by Breakup(lit)
out approached, again from the east.
"What the fuck's going on?" somebody yelled.
"Dive, dive!" somebody else yelled, and they did, everyone who had just
picked themselves out of the mud and the slush dove for cover yet again,
with the exception, of course, of the Earlybird man, who gazed about him
with a bewildered air. The stranger in a strange land.
Two four-wheelers, driven by two big men in black-and-red- checked
mackinaws and deerstalker caps, burst into the clearing. Mutt, balked
from bear chasing, took off after the four-wheelers instead, barking
with enthusiasm and adding to the general uproar.
One of the four-wheeler drivers had a rifle in his right hand
32 with the sling wrapped around his forearm and a bottle in his left.
"Whoopee!" he shouted.
"Powder River, let 'her buck!" yelled his friend.
They roared in a circle around the Earlybird man, frozen in the center
of the clearing, only to finish up, after Whoopee clipped a section of
the jet engine and swerved, with a grand front-end finale, hard enough
to catapult both drivers from their seats. They met head to head with a
Crack! that could be heard all across the clearing. One of the
four-wheelers managed to climb over its sister ship, turn hard right
rudder and run straight into Kate's garage, impacting, in order, Kate's
old-fashioned but until then still-working wringer washing machine, the
trickle charger and the far wall with enough force to send all the
remaining tools on the wall crashing to the floor. The washer, dancing
frantically around on one caster, lost the battle for balance to gravity
and tipped over, landing on its barrel side. For not having achieved
thirty-two feet per second per second, it made a splendid crash.
Kevin Bickford stood where he was, white face streaked with mud and
oversize parka stained with slush, looking as if he couldn't believe he
was still alive and in one piece. Kate didn't blame him, but she had
other things on her mind, like murder.
She started forward and a third four-wheeler leapt out of the brush,
this one driven by Dan O'Brian. Skidding to a stop in the center of the
clearing, he killed the engine and was one step ahead of Kate to the
four-wheeler drivers, who were sitting up and beginning to take
hilarious notice of their surroundings. Whoopee had lost his bottle, so
Powder River hoisted himself up and fished a silver flask from a hip
pocket. Whoopee greeted this with a loud cheer and a wet, noisy kiss on
Powder River's cheek.
They had just enough time for a gulp apiece before Dan fastened a hand
in each collar and jerked them to their feet, causing them to spray
whiskey all over the Earlybird man, for whom Kate, against her will, was
beginning to feel a little sorry.
"GOTCHA," Dan roared, "you drunk-driving, wildlife-poaching,
great-white-hunter-wannabe sonsaBITCHES!"
33 He slung Whoopee down ungently at the base of a tree and fastened his
wrists together with a plastic restraint. Powder River received the same
treatment. They recovered enough to protest.
"SHADDUP!" Dan roared again.
They shaddup.
Dan, quivering with outrage, smoothed a trembling hand over the red hair
standing straight up all over his head and turned a wrathful gaze on
Kate to say one infuriated word.
"Breakup."
34
At that moment the sound of another engine was heard, and with a single
bound Mutt gained the center of the clearing, where she stood barking up
at the sky, tail wagging furiously. Kate didn't look. She, too, knew the
sound of that engine.
Sure enough, over the tops of the trees came a Bell Jet Ranger, a small
helicopter with the insignia of the Alaska Department of Public Safety
emblazoned on the doors. It set down a little to one side of the center
of the clearing, rotors only just missing the top of the wrecked engine
and the eaves of Kate's garage, cabin, greenhouse and outhouse. It would
have taken a chunk out of the cache's roof had the cache still been
standing, but it wasn't, and if Kate had been in a fair mood, she would
have admired the artistry of the landing.
She wasn't. She didn't.
35 Seconds later the trooper emerged in all his blue-and-gold glory. He
conferred first with Dan, then with Stewman, then with Brandon and
Selina, while Kate watched from her front doorstep, scowling and keeping
her distance. Wasn't her land. Wasn't her body. Weren't her hunters. She
didn't want anything to do with any of it, and she was prepared to tell
Jim Chopin so, at length, but she never got the chance, because he
loaded Selina into the chopper and took off.
Well. It was obvious that her help was neither wanted nor needed. Fine.
She stamped inside and made a fresh pot of hot water, just in time to
pour out for Dan O'Brian, who had calmed down enough to stare into his
mug and say incredulously, "Since when do you drink tea?"
"Since I ran out of coffee and a jet engine fell on the only
transportation I've got to get me to the store for supplies."
He caught the ferocity behind the misleadingly mild words, and said
hastily, "Hey, I live for tea. Serve it up. Got any sugar?" It was
immediately obvious that that was the wrong thing to say too, so he fell
back on something he knew for certain she would agree with. "I hate this
time of year."
"I heard that," Kate said, with feeling.
He nodded at the wreckage in the yard. "Looks like Chicken Little was
right."
"Looks like."
"Jim says they found a body."
"That's the rumor," Kate said, studying the swirling liquid in her mug
with absorption.
He grinned. "Amazing how you don't have to go looking for work, Shugak,
how it comes looking for you."
"I wasn't looking," she stated. "I'm not looking. It's breakup, for
crissake, I've got nineteen different things to do without taking on
trying to figure out why some doofus wound up dead wandering around the
back of beyond."
His grin faded. "I thought he got brained by a piece off that engine."
36 "I don't know," Kate said stubbornly, stifling the memory of Stewman
saying, This guy's been there longer than last night. "I don't know
anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. All I know is
the engine missed me."
He got up to look out the window, measuring the distance between the
engine and her front door. "Barely."
She was tired of the subject, or so she told herself, and nodded through
the cabin's open door at the two men sitting at the base of the tree.
They had stopped shouting obscenities with the arrival of the trooper.
Now they were silent and glum. "What's with Rocky and Rambo?"
"Couple of Arco engineers from Anchorage." Dan turned to raise an
eyebrow in her direction. "On a hunting trip," he added blandly.
"In a manner of speaking," Kate agreed dryly. "How'd you get onto them
so fast?"
It was a legitimate question. The Park comprised twenty million acres
and the year-round ranger s
taff was so small that most of the time
irresponsible hunters did their damage and were long gone by the time
Dan caught up with them.
"You'll like this." He drank tea, repressing a shudder. "They flew into
Niniltna in a Cessna 180, loaded-you should pardon the expression-for
bear. They got a ride to the Roadhouse last night and started asking
around for the best place to go hunting."
Kate laughed. She couldn't help it.
Dan grinned. "Yeah, I know. Like anybody at the Roadhouse would steer
them toward a bear they'd already marked out for themselves. So somebody
told them Fish and Game hasn't issued permits for a bear hunt in ten
years, the grizz population in the Park being down to what it is and all."
Kate was of the newly formed opinion that the Park's grizzly population
was in definite need of a brisk culling, but the Park's chief ranger was
highly unlikely to enter into her feelings on the subject. "I guess they
didn't take the warning to heart, did they?"
37 "Nope." Dan shook his head. "First they got drunk, and then they got
a couple of four wheelers-"
"Where from?"
Dan looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said, "Bought them
off Dandy Mike. Cash on the barrelhead. Twice what they were worth."
"Ouch." Like all Park rats open to opportunity, Kate prudently refrained
from asking him if the four-wheelers had belonged to Dandy in the first
place, and, like a good friend, Dan avoided burdening her with that
information. "Anyway, Dandy counted the cash, twice, made a few
suggestions as to where they might look for bear, and as soon as they
were out of sight he called me. I flew down and borrowed Billy Mike's
four-wheeler, and here I am."
Kate sat up straight. "Dandy sent them up here?" Dan grinned again, an
answer in itself. "That son of a bitch!"
"Now, Kate," Dan said soothingly. "To be fair, I'd rather they tangle
with you than anyone else in the Park, and Dandy knows it. Hell, they
all do."
Kate looked around at the shambles of her homestead, and her burst of
anger died away. "I don't feel all that formidable today, Dan."
The ranger raised his mug in salute. "A temporary setback, Shugak.
You'll have all this up and running again in no time, I guarantee it.
These go teams move fast, from what I hear."
They watched the NTSB work in silence for a moment. "So if he didn't get
brained by a piece off your engine-"
"It's not my engine."
"-what was he doing out here anyway? Hunting bear, do you think? That's
the only thing worth hunting this time of year."
"Don't know how long he has been there," Kate said, and shrugged. Okay,
she'd play. "If he really has been out there over the winter, he could
have gotten lost hunting, got hurt. Happens all the time."
"Maybe a bear ate him," Dan suggested.
38 Kate thought of Mama Bear coming at her flat out across the creek the
morning before. Maybe the sow's eagerness and speed hadn't entirely been
due to her protective instincts, but to the sight of what she had
already found to be an easy snack. Ursine finger food. Kate repressed a
shiver. "Maybe. Although it's not like a hungry bear to leave enough to
show whether a body is male or female, and Stewman was definite that it
was a man." She shrugged again.
"Aren't you even curious?" Dan was joking when he added, "What kind of
sleuth are you anyway, Shugak?"
She wasn't when she snapped out her reply. "A retired one."
Dan looked as if he'd like to argue the point but Chopper Jim's return
spared her. The helicopter settled into the clearing in the exact same
spot as before, this time with a body bag strapped to one of the skids
and a stretcher with a sandbag strapped to the other for ballast. Selina
got out the instant the skids touched down and walked away very fast
without looking back. Dan went to retrieve Whoopee and Powder River. Jim
waved Kate over. She went, reluctantly.
He opened the door as she approached, his earphones around his neck.
"What you got?" Kate shouted over the noise of the engine, the rotors
whapping at the air over her head.
He grinned at her. "Looking for business, Kate?"
Her expression told him what she thought of that question and he
laughed, kind of heartlessly, she thought, given she was standing like
Dido in the middle of Carthage after the sack. He nodded at the jet
engine. "It seems Chicken Little was right."
"So they tell me." She jerked her chin at the body bag. "What'd he get
hit with?"
"What do you mean, what'd he get hit with?"
"Didn't he get clobbered by a piece off that engine?"
"Kate. We found him three miles from here."
"When you drop an airplane engine from thirty thousand feet, I imagine
the parts tend to scatter just a tad."
39 "True, but he didn't get hit with a piece of your engine. He's been
there all winter."
Shit, she thought. "Who is he?" she said out loud, adding immediately,
"Not that I'm all that interested."
"No ID left on him. For sure he isn't my missing hiker."
It took her a minute. "You mean the guy you were looking for last June?
The one up in the Mentastas?"
He nodded.
She almost smiled. "Come on, Jim. The Mentastas are seventy miles north
of here. That would have been one hell of a hike."
Jim grinned again, unrepentant. "I hate open cases. And he almost fits
the description."
Kate nodded at the body bag. "How long's he been dead?"
"Longer than last night. Long enough for the critters to chow down some
on him." He raised an inquiring eyebrow. "Mutt bring home any
suspicious-looking femurs lately? He's only got one left, and it looks
kind of gnawed on."
"Yuck," said Dan O'Bftan, in the process of forcing the Great White
Hunters into the back of the chopper. Whoopee started to complain that
his butt was wet. The trooper turned his head and gave him a narrow-eyed
look that reminded Whoopee that he was soon to be two thousand feet up
with one potential witness dead and the other already snoring in a
drunken stupor. He shut up.
Kate heard a faint staticky noise and Jim raised one of the earphones to
his ear. "Roger that," he said into the microphone. "I'm on my way."
He resettled the headset in place. "Gotta run," he said, raising his
voice over the increasing whine of the helicopter's engine. "A Nizina
fisherman just shot his father over a Prince William Sound drift permit.
Seems he thought it was time for Dad to retire, only Dad disagreed." He
adjusted something on the dash and raised his voice over the increasing
whine of the engine. "I just love breakup, don't you?"
40 Kate and Dan duckwalked beneath the props to one side of the clearing
as the rotors spun into a blur. A tossed salute through the windscreen
and Jim was gone.
The sound of the chopper faded into the distance. "Well," Dan said,
"time I moved like I had a purpose." He surveyed her trashed yard one
more time and cocked an eye at Kate. "You going to be
okay?"
"Yeah."
"We got a bunk up on the Step with your name on it, if you need it."
She relaxed enough to smile, and mean it. "Thanks, Dan. I'll keep it in
mind."
