by Breakup(lit)
description. Guy from Anchorage, electrician, contract hire for
197 Northern Enterprises-now there's an imaginative name-anyway, he
didn't come in for work one day last October. After three days' no show
and no call-apparently Harrigan was the responsible type-the boss got
worried and sent his secretary to check out Harrigan's apartment. Nobody
home, nothing missing except maybe a few clothes, truck parked in the
lot. Nobody's heard from him since."
"No family?"
He shook his head. "There was a girlfriend a while back, last summer
sometime according to the apartment manager, but he couldn't remember
much about her except that he thought she was blonde. Or maybe brunette.
I love eyewitnesses. Almost as much as I love breakup. And of course he
didn't know her name or anything about her. Nobody at work did, either."
"A man who kept himself to himself," Kate murmured, still trying to
scratch the little itch at the back of her brain. "How'd he die?"
"Coroner says he's got a crack on the back of his skull, and his right
femur is cracked about halfway down."
"So he fell down and broke his leg and hit his head while he was at it?"
"Something like that."
"Did you find a rifle or gear or anything at the scene?"
Jim shook his head again.
"Then what the hell was he doing out there?"
Jim smiled his carcharodonian smile, all teeth and appetite. "I was
hoping you'd check around a little, take Mutt, see if the two of you can
sniff out something."
She opened her mouth to tell him exactly and precisely what she thought
of that idea when the window to the right of the door shattered, and the
neon Rolling Rock sign with it.
"Shit!" Bernie said, and dropped for cover.
198
The second bullet shattered the mirror behind the bar.
Chopper Jim clapped his hat on his head and performed a neat,
economical, 5.4 swan dive over the bar to land with a breathless thud on
Bernie's other side. Bobby had his chair in overdrive with Dinah in his
lap as he skidded around the other end. Dan was left sitting,
open-mouthed, where he was, one arm around an equally befuddled Amy.
Kate tackled the gray streak as it launched itself from beneath her
stool. "No, Mutt, no! Stay!" Mutt, growling and barking, was an inch
away from fighting free when Kate got a headlock on her. "No! Calm down,
girl, calm down. Dammit, stop that!"
She got to her knees and knotted a hand in Mutt's ruff. "Come on,
sweetheart, there's a good girl. Come on, dammit!" With a mixture of
curses and endearments she managed to
199 crawl around the bar, hauling Mutt behind her. They took cover next
to Bernie.
The door banged open and a figure backed in. Kate, sneaking a look over
the top of the bar, saw that the figure, which looked ominously
familiar, held a rifle at waist level and was firing pointblank into the
parking lot. For the moment the target had shifted, and she motioned to
Jim and together they rose to grab Dan and Amy and haul them over the
bar to safety, where they landed on Bernie, hard. Bernie complained.
All around the bar, tables and chairs overturned as everyone in Bernie's
Roadhouse dove for cover for the second time in two days, with the
exception of Ralph Estes, who remained head down on the bar, snoring
peacefully. The six Unitarians charged off in six different directions,
uttering loud cries to the Lord. Dandy Mike wound up on top of Shirley
Inglima, which was what he'd been trying for anyway, and all four
Grosdidier brothers were jammed into the same corner.
Mark Stewart and Jackie Webber were on the floor beneath their table.
Harvey, Demetri and Billy Mike had sought refuge with Old Sam, whose
gleeful expression was clearly visible from where Kate crouched. The
quilting bee rose to its collective feet, folded and stowed their work
and made for the back door in calm, orderly procession, bullets flying
all around them. Kate, furious with fear, saw the door close safely
behind Auntie Joy and suffered a wave of relief that had her sagging
weakly against the bar.
"GodDAM!" Bobby roared. "We didn't use this much ammo at Hue!"
"Do something, Kate!" Bernie said, shoving her. Kate shoved Bernie.
"It's your bar, you do something!" Bernie shoved Dan. "It's your Park,
you do something!" Dan shoved Jim. "It's your state, you do something!"
The trooper might have been able to hold out against everyone else, but
Mutt barked an endorsement of their views right in his face. Until then
he had regarded Mutt as his love slave, but sometimes love is not
enough. He cursed, thrashed around until he got
200 his .357 out and very slowly and very carefully got his feet under
him to hoist a wary eye over the top of the bar.
The next round took his hat off.
Chopper Jim sat back down again and said very calmly, "I think we'll
wait a bit longer before we mount a frontal assault."
"What do you mean we, white man?" Bobby said.
Kate cursed them all with impartial fervor. "Bobby, hold Mutt." Mutt
didn't like it, neither did Bobby, and Jim said sharply, "Kate!" but she
was up on all fours and peering around the end of the bar before he
could stop her.
The figure in the doorway was reloading and a positive hail of bullets
smacked against the outside of the building. Kate recognized Cheryl
Jeppsen feeding shells into the stock of a Winchester. She ducked back.
"It's the Hatfields and the McCoys again."
"Gee, why am I not surprised?" Dinah said wearily.
Bernie swore loud and long. "Goddammit, why do they always have to come
and shoot up my place? Why can't they stay home and shoot each other's
places up! I hate breakup!"
"Give it up, Kay!" Cheryl shouted. "Go on home and I'll forget you
started this!"
"I started it!" a furious voice yelled from outside. "Like hell! You
started this, you bitch, I was driving down the road minding my own
business, and you shot my husband!"
"It's not your road, and it's not your land!"
"Bullshit! We've got a right of way!"
A shot was her reply.
"Can't you throw them out of the Park or something?" Kate said to Dan.
"You tell me how, legally," Dan said grimly, "and I'll be more than
happy to oblige."
Another flurry of shots and everybody ducked. "I don't know, get
creative, take their land back or something!"
"What land?" Dan hissed back. "Their homesteads? It's not federal land
anymore, it's state land, or it was until the Jeppsens and the Kreugers
won it in the lottery, now it's private property.
201 Both families have already proved up, it's theirs, nothing the Parks
Service can do about it now," Dan said, adding with heartfelt sincerity,
"thank God."
"You think maybe you guys could discuss who owns Alaska some other
time?" Bobby said politely, adding in a ferocious bellow that could
probably be heard in Whitehorse, "LIKE AFTER SOMEBODY COLDCOCKS THOSE
TWO CRAZY BITCHES OUT IN FRONT OF THIS FRIGGIN SALOON!"
Kate swore ripely-t
here'd been a lot of that going around lately-and
raised her voice. "Cheryl? Cheryl, it's Kate Shugak."
"What do you want?" the woman with the rifle snarled without turning around.
"You think you could kind of take it easy? There are a lot of people in
here who don't use your land to get to their homestead. No reason for
them to get hurt."
"I don't have any intention of shooting anybody, except that red-haired,
brass-plated bitch outside!"
Cheryl's Christian charity was slipping along with her language. As if
to underline the thought, there was another loud Bang! and Kate
flinched. So far, it had been the noisiest spring in the Park in her
memory. "Cheryl," she tried again, "this is silly. Are you and Kay just
going to keep shooting at each other until you run out of bullets?"
Cheryl fired, Kay fired a return volley and a bullet hit the bar right
in front of Kate with a businesslike thud. Another shattered a bottle in
back of the bar and showered them all with glass and liquid. Kate sat down.
"Offhand," Dan said, picking brown glass out of his hair, "I'd say the
answer to your question would be yes."
Dinah tasted the back of her hand. "I always did like a shot of Grand
Marnier after a meal. Settles the stomach, promotes digestion, gives you
that nice little glow, you know?"
Bobby slapped her hand away. "You're pregnant, you're not supposed to be
drinking."
There was another shot and almost simultaneously another
202 bottle shattered on a shelf in back of the bar, raining tequila and
shards of glass mostly on Bernie. A second later a withered finger
dropped to the bottom shelf and rolled off into Bemie's lap. Dan and Amy
both let out involuntary yelps.
Bernie's sense of outrage swelled to heroic proportions. "There goes the
Middle Finger bottle! Goddammit! I just refilled it, too, and with Jose
Cuervo Gold! This bullshit's starting to cost me money!"
He leapt to his feet and started around the bar. "All right, you two,
that is just about enough!"
Cheryl swiveled and brought the rifle up. "Don't move, Koslowski! Don't
take another goddam step!"
"Such language, Cheryl," Bernie said mildly, but he froze where he
stood. One of the Grosdidier brothers said, "Oh hell," sounding more
disgusted than alarmed. "I can't look!" Frank Scully screamed from
beneath a table, and buried his head in his arms. While Shirley
Inglima's attention was distracted Dandy Mike slid one hand beneath her
blouse. She didn't object. As far as Dandy was concerned, Bernie ought
to throw a shootout every day.
Kate rose to her feet to give Cheryl two people to cover. "Cheryl, this
has to stop." There was a furtive noise from behind the bar and she knew
Jim was crawling down to the opposite end. She raised her voice to cover
the sound of his movements. "Put the rifle down, and maybe the Parks
Service can get some kind of arbitrator in to resurvey the land and
reroute that road."
Dan O'Brian might have had his own ideas about that but he kept quiet,
for which Kate was profoundly thankful.
It didn't do any good. "You go to hell," Cheryl said tightly. "This has
gone way beyond some arbitrator." The muscles in her shoulders tensed,
the barrel of the rifle began to rise, and in that moment Old Sam
Dementieff lunged forward to grab hold with both hands, gnarled knuckles
gleaming against the dark metal.
Cheryl was around five foot ten, weighed in at 160 pounds and
203 was a hale and hearty forty years old. Sam was five foot one,
weighed maybe 100 pounds with his boots on and had at least forty years
on Cheryl, but he had a grip like the big claw on a king crab and he
hung on like grim death as Cheryl tried to throw him off. The barrel
swung first to the left and then to the right and then back again, this
time all the way around in a circle so that it pulled Old Sam into a
smart trot.
Kate and Bernie both took a step forward, but Old Sam's palms were
sweaty and his grip slid down the barrel and off, right over the sight,
which must have been fairly painful. Centrifugal force did the rest: Old
Sam, moving by then at a medium gallop, slammed into Ralph Estes's back,
which caused Ralph's gut to slam into the bar. Rudely awakened, Ralph
sat up with a disbelieving snort, turned green and blew chunks across
the bar, showering Dan and Amy with predigested popcorn and beer. It was
as efficient an example of projectile vomiting as an admiring Kate had
ever seen, but then she was out of the line of fire.
Cheryl, momentarily stunned, was motionless for one second too long,
just long enough for the basketball fans to switch sports and sweep down
in a group tackle. She fought hard, letting out a primal scream that Kay
must have heard outside and correctly interpreted, because when Kate
crashed through the front door and skidded to a halt in the middle of
the parking lot, all she saw were the taillights of Wayne's old
International bouncing down the road to Niniltna.
Kate swore in disgust and was turning to climb back up the steps to
Bernie's front door when it burst open and Cheryl came flying out. She
knocked Kate flat, left the footprint of a size-nine shoe on Kate's
chest and made tracks for an ancient and filthy white Econoine van.
Kate sat up, only to be knocked flat for the second time that evening by
the Grosdidier flying squad in hot pursuit. The door to the Econoline
slammed, the engine started and the van fishtailed out of the parking
lot and onto the road, moving at about the same pace as the now
long-gone truck.
204
The Grosdidiers stamped and kicked and cursed, and only belatedly
remembered Kate, still prone at the bottom of the Roadhouse's front
porch trying to catch her breath. They stood around in a circle peering
down at her, identical expressions of gathering concern on their nearly
identical faces. "Are you okay, Kate?" Peter said, stretching out a hand.
Her breath returned with a great whoosh and she took in grateful gulps
of cool night air. Ignoring Peter's hand, she got to her feet, wincing a
little on the way up. "I hate breakup," she said, very quietly but with
great feeling.
"She is hurt, guys," Luke said in an odd voice. "Look." He pointed.
Everyone looked, including Kate. Her right biceps was soaked in blood,
and she became aware of a throbbing ache in the same area.
"Holy shit," Peter blurted, and the Four Musketeers exploded into action.
"Help her up the stairs!"
"Pressure, we've got to apply pressure directly to the wound!"
"Antiseptic, we need antiseptic!"
"Shock! She's going to get shocky!"
"We need to lay her down, put her feet up!"
Four pairs of hands reached for her.
"No!" Kate yelped. "I'm fine! Really! It's no problem. Don't touch that
arm, Luke!"
Johnny said earnestly, "It's okay, Kate. We're just trying to help."
"I know," she said, still fending them off. "And I appreciate it. But
please don't. I'm begging you. Please." The stairs rocked gently beneath
<
br /> her feet. Wet mud seeped through her shirt to her skin. Her left knee
thought about giving. She strengthened it with a mental threat. "I'm
fine, guys. Really. I'm fine." She turned and took the steps at a slow
limp, followed at close range by a fourGrosdidier escort.
