he had visited with Kenny Hazen that morning, and see if Kate was done
communing with her new best friend's spirit. Not that he owed her a ride
home or anything, but it was the neighborly thing to do.
You've got it bad, boy.
"Yeah, and the horse you rode in on," he said out loud, alarming the
young man who fueled planes for the local Chevron dealership.
He borrowed the airport manager's truck and drove out to the trailer, on
the way nearly sideswiped by a dark green truck speeding in the other
direction. He was sorry he didn't have lights and siren, sorrier still
that he'd left the ticket book back in the plane, and sorriest of all
that the truck he was driving had a shimmy in the front end and a
distressing tendency on the part of the gearshift to resist going into
and popping out of third gear, or it would have been his very great
pleasure to haul this sorry excuse for transportation
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in a U-turn and give chase. He didn't catch the tag number, either.
It was in no very cheerful frame of mind that he pulled into the
driveway. For one thing, he didn't know what the hell he was going to
say. "Want a ride home?" wasn't quite going to cut it this time.
When he got out of the truck, he heard a dog barking. It got louder as
he approached the trailer, and when he got to the door he saw Mutt
hurling herself at the window in it. If there had been a little more
glass, she would have broken through.
"Mutt!" he said. "Stop it! Kate, where are you? Kate!"
He barged inside, or he would have if Mutt hadn't hit him square in the
chest on her way out. She hit the ground over his head and made for the
road, barking all the way, sharp, urgent barks.
"Mutt!" he roared, and she skidded to a halt. "Stay! Stay right there,
girl!" She took a few steps toward him and whined, a few steps toward
the road, whined again, and was repeating this dance as he got up and
made for the trailer door. The next thing he knew he was on the ground
again, Mutt having caught the hem of his pants leg and yanked him off
his feet. "What the hell?" he said, staring up at her. "Will you knock
it off! Jesus!" He got to his feet again and made the trailer in one
giant step. Mutt started barking again.
A hurricane appeared to have passed through the neat home he had seen
that morning. Every dish, serving bowl, pot was out of the cupboards.
The box of Tide had been emptied into the middle of the floor, along
with the garbage and a box of Special K. The clothes had been torn off
their hangars, the closet emptied.
There was no indication that this was an office as well as a home: no
desk, no filing cabinet, no fax machine. There were books, though, and
every single one of the hooks was on the floor, in heaps he had to step
over. Those
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bookshelves not fastened to the walls had been overturned, as if the
hurricane had wanted to look behind them.
A pocket door between the kitchen and living area had been locked from
the other side. He kicked it out of its frame and found more chaos: the
covers ripped from the bed, the mattress and springs tipped to the
floor, and more books pulled from their shelves and more bookshelves
pulled from the walls.
Kate was nowhere to be found.
Mutt's barks became louder and more frantic.
There was a second door, however, that had been hidden behind one of the
bookshelves. It was slightly ajar, held so by a book that had fallen
into the crack. There were more books on the ground outside.
He waded back to the front door, taking one last look around in a vain
attempt to see if Kate had even been here. He damned her for not
carrying a purse, standard issue for every other woman in the world, but
oh no, not her. He gave a pile of books a savage kick and missed, and
the toe of his boot hit the corner of the bookcase instead. He let out a
yell and tried to hop up and down, but there wasn't any room. His good
foot hit another pile of books and they tilted, and he lost his balance
and fell heavily on another pile. Outside, Mutt's barks increased in
frequency and intensity.
He damned the books loudly and with imagination, glaring down at the
bookcase as if it were animate. It lay drunkenly on one side with a
piece of rubber caught in a splinter on one corner.
He climbed to his feet and reached for the door. Mutt bounded over,
alternately whining and barking, her attitude one of frantic urgency.
"Hold on, girl, I think we're onto something here." There was a long,
thick rubber band dangling from the doorknob on the inside, snapped in
half, ends ragged. It matched the piece of rubber caught on the splinter
on the corner of the bookcase. He let go of the
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knob and the door slammed shut, nearly catching Mutt's nose in it.
If the bookcase were raised to what he thought was its proper place, at
right angles to the door, someone could wrap a long rubber band around
the doorknob and, providing it were long and thick enough, stretch it to
wrap around the corner of the bookcase. Thus keeping the door closed.
Why?
He opened the door again, let it slam shut again. Pretty efficient
hydraulic hinge. Why bother with the rubber band?
He thought of how Mutt had been on the other side of that door.
Suppose Mutt was on the outside, Kate on the inside and in trouble.
Suppose whomever Kate was in trouble with was also on the inside.
That whoever would think three or four times before stepping into the
teeth of a one hundred and forty pound dog who was half gray wolf and
all fangs.
He turned and looked at the pocket door he'd kicked off its hinges.
Suppose whoever had come in, coldcocked Kate, searched the trailer, and
had prepared to leave, to find Mutt at the front door. The back door was
only a few feet away down the same wall, reachable by Mutt in a single
bound.
Whoever was stuck.
Unless whoever rigged the door with the rubber band and then propped it
open a crack-say with a paperback, perhaps? There were enough of them
laying around. Whoever could be fairly certain that with even a little
toehold, Mutt and her claws would be able to get the door open, just not
right away, which might be the point. When the door opened, the book
would fall out.
He looked outside. The paperback edition of The Handmaid's Tale, a book
which had left him about as terrified upon reading it as he was now, lay
on the concrete square
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in front of the door. He'd fallen on it when Mutt tackled him and hadn't
noticed.
As the book fell out, the dog got in. The hydraulic hinge would close
the door. Hydraulic hinges were common in the north, helped to keep the
cold out when you had your arms full of groceries. The doorknob was a
smooth metal. Even if a dog was smart enough to open a door, this one
wouldn't open easy.
He turned and looked at the pocket door again. The rubber band would
take even Mutt some time to negotiate. Maybe just long enough for
<
br /> whoever to scoot to the back of the trailer and close the pocket door,
and lock it behind them. Then all whoever had to do was wait for the
front door to close behind Mutt, forming a neat little trap.
Whoever then exited the back door.
Why did whoever take Kate?
Maybe whoever didn't take Kate, maybe Kate followed.
But then there would have been no need for the neatest little animal
trap Jim had seen in a long time.
"Son of a bitch," he said, and yanked at the door knob. Standing
stiff-legged on the other side, Mutt growled at him, the first time
she'd ever done so. She lunged forward and grabbed a fold of his blue
uniform pants, and it wasn't her fault she didn't get a mouthful of
thigh while she was at it. Jim almost overbalanced again. "Damn it, I'm
coming, let go!"
She didn't believe him and backed out of the trailer, pulling him
inexorably forward. "Damn it, Mutt, I said I was coming! Now let go,
right now!" He glared down at her.
She let go long enough to bark at him. She trotted toward his truck,
back toward him, toward the truck, and barked again.
A dark blue Ford Escort sat in front of his borrowed truck. He had
thought it belonged to Paula Pawlowski, but now he remembered he hadn't
seen it this morning. It was
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open, and empty but for a large box of dinner-size paper napkins in the
trunk. The registration was in the glove box, in the name of Luiz
Antonio Orozco y Elizondo, which name meant nothing to Jim. The keys
were in it. He wiped a hand across the back seat, and it came up covered
with a lot of stiff, gray hairs that exactly matched the coat of the dog
who squeezed into the car, turned around on the size of a quarter and
barked once, right in his face, and then growled again, as if to
underline the bark. If Kate had borrowed this car, if she and Mutt had
driven out to the Pawlowski trailer in it, then why had she left it behind?
More importantly, why-and how?-had she left Mutt behind?
She hadn't.
Suddenly he remembered the truck that had nearly sideswiped his borrowed
truck on the way down the road to the trailer. "Mutt! Let's go!"
One sharp bark, easily translated as, About time! She was in the back of
the pickup before he was in the cab.
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FAIRBANKS 1907
"Are you a lady or a whore?"
It was only an inquiry, not an attack, and the young man with the bowler
hat shoved to the back of his head, shirtsleeves rolled up, and a baggy
tweed vest over even baggier tweed pants didn't look all that interested
in the answer after his first speculative once-over, earmarking her for
future reference: redhead, a little long in the tooth but still toothsome.
"A whore," she said, her voice steady. Her son looked at her, and she
smiled at him.
The young man saw the boy and had the grace to flush. "Your son?"
"Yes."
"You plan on keeping him with you on the Line?"
"No."
Her expression didn't change, but the young man shifted anyway. It was a
simple, single-syllable word, but she managed to infuse a great deal of
feeling into it. For reasons he could never explain, it moved him to
say, "You might want to check with the MacGregors. Lily MacGregor has
been known to look after a child now and then. Fine woman.
Well-respected in the community."
"Thank you."
"Yes. Well." Uncomfortable with his unaccustomed shift into altruism,
the young man hawked and spit, thereby reasserting his masculinity and
erasing any notion that he might
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be turning soft, and said in his gruffest voice, "There are rules on the
Line."
"I know."
"It's my job to tell you what they are." He reeled them off with the
habit of long practice. No soliciting in saloons or dance halls. There
were special hours for going to the movies and visiting the shops, when
she wouldn't be mingling with respectable society. Regular health
inspections and a small monthly payment of something he called a "fine"
but which sounded to her like a license to operate.
If she abided by these rules, she would have the backing of the
community and no threat of legal reprisal. "Do you have any capital?" he
said. "Any money to invest?" She gave a small nod, wary of admitting to
the carrying of any cash.
"Then you can buy your own house on the Line or, if you like, buy a lot
and build." Seeing her expression, he added, "It's not like that. The
rents are reasonable. So are prices for the lots." He shrugged, losing
interest. "You'll see for yourself. Next!"
She stepped to the gangway and paused. "Sir?"
He looked over his shoulder. "What?"
"Thank you for your kindness. We are strangers here, and we appreciate it."
He grunted. "Are you a lady or are you a whore?" he said to the woman
behind her, and she left the deck of the stern-wheeler Georgia Lee
behind and descended to the shore of the city of Fairbanks, on the banks
of the Chena River, in the heart of interior Alaska.
She hadn't taken the boat for Fairbanks that day in Nome seven years
before. Alex Papadopolous, who had staggered away after she had shot
him, hadn't looked dead enough to her, and she didn't think for a minute
that if he survived that he would think she had gone to Seattle. She was
a whore, it was her trade, and the most profitable place
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to practice it at present was Alaska. Alex would know that, and he would
look for her, and he would find her. Outside, she had all the room in
the world in which to disappear.
Gunshots attracted no attention in Nome in 1900, where they averaged one
murder a day. She had put Matt, unconscious from the time she had shot
Alex, into her own bed and bound the wound in his shoulder as best she
could. She'd thrown some clothes in a valise, exchanged one of Matt's
precious nuggets for a case of canned milk, and had smuggled herself and
the boy down to the beach, where she found a ship's captain with an eye
for a pretty woman willing to hide her away in his cabin for the
duration of the voyage, and willing to be seduced out of the irritants
supplied by the presence of a toddler. He had been kind, after his
fashion, and mercifully normal in his attentions, and she had parted
from him in Seattle with no bad feelings and no regrets.
Percy was so thin and so pale and so listless those first days at sea
that she had been afraid she might lose him. When the captain was
absent, she spent all her time with Percy cradled in her arms, holding
him, covering his face with kisses, rocking him, talking to him, talking
to herself. For a month, as the steamer wended its way slowly south and
east, she had nothing to do but submit to the captain's demands and tend
to Percy's needs. These duties left an uncomfortable amount of free time
in which to think, and as the days passed and the relative peace of the
voyage remained unbroken, she had time to reflect, to interpret, to
determine, and, finally, to plan.
Her entire life to
that point passed in review before eyes newly opened
and bitterly critical of her actions to date. She had been so secure in
her beauty that she had allowed herself to be sold at auction to the
highest bidder, confident that she remained in control of her life and
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead Page 20
