Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  And had Ben Gunn, upon hearing of Old Sam’s death, taken the first opportunity to come into the Park and look for it?

  She remembered the monster truck parked in front of the Adit’s offices. It was white. She had been pretty sure the truck that had run her off the road had been dark. If Ben had run her off the road, that meant that he hadn’t found anything in the journal he had stolen.

  Had the intruder this morning been Ben Gunn? And if so, who was his buddy? She didn’t know him well enough to know who he ran with. Kenny would.

  She put down her mug to pick up the journal again, and leafed through it, pausing here and there to reread certain entries. Judge Anglebrandt had had a good sense of humor and a sly writing style. “Upon his incarceration in the Ahtna Jail, Mr. Selanoff was seized with such despair that he attempted to commit suicide by drowning himself in the toilet. He failed to succeed because he had to keep coming up for air.”

  Kate laughed and closed the journal again, examining the cover and the spine. Well, if Old Sam had left the journal for her to find strictly for the entertainment value, he had been successful. For the life of her she couldn’t see how the entry about McCullough was supposed to help her find the icon, or this alleged map.

  She looked up at the wall. He hadn’t made it easy for her to find, that was for sure. She had a dark suspicion that nothing else he’d left behind for her to find was going to be easy, either.

  Had she mourned her loss a little less, she might have noticed the lift in her heart, the sharpening of her senses, the new intensity of the colors that came within her range of vision. She might have recognized the return of her curiosity, that most essential quality of the effective investigator, which had been dulled by recent cases without satisfactory resolutions, and blunted by the draining, enervating toil of being Everychair to every shareholder in the Niniltna Native Association.

  Instead she just went to bed, and if she slept better that night on the hard floor of that derelict old cabin than she had since she’d been shanghaied onto the NNA board, even given the void left by Mutt’s continued absence, she wasn’t restless enough to notice.

  Twenty

  She rose with the sun the next morning and packed up after a breakfast of eggs and leftover chile relleno pie. The dishes washed with snowmelt, she lashed a tarp down over the trailer. The tarps she’d tacked to the walls of the cabin she left there for the next pilgrim. Who knew? It might even be herself.

  She’d written a note on the inside of the wrapper of a Hershey bar, placed it inside a Ziploc bag, and duct-taped it to the door. The note read:

  Welcome, stranger!

  Feel free to use the cabin.

  Leave it as you found it.

  Thanks.

  —Kate Shugak, owner

  She hoped that the invitation and the implied threat, combined with her signature, would rein in the more sober of the backwoods adventurers who made it this far. The kids and the drunks would probably ignore anything less than lights and a siren, but you do what you can.

  She had given some thought to changing her mind about the hidden space behind the loft support. Maybe it would have been better to pull it out and leave it on the floor, so that if the people looking for the so-called map returned, they could assume she’d found it and would not tear the cabin down looking for it. In the end she had nixed the idea out of fear someone might use it for fuel in the woodstove.

  That cut might be the last thing Old Sam had made with his own hands.

  If they did come back, with any luck they would assume she had it, period, and would pick up her trail again in Niniltna.

  She climbed onto the snow machine and started the engine. It kicked over without a hint of protest at being used for target practice the day before. She put on her goggles and pulled up her hood, fastening it at her throat, fixing the windshield with a steadfast gaze.

  Nothing.

  She revved the engine.

  Nothing.

  She revved it again.

  Still nothing.

  She swallowed hard and moved out slowly, following her incoming track down to the dogleg and around the saddle.

  On the other side, Mutt was sitting in the snow, her front paws placed just so, a certain inflexibility about her jaw.

  Kate stopped.

  They exchanged a long look. Kate broke first. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I’ve been scared you’d get hurt again. I’ve been holding you back from doing your job, the job I trained you to do, because of it.” She swallowed hard, remembering that long, dark night spent laying on the steel examining table in the vet’s office, one arm around Mutt so she could reassure herself that her dog was still breathing. It hurt to get the words out. “That stops now. You’re back to being a full partner in the firm.”

  Angry at having her hand forced, she hit the gas and the snow mobile slid out.

  Next to her, Mutt maintained a steady pace.

  * * *

  Downhill, the twists and turns and the steep little hills seemed more appropriate for a luge. She took them slowly and with care, Mutt trotting alternately before and behind, nose sniffing the air. They were out of the mountains before noon. She stopped on the same rise where they’d stopped for lunch on the way in to check the duct tape over the bullet hole and top off the tank. Lunch was leftover biscuits from breakfast and hot soup from the thermos.

  She kept it at a steady forty miles an hour, stopping to refuel twice, which she admitted to herself was verging on paranoia, but just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. Empirical evidence recently received indicated rather the opposite, and she kept a sharp eye out for attackers hiding behind every tree and rock they passed.

  At the last foothill, the trail of the Polaris headed south for the river instead of west for Niniltna.

  She stopped to consider.

  The pain of her newest wound had receded to a dull ache, and she could see clearly with both eyes. She felt as well as someone shot in the head less than twenty-four hours before could expect.

  The sky was partly cloudy, the horizon unthreatening. There was enough gas left in the spare can to see her to the river and back to Niniltna.

  She grinned. Why the hell not?

  “Hop on,” she said to Mutt, and hit the gas.

  It took a little over forty minutes, but when they got there Kate was presented with yet another mystery.

  The Polaris tracks ran right over the edge of the river.

  “What the hell,” she said, and investigated.

  She had to climb down the bank and she nearly got her boots wet before she figured it out. They’d taken the snowgo off on a boat. There was an indentation in the gravel where they’d nosed it in, and more indentations in the snow that showed where they’d laid planks to run the snowgo on board.

  Well, shit. Depending on how fast the boat was and which direction they’d headed, they were either at Ahtna or Alaganik by now.

  Still, there wasn’t much traffic on the river this late in the year. A lot of Park rats had cabins on the river and paid attention to who went by when. She turned around, feeling not entirely without hope. But the Arctic Cat finally took umbrage, first at being holed by a bullet, and then by being patched with duct tape, and it gave up the ghost five miles short of Niniltna. Naturally no one was traveling on their own snowgo or four-wheeler within a light-year of her when it did. Five feet was too far to walk in the Park without supplies at this time of year, let alone five miles, so she loaded her pack and set it to one side while she tarped up the snowgo and the trailer yet again.

  The light was failing by the time she entered the village. She made directly for the Grosdidiers, shedding pack and snowshoes at the door. When she entered the clinic’s waiting room everyone including the ill and injured backed up, as if the walls of the room weren’t strong enough to contain both Kate’s rage and them, too.

  Matt appeared at this opportune moment and took in the situation at a glance. “Yeah,” he
said. “Come right on in here, Kate.”

  Mutt refused to be left behind, and in the exam room Matt gave her a wary glance. “Is she going to take a chunk out of me if I touch you?”

  “She might,” Kate said, and rejoiced at the thought. Well, not about Mutt’s taking a chunk out of Matt, specifically, but about Mutt’s taking a chunk out of anyone on Kate’s behalf.

  She climbed up on the table, and wondered if she was going to have the strength to climb down again. Matt worked quickly and efficiently, removing the Band-Aid Kate had put on, cleaning and disinfecting the wound and applying a more professional dressing. He insisted on checking her pupils and reflexes and questioned her closely about her behavior between now and the time she’d been shot. He appeared satisfied with her answers, gave her some painkillers and some antibiotics, and shouted down the hall, “Hey, guys, come on in here and get a load of this!”

  The other three Grosdidiers trooped in to radiate an incandescent and entirely unnecessary delight at Kate Shugak in their infirmary twice in one week, both times with shiners you could see from the moon.

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Kate said. “Did any of you guys see a Polaris go through town, night before last? Two people on one machine, one large, one medium sized, dressed like they knew what they were doing, both armed, one of them with a Savage 110? Other one might have been a thirty-thirty. A hunting rifle, anyway.” She hadn’t been able to recover the bullet from the accidental shot the first intruder had fired, but she’d found the one that had ricocheted off her forehead embedded in the wall behind the green tarp.

  An exchange of glances, a communal shaking of the head. “That who shot you?” Matt said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  The brothers gave a collective shrug. “With all those guys coming through on their way to and from the Suulutaq, you never notice a stranger anymore,” Peter said.

  “We could mount up, pick up their trail,” Mark said eagerly.

  Kate shook her head. “They left by the river.”

  They exchanged another glance over her head, this time one fraught with meaning. “Kate,” Matt said, “let me take another look at your eyes.”

  She waved him off. “They took the snowgo off on a boat. I found the tracks.”

  There was a short silence. “Jesus,” Matt said.

  “Risky, this time of year,” Mark said.

  Luke cast an involuntary look over his shoulder, as if he could see the river through the walls. “That sucker can freeze solid overnight.”

  “You probably didn’t see the boat go by yesterday, either,” Kate said.

  Nope.

  “What the hell did they want?” Peter said.

  They all looked at Kate with a marveling eye, incredulous that anyone in their right mind would take a shot at Kate Shugak.

  “I don’t suppose it’s any use to say you should stay overnight for observation,” Matt said.

  “I need a ride out to where I left my snowgo,” she said. “Can one of you give me a lift?”

  Luke could and did. He towed her machine and trailer into town, at her request stopping briefly at the airstrip so she could talk to George Perry before heading for Herbie Topkok’s garage. Herbie came out as Luke pulled away. “Kate.” He looked at her eyes and at the bandage but he didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, Herbie,” she said, and dismounted, groaning a little as she stretched out the kinks. “Ran into a little trouble. I was hoping you could help me out.” She leaned forward and ripped the duct tape off the gas tank.

  He stared at the neat hole that any Park rat except maybe Willard Shugak would instantly recognize as having been made by a bullet. He looked up at her again to contemplate the shiners, olds ones fading, new ones weighing in, bandage covering up something, probably bad. “Who’d you piss off this time?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just making this up as I go along.”

  Herbie’s usually lugubrious expression lightened into what might have been almost a laugh.

  “Can you fix it?”

  Herbie was one of the newer members of the NNA’s board of directors, but for his day job he ran what amounted to a garage for all makes and models of snowgo and four-wheeler in the Park, with a side dabble in boat engines. He shrugged. “Sure. I can patch the hole or I can replace the tank. Replacing it’s quicker and more expensive. Patching it’s cheaper and slower. Take your pick.”

  Kate took patching. Herbie ran up the garage door and they disconnected the trailer and pulled the snowgo inside. “Can I leave the trailer in the driveway until I can get Bobby over here to pick it up?”

  Herbie shrugged, already mentally sparking his welding torch. What was it about men and fire? “Sure.” He did look up for just a moment to say, “I was sorry to hear about Old Sam. I’ll miss that cranky old bastard.”

  “So will we all.”

  “Heard he left you the whole shebang.”

  “He did.”

  “You want to sell that Honda FourTrax and that Polaris 800 of his, you come see me first. I’ll make you a good offer.”

  She gave the Arctic Cat a rueful glance. “I might need a new snow machine myself, but I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks, Herbie.” She shouldered her rifle and she and Mutt hitched a ride with a couple of Park rats headed for the Roadhouse as far as Squaw Candy Creek. She snowshoed in from there, crossing the wooden bridge over the creek twenty minutes later.

  The door to the A-frame opened and Dinah, an angelic blue-eyed blonde lacking only the wings and a harp, looked out with a welcoming smile. “Hey, Kate.” Mercifully, she refrained from the obvious comment.

  “Hey, Dinah.”

  Mutt eeled between Dinah and the door frame and disappeared into the house. There followed shortly thereafter a stentorian bellow. “God DAMN, Shugak! Fucking WOLVES in the fucking HOUSE again!”

  Kate shed her snowshoes and entered the house to see Bobby sitting at a circular console loaded with electronic equipment, connected by a snake’s nest of cables whose ends slithered up a pole through the roof, and by extension to the 112-foot metal tower out back. From here the word went forth to the Park from Park Air, the pirate radio station that featured music (“None of that shit recorded after CCR broke up”), a continuing swap-and-shop where Park rats bartered services for goods (“I’ll cut your blowdown into firewood for smoke fish, one case per cord, straight trade”), and current events, including interviews with elected representatives like Pete Heiman that frequently ventured into the profane but were always entertaining and sometimes even informative.

  Bobby had no license, of course, much less a dedicated bandwidth for broadcast, so he changed frequencies daily. So far he had eluded detection and arrest by the FCC. It probably helped that he broadcast from the back of beyond.

  “Shugak!” he said, from beneath the enthusiastic tongue lashing he was receiving from Mutt, who was standing with her paws on his shoulders. “Shugak! Call OFF the fucking WOLF!”

  Kate, grinning, did no such thing.

  Bobby Clark had come into the Park many years ago by means that would not bear close scrutiny. Kate Shugak knew more about his past than most, and certainly more than she let on, but Kate wasn’t talking. He was big and black and had lost both his legs below the knee to a land mine in one of America’s many and apparently endless Asian wars. His head was shaved, his grin was broad, his shoulders and arms were roped with muscle, and he had a voice that sounded like a cross between those of James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart, with a shivering timbre than made most women want to strip out of their clothes and fall flat on the nearest horizontal surface.

  Kate Shugak knew more about that than she let on, too.

  Mutt dropped back to the floor and laughed her lupine laugh up at him. “Fucking WOLVES in the house,” Bobby said, but he was all bluff and bluster and she knew it. She sneezed, gave herself a vigorous shake, and trotted over to the wood box next to the big stone fireplace, where Bobby made a habit of keeping items that could be rel
ied upon to keep the wolves at bay. Nor did this confidence betray her—she rooted around with such purpose that presently she emerged from the jumble of firewood with something that looked like the vertebrate of a finback whale. She settled happily in front of the fire and prepared to gnaw.

  “Like woman, like dog, always thinking with her stomach.” Bobby gave the wheels of his chair a quick, firm shove and then with a quick twist skidded to a hockey stop, as usual making Kate hop back so he wouldn’t run over her toes. He inspected her face. “You look like you went three rounds with Muhammad Ali.”

  “Worse than I expected,” Dinah said, looking her share.

  “What’s going on?” Bobby said.

  “I got shot,” Kate said, tactful as always, and then of course had to explain. Bobby got dangerously quiet, and Kate said, “Don’t even think about it. Whoever it was is long gone.”

  “Might take a ride out there myself,” Bobby said. “See what you missed.”

  “I didn’t miss anything.” Kate looked around the house, which seemed oddly empty. “Where is the child?”

  Unconsciously, Dinah tracked her gaze, as if she wondered where Kate’s four-year-old namesake was, too. “Auntie Balasha’s granddaughter, the school nurse, what’s her name?”

  “Desiree.”

  “Yeah, Desiree. Anyway, Desiree, who has evidently decided that a life of administering oral vaccines and treating epidemics of the galloping crud is not enough for her, has pried funds loose from somewhere to create an after-preschool tumbling class. Katya, god help them all, is there.”

  “Really? She enjoys it?”

  “Since she goes into a screaming fit every time I go to pick her up, my guess is yes.” Dinah glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Another hour.”