Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  Initially the job had required heavy equipment and people who knew how to drive it. He’d found a dirt moving business in Ahtna that gave him a bid on clearing the land that put him into mild pecuniary shock until he remembered that his father’s will had left him wealthy beyond dreams of avarice and signed on the dotted line. It took two bulldozers and one front end loader with a grapple attachment five days to clear the area he’d pegged out with stick and string.

  The result was a strip of bare, packed earth a hundred feet wide and three thousand feet long (nothing succeeds like excess and he was still shopping around for an aircraft so he had no idea what kind of length he’d need), running roughly east-west to take advantage of the day breeze that blew toward the Quilak Mountains and the night breeze that blew away from them. Zero niner and two seven, easy peasy.

  He ran a drainage ditch down both sides and one probably unnecessary culvert to drain down the cliff that fell into the creek, but better safe than sorry and it was going to snow again someday. He made sure any culvert would empty out on the bank well above the creek itself so it wouldn’t foul the spawning grounds for the king and silver runs that called Zoya Creek home. Always thinking with his stomach.

  He’d acquired what appeared to be the entire senior class of Niniltna High to limb the trees in exchange for a hefty donation toward the senior class trip (“We’re going to London,” the basketball team’s captain had told him. “You can drink at age sixteen in England, did you know that?” Now he did, and was ever so grateful not to live there.) The limbed trees had been neatly stacked in a small mountain and the limbs and the rotted trees in a much larger mountain waiting on winter to be burned. Given that winter had taken a pass the last two years, it might be waiting a long time.

  That had been the end of July. The first of August had seen the delivery of a dozen pallets containing a pre-fab hangar broken into its essential parts. He hired help, again from Ahtna, and spent a blasphemous two weeks assembling it. IKEA this hangar was not, but when it was done he was satisfied. It was more or less the shape of a shoebox with sliding doors that opened up the long side facing the strip. The roof had a mild peak to facilitate snow removal. Aluminum-zinc alloy coated sheet steel on a steel frame bolted to concrete pillars sunk into the bedrock. With a forty-year rust warranty it ought to stand up to the worst storms Prince William Sound could scare up. He’d put in the recommended amount of strapping and bracing for earthquakes, too. He’d been born in California and he hadn’t left the Ring of Fire behind when he moved to Alaska.

  After that he had the hangar wired for electricity and installed a generator in a much smaller and extremely well insulated prefab next door. He thought about solar and did some research, which did not convince him that the tech was there yet, so in went a thousand-gallon tank on cradles next to the generator shed. Bastard weighed thirteen hundred pounds and cost twelve hundred dollars to fill, for which he ought to be able to work on his airplane in the nude for a year at least. If he was into that kind of thing.

  Another tank was installed on the other side of the hangar for avgas, same size, much more sophisticated and way more expensive both to buy and to fill. After it was in, he got a card-carrying, dues paying honest to god electrician to come in and wire everything to code. “Dude,” the guy said, admiring the strip, the hangar, the tanks, even the stack of soon-to-be firewood. “Okay if I ride my 172 out here for some touch and goes?”

  “Call first,” Jim said, and paid in cash and didn’t give the guy his number. He checked the Recreational Use Statutes for Alaska and did call his insurance agent.

  That was the end of August. This November morning he woke, dressed and drove into town early in the hope he would see as few people as possible. As he pulled up at the post office, he saw George Perry in an Aero Tech Bell 212 lifting off with a plastic-sealed pallet depending from a sling. Looked like building materials and a few cases of dry and canned goods. George either didn’t see Jim wave or didn’t want to, pointing the nose of the Aero Tech northeast and skeddaddling out of Niniltna air space.

  Jim didn’t think the Aero Tech was rated for high altitude work so George was probably headed for Park Headquarters on the Step. Although Ranger Dan or one of his minions generally bought most of the Step’s groceries at the Ahtna Costco and drove it in. The Step being one of those rare locations in the Park that had a road to it.

  A whine of turbofans drew his attention to the GII parked next to George’s hangar, which ran up and back on its engines, pulled out and onto the runway and took off with no more ado. He watched it disappear rapidly into the west. He’d seen that aircraft overhead a lot lately.

  He went into the post office, the small, square, mercifully empty room an obvious add-on to the log cabin it was attached to. Both boxes contained only a single slip marked “Overflow.” He went to the Dutch door, the top half of which stood open, and dinged the bell. Noises off came from the cabin and shortly thereafter the postmistress hove into view. Hove was exactly the right word, as Cheryl Jeppsen was a generously-sized woman who dressed in loose-fitting layers that fluttered like floral sails. “Jim,” she said, eyeing him with more interest than he felt was strictly necessary. He was dressed in jeans worn white at the seams, a beat-up brown leather bomber jacket over a blue T-shirt and scuffed, stained Carhartt boots, the kind with the steel toes. It wasn’t exactly a tuxedo, even an Alaskan one.

  “Cheryl.” He held out the slips.

  Her lips pressed together. “No need. I haven’t been able to walk a straight line back here for all the mail you’ve let pile up.”

  She disappeared for a few moments, reappearing with two overflowing tubs and had to return for a dolly piled high with packages. “You bring these tubs back now, you hear?”

  “I hear.” He carried them out to the pickup and returned for the dolly, pitching the packages into the passenger side foot well of the cab and wheeling the dolly back inside with dispatch. But she caught him anyway, Cheryl. As the principal media outlet for the Park she had her responsibilities. “You look, I don’t know, different.”

  He didn’t quite know what she meant. “Probably the lack of uniform,” he said, parking the dolly next to the dutch door.

  “No,” she said with a frown. “That’s not it.” She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, okay, when I look for it I see you’ve got a whole WWE look going on here. You been working out?”

  “Not working at a real job, that’s for sure,” Bobby said, who had come up unnoticed behind Jim.

  Fuck. “Bobby,” he said, because he had to say something, the guy was standing right in front of him.

  “Asshole,” Bobby said, in exactly the same tone. “Cheryl! Looking good, girl!”

  Jim could hear the simper. “Why, thank you, Mr. Clark, sir. And how are Dinah and Katya?”

  Bobby shoved past Jim. He was wearing his legs, not driving his chair, although he managed to step on one of Jim’s feet anyway. Jim took that as his congé and left the building. He climbed back into his pickup—that was new, a Toyota Tacoma standard cab in Blazing Blue Pearl, with the V6 after he’d read a scathing blog post on the 4-cylinder—and lit out of town like his pants were on fire. He got back to the homestead with the feeling of having dodged a bullet.

  Unfortunate choice of metaphor, that.

  One of the packages was a wireless weather station—love love love Amazon Prime—to which he added batteries and mounted on a limbed, debarked tree trunk he’d tarred and countersunk into the ground on the north side of the hangar. The homestead already had internet but he’d upgraded and boostered it between house and strip. The station came with an app that he immediately downloaded to his phone and there it was, light winds out of the west, fluctuating a little south by, barometer holding steady at two niner, no perceptible precip, temperature thirty-nine degrees, just plain bizarre for even the first of November in the Park. It had begun laying down frost overnight recently but there had been as yet no hard freeze. The alders lining the strip didn’t know wha
t to think and kept putting up buds only to have them knocked back by the lack of light and heat.

  He spent the rest of the day rendering a very small part of the limbed logs into firewood with a chainsaw and splitter. At four-eleven the sun went down and he put the chainsaw and the splitter in the hangar, closed the big sliding doors, and added most of the cut wood to the stack against the back wall that was already six cords. The rest went into the trailer attached to the four-wheeler—also new, a very nice and very expensive Polaris Sportsman that always started and seemed to regard a forty-five degree incline as a laugh—and he putted back to the house, having ripped through yet another Pendleton shirt, which pissed him off no end as those shirts were supposed to be virtually indestructible. They were sure as hell priced like it. Maybe Cheryl was right, maybe he had bulked up some since July. Certainly he’d been working physically harder than he’d ever worked before in his life.

  He dumped the wood next to the wood pile beneath the deck, stacked it, and drove the ATV into the garage and closed it up before trudging back to the house. He stood in the shower until the hot water ran out and came down the stairs pounding the sides of his head to clear his ears. Dinner was half a pound of moose stew meat stir-fried with garlic and a package of mixed vegetables and anointed with sesame oil and soy sauce, served over the entire contents of the three-cup rice cooker.

  Afterward he built a fire in the fireplace and took a beer out on the deck to watch the moon rise over the Quilaks. It was a bare sliver of silver, a waxing crescent, overshadowed and nearly outshone by Orion striding up behind it. The temperature had dropped to just above freezing according to the weather station app, and he could feel his still-damp hair freezing to his head, but he stayed where he was, his breath beginning to steam in the cool air.

  Kate had run here, to the Park, to her father’s homestead, after that colossal snafu in Anchorage had left her for dead with a throat slit from ear to ear. Not quite dead, though, she’d left ANMC the same way she’d left Ahtna General, against medical advice, and disappeared—as seemed her invariable habit—to lick her wound and regain her strength away from the prying eyes of the honestly concerned and the pruriently curious alike. Eighteen months last time, before she’d returned to the world.

  He’d only been holed up for four.

  He heard a wolf howl far away, and he looked up again at the Quilaks, at Big Bump and Mother and Child outlined against the stars along with the rest of the Praetorian Guard, a solid line of mountains running north from Prince William Sound to the edge of the Park, where it curved west to follow the Park’s border until it diminished into rolling hills interspersed with broad stretches of taiga and tundra. Cupped in the Quilak’s cold embrace was most of the twenty million acres of the Park, drained by the Kanuyaq River, meandering back and forth across the Park until it reached the Sound some hundred and thirty miles west of the Quilaks.

  The wolf howled again, or another wolf howled in answer to the first one. He raised his beer for another swallow and found the bottle empty. His hand was clenched around it so tightly his knuckles gleamed white even in the darkness. He took a deep breath and went back inside.

  The house was scrupulously, even painfully clean. He went through it every Sunday morning, changing the sheets and towels, scrubbing out both bathrooms, dusting and vacuuming all the rooms, wiping down the entire kitchen with undiluted Clorox so thoroughly that he had to open up all the windows and doors afterward so his eyes wouldn’t tear up.

  Because when Kate came back, the fact that every flat and horizontal surface was as antiseptic as an OR table might blind her to the fact that he had nearly gotten her killed.

  Not to mention the aroma of the aforesaid Clorox.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. He tossed the bottle and sat down on the couch with his laptop to resume his search for the perfect plane.

  A pilot’s license made a candidate for trooper that much more attractive to the State of Alaska and had been his main motivation in acquiring one, but after twenty-two years on the job, much of it in the air between crime scenes, flying was in his blood now. Besides, the very thought of driving the three hundred and fifty miles to Anchorage made his butt hurt. Now that he no longer had access to the Alaska Department of Public Safety Cessna 180 stationed at Niniltna, the only alternative was a plane of his own. His father, a wizard (“wizard” might have been his actual job title) at investment, had left Jim with more than enough money to indulge his son and heir not only with an airstrip with all the mod cons but the aircraft of his choice as well. The problem was, which aircraft.

  For a while now he’d been seduced by the Cirrus SR-22, the airplane with the built-in parachute, mostly because he’d read the news articles about the instances where the parachute had saved lives, although he didn’t expect to find himself flying over the middle of the Pacific or anywhere the hell near DC anytime soon. The drawback of the Cirrus was its low wing, impractical for landing on narrow Bush airstrips, but really, he asked himself, how many Bush strips was he going to be flying into in the future?

  He bookmarked the Cirrus website and googled that quintessential Bush aircraft, the Piper Super Cub (Only half a million hits? Really? For an iconic aircraft like the Cub? Google, you are drunk, go home.) The Super Cub was the take-off-almost-anywhere go-to aircraft for flying in Alaska. Put it on tundra tires and you could land almost anywhere, too. Put it on floats and every lake and seaplane base was in play. A pilot he knew took his Super Cub out to Southwest Alaska once a year to go beachcombing and had the biggest stash of Japanese floats (legal) and walrus tusks (not) Jim had ever seen. Another had landed on a glacier to rescue someone who had fallen down a crevasse. Another had landed in the middle of a running river to rescue a canoer come to grief in rapids. He’d seen with his own eyes Demetri Totemoff take off from the Kanuyaq River with two sheets of four-by-eight plywood strapped to both floats. He’d had to use the river damn near all the way to Double Eagle to build enough speed to get into the air, admittedly. For going low and slow there was nothing like the Super Cub. The downsides were, well, slow, and if he wanted to hunt with a Super Cub he’d be going after caribou because he’d never fit a whole moose into the back of one.

  He bookmarked a few websites that felt more like Super Cub fan clubs than straightforward sales platforms and moved on to the deHaviland Beaver, which was way more plane than he needed, but put it on floats and keep a pair of wheel-skis in reserve and there was just nowhere he couldn’t go and nothing he couldn’t carry, and at any time of the year, too.

  And then there was the Cessna 180, the plane he’d been flying for the last twenty years, with time off for bad behavior in a Bell Jet Ranger, as he was rated for both fixed wing and rotor, and which latter craft had given rise to his nickname (one of them, anyway), Chopper Jim. The Cessna 180 was a fast, reliable bird with a lot of room, but a little too much aircraft for too many of the smaller airstrips. But, again, how often would he be flying into smaller strips? The job that had required that was in his rear-view mirror, and he wouldn’t have access to the helo anymore. Although… He shook his head. That way lay madness.

  He closed the laptop and set it aside, standing to stretch out his back and put another log on the fire. He got another beer and went to drink it standing in front of the bank of windows that made up the prow front of the house. The crescent moon was well over the Quilaks now, tracing their peaks with a faint iridescence that made the edges of their drawn blades seem insubstantial, even ghostly. Quite a trick when most of the time those swords’ points looked like they ought to be covered with the blood of those who dared to cross them.

  The vale of the Kanuyaq River lay in deep shadow as it rolled westward from the mountains. No snow or ice to reflect the moonlight, and the dark hills and hollows seemed hidden and full of mystery and danger. The deciduous trees, the birches and the aspens and the cottonwoods and the all-pervasive alders were bare of leaf, throwing the evergreens with their thick-needled limbs into promine
nce, looming, alert, on watch.

  It was hard not to anthropomorphize the Alaskan landscape, he thought, when it was trying to kill you pretty much every time you stepped out the door. A sudden winter storm and any minor emergency like childbirth or murder was transformed into a survival story that made the voyage of the Endurance look like amateur hour. A warm spring melted too much snowfall too fast and a flood took out your homestead and you and every member of your family along with it. Hell, for that matter, a moose could stove in your skull with one kick and a bear could rip you four new bodily orifices with one swipe of his or her paw. It was hard not to imagine a certain native animus in the very topography. Much better to fly over it than drive it, especially in winter.

  But in what? It occurred to him that in the months since he’d been searching for exactly the right aircraft, that one all-purpose superduper utility at altitude vehicle, that he had yet to look up the price of any of them. He wondered if having unlimited funds was adding to his indecision. If you were broke you bought what you could afford. When you had money enough in the bank to buy anything up to and including a GII like the one that had taken off from Niniltna that morning, your choices expanded algebraically and it was much harder to choose. A First World problem if he’d ever heard one.

  The outline of the mountains seemed to firm up for a moment, become more substantial, more assertive, more present. At a distance, he could admire their beauty and their magnificence. Up close, they were just another killer added into the Park mix.

  He wondered how often Kate had stared at this same view, that time when she had come back to the Park wounded physically, mentally, emotionally. The homestead was a refuge, isolated, as Robert Service would have had it, amid a silence you most could hear. The aunties had left her alone for a while, letting her heal physically, before depositing a half-wolf, half-husky hybrid pup, abused, near starving, on her doorstep. Something to divert her thoughts away from herself. Something to help her heal.