And of course, she had the gun. That made all the difference.
Another shot came, this one lopping off the limb of a quaking aspen fifteen feet to Kate’s left. Her aim was improving.
Kate’s stride didn’t falter. She ran straight up the little ridge where Berg had met his bear and Dieter had been shit on by it and over the top. The instant she was down the other side she ducked into the brush and waited.
Senta came thudding along behind. Kate was pleased to hear that she was wheezingly out of breath.
She waited until the other woman was abreast of her and then she stuck out a foot and tripped her, as simple as that. Senta went sprawling on the path. Kate, knife at the ready, was on her in a single pounce, one knee in Senta’s back, one hand knotted in Senta’s hair, pulling her head back, the other holding the knife to her throat.
“Don’t move or I will kill you,” Kate said.
Senta believed her implicitly.
After all, it was what she would have done.
Kate pulled the duct tape from the front of her shirt and bound Senta’s hands behind her back. Another strip went around Senta’s mouth. She objected. Kate kicked her in the side, not too hard, just hard enough to get her attention. It worked.
The rifle had skidded partway down the path. She picked it up and checked the magazine. Two rounds left.
She held in her hands the weapon that had killed Jack Morgan. It was a heavy weapon with a smooth stock and flip-up sights.
She wanted to flip them up. She wanted to use one of the rounds in the magazine. She wanted to blow a hole through Senta’s side and leave her guts to spill out onto the trail, to leave her lying there to the tender mercies of the jays and the seagulls and the ravens and the eagles. She wanted it so desperately her hands shook so she couldn’t have drawn a bead.
Instead she motioned with the muzzle. “On your feet.”
Senta’s blue eyes burned over their silver gag, but she got up, maneuvering awkwardly because of her hands. Kate smiled without humor. “Not very comfortable, is it? March.”
Senta turned toward the lodge.
“No,” Kate said. “Other way.”
The blue eyes looked momentarily confused. “Other way,” Kate said and prodded her for emphasis. Senta flinched and groaned behind her gag. Kate remembered her burned back, burns it had been Kate’s pleasure to give her, and prodded her again.
An hour and twenty minutes of forced march later they walked into the tiny clearing where Dieter had shot the moose. Senta stumbled over a long leg bone picked clean and fell heavily to the forest floor.
“Get up,” Kate said.
Senta, moving more slowly now, got up.
Kate nudged her again with the rifle. Senta screamed behind her gag. What a shame. Kate prodded her again. “March.”
Senta marched.
Crazy Emmett had hid his trail well but not well enough, not today. Half an hour later they halted just inside the ring of trees clustered at the edge of the clearing surrounding Crazy Emmett’s cabin. It was built of logs, chinked with moss and roofed with what looked like a spruce thatch. A wisp of smoke rose up from a chimney made of weathered black stovepipe.
“Lay down,” Kate said in a low voice.
Senta refused. Kate hooked a foot behind one of her ankles and shoved her hard with one hand planted in her back. Senta fell face forward. Before she could move Kate had her ankles strapped with duct tape. Senta was immobilized.
Kate leaned down and spoke, her voice flat and expressionless. “First off, Eberhard is dead. I killed him.” Senta rolled over and stared. “No one is coming to your rescue, Senta. In fact, no one even knows where you are, or that you’re still alive. And I’m not going to tell them, so they never will.”
It took a moment or two for the import of that statement to sink in. When it did, Senta’s face turned a congested red. Kate remembered Dieter’s face turning that exact same shade. Must run in the family. She said, “There’s a man we call Crazy Emmett who lives in this cabin. You can see for yourself, it’s got a roof, but I don’t imagine there’s any hot water, or any running water at all for that matter, and certainly no electricity. He doesn’t go hungry, but he doesn’t have much time for any of the finer things in life, like, oh, I don’t know, say baths, for instance.”
Senta closed her eyes, and Kate nudged her again, this time even less gently. “This is important, Senta, so you’d better listen. We call Emmett crazy because he’s hiding out from the feds and their black helicopters, thinks the United States is about to be taken over by the United Nations and a one-world government. He doesn’t take to the idea. So he hides out in the Bush, lives off the land. He doesn’t see anybody if he can help it.”
Kate paused. “There are a lot of stories about the bodies buried on this place, stories of people who poked their noses in where their noses had no business being. Nobody’s ever had the guts to ask him straight out if any of those rumors are true.”
Kate slung the Weatherby over her shoulder. The unfamiliar weight settled against her back like it had found a home.
“One thing I can tell you that isn’t a rumor. Crazy Emmett’s been a long, long time without a woman. He made that real clear when I saw him last. I was lucky I had a rifle with me. Real lucky.”
She patted the strap of the rifle. “You won’t be.”
She saw a dawning awareness in Senta’s eyes, followed by a kindling rage and a faint but gathering fear. “You can fight him or not, it’s up to you. He’ll fuck you regardless, but he’ll feed you, too, he’s not dumb enough to starve his plaything. He might even let you go eventually, if you work hard and be real, real nice to him.”
She shook her head. “I doubt it, though. He’s had a long dry spell, and once he gets his hands on something as fine as you I expect he’ll do his best to keep you.
“But you can always try.”
Kate stood up. “I’ll just let him know you’re here.”
She stepped into the clearing. Behind her she could hear thumps and grunts as Senta fought to free herself. “Hello the house!”
A thin husky lying next to the cabin woke up and began barking hysterically, lunging the full length of his chain. “Emmett, it’s Kate Shugak. I’ve got a present for you.”
It took a good five minutes before curiosity got the better of him and the door cracked open. “What do you want? What do you mean, a present? I skinned out that bull; you said I could.”
“Doesn’t have anything to do with the bull. I got a woman here for you. No one knows she’s here, and no one will know. You don’t tell anybody, she’s yours as long as you want.”
The door swung wide and he stepped out, rifle held in two hands across his chest. He looked at her suspiciously. “I don’t see any woman except you.”
Kate jerked her head backward. “She’s right here. Behind this stand of spruce.”
He hesitated, took a cautious step forward, wanting enough to believe, not credulous enough to believe too quickly, too suspicious to move too fast in any case.
Kate moved down the trail about ten feet and turned to wait.
Before too long Emmett sidled into the trees. He saw Senta and halted, an amazed expression on his face.
Senta took one look and began loud grunting noises of protest, writhing to throw off her bonds and escape.
Kate wondered briefly if she should warn him. No, she decided. No need. Poisonous as Senta was, Crazy Emmett hadn’t spent all these years in the Bush without learning to watch his back.
She watched Crazy Emmett kneel and begin to unwrap the duct tape from around Senta’s ankles. Over his head, Kate met Senta’s eyes.
She smiled.
As she walked away, she could hear muffled grunts and thrashing sounds as Senta fought in vain to free herself before Emmett could lay hands on her.
Like Jack had said, there was no finer example of the mind of man at work than duct tape.
*
Ten paces up the trail she stopped as if
she had run into a wall.
No, she thought. No.
She stood stock still, deliberately conjuring up the dead face of Jack Morgan, the memory of the life leaving it, the inanimate sprawl of his limbs, limp hands that had caressed her, cold lips that had kissed her. Klemens, his head gone. Mutt, gut-shot. Old Sam, wounded, perhaps mortally. Dieter, staring lifelessly at the sky.
No, she thought. Kate, don’t do this. Leave her. She deserves it. Leave her!
Against her will, she felt herself turn around and head backdown the trail.
Senta’s charms were so overwhelming that Crazy Emmett’s vigilance was not at its normal peak of efficiency. With a faint feeling of regret Kate hit him once at the base of the skull with the butt of the rifle, and he slumped down without a sound, his head lying on Senta’s breast in a parody of repletion. Over the duct tape gag, Senta’s eyes glared at Kate with a mixture of fury, fear and relief.
With one foot Kate nudged Emmett off her, and he rolled to his back, his mouth slack. At the cabin the dog set up a frenzy of barking.
“Get up,” Kate said. Her voice was flat and expressionless.
Shakily, Senta rose to her feet. With rough movements, Kate pulled up Senta’s pants and fastened them. She rose. “If you fight me, I’ll kill you. If you run, I’ll kill you. If you do anything but exactly and precisely what I tell you to do, I will kill you.”
She took a step forward and went up on her toes, trembling with rage, and glared at Senta. “I want to kill you, you crazy fucking bitch, I want to kill you so bad my teeth ache, so I’m praying you’re stupid enough to do any one of those things. Do you understand?”
Senta, cowed by Kate’s wrath and her near escape from rape and lifelong slavery, gave a jerky nod. After all, Emmett wasn’t dead, and this short, skinny little brown woman with the awkwardly cut hair and the crazy eyes could change her mind again.
And of course, now she had the gun.
Kate motioned at the trail. “Walk.”
Senta walked.
Eighteen
Leave her be.
BY MORNING THE RAIN HAD STOPPED, the fog had vanished and the clouds had dissipated into the west and south, and hard on their heels came the sound of two engines. First a Super Cub landed, and then a helicopter. George had come back, finally, and he had brought Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin with him, brave and immaculate in his blue and gold.
The first thing they saw was Old Sam, bloody but unbowed.
“Took you long enough to get back,” Old Sam said. “I suppose you both had a girl in Ahtna who just couldn’t wait?”
The old man sat propped against the tire of a four-wheeler, rifle held loosely in the crook of one arm. Two other people lay bundled into sleeping bags nearby. One was Demetri, the other Hubert. Both were unconscious but breathing.
Senta and Berg had been duct taped to chairs from the lodge and were sitting next to each other. Berg had lost his glasses and messed in his pants, and the bandage wrapped around his middle was red and sodden.
At the edge of the trees there was a fire, and at its side sat Kate, hair cropped, face and hands cut and bruised, shirt stained with blood gone brown with age. Her eyes were dark and staring, lacking soul or spirit. An endless, keening sound came from her throat as she rocked, back and forth, back and forth, cradling the lifeless body of her lover in her arms.
Next to her on the bare patch of ground lay the great gray halfbreed, coat encrusted with blood, panting in short, labored breaths, raising her voice now and then in a frail accompaniment. One voice was strong, one weak, the two united in sorrow and rage and protest and lamentation.
“Christ,” Jim breathed.
“Kate,” George said, starting forward. “Kate, what happened? Let me—”
“No,” Jim said, holding up an arm to block his way.
“Jim, come on, that’s Jack. We’ve got to help, we can’t—”
“No,” Jim said, voice as stony as his face.
“Leave her be,” Old Sam growled.
Jim passed a shaking hand over his eyes and turned away as if he could no longer bear to look, which indeed he could not.
The tuneless lament drifted up like smoke and hung there like a grieving wraith in the clear autumn air.
It was a sound none of the men would ever forget, no matter how hard they tried.
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About Dana Stabenow
DANA STABENOW was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised on a 75-foot salmon fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska. Her mother was a deckhand and she and Dana spent nearly five years living on board. For the next three decades, Dana refused to eat salmon.
Dana received a BA in Journalism from the University of Alaska, toured the world with a backpack discovering English pubs, German beer and Irish men, before returning to Alaska to work for BP at Prudhoe Bay, inside the Arctic Circle. Knowing that there must be a warmer job out there, she gave it all up to become a writer. In 1991, the first Kate Shugak Mystery, A Cold Day for Murder, won the Edgar Award for the Best Paperback Novel and her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list
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About the Kate Shugak Series
Kate Shugak is a native Aleut with a touch of Russian heritage working as a private investigator in Alaska. She’s 5 foot 1 inch tall, carries a scar that runs from ear to ear across her throat and owns a half-wolf, half-husky named Mutt. Orphaned at eight years old, Kate grew up to be resourceful, strong willed and defiant. She is tougher than your average heroine – and she needs to be to survive the worst the Alaskan wilds can throw at her.
Kate used to work as an investigator for the Anchorage DA’s office but after her throat was slashed while saving a child, she resigned from her job, and returned to the log cabin her father built on her tribe’s native lands, deep in Alaska’s largest national park in the shadow of the Quilak Mountains.
For fourteen months Kate remained in the wilderness – her voice cut down to a raspy growl by the jagged scar stretched across her neck. Then, during the worst winter on record, a congressman’s son disappeared... Two weeks later, the DA’s investigator sent to find him was also reported missing. The FBI turned to the one person they knew had the skills to track down the missing men in the depths of an Alaskan winter. This is where you’ll meet Kate in book one, A Cold Day for Murder.
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Liam Campbell Mysteries
Fire and Ice
So Sure of Death
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Better to Rest
Star Svensdotter
Second Star
A Handful of Stars
Red Planet Run
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Blindfold Game
Prepared for R
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First published in the United States in 1999 by Berkley.
The first digital edition (v1.3) was published in 2011 by Gere Donovan Press.
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Dana Stabenow, 1999
“Bright Shining” by Mary TallMountain reprinted from The Light on the Tent Wall, by permission of the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA, © Regents of the University of California.
The moral right of Dana Stabenow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
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