killed the engines and went into the house, shedding outerwear as they
went.

"I'm freezing, let me make some coffee," Dinah said.

"Talk while you do," Kate said. At her side stood Mutt, tense and
ready to rip a new one in whatever had Kate so upset. She looked up and Kate
rested a hand on her head. Mutt's ears flattened and she gave an interrogatory
whine.

"It's okay, girl," Kate said with more confidence than she felt.
"Everything's going to be fine." She hooked the rung of a stool with
her foot and sat down. Mutt, not entirely convinced, allowed herself to be
persuaded to sit, too, but she wouldn't move from Kate's side, leaning against
her thigh, a solid, anxious presence. When Dinah gave her a strip of moose
jerky, she took it politely, gave it a gnaw or two, and then set it down, which
had to be a first.

"Where's my goddaughter?" Kate asked belatedly.

"With Bobby. We figured it was better Katya was in the truck with
him."

"What happened?"

"At about—" Dinah glanced at the clock on the wall and
calculated. "—I guess it would have been about one a.m. . . . maybe
one thirty, everything happened so fast I wasn't paying attention to the time .
. . Jim banged on the door. He said that Johnny's PLB- Your idea?"

"Yes."

"I think I'll have one welded to Katya's ankle. The Park equivalent of
a Lojack. Anyway, Jim said Johnny's PLB went off and wherever the alarm is
received alerted Kenny Hazen, who called Jim. Who evidently was in
Niniltna?" A raised eyebrow.

Kate raised her shoulders. "I don't know, work, I guess. He didn't make
it out to the house last night."

"We need cell towers in the Park and we need them now," Dinah
said. "Jim was going out after them. Bobby said he'd ride shotgun. Jim
said no, he didn't know what the situation was, if anyone was hurt or how
badly, be better if Bobby brought his truck, and the snow machine trailer,
too."

Kate drew in a sharp breath.

Dinah held up one stern hand, like a traffic cop, and repeated

Kate's own admonitions to herself almost word for word. "Don't, Kate,
don't borrow trouble. They'll bring them back and then we'll see. We can handle
whatever happens. Just keep calm."

But Kate noticed that her hands were a little unsteady with the teakettle.

They drank in silence. The minutes crawled by, the drag of every second like
a fingernail on a blackboard. It was twenty-plus miles from Bobby's house to
where Jim said the PLB was transmitting from. Bobby and Jim would have taken
the road to a mile or so past the turnoff to
Camp
Theodore
,
Ruthe's eco-lodge. There they would have left the road to Bernie's and taken to
the river.

Kate walked to the window and looked out. It was a clear, cold night, and it
was early enough that there shouldn't be any traffic on the river and less on
the road. She stared at the track that led from Bobby's yard to the little
bridge that crossed
Squaw
Candy
Creek
and disappeared into the trees, willing the nose of the white Blazer with the
trooper seal on the side to appear.

It didn't. By a sheer act of will she turned her back on the window and
walked away.

Bobby's house was one large, open A-frame room, except for the bathroom in
one corner-bedroom, kitchen, living room surrounding the central work station
in one continuous space. At the work station, a doughnut-shaped desk supported
a whole bunch of electronic equipment, which was connected to a snake's nest of
wires writhing up a central pole to disappear through the roof. Outside, they
were connected to antennas and microwave shots and who knew what else hanging
off the 112-foot tower that stood out back.

Bobby Clark had lost both legs below the knee in
Vietnam
. After too long in a vet
hospital, he spent the intervening years making a lot of money in endeavors
that no one was so impolite as to inquire into before he arrived in the Park,
flush in the pocket and with a mind to buy land and build. The A-frame and the
tower went up the first year and shortly thereafter Bobby became the NOAA
weather observer for the Park. It was gainful employment that gave him a vague
aura of respectability and more important, a verifiable income. If said income
didn't come close to equaling his expenditures at least its existence laid the
hackles of law enforcement personnel who might be otherwise inclined to inquire
as to the provenance of his additional funding.

Bobby broadcast Park Air from that same console, a pirate radio station
featuring pre-seventies rock and blues, with occasional forays into
post-acoustic Jimmy Buffett, and irregularly scheduled public service programs
featuring swap and shops, talk radio, and broadcasts for messages on the Bush
telegraph. He flew a Super Cub specially altered to accommodate his disability,
drove a pickup and a snow machine ditto, and he was Dinah's husband and the
father of a three-year-old imp named for Kate. She'd delivered the imp and done
duty as best man and maid of honor both at Bobby and Dinah's wedding, all three
on the same day, the memory of which never failed to give everyone involved the
heebie-jeebies.

She looked around the room, noting the distance between Katya's crib and the
California King not that far away, and her eyes came to rest on Dinah, who was
watching her with a worried expression. "You're going to need to add
on," Kate said. "Katya's getting to be an age where she could
seriously interfere with your love life."

Dinah actually smiled. "Tell me about it. She's already interrupted us
a couple of times. There is nothing more, um, deflating, than a three-year-old
kid saying, 'Daddy, get off, you're squishing her!'"

Kate laughed dutifully.

"We've already talked about building another room," Dinah said.
"Where will you put it?"

Appreciating Kate's determination to act as normally as possible, Dinah fell
into discussing the proposed addition. It would be built on the east side of
the existing house, cutting a hole in that wall, extending the foundation, and
building the room on top of it. "She's almost too big for the crib now
anyway, she's been climbing in and out of it for almost a year. We
think—"

Mutt's ears pricked up and she padded forward. "Listen," Kate said
sharply, running to the window.

The white Blazer bumped into the clearing, followed by the brand-new black
Ford Ranger Bobby had bought Dinah for her birthday that year. The motion
detector lights on the outside of the A-frame lit up the two snow machines
lashed to the trailer it pulled, both of them looking worse for wear.

Kate gave something like a sob. "Kate—," Dinah started to
say, but by then Kate was out the door and halfway down the steps.

Jim popped his door and stuck his head out. "They're okay, Kate,"
he said. "They're all okay."

By then Johnny was out of the cab and on the ground, looking tired and beat
up, and Kate had her arms around him and her face buried in his bib overalls.
She wasn't crying, she never cried, but she didn't want anyone to see whatever
it was on her face. His arms came around her, hugging her back just as
fiercely.

She might have sniffled, just a little, and then she forced herself to let
him go. "You're okay, then," she said, a little gruffly.

"Yeah," he said, with a long sigh.

She looked past him, at Ruthe and Van, Ruthe angry, Van exhausted. "All
of you?"

"Yeah. All of us. Kate?"

"What?"

He suddenly looked older than his years. "Mac Devlin has been
murdered."

ELEVEN

J
im was in the air at first light, on
his way to Suulutaq. Kate was with him. "You'll need help loading the
body," she said. "And if some nut is running around out there with a
gun, you could use the backup, preferably backup that knows enough not to mess
with your crime scene."

No point arguing with that, and Jim didn't waste his breath. She had her
snow machine. If he hadn't let her come with him, she would have been on the
river by sunrise.

Bobby had fetched the Grosdidier brothers, who patched up the walking
wounded and made sure everyone saw two fingers, after which Bobby drove them
and Van home. Ruthe put away a gargantuan breakfast, eggs and bacon and
potatoes and the better part of a loaf of bread, toasted and slathered with
butter, and departed for home on the Jag, resisting Dinah's entreaties to rest
up on one of the couches before making the journey. "Gal's almost psychic,
she'll know something's wrong and she'll be anxious after me," she said,
adding, not unaffectionately, "Damn cat."

On the doorstep she paused. "I never liked Mac Devlin much," she
said after a moment, appearing to chew on the words. "But he was a Park
rat, and a neighbor. We lent him one of our cabins the year his burned. He
stayed there for two months while he rebuilt. After that, whenever we needed
some dirt work done, he was there with his D6 or his front-end loader. Never
had to ask more than once. Never had to ask, really, just had to say what
needed doing and he was there, usually the next day."

She looked at Kate. "You'll find out who did this, and why, and you'll
make sure they get what's coming to them."

"Yes," Kate said.

Ruthe nodded, still in that ruminant way, and took herself off.

Katya attached herself to Johnny like a barnacle and refused all attempts to
remove her, until she finally fell asleep, drooling into his shoulder. Dinah
detached her and put her to bed. In turn, Johnny passed out on one of the
couches. Kate covered him with a blanket and stood looking down at him.

"Little fucker like to give his momma a heart attack?" Bobby said
fondly, rolling his chair up next to her.

"Shh," she said, "you'll wake him."

"Couldn't wake that boy with a goddamn air horn," Bobby said.
"Wanna try?" Without waiting for an answer he rolled to the table and
tucked into his own breakfast. "When's my next fare?" he said between
bites.

"Me to the airstrip," Kate said. "I'm flying out to Suulutaq
with Jim as soon as it's light."

Bobby chewed and swallowed. Mutt was sitting next to him, gazing at him with
an adoration that had very little to do with the strip of bacon he was eating.
He fed it to her anyway, still eyeing Kate. "Mac Devlin," he said.
"The Park's least favorite miner. At least until Global Harvest came
along. You know Global Harvest bought him out for about ten cents on the
dollar?"

"Yeah."

"He wasn't happy about that."

"No," Kate said, "he wasn't."

"He's been popping up everywhere in the Park that Macleod broad has
shown up talking about the mine-Bernie's, the Riverside Cafe, up the store. I
heard he was at the Chamber of Commerce meeting she spoke at in Ahtna, even.
You could almost say he was stalking her."

"You could," Kate said.

"What the hell was he doing out there, Kate? Trying to burn it down?
Even Mac Devlin had to know what a futile gesture that would be."

"You'd think," she said. "I don't know anything about it yet,
Bobby. All I know is he's been shot, and that he's dead, and that it happened
in the Global Harvest trailer at Suulutaq."

"Interesting to speculate, though," he said. "There'll be a
lot of that going on in the Park."

"Yes," she said grimly. "There surely will."

T
he high over the Park was holding and
according to Bobby was supposed to keep holding at least through the weekend.
It was another clear, calm day when they rose into the air off the end of the
forty-eight-hundred-foot gravel airstrip that ran behind the
village
of
Niniltna
.

"I love CAVU," Jim said over the headset.

Ceiling and visibility unlimited. "I heard that," Kate said with
feeling. "Have you talked to Macleod yet?"

His voice came back over her earphones, sounding tinny and devoid of its
usual resonant assurance. "Yeah."

"Where is she? I kind of thought she might insist on accompanying
us."

"She probably would have, but she's in Cordova."

"You talk to her on the phone?"

"Yeah. She'll be back in the Park this evening."

"She say what Mac Devlin was doing out there?"

"No, but she said he was really unhappy over what Global Harvest paid
him for the Nabesna Mine, and he didn't mind saying so every time he saw
her."

"Bobby said he was stalking her."

"Pretty much. She told me that she figured he was going to make enough
of a nuisance of himself that Global Harvest would buy him off. And that Global
Harvest knew that the longer they waited the lower Mac's price would be."

"Whoa."

She could hear the shrug in his voice. "That's business. It's all about
the bottom line for those people, Kate."

The Quilaks rose up on their left, the land falling gradually and inevitably
to sea level in a series of lesser mountains, foothills, knolls, buttes,
plateaus, and valleys, hedged about by glaciers large and small, creviced by
rivulets, streams, and creeks, all frozen now, a hundred, no, a thousand
wrinkled cracks in the face of the Park smoothed to a crisp white finish by a
thick layer of snow. The sky was a pale, icy blue, the
Gulf
of Alaska
a hint of deeper blue on the southern horizon, and the
sun a small, bright ball of pale yellow on the rising half of its tiny winter
arc. It'd be below the horizon again in five hours. They didn't have a lot of
time.