A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  “I believe they prefer the term ‘entrepreneur,’” she replied gravely.

  When he stopped laughing he gave her a shrewd look. “You’re enjoying yourself.”

  She thought it over. “Maybe. A little. It’s—” she searched for the right words, and wound up saying lamely, “it’s different.”

  “It is that,” he agreed. He drank coffee, watching her over the rim.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m just waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For that great downpour of the wrath of Shugak. The Kate Shugak I know doesn’t tolerate booze, drugs or mind-altering substances of any kind, in any amount, anywhere near her or hers. I’m having trouble accepting the fact that you spent Saturday night in the middle of what sounds like a user’s Utopia and everybody came out alive.”

  She was a little taken aback. “You make me sound like Carry Nation.”

  “You are a little like Carry Nation at times. That was a hatchet you used to break up that bootlegger’s cache a few years ago, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “That was Niniltna.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And this is only an oil company, and only oil company employees, and so nothing to overexcite yourself about?”

  “Go to hell,” she said sweetly.

  He laughed and drained his mug. “Why don’t you walk up and meet me for lunch at the Downtown Deli? About eleven-thirty or so?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “See you then.” He swooped down for a hard, quick kiss. On his way out the door he paused and called over his shoulder, “Oh, yeah, John King called while you were in the shower. He says he’ll call—”

  The phone rang, and Kate picked up the receiver as Jack closed the door behind him. “Shugak?” King barked. “That you? What’d you find out?”

  “Nothing,” Kate told him, “except that RPetCo’s racing turtles are among the finest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Did you find evidence of any drugs?”

  “Well,” Kate admitted, “rumor has it Deputy Dawg was high on Absorbine Jr., but the breathalyzer test came up clean, so there’s no proof.”

  She allowed him to vent some of his spleen and then interrupted him without compunction or apology. “These things take time, King. I can’t just walk up to someone doing a line of coke and ask him where he got it.”

  “Who’d you see doing coke?”

  She winced away from the roar of outrage. “I won’t tell you.”

  “God the hell damn it all, I—”

  “King!” she bellowed. The shock of her harsh, torn voice ripping down the line caused him to fall silent, she was sure only temporarily. “You don’t want the doers, you want the dealers. There’s no point in fingering people who are only buying. I’m going to have to backtrack, and I’m new to the Slope and to Slopers. It won’t happen overnight.” As she spoke she remembered again the crack she had made to Jack about being up and back in forty-eight hours, and was grateful King had not heard it. “Try for a little patience, okay? In the meantime, I’d like to see the manifests for all the charter flights for the past twelve months. Oh, yeah, and the medical logs, too.”

  “Talk to Lou.” He gave her Childress’s extension. “And, Shugak—”

  “I’ll talk to you before I head up on Tuesday.” She hung up before he could launch into another diatribe and dialed the security chief’s number. “Childress,” she said, “this is Kate Shugak. I want to look at the flight manifests and the medical logs for the last twelve months.”

  “Out of the question,” he snapped back. “Those are restricted company records. You’re not cleared for them, shit, you’re not even a real employee.”

  “John King assured me I could count on you for every assistance,” Kate said mildly. There was a pause simmering with resentment. “The flight manifests and the medical logs. At Jack Morgan’s house no later than this afternoon, please. I assume you don’t want me picking them up in person.”

  Childress muttered a curse and there was a savage crash of receiver in cradle in Kate’s ear.

  There was a caribou in the freezer from last year’s hunt, carrots, celery, onions and potatoes in the refrigerator and beef broth in the cupboard. “Jack, you sweet devil, you shopped for me.” The ingredients for the stew went into the Crockpot on the counter. Kate, running out of domestic steam, poured herself another cup of coffee, opened the newspaper, found Doonesbury and went straight from Zonker to The New York Times crossword puzzle, a segue that pleased her with its linear progression.

  At nine-thirty she put down her pen and stretched out a hand for the phone book. She found the number she was looking for and punched it in. It rang once. “Good morning, Downtown Detox.”

  “Hi, this is Kate Shugak. I’m calling about a cousin of mine, a patient there, should have been brought in last week.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Martin Shugak. That’s S-H-U-G-A-K.”

  “One moment.” There was a rustle of paper, a silence during which Kate could hear the woman breathing, the sound of a hand muffling the receiver and a muted rumble of voices. After a moment the voice came back on. “Ma’am? Mr. Shugak checked himself out last Friday. Against all advice, I might add.”

  “I see.” Kate was saddened but not surprised. “Did he say where he was going?”

  The woman hesitated. “Did you say your name was Kate?”

  “Yes.”

  “He left a message for you.”

  Kate’s mouth twisted. “Is it repeatable?”

  The woman laughed. “He said, quote, ‘Tell her I’m going home,’ unquote.”

  Kate’s heart lifted a little. It might be a lie, but it might also be the truth. “Thanks.” She hung up.

  Martin. If he’d just stay home. If he’d just stay off the sauce. If, if, if.

  Tilting her chair against the wall, she looked out the window. A slight breeze stirred the leafless limbs of the trees. The surface of the lagoon was a crust of rapidly rotting ice. On the other side of the lagoon was a collection of the ugliest houses she’d ever seen in her life, enormous boxes built of ninety-degree angles and finished with clapboard siding, plunked down on lots so close together the owners could probably hear their neighbors inhale.

  A little red car with windows tinted so dark she couldn’t see inside drove by, the thud of its stereo enough to rattle Jack’s kitchen window in its frame. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall. On the homestead the pussy willows would just be starting to come out. The creek out back should be clearing of ice, not that its swift-running water ever completely froze over during the winter.

  She felt disoriented, afflicted with a sense of wrongness, of not belonging. She was home from the Slope, and yet not home.

  Images passed quickly beneath her closed eyelids. Waxed paper envelopes. Grizzly bears head down in garbage. The honorable senator from the great state of Illinois cradling his wounded hand. The expression in Jerry’s eyes when she deliberately recalled Petey Washington to both their minds.

  The flirtation in that up-from-under glance from Toni by the truck that morning. The broken helicopter. The swing of the chain on the rig floor, the scream of the gas in the pipes overhead in the Production Center, the trim line of wellheads in their neat little houses. A million and a half barrels of oil a day, and the people who produced it from the source never saw a drop.

  Oil. Crude. Petroleum. Black gold. Dinosaur piss. Raghead blood. Fossil shit. Gasoline, Blazo, kerosene, propane, paraffin. Three-in-One, 80/87, WD-40, 10W-30. It came in all consistencies, all numbers, all essential to life as we know it. The kingdom of heaven runs on faith, the kingdoms of earth on oil. Who had said that? She couldn’t remember.

  When it washed ashore in Prince William Sound, the crude came in in sticky gobs, in tar balls, in what they called mousse, crude whipped to a froth in the action of the sea. It rolled into shore in large waves, in small blots, in medium-sized blobs. It infiltrated every crack, ever
y crevice, it penetrated beneath every rock and grain of sand. In a very short while it came in entangled with spruce needles and driftwood and green glass Japanese net floats, and with the bodies of loons, grebes, cormorants, geese, ducks, cranes, gulls, murres, puffins, auks, bald eagles, seals, sea lions and sea otters.

  Kate remembered the first sea otter she had seen after the spill. Somehow he had fought his way ashore, to a beach as covered with oil as he was, and when she came up to him she saw that his eyes were red and enraged and terrified, heard his labored breathing, wheezing, in and out. He was licking his fur, grooming it with his claws, frantic to rid himself of the oil that gummed the individual hairs together, that destroyed his insulation, his means of flotation. He died as she watched, painfully, taking a long time about it, but she stayed with him until it was over. The most she could do for him was bear witness.

  During the rest of that long, horrible summer, she never again made the mistake of going down to the shore without her rifle.

  She came to with a jerk and the chair bounced forward on its front legs, almost unseating her. Her heart was beating rapidly, high up in her throat. Next to her Mutt whined once, a short, anxious sound. She looked around to find worried yellow eyes fixed on her face.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Mutt wagged an eager assent. Neither of them had spent this much time indoors since Mutt had moved in with Kate, and neither of them liked it much. Lack of outdoor exercise was answerable for a great deal, all of it bad, and beginning with hallucinations in the morning.

  She closed the door of Jack’s townhouse behind her, and paused for a moment on the doorstep, looking. The townhouse was one of a row of townhouses facing a street. On the other side of the street was a park, and on the other side of the park, a lagoon. Street, park and lagoon stretched east to west; the row of townhouses faced south. The eastern shore of the lagoon was bordered by Minnesota Bypass, a five-lane street with a roar of nonstop traffic coming off it.

  She turned her back on it. The bike trail ran beside the lagoon; they got on it. It split almost immediately, the right fork disappearing into a tunnel burrowed into the side of a gravel embankment supporting a set of railroad tracks. She walked through the tunnel and emerged onto the headwaters of Cook Inlet. It was after ten o’clock, and the temperature had warmed enough to cause the glaze of ice underfoot to melt into a layer of slush that slopped wetly with each step. The sky was pale blue behind torn white wisps of swiftly scudding clouds. Mutt padded at her side, making an occasional foray to investigate an interesting smell, but never letting Kate out of her sight. The spring breeze ruffled her coat with a gentle hand and was soft on Kate’s cheek, and stayed that way up the curve of the trail to Second Avenue, where the Coastal Trail ended and the city streets began. Beyond the alder-infested slope to their left was the Alaska Railroad station depot, the railroad yards and Anchorage’s waterfront, a stretch of mud flats constantly renewed by glacial silt washed down the Knik and Matanuska rivers into Knik Arm. Kate turned right on E Street and walked up to Fourth Avenue. Half the galleries she remembered had been replaced by stores selling T-shirts appliqued with pictures of eagles on the wing against a setting sun and “Alaska—The Great Land” printed beneath. She found one with a dog sled team and musher on it and an inscription that read, “Alaska—Where Men Are Men and Women Win the Iditarod.” Kate, who bought her plain white T-shirts by the dozen from Hanes’s discount catalogue for six bucks each, bought one of these for sixteen dollars that she told herself was for Mandy.

  A block down Fourth, in the window of a gift shop with the straightforward name of Alaska Native Arts & Crafts, an ivory otter caught her eye. Up on his hind legs in the midst of a menagerie sculpted from soapstone, antler, jade and wood, tiny paws held just so, thick tail disposed in a graceful curve, whiskers immaculately groomed, he stood just three inches high, black eyes bright with curiosity, every detail faithfully and exquisitely rendered. He was irresistible. He also looked familiar. Kate went inside, Mutt padding next to her.

  The clerk, a woman of character, included both woman and wolf in a friendly, unruffled smile. “Hello. May I help you?”

  Kate nodded toward the window. “The ivory otter. The one next to the soapstone bear. Is that Wilson Oozeva of Gambell?”

  The woman’s smile widened. “You have a good eye.” She went to the window and brought back the carving. “He’s good, isn’t he?”

  The little otter sat on the glass-topped counter between them, a soft gleam of ivory perfection. Touching one forefinger to the otter’s perfectly groomed fur, running it down the thick curve of the tail, Kate said, “Yes. On his good days, one of the best.”

  “Do you carve yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. A collector, then.”

  Kate shook her head. “No.”

  Her chin dragged her collar open, exposing her scar, but all the woman said was, “Were you interested in buying this piece?” She smiled again. “To begin a collection, perhaps?”

  Kate’s first instinctive response was refusal. She had no use for knickknacks that existed solely to be dusted. But when she started to shake her head the otter caught her eye, his bright, black gaze fixed on her face, his head cocked at an inquisitive angle, and suddenly she heard John King’s voice saying, Plus expenses, of course. Should run you, oh, say, around $250 a day. She reached out and picked him up. He looked up at her from the palm of her hand, vital, expectant, fairly quivering with life. Any minute now he was going to drop to his forepaws and scamper up her arm. “How much is he?”

  ‘Two hundred dollars.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. She wondered what Jack would say. Well, he was the one who had told her to find something to justify her expense account with. “And after all, we have to support the home team,” she told Mutt when they were in the street again. Mutt raised a skeptical eyebrow. Kate ignored her and tucked the tiny box carefully away in the inside pocket of her jacket.

  She found Cyrano’s and, physically incapable of passing a bookstore, any bookstore, entered and emerged thirty minutes later with a hundred dollars’ worth of books, one of them actually in hardcover. She felt a little dizzy. She’d never been in Anchorage before with this sense of having money to burn. It was unnerving to realize how easily she could seduce herself into spending it.

  She wandered back up the street, determined to avoid further temptation at all costs, when through another window she caught sight of a painting so stunningly bad the vacuum it left behind in the artistic firmament sucked her in the door. It proved to be only one of an entire glorious exhibit by a single artist, presided over by a woman wearing a square-shouldered smile featuring her dentist’s best and most lucrative work. The smile faded as she took in Kate’s worn jeans, shabby jacket and brown skin. Her assistant, a younger edition dressed for success in the same dark suit and the same perfect porcelain smile, came forward in response to some signal Kate missed. “I’m terribly sorry, but we don’t allow dogs in the gallery.”

  “Okay,” Kate said agreeably, and nodded at Mutt, who, after a long, considering look that caused the younger woman to back up a step, shouldered through the swinging glass door and took up a position directly outside. Kate smiled. “Okay?”

  The young woman’s gaze moved from Mutt to Kate, falling to the open collar of her shirt. At the sight of the scar her face lost color. “Uh, certainly.” A significant harrUMPH came from behind the counter. “Certainly,” she said in a stronger voice, shocked gaze unable to lift itself from the scar. “My name is Yvonne. Was there something I could help you with?”

  “No, thanks, Yvonne, I just saw the picture in the window and wanted to take a closer look.” She looked over Yvonne’s shoulder and her eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed. “That would be by the same hand, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Yvonne followed Kate to a red and purple monstrosity that covered most of one wall. Kate stared, enraptured. It was a sunset. Maybe. The paint appeared to have been applied with a trowel. Sh
e looked closer. Something resembling medical gauze and mirrored chips of glass and what might have been a razor blade had been incorporated into the globs of paint. In another corner a syringe with a broken needle had been glued to the canvas. Not a sunset, after all, Kate decided, but the residue of a run with Jerry McIsaac. She couldn’t quite reconcile that theory with the peony in a third corner, though. A lily she could have understood, but not a peony.

  “Quite an interesting technique, wouldn’t you say?” Yvonne said brightly, next to her. “Carroll is one of our most promising young artists. Notice how the effrontery of line clashes with the insolence of color, and how his choice of supplementary media connect the two to make a statement.”

  Kate hung on every word. “I hadn’t quite seen it that way,” she said, adding earnestly, “And what statement would that be, exactly?”

  Yvonne started to tell her and was stopped by another meaningful harrUMPH. Kate repressed a grin and stepped back, immensely relieved that she’d already justified her expense account. There were some things even RPetCo’s money did not deserve to be spent on.

  The door opened behind them, and Kate turned, curious to see who else had been suckered inside by the putative picture in the window.

  He was an old man, dressed in dirty jeans and a red wool shirt frayed at the elbows. He had no coat. His face was dark and seamed, his black hair lank, his eyes rheumy and he needed a shave. A battered cardboard box under one arm, he stopped just inside the door, converged upon by both dress-for-success suits in the same moment. “Yes, sir, may I help you?” the older woman said. Her tone was sure she couldn’t.

  He held out the box. His movements were slow, made so by age or alcohol or both. “This is my work.”

  “We don’t buy art,” the older woman said.

  “This is my work,” the old man repeated, his voice rising.