Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  Gull had turned a delicate shade of red, and he looked everywhere but at Kate. Kate herself was unmoved. The encounter had had all the tenderness and respect of a couple of Doberman pinschers in heat. She looked around the harbor, wondering how many other witnesses there had been. Meany had conducted his amour on the side of the boat facing away from town, but that didn’t mean much between periods in the middle of the fishing season.

  “Bastard,” Gull mumbled, still red.

  “You know Meany, Gull?” Kate said, starting to walk again.

  “Damn straight I do, that prick is the biggest poacher in town. I mean to tell you, Kate, it’s hot and cold running babes the year round. And he’s married,” he added, outraged, like no one in Alaska had ever committed adultery before. He added accusingly, “And so is she.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Myra,” he said. “Myra Sarakovikoff.”

  “Not Tim’s wife?” she exclaimed. She hadn’t made the wedding, and so had not yet met the bride.

  Gull gave a gloomy nod. “Meany likes his married, because he is, too,” he said. “Makes it easier to avoid scenes when they’ll both be in trouble if they get caught.” They came abreast of the last slip before the ramp, the timbers lining the edges painted yellow, and black letters spelling out “Transient Parking Only.” The big man’s face darkened. “And Meany’s always sneaking into transient parking when I’ve got my back turned. Last time I ran him off with a shotgun. I’ll use it, by God, the next time he tries to pull that crap.”

  Kate regarded the empty spaces, enough for a dozen bowpickers or two dozen pleasure craft or four or five crabbers, her tongue firmly between her teeth. “Umm.”

  “Damn fishermen, anyway,” Gull grumbled. “They’re always whining and complaining about how long it takes to get a permanent slip, like that’s some excuse to take the transient spaces instead. I mean, if you think it takes forever to get a permanent slip in this harbor, you ought to hear what the parking situation is like around Enif Prime, especially since those pushy Nekkarians insisted on a whole friggin’ degree of arc for their ambassadorial entourage.”

  “Crowded, is it?” Kate said sympathetically.

  The harbormaster gave an indignant, emphatic nod. “Like salmon up a creek on a morning in July!”

  “That is crowded,” Kate agreed. She regarded him from one corner of her eye. He had a broad, smooth face (he plucked his whiskers out by the roots) dominated by high, wide cheekbones, widely spaced brown eyes, eyebrows that looked as if they could use a good raking and a mop of thick, naturally curly hair the color of wet sand that would not stay in braids, but Gull didn’t let that stop him.

  In his authority as harbormaster. Shitting Seagull retained the right to reserve transient parking for ships belonging to such extraterrestrial visitors as wandered out this far on the galactic rim. He had been doing so for twenty years, ever since he first took on the job. The mayor would have fired him for this partiality except that each month, rent for transient parking accumulated in the city account at the National Bank of Alaska, twenty cents per foot per day, for nine hundred feet of dock. It was deposited directly into the account, in the exact amount required per foot of slip space. When rents had gone up two years before, the amount had obligingly adjusted itself accordingly.

  The mayor decided what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, although it made sport fishermen in for the day a little irritable, because no one could see the visiting spaceships except Gull. The same size and mass that allowed Gull to keep the peace in the harbor had kept anyone, thus far, from arguing the point. It was infinitely easier to raft their boats together two and three at a time.

  Besides, Alaskan fishermen, a race who embraced eccentricity as a way of life, were rather proud to call Gull one of their own, especially when they got a couple of beers down him and he began to hold forth on the price per pound of bantha tongue on Tatooine.

  So Kate walked the floats with Shitting Seagull, Mutt padding patiently behind, listening as Gull rebroadcast the latest headlines from abroad, a tale involving the secretary-general of the Council of Planets, centrally located on Deneb Prime; the son and heir of the warlord of Dubhe; the nubile daughter of the prime minister of the United System of Sidus Ludovicianum; a rare element called merakium found only on, you guessed it, Merak; the Free Traders; and pirates from Spica Four.

  Kate was enthralled (this was better than a Heinlein novel—hell, it was better than Star Wars on Bobby’s VCR, with or without popcorn), and was just about to request a definition of “nubile” on Sidus Prime when a shout came from the head of the gangway at the end of the dock.

  She looked up and saw a tall man with dark hair and blue eyes in an almost ugly face, a boy who was obviously his son, waving madly, and Old Sam with his nasty grin dwarfed between them.

  Gull, thrown off his rhythm, frowned up at the end of the dock. After a moment his brow cleared. “Hey, isn’t that Jack Morgan? Who’s that kid with him? Kate?”

  But when he looked around she was already running for the gangway.

  Five

  THEY LEFT THAT EVENING at ten o’clock, and dropped anchor in Alaganik Bay a little after eleven. With the sudden facility of prepubescence, Johnny crashed in the spare stateroom across from Old Sam’s, who was already bunked down and out if the snores rattling the door in its frame were any indication. Kate and Jack rendezvoused in the bow, beneath a clear sky with a rim of light around the horizon, no clouds and no stars, either, because it was too light to see them. It would be too light until September.

  “Goddam, woman, I have missed the hell out of you,” Jack said, and without bothering to wait for a reciprocal declaration grabbed her up into a comprehensive embrace that escalated rapidly.

  “Hold it,” Kate managed to say after a moment.

  “Funny,” he said, “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

  She smothered a laugh. “Jack, no—”

  “Not the ‘n’ word, not now.” He lifted her to sit on the gunnel and moved purposefully between her legs.

  “Jack!”

  “What!” he bellowed.

  “Knock it off!” somebody yelled from another boat, and somebody else cursed and added, “Can’t a person get some goddam sleep around here?” The comment was followed by a long, loud wolf whistle, and at least three heads popped out of cabin doors.

  Kate stiff-armed the extremely aroused and extremely frustrated male away from her. “That’s what.”

  She was not unaffected by having her legs wrapped around Jack Morgan for the first time in three months. Johnny had spent spring break with his grandparents in Arizona, and Jack had spent his in the loft of Kate’s cabin. It had been an extremely active ten days, followed by a long and very fallow three months interrupted only by Kate’s too brief spring shopping trip to Anchorage. Considering Jack lived in Anchorage and Kate lived on her homestead in the Park, they took what they could get when they could get it. But not here, and not now, with half the boats in the bay moored side by side next to the Freya’s gunnels.

  She cleared her throat and pulled herself together. Her voice, already husky from the scar tissue that would never fade from her throat, rasped with an unconscious frustration it did Jack’s heart good to hear. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got boats sitting at anchor all around us, not to mention we’ve got four rafted to starboard and three to port.” She was reminding herself as much as she was explaining to him.

  His teeth, which had returned to nuzzling her neck, let go of her earlobe reluctantly, and she shivered. He raised his head and looked around, for the first time registering the seven boats rafted to the gunnels and the others anchored a dozen deep on both sides. “Shit,” he said, with feeling. “Where’s your bunk?”

  “No, Jack,” she said.

  The bellow was back. “What do you mean, no!”

  There was another comment from one of the boats rafted to port. Kate said, “I am not going to make love with you in the chart roo
m bunk.”

  “Why not!”

  “For one thing, Johnny and Old Sam are sleeping in the staterooms below, for another the bunk is too narrow, and for a third sound carries over water.” She couldn’t help grinning at his woebegone countenance, and raised a hand to his cheek. “Be patient, we’ll find a time and a place.”

  “Patient,” he grumbled, and caught one of her fingers between his teeth. She gave some thought to the less than comfortable but undeniably private possibilities of the focsle. Reminding herself to be strong, she tried to pull free, thinking only to move Jack out of the reach of temptation.

  He wasn’t having any; he sat down on the gunnel and hauled her into his lap. “Just so you know what you’re missing,” he said, and his grin flashed in the half-light.

  They sat there for an hour, talking in low voices of Jack’s custody battle over Johnny with ex-wife Jane, now apparently over and the enemy routed, of the murder case pending against Myra Randall Wisdon Hunt Banner King, of E. P. Dischner’s uncanny ability to thus far escape indictment, of Jack’s caseload. In turn Kate told him of the size of Dinah’s belly (“Bernie says odds are even it’s twins”), of Dandy Mike’s latest ménage à quatre, of his father’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the Niniltna Native Association board, of Harvey Meganack’s attempts to open up new areas of Iqaluk to clear-cutting, of the Bingleys’ slow and shaky attempts toward recovery. He listened in silence, and when she was through said briefly, “You miss her more than you thought you would.”

  “Emaa?” Kate thought about that for a moment. “I don’t,” she said at last. “They do.”

  “Who is they?”

  She waved a hand. “All of them, everyone in the Park, the tribe. Park rats, Park rangers—Dan O’Brian came to see me this spring, did I tell you? He wanted me to talk to the elders about the Taiga caribou herd, he says it’s so big that the fish hawks are thinking about going for a same-day fly-and-shoot hunt in January.”

  “In January? I thought caribou season started in September.”

  “It does, but they figure the trophy hunters will all be gone by January, so it’ll be locals taking game for meat. But to get back to my point, Dan came to me to talk over something he could just as easily have bounced off Billy Mike or even Auntie Vi.”

  “You’re standing in for her.”

  “For Emaa?” The image of her grandmother rose up before her, solemn, stern, commanding. “They think I am.

  “The tribe elected you to the council yet?”

  “No,” Kate said, “and they won’t, either.”

  Jack detected the note of truculence in her voice and as a matter of self-preservation decided to change the subject. “Speaking of Auntie Joy—”

  “What about her?”

  “Didn’t you tell me once she’s got a fish camp up Amartuq Creek?”

  “Not according to the federal government.”

  “She still suing them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Jack grinned. “What is it with the women in your family, you take a vow with Rabble Rousers, Inc., before you’re allowed into puberty or something?”

  “Emaa trained us well.” Kate had meant the words to be a joke, but they were too true to be laughed off. “Amartuq where you and Johnny want to go fishing?”

  He nodded. “Do you think it’ll be a problem?”

  Her answer was oblique. “The period opens at six a.m. The fishermen won’t be delivering until ten or so. I’ll give you a ride up the creek in the skiff.” She raised her head to look at him, a suggestion of a smile on her face. “Be warned. She might let you fish.”

  He eyed her expression. “Just not with poles and lures?”

  She grinned. “I’ve always liked that about you, Morgan, you’re very quick.”

  “Not when it counts,” he said with a cocky grin.

  A smile spread across her face. “No.”

  He couldn’t resist kissing her under that kind of provocation, and he had a good try at talking his way into her bunk, but she held out for dry land and privacy, and in the end he unrolled his sleeping pad and bag on the hatch cover and she ascended to her lonely bunk in the chart room.

  It hadn’t been a lonely bunk until she climbed into it with the knowledge that Jack Morgan was lying thirty feet away and one deck down.

  *

  “What the hell,” Old Sam said the next morning. He was standing in the wheelhouse, coffee cup in hand, staring hard out the windows. Kate, zipping her jeans, padded forward in bare feet to look over his shoulder at the gray day outside.

  It was six-thirty and the seven boats rafted with the Freya had yet to cast off. The other dozen or more boats had yet to up anchor. She reached around Old Sam and picked up the binoculars. There was a setnet out; through the glasses she could see white corks bobbing against dull green ripples close to shore. She moved around Old Sam and craned her neck. And there was one drifter, after all, a white drifter with no name lettered on the bow.

  It wasn’t that everyone had overslept; there were men and women on the deck of every boat within eyesight. They all seemed to be staring at the lone drifter, and from the collective set of jaw on the bay, not liking what they were seeing. Not at all.

  Kate nipped the mug out of Old Sam’s hand and took a deep swallow of coffee. “Strike?”

  “Looks like it, goddammit,” Old Sam said. “Look at that.”

  Kate’s gaze followed his long arm. There was a convulsive ripple over the surface of the water, and several flashing bodies leapt into the air at once, smacking, back into the water with loud splashes. The corks on the only two nets out were bobbing energetically, and Kate could see a figure from the no-name drifter preparing to climb down into his skiff, a figure even at this distance identifiable by the width of his shoulders and the thickness of his chest. “Cal Meany’s still fishing,” she observed.

  “That setnetter, too,” Old Sam said, snatching his coffee back.

  “What do you want to bet it’s Meany’s site?”

  “No bet.” Old Sam drained his cup. “Goddammit,” he said again. “And we were just inches away from a decent season.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Kate said.

  They looked at each other, thinking the same thing. When fishermen got this pissed off, it might as well be.

  Hard on the heels of that unsettling thought came a loud crack! over the water. They both instinctively ducked down.

  Old Sam swore. “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, beginning to rise to peer up over the console, and ducked back again when there was another loud crack! followed by a rapid rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat! and a long, loud whistle, followed by a distant explosion. There was a flare of color through a window. “What the hell?” She stood up, in time to see a shower of lavender stars fall from the sky, fading rapidly into oblivion. It had already been light out for five hours.

  “I’ll be goddammed,” Old Sam said, rising to stand next to her. “I totally forgot.” Kate looked at him, and he whacked her across the shoulders. “It’s the Fourth of July, Kate! Independence Day, by God! Fireworks and hot dogs and beer and boring speeches by pissant politicians and freedom and justice for all!”

  Kate counted backwards in her mind. The opener had been two days before, and it had been July 2. Yes, indubitably, today was the Fourth of July.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Her question was punctuated by another pyromaniac getting an early start on the celebrations with a cherry bomb. A fountain of water rose up from a space between two boats and smacked down again, liberally dousing both decks and the fishermen thereon. Old Sam waited until the cursing stopped before answering Kate’s question. “Have breakfast. I’m hungry.”

  *

  Jack made the toast while Kate scrambled eggs with cheese and onions and potatoes. “So do we get to go fishing. Dad?” Johnny said, buttering his toast with a lavish hand and loading on a half a jar of strawberry preserves.

  Jack raised an
eyebrow at Kate, who shrugged. “No reason why not. The commercial fishermen are on strike, but to my knowledge that’s never stopped a sport fisherman.”

  “Or a subsistence fisherman,” Old Sam said.

  “Solidarity, anyone?” Jack said brightly. Nobody laughed, nobody even smiled, and he reflected on the foolhardiness of joking in Alaska about something as serious as salmon.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody’ll be delivering fish anytime soon,” Kate said, “so I’ll take the two of you up Amartuq in the skiff after breakfast.” After an acid remark on the unreliability of wimmen and how a sure-enough boat jockey had only his fool self to blame if he hired one for a deckhand. Old Sam waved his assent.

  “Is he mad?” Johnny said in a low voice as they cast off.

  “Nah.” Kate said as she started the kicker and the skiff pulled away from the Freya. “He’s ecstatic. I’m living proof that all his worst suspicions about women in the workplace are true. The next time he gets together with Pete Petersen they can damn my whole sex without fear or favor.”

  “If he feels that way,” Jack said, “how come he even lets you on board?”

  She grinned. “If I didn’t work summers on the Freya, I’d have to find another tender. Old Sam isn’t about to turn me loose on the unsuspecting fishing population.”

  Probably, Jack thought, Old Sam wasn’t about to allow the population to turn itself loose on an unsuspecting Kate. Probably Kate knew that, because nearly every summer Kate could be found weighing fish on the deck of the seventy-five-foot fish tender, at the beck and call of the crustiest, crankiest Alaskan old fart ever to wet a toe in the Gulf of Alaska. “I thought he liked women. You’re always telling me stories about Old Sam’s girlfriends. That nurse in Anchorage, for instance.”