Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  In front of the Ranchero was a brave new Bronco with the sticker still on the rear window, and in front of the Bronco were three RVs from-Kate squinted--it couldn't be Alabama. She goosed the gas a little to close up on the Volkswagen's bumper.

  It was, by God, Alabama, yet another redneck state with vowels on both ends. I wish I was in Dixie, hooray, hooray. And they drove like it, too, thirty-five miles an hour, except when they hit a straight stretch, when they reached speeds considerably in excess of the speed limit on German autobahns. Kate wished they were in Dixie, too. It didn't help matters when it began to rain again. She dropped back three car lengths and occupied herself by counting pull-offs the RVs could have taken to let the rest of the traffic pass.

  She'd reached five when she looked in the rearview mirror and beheld a sight fit to strike terror into the heart of the most intrepid driver: a Toyota truck from Tennessee with two teenage boys in it closing rapidly on her rear bumper. They tailgated her for five minutes, waiting for a blind curve. When one came they pulled out into the left lane to pass. A pickup with a camper on the back lumbered around the curve and the Toyota truck from Tennessee slid back behind Kate with inches to spare.

  As he came abreast of Kate the white-faced pickup driver was saying something that was undoubtedly educational for all concerned and flipped off the driver of the truck from Tennessee. The truck from Tennessee responded on the next curve, which turned out to be blind, deaf and dumb, by pulling into the oncoming lane again, flooring the accelerator and roaring past Kate, the Volkswagen bus from Washington State, the rented Ford sedan, the rusty Ranchero, the brand-new Bronco with the sticker in the window and was just fixing to take on the first RV from Alabama when a police cruiser driven by an Alaska State Trooper materialized on his front bumper.

  Everyone slammed on the brakes.

  Kate was in better shape than the rest of them because she liked living, had years of experience in driving Alaska highways and had been braking since the Toyota truck from Tennessee passed her. Even so, Mutt landed with her front paws on the dashboard and Kate was glad she was wearing her seat belt when her brakes locked up. The Isuzu bucked and stalled and the rear wheels skidded over the wet pavement and hit the grass and gravel of the very narrow shoulder and mercifully came to a halt just short of the mess rapidly accumulating inches in front of the passenger side door.

  The cruiser hit lights, siren and the ditch simultaneously. The Toyota truck from Tennessee swerved to avoid going into the ditch on top of the cruiser and whizzed between the second and third RVs to run head-on into a tree. Due to the latitude and the thin layer of topsoil overlaying the permafrost, trees in interior Alaska never get very thick through the trunk, and this one snapped like a matchstick. So did the next three.

  Scrub spruces, Kate noticed, gripping the wheel with both hands so tightly it felt like her arm muscles were going to burst out of their skin. A thicket of diamond willow proved tougher and the Toyota truck from Tennessee came to a stop buried in the middle of it.

  The Volkswagen bus from Washington State rear-ended the rented Ford, which rear-ended the Alaska Ranchero, which rear-ended the brand-new Bronco with the sticker in the window. The brand new Bronco was hurled forward toward the last Alabama RV and the driver hauled on the wheel to avoid a collision and that and the high center of gravity on the vehicle rolled it over on its right side. It slid twelve feet down the yellow line and stopped.

  The three RVs screeched to a halt, unharmed except for the fifteen feet of rubber they left behind them on the road.

  For one frozen moment nobody moved.

  Then everybody did, doors springing open, people leaping out onto the pavement, lots of yelling.

  "Are you hurt?"

  "Are y'all okay?"

  "Yes! You?"

  "We're all right!"

  "The Bronco!"

  "Yeah, check the Bronco!"

  They reached the Bronco in a body. The engine was still running, the wheels spinning against air. Kate was the smallest and they hoisted her up on the side. She brushed ineffectually at the water streaming down the driver's window and knocked on the glass. "Hey! Hey in there, are you okay?" She tried opening the door, which of course was locked. "Hey, in the Bronco! You alive?" She thought she heard a reply and looked over the side. "You guys shut up!" She looked back in the window and saw movement, an arm maybe, reaching toward her. "Can you unlock the door?

  The door, can you unlock the door so we can get you out?"

  The arm moved lower. There was a low hum and the window descended. The Bronco had electric windows, and they still worked. The first thing Kate did was reach down and turn off the ignition. The engine sputtered and died and the rear wheels rolled to a stop. A man, blood trickling down his forehead, was crouched on the passenger side door, unfastening the seat belt of a woman in the passenger seat. "It's my wife. She's unconscious."

  Kate yelled over the side, "Anybody got a first aid kit?" Half a dozen people scrambled for their vehicles. The white-haired driver of the rented Ford sedan said, "Miss.? I'm a doctor."

  Relief washed over her. "Good." Her eyes fell on the woman standing next to him, the driver of the Volkswagen. "He's going to need help getting her out."

  The woman, fiftyish and clad in jeans and a Pendleton shirt, swung up next to Kate. The Bronco rocked a little. The driver's side door opened, but it wouldn't stay open, so they left it closed and together with the unconscious woman's husband, maneuvered her through the window. "Put her in my rig," the driver of the Volkswagen bus said, and ran ahead to slide open the side door and pull down the bed in back.

  They got her inside and on the bed and the doctor squeezed in next to her, his black bag fetched by one of the white-haired ladies who had been sitting in the backseat of the rented Ford. The Bronco driver wedged in between the refrigerator and the table, anxious eyes on his wife. The rest of them clustered around the open door, watching the doctor run competent hands down the woman's body. "Doesn't feel like anything's broken. She's got a lump on her right temple; she probably whacked her head on the window when you went over. What's her name?" he said, one hand on her wrist, eyes on his watch.

  "Elaine."

  "Elaine?" The doctor leaned over and looked into her face, one hand on her wrist, counting her pulse. "Elaine? Can you hear me?"

  Her eyelids fluttered. "Elaine? Elaine, this is Dr. Westfall. Open your eyes." Still holding her wrist, he moved her arm across her breast, counting respirations.

  The tension in the group eased when they heard the small groan and saw the woman's eyes open. One hand came up and the doctor caught it before it could feel her head. "Elaine?" He smiled down at her. "I'm Dr.

  Westfall. That's right, you've hurt your head. Don't move." He held up one hand in front of her face, two fingers raised. "How many fingers do you see?" She muttered something and he said insistently, "How many fingers do you see, Elaine?"

  "Two."

  "Good. How many this time? Elaine?"

  "Three."

  "Good." He held both her hands. "Will you squeeze my hands, please?"

  She blinked, and spoke again, her voice rising. "Where's Steve?

  Where's my husband?"

  "He's right here, Elaine." "I'm right here, honey," Steve said, crowding up behind the doctor, relief flooding his voice. "I'm right here, and I'm okay."

  "Steve." She tried to reach for him and Dr. West fall said firmly, "In a minute, Elaine. First squeeze my hands. Squeeze. That's good."

  He moved the palms of his hands to the soles of her feet. "Press your feet down for me. Press harder. Good girl." He got a penlight out of his bag and shone it in her eyes, one at a time. "Good." He put the penlight back in his bag. "I think you're going to be fine, Elaine.

  You took a bump on the side of your head, but your pupils aren't dilated and they're responding so it doesn't look like there's anything wrong internally. I'd recommend an X ray to be sure, maybe a night in the hospital for observation."

  He turn
ed to Steve. "How about you?"

  Steve, oblivious to the blood running down the side of his face, said,

  "Huh?"

  It was just a scratch from a piece of the shattered window and the doctor cleaned it up and sat back. "They could both use something hot to drink."

  The driver of the Volkswagen bus said, "Hot tea, maybe? With honey?"

  "Perfect."

  In back of the crowd someone cleared his throat. They turned as one and beheld First Sergeant James M. Chopin, trooper in residence at Tok and the pride of the Alaska Department of Public Safety.

  He'd been busy, Kate realized, looking beyond him. There were flares burning brightly at both ends of the curve. The cruiser was up out of the ditch and parked by the side of the road. There was a clipboard beneath his arm with a drawing of the accident and the relative positions of the vehicles already sketched on an accident report.

  "What are you doing here?" Kate demanded, but so only he could hear her.

  "I thought they didn't let you out without your helicopter."

  He touched one finger to the brim of his hat in reply, calm, dignified, even stately. "Kate. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll identify your vehicles for me, I'll need to see your licenses and registrations.

  You can get them after you move your vehicles to the side of the road."

  "It was his fault!" a big, beefy man in an Alyeska cap growled. "He was passing on a curve." He was the driver of the Ranchero with the vet plates, and he was pointing at the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee, who gulped and looked young and scared. His companion was edging to one side, looking as if he wished he'd hit his dad up for that plane ticket to the cannery job with Peter Pan Seafoods in Dillingham after all.

  Now that there was time, now that nobody had died, they got mad, and there was a concerted move toward the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee, with son of a bitch the nicest epithet hurled at him and shooting the least painful method of execution suggested. Chopper Jim quelled the incipient riot without effort and went about the business of taking statements, patient, imperturbable, his absolute calm infectious, his innate authority unquestioned. From the front seat of the Isuzu, Kate watched him move from one group of people to the next, doing more listening than talking, taking notes, letting each of the drivers walk him through their version of the accident.

  She dug out a piece of beef jerky from the glove compartment and split it with Mutt. Gnawing on her share, she watched Chopper Jim do the trooper thing and thought of the first time she'd ever seen an Alaska state trooper in action. Back before the Dam pact when there were still two bars in Niniltna, a gold miner had made the mistake of pulling a knife on one of the Moonin boys in front of three of his brothers. The miner had died shortly thereafter. The death had been messy and public and the miner was white so somebody radioed for the trooper from Tok.

  Back then the trooper had made his rounds in a Piper Cub and a group of curious kids, Kate among them, had been waiting at the airstrip when he landed.

  The Cub rolled out to a stop. The door opened and a man climbed out.

  He was too tall to stand up straight beneath the wing, Kate remembered; he had to stoop a little until he cleared it. Before the days of EEO, there had been a height requirement for the Alaska State Troopers and this officer exceeded it handily. Or so it seemed to the little eight year-old girl goggling from the end of the runway, and a little nearer to the end of it than she had been before the door to the plane opened.

  He was immaculately dressed in blue and gold, the colors of the state flag, the colors of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, now that she thought of it. His pistol rode obviously on his hip, but the closest it ever got to being drawn was the casual hitching motion he made with his belt, a habitual, even professional gesture echoed by every state trooper Kate ever saw walk into in a dicey situation, and one that never failed in its effect. In motion, he walked slow, he talked slower, and he never, ever raised his voice, not even when Henry Moonin threatened to open him up the way he had the miner.

  Kate had been spending the weekend with Ekaterina and she had seen her cousin knifed in front of the bar, and the fight and all the blood that followed had shaken her badly. She never remembered that trooper's name but she knew, with a bone deep, unshakable conviction that never left her, that he had brought all the might and authority of the law with him to Niniltna, Alaska, and the ground had felt that much steadier beneath her feet.

  It was years since she'd thought of that day. For the first time, she realized it wasn't only the ex-cop from Cook County who had influenced her to take up a career in law enforcement.

  The Ranchero had a come-along and they had the Bronco right side up in ten minutes. The passenger door window was broken and the door wouldn't open. It started; it even went into drive, but the doctor ruled out Steve behind the wheel this soon, so the woman in the Volkswagen volunteered to drive him and Elaine to the clinic in Glennallen. The driver of the Alaska Ranchero flatly refused to pull the Toyota truck from Tennessee out of the willow thicket. Jim insisted. The Ranchero driver growled and gave in. It ran, too. It also didn't have a scratch on it. The rest of the vehicles had dinged front and back ends and a couple of the doors were hard to open and close, but on the whole were serviceable.

  Jim ticketed the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee for speeding, reckless driving and driving uninsured. He warned him to stop at the trooper's office in Glennallen, speculated out loud on the possibility of charging him with attempted vehicular homicide if he did not, and dwelled for a few graphic moments on the delights awaiting young and nubile hard-timers at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward.

  This sounded like a fine idea to everyone else and they said so. The drivers of the three RVs from Alabama were especially vociferous in their support, until Jim ticketed them for not pulling off the road when they had five vehicles behind them. They were even less happy when he held them up long enough for everyone else to take to the road in front of them. Of course, he'd cited everyone else for tailgating, so it was with a united air of general disenchantment that the convoy finally hit the road.

  "Attempted vehicular homicide'?" she said when Jim came up to her.

  He grinned.

  "What are you doing on the road? And behind the wheel of a car, no less?" Kate added.

  "You make it sound like a penance."

  "For you it is."

  He resettled the hat on his head. "I flew into Glennallen and borrowed one of their cruisers. Jack called; I knew you were on your way down, and I wanted to talk to you."

  "Why didn't you just wait at the junction?"

  "And miss this opportunity to help balance the state budget?"

  Chopper Jim loved writing tickets, and there wasn't much opportunity for that a thousand feet up, his usual milieu. "What's going on?"

  The rain was coming down harder now. "Let's get in the cruiser."

  "Okay." She climbed in next to him.

  He moved the shotgun out of her way and then had to get out and open the back door for Mutt when she gave an imperious yip outside the driver's window. He got back in again and shut the door. He sniffed.

  "What is that smell?"

  Kate looked innocent.

  "Is that roses?"

  Mutt looked coy.

  "Don't ask," Kate said.

  Jim shook his head. He didn't say, "Women!" but only because he knew it'd probably get him killed. "Jack marched into Frances Sleighter's office at 8:01 A.M. today." Kate paused in the act of slicking rain off her braid. A smile spread slowly across her face. "Oh he did, did he?"