Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 08 - Killing Grounds

by Killing Grounds(lit)

  When Kate's skiff emerged from the mouth of the creek, Meany's setnet site was still the only site fishing, and his drifter was still the only boat with a net out. He'd drifted a little too close to shore for his sixty-mesh, or thirty-foot, net, and so was pulling it, presumably prior to moving the boat farther off shore and resetting the net there, or perhaps prior to delivery, since he was riding very low in the water.

  Only he had a problem, because half a dozen other drifters had crowded round him, their engines idling, making no effort to move out of the way.

  Kate caught the barest glimpse of all this on her way back to the Freya, as she was preoccupied with dodging hatch-cover water-skiers and fireworks. Dewey Dineen tossed another cherry bomb that came a little too close for comfort, dousing Kate with water. She altered course to come alongside the Priscilla and share her feelings on the subject. He was half in the bag, so she let it go with a few pithy remarks that were received with a wide, unfocused grin and the offer of a beer.

  Old Sam was standing in the bow of the Freya, and came down on deck to catch her line. She came up on deck and said, "What's going on?"

  Old Sam grinned the grin that made him look like a cross between Lucifer and Linda Lovelace. "It's better than a Hollywood movie, Kate. Come watch."

  She followed him up to the bow, from where they had an excellent view of the altercation shaping up off the port bow. On board the no-name drifter, Meany's son was pulling in the last of the gear, where it sat in a green pile of mesh on deck forward of the reel. Meany himself was at the controls on the flying bridge, trying to make way without much success, because he was being matched move for move by the half-dozen drifters surrounding him.

  With immense enjoyment, Old Sam said, "He just took delivery from his beach site, and the rest of 'em won't give him sea room."

  Kate eyed him, one eyebrow raised. Old Sam was maybe five feet, two and a half inches when he stood on tiptoe and weighed maybe 125 pounds after a nine-course mealmaybe. With the passage of timehe wouldn't say how muchthe flesh of his face had wrinkled like a mass of contour lines on a well-worn map, but his step was firm, his eye sharp and his grin just nasty enough to make the people he turned it on feel for their wallets. "What are you grinning about, old man? If the fleet's on strike, so are we. This situation isn't putting any butter on our bread, either."

  "Yeah, well, was I fishing instead of tendering, I don't know's how I'd be risking a new drift net for fifty cents a pound myself."

  "I guess Meany doesn't think so."

  Old Sam spat over the side, an eloquent assessment of his opinion of the fisherman in question.

  Kate looked over at the drifter, still surrounded. "He trying for us, or for town?" Beneath the green mesh of the net, the deck of the drifter was awash in a slippery pile of salmon, while her trim line was riding dangerously close to water level. If a squall blew up, the drifter could founder in an instant. It had happened before, when a skipper's greed overshadowed considerations of safety of ship and crew. It would happen again.

  But not today. "Them boys ain't gonna let him do neither," Old Sam predicted.

  He was only half right. There was the sudden roar of an engine and Meany's drifter, sluggish but determined, plowed straight for the midships of the Esther. Tim Sarakovikoff let out a yell of outrage, and Kate had a split second to wonder if he knew about Myra's extramarital activities. There was an answering roar of engines and a froth of water from the stern of the other boats, and the drifter slid through the sudden opening made between the Esther and the Deliah like waxed thread through the eye of a needle.

  "Slicker'n snot," Old Sam said with reluctant admiration.

  There was a furious roar from a dozen throats. Meany was called a lot of names, most of which would have offended his mother deeply, but he made it to deep water and out of the bay.

  Old Sam spat over the side again. "Guess he's doing his own delivering today. Good."

  Kate thought so, too. Fishermen had long memories, and Old Sam and the Freya could ill afford to be seen as helping to break a strike, not if they wanted fishermen delivering to them in the future. On the other hand, Kamaishi signed their paycheck. It was a thin enough line to tread, sometimes too thin. "We heading for the barn? Not much point in sticking around here, if nobody's fishing."

  What with Jack and Johnny marooned with the aunties up Amartuq Creek, she didn't really want to go anywhere, and was glad when Old Sam grinned his demon grin. "Here's where the action seems to be, girl. We might as well stay and watch the show. Hell, we got front-row seats." She opened her mouth to request permission to spend the night on shore, caught his choleric eye and thought better of it. Besides, Jack and Johnny needed a day or so to acclimate, anyway. Not to mention, if she stayed on board she could read instead of fillet fish.

  Pete Petersen brought the Monica alongside and the two old men retired to the galley and drank beer and reminisced about the good old days, when the Fish and Game and the fish buyers and wimmen knew their places and kept them. Kate had heard it all before, and retreated to the wheelhouse. Settling herself comfortably in the captain's chair, feet propped on the console, she opened The Heaven Tree Trilogy and lost herself in medieval Wales, which at that point seemed a lot more civilized than modern-day Prince William Sound on the Fourth of July.

  With Meany gone, the scene shifted from confrontation to celebration. The parade in Cordova started at two that afternoon and since the fleet was on strike the fishermen could have upped anchor and sailed for Cordova in time to catch it, but they didn't trust each other enough to stay on strike, so they all stayed out on the fishing grounds until the period was over, just to keep each other honest.

  It was immediately obvious that most of them had prepared well in advance to celebrate Independence Day, strike or no. At two o'clock, precisely in conjunction with the parade they were all missing, the fireworks came out in force, a fountain of pyrotechnics generated from every deck. With the injudicious placement of a large Roman candle, Jimmy Velasco went so far as to set the roof of the cabin of the Marie Josephine on fire. His nearest neighbors downed punk and raised buckets and helped him get it out before it did too much damage.

  Les Nordensen broke his left arm when the hatch cover he was water-skiing on caught the stern of the Terra Jean. Pete Petersen set it with a roll of Playboy magazines and duct tape, and Les went back to the party.

  Also under the influence, Kell Van Brocklin fell hopelessly in love with Ellen Steen, and pulled the hook to follow his pheromones across Alaganik Bay. They were pretty effective; after nearly running down Lamar Rousch's Zodiac, which raised a doubt in certain suspicious minds as to just how drunk he actually was, he sniffed the Dawn out from a group of drifters rafted together at the south end of the bay and nosed up alongside. From the Freya's wheelhouse it looked like the Joanna C. was trying to mate with the Dawn, but Ellen managed to repel boarders and steam off to a safe distance. Rejected, Kell lost interest, passed out at the wheel and ran the Joanna C. up on a sandbar, which effectively put him out of commission until the next high tide.

  Joe Anahonak challenged Craig Pirtle to a joust, and a group of drifters made a lane between two unsteady lines of boats. The Darlene and the Rose charged at each other at full throttle, boat hooks at the ready. Full throttle on a Grayling bowpicker was only about eight knots; still, it was enough to bring the aluminum bows together with one hell of a clang, causing Kate to peer over the top of her book just in time to see Joe take a perfect, airborne tuck-and-roll over his own bow and Craig's as well, ending up in the water with a magnificent splash, big enough to cause a mini tidal wave that rocked nearby boats and caused two other fishermen to nose-dive for sea bottom. Craig was not so lucky, his boat hook somehow entangling itself in Joe's anchor chain. Either too dumb or too drunk to let go, or possibly distracted by a low-flying Super Cub, a grinning George Perry on the yoke, Craig pole-vaulted Joe's deck with a form worthy of an Olympic score of ten, to pancake on the roof of Joe's cabin, where, fortu
nately for him, Joe's spare set of gear was piled.

  George waggled his wings in applause and headed off toward Cordova. Kate reached for the binoculars. The person in the rear seat sprang into focus. It wasn't the man she'd seen going up the creek; this time it was Auntie Joy. What was Auntie Joy doing going into town? Usually once she got out to fish camp she was there for the duration, like the rest of the aunties. The aunties didn't usually fly between fish camp and town, either; it was too expensive for all of them and supplies, too. If there were anything to worry about, Auntie Vi would have brought the whole bunch out to the Freya. Kate trained the glasses on the mouth of Amartuq Creek. It remained empty of anything but water and sand and occasional jumping salmon. She put down the glasses and tried not to worry.

  Meanwhile, back on the jousting grounds, Yuri Andreev fished Joe out of the drink. Yuri was one of the teetotaling Old Believers from Anchor Point, fishing his first year on the Sound, and he was torn between disbelief and disgust at the behavior of his fellow fishermen. Joe, unheeding, thanked Yuri profusely for the rescue and collapsed into Craig's arms to swear lifelong devotion to liberty, equality and especially fraternity.

  The party went on. It was still going on when Kate finished the first part of the Trilogy, mopped up her tears with a shirtsleeve and turned in.

  Possibly because of the unusual activity carrying on all night around the Freya, her dreams were disturbing. In one, Auntie Joy was tending her fish wheel, with Aunties Vi and Edna and Balasha cleaning and filleting the catch on the bank behind her. Lamar and Becky appeared, attired in clean uniforms with knife-edged creases on their shirtsleeves and pantlegs, and hats squared away at precisely the correct angle. Somehow Auntie Vi had a gun, and it went off. It was a shotgun, Kate noticed, because Kate was in the dream, too, but only as an invisible observer, and the shotgun kicked hard, knocking Auntie Vi over backwards. Lamar and Becky were miraculously unharmed, no speck of blood marring their crisp uniforms, but Auntie Vi's chest had been crushed by the recoil and she lay dead, staring open-eyed at the blue, blue sky.

  Kate couldn't remember dreaming in color before, and she admired the effect, before the scene shifted to the deck of Meany's no-namer. He was beating his kid again, thump, thump, thump, his fist connecting with the boy's body in the one-two punch of a professional boxer, the meaty sound like someone smacking his lips together over and over again.

  Or no, it was the sound of a heartbeat, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub, slow, steady, inexorable. The halibut heart was back, and Kate stirred and moaned in her sleep. The dusky, humping lump of grainy flesh pumped against her hands, once, twice, three times, and she came awake in a rush, perspiration beading her forehead, her blood beating rapidly against her eardrums.

  It was early yet, by the slant of the sun's rays no more than six. A light breeze caused the water to lap at the hull of the Freya. All else was calm, no sounds of jousting or other celebrations of fraternal love. There wasn't any halibut heart sharing her bunk, or crawling down the slant of the chart table, or lumping its way over the sill of the door between chart room and wheelhouse. She shook her head once, sharply, clearing the lingering trace of the dream from her mind, and took a deep breath and blew it out explosively.

  Kate was not given to introspection, a nasty, addictive habit she believed led to self-absorption and a lifelong preoccupation with one's navel. Dreams weird enough to leave a shudder along the flesh were the best dreams to walk away from, as fast and as far as possible. Once upon a time, her dreams had been of former victims from her years as a sex crimes investigator in the Anchorage DA's office, children mostly, children and women too beaten down for too long to fight back. She shook off those memories, too, something it was getting easier to do with every passing year, although the scar on her throat would never let her completely forget.

  She never would forget them, the children especially, their staring eyes, broken bodies and wounded hearts, but they no longer held her hostage to their memory, and she no longer felt guilty at having abandoned their successors to their fate. Five years was all she'd had to give, and she had given them, with every scrap of ability and dedication and passion she had to offer. When it was over, she came home, to recover her health, her equilibrium and her sanity, and to live out her life in a place that was as nourishing of spirit as it was calming of soul.

  Understanding this in so many words for the first time, she felt her heart lift a little, and it was then she heard it, a faint, thudding sound, coming from below. She had to listen hard, but it was there, and seemed to be coming from the starboard side of the hull. "Sam?" she called.

  There was no answer. Old Sam and Pete hadn't turned in until long after she had, and with no delivery to make to the cannery Old Sam was probably still sacked out. She scrambled into her clothes and hopped out to the catwalk running around the bridge, pulling her tennis shoes on as she went. A bit of breeze formed a small, regular chop, and it lapped against the hull with a regular beat. For a moment she thought that was all it was, and then, as she leaned out over the railing, she caught sight of what looked like a bundle of sodden clothes pressed up against the black hull of the Freya. In that instant, a wave caught the bundle and it rolled face upward, resolving into the body of a man, the skin of his face leached white in the morning sun.

  Even at this distance, even with the water darkening the color of his hair, she could identify him. The broad forehead, the heavy jaw, the thick torso.

  It was Cal Meany.

  And his eyes, staring blindly up at the dawn of a new day, left her in no doubt, even if she hadn't seen the swollen tongue protruding from between his half-open lips.

  He was most definitely dead.

  8

  Nine hours later Kate watched as an Alaska Airlines 737 rolled to a halt in front of the Mudhole Smith International Airport, there to disgorge a full load of passengers and two igloos of freight. Five of the passengers on flight 66 were locals, had little or no luggage and were whisked away by family members driving rusted-out Subarus and four-wheel-drive pickups; the rest were tourists, kayakers, sport fishermen, hikers and campers. One couple was met by a Bluebird bus converted into a recreational vehicle bearing Montana plates. An Isuzu pickup with Idaho plates picked up a pair of kayakers, with kayaks, and a tall, eager woman with flying blond hair screeched up in a puke-green Ford Econoline van with rapidly failing brakes and no plates at all and leapt out to embrace a man half as tall and twice as thick as she was, who returned her embrace with enthusiasm, to the point that Kate delicately averted her eyes.

  A baggage tractor lumbered up to the luggage window and began off-loading duffel bags, cardboard boxes fastened with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, frame packs, knapsacks, sleeping bags, fishing pole cases, tackle boxes and about fifty optimistically empty coolers. Passengers crowded around and the pile melted.

  Fifteen minutes later the first of the small planes began taking off, a Cessna 206 so heavy with freight and passengers it used up most of the runway before becoming airborne. It they caught any fish at all, it was going to take them at least two trips to get everything back to Cordova.

  The next small plane took off the second the Cessna was clear of the ground, this time a Super Cub on wheel floats with rifles tied to the struts and gear lashed to the floats. It, too, took an inordinate amount of pavement to get into the air. The third small plane was a TriPacer, sprightly on its tricycle gear and with its light load of one pilot, one passenger, one pole, one pack, one rifle and one cooler. A fisherman who believed in traveling light and in solitude. Kate approved.

  At that point a Cessna 185 with the blue and gold seal of the Alaska state troopers embossed on the tail landed in a three-point runway paint job, and Master Sergeant James M. Chopin pulled up on the apron with a flourish. It was a new plane, and gleamed bravely even in the cloudy drizzle that was standard for Mudhole Smith. Jim emerged gleaming no less bravely, a tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged man clad in an immaculate uniform, shiny blue jacket zipped to just ben
eath the perfectly tied Windsor knot of his tie, hat freshly brushed and its brim pulled down just far enough to provide Jim's bright blue eyes with just the correct amount of shade. Jim was well aware of the cachet the Alaska state trooper's uniform lent the wearer, and he took care never to appear less than sartori-ally splendid, whether he was testifying in court in Anchorage, disarming a wife killer in Chitina or responding to the scene of a murder in Cordova.

  "Kate," he said, giving her a formal nod, immediately spoiling the effect with a grin than reminded her of nothing so much as the expression on the snout of a great white shark on its second pass. "Where's Mutt?"

  "At fish camp. Where's your helicopter?"

  "In the shop. Fish camp?"

  "On Amartuq Creek, with Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi."

  "Right. On Walden Pond with Thoreau, Gandhi and Dr. King, learning to practice civil disobedience. Mutt ought to be good at that." It unsettled Kate when she and Jim shared the same opinion on any subject, and it was doubly unnerving when the opinion concerned her elders' perfectly legitimate actions in defense of their cultural history.

  He sensed her uneasiness. His grin widened and he adjusted his hat a millimeter to the south. "Hear you found yourself another body."

  "I don't exactly go around drumming up business," Kate said, irritated.

  His dimples deepened. Master Sergeant James M. Chopin was a die-hard flirt who made his home as state trooper in residence at Tok, a small community to the north of the Park that didn't quite qualify as Bush because there was a road through it. Rated on both fixed wing and helicopter, he kept the peace of the Park's twenty million acres from the air, the only way to get around Bush Alaska, and had been doing so for the last fifteen years. He'd been seducing Kate's female relatives for at least that long, earning himself the nickname Father of the Park, used with affection by some (usually female) and with opprobrium by others (usually male).