Whisper to the Blood (34 page)

"Ask him some questions?"

Mark shrugged. "If he's up to it."

Jim shouldered forward and hunkered down in front of the victim.
"What's your name, sir?"

The man's eyes seemed to be wandering a little, and he made a visible effort
to bring them back under control. "Oh," he said, zeroing in on Jim.
"The Niniltna trooper, right?"

"That's me. What's your name, and where do you live?"

"Gene Daly. I live in Anchorage. I've got a cabin on the river the
other side of Double Eagle. I was headed there on my snow machine."

"What happened?"

"Wish to hell I knew," Daly said, wincing when Matt pressed a
little too hard on his head wound. Matt muttered an apology, and Kate gave him
a thoughtful look.

"I was coasting down the river, smooth as you please, making for the
cabin with a bunch of supplies, going to spend a week there." He put a
tentative hand to his head and winced again. "Everything inside my head
just sort of exploded." He looked up. "I woke up and the trailer was
gone and I was bleeding and I couldn't get my snow machine started. Woulda
froze to death if this guy hadn't come along. Saved my life. Thanks, man."

His rescuer looked anything but pleased at the accolade. Indeed, he was
trying to worm through the crowd, on a heading for the door. Jim took three
steps and grabbed him by his collar. "Hold on, there, Martin. Been looking
for you. Need a word."

Jim frog-marched Martin to the bar, sat him on a stool, and said to Kate,
"Watch him for me?"

Kate said to Mutt, "Watch him for me?"

Mutt looked at Martin and gave a single, authoritative bark that established
a perimeter of not more than a foot in every direction that was perfectly
understood by everyone concerned.

Kate followed Jim back to the victim, who was struggling to remember
something, anything else. "No," he said. "I'm sorry, I just
don't remember. Wait, maybe, there might have been another snow machine?"
He closed his eyes and shook his head, and then stopped, grimacing, as if
trying to think hurt his head. "I don't know."

"If you remember something else, be sure to contact me," Jim said,
and stood, nodding at the Grosdidiers, who escorted their patient out in an EMT
guard of honor. There was nothing the four Grosdidiers loved more than having a
patient to minister to. They'd fixed up what was essentially a two-bed ward in
their house, and Daly would be well looked after until George took him to Ahtna
the following day.

Jim turned to Kate. "Well, you can stop worrying. It would appear the
Johansens are alive and well and still in business."

"Not for much longer," Kate said. "Mutt!"

Mutt gave Martin a threatening glare, just to keep in practice, and shot
after Kate as she headed for the door. They were both showing a considerable
amount of teeth.

"Kate," Jim said.

"Later," she said. The door to the Roadhouse opened and Harvey
Meganack stepped inside. He saw what was coming his way and he stepped back
hastily, overbalanced on the top step, and stumbled backward. Kate and Mutt
didn't so much as break stride, brushing by him as his arms windmilled and he
tap-danced backward down the stairs.

"Kate!"

This time she didn't bother answering.

TWENTY-TWO

S
he loaded a fifty-gallon drum onto
the trailer of her snow machine, lashing it down. It held gas for the snow
machine, not stove oil, but the Johansen brothers wouldn't know that and they
probably wouldn't care anyway. Around the drum on the sled, she packed food,
stove, and tent.

As angry as she was, she was glad to have a focus, a goal with a tangible
end in sight. Someone was hijacking innocent Park rats and hapless Park
visitors on the Kanuyaq River. She was going to find them and stop them,
and-she patted the rifle-if she had to hurt someone in the process, fine by
her. She might even be looking forward to it.

She kept her thoughts firmly focused on her preparations, but somewhere,
tucked in a corner of her mind, she knew what was really pushing her down the
river.

Life had taken some strange turns of late, and all of those turns had left
her on an unfamiliar path, each with a destination shrouded in darkness and
uncertainty. Kate didn't care for uncertainty. If it came to that, she wasn't
big with the darkness, either.

If that little weasel, Howie Katelnikof, were to be believed, the aunties
had conspired to have Louis Deem murdered. The aunties, of all people, the
fixed foot around which the rest of the Park revolved. The aunties were the
first and last stop when you needed a job, a bed, a meal, or just some
ordinary, everyday comfort, ladled out with cocoa and fry bread and an
attentive and sympathetic ear.

She'd always known the aunties were judge and jury. She just hadn't known
that they saw themselves as executioner, too.

The aunties. Conspiracy to commit murder. She couldn't believe it, and her
mind refused to deal with the thought of them being tried and jailed for it.

Or of a Park without aunties in it.

The snow machine was fueled, oil checked, the rifle loaded and snug in its
scabbard.

Then there was her seat on the Association board, definitely not a
consummation devoutly to be wished, if she wanted to keep quoting poetry to
herself, which she could if she wanted to. Not only a seat, she was chair of
the board. How the hell had that happened? There followed of course her less
than stellar debut at her first board meeting, as she fumbled and farted her
way through an unfamiliar agenda she hadn't written, and responded-or not-to topics
about which she knew little or-be honest, now-nothing.

Kate had always regarded herself as a responsible shareholder. Well, she
would have if she'd thought about it. She voted in all the elections and where
she felt it was necessary she spoke her mind at those-be honest again,
admittedly few-shareholder meetings she'd managed to attend, work permitting.
Her work took her all over the state, from Prudhoe Bay to Dutch Harbor, often
at a moment's notice. The number of meetings she'd missed far outweighed the
number of meetings she'd attended.

If she were being brutally honest, her shares in the Niniltna Native
Association didn't mean tribal pride or self-determination or land ownership.
No, what the Niniltna Native Association meant most to her was the quarterly
dividend that landed in her mailbox four times a year. That dividend meant
food, fuel, new jeans when the knees on the old ones ripped out, money for
taxes and vehicle registration and insurance. She owned her house and her land
outright, but all those things cost money to support and maintain. Her job paid
well, sometimes very well indeed, but she only had on average half a dozen jobs
a year, and the amount of the Association quarterly dividend was often an
essential cushion between paychecks.

She went back inside and donned long Johns, cotton, wool, and felt socks,
down bibs, down jacket, parka, and Sorels.

Speaking of money, now she had Johnny to provide for.

Look out for Johnny for me, okay?
It was very nearly the last thing
Jack had said to her. Johnny was all she had left to her of Jack Morgan. And
hell-tell the truth again-she loved the boy for himself, and she wanted the
best for him. He had to have an education. Since he'd been with her, her
quarterly dividends had been going directly into his college fund.

Johnny was another black hole, sucking in every worry and fear she had.
Adolescence was the worst time in anyone's life, when the body betrayed the
comparatively stable twelve previous years and erupted suddenly in every
direction, things popping out, things dropping down, voices changing, hair
changing, hormones launching an all-out attack, no mercy, no quarter, no
prisoners. It was quite literally an outrage, physically, mentally, and
emotionally, and it went on for years, during which life existed at either the
zenith or the nadir, occupying no middle ground and offering no peace. It was
exhausting just to think about it. All too well did Kate remember being at the
mercy of a body that would not leave her alone. It was good that she and Ekaterina
had come to an understanding about Kate living on her own at the homestead,
because otherwise they might have killed each other.

So far, Johnny seemed reasonably sane, although there had been something
worrying at him lately, leading to long, abstracted silences. She made every
effort to give him as much space and privacy as he needed, in hopes that he
would voluntarily tell her what it was. In the meantime, she stewed over the
cause. Vanessa, maybe? Girlfriends were tough.

Not as tough as boyfriends, though. Not near as.

In the pantry she loaded the pockets of her parka with dried dates, dried
apricots, tamari almonds, and roasted pecans. She didn't know how long this was
going to take and she might need fuel herself before she found them.

She went back outside and rechecked the lines on the drum, Mutt trotting
behind her, ears pricked, tail wagging, as always ready to go anywhere,
anytime. A scattered overcast allowed some stars to peer down at her. Her
breath was a white cloud in the cold air.

"I did turn off the stove," she said.

Mutt looked up at her, tail slowing.

"I did," Kate said. "I did turn off that goddamn stove."

Jim had started coming for her, and she had known what was going to happen,
every cell in her body sounding the alarm.

Not just the alarm. If she had really fought him, he would have stopped. If
she had said no and meant it, he would have stopped. If she had raised so much
as a wooden spoon in his direction, he would have stopped in his tracks. No, it
wasn't only alarm she had been feeling, as events upstairs had demonstrated
very shortly thereafter. Damn him, anyway.

"I just didn't see it lasting this long," she said to Mutt.

Mutt, realizing that departure had been delayed indefinitely, sat down with
a martyred air.

Kate sat down on the seat of the snow machine. "He was supposed to be
long gone by now, history, conspicuous by his absence. But he's still
here."

Mutt gave her a bored look. Obviously. "Why? Is it just the sex?"

Which was a considerable factor, given the intensity of their latest
encounter, and which led to a whole other worry. Passion, according to
conventional wisdom and
Cosmopolitan,
was supposed to wane as the
relationship aged. They had gone at each other like minks that first year, but
while subsequently the frequency had decreased the intensity had remained,
whether Jim took her by storm at night or she launched a surprise seduction
before he had his eyes open in the morning.

"You know what the problem is?" she said to Mutt. "I like
him. I really like him. He's smart, he's funny, he's good at his job." She
thought for a moment and added, a little doubtfully, "Everybody tells me
he's gorgeous. I guess he is. But you know eye candy's never been enough for
me." She thought of Jack, whose blunt, irregular features had looked like
something chipped off the cornice at Notre Dame, and smiled a little. No, she
could accuse herself of many things, but falling for a pretty face wasn't one
of them.

Mutt, impatient, thumped Kate's leg with her head.

"You're right," Kate said, and welcomed the rush of anticipation
that washed out all misgivings and indecision. Action was what was needed to
shake the cobwebs out, hard, fast action, a fight for the right, without
question or pause. "Let's get a move on, girlfriend."

She mounted the snowgo, pressed the starter, waited for Mutt to jump up on
the seat behind, and lit out of the clearing as if Raven himself was on her
tail.

I
t took three days to smoke them out.

On the way through town she stopped for a late-night coffee at the Riverside
Cafe in Niniltna, telling Laurel Meganack where she was going and what she was
doing in a full, carrying voice, her words falling on a dozen pairs of eager
and, she hoped, fertile ears.

Her next stop was the store, where Cindy was just closing. She bought a
package of Oreos and told her all about it, too.

At the Roadhouse, Jim had left, and Kate marched back up to the bar and
ordered the usual. Conversation ensued, in the course of which Kate let it be
known, again in a carrying voice, that she was delivering fuel over the next
week to some of the shut-ins along the river. Bernie continued noncommittal and
subdued. In the corner, the aunties sewed industriously without looking her
way. Old Sam, attention fixed on the slamming and dunking going on on the big
screen overhead, nevertheless spared her a sharp glance. His shrewd eye
lingered as the door closed behind her, before looking over at the aunties'
table. None of them would meet his eye, either. He nodded as if their inaction
had confirmed a profoundly unpleasant inner thought, and returned his attention
to the screen.

T
hat first night she camped on the
bank of the river a mile north of Double Eagle, almost exactly at the spot
where the attack on the Kaltaks had taken place. She and Mutt passed an
unfortunately peaceful evening in the tent, a wood fire a safe distance in
front of the flap built high enough to illuminate the loaded sled, the barrel
casting a long and come-hither shadow.

The next day they trolled the river with the drum as bait, up and down the
frozen expanse between Tikani and Red Run, stopping at every cabin and village
on the way south. Some of them were surprised to see her again this soon but
they all made her welcome.

That night they camped in a willow thicket at the mouth of the Gruening
River. The next morning Kate watched the light come up on the tent wall,
thinking. Mutt, a warm, solid presence next to her, stretched, groaned, and
pressed a cold nose to Kate's cheek, indicating a pressing need to be on the
other side of the tent flap.