"Really?" Kate said politely. "If there were any Cetaceans in Cordova, I'd recommend it to Gull. As it is . . ."
"You're probably right."
Their eyes met and they smiled.
Jim resettled his hat, flat brim not a bubble off level, and straightened his already straight shoulders. He nodded at the corpse in the back of the pickup. "Give me a ride to the airport?"
"You going to fly him in?"
"Quicker than waiting for tomorrow's jet, and the sooner we get the body back to Anchorage and the techies in the lab, the better."
She nodded, and they climbed in.
Jim was silent until they were well out of town. He sighed, and said, "Beaten, strangled and stabbed. I wouldn't be surprised if Frank finds a bullet in him."
"Kind of emphasizes the killer's sincerity, doesn't it?"
"Kind of."
They passed the Powder House, a southcentral Alaskan institution on a par with Bernie's Roadhouse in Niniltna. From the stories Old Sam told, and hints she'd had from other old-timers and elders, Stephan had hoisted more than a few at the Powder House when he got this far south.
He hadn't hoisted any at home. He had left that to her mother. Kate shook the memory off before it took hold.
They were almost to the airport before Jim said, "Unless, of course, we've got more than one killer."
Kate slumped a little in her seat, sorry he'd put her fear into words. "I hate the weird ones. I hate the weird ones."
"Yeah."
Jim could afford to sound laconic. "I suppose you expect me to go on out to the setnet site and interview the family."
The shark's grin was back, wide and predatory, with entirely too many teeth showing.
"I'm tendering," she said. "Some of us actually have to work for a living, you knowwe're not subsidized to live in luxury by a grateful state."
He let out a great shout of laughter that rang off the metal insides of the cab.
"Shit," Kate said, with feeling.
"Thanks, Kate," he said, still laughing. "I appreciate the offer. And the laugh."
"Up yours," she said.
With true nobility, he refrained from giving the obvious reply, but only because he needed help in muscling Meany's stiff and awkward body out of the truck bed and into the back of the plane. They slammed the door on the macabre object ignoring the wide-eyed looks of a cluster of airport worker standing near the terminal. "I'll be back, this evening if I can tomorrow if I can't."
"Hurry," she said, with emphasis. "If this strike continues, most of your best suspects are going to head south for the winter."
"I'll hurry."
"Meantime, I'll dig up what I can, but if they start fishing again, I start tendering."
He eyed her, considering. "You want me to put you or temporary staff? There's a per diem."
"God, no!" she said, genuinely horrified.
He spread his hands. "I offered."
"And I turned you down flat. Just get your sweet ass back here as soon as you can."
The grin flashed again. "Why, thank you, Kate. I didn't think you'd noticed."
Back in town, Kate narrowly avoided a squirrel darting across the road and pulled the truck up in front of the harbormaster's office. Through the window, she could see Gull sitting at his desk. He looked up and waved her inside.
"Thanks for the use of the truck, Gull," she said, handing over the keys.
He looked at them, thought about it for a moment and then, as if inspiration had struck, stuffed them into a pocket. Not a man who maintained a strict guard over the material things in his life, but then the truck was the property of the city, and there weren't many places to drive a stolen vehicle in Cordova.
"So, Chopper Jim get off with the stiff all right?" he said, sitting back and putting his feet on the desk.
She mimicked his actions, linking her hands and stretching so that her bones popped. "Yeah."
Gull scratched the back of his head. "Hell of a thing." It was an offhand observation; he didn't look shocked or horrified or disgusted, but then he could quote chapter and verse of a century's worth of atrocities committed against the noble red man by the base white man from the Mexican to the Canadian border. He wasn't one to get overly excited at a single murder, no matter how redundant in method. "What do you think happened?"
"I don't have a clue," Kate said. "Or rather, I've got too many of them. Did you see Meany when he came in yesterday afternoon?"
Gull snorted, and folded his gigantic paws over his chest. "Hell, I saw him yesterday evening. I had to run him out of transient parking. Son of a bitch. You know, Kate, it's not the fact that guys like him try to steal from the city that upsets me so much, it's the discourtesy."
"Discourtesy?"
"Discourtesy," he said firmly. "I mean, the Fomalhauters weren't having enough problems with the repairs to their exhaust ducttheir Star Grazer'd taken a hit from a rogue microplanetoidthen this earthbound yo-yo tries to put a goddam drift netter up their tailpipe."
Kate wondered if Gull knew anything more about astronomy and the potential for extraterrestrial life than he did about the Native American. Probably not, but who was she to spoil his fun.'
Then it hit her. "What time was that?"
"What, when the Fomalhauters landed?"
"No," Kate said gravely, "when Meany tried to drive up their tailpipe."
He scratched again. It seemed to help him think. "I dont know, about ten maybe? He always does that, or did it, coming in later in the evening, thinking I won't nail his ass."
"And did you? Nail his ass?"
"To the floor. I was practicing 'The Ojibway Square Dance' on my fluteit sounds better when you sit next to an open windowand I looked up and there he was, the prick sneaking up on the float, without running lights, can you imagine? He's lucky I wasn't the Coast Guard. So I marched right down there and ran him off."
"Was he alone?"
"I didn't see anybody else," Gull said. He added, "Of course, Meany was on the flying bridge, and like I said, he was running dark. There could have been somebody in the cabin, I suppose. Like ten or twelve women," he added, "all married to somebody else. I'm telling you, Kate, the guy went for quantity."
"Did you have words?"
"I yelled at him," Gull said with satisfaction. "He didn't bother yelling back, he just slammed her into reverse so fast he rammed the slip and damn near stripped the gears. Some kind of boat jockey he is." He snorted, sounding like a disdainful bull.
Kate thought about that for a few moments, then for the time being abandoned it. Gull had no motive, other than the continuing battle over transient parking, a battle he carried with enthusiasm to every skipper of every boat, sport or commercial, seiner or drifter, who dared preempt a foot of the transient float. There ought to be signs, like the blue-and-white wheelchair they had for Handicapped Parking. Maybe a fluorescent decal every ten feet of float with a flying saucer on it. Alien Anchorage. Outlander Landing. Put it next to a red circle with the figure of a man in the center of it and a red slanted line crossing him off. Little Green Men and Bug-Eyed Monsters Only. Kate wondered what shape the Fomalhauters took, and decided not to ask. "So that was about ten o'clock."
Gull nodded, then brightened. "It must have been about twenty after when I came in, because I turned on the TV in time to watch Jackie Purcell lie about the weather."
So Meany was still alive at ten, and his son may or may not have been on board. She should head on out to Alaganik, start banging on hatches, talking to fishermen to find out if they'd seen anything at Alaganik the night before. But they'd chased him off hours before the period ended, none of them had given pursuit, none of them had been fishing except for Meany, and most of them had been drinking and partying besides, and Meany had been such a popular guy that none of them would be inclined to care one way or the other if the murderer was caught, anyway.
Except the murderer.
She ought to take a look at Meany's boat, too. They'd left it in Alagani
k at anchor. Someone had given the son a ride to his family's setnet site, where his mother and uncle were supposed to be. Her next stop, she thought drearily.
They were startled out of their separate reveries by the crackle of the radio and Lamar Rousch's voice, rendered thin and reedy by the FM bandwidth, announcing the next fishing period. Gull leaned over to turn up the volume, and when Lamar signed off, turn it down again. "No period," he said. "Escapement must be down."
"For crying out loud," Kate said, "about a million reds must have gone up the Kanuyaq yesterday from Alaganik Bay alone, and nobody was hanging any nets in their way. Well, two, but hell."
Gull gave his head a sympathetic wag. "I wonder sometimes myself how accurate those fish counts can be. You know, there was a trader from Andromeda riding deadhead on the last SeaLandSpace freighter through here, he was telling me"
A movement caught her eye and she looked up to see Old Sam heading down the ramp. "Oops. There's my boss. Gotta go. Thanks again for the truck."
Gull waved her off with a regal hand, very much master of all he surveyed. "Okay, Kate. See you."
She caught up with Old Sam as he was about to board the Freya. "Hey, Sam."
"Hey, girl." Nimble in the face of eighty winters, Sam hopped over the gunnel and landed lightly on the deck.
She followed him into the galley, and sat down as he began assembling the ingredients for dinner. With something of a shock, Kate realized that it wasn't even six o'clock. It had been a full day. "Listen, Sam?"
"What?" he said, pulling a package of mooseburger out of the sink where he'd left it to thaw at breakfast. He turned a burner on and got out a frying pan.
She sidled in next to him and made her own patty. She liked hers thicker than he did his. "Could we maybe head back for Alaganik after dinner?"
He paused. "Why? It's early yet. And we don't even know what hours the period's going to be, let alone is anybody fishing it."
"There isn't one," Kate said. "It was on the radio in the harbormaster's office."
"No period?"
Kate shook her head.
"Why the hell not?" Old Sam said indignantly. "Christ on a crutch, what about all the fish we saw heading north yesterday? And hardly anyone with a net in the water?" He slammed his patty into the frying pan with unnecessary force, and the resulting sizzle nearly took off his eyebrows. "It's those goddam sport fishermen, is what it is, and their idiot escape demands. That goddam Bill Nickle won't be satisfied until the only red taken from the Sound is taken with a silver spinner."
Kate set her patty down next to his. The subsequent tantalizing aroma made her mouth water. There was nothing better than mooseburger, especially in the middle of the summer, when it seemed you would never get the smell of fish out of your nostrils or the fish scales out of your hair. Frying mooseburger was the smell of fall, and dry land beneath your feet, and settlement time.
Kate waited until they'd eaten before broaching the matter of their departure a second time. Old Sam was much more approachable on a full stomach. For that matter, so was she.
"We might as well put 'er in dry dock," he said glumly, "all the fish we're likely to haul in this year. Hardly worth the price of copper paint."
Kate wasn't sure she'd ever seen Old Sam glum before. A mischievous, sometimes malicious, always impudent elf of a man, he enjoyed life and irritating the people in it too much to squander time brooding. As annoying as he usually was, she found she didn't like it when he wasn't. "Listen, Sam, I need to talk to some people on the Alaganik beach. Maybe even some of the drifters." She paused. "It'd be a lot easier to have the Freya as a base of operations."
He raised his head, examining her with sharp old eyes almost hidden in folds of wrinkles. "This got something to do with Meany?"
She nodded. "I promised Chopper Jim I'd nose around a little."
It was like she'd thrown a switch. He jumped to his feet and chucked plate, silver and mug into the sink on top of the unwashed frying pan. "Why didn't you say so, girl?" he said, grinning a grin that rivaled Chopper Jim's for sharkness. "Cast off, I'll wake her up."
As Kate went to the bow, she reflected that cops-and-robbers was the one game boys never really grew out of.
The beach that edged Alaganik Bay began in the west at the Kanuyaq River delta and ended in the east in the high cliffs that abruptly broke off the southward march of the Ragged Mountains. There were three creeks big enough to be named, Calhoun, Amartuq and Coal, and a dozen rivulets that only appeared at low tide.
It was a broad, steep expanse of fine, dark gray sand mixed with tumbled gravel. Heaped piles of seaweed and driftwood logs bleached white by the salt of the sea were scattered across the high-water mark. Tidal pools formed in the rocks exposed by low tide, sheltering sticklebacks and hermit crabs and sea urchins, and now and then a flounder or a bullhead, and occasionally a small salmon. Kate loved a tidal pool, and had ever since she was a toddler splashing after bidarkys.
No time for tidal pool exploration or a seafood harvest today. Kate stood on the bridge of the Freya and surveyed the beach through Old Sam's binoculars. Just above the high-tide mark the rain forest closed in, pine and cedar and alder and cottonwood and birch and spruce all jostling for place. The setnet sites had been hacked out of this jungle by main force, and the cabins built there constructed either of prefab kits freighted in by barge, or of the detritus of sea and land, their split log-tarpaper-plywood designs reminding Kate of Emaa's add-on, multilevel, any-thing-goes-for-siding-including-the-sawed-off-bottoms-of-beer-bottles home in Niniltna.
The Meanys' nearest neighbor to the west was Mary Balashoff; to the east, the Flanagans. "Widow woman," Old Sam said briefly. "Got herself a couple of girl kids that are holy terrors. You can go talk to them all by yourself."
She wanted to talk to everyone all by herself, but Old Sam wasn't having any. He ignored gentle hint and loud protest alike and climbed down into the skiff like he owned it. He did, so she yielded the kicker and moved forward to sit on the thwart in the bow, feeling reduced to ballast. Mary Balashoff's site was on the west side of Amartuq Creek, Meany's on the east. It was far and away the richest creek that emptied into Alaganik Bay (Kate's ancestral elders had been no fools), and she wondered how Johnny-come-lately Meany had acquired title to the site. She asked Old Sam.
Old Sam took his time steering the skiff around a clump of seaweed. A sea otter kept a wary eye on them from the center of the clump, paws clutching a clam and a rock. "He didn't. He didn't need to."
"Why not?"
"Alaska beaches are public beaches up to the high-water mark. Setnet sites can't be personal property."
Kate knew this, but held her peace. Old Sam never passed up an opportunity to relieve her ignorance, whether or not she suffered any. He resembled Shitting Seagull in that respect. She turned her head to hide a smile.
"However," Old Sam said pontifically, "if somebody's family has been fishing the same site for a hundred years, it's their site for the next hundred, unless you want to try to move in at the point of a twelve-gauge."
Kate's gaze sharpened. "So you're telling me Meany brought a twelve-gauge?"
"Pretty much. Nate Moonin used to fish it, but he sold his cabin to the Ursins, a married couple from Anchorage." Kate remembered Lamar telling her that nearly a third of the setnetters on the Sound were neither traditional nor professional fishermen. "Teachers," Old Sam said. "Well hell, makes some kind of sense, I guess. Teachers get the summer off, so they buy a permit and move their families down for the duration." He grinned. " 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation.' "
"How'd Meany get in on the act?"
Old Sam shrugged. "Way I heard it, school got out and the Ursins came down and Meany was already on the site."
"That's all?"
Old Sam snorted. "Hell no, that's not all. I wasn't there, and Ursin didn't slow down enough to talk to on his way north, so I don't know what happened firsthand."
"But you can guess."
"I can guess,"
Sam said, nodding. "I figure Meany offered to buy the cabin, because Meany always was one to keep things nice and legal. Probably for ten cents on the dollar, but he sure as shit'd steal it legal." He paused, and added, almost reluctantly, "They had those three kids, ages ten and under."
It was a moment before Kate realized what he was saying. "You think he threatened them? You think Meany threatened to hurt the Ursin kids if the Ursins didn't sell to him?"
With flat conviction Old Sam said, "I think Meany did whatever was necessary to get the job done."
Kate thought again of the boy on the boat. Meany had been more than capable of beating on his own kid. Threats to someone else's would have come naturally to him.
The buzz of the outboard was loud against the silence of the day, the smell of salt water sharp and demanding. "That Mrs. Ursin, now, there was a nice gal," Sam said suddenly. "Womanly," he added with emphasis, nodding at Kate to make sure she got the idea that she herself might be somewhat lacking in that department. "Made one hell of a pineapple upside-down cake."
So do I, Kate thought, given enough Bisquick. But if she said so she'd be making two a week for the rest of the summer, so she kept quiet.
"They didn't know much about fishing, but they were learning. Didn't sell much, but then they canned half "of what they caught. I was going to show them how to smoke fish this summer." He nodded toward the beach. "Jeff cleared a bunch of alder last fall, cut and stacked a cord of it next to the cabin. I see the Meanys been burning it, probably for fuel." He spat over the side, and shipped oars as the skiff's bow ran up on the beach.
Kate jumped ashore and pulled the skiff up, tying the bow line to a driftwood log above the high-water mark. She looked toward the cabin and saw a curl of smoke rising up out of the chimney. It was half past seven, and the sun was still struggling to fight its way inside the low overcast. The bay was like glass, and although most of the fleet had headed back for town on the morning tide, there were enough boats left with men occupying themselves with make-work jobs in their laps for Kate to realize she was under better surveillance than she could have hired through the Continental Op. She was not overjoyed to see that the Bush telegraph was doing its usual efficient job. Gossip tainted memories. She hoped potential eyewitnesses were keeping themselves to themselves, but it was a vain hope and she knew it.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 08 - Killing Grounds Page 10
