They looked tanned and fit and happy. Percy joined them without a
backward glance at his mother and was accepted without question, a
tow-head among many darker ones.
Lily MacGregor not only sold the Darling the best of the two lots, she
found her a contractor to put up a crib, two stories with a scalloped
awning, a dainty porch, and the biggest sitting-room window on the
street. It was a design much envied and quickly copied.
It took no time to settle into a routine, and she picked up a steady
clientele with no trouble. Several of her clients fell in love with her
and proposed.
Why not? she often thought. It wasn't as if it didn't happen
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on a regular basis, girls of the Line marrying into the first gentlemen
of Alaska, retiring into a quieter life of housewifery and gardening,
even motherhood for some of them not too old to bear children.
But in the end she refused them all, wary of ever again ceding power
over her life to anyone else, no matter how charming he seemed on the
surface. In the meantime, the Dawson Darling plied her trade, saved her
money, and raised her son. In 1910 he celebrated his eleventh birthday,
and no one looking at him that day, covered with dirt from playing
hide-and-seek in Lily MacGregor's yard with Lily MacGregor's many and
various children, would recognize him for the sickly child she had
carried from Nome those long years ago.
Tuesday of the week following Percy's eleventh birthday she looked up
from the pink silk settee upon which she displayed her wares, and saw
Matt staring back at her through the plate-glass window.
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The truck tore down the road as the needle on the speedometer swung hard
to the right and stayed there. How long had he dawdled at the trailer,
trying to figure out what had happened? Five minutes? Ten? How fast had
the green truck been traveling? Fifty, sixty miles an hour? Faster?
There was only one highway, but there were hundreds of roads, marked and
unmarked, leading off it. How far? Which one? Mutt, her nose into the
wind, barked encouragement. SuperMutt, his own personal DEW Line, his
Early Kate Detector.
He didn't want to call what he felt panic. He didn't want the
disappearance of one woman, of one person, to have this clutch on his
gut. He was worried, of course he was. He would be worried about anyone
he'd gone looking for and been unable to find. Leaving a Force 10 mess
behind. Leaving her canine soul mate behind.
Get a grip, Chopin, he told himself, and made a desperate effort to
think rationally. Who had come on Kate at the trailer? Had they
kidnapped her? If so, why? Had she seen them? Were they disposing of a
witness? If that were the case, what possible reason could they have for
keeping her alive?
An ancient Ford Ranchero pulled onto the highway a foolish three hundred
yards in front of him, and Jim pulled into the left lane and slowed down
to eighty miles an hour
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to pass. There was a white, frightened blur in the driver's side window
and then it was gone.
His lights picked the letters of signs out of the dark as they flashed
past. 14 miles to Ahtna. food, phone, lodging, rv dump, arrow pointing
right.
The truck spit gravel in every direction as he wheeled into the parking
lot of the Ernestine Creek Lodge. Two campers, one Winnebago, a pickup,
and a van. No green truck. No road around the back. He pulled into a
circle and roared back out to the highway.
Fluorescent snow guide on the left, marking an access road. He pulled
in, drove a hundred feet over a series of rocky craters, saw nothing,
heard nothing (Mutt was growling and snapping at the open driver's
window, her teeth five inches from his ear), put the truck into reverse,
and backed out onto the highway again.
rest stop, one thousand feet. No cars in front of the toilets. He got
out anyway and ran to open the doors, Mutt barking at him, she didn't
smell Kate, had to check anyway, had to, great place to dump a body.
Women's, empty. Men's, empty. Dumpster, a few empty cans and bottles, a
few candy wrappers, an empty box of Kleenex, nothing else. Back in the
truck, back on the highway.
Miles flashed past. He almost hit a cow moose and calf crossing the
road. He left his foot on the gas. scenic viewpoint, one mile. No cars,
no trucks, no one. When he slowed, Mutt barked once, sharp, admonitory.
Don't stop here. He stepped on the gas.
AHTNA LANDFILL, NEXT RIGHT.
Mutt exploded, and when he hit the brakes she didn't wait. She went over
the side and vanished down the access road. The truck skidded to a halt
twenty feet past the turnoff.
Landfill. Dump. Mountains of discards of modern life. Great place to
lose a body.
He cursed the truck into reverse and didn't bother turning
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around, just backed down the road to the Ahtna landfill with the gas
pedal all the way down. He over steered and almost hit a tree on one
side of the road, overcorrected and almost hit another on the other
side. He came into a clearing at full throttle. He hit something,
bounced the ass end of the truck up in the air, came down again, hard.
It sounded like something might have fallen off. Might not. He snapped
off the engine without bothering to let out the clutch. It bucked and
snorted, and he baled out before it dieseled to a halt. "Mutt? Where are
you, girl? Mutt? Kate? Are you here? Kate? Kate!"
The truck had highcentered on a pile of garbage that looked as if it had
been pushed off the back of a pickup truck similar in size and height to
the one he was driving. The driver's side rear tire was off the ground.
Worry about that later. "Mutt? Mutt? Kate!"
The Ahtna Landfill was a hole in the ground, a natural one, falling off
from a steep, crumbling wall of hard-packed dirt. The stench was strong
and sour. He stood on the edge and squinted into the twilight. "Mutt?"
He heard a yelp, and cursed himself for leaving his flashlight in the
Cessna. "Mutt?" A movement caught his eye, off to his right. "Mutt, is
that you?"
She yelped, and he broke into a stumbling run, around the edge of the
drop-off to where it degenerated into a steep, jumbled slide of debris.
He scrambled down into the pit, grabbing at handholds wherever he found
them, a tree root, a poushki bush that gave beneath his weight and sent
him slipping into a mess of something that smelled like he didn't want
to know what it was, a rusty old bedspring that cut his hand. Mutt
barked encouragement, providing him with a beacon and he moved toward
it, stepping from a mound of garbage bags to the top of an old gas
range. He tripped on a floor lamp minus a shade and fell face forward,
picked himself up, and went on.
Mutt sounded nearer. "Where is she, girl?" he said, panting.
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Mutt let loose with a flurry of barks and yips and yells, interspersed
with worrying at a dark lump laying between two mountains of trash. She
growled at him whe
n he got to her finally. No gratitude.
"It's all right, girl," he said, praying it was, falling more than
dropping to his knees. He touched the lump and felt plastic, and
remembered the dark green trash bags strewn across the kitchen floor of
the trailer. "Oh shit, no," he said and tore at it. She was curled
inside in a fetal position, and she was wet, he thought with sweat. He
found her throat, felt for a pulse.
There was one, strong and slow and steady, and the wave of relief that
swept over him then made him feel like he was drowning. Immediately in
its wake was anger, so powerful and so vicious that he wanted to kill
her. How had she let herself be sandbagged like this? How could she have
been so careless of her own safety? Anybody would think she had a death
wish, last September at George Perry's hunting camp, now here in Ahtna.
What the hell was wrong with the woman? Plenty, and he couldn't wait to
tell her, in detail.
He struggled for control, for breath. Mutt licked at Kate's face,
whining. When he thought he could lay hands on her without doing serious
bodily injury, he managed to get Kate into a fireman's lift, how later
he would never know. Then began the nightmare journey back, during which
he found even more things to trip over and fall into than he had on the
way there. Almost to the edge of the pit, he thought close to where he
had climbed and slid down, he heard the sound of a engine. "Hey," he
yelled. "Down here!"
He was answered by a thrown garbage bag, which exploded on contact four
feet away and which sprayed all three of them with something liquid that
smelled like sour milk.
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"Hey!" he bellowed. "there's somebody down here!" but the vehicle was
already leaving.
"You miserable-" Jim stood where he was and called the driver every name
he could think of and some he made up on the spot. He threatened him
with arrest for assaulting a police officer, fleeing the scene of an
accident, and being a deaf motherfucker whose father's identity was in
serious doubt. He promised him no bail and no parole. The driver didn't
hear him, and didn't come back, on the whole a good thing for both of them.
When he ran out of steam, he felt better. Over his shoulder, Kate
uttered a faint groan.
"Hang on, girl," he said, and began the grim climb up the steep bank, in
the dark, with a hundred-pound sack of potatoes over his shoulder. When
he got back to his truck, he set her down carefully in the cab and told
her, "You have not been a fun date."
The potatoes stirred. "Jim?"
His heart leaped. "Kate? Can you hear me?"
"Of course I can hear you," she said, sounding fretful "I can smell you,
too."
His laugh was short but heartfelt. "You should talk."
"Where are we? What are you doing here? What- where's Mutt?"
Mutt wormed her way in between them and lavished Kate's face with her
tongue. For once, Jim envied her.
"What happened?" Kate said, when Mutt finally calmed down. "Where are
we?" She blinked at her surroundings. "Whose truck is this, and why am I
laying in it?"
He told her.
She was silent.
"Was somebody in the trailer with you?"
"No, I-no."
"What is the last thing you remember?" A brief silence. "Kate?"
"I was reading a book, I think."
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"Reading a book?"
"Well, she had a lot of them, and I didn't find anything else, and I was
there and so were they, so. .." Her voice trailed away.
"I see. You were reading a book," he said, his voice very calm. "Did
you, while you were reading this book, notice if anyone joined you in
the trailer?"
"I-no."
"No one did, or you didn't notice?"
"No one did."
"Right. You didn't notice. Either that, or you stuffed yourself in a
garbage sack and dumped yourself in the landfill." The rage was back. He
tamped it down.
At every scene, your first act is to establish your authority. State
Trooper 101, first day. For some reason, Kate Shugak could make him
forget every rule he'd ever learned in class or on the job. For one
brief, sweet moment he was tempted to finish the job whoever had started
that afternoon. He mastered the impulse, and was proud of himself, and
then was mad all over again.
In a level voice he said, "Did you find anything in the trailer?"
"I don't know. Let me think a minute. No, I-no. Nothing but books.
That's what she had most of."
"Did you dump them on the floor?"
"What?"
"Pawlowski's books. Did you dump them on the floor?"
"No! I would never-she had some old books, one was ... do you mean
somebody pulled them off the shelves?"
"Yes. All of them."
"The same person who attacked me?"
"That would be my professional opinion, yes."
She grabbed the steering wheel and pulled herself erect. The dome light
was burned out, and she couldn't see Jim's face. "Come on, we have to
get back there."
"Like hell, we have to get you to a hospital."
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"You don't understand, Jim. Some of those books were really valuable."
"I don't care if the covers were made of gold and the pages were made of
silver! Your shoulder's messed up, something could be broken, you've got
scrapes and bruises everywhere. When's the last time you had a tetanus
shot?"
"Last year," she said, annoyed, her voice stronger now. With Jim
bellowing on one side and Mutt yipping anxiously on the other, she was
not feeling at the top of her game. "It's okay," she said to Mutt.
"Okay my ass! You-"
"Jim," she said. It was one word, his name, flat, devoid of emotion. It
meant business.
It stopped him, mercifully, at least for the moment. "What?"
"Shut up. Please. I've got a hell of a headache, and you yelling and her
yipping makes it worse."
He dropped his voice but he was still mad. "Why won't you go to the
hospital? Give me one good goddamn reason!"
She felt an insane desire to laugh at the hissed whisper. That way lay a
descent into hysteria, and she fought it back. "If you'd been stuffed
into a trash bag and tossed into the city dump like last week's garbage,
would you be in a hurry to tell anyone about it?"
They compromised, and went back to Ahtna. As Jim pointed out, they were
all in need of a change of clothes. Kate took a shower. Mutt took a
bath. Jim borrowed jeans and a sweatshirt from Kenny Hazen, who dropped
Jim's uniform off at the only dry cleaners in town the following
morning. There was no ridding his boots of the smell, though; for months
afterward he would look down and see flies buzzing around his ankles.
Kate checked on the whereabouts of the other campaign staffers, who were
all present and accounted for at another
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basketball game at the gym. Halftime and Anne was working the bleachers,
Darlene at her elbow, Erin in tow, Doug chasing some skirt on the
opposite side of the room, Tom at the center of an admiri
ng group of
teenage girls, Tracy snapping pictures, getting names, keeping one eye
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead Page 22
