Someone called for another round at the end of the bar and he strolled off to fill it. Kate turned, leaning her elbows on the upholstered edge, and surveyed the room. To all outward appearances, it was a Wednesday like any other at Bernie’s Roadhouse. The crowd was nothing out of the usual: mushers, quilters, parishioners, serious drinkers who bellied up to the bar at 8:01 A.M., homesteaders there to enjoy Bernie’s flush toilet, Park rats looking for company, fishermen like Sam Dementieff planning this year’s assault on the first run of salmon. True, the laughter sounded a trifle forced, the conversation a bit stilted, and the attention seemed unnaturally fixed. The whole scene felt unreal, as if the roomful of people had joined together in an unspoken decision to repudiate the horrible reality of the events of the Saturday before last. There was a sense of gritted teeth behind the grins, a shaken but solid persistence in the good cheer, a determined normality in action. In summer, their ranks swollen double by the influx of fishermen, the population of Niniltna, including all the outlying cabins and homesteads and mines and fishing sites, usually ran at sixteen hundred-plus. In winter, the numbers dropped back down to less than eight hundred, eight hundred people bound together in the common struggle to survive the cold and the dark, and to stay sane while they did. Nine of their neighbors were now dead, and laid to rest beneath the scrub spruce and spindly birches in the small, fenced cemetery on the hill in back of the town. These people were gathered together today to seek and receive comfort from the presence of their friends, to present a united front against the madness forced upon them from inside.
In the Alaskan bush it is a long summer day’s journey into that winter night, but the night is longer still, and very dark, and very, very cold. Buried deep in the consciousness of every Park rat present was the knowledge that the seeds of madness lay within each of them, seeds which, bred on darkness and suckled on the frigid milk of a seemingly endless winter, were all too capable of burgeoning forth into the blood-red blooms of paranoia and dementia. The knowledge of the possibility was there, in the eyes of everyone present. The knowledge, as well as the determination to defeat it. It was a good effort, Kate thought, and raised her glass in silent tribute.
The door burst open and there flooded in what seemed like a mob of people, which after a few noisy, confused moments settled into half a dozen men and two women, dressed in down jumpsuits and parkas and bunny boots, bulky garments that made them look bear-size. Their faces were red with sunburn, none of them looked as if they’d had a bath in memory of man, and as they came closer Kate’s nose told her they smelled the same way. Climbers. You could always tell, if not by the smell, then by the exhausted exaltation on their faces.
This shouting, laughing, odoriferous human wave surged across the floor and broke against the bar. “You Bernie?” the tallest, burliest and smelliest man demanded.
“So they tell me,” Bernie drawled.
The stranger drew himself up to his full height. “I’m Doug, and I just climbed Angqaq Peak.” A cheer rose up. “We all did,” he said, looking around at his companions.
“You make the summit?”
“Damn straight we made the summit!” Doug whooped, and for a minute the rafters rung with the deep-throated yells of the climbers. When the noise died down. Doug turned back to Bernie. “George Perry told us that before we’re confirmed as bona fide Big Bumpers we had to stop in here and have a drink called a Middle Finger.”
“That’s right,” Bernie said, “you do.”
“Well?” Doug looked around him. “Eight Middle Fingers, straight up, barkeep.”
“And keep ’em coming!” one of the other climbers called, and his friends whooped and beat him on the back.
Bernie waited for the hubbub to die down before saying, “Take off your gloves.”
“What?”
“Take off your gloves,” Bernie repeated.
The climbers exchanged mystified glances but complied. They began to be uneasily aware of the interest they were generating, the broad general grin that sprawled across the expectant face of everyone in the room.
“All right,” Bernie said again. “One at a time, step up, hold up your hands and spread your fingers.” He reached beneath the bar and produced eight shot glasses. Turning, he took down a fifth of some clear liquor sitting in the absolute center of the middle shelf, with the rest of the bottles drawn respectfully off to the right and left, and set it down on the counter next to the shot glasses.
Doug looked at the bottle. “What the hell?” Beneath its sunburn his face lost color.
“Along about 1949,” Bernie said, his voice pitched to carry, “some surveyors made a trip up Angqaq to see what they could see. They didn’t have a clue about climbing a mountain like the Big Bump, they didn’t have much equipment or anything in the way of survival gear, and what happened was what you might expect: They got caught in a blizzard and two of them froze to death. The third survived in spite of a case of serious frostbite, which cost him three fingers off his left hand.” He paused and surveyed the sobering faces of the climbers. “Before I built the Roadhouse, a guy by the name of Sneaky Pete had a kind of trading post here, and the surveyor made it back this far and collapsed on his front doorstep. Pete took off the guy’s fingers, and he decided, as a lesson to future climbers, that he ought to commemorate the cost of this guy’s survival. He dropped the guy’s middle finger into a bottle of Everclear. From that day forward it has been required of every climber who successfully makes the summit of Big Bump, with all their fingers intact, to toss back a shot of Middle Finger and toast to the memory of those who don’t come back, or don’t come back whole.”
Doug’s face was a sight to behold, but he was game. He thrust out his jaw and held up his hands. “One,” Bernie said, pointing to Doug’s right pinkie finger, “two,” pointing to his right ring finger, “three,” pointing to his right middle finger, and so on. By Doug’s left thumb the entire bar was chanting along, “six, seven, eight, nine, ten!”
There was an electric silence. Bernie uncapped the bottle in which the surveyor’s finger washed gently back and forth. Bernie had changed the mix to Jose Cuervo Gold, and after forty-plus years of pickling, the wrinkled skin of the surprisingly well-preserved finger looked as if it had been seasoned with saffron. It still sported a fingernail. Kate noted, and, if she were not mistaken, what might have been a hangnail.
Bernie poured out a shot and waited. Doug took a deep breath, threw back his shoulders, no doubt gave a fleeting thought to the sterilizing effects of eighty-proof alcohol, and in one quick movement raised the shot glass and tossed it off.
The bar thundered with cheers and applause. There was only a slight hesitation before the next climber stepped willingly if unenthusiastically forward, held up her hands, suffered the count and choked back a straight shot of Middle Finger. Each of the climbers followed, and each performance was counted down by the bar in a body, witnessed with bated breath, and cheered with fervor.
The ceremony concluded, people crowded forward to treat the newly inducted Big Bumpers to the Middle Finger chaser of their choice, and the climbers began peeling off their down outerwear with a view to settling in for the afternoon, and perhaps the night.
She’d missed his entrance in the pandemonium following the climber’s entrance, so she started when he spoke right next to her. “Kate. How are you?”
Mutt lifted her lip in a perfunctory baring of teeth, not bothering to growl, and Kate turned to see a man with a stiff red face and stiffer red hair about a quarter of an inch long all over his head. His sharp brown eyes looked less merry than usual, and his stubborn chin jutted out with less than its usual arrogance. His left arm was in a sling.
“Mac,” she said, nodding at him.
“I hear you got him,” Mac said.
Kate nodded again. She didn’t want to talk about it, and she hoped Mac didn’t either.
“You should have shot him when you had the chance.”
Evidently he did. “So I’ve been
told,” she said wearily. “About ten times. Look, Mac, I don’t—”
“You don’t want to talk about it, fine, you don’t have to,“ he interrupted her. “Just let me say this.” He gave her a twisted smile. “When I ran off into the trees with that nut blazing away at my back, my arm bleeding a road map in the snow, I was sure he was following me. I was sure he wasn’t going to stop until he got me. His eyes—” Mac halted, and for the first time in Kate’s memory he seemed to be at a loss for words. “Well, you saw his eyes. From what I hear, most of the folks he shot at that day didn’t get away. I was lucky, but I didn’t know that.” Bernie set an open Heineken in front of him, and he paused for a long pull. Wiping his mouth, he set the bottle down and regarded it. “I hid out in the woods heard an owl hoot, I thought it was him. Every time a tree creaked, or the wind blew, or the ice cracked, I thought it was him. I was cold and wet and hungry and tired, but I stayed in the woods. I didn’t have any food, or a tent, I wasn’t even wearing boots. I was pretty sure I’d heard his snow machine drive away, but I stayed in those goddam woods. I stayed in those goddam woods all that night, all the next day and all the next night, too. If I hadn’t seen Chopper Jim land at the mine the next morning, I might still be there. I swear, when Jim told me that you’d caught him, I felt someone reach around and pull the target off my back.”
Mac drained his beer and set it down on the bar with a final ring of glass on wood. “I owe you, Kate.”
“I didn’t save your life, Mac. You did.”
“Yeah. But you gave me back my sanity. If you hadn’t caught that guy, I’d never have felt safe again.” He stretched out a hand, and befuddled, she took it. His grip was strong. “Thanks, Kate.”
“You’re welcome,” she said automatically. A puzzled frown between her brows, she watched his stocky figure thread its way through the crowd and out the door.
“What’d he want?” Bernie’s voice asked.
She turned. “Nothing.”
Bernie grunted, conveying boundless skepticism in that one sound. “If you say so.”
There was a burst of laughter and applause from behind a closed door. “Who is that in the back room, anyway?” Kate asked, glad of a change of subject. “Sounds like they’re having some fun now.”
“Bunch of belly dancers,” Bernie said.
Kate held both hands up, palms out. “Okay, none of my business. Sorry I asked.”
“No, really, they rent the back room the first Wednesday of every month to practice.”
“Of course they do.” Kate said and smiled at Bernie. One must humor those less fortunately endowed than oneself in their degree of sanity.
A small, slight man with Asian features elbowed his way through the crowd. He didn’t look like a climber—he wasn’t wearing enough clothes—and he didn’t smell like a fisherman. It was too late for caribou and too early for black bear. The bump of insatiable curiosity that had caused Kate to be an investigator in the first place was roused. She watched him out of the corner of one eye. His look was appraising, his movements furtive. He walked as if he should be wearing a long raincoat, with pockets sewn to the lining filled with stolen watches and dirty postcards.
When he spoke to Bernie, his English was American. “Hi there. Got any draft?”
Bernie shook his head. “Sorry.”
“What flavor?” Bernie indicated the row of bottles and cans lining the back of the bar. “Oh. Okay. I’ll have a Michelob.”
“Coming right up.”
He tossed a one-hundred-dollar bill down on the bar and looked around. “Nice place,” he observed to Kate.
“We like it,” she said, eyeing the bill. “Your first time in the Park?”
He smiled. “First time in Alaska.” Bernie set a bottle and a glass on a napkin in front of him. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure,” Kate said, and Bernie nodded and went away with the bill. “Where you from?”
“Honolulu.” He drank thirstily straight from the bottle.
Kate smiled. “You’re a ways from home. What brings you to the Park?”
He shrugged. Bernie came back with his change and Kate’s Coke. “Business.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She raised her glass in the newcomer’s direction, turning her shoulder slightly to Bernie. He drifted down to the other end of the bar. She drank. “What kind of business?”
“Import-export,” he said. “And you?”
“Oh, I homestead about twenty-five miles from here. I’m Kate Shugak, by the way. And you?”
He took her hand. “Johnny Wu. Live here year round, do you? How long?”
“I was born here.”
“Really. That’s interesting.”
“How about you? How long have you lived in Hawaii?”
“Maybe you can help me,” he replied, either not hearing or ignoring her question. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Well, I know pretty much everyone in the Park. Who do you want?”
“It’s a woman, name of Lisa Getty.”
Kate felt a frisson of awareness run up her spine. “Lisa Getty?”
“Yes. A… mutual friend gave me her name, said she was the best guide in the Park.”
“Lisa Getty is dead,” Kate said bluntly. The smile was wiped from his face, and she congratulated herself inwardly that her cop’s eye was still in. “Didn’t you hear about the massacre?”
“Massacre? What massacre?”
“A week, week and a half ago. Some Park rat went nuts with a 30.06. Lisa Getty was one of the victims.”
“Jesus,” Wu said.
“Sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” she said. “You know Lisa yourself?”
“No,” he muttered, his face pale, grabbing his beer. “I never met her personally.” He tilted the bottle up and gulped thirstily.
“I do some guiding myself, in season,” Kate offered. “Maybe we could work something out. You didn’t say what you were after—bear? Did Lisa organize you a permit?”
He smiled, a sick smile, and set the empty bottle down. “Thanks anyway. This whole thing is pretty—pretty shocking. I think I’ll—” He got off his bar stool without finishing his sentence and picked up his bag.
“You need a place to stay?”
He shook his head and went to the door. Kate watched him go, a thoughtful expression on her face, and turned back to the bar to find Bernie watching her. “What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You hear all that?”
“Most of it.”
“Seen him around before?”
Bernie was silent for a moment. Finally he said, “Not him, no.”
She paused in the act of raising her glass and stared at him over the rim. His expression was bland. “Right,” she said finally and drank. “See you.”
“I wonder where you’re going.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No, you don’t.”
She stood up just as the door to the back room opened and, to Kate’s dumb amazement, a group of belly dancers came out. One of them was in full regalia, all diaphanous gauze and jingling gold coins, laughing eyes above a sheer veil. A second dancer in bikini bra and jeans struck a tambourine, a third in shorts and a tank top blew on a flute, and a collective whoop went up around the house.
Kate looked at Bernie, open-mouthed. He grinned at her expression and gave a deprecating shrug. The dancers began to shimmy, and the congregation deserted their pastor and the mushers their map to join the climbers and the other miscellaneous drinkers in a shouting circle that beat time with their hands. Only the quilters stayed where they were, plying needles and tongues with equal intensity. Kate shook her head in disbelief and made for the door, passing near the quilters on her way out.
“So did she divorce him?”
“Heavens no, dear. She wanted one. He drowned before he could give it to her.”
“They do say…”
“What?”
“What do they say?”
“What, Darlene?”
&n
bsp; “Well,” Darlene said, leaning forward and dropping her voice, “you know they found him floating at the bottom of the ramp…”
“Yes, yes?”
“Someone said they saw her down there, too, that morning.”
“No!”
The door closed behind Kate. Blinking as her eyes adjusted from the gloom of the bar to the bright light of the afternoon, she saw Leonard and Amos sitting together at the top of the stairs, playing scissors-paper-stone. As she watched, Leonard lost and took a wallop on his upper arm from Amos’s clenched fist. Kate took careful aim with one booted foot and kicked them both down the stairs.
She climbed on the Super Jag as they were picking themselves up out of the snow, motioned Mutt up behind her, and left.
*
Lisa Getty’s bowpicker was racked up above the high tide mark, side by side with thirty others, all waiting for the ice to go out of the river before their hulls could hit water.
It was a thirty-two foot bowpicker with a bare, stainless-steel reel in the bow and a square, squatty cabin that filled up the stern. Between them was the hold, covered over in wooden deck planking. In appearance it had much in common with the Getty’s homestead, as it was messy but in good repair, and clean if not neat. There were old tracks of a very small boot in the thin layer of crusting snow on deck. Kate climbed aboard and began to pull up the deck planks—long, one-by-twelve-by-twelves laid side by side across the inner lip of the holding tank. Mutt wagged her tail encouragingly from her comfortable seat on the mat in front of the cabin door.
It was noon, and the sun was shining, and Kate was sweating before she had enough planks up to climb down into the hold.
She surfaced some twenty minutes later, puzzled. The hold was empty, without a net, corkline, leadline or buoy to be found. She’d even pried up the floorboards and checked the bilge. Bone dry from a winter in dry dock, it, too, was empty, from stem to stern.
She replaced the floorboards and straightened, groaning a little when her back creaked in protest. “It has to be here if it’s anywhere,” she told Mutt.
“Woof,” Mutt agreed without moving.
A Fatal Thaw Page 10
