Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  "Why the hell you going to Fairbanks, anyway? Is there some Aleut proverb that says if you find a body you have to find out how it got there?"

  There followed a brisk discussion during which the defects of certain personalities were identified and examined.

  Dinah, mercifully, did not record any of it for posterity. Kate finally shouldered her pack and stamped out of camp, Mutt limping at her heels.

  She had tried to get her to stay behind but Mutt wasn't having any that morning, either.

  They arrived at their destination at four-thirty that afternoon. A smoky haze from the three separate forest fires burning in the Interior hung over the city like a pall. Ice fog in winter, smoke in summer, Kate couldn't remember very many days in Fairbanks when the sky obtained its normal shade of blue. Of the two, ice fog or smoke, she preferred ice fog. Ice fog meant the temperature would be something decent and endurable, like twenty below. Thirty below was more the norm and forty below not rare, but, she remembered, you could always tell when it got up to twenty below because the guys went from the dorm to the commons in their T-shirts. At thirty below, they put on their jackets. At forty below, they might even wear gloves.

  As she turned onto University Avenue her sinuses suddenly seized up like a muscle with a charley horse. She'd forgotten about the lack of moisture in Fairbanks's air, but they hadn't. You promised, they wailed all the way up University Avenue and left on Taku Drive, you promised you'd never do this to us again. They moaned and sobbed and cried as she turned right on Tanana Loop and left on Yukon Drive, until she parked in front of the upper campus dorms and they shut up and made her breathe through her mouth instead, just to show her. She hoped her nose wouldn't start bleeding.

  The desk was presided over by a polite girl with the longest, straightest, most colorless hair Kate had ever seen. It swept behind her like a train and there was enough of it to weigh more than she did.

  In the act of handing over the key to Bartlett 713, she saw Mutt. "Uh, no animals allowed in the dorm." "Okay," Kate said equably. She jerked a thumb at Mutt. "You explain to her how she's going to have to sleep in the truck."

  She went to the elevator, Mutt padding at her side.

  Emerging on the seventh floor, the first sound to greet her was the insistent ring of the telephone. As easily and as instantly as that, she was transported back in time.

  There was one phone for every floor of every dorm on campus. Since it is a demonstrably true fact of life that most people in their late teens and early twenties live on the phone, it follows that an entire floor of them generate a lot of phone calls. Answering the phone was a job purportedly shared by everyone on the floor but in reality defaulted to those whose rooms were closest to the booth. Having answered the phone, it was then the resident's responsibility to locate the person the caller wished to speak to. About a month into the semester, the phone rang unanswered. Her first year, Kate's room had been one door down from the phone booth. Her second, third and fourth years, she had requested the room farthest from it.

  The phone was still ringing and still no one was answering it when Kate found 713 and unlocked the door. Inside was just as depressing as it had ever been, a single bed, a row of closets, a sort of a desk with shelves, not enough plug-ins, cement walls painted a hideous electric blue, linoleum squares laid down over a cement floor, stained acoustical tiles overhead, exposed pipes and conduit. Any freshman in his or her right mind would have run screaming at first sight.

  There was a tall, narrow window, the bottom of which opened in and had a handle, all the better for use as a beer cooler in winter. Kate remembered one Inupiat girl from Point Hope who had received care packages of maqtaq from home and would hang it outside from that handle.

  Truth be told, most of the dorms during the winter had various bags hanging outside their windows, giving the buildings the look of an itinerant tinker, laden with wares.

  There was a tap at the door. Kate opened it and there stood Jack Morgan.

  He looked needy, quite a feat for a man six feet two inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, all of it muscle. "Hi." He sounded needy, too.

  "Hello."

  "Jim Chopin called me, told me you'd be here." He made a vague gesture toward an unseen airport. "I flew up this morning."

  "So I see."

  The blue eyes were wary beneath the thatch of untidy brown hair. "I hope you don't mind?"

  It was a legitimate question, given the way they had parted two months before. He had told her he loved her, and she had run like a thief.

  "How'd you know which room?"

  "I showed the clerk my ID."

  "Oh."

  "Kate?"

  "What?"

  "I've missed you."

  The hell with it. Life was too short to pick fights in which everyone lost. She stretched out a hand and pulled him inside. "Show me how much."

  The door opened a second later and Mutt was assisted into the hall. She curled up on the thin brown carpeting, stuck her nose under her tail and prepared to enjoy a better night's sleep than the two people on the other side of the door.

  It was a single bed. They didn't notice. They missed dinner. They didn't care. The phone in the hall rang every ten minutes. They never heard it.

  They went at each other like pirates after plunder. It was loot, pillage and burn all night long, and as Jack said ruefully the following morning, surveying in the mirror the marks she'd left on his back,

  "There's nothing like that little touch of frenzy to spice up your sex life."

  Her answer was to move behind him and run her tongue down one of the red lines scoring his skin, and it was another hour before they got up the second time and managed to keep their hands off each other long enough to dress and go in search of breakfast. They found it at Sourdough Sam's Cafe, a restaurant where the waitresses still wore their hair in beehives and the menus promised the short stacks really would be sour. A table next to the window was free and they slid into it just ahead of a family of four from Des Moines and ordered pancake sandwiches. When they came, the sausage was patty and the cakes lived up to their reputation.

  "As good as Emaa's," Kate said thickly, and applied herself to her meal.

  She was hungry.

  So was he. He finished before she did and watched her sop up the rest of the syrup with the last bite of pancake. The view was superb. Her hazel eyes were sleepy, a little secretive, and her brown skin glowed as if lit from behind. She looked like she had just spent the night doing exactly what she had been doing. He wondered what he looked like. The same, probably.

  She glanced up and flushed beneath his regard. "What?"

  He reached across the table and filched the last of her sausage. "You know very well what."

  His voice was deep and a little husky and Kate thought it best to change the subject before they wound up back in her room for the rest of the day. "How's Johnny?"

  He knew exactly what she was doing and the gravity of his tone was belied by the amusement in his eyes. "Fine."

  "He living with you now?"

  "Yeah, Judge Finn gave me temporary custody, pending final disposition."

  "And Jane?"

  One eyebrow quirked. "She's on her third attorney. They keep dumping her."

  "Who've you got?"

  "Dorothy Ganepole."

  Kate nodded. "She's good. She's even halfway human. For an attorney."

  "Yeah, Johnny likes her, too. She's the only other person besides me who reads the same science fiction authors he does."

  "And me."

  "And you."

  "Who'd you leave him with?"

  "Jane." Her face changed, and he said, "She has visitation rights. She is his mother, Kate."

  "Not so's you'd notice," she muttered, but he wisely refused to be drawn into a discussion of Jane's shortcomings. Kate had never lived with the woman; she didn't know the half of it. He shied away from the thought of what might happen if she did.

  She pushed her chair back. "W
here we going?" he said.

  "Up to the museum."

  She parked again in front of Bartlett and they walked the rest of the way. Between the upper campus dorms and the museum, a new science building had been constructed with federal funds; Kate thought what a pity it was some of those funds had not been earmarked for new dorms.

  Adequate housing --hell, even just enough housing--had always been a problem on the Fairbanks campus. She remembered first-year students sleeping on the floor of the student union building. Didn't look like much had changed.

  The haze had thinned enough to see the river valley and the rolling hills that surrounded the campus, although the smell of burning timber was still a tangy and tangible presence. "What are you doing here anyway?" Jack said, as if he'd just thought of it.

  "Didn't Jim say?"

  He shook his head. He didn't tell her, but when he'd heard she would be in a place with a functioning airstrip he'd been in such a hurry to arrange for the days off and get out to his tie down at Merrill Field that he hadn't bothered to ask. He said now, with elaborate unconcern,

  "I presume it has something to do with the bruises I saw last night."

  His even, indifferent tone invited her to admire how well he was behaving. She stopped dead in her tracks and gave him that patented Shugak glare. He sighed. "Well, I could hardly help noticing. You've got defensive marks all up and down the underside of your forearms, and one real beauty of a bruise on your right thigh turning an interesting shade of yellow." He gave her a wicked grin, and she would never know the effort it cost him to maintain it. "Kind of hard for me to miss that one. Who jumped you, and how come, and does he or she look worse than you do?"

  She started walking again. Evidently Jack had his protective instincts well in hand, for a change. "I doubt it. They were in and out of camp pretty fast."

  "Who is ''?"

  "I don't know."

  They arrived at the museum before she could say more. Mutt flopped down in a patch of shade and Kate and Jack paid their entry fees and walked inside.

  The first thing they saw was the woolly mammoth. "I'll be damned, I didn't know they had one of these here," Jack said. "Our official Alaska state fossil."

  "He's the woolly mammoth, big and hairy," Kate said.

  "He's the woolly mammoth, ooh, he's scary," Jack came back in a high falsetto, and they both laughed.

  "And how is Mr. Whitekeys and the Fly-By-Nite Club?"

  "Still packing in the Houseguests from Hell. Have you seen

  "The Duct Tape Song' yet?" She shook her head and he said, grinning,

  "It's worth the drive into Anchorage all by itself. The tourists don't know quite what to make of it, but the locals love it."

  The mammoth's tusks spiraled up from the display, graceful in spite of their mass, nearly full curls of fossil ivory. "You kind of wonder how they held their heads up under all that weight."

  "Make you feel kind of insignificant, don't they?" Kate said. "That something that big, that indestructible was stamping and snorting around here twelve thousand years ago? And now they're gone. Extinct.

  Like that." She snapped her fingers.

  He considered the skull mounted over the tusks. "They make me horny."

  She turned her head so he wouldn't see her grin. "Everything makes you horny." "No, really," he said, and she looked back and found he was serious.

  "They make me want to procreate, as fast and as often and as much as I possibly can."

  She looked at the fossil, the huge, bony skull, the long curving tusks, and understood. "You don't think anyone's going to preserve your skeleton after you die and stick it up on a museum wall?"

  "Nope. There's even a poem about it."

  "About preserving your skeleton?"

  "No, idiot, about them." He nodded at the tusks. "Something about how all they are now is billiard balls."

  The tusks gleamed beneath small, carefully directed spotlights. "

  "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair'?" He nodded. "And that bugs you?"

  He shrugged. "Sure. Gotta leave a mark."

  She looked from the tusks to him, his relaxed stance, his meditative expression. He didn't look as if he were frantically in search of immortality to her, but then he had Johnny. She looked back at the tusks. "Funny you should feel that way."

  "Funny ha-ha?"

  "Funny strange. I've been running up against immortality and/or the possibility of it a lot lately."

  "Tell me."

  Behind them a busload of tourists flooded through the doors, all the women in pastels, all the men in plaid, everyone in polyester and no one under sixty-five. They drifted over to Blue Babe and paused.

  "You know what we were doing in Chistona?" Kate asked.

  "No," he said gravely, "somehow we never got around to discussing that last night. Must have been distracted. Who's we?"

  "Bobby and me."

  "And?"

  "And we drove up to Chistona to pick mushrooms."

  "And?"

  "And I found a body when I was out picking Saturday morning. Chopper Jim flew up and took it to town that afternoon." "The Body in the Mushrooms," Jack said. "Sounds like a Jane Marple murder mystery."

  It made her nervous that his first thought would be the same as hers.

  "Jim flew in and took the body back," she said, sticking firmly to the story. "It was a guy named Daniel Seabolt." She told him the rest of it, omitting nothing. "And then last night, somebody jumped us. Just jumped us, out of the blue, in our tents. Dinah got one hell of a shiner, Bobby--"

  "Dinah?"

  "Dinah Cookman, she was driving up the Alcan and ran out of gas money about the same time the mushrooms popped up."

  "Fortuitous."

  Kate said demurely, "Bobby would agree."

  "Aha."

  She grinned. "At any rate, all I know is there was some fuss at the school over what Seabolt was teaching. You ever know a cop at APD by the name of Brad Burns?"

  "Brad Burns?" He looked down at her, an arrested expression in his eyes.

  "Yeah, he knew Daniel Seabolt. He's the one who told me about the business at the school."

  "He's in Chistona?"

  "Yes. Well, in a cabin on the Kanuyaq near Chistona."

  Jack gazed off into the distance, a frown pulling his eyebrows together.

  "So that's where he went after."

  Kate looked at him. When he didn't speak, she said impatiently, "After what?"

  His gaze focused on her face with a considering expression. "How much did he tell you?" "Nothing," she said promptly, "except that he'd been a cop with APD."

  She waited, expectant. "Jack. What?" He sighed and looked down at her.

  "He was new on the force, about four years ago. They used him undercover on a narcotics sting. It went bad and he shot a kid."