Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  The gray overcast was eclipsed by thick, low-lying clouds coming at them hard out of the Mother of Storms. In the distance, a bird sang, a pure, poignant three-note descant that lingered on the still winter air. A shiver raced up Jim’s spine. “Doesn’t that bird know it’s supposed to have flown south for the winter?”

  He listened but the song didn’t come again. “I guess some of them are overwintering nowadays. Climate change, maybe.” When he looked back across the creek Mutt had disappeared. Something cold kissed his cheek. He looked up. “Hey. What do you know. It’s snowing. Finally.”

  She pulled her glove and held her hand out and watched as several flakes disappeared in her palm. “So it is.”

  “Maybe we’ll get snowed in.” He pulled her into his lap, folding her legs around his waist. “Whatever shall we do to pass the time?”

  She pulled back and smiled at him, flushed and desirable and everything he wanted in this world. “But there are children in the house.”

  He slid to his feet and whispered in her ear. Her legs tightened around his waist and she laughed low in her throat.

  Kissing her and walking at the same time proved problematic but not impossible. His foot was feeling for the bottom step of the deck stairs when he felt a strong, sharp tug on the hem of his pants. Caught off balance his legs went right out from under him. By a gymnastic contortion worthy of Simone Biles he managed to land on his ass and not on Kate and to catch her at the same time.

  “What the hell—”

  They both looked up to see Mutt standing over them, yellow eyes narrowed and sharp teeth bared in the biggest of all lupine laughs. She barked once, a joyous bark, and romped a couple of yards away. She stopped to look at them over her shoulder, tail wagging hard enough to power an electric generator. She barked once more and took off into the gathering snow.

  They leaped to their feet and gave chase.

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks go first to Der Plotmeister. Every author of crime fiction needs a friend with a seriously twisted mind.

  Thanks to Kevin Gottlieb for the last minute catch on the E.L.T. Every author of Alaskan crime fiction needs a pilot in her life.

  Thanks to Barbara Peters who ferreted out all the “Then a miracle occurs” moments.

  Thanks to Rob Rosenwald for buying that gargantuan flatscreen television which now hangs on the wall of Bernie’s Roadhouse, keeping the old farts entertained.

  And no matter how narrow or peculiar or last minute my search parameters, researcher Michael Cattogio always comes up with something I can use, and then, on those very rare occasions when he panics and thinks he might have sent me the wrong information, he knows people I can fact-check him on. This time that would be Dave Reineke. Thank you both, gentlemen.

  Fire and Ice

  The first novel in Dana Stabenow’s other Alaska mystery series.

  Here’s how it begins:

  LIAM BOARDED FIRST and watched the rest of the passengers troop down the aisle. It was a full load, a disparate group that he had already typed and cross-matched with their potential for future crime.

  There was the Alaskan Old Fart, short, dark, a grin one part mean to two parts pure evil, who had poacher written all over him. There was the tall man with a shock of white hair and his green-eyed daughter, who would both of them have helped the Old Fart skin out whatever he took whenever he took it, but only so much as they could use in a winter. There was the Moccasin Man, tall, loping, clad in fatigues and beaded buckskin moccasins with matching belt pouch that Liam instantly pegged for growing wholesale quantities of marijuana in his back bedroom, and the Hell’s Angel, Moccasin Man’s sidekick, barrel-shaped beer belly, black leather boots with a shine on them to match the one reflected by his shaved, bullet-shaped scalp with a meth lab in his spare room. The Flirt, on the other hand, should have been arrested for incitement to riot the second after she’d stepped out in public that morning: she wore a red silk shirt with no bra beneath it and a long skirt that accentuated the deliberate sway of her very nice ass. Moccasin Man had demonstrated an immediate and obvious admiration for that sway, and had been granted the privilege of escorting the Flirt to her seat.

  The rest of the manifest wasn’t as interesting. There was the Bush couple, a nondescript husband and wife who looked like card-carrying members of the proletariat who took their seats and melted into the bulkhead. They were followed by a family of five, white father, Yupik mother, and three small children, one still nursing, a tall, spare, grizzled man who had looked long and hard at Liam and who had almost spoken to him in the terminal but then appeared to think better of it, a plump woman who just missed being grandmotherly by two streaks of ice blue eye shadow and a slash of maroon lipstick, and the airline’s station manager for King Salmon, who curled up in the front-right-hand seat and promptly went to sleep, snoring loudly enough to be heard over the engines.

  Liam envied him deeply. He himself was occupied with holding the fourteen-seat Fairchild Metroliner up in the air by the edge of his seat as they rose smoothly over Knik Arm and banked south down Cook Inlet. It was half past three o’clock on the afternoon of May 1. Breakup was late, temperatures still dropping to or below freezing at nights, stubborn ice ruts refusing to melt from the roads, snow clinging obstinately to the Chugach Mountains. It wasn’t the only reason Liam was glad to be leaving Anchorage behind, but it would do, and it was almost enough for him to forget that he was ten thousand feet up in the air.

  Almost.

  Within minutes they were out of the low-lying clouds clustered over the Anchorage bowl, and mountains Denali and Foraker loomed up on the right. Foraker looked like a square, stolid Norman keep, and Denali like a home for gods. Susitna and Spurr were beneath them, the Sleeping Lady undisturbed beneath her lingering white winter blanket, Spurr worn down to three or four lesser peaks by an average of one eruption per decade. Redoubt, a once perfect cone blown to a shark’s tooth, barely registered through the window before the plane banked right and southwest. Liam swallowed hard.

  Now it was the Alaska Range, an entire horizon filled with sharp, unfriendly peaks, and no place that he could see to land safely. But there was for a miracle little turbulence, and the smooth ride and the drone of the engines eventually dulled him into an unexpected, uneasy doze, where his subconscious, that sly, slick bastard, was lurking, loitering with intent, just waiting to raise his viperous head and hiss a reminder that Liam had yet to call his soul his own. A jumbled mass of images fast-forwarded in front of him: laughing, loving Jenny with the light brown hair, his father’s implacable eyes, Charlie’s gap-toothed grin. Alfred and Rose, faces dull with grief and despair. That old black Ford sedan stuck on the Denali Highway, the bodies huddled together in the backseat for a warmth that failed them in the end. The disappointment and determination on John Barton’s face. Dyson groveling on his knees, begging for his life.

  She was there, too, of course, the brown-eyed, blond-haired witch. Once again she turned and walked away, down the street, around a corner, and out of his life, and once again the grief of parting jerked him up in his seat with a jolt, heart pounding, palms sweaty, the loss as sharply felt as if he had suffered it yesterday. They were descending, and the clouds had closed back in and brought turbulence with them. Liam looked out the window, where a thin line of frost was forming on the leading edge of the wing, and he welcomed the distraction the terror of the sight brought him.

  He watched the line of frost attentively, until they came out of the clouds at seven thousand feet and it vanished and the Nushagak River and Bristol Bay came into view. To Liam it looked like the approach to heaven, an image enhanced by the golden rim of sunshine shining through the gap between the clouds and the vast expanse of gray water that took up the whole southern horizon.

  Ten minutes later they were on the ground, at the end of a paved runway six thousand feet in length; plenty long enough for 737s loaded with herring roe and salmon, the reason for the city of Newenham’s existence
, the raison d’être of Bristol Bay, and, at least indirectly, the cause of Liam’s new posting.

  Congratulations, he thought. You’re a trooper. Again. He’d removed his sergeant’s insignia from his uniform before he’d left Glenallen, and had it cleaned twice to fade the marks where it had been. With luck, no one would know. His uniform was packed in a bag stored in the hold. All the pictures on the news had been of him in his uniform; he wanted to avoid recognition for as long as possible.

  The Metroliner turned off onto the taxiway. In a voice that carried to the back of the cabin, the pilot said, “What the hell!” and they screeched to a halt, the engines roaring a protest. Everyone was thrown forward against their seat belts, and some who had unbuckled too soon found their faces right against the backs of the seats in front of them. By the time Liam got his heart restarted, the pilot had shut down both engines and the copilot had the door open and the steps let down. Liam unbuckled his belt with shaky hands and was on the ground right behind him.

  The Newenham airport was ten miles south of Newenham proper, forty miles short of Chinook Air Force Base. It was of recent construction, not five years old, and replaced the previous airstrip, which, if it had held true to old-time Bush construction, would have run either parallel to or right down Main Street, where people could step out their front doors and onto a plane. Nowadays they built Bush airstrips ten to fifty miles away from the town, forcing everyone to buy cars to get back and forth.

  A series of prefabricated corrugated steel buildings of various sizes marched unevenly down one side of the runway, opposite a wide gravel area dotted with tie-downs. A third of the tie-downs were occupied by small planes of every age and make, some big, some small, most with two wings and a propeller, some with four wings, some with two propellers, some with wings made of fabric stretched over aluminum tubing, some built of aluminum from the inside out. Most of them looked neat and ready to fly and some looked like they would drop right out of the sky, providing they got up into the air in the first place.

  They all looked alike to Liam. They were planes. He didn’t need to know any more, thank you.

  The buildings consisted of a terminal and hangars, offices for air taxis and a Standard Oil office with a tank farm looming up in back of it, and a couple of aviation parts stores and a tiny little log house that would have looked like a cache without the stilts that bore a sign proclaiming it YE OLDE GIFTE SHOPPE.

  Small planes buzzed overhead on takeoff and landing. There was another small plane pulled around in front of the Standard Oil pumps, a red one with a pair of wings that looked larger than its fuselage and white identification letters down the side ending in 78 ZULU. Liam’s heart gave an involuntary thump, and then his eyes dropped to the ground in front of the aircraft.

  “Oh my God!” the near-miss grandmother said from the top of the Metroliner’s stairs.

  A body lay on the ground, a bright red circle spreading rapidly from beneath its head, or where its head used to be. The propeller of the little plane was stained the same bright red.

  About the Author

  Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time working in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.

  Her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar award; her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list. Published in 2016, Dana’s Silk and Song trilogy is an historical adventure set along the medieval Silk Road. Less Than a Treason is her 21st Kate Shugak novel.

  Find her on the web at stabenow.com.

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  Kate Shugak Mysteries

  A Cold Day for Murder

  A Fatal Thaw

  Dead in the Water

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Play with Fire

  Blood Will Tell

  Breakup

  Killing Grounds

  Hunter’s Moon

  Midnight Come Again

  The Singing of the Dead

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  A Grave Denied

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Night Too Dark

  Though Not Dead

  Restless in the Grave

  Bad Blood

  Less Than a Treason

  Liam Campbell Mysteries

  Fire and Ice

  So Sure of Death

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  Better to Rest

  Silk and Song

  Everything Under the Heavens

  By the Shores of the Middle Sea

  The Land Beyond

  Star Svensdotter

  Second Star

  A Handful of Stars

  Red Planet Run

  Others

  Blindfold Game

  Prepared for Rage

  Copyright

  This digital edition of Less Than a Treason (v1.0) was published in 2017 by Gere Donovan Press.

  If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and available from all major outlets. And if you enjoy it, leave a positive review. Your author thanks you.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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