Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  He cocked his finger and fired. "And they're just as nuts." "Thanks for the tip," she said, and swung the door open. Mutt padded past her into the hallway.

  He leaned out of the bed to call after her, "I'm taking ten days around the Labor Day weekend."

  She blew him a kiss. "See you then." The door swung almost closed and then opened again when she poked her head back in. "Bring the kid, if you want."

  Fortunately for him, she was gone before the wide, pleased grin spread all the way across his face.

  She stopped at Carr's for a cafe mocha, a sugar doughnut, and five pounds of green grapes, road food for herself and an apology to Bobby and Dinah for her short temper the morning she left. She found a truck stop with a diesel pump and filled up the Isuzu, which cost the grand sum of $14.37. Fourteen dollars for five hundred miles. "I hate Japan," she told Mutt, reholstering the diesel nozzle in the pump. "Or I hate their automobile designers."

  She went inside to pay. "Little drizzly this morning," the man behind the counter observed.

  "Yeah, but it sure feels good on the nasal passages," she replied.

  The register ka-chunged and the drawer slid out. "Yeah, oughta lay a little of this smoke. That your dog?"

  Kate looked up at Mutt, trotting back to the truck from a close encounter with the thicket at the edge of the parking lot. The limp was almost gone. Lucky for whoever had inflicted it. "Yeah."

  "Female?"

  "Yeah."

  "Nice. Got some wolf in her."

  "Half."

  "Ever give you any trouble?"

  "Trouble?" Kate looked at him, honestly bewildered.

  "Guess not," he said, handing her the change. "Some of those half-breeds do. Always reading about it in the papers. People take them and try to make pets out of them." He shook his head. "Ever want to breed her, I've got a Shepherd mix I'd be interested to see crossed with her." "That's kind of up to her." She smiled and took her leave. It was raining, hard enough to put the wipers on hesitation but not enough to interfere with vision or traction. After the Eielson Air Force Base turnoff the traffic was negligible and Kate kept the truck at a steady sixty-five miles per hour straight through to Delta Junction. She thought about stopping for breakfast there, but the only restaurant she saw was on the wrong side of the road and there were plenty of Bobby and Dinah's grapes so she took the Richardson Highway turnoff and kept on going. The Richardson was a narrow, two-lane blacktop with even less traffic than the Alcan and Kate put her foot down and left it there. On one curve a sign told her to slow down to thirty-five; she slowed from seventy to fifty, what any Alaskan driver would have considered a reasonable compromise between the letter and the spirit of the law.

  The sky stayed overcast, the rain kept drizzling down, and having left the Tanana behind at Delta Junction it was just one creek after another:

  Ruby, Darling, Ann, Suzy Q, Gunnysack. Gunnysack? It was easy for her mind to wander back to the discovery of Daniel Seabolt's body six days before.

  Why did it haunt her so? Why was she so determined on an explanation?

  She'd heard stories all her life about cheechakos being caught out in the bush without proper clothing and going mad from the mosquitoes.

  She'd heard stories all her life about sourdoughs going out into the bush with all the equipment in the world and still going mad from the mosquitoes, for that matter.

  A yearling moose hesitated next to the guardrail in the oncoming lane.

  Kate took her foot off the gas in case he decided he really did want to get to the other side, but when the truck came abreast of him he leapt the rail in a panic and crashed off through the brush. She put her foot down again.

  The idea of murder in the case of Daniel Seabolt was ludicrous. There was no evidence, and there were no suspects.

  But what the hell was Seabolt doing out there in the bush, a mile or more from the nearest cabin, without any clothing at all, proper or otherwise? She imagined the day: hot, the sun shining down, sweat trickling down his back as he bushwhacked his way from swamp to swamp, in search of-what? It had been too late for fiddlehead ferns and too early for hunting season. Not that it meant anything in the bush, and if Brad Burns was to be believed Seabolt might have had a subsistence permit. She imagined him taking off his shirt, his T-shirt, and then she imagined him putting them both back on again immediately when he realized what he'd let himself in for in the way of aerial bombardment.

  The pants and the boots he would have left on regardless, the sharp brush taking too great a toll on exposed flesh, as Kate well knew from painful personal experience.

  But he had had no clothes on, none. She wondered what his last moments had been like. She imagined him stripped to the skin, running frantically, crashing headlong over rock and stump, into bush and tree.

  She imagined the whine of a thousand pairs of wings, the sting of a thousand bites, the frantic slap of hands in futile defense, the running, running, running, with nowhere to run to. She imagined him maddened beyond the point of following a slope down to a cooling stream, or perhaps the shadowing fire sweeping down on him in one such stream and chasing him out into the woods again. She imagined him exhausted, tripping, falling, facedown, the collapse, the settling swarm of insects hungry for blood.

  A shiver began at the base of her spine and worked its way up under her skin. Mutt looked at her, cocking a concerned ear. "No one should die like that," she said, consciously loosening the grip she had on the steering wheel. "No one."

  The rain had let up and she pulled over onto the nonexistent shoulder.

  Buds barely open, a great drift of wild roses spilled over the slight rise on their right to pool in the hollow beneath. Kate reached across and opened the door. Mutt leapt out and plunged into the undergrowth.

  Yes, the limp was almost gone. She rubbed the bruise on her thigh. It was still sore.

  She got out of the truck and stretched, taking deep breaths of moist air. Her unforgiving sinuses had finally begun to relax, and it was the first breath she had taken in two weeks without a trace of burn in it.

  Lush greenery clustered thickly at the edges of the pavement, just waiting for an opportunity to slipover the edge and take the road back.

  No fires here for a while. She hoped it would be a while longer before there were.

  Suppose he had been a serious jogger? A crosscountry runner? Maybe even an orienteer? Burns had said he was interested in the subsistence lifestyle; maybe he'd gone on a cross-country hike and gotten lost. It happened all the time; now that she remembered it, it had happened just this past week, that hiker lost in the Mentastas that Chopper Jim had cited as part of his case load.

  The hood of the car was wet and the seat of her jeans became damp as she leaned up against it. She had a good imagination, all right, but even Kate could not imagine Daniel Seabolt stripping off his clothes for a jog through the Alaskan bush. Nothing of the admittedly little she had learned of him thus far led her to believe he was that stupid.

  And he'd been taking sourdough lessons from Brad Burns to boot. He would have known that wild roses had thorns, and there were nettles, and Devil's club, and pushki, which could raise blisters if you got the juice on you and didn't wash it off fast enough. Not to mention no-see-urns and biting flies. And Dinah's twenty-seven known species of mosquitoes. She remembered again the instant swelling of Matthew Seabolt's arm after the mosquito bit him.

  And Jim's amorous inclinations notwithstanding, she didn't think even he would strip to the buff deep in the heart of the interior Alaskan bush in summertime, not even to scratch what appeared to be a ceaseless itch of a different kind. And even if Sea bolt had been experiencing love au naturel, where was his girlfriend? Why hadn't she reported him missing?

  Or, if she had perished in the fire, too, where was her body?

  And why hadn't someone reported her missing?

  From somewhere off to the right side of the road came a cluck and a hoot and a cackle and an explosion of wings. A caribou cow, loo
king harried, emerged from the leaves at the edge of the road and paused, one hoof on the pavement, looking at Kate. Deciding the human was no threat, she stepped out into the lane, followed by two more cows and four calves.

  They looked good, all seven of them, new racks growing velvet, coats thick and glossy, bodies well filled out. Looked like Thanksgiving dinner to Kate, but it wasn't hunting season, and she made no move for the rifle behind her seat. They tip petty tapped across the road and vanished unmolested into the undergrowth on the other side.

  Kate doubted that Seabolt had been sunbathing, either. Or swimming, since he was two-plus bushwhacking miles from the nearest creek. There was plenty of swamp nearby, but no running water to speak of. If he'd been taking a leak, only his zipper would have been open. If he'd been taking a dump, his pants might have been down around his ankles. In either case, he still would have had most of his clothes on.

  A rainy gust of wind tore over the rise, swooped across the road and tossed up the leaves of a stand of birches, exposing their lighter undersides. A lusty laugh and the gust was gone and with a scandalized rustle the birches shook their skirts back down over their white boles, and all was still again, except for the patter of returning rain. Kate turned her face up and closed her eyes. The drops were cool on her skin.

  She was left with only one solution. Daniel Sea bolt didn't have his clothes off by choice. Unless he was out of his mind.

  Of course, with that father and that son, she wouldn't blame him if he was, and certainly that assumption was the easiest way out for her. Who can explain a nut's behavior? As his father had more or less said.

  Which generated an entirely irrational impulse on her part to doubt it at once.

  The only alternative to madness was that he'd been killed, stripped and dumped where she had found him. But there was no evidence of murder, why would his killer strip him anyway, and why on earth go to all the trouble of dragging him out there if they weren't going to bury him?

  Even supposing last year's fire had been breathing down their necks? The area had been flooded with smoke jumpers odds were at least even that one of them would have stumbled over the body. Or the following year by a ranger assessing the damage.

  Or her. Picking mushrooms.

  Full circle, and still no answers. Giving a frustrated shake of her head, she called, "Mutt!" and climbed back behind the wheel. After a moment Mutt crashed out of the bushes and leapt up beside her, smelling exotically of roses. A ptarmigan feather hung from one side of her mouth. Kate started the truck and drove on.

  An hour later the Isuzu topped a rise, the sun burst out of the clouds and Summit Lake appeared on the right. She stopped at the lodge to use the bathroom and get a cup of coffee. When she came out Mutt was lapping up some of the lake. She walked down to stand next to the dog and gaze out at the expanse of water, a pool of iridescent gray brimming over the sides of an elongated bowl of emerald green, behind which the Amphitheater Mountains leapt up and crashed down again in great waves of rock and ice.

  Turning, she looked across the valley at the silver snake of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which had been with them most of the way south from Fairbanks, slithering up out of the ground here, outlined against the sky on the crest of a ridge there, outwardly stolid and serene, inside filled with the daily rush of a million barrels of Prudhoe Bay crude, from Pump Station One at the edge of the Arctic Ocean to the Oil Control Center in Valdez.

  Eight hundred miles of it, crossing three mountain ranges, two earthquake faults, with a river or a creek for every mile of pipe. It was a triumph of engineering over terrain, in situ testimony to the human ability to manage the environment, and it meant a one-eighth share of Prudhoe Bay proceeds, measured in billions of dollars per year, for the state of Alaska.

  Kate had no objection to that; the oil was there and because of it the state could afford big budget items like Molly Hootch without requiring her to pay state income taxes. She just wished the pipeline ran all the way south through Canada, as one of the original designs had called for, instead of terminating in Valdez. It was a route the Cordova Aquatic Marketing Association, the Cordova District Fishermen's United and the Lower Cook Inlet Fishermen's League, among others, had lobbied for and lobbied hard, on their own time and with their own money. No one had listened to them, of course; they were only the people out on those waters every day, who knew them better than anyone else living, who fed their families on the bounty nurtured therein.

  Instead, the line went to Valdez and the oil was shipped out by tanker, and twelve years after oil in to the Operations Control Center the RPetco Anchorage went hard aground on Bligh Reef, and spilled nearly eleven million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude across Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, in the process proving the fishermen's fears all too true. Kate never saw the pipeline without thinking of them and the damage done to their homes and livelihoods.

  For the coastal dwellers of the south-central part of the state, the Gulf of Alaska was one and the same.

  But her last job had put a face on the monster, and now she looked at the pipeline and wondered how the people at the other end of the line were doing, the people living and working at the RPetco Base Camp at Prudhoe Bay. She wondered if Dale and Sue had gang-beeped anyone lately.

  She wondered how the archaeological dig was progressing at Heald Point.

  She wondered how Cindy Sovalik was getting back and forth to work now that the snow was gone. Four-wheeler, probably. She hoped Cindy would take it slow and easy over the thirty miles of tundra between her home in Ichelik, east of Prudhoe, and her job at the Prudhoe Hilton in Prudhoe Bay. Remembering the time Cindy, in a snow machine, had bluffed the fifty-six-passenger bus Kate was driving out of its right-of-way, she doubted it.

  Mutt nudged Kate's hand with her head. "Okay, okay," Kate told her, and together they walked around the lodge and back to the truck. The parking lot was overflowing with a bicycle touring group, men and women in their thirties and forties wearing Spandex and helmets. One woman was loading her panniers as Kate approached. "Hi," Kate said.

  "Hi," the woman said, looking up briefly.

  "Where'd you come from?"

  The woman secured the last strap and straightened, one fist rubbing the small of her back. "We came eighty-seven miles yesterday. We're doing sixty-nine today."

  Kate had noticed this phenomenon in bicyclers before. Killer hills, dead man's curves, stubborn headwinds, flat stretches, record times, all these received intense attention and merited close and involved discussion, but

  "Where did you come from?" never got a direct answer.

  Bicyclers didn't care where they had come from, or where they were going, or anything that happened in between, except as how it related to their miles per day. They probably had not even noticed the frozen, striated flood of ice that was Gakona Glacier, spilling down from Mount Gakona east of the road, one peak in a queenly procession of peaks that formed the Alaska Range, a sight that, as many times as Kate had seen it, never failed to take her breath away.

  She tested the theory. "Gakona sure looks pretty today."

  "Yeah," the woman grunted, "with the sun up there'll probably be a hell of a headwind coming down off Rainbow Ridge, really cut into our time."

  Mutt took a leak near her rear tire, but the woman was so involved with the quick release hub on the front tire that she didn't notice, and Kate would never tell. They climbed back into the truck.

  Twenty miles past Paxson the clouds parted enough for Kate to catch a distant glimpse of the Quilaks, and she felt an easing of the close-held tension that always accumulated in direct proportion to the amount of time she'd been gone and the amount of distance between her and home.

  The Kanuyaq River valley lay broad and deep, an immense gulf of forest and river that hardly went unnoticed, but the eyes tended to skip over it for the more striking profile of the Quilak Mountains, and maybe even a hint of the blue-white peak of Angqaq.

  At any rate, Kate's eyes did.


  At that moment of well-being, at just the point when the surface of the road deteriorated into one series of patches after another and its course began to twist and turn worse than one of the Kanuyaq's tributaries, they came upon a line of slow-moving vehicles. Closest to Kate was a Volkswagen bus with Washington State plates. The curtains were closed across the back window so she couldn't see who was driving it. Next car up was a white Ford four-door, a rental, through the back window of which she could see four white-haired heads, men in the front, women in the back. Ahead of them was an old black, rusty Ranchero with Alaska Veteran plates and no chrome left on it anywhere Kate could see.