Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 10 - Midnight Come Again

by Midnight Come Again(lit)

  He looked at the altimeter, which read a little less than two hundred feet. He looked out. The belly of the Here seemed to skim the vegetation of the Delta. He pulled back on the yoke to put some space between them and the ground, and tried not to think of how close they'd come to augering in. For the first time since he'd arrived in Bering, he could appreciate the lack of mountains, the flat, featureless topography of the Delta. If he'd tried a flat spin at home, he and the Here and everybody on board would have found a cloud full of rocks almost immediately.

  They bounced three times on landing, the third time so hard he thought the nose gear was coming up through the fuselage. But she held together.

  She was one sweet craft, powerful and forgiving, and he decided he was in love for life. If he ever met Mr. Lockheed in person, he would kiss him on the mouth.

  They had barely rolled to a stop when he was up and out of his seat and moving back, pulling at the pile of bodies lying crumpled against the right bulkhead of the cavernous cargo bay.

  Kate was the fourth one he came to. "Kate," he said. "Kate? Come on, baby, come on, come out of it, you know you can do it, you know you can.

  Get your ass back here, Shugak!" Her eyelids fluttered.

  "Kate," he said, unable to keep from shaking her. He didn't care what was broken, he wanted her conscious, he wanted her alive and awake and yelling at him, he wanted the world back the way it was, the way it never would be again.

  She blinked up at him. "Jim?"

  An immense wave of relief swept over him. He had to check himself from scooping her up into his arms. "Yeah. Yeah, it's Jim."

  She raised her head and looked around at the pile of bodies surrounding them, some of them beginning to stir and groan. "What happened?" She looked back at him, and said accusingly, "What the hell did you do?"

  He started to laugh, and this time he didn't try to fight it. He hugged her hard, ignoring the protest muffled against his shoulder, the hands trying to shove him away.

  There was a thudding against the outside of the plane. Others were beginning to stir, and Jim got to his feet and fumbled around until he found the ramp control. Somewhat to his surprise, it still worked. The first person he saw was Carroll, who came on board at a quick pace, pistol drawn and held in the government-certified two-hand grip.

  She ignored Jim and Kate, heading straight for Kamyanka. "He's not dead is he, damn it?" She nudged Kamyanka ungently with one toe.

  Kamyanka groaned and opened his eyes.

  Carroll smiled down at him. "Hello, Ivanov. At last we meet. Now, just where the hell is that plutonium?"

  He stared up at her. "I don't know what you're talking about. Who is this Ivanov?"

  She turned her head. "Al?"

  Casanare came up the ramp holding the arm of a man whose hair was just beginning to grow back over a shaved scalp, not enough to hide the scar left behind when they cracked his skull open and got the bullet out. He moved slowly but steadily, his color was good and he looked like he had a long life in front of him.

  "Is this the man who held up your armored truck?" Carroll asked him.

  "Yes," Kiril Davidovitch said, staring down at Kamyanka with a bright, triumphant expression. "This the man who shoot the girl. This the man who shoot me. This the man."

  Kamyanka closed his eyes.

  When does your mouth say goodbye to your heart?

  --There Is No Word For Goodbye She walked into the bunkhouse at noon the next day and found Jim packing. "I'm taking the jet out this afternoon," he said.

  "Yeah," she said, sitting on her bunk and watching him stuff balled-up dirty shirts into his duffel.

  "You know where that goddamn plutonium is that Boris and Natasha were chasing? Pakistan, is where. Or some of it, anyway. Turns out Kamyanka shipped it out the day after he bought it from Glukhov."

  "How much did he make?"

  "Enough to start this operation, evidently," he said with a nod of his head in the direction of the docks. "Looks like things were getting a little too hot for him in Russia. He'd been operating pretty free, wide and handsome there for years, but lately he'd been crossing some lines, pulling some shit even the Russians couldn't tolerate."

  "Like what?"

  "Like buying elections. So the word came down--hell, who knows--maybe from Yeltsin himself, Kamyanka, or Ivanov, had to go. So he pulled one last job, bought the plutonium with it, sold the plutonium and started laundering it through the Alaska First Bank of Bering."

  "Why the Alaska First Bank of Bering?"

  "Seems Glukhov had met Overmore in Magadan when Overmore was over there glad-handing. God knows why, nobody in Magadan could vote for him. They became bosom buddies."

  "So Glukhov put Kamyanka in touch with Overmore."

  "Who is the major stockholder in Northern Consolidated Seafood Distributors, Inc. And Overmore roped in his brother-in-law, who is even more stupid than he is greedy. Overmore, by the way, can't talk fast enough. He's stumbling over his own tongue implicating Sullivan and Glukhov, Sullivan is trying to give up Overmore, and Glukhov is telling everything he knows about Kamyanka's operation. Which isn't much, according to Carroll."

  "Carroll?"

  "Casey's real name."

  "Oh. What about Kamyanka?"

  "He's not talking."

  "Big surprise."

  "Yeah, I'd be careful if I was Glukhov. I'm not sure there is a hole so deep that Kamyanka can't dig him out."

  "He missed Davidovitch."

  "Yeah. He did. For once, the forces for good prevailed."

  "He's a cute kid."

  "You saying that because he's testifying for our side, or because he was hitting on you before I managed to carry you out of that plane?" "Still seems strange they'd pick Bering," Kate said. "For that matter, it seems strange they'd pick Alaska. We're not exactly on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim economy."

  "Maybe that's why," Jim said, cramming clean shirts in after the dirty ones. "Maybe all the usual suspects were busy. Maybe all the usual suspects were under investigation. And Overmore was ripe for the picking. Like you said. Past history of fraud and embezzlement. And he had a nice big expensive campaign coming up."

  Kate said somberly, "I can't believe they killed Alice."

  He stopped packing to look over his shoulder. "They didn't."

  "What?" "Zarr said they got the guy last night. Alice's ex boyfriend got liquored up on some imported Thunderbird and sobbed out the story on his sister's shoulder. He picked Alice up outside the bank on Sunday, drove out somewhere, tried to talk her into coming back to him and when she wouldn't, beat her to death. The sister turned him in."

  "Alice was killed by an ex-boyfriend?" She remembered the man outside the grocery store. "Was his name Charlie?"

  "Yeah, Charlie Hoffman. How did you know?"

  "I ran into him with Alice, coming out of the grocery store." Kate sat down on her bunk, dizzy with relief. "I went on board the Kosygin because of you, trying to find out what you were up to. But I did the rest of it for Alice. Because I thought I got her killed."

  "Yeah. Well, you didn't. Charlie Hoffman killed her. For what it's worth, he seems really broken up about it." "It's not worth much," Kate said.

  "No," Jim said, adding, "They ought to make this town dry and be done with it."

  "Yes." She searched for the relief that had to be there, her exoneration, and found only a numb stillness.

  "I went to see Stephanie this morning. She's going to be okay, I think.

  She never liked Charlie, she said."

  "Her family will take care of her." "Yeah." He thought of his own parents, how he wouldn't be telling them of this week of TDY in Bering, how they would never know about any of the close encounters of the homicide kind he had during the course of a working day. He called once a month, he sent a card on Father's Day and flowers on Mother's Day and he tried to get down for an extended weekend every year. They were polite when they were together, but they weren't close. He didn't blame them for it, it
was how things were, it was how they'd always been.

  Stephanie's family would handle things differently.

  "She's not a voyeur," Jim said. "I mean, she doesn't make a habit out of spying on people. She's just lonely. There aren't any other ten-year-olds around here who want to be engineers and astronauts. Even Ray, who helps her a little with her models, doesn't know what she's talking about half the time. She built that Super Cub model almost all by herself, Kate, and she thought up putting the camera in it, and the remote transmitter that could transmit to the rabbit ears of her television antenna so she could record everything on the VCR. She got the idea from communications satellites, she said. She wanted to build her own.

  "She went out late at night or early in the morning to test the equipment, less traffic in the air then. Lucky for us that on Wednesday she'd just put the finishing touches to a monitor so she could look at what she was filming from where she was flying the plane, instead of having to wait until she got home to watch it on the television."

  "And lucky for us she was in the right place at the right time to see what happened to us."

  "Yeah, that tape will come in handy at trial." He shoved socks into empty nooks. "How about you? What do you do now?"

  She made a vague gesture. "Oh, I'll stick around for a while, help the guys figure out a way to keep the business going until Baird gets out of the hospital, train my re placement. They need a good ground crew or they'll go under, and too many small communities up and down the river depend on Baird Air."

  He shook his head. "Kate Shugak, Rescue, Inc. Thanks for saving my life, by the way."

  "Thanks for saving mine." She rubbed the back of her neck. "Even if you did have to slam me against the wall to do it."

  "Still, you kept Kamyanka, or whatever the hell his name really is, from shooting me. So." He repeated it solemnly. "Thanks for saving my life."

  I couldn't save Jack's, she thought.

  "Here."

  She blinked her eyes clear and saw he was holding something out. "What's this?"

  He waved it at her. "It's yours, anyway."

  It was the picture he had taken from her cabin, the one Bobby had snapped of Jack carrying her off into the woods after Bobby and Dinah's wedding and Katya's unexpected appearance. "Where'd you get this?" He made a dismissive gesture. "It was on your kitchen table."

  "You've been to the cabin?"

  "Yes. When I was looking for you for this job."

  She looked back down at the picture. That woman looks happy, she thought.

  Without volition, tears slid down her face, long, silent, one after the other. She let them collect and fall, and she made no attempt to hide them. Those tears shook him to the bone. He took a deep breath, let it out. He wanted to hold her.

  He stayed where he was. "Listen, Kate. About what happened between us--"

  She said nothing. "Look, I'm sorry. I should have--" "No," she said, looking up through her tears. "Don't. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I did. It wasn't true. You didn't take advantage of me. I woke up, and you were there, and I reached for you. I didn't give you a choice."

  He patted the air with his hands. "Nice try, but don't fit me for a halo just yet, okay? Maybe I did take advantage of the situation. You were right. I wanted you. I have for a long time. I haven't made any secret of it."

  A faint smile. "You want everybody." He thought of Kathy at Alaska Geographic, with whom he couldn't summon enough energy to strike up even a mild flirtation, of the flight attendant on the plane in, whose phone number he would never have let get away from him in his prior life, of the frank interest in Sophie the waitress's eyes, of Mary Zarr, whom he'd treated so badly. "Yeah. I guess."

  She realized she was sitting on the same bunk upon which they had made love, and stood up abruptly. "I was hurting, Jim, and you, well, you comforted me. You held me while I--while I cried," she said, and the strained expression on her face showed him how hard it was for her to say it. "Thank you for that." She took a deep breath. "And then we fell asleep. Understandable, we were both tired out, emotionally at least.

  Plus you were still recovering." She nodded at the wound, a neat furrow above his left temple. And then when we woke up--" She spread her hands.

  "It was a once in a lifetime situation, a fluke of circumstance. It'll never happen again."

  "No."

  "I mean, you're a rounder. No offense, but--" "It's the truth," he said glumly, and wondered why his heart felt like a stone in his chest. "And I'm a one-man woman. I don't stand in line." He smiled then. "No. You don't."

  She blew out a relieved breath. "So we'll put it behind us. Move on."

  "Okay."

  She looked back at the picture. "I loved him," she said softly.

  "Yeah, I know," he said. He hesitated. What the hell. "But you don't have to be guilty because you're alive and he's dead. He saved your life, that's what you said."

  "Yes."

  "Then live it. It was his gift to you."

  She opened her mouth as if to speak, and closed it again.

  He looked down at the duffel. His voice so soft as to be almost inaudible, he said, "Where did you get the tooth marks?"

  "What?"

  He gestured. "On your arm. I saw the scar when-- well. George saw them, too, when he flew you out, and he was worried. Where'd they come from?"

  She looked down at the scar, touched it wonderingly with her fingers as if she'd never seen it before.

  "Where'd they come from, Kate? Mutt?"

  She nodded, seemingly fascinated by the marks on her arm.

  Still that soft, inescapable tone. "What were you trying to do?"

  "I had the rifle down." She spoke as one mesmerized. "I was--I don't know what I was going to do."

  He closed his eyes, opened them again and spoke very carefully. "Mutt stopped you."

  "Yes."

  "And you left the Park"

  "That day." She looked up, and her eyes were haunted with the memory of those last days, the Quilaks closing in, the silence getting louder and louder. "I've always run home to the Park.

  This was the first time I ever had to run away from it."

  They stood in silence, until Mutt nudged Jim with her head. He knelt down and put an arm around her neck. "Good girl," he said, looking into her wise eyes, her loyal face. "Good girl, Mutt."

  She let him have it with the tongue again, all over his face and all of his ears and neck she could reach. Mutt didn't hold back. When she liked, she liked.

  He let her go and rose to his feet again. He picked up his duffel. "Jack is dead, Kate," he said. "You aren't. Come home. You've got people there who need you."

  At the door he stopped to look back at her, dark head bent beneath the sunshine streaming in through the window.

  He went back then, and put his arms around her. She didn't resist, merely rested against him.

  He kissed her brow.

  He kissed her cheek.

  He kissed her mouth, a sweet, tender kiss that went on a little too long for his comfort.

  He raised his head, traced the line of her neat cap of hair. "Good-bye, Kate."

  She looked up at him with grave eyes. "Good-bye, Jim."

  He brushed her chin with a knuckle, turning it into a caress, and let her go. He patted Mutt on the head, picked up his duffel again and went out the door of the bunkhouse they had shared for the last time.

  On the walk to the terminal he thought again of his first sight of her at the gold camp the previous fall; torn, bleeding, the body of her lover in her arms, unwilling, no, unable to let him go. He heard again the sound of that muted wail, a distilled grief drifting up into the air like smoke.

  When had anyone ever loved him that much?

  "Don't forget," Stephanie said.

  Kate looked around the girl's room, at the airplane models hanging from the ceiling, at the textbooks crowding the shelves. "I won't forget."