Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “So Jane told you about the manuscript,” she said. “You weren’t researching your grandfather’s biography when I walked into the Adit office, you were establishing an alibi.”

  He was silent for a moment, debating the wisdom of telling her too much. “How do you know it was me? There’s been a bunch of break-ins around town this fall.”

  “You had tears in your eyes when I told you she was dead,” she said. “You were hoping she had lived.”

  He was silent.

  “You saw me go into the courthouse,” she said. “You heard me tell Judge Singh I was going to talk to Jane. You panicked, afraid Jane either had it herself or knew where it was, and I’d get to it first.”

  Still with the silent treatment.

  “So,” she said, “Jane told you about Old Sam’s manuscript, that it had been written by Hammett. It’s an unlikely story. What made you believe her?”

  He made up his mind to talk, and Kate gave a silent cheer. So much of the mystery that Old Sam had left behind for her solve had involved too much guesswork.

  “Like I told you, my dad was one of Castner’s Cutthroats,” he said. “He got wounded, and, like Old Sam, he met Hammett when he was in the hospital on Adak. Hammett mentioned that he was writing a story about one of the other men in the unit.” He paused. “Hammett died without writing anything after The Thin Man.”

  “I didn’t really suspect you of anything,” Kate said, “until it was pointed out to me how much a new Hammett manuscript might get at auction.”

  “Are you kidding me? Sell it? Sell an original manuscript by Dashiell Hammett? I don’t want to sell it. I just want to have it. To hold it in my hands.” He sounded like Galahad talking about the Holy Grail. “To read it,” he said in a hushed, reverent voice.

  Kate snorted. “Which is why you killed Jane Silver when she caught you breaking into her house, looking for it. Just so you could hold it.”

  He reddened again. “That was an accident,” he repeated.

  “What happened?”

  Again, he debated telling her the truth, and again, the eagerness to talk outweighed the need for self-preservation. Either that or he meant Kate never to leave Canyon Hot Springs.

  “I was going through her bookshelves,” he said. “She walked in.” He leaned forward. “She rushed at me, Kate. She grabbed for the book I was holding. I tried to shake her off but she just wouldn’t let go.” His head dropped so that she couldn’t see his expression. “She tripped. She lost her balance, and she just fell.”

  “Old people do that,” she said.

  He shook his head, his eyes shut. “Her head hit the corner of the table. It was the most awful sound. Then I heard someone coming up the steps. I ran.”

  “She didn’t die right away,” Kate said. “She managed to speak to me, a few words, only one of which I could understand. ‘Paper.’ I thought she meant some kind of document. Turns out she was trying to say newspaper, or newspaperman. That’d be you.”

  “I told you, it was an accident,” he said.

  “Involuntary manslaughter,” she said.

  “But not murder,” he said.

  “You figured I survived the same treatment, why shouldn’t Jane?” Kate said.

  He looked startled. “What?”

  “When you clobbered me with the piece of firewood in Old Sam’s cabin. Made me a nine-day Technicolor wonder, I can’t thank you enough. But hey”—she rapped her head with her knuckles—“takes a licking, keeps on ticking. The Grosdidier brothers regard me as a medical miracle.”

  He sat up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Old Sam was alive and well the last time I was in the Park, and I never went anywhere near his cabin that trip.”

  This, unfortunately, had the ring of truth, but then she’d been pretty sure he hadn’t been the one wielding the firewood. “And then there’s the little matter of you running me off the road.”

  He looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did someone run you off the road?”

  She shook her head. “Come on, Ben. I saw that big-ass truck parked in front of the Adit’s office. Looks about the same general size and shape as the one that ran me off the road.”

  “Everybody’s got a big-ass truck in the Park,” he said. “You’ve got a big-ass truck. That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “You knew I was headed for home when I left your office. You didn’t find the manuscript at Jane’s that morning, so you figured Old Sam must have held on to it. You wanted to stall me, slow me down so you could search his cabin.” She looked at him, and said softly, “Or you wanted to get me out of the way entirely.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said again.

  “Attempted murder, this time,” she said. “At the very least assault with intent. You’ll still do a healthy chunk of time.”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “I will tell,” she said mildly.

  “No,” he said. “You won’t.” He had let his hand slide down to rest on the butt of the pistol he wore in a holster at his belt. It looked very old, like something out of Casablanca. Another stellar Bogart performance, she thought irrelevantly. “It’s a plan,” she said to Ben, complimentary. “I can see only one flaw.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have the manuscript.”

  “Not yet.” He matched her look for look, hand still on his pistol.

  “See, there’s your problem.”

  “What?’

  “I don’t have it, either.”

  He looked disconcerted, then rallied. “But you know where it is.”

  “Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t let you shoot me before I told you,” she said, and while he was still absorbing that cheerfully delivered statement she threw her coffee in his face. It wasn’t that hot but he flinched, and she rocked forward to the balls of her feet and pushed off. A beat later he reacted, pulling the pistol free. It was one beat too long.

  Sometimes it just didn’t matter how many times they’d heard The Legend of Kate Shugak. When six-foot men faced a five-foot woman, they naturally assumed they had the advantage. It was Kate’s very great pleasure to instruct them otherwise whenever she got the chance, and with all the considerable force and speed of one hundred twenty well-directed pounds of pissed-off woman behind it, Ben’s hand slammed against the wall.

  Bones cracked and he yelled. He was, in fact, bigger than she was, but he spent most of his time typing. She spent most of her time kicking ass. He heaved, trying to throw her off, but she clung like a limpet. He rolled, trying to push her into the hot stove, and she leaned forward and sank her teeth into his nose.

  “Ahhh! ‘Et ‘oh, ‘et ‘oh!” She could feel his grip tighten on the pistol, which he had somehow managed to keep hold of. It fired a round at close quarters into the stove. Kate looked up to see the stack tremble, but the coffeepot was too close to the edge and it started to fall. She rolled out of the way just in time, before what was left inside the pot poured down his right thigh and his crotch.

  Ben screamed like a little girl, and while his attention was diverted she pounced on the pistol and popped to her feet. He wasn’t even looking at her as he frantically plucked the fabric of his jeans away from his crotch, shaking his leg, and giving out with what she considered to be pretty pedestrian language. “Ouch, shit, goddammit, shit, fuck, ow, ow, ow!” The blood gushing from his nose was a nice grace note, though.

  It took a few moments for Ben’s pants to cool off and for him to reacquire focus. By then Kate had some fourteen-inch zip ties she’d brought along specifically for the purpose out and ready, and before he could react she had his right hand bound to his left foot. It was an effective hobble she had used before. They were going to be here at least overnight and she didn’t want to have to feed him or unzip his fly.

  Mutt shouldered the door open and poked her head inside. Gunn froze in place. Kate wasn’t sure he was even breathing, and given the speculative look in Mutt’s y
ellow eyes she didn’t blame him.

  Satisfied, Mutt cocked an eyebrow at Kate. Leave anything for me?

  “Back on watch,” Kate said, and Mutt huffed out an indignant breath mostly for show and vanished again.

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?” Kate said to Ben, not unkindly but without much interest, either. “You should have read Mr. Hammett with more attention. Sam Spade would never have let me get the drop on him like that.” She considered. “Well, Humphrey Bogart never would have, anyway.”

  She grabbed the collar of his jacket and the seat of his pants and hauled him to where he could lean up against the wall, sort of. She retrieved the pot, made a fresh batch of coffee, and poured them each a cup, taking care to set his down a little distance away, so she was safely out of reach by the time he could get to it.

  “You broke my hand,” he said, and in fact his right hand looked a little crushed. The flesh had begun to swell against the zip tie. He had a hard time picking up the mug, bound as he was, and finally rolled over on his right side so he could reach for the cup with his left hand. His nose was the size of a banana and his eyes were swollen half shut and beginning to blacken. Kate watched without sympathy as she unloaded his pistol and tucked it into her pack.

  He sat up again, awkwardly. He kept his head down, unable to meet her eyes, and when he spoke his voice was barely above a mumble. “What happens now?”

  “Now?” She gave him a sunny smile. “Now we wait.”

  “Wait?” he said. “What for?”

  “Not what,” she said, “who.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This who would be the guy who clobbered me over the head in Old Sam’s cabin in Niniltna, and ransacked it before you could. Why didn’t you turn around and keep going to Niniltna that night, by the way? You’d already killed once that day, what the hell. You could have broken into the cabin and searched all night if you wanted to.”

  “My hand hurts,” he said. “Haven’t you got some aspirin or something you could give me?”

  “Or I suppose you could have just lost your nerve,” Kate said. “One killing that morning, another that night, both with no witnesses. You probably decided it was time to head for the barn.”

  He said nothing.

  Night fell soon after. Kate fried moose liver with onions and apples and bacon and ate heartily. Ben, sadly not a liver fan, ate, too, although less heartily, and gulped down the 222s Kate offered as a side dish. “I need to use the, er,” he said, and jerked his head at the door.

  “Go right ahead,” Kate said amiably.

  He maneuvered himself to his feet, more or less, and looked at her, his face red from his hunched over position. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away?”

  A long, low howl sounded from somewhere outside that wasn’t far enough away, and his face lost some of its color. Kate smiled. “Not very.”

  Back inside, having lurched to his piece of the floor and clawed the spare sleeping bag around him, he said, “Can’t I sleep closer to the stove? There’s a draft coming through the walls under the tarp.”

  “No,” Kate said.

  The disarrangement of limbs caused by the zip-tied hobble frustrated his attempts to cover himself completely. Eventually he gave up and laid back. “Who’s coming?”

  She looked at him. “You don’t know?”

  He was silent.

  “You ever hear of the Lady of Kodiak?”

  “No.”

  He occupied himself again with grunting and yanking and thumping the sleeping bag in place. He got enough material over and under him to be satisfied, if not comfortable, finally, although he was breathing a little harder from the effort.

  Kate wasn’t feeling his pain. “I don’t believe you, Ben,” she said. “You’re a newspaperman. So was your father, and so was your grandfather. Your grandfather had to have known the story. He was here, he was practically an eyewitness. He had to have told your father about it, and I don’t for one moment believe that your father didn’t tell you.”

  He tried and failed to zip up the bag. “The Lady?”

  “The Lady of Kodiak. Or the sainted Mary. It’s the name of the icon.”

  He tried to shrug into the bag, but it just wasn’t happening in his bent-over position. “Maybe I could remember something if you could zip up this goddamn bag.“

  She rose to her feet and stepped across the room. Before he could do or say anything she had her foot on his throat. Automatically his left hand came up to wrap loosely around her ankle. “Let go,” she said, leaning her weight on her foot.

  His eyes went wide. He wheezed. His hand tightened.

  She leaned harder. “Let go,” she said again.

  His hand fell away. While he was gasping for breath she pulled up the zip on the bag and nipped back to the snowgo seat before he had a chance to recover.

  When he got his breath back he scowled at her. “There was no need for that.”

  “No?” Kate said. “Then I apologize. Really I do. About the Lady?”

  But he was sulky after the foot in the neck, so conversation lagged. After an hour of tossing and turning, he finally fell asleep. He snored, a deep, loud gurgle through his wounded nose that sounded like a clogged drain. Good thing Kate had no intention of sleeping.

  Kate turned off the gas in the Coleman lantern, and the inside of the cabin was dark but for the light of the wood fire flickering through the cracks and the new bullet hole in the stove. If people kept shooting off weapons in here, a new outhouse was going to be the least of it to keep the place a going concern.

  The hours crawled on, nine, ten, eleven, midnight, one. Kate had just reached the end of David McCullough’s John Adams, and was trying, for the most part unsuccessfully, not to break into sobs over Abigail’s death when she heard Mutt howl. It sounded a lot farther off than it should have.

  Kate set the book down, turned off the book light, and rose soundlessly to her feet. She was still fully dressed.

  She looked over at Ben, whose snoring continued unabated. She stepped into her boots, shrugged into her parka, and slid outside and around the back of the cabin, pulling on hat and gloves as she went.

  If she hadn’t been listening for it she wouldn’t have heard it: the faint buzz of an engine. Not a plane, not a four-wheeler. No, this was a snow machine. Kate couldn’t tell if it was the Polaris that had followed her the last time she’d come to the canyon. The sound of the engine was muted, probably deliberately so. Without Mutt’s warning she wouldn’t have heard it until it was much closer.

  It took another fifteen minutes for them to approach the saddle. Again, they stopped just before the canyon entrance. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  Kate was leaning against the back wall and Ben’s snoring was of such power and volume that she didn’t hear the footsteps until they were almost at the door of the cabin. But she heard the latch click, and the creak of the door opening, and she stepped quickly and quietly around to the front, to reach the intruder still in the doorway. She pressed the muzzle of Ben’s pistol into the small of his back. “Careful,” she said. “There be dragons here.”

  The back froze in mid-step.

  “Good plan,” she said.

  Something cold and hard pressed against her own back. “Better plan,” a voice said.

  “I don’t think so,” Kate said.

  There was a corresponding growl so loud and so menacing that if it wasn’t a grizzly it had to be a T. rex.

  All three of them looked over their shoulders.

  Mutt, a gray ghost scudding crablike and soundless across the snow, legs stiff, hackles raised, head lowered, lips drawn back. Luck was with Kate still and the moon chose that moment to crest the ridge. It lit Mutt’s narrowed yellow eyes and sharp white teeth with an unearthly glow, just as she let forth with another rumbling growl that sounded like the promise of lightning striking.

  The person standing behind Kate let out something between a scream and a squawk. “I’ll sho
ot her! I will!”

  “No, you won’t,” Kate said. “Mutt?”

  The thunder filled the horizon.

  “Take,” Kate said.

  1958

  Anchorage

  Emil had the true spirit of Alaskan hospitality. Sam, while marveling at the other man’s evident inability to see the obvious resemblance between his son and his newfound friend, had to give him that. The hand of friendship might be oblivious but it wasn’t insincere, and from the time they met in Nikiski, Emil treated Sam like any one of his two hundred best friends, grabbing the check for lunch at the Ace of Clubs, buying the first round at the Inlet Bar, holding out the promise of a room at his house in Anchorage should Sam make it to town. He wasn’t too proud to visit Sam on the Freya, and ate enthusiastically of everything put before him, from moose tongue to seal liver.

  He had a confiding nature that invited confidence in return. When he heard what part of Alaska Sam was from, Emil questioned him closely about the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and the possibility for other discoveries in the Quilaks. His enthusiasm was catching. At one point Sam found himself pulling out the map of his homestead, marked with all the mines Mac had dug into the granite walls. None of them had paid out, of course.

  Erland, on the other hand, was the human equivalent of Switzerland, not quite unfriendly but distant, aloof, neutral. Sam understood, having suffered through his own discomforting doppelgänger recognition at that first meeting in the Nikiski oil field. And Erland was just a kid. It didn’t help that Erland and Emil didn’t get along, and again, Sam wondered if this was because at some level Emil knew Erland wasn’t his son.

  Sam had a half brother.

  If nothing else, it proved that Mac had survived the wounds he’d received saving Sam’s life, which made Sam feel less guilty.

  And more pissed off. He thought again of writing to Hammett, but it seemed to him that most of his answers were right here. He developed a lively curiosity about Emil’s wife and Erland’s mother, and the year after their first meeting maneuvered a delivery to the embryonic port of Anchorage. After a hair-raising docking during which he nearly grounded the Freya twice, he almost forgot the purpose of his visit, expatiating in full and at length and with emphasis to Emil, who was by now one of the city fathers, on the dangers of building a port on a shallow and ever-shifting bottom of glacial silt, a situation unimproved by forty-two-foot tides. Emil replied soothingly, and tucked Sam into a two-tone Cadillac with foot-high fins and bug-eyed taillights. It was the first automatic shift Sam had ever seen.