Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  He went back to the house, showered and fell into bed. He slept for twelve hours and would have slept longer if he hadn’t had to pee. He showered, got dressed and drove the fifty miles back to Ahtna. He kept his eyes straight ahead while passing the turnoff to the old Deem place where Howie and Willard lived, and he didn’t drive down the single lane that led there, and he didn’t beat Howie Katelnikof to death with his fists. He didn’t take any particular pride in it but he didn’t do it all the same.

  The first person he saw in ICU was the Right Reverend Anne Flanagan, the Park’s flying pastor. She held up a hand, stopping him in mid-stride. “She’s gone, Jim.”

  His vision grayed.

  “No!” she said. “No, I’m sorry, no, that’s not what I meant. Here, look—”

  She got both hands under his elbow and kept him upright as she dragged him to the door of Kate’s room.

  The bed was empty.

  He must have staggered, because he felt Anne grab his arm and pull him up. “Jim,” he heard her say. “She didn’t die, she left. Jim!” She shook him, trying to get his attention. “She didn’t die, Jim, she left.”

  Gradually, his balance returned and the mint green cubicle where he had last seen Kate hooked up to every tube and monitor known to medical science came back into focus. A doc he remembered vaguely from before, standing at what he would recognize later was a safe distance, stood with both hands up and his lips moving. Jim concentrated. Eventually the lips synced with words. “She woke up this morning and insisted we remove the ventilator. She would have pulled it out on her own if we hadn’t, so we did. The next time a nurse checked on her, she was gone. Left AMA.”

  “Against medical advice,” Flanagan said, looking at Jim with an anxious expression.

  All he could think was the last time he’d seen Kate Shugak, he’d thought she was dying.

  · · ·

  July 19th

  the Park

  “You know where she is,” Jim said. It wasn’t a question.

  “You don’t?” Bobby said. It wasn’t an answer.

  They glared at each other, both big men, one black, one blond, one in a wheelchair, one in the blue and gold of the Alaska state trooper, both of them mightily pissed off.

  From behind the kitchen counter Dinah watched, her face still. Next to her, Katya peeped over the edge, big-eyed. She’d never heard her father speak in quite that tone of voice before. For that matter, she’d never seen her favorite man next to her father look that angry, either.

  Jim felt his fist curling.

  “Don’t let the chair stop you, buddy,” Bobby said, his own hands clenching.

  Jim turned and yanked the door open.

  “Leave her alone, Jim,” Bobby said. “Jack did, for eighteen months. Be at least as smart as he was.”

  Three

  Tuesday, November 1st

  the Roadhouse

  Ernie Ivanoff held forth in fine voice. “Opera is not some goddamn mystical redemptive force. It’s fat people singing really loud in French or Italian or Russian or some other language that ain’t English. It might help Nicholas Cage or Richard Gere get laid but that’s only in the movies.”

  “It’s like Old Sam came back from the dead,” Bobby said. He raised his beer in a silent toast to the group of old farts collected around the big round table, the one with the best view of the eighty-five inch Samsung mounted flat to the wall. On that thing you could count the pores on Stephen Curry’s nose from twenty feet away.

  “In fact, I have heard opera, and I have loved it,” said Bert Topkok, Sr., puffing out his chest and attempting to look down the pug nose that marked all the sons of long gone Park rat Amalia Mercado.

  “Right,” said Ernie with vast suspicion. “Sung by who?”

  Bert drank beer and belched, both with style. “Roy Orbison. And he sang in English. And told real stories. And with feeling, instead of just trying to blast the ears offa your head.”

  Ernie, crushed, retired from the lists, and the half dozen other old farts thumped the table to applaud his rout. Bert accepted it as his due with pretend modesty.

  “See any snow in Niniltna yet?” Bernie said.

  Bobby shook his head. “Here?”

  “Nope. Looking like another non-winter winter,” Bernie said.

  Bobby drank beer, and directed a casual nod at the table beyond the old farts. “What’s with Ace and Deuce over there?”

  The two men he referred to were the same general size and bulk of bulldozers, with tats showing above the necks and below the sleeves of their identical black T-shirts. The younger man had his hair cut in a mullet, swear to god, while the older had a clean-shaven scalp. Both wore visible scars on their faces, and both sets of hands showed signs of broken knuckles, although the younger man looked a little puffy around the edges, compared to the older man who appeared to be all hard muscle.

  Bernie gave a casual glance over his shoulder. “You mean those two ex-cast members of Oz? Yeah, they’ve been hanging around for a couple of days now. Rented one of the cabins out back. Say they came looking for jobs up the mine. Haven’t noticed them looking very hard.” He took a pull of beer. “Ace there did ask after his good buddy, that asshole Ken Halvorsen. Didn’t seem all that surprised to hear he was dead.” Bobby swirled the beer in his bottle. “Then he asked after Martin Shugak.”

  “Martin,” Bobby said. Bobby rolled his eyes. “Martin. Jesus. He’s like Gollum.”

  “How so?”

  “Seldom in sight but always a foul rumor. Haven’t seen a whole lot of Martin lately. Haven’t missed him, either. You tell the trooper?”

  Bernie snorted. “What’s the point.”

  Bobby grimaced.

  Bernie changed the subject. “You hear about Auntie Edna’s last words?”

  Bobby glanced over his shoulder at the quilting bee in the corner. Aunties Joy, Viola, and Balasha worked steadily at piecing bright squares together, the usual Irish coffees sitting neglected on the table. Annie Mike was there as well, knitting something blue and fluffy. She wasn’t quite an auntie, not yet.

  In late August, that oldest and toughest and inarguably the meanest of the four aunties, Edna Aguilar, had been returning from berry picking up the Step road in her ancient Chevy Suburban when a couple of yearling moose broke out of the brush and shot across the road a foot from her front bumper. It wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened a hundred times before during her life in the Park, but this time what the yearlings were running from was twelve feet behind them, a couple of grizzly two-year olds who had been kicked out by their mom that fall. They were too hungry to den up for the winter and hot on the trail of dinner.

  From what the trooper could make out afterward from the skid marks in the gravel surface of the road, Edna had tapped her brakes at the moose and then stamped on them at the grizz. The back end of the Chevy, empty but for a half a dozen one-gallon buckets of raspberries and blueberries picked only she knew where bungied into the back, slid first to the right and then more decisively to the left. At the end of the second slide the left front tire caught the shoulder and the pickup rolled. The gradient of the embankment made it roll twice more, picking up enough speed to severely impact a stand of cottonwood Keith Gette had been cultivating along the edge of a creek that ran alongside the lot line of the old Gette homestead. Meant to soak up the creek and dry the land out for later cultivation, on that fateful day that section instead presented an immovable object to Edna’s irresistible force. Keith had been quite colorful on the subject. But then Edna had not been the most popular of the aunties by a long shot.

  She had also not been wearing her seatbelt. When her body was finally located she had still been alive and conscious. “The troopers just released the official accident report,” Bernie said now. “‘Never mind me,’ she says to him, ‘get the berries.’”

  Both men were silent, watching the quilting bee. The three remaining aunties looked somehow a little diminished. “I didn’t like her much,” Bobby sai
d.

  “Who did?”

  Auntie Edna had been buried but the word had gone forth that the potlatch would be delayed until everyone got back from fishing and hunting. It was generally understood that this was code for “until Kate Shugak reappeared.” If she ever did. Half of the Park rats were convinced she was dead, too.

  Bobby’s chair was pulled up to a table at the Roadhouse, the only drinking establishment within driving distance of the village of Niniltna, if you didn’t want to drive fifty miles in the other direction to Ahtna, and nobody did. Bernie was a Vietnam era draft dodger and Bobby was a Vietnam War vet. They had arrived in the Park not many years apart and against every Park rat’s expectation had bonded over that extremely ill-advised conflict, celebrating the Tet Offensive’s anniversary every year at Bobby’s house together with other likeminded survivors, holding the trauma of that time at bay with a boozy blowout that was as loud as it was therapeutic.

  Almost as loud as the celebration going on at the next table over, where three women, not Park rats, sat drinking Bloody Marys. One was fifty-ish and zaftig with a tumbled mass of graying curls, the second a willowy blond who was a dead ringer for Cate Blanchette, and the third a voluptuous brunette who took this opportunity to announce, apparently out of the blue, “Well, yes, but I majored in French.” Bobby watched points grow on the ears of the half dozen hopeful Park rats malingering with intent a discreet distance away. He pointed with his chin. “What’s going on next door?”

  “Three Anchorage businesswomen walk into a bar,” Bernie said, and laughed. “They’re here on a fishing trip.”

  Bobby stared. “In November?”

  Deadpan, Bernie said, “They were misinformed.”

  Bobby threw back his head and laughed loud and long, only interrupted by a voice saying, “I am informed that you are the proprietor of this establishment.” He looked around to see the Amazon with the curly hair looking down at Bernie with a pronounced twinkle in her eye.

  “Depends,” Bernie said. “You packing?”

  “No, but Lorie is,” she said, indicating the blonde.

  “Well, then, I guess I better fess up. To what, exactly?”

  “I’m Alison, and I’d like to know if this is your best effort at a Bloody Mary.” She held up an accusatory glass.

  “Alison,” Bernie said, with the air of confessing all, “it is.”

  “Let me show you how it’s done, cowboy,” Alison said, and sashayed around behind the bar. Bernie joined her in an effort to defend his liquor supply but before long all the ingredients and then some were assembled and a raucous crowd had formed to sample the results of the Bloody Mary-Off. It was going to be one of those nights.

  “Did you hear about Pat Mack?” Bernie said, returning to the table with a Bloody Mary not of his own making and a big grin all over his face that indicated some hope of getting lucky later on. He’d left Alison in charge behind the bar, which told its own story.

  “Yeah, I heard. I’ll put it out on Park Air this evening.”

  “Worse ways to go.”

  Bobby thought about Pat Mack, the oldest geezer of a steadily diminishing number of old geezers in Kushtaka village, dead of a heart attack after shooting and eating a mess of ptarmigan he’d flushed out of a patch of lowbush cranberries. “I suppose. What’s the population in Kushtaka down to now?”

  Bernie shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s three they lost in one year, Tyler, Pat—” he hesitated “—Jennifer. I heard her parents are moving to Healy. Dale got a job at Usibelli. So that’s five gone.”

  A lot of villages in the Park were dwindling, their populations aging out and the kids moving to anywhere there might be a job, which was usually on the road system and mostly in Anchorage. “Kuskulaners doing fine, though, I expect.”

  “They usually do,” Bernie said. He looked over Bobby’s shoulder, and grinned.

  “What?” Bobby looked around.

  “That,” Bernie said happily, “would be intrepid filmmaker Bo Diddley Tarentino zeroing in on Ranger One, aka Dan O’Brian of the U.S. Park Service. Poor bastard.”

  “Which one?”

  Bernie nudged Bobby. “Just listen.”

  It was easy to do, as Bo Diddley Tarentino’s voice was rising to a decibel level heard over even the usual happy tumult of a profitable evening at the Roadhouse. “You mean to tell me my production company is bringing tens of thousands of dollars per season into your Park and I can’t shoot one goddamn moose?”

  Bo was a thin, dark man with wrinkles he knew to be interesting or he wouldn’t scrunch up his face that way otherwise. He was kitted out in L.L. Bean’s idea of an Alaska tuxedo, khaki from head to toe, with snapped pockets all the way down his arms and all the way up his legs, no item of which appeared to have seen the Great Outdoors since it came off the hanger.

  The way the chief ranger was spacing out his words told Bobby that he’d been pushed pretty far that afternoon. “As. I. Said. Before, Mr. Tarantula—”

  “It’s Travaglio, and I keep telling you to call me Bodhi anyway.” Bo Diddley Tarentino tried what he obviously imagined to be a winning smile, which caused absolutely no perceptible change in Dan O’Brian’s stone face.

  “As. I. Said. Before,” the chief ranger said, and Bobby observed with interest just how white his knuckles were where his hand grasped his beer bottle, “moose season was over two months ago. I’m afraid you missed it.”

  “Missed it! How the hell could we have missed it! One of those big bastards nearly ran me off the road on the way here!”

  “Yes, well, perhaps you might like to reduce your speed on Park roads,” Dan said. “We do have a lot of large mammals running around loose in these parts.”

  Bo Diddley Tarentino’s voice turned wheedling. “Couldn’t you make an exception in our case? One little moose, is all I’m asking for here.” He waved at the crowd around the table. “All these people are depending on this hunt, Chief Ranger.”

  “It’s Dan. Just Dan.”

  “Well, Dan then, come on. Surely you can relax the rules just this one time?”

  “I’m out of beer,” Ranger Dan said. He stood up and headed for the bar.

  His audience took a moment for their dicks to unshrivel from the ranger’s friendly smile and put their heads together. “Well, what the hell can we shoot, then?” Bobby heard Bo Diddley say. He snapped his fingers, the picture of sudden inspiration. “I know! I saw a bunch of squirrels running around out at your place, Howie.”

  “Squirrels?” Howie, a short, skinny guy with a weasel face, a battery of brand new, blindingly white teeth, and irremediably greasy hair, paused with his drink halfway to his mouth. No way had Howie paid for that drink himself.

  “Yeah, squirrels!” Bo waxed enthusiastic. “There’s plenty of those and they aren’t protected, are they? And, Howie, my man, you’ve got to fill your freezer for the winter in the next episode, right? We need footage of you shooting something.”

  “Anakin don’t shoot no squirrels,” the big man sitting next to Howie said in a tone that brooked no contradiction, and patted his shirt pocket for emphasis. If you looked for it, you could see the head of the Anakin Skywalker doll peeping over the edge of the pocket.

  Bobby turned back. “Squirrels,” he said, his broad black face radiating an incandescent joy. “For the freezer.”

  Bernie was shaking with repressed laughter. “I might have to close down the Roadhouse to watch that.” He shook his head. “Who knew that rat-faced little bastard was so telegenic?”

  “Howie Katelnikof,” Bobby said, testing the name on his tongue as if it had never registered there before. “Television star.”

  “Well,” Bernie said, “reality television star. Oh, and Willard’s sharing screen time, too, and is getting more mail. Evidently female viewers like ’em big and dumb.”

  “Where are they filming this masterpiece?”

  Bernie grinned. “On the auld Deem homeplace, yawl.”

  “Where bodies of Louis De
em’s planting remain yet to be found. Is Tarnation really so clueless as to be totally unaware of the serial killer history of his show’s location?”

  “It appears so. And you know Howie will never say anything for fear all this will go away. Probably the first regularly paying job he’s ever had, and all he has to do is get in front of a camera and repeat the lines they throw at him. Easier than bootlegging any day.”

  “And the name of this magnificent cinematic effort?”

  “Wait for it,” Bernie said. He paused for effect. “Surviving Alaska.”

  Bobby stared. “And what are they supposed to be surviving?”

  “Well.” Bernie grinned. “Alaska? It supposed to be about subsistence on the Last Frontier.”

  “They’re on the road, for crissake! If they’re hungry all they have to do is turn left out of their driveway!”

  Bernie patted the air with his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger.” He grinned again. “You know how much they’re pulling down?”

  “I don’t want to know.” Bobby thought about it. “Do I?”

  “No, but I’m going to tell you anyway.” Bernie paused again. “Twenty grand.”

  “Jesus. For the whole show?”

  Bernie shook his head. “Per episode.” Bernie took several moments to enjoy the expression on Bobby’s face and added, “Thirteen episodes per season. That makes it $260,000 total, each. Every year. Supposing they’re renewed. Which, the universe unfolding as it should, by which I mean making no fucking sense whatsoever, it undoubtedly will be.”

  Bernie walked back behind the bar, pulled a couple of Alaskan Ambers out of the cooler, popped the tops and brought them back to the table. He sat down and handed one to Bobby. They toasted to the inexplicable ways of the Park ’verse and each drank half at one go.