He grinned. “You here to warn me I’m in danger of my life?”
Anyone looking at that grin would have run, not walked in the other direction. Kate maintained what she hoped was a neutral expression. “You could be, I suppose. If you were and if my visit put you on your guard, then you’d owe me, wouldn’t you?”
He looked at her for a speculative moment, and burst out laughing. “You are Ekaterina’s granddaughter, no question. All right, Kate Shugak. Follow me.”
He walked them back through his bedroom, a utilitarian room with a bed and a nightstand and a door through the rear wall, as substantial in size and heft as the front door. It led directly into an outbuilding much newer in construction than the cabin, at least on the inside. Counters ran around three walls arranged neatly with many tools—Kate recognized a pair of tongs and that was about it—and a large electric crucible situated beneath a stainless steel hood like the ones over restaurant stoves. There was a sprinkler system that was newer than the drop ceiling from which it protruded. There were no windows but there was a camera in every corner near the ceiling matching the ones on the front of the house.
He saw her noticing them. “Ain’t Costco grand?” he said. “So you got me, Kate Shugak. Yes, I’m an assayer.”
On the fourth wall, the one next to the door, there was a desk with a laptop, a wire basket half full of paperwork and a standup file with an assortment of mailing envelopes in it, including ones for USPS Express Mail. “There was a charge on Fergus McDonalds’ Visa card to you last month. Did you assay a sample for him?”
Nothing.
“And did you then express mail that assay to him at his home address? Because his wife had one of those envelopes—” she pointed “—in her purse when I met her in the Park.”
“Answer your own question, then.”
“I can’t. It wasn’t on her body.”
He shrugged.
“Look, Mr. Lippy, two people are dead and one is missing, and that missing person is a Suulutaq geologist known for going exploring with his rock hammer in hand. He had business with you recently. Did he send you a sample of something he found in the Park?” Still nothing. Kate gave him her last shot. “Didn’t you say you owed Emaa?”
This time she didn’t try to fill the following silence. After a bit Lippy said, “Aw hell,” and pushed the chair in front of the desk to one side. He peeled back the bamboo mat beneath, revealing the door of a safe sunk into the concrete slab of the floor. He glanced up at her. “Back off.”
She backed off and pretended to be absorbed in the contents of a little wooden case on one of the counters. It contained a small, thin square of flat black stone and six glass apothecary bottles. One was marked nitric acid and another hydrochloric acid. An old-fashioned assayer’s kit. Old Sam had had one.
“Here,” Lippy said, and she turned to see him holding out an envelope. “Hold out your hand.” She did and he tipped the contents of the envelope into it. “Those are the samples Fergus McDonald left with me four weeks ago.”
She rolled the rocks around in her palm. They were the size of big marbles, roundish and rough with a lot of granite running through them. She caught a few sparkles. She raised her eyebrows. “Looks like every bit of fool’s gold I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, it’s the real thing all right,” Lippy said.
She stood very still, staring at him. “Where did he find it?”
Lippy laughed and took the rocks back. “That would be the question now, wouldn’t it, Kate Shugak? No one who hires my services has any obligation to tell me where they found their ore samples. And I think a lot better of their intelligence if they don’t.”
And that was all he would say, although he did let her take pictures of the rocks with her phone before he put them back in the safe. And then he ushered her back into the house and out his front door, and he did not say she should drop by the next time she was in town, although she might do that anyway. She liked him.
Besides, she knew a miner in the Park. If Fergus “Mac” McDonald had found that gold-bearing rock anywhere in the Park, Clarence Bocee might know where.
She dropped the Forester at the townhouse and cabbed it to Merrill and caught a ride home with George. This time he put her firmly in the shotgun seat.
“Thanks for getting all the supplies into Canyon Hot Springs, George. And for the loan of the sat phone.”
He shrugged. “You paid for it.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “You know what they’ve been saying in the Park?”
“That I’m dead? Yeah, I heard. Greatly exaggerated, yadda yadda.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Full plane. I figured things would have slowed down a little when the EIS statement came out.”
“They did, briefly.” He shrugged. “Then they started up again.”
“What’s that about?”
“Who knows?” He grinned. “I just cash the checks.”
She leaned her head against the window and slept the rest of the way back to Niniltna, disembarking stiffly to walk down the hill to Auntie Vi’s. It was coming on dusk a few minutes earlier than it had when she left. She trudged up the steps and opened the door. “Auntie?”
“Katya?”
Her phone beeped and whistled before she had time to toe off her shoes. It was Gavin Mortimer, again. “No, Gavin,” she said. “Not in the eight hours since you last called.”
He apologized and hung up, and for the first time she wondered why he was so anxious for the identification. Aronsen had been missing for four years. She called Kurt. “One more thing, Kurt—get me some background information on Aronsen’s heirs, will you?”
“He didn’t leave much, Kate, and what he did his wife got.”
“No children, right?”
“No, no kids.”
“Huh. Well, just make one more pass at him, okay? Humor me.”
“Sure. Call you later.”
“Thanks.”
She hung up her coat and walked into the kitchen, where Auntie Vi was rolling lumpia. She nodded at the chair opposite her. Kate washed her hands and pushed up her sleeves and got to work. A spoonful of filling made of some fried crumbled meat and chopped vegetables and bean sprouts was spooned into a thin pastry prone to tearing was rolled and the resulting tubes stacked in a baking pan lined with waxed paper. The first layer was soon finished, another sheet of wax paper and they started on the second.
“You back to stay now?”
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“You find who kill that lady?”
“I’m still looking.”
“You see Jim?”
“Not yet.”
Auntie Vi made a sound like she was spitting. “Ay de mi, Katya, you one spineless girl.”
Kate paused in mid-roll and stared across the table. “Pretty good talk from a woman who was trying to get me to dump him for a good Native boy.”
They rolled more lumpia.
“If you stay we can finally have potlatch for Edna.”
Kate didn’t say anything. Lumpia froze well.
“She was coming home from berry picking.”
“I heard.” Kate might have seen Auntie Vi’s lips tremble if she looked up, so she didn’t look up.
“Not the worst way to die, on the way home from picking berries.”
“No.”
“She always put too much spice in her blueberry jam.”
Kate knew better than to have any comment on the matter. The aunties could criticize each other all they wanted. They would annihilate any one outside the Gang of Four who dared to do so, even Kate.
They rolled more lumpia.
“I miss that dog,” Auntie Vi said.
They filled the pan and started on another.
Twelve
Sunday, November 6th
the Park
—smooth hip firm beneath his hand. He rolled over, pushing his knee between—
And then a thunder of knocking caused him to lurch up out of sleep, his erection an irritat
ed thrust against his belly. “Fuck,” he said.
If only. He’d spent the last four months at hard labor, falling into bed every night too exhausted for wet dreams, and all Kate Shugak had to do was show up back in the Park for his libido to start lunging off its chain.
Another round of knocking, this time demanding enough to make something rattle in a kitchen cupboard. He scrubbed his hands against his head in an attempt to get his brain started and tossed the covers to one side. The digital readout on the nightstand read 7:00, and he cursed his way into a pair of sweatpants and pulled a sweatshirt over his head on his way down the stairs. He hit the light switch next to the door at the same time he yanked it open. “What!”
Bobby Clark glared back at him. “You got coffee or what?”
For at least five seconds Jim thought longingly about slamming the door in Bobby’s face and going back to bed. Instead, he turned and headed for the kitchen, there to make his sentiments known by using extreme vigor in filling the carafe with water, to the point that it was a wonder it didn’t break when he slammed it home in the coffee maker. He measured out the coffee, adding an extra heaping spoonful in the hopes that the resulting brew would dissolve the enamel on Bobby’s teeth and hit the switch. He heard Bobby unzip his coat and his imperceptibly halting step as he moved to sit down at the table on the other side of the passthrough. Jim brought out sugar and half and half and spoons and slammed them down. He returned to the kitchen and willed the coffee maker to work faster, and when it obeyed pulled the carafe and let it drain directly into the mugs. He carried them to the table, as good as tossed Bobby’s in front of him and sat down to doctor his own. Bobby tasted his without a wince. Fucker.
They drank in silence, two big, pissed-off men, both of whom had been in love with the same woman at one time or another and between them there was always the knowledge that Bobby had got there first. Jim could really give a shit so long as he got there last, but nevertheless Bobby was always a little proprietary when it came to Kate Shugak and more than a little suspicious of Jim’s staying power.
Jim drained his mug, reached over to take Bobby’s out of his hand without asking and got up to refill them. This time he brought back what was left of Auntie Vi’s fry bread, nuked in the microwave and served with melted butter and powdered sugar. The two men dipped and ate and finished their second mugs. This time Jim held out his hand for Bobby’s mug instead of snatching it.
Jim put on another pot and returned to the table. By now the light was coming up behind the Quilaks, illuminating the blades of the still dark peaks in sharply etched relief. The land outside the floor-to-ceiling windows fell gradually away from the cabin to the southeast and then down to the Kanuyaq River, making the view on a morning such as this nothing less than staggering.
“Glad to see the end of that gray overcast,” Jim said. When all else failed, in Alaska you could always talk about the weather.
Bobby grunted.
Or not. Jim looked out the window again, this time in the direction of the yard, where Halvorsen had breathed his last in July.
Bobby followed his gaze. “He shot Kate.”
“Yeah.” It occurred to Jim that he was sitting across from another man who had killed.
Bobby read the thought on his face. “The difference is I was drafted. You volunteered.”
“How does that make it different?”
“I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to be there, all I wanted was to do my thirteen months and fifteen days and go home alive, and I was willing to kill anything that got in the way of that. My weapon was never out of my reach, eating, sleeping, fucking, didn’t matter, it was right there. I only wish I’d managed to take out a couple officers while I was killing my way home because you’d rather have the VC at your back than some of them.”
Jim didn’t think he was kidding.
Bobby gestured. “Whereas you, you willingly put yourself in the line of fire, to serve and protect. You wore the weapon, sure, but I never saw you pull it. You went home every night. Trust me, it’s different.” He paused, watching his fingers turn his mug in a circle. “I been up to the post half a dozen times since I saw those two yahoos at Bernie’s. Nick wasn’t there and neither was that child playing trooper dress up and that new dispatcher doesn’t know shit.”
“Those guys still camping out in Bernie’s cabin?”
“Far as I know.”
“Wanna go see if they’re there this morning?”
A grin split Bobby’s face. “Sure. I’ll drive.”
An answering grin spread across Jim’s. “No need. Grab your coat and follow me.”
Bobby stopped dead when he saw the strip. “Dude. Seriously. How long?”
“Three thousand feet.”
“Jesus. What are you thinking of buying, a Herc?”
Jim laughed. “Not hardly, but if I need an excavator or a D-8, I want to be able to rent one and have it hauled in.”
Bobby eyed him. “So, retirement not taking you out of the Park.”
“Not up to me,” Jim said.
They were at the hangar now and Bobby kept any inevitable reflections about the permanence of the airstrip and its all mod cons to himself. Jim unlocked the padlock and flipped back the hasp and slid the doors open.
Bobby drew in a breath of pure delight. “Oh my dear lord above. The station wagon of the air.” He circled 18 Kilo Oscar with a worshipful eye and a caressing hand. “She’s a beauty, Jim. When—”
“Yesterday.”
He recounted the events and Bobby laughed. “Gotta love those old farts. You flew her home after?”
“Merrill to touchdown in an hour and a half.” At Bobby’s look he shrugged. “I was pushing it a little, I admit. Wanted to beat twilight and just barely made it. I had Chick Noyukpuk with me so I buzzed Mandy’s place and she ran over on her four-wheeler and parked at the far end and left her headlights on. Didn’t really need it but you know, helpful. I still have to put a reflector board up at either end.”
Bobby tore his eyes from 18 Kilo Oscar long enough to survey their surroundings. “I remember now. Your father died last year.”
“Yeah.”
“You said he’d left you an inheritance.”
Jim shrugged.
“Yeah.” Bobby took a deep breath. “Well, you going to show me what this baby can do?”
· · ·
The strip at the Roadhouse was usually hard packed snow in the winter but now it was just dead grass left over from summer. The sun still hadn’t fully risen but there was enough light to land. Bernie poked his head out of his front door when Jim cut the engine. “Nice ride, Chopin.”
“Thanks.”
“Bar doesn’t open until noon.”
“Ace and Deuce still around?” Bobby said.
Bernie gestured at the row of tiny cabins behind the Roadhouse, just out of earshot of the airstrip that fronted Bernie’s house. “Same cabin as yesterday. You packing?”
Jim and Bobby looked at each other. Bernie rolled his eyes. “Wait there.”
Five minutes later Bernie trotted out carrying two long guns, one a rifle, the other a shotgun. He tossed the rifle to Bobby, who caught it and checked the magazine. He looked up and laughed at Jim’s expression. “Don’t worry, Chopin, we got your back.”
In the end it proved unnecessary. The cabin was still empty, although today the few toiletries in the bathroom were gone.
“Any idea when they left?”
“No. Damn it.”
“Were they in the bar last night?” Jim said.
“Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know. It was Saturday night, and Shitting Seagull came up the river for his annual visit and things got a little enthusiastic.”
The Cordova harbormaster was an eccentric individual who reserved transient parking for alien spaceships only he could see, but he was more than pleased to regale Park rats with tales of his more exotic visitors. Niniltna simply emptied out when Shitting Seagull came to call at the Roadhouse.
&n
bsp; “All the other cabins full?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to knock on some doors?”
“No.”
They did anyway, but their only reward was getting to see Dulcey Kineen naked and that only for a brief moment until Albert Balluta yanked her back inside. The interview was conducted in shouts through a firmly closed door, and they didn’t remember Ace and Deuce any more than any of the rest of those sleeping off the night before did.
“Well, hell,” Bernie said. “If I’d known they’d gone I could’ve rented out their cabin.”
“Was Martin Shugak here last night?” Jim said.
Bernie shook his head. “Didn’t see him.” He stopped. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Gull said he saw smoke coming out of one of the cabins at Potlatch when he was going by. He stopped and yelled but no one showed, so he just kept on.”
“I thought I heard Scott Ukatish had pulled out of Potlatch.”
“You did. He moved to Cordova. That’s why Gull was surprised to see smoke.”
Jim thought about that. Potlatch was some distance from the populated areas but still in the Park and on the river. And it wouldn’t be known to Outsiders or for that matter many Alaskans. “Want to take a ride down the river?”
“Yes,” Bobby said.
“Hell yeah,” Bernie said.
· · ·
Potlatch wasn’t even twenty-five miles from the Roadhouse as the crow flies and they were circling over the tiny jumble of weathered gray houses twenty minutes later. Indeed there was a plume of smoke coming from the largest of them.
“That’s Scott’s place?”
“Yeah.”
They circled low and slow, or as slow as 18 Kilo Oscar would allow, and Jim picked out the faint trace of an airstrip running east-west in back of the buildings. He came down to about ten feet and ran the length of it. It looked frozen hard and free of obstacles except for a few tufts of pea grass. It might even be long enough. He pulled up, turned and began his approach as slowly as possible. He touched down at the extreme eastern end and rolled out to within ten feet of the western end.
Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21) Page 15
