Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “He coulda just had a heart attack!” Brillo yelled after him as he left the lab.

  “He coulda,” Jim said without breaking stride.

  * * *

  It was late and he knew better than to get back into the air before he’d had some rest. He spent the night in Anchorage, breakfasted well, and was at five thousand feet on an easterly heading half an hour later. Two plus hours after that, he was landing in Niniltna.

  First order of business was finding Boris Balluta. Jim was going to find him and if necessary beat some answers out of him. Whether it resulted in a “heart attack” or not.

  Easier said than done, however. Boris wasn’t in the tiny cabin at the edge of the village that he’d fallen heir to when his brother Albert married Dulcey Kineen and moved to Cordova, as far away from Boris and Albert’s other brother Nathan as he could get and still be almost in the Park. Jim drove the fifty miles to the Roadhouse, where Boris wasn’t, either.

  “Probably working his fish wheel,” Bernie said. “He makes the best smoked fish I ever ate.” He made a face. “Must be making a mint, the price he charges for it.”

  Jim looked for answers in the bottom of his Coke and found none. “What do you hear about this feud between Kushtaka and Kuskulana, Bernie?”

  Bernie, a thin man with a hairline receding all the way back to a graying ponytail that reached his waist, moved a damp rag up and down the already shining surface of the bar. The big square room, the floor filled with mismatched tables and chairs and the walls and ceiling decorated with gill net, glass floats, moose racks, and women’s underwear, was quiet at this time of day. “I know what everybody knows,” he said. “They hate each other’s guts.” He meditated. “The Kuskulana kids show up here from time to time, trying to pass themselves off as legal.” He smiled. “Doesn’t get ’em far.”

  Jim smiled, too. Bernie Koslowski had an encyclopedic memory of every child born in the Park since he’d arrived in it. “I’m told Boris hung with Tyler Mack,” he said.

  Bernie nodded.

  “Tyler’s dead,” Jim said. “Murdered. Why I’m looking for Boris.”

  Bernie’s face was grim. “Man, it just doesn’t get any better down there.” He topped up Jim’s drink.

  “They ever bring any of that here?”

  “No,” Bernie said definitely. “They know better. Well.”

  “What?” Jim said.

  “The Kuskulana chief’s son, what’s his name?”

  “Ryan?”

  “That’s him. He and his buddies showed up here one night last winter on snow machines and tried to talk their way in the door. Kenny and Mitch Halvorsen, some kinda Christianson cousins, I think, were here. They booted the boys out the door, none too gently, either.”

  “Kuskulana on Kuskulana,” Jim said.

  Bernie shrugged. “I remember Mitch was especially enthusiastic with Ryan. Although Ryan got in a few good licks. Mitch came back in looking like he’d been through the wars, and Kenny gave him a pretty hard time for taking such a beating from a teenager.”

  * * *

  Jim drove grimly back to Niniltna and down the Park road to the turnoff to Boris’s fishing hole, where Boris put up his fish wheel every year. It was invisible to passersby on the road, and the only reason Jim knew where it was was because he was the perfect trooper. Also because Kate had once showed it to him. If he’d had a brain in his head, he would have started there.

  He bumped carefully down the rudimentary road to the side of the river, branches scraping at the trooper seals on the doors. Alas, the fish wheel was there but Boris wasn’t. A Honda Rancher, the Park’s default ATV, was hidden in a thick stand of alder. No keys. There were a few reds in the holding pen, which indicated that either the fishing was really bad or that Boris had just been there.

  Across the river a black head poked out of the underbrush. As if on cue in front of a Disney camera, three much smaller heads poked out of the leaves beneath her. A black bear sow with triplets. Maybe they’d been feeding out of the holding pen. Bears were nature’s most dedicated opportunists.

  Jim climbed back in his vehicle and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. If Boris wasn’t sleeping, and he wasn’t drinking, and he wasn’t fishing, where the hell was he? It was July. No Park rat got that far from the water in July.

  The only other place he could think to look for him was at Howie Katelnikof’s. There was a variety of reasons Jim hated going out there, not least of which the shooting of Bernie’s late wife and who had really killed her. Not to mention the risk of catching weasel cooties from Howie.

  But go he would if go he must. He sighed and reached for the key. A movement caught the corner of his eye and he looked around just in time to see the terrified look on Boris’s face as he vanished back into the alders. Jim was out of the cab and after him in a moment, shoving through the bushes and getting slapped in the face by vengeful spruce trees. His eyes stinging, his skin smarting, he crashed through to a small clearing that held a pop-up tent and a fire pit made of river rocks. Jim was just in time to snag the collar of Boris’s shirt before Boris hit the trees on the other side.

  The fabric twisted around his neck and Boris choked, hands going to his collar to try to pull it free. Jim hauled him up on his toes, not trying to help. “Boris Balluta, as I live and breathe,” he said, “how nice to see you again.”

  “Gug, ack, gah,” Boris said, clawing at his collar.

  “Oh,” Jim said, “I’m so sorry, Boris, are you having trouble speaking?” He released the tension on Boris’s collar a minuscule amount.

  “They’ll kill me,” Boris managed to gasp. “They’ll kill me, too!”

  “Interesting,” Jim said. “Tell me who they are, who else they’ve killed, and why they want to kill you.” He smiled, which could be a terrifying sight when he wanted it to be. “And why I shouldn’t let them.”

  It turned out Boris wasn’t into reticence. Or loyalty. When the frantic babble of words finally abated, Jim said, “Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight.”

  They were in his vehicle, Boris behind the screen in the back, and the black sow and her three cubs sniffing interestedly at his tires. He rolled down the window a couple of inches. “Hey! Hey! Get away from there!” He honked the horn a couple of times. “Scat!”

  Momma got up on her hind legs and gave him a look that gave him to understand that this was her territory, not his, but one of her cubs squawked and lit out into the brush, followed by his siblings. Momma seemed to sigh and might even have rolled her eyes. She dropped back down on all fours and lumbered after them.

  Down the bank, Boris’s fish wheel creaked as it turned, water dripping from it and sparking in the sun, and there was the occasional splash from a salmon jumping. Across the river a couple of eagles roosted in a scrag, one immature and looking very skinny. The mature one, probably one of its parents, launched forth, did a strafing run over the surface of the water, and scooped up an unwary salmon in its claws. Returning to the scrag, it tore into the salmon without bothering to share.

  “You and Tyler notice that Mitch and Kenny got a good thing going for them in their bootlegger business, and you decide they need some competition.” He paused, more out of incredulity than because he had to collect his thoughts. “However, you don’t have any money to buy stock, so you decide to steal from their stash to get your own business going. That right?”

  He looked over the back of the seat. Boris, who looked like a teddy bear someone had ripped all the stuffing out of, gave a miserable nod.

  “Mitch showed up and caught you in the act. There was a fight, and Mitch went down. That about it?”

  “I didn’t hit him,” Boris said, repeating the words for the fourth or maybe the fortieth time. Jim had lost count. “It was Tyler. Mitch was pretty pissed. Him and Tyler got into this big-ass fight. I didn’t want no part of it. I was up the ladder by the time Tyler yelled that Mitch was dead.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Why did you nail d
own the hatch cover?”

  “It was Tyler’s idea,” Boris said. “Like I told you. He saw the toolbox and found the hammer and nails. He didn’t want the body to be found too soon. Give us time to get away from there and get our alibis straight.”

  Jim wondered if Boris could even spell “alibi.” CSI really did have a lot to answer for. “Boris?” He met Boris’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Mitch was alive when you left him.”

  Boris gaped at him. “What?” he said, his voice little more than a croak.

  “Oh yeah.” Jim nodded. “And eventually conscious. He broke a collarbone trying to get out of that crawl space.”

  “Oh man,” Boris said, now turning an interesting shade of puce.

  “The two of you left him in that crawl space alive. Tyler might have knocked him out, but Mitch woke up later, nailed up inside what would become his tomb.”

  “Man,” Boris said, bent over, groaning. “Don’t say that, man. Don’t. He was dead, man. He was dead! Tyler said he hit his head on something.”

  “He might have died from alcohol poisoning from drinking the stock you were trying to steal while he waited for someone to find him and get him out of there.” Jim watched Boris’s reaction in the rearview with an entirely clinical eye. He was afraid Boris was going to puke in his vehicle. He hated when that happened. “Although his body was so desiccated when Kenny finally found it that we might never know for sure.”

  “Oh man,” Boris said, rocking back and forth. “Oh man, don’t tell me that, man.”

  “When was the last time you saw Tyler, Boris?” Jim said.

  Boris stared at him. “I told you, man!”

  “Tell me again,” Jim said.

  “That was the last time I saw Tyler!”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim said.

  “It’s the truth! I don’t want nothing to do with him after that! I came out here to the fish wheel and I been out here ever since!”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim said.

  “You have to believe me, man, you have to!”

  Jim probably did have to, given that of the three men in the crawl space that night, the only one left alive was sitting in the backseat of his vehicle, trying not to spew.

  “You ask Tyler,” Boris said desperately, “he’ll tell you!”

  “Tyler’s dead, Boris,” he said.

  Boris went white. “What!”

  “Tyler’s dead,” Jim said again. “Murdered.” He looked at Boris’s fish wheel circulating steadily with the flow of water downriver.

  There was a short, electric silence from the backseat, followed by something that approximated a shriek. “They’ll be coming for me next, man! You have to protect me! You have to protect me, man!” he sputtered. “Witness protection! You have to!”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim said, and turned the key in the ignition.

  * * *

  As they were coming up on the turnoff to Mandy’s, her truck nosed up onto the road and turned toward Ahtna. She waved and he braked and rolled down the window, closed against the dust of the road. “Hey, Mandy.”

  “Hey, Jim,” she said. She looked at the backseat, where Boris Balluta sat, white-faced and subdued. “What’s up?”

  “You know, serving and protecting. The usual. How about you?”

  She nodded at the road. “Got a community meeting in Ahtna.”

  Mandy, championship musher, retired, was the new community representative for the Suulutaq Mine. “Lucky you,” Jim said.

  She shrugged. “People have questions. They live here, they deserve answers.”

  Depends on how true those answers are, Jim thought.

  “What’s Kate up to?” Mandy said, by the change of subject leading him to believe that he might have to work on his stone face. “Chick and I were cutting dead wood on the north edge of my property yesterday. We saw her headed out on her ATV.”

  “Oh?” he said. “Out where?”

  Mandy hooked a thumb over her shoulder in a generally eastward direction. “She waved but she didn’t stop to talk. Van and Johnny were with her, on Johnny’s four-wheeler.”

  “Johnny and Van?” Jim said.

  “They were at the top of that ridge, you know, the one that backs both our homesteads?”

  He remembered very vividly, having surveyed the area from the air not two days before.

  A slight but distinct uneasiness ran beneath Jim’s skin as they headed off in their respective directions, although he couldn’t have said precisely why. It wasn’t as if Kate had to clear her activities with him.

  He laughed suddenly.

  Which was a good thing, because it would never occur to her ever to do so.

  He deposited Boris in a cell at the Niniltna post, checked in briefly with Maggie, and on impulse called Johnny’s cell. It rang three times before picking up.

  “Hey, Jim,” Johnny said.

  “Hey,” Jim said. There was noise in the background. “You in the middle of a riot or what?”

  “Kind of a party,” Johnny said. “Pipe down, you guys!” To Jim he said, “Somebody got hold of some booze, and, you know.”

  “I know,” Jim said. “Which you are not drinking?”

  Johnny’s grin was almost visible. “Who, me?”

  “So you’re at the mine?”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said.

  “You and Van both?”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said. “We’re on shift for another week, and maybe more if somebody calls in sick.”

  “It’s all about the money with you, you filthy little capitalist.”

  Johnny laughed. “Damn straight it is. Why’d you call? Something up?” His voice changed. “Kate okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Jim said. “Just checking in.”

  He was back in the air shortly thereafter. It was a gray day with a stiff, chill breeze out of the southwest, and some trick of the atmosphere made the Quilaks feel taller and more menacing on his left. When he lifted off the Niniltna strip, he knew a momentary urge to turn north and east to try to find Kate. As numerous as airstrips were in rural Alaska, he couldn’t be guaranteed she would be anywhere near one, or that she would be in cell range, or that she would even be visible in the overabundant summer undergrowth.

  Not to mention his sworn duty. He put his curiosity about whom she was with and what she was up to resolutely in the “Later” file and headed south-southeast.

  When he landed in Kuskulana, he tied down the Cessna and headed straight for Roger Christianson’s house. Carol answered the door, looking a lot older than the last time she’d seen him. “Jim,” she said, and didn’t step back.

  “Let him in, Carol,” Roger said behind her. If anything, he’d gained a couple of decades on Carol in the time since Jim had seen him last.

  They settled into the kitchen as before, although this time there was no offer of coffee and cake. Jim dispensed with the preliminaries. “Here’s what I know,” he said. Or think I do, he thought.

  “Mitchell and Kenny Halvorsen were running a bootlegger operation, alcohol and I’m guessing drugs, too, out of the crawl space of the house Mitch was building. They’d fly it in from Anchorage or wherever, offload it and store it in the crawl space, and then transport it a load at a time up the trail to the Suulutaq Mine, where they’d sell it to the miners.”

  He waited. Roger and Carol studied their hands and said nothing.

  There is no way in a community this size you couldn’t have known, he thought. “Tyler Mack and Boris Balluta saw what was going on and decided there were enough McMiners to support two bootlegging operations in the Park. Since neither of them had a pot to piss in, and since Mitch chose to build his house in such a nice private spot at such a nice convenient distance from Kuskulana, why not acquire seed stock from their competition?”

  Roger opened his mouth, and closed it again when Carol gripped his wrist.

  “So, late one night last May, Tyler and Boris came upriver and started lifting cases of booze out of Mitch’s crawl space. Mitch caught them in the act
. There was a fight, and Mitch died. I don’t imagine for a moment they meant to kill him, but Tyler and Boris, in a spectacularly intelligent move you might expect from a couple of guys with a combined IQ of, oh, I don’t know, twenty-two, nailed the hatch down over him and ran for it.

  “Then two months later, Kenny came back from Alaganik, went to the stash in the crawl space of Mitch’s house, probably looking to fill up an ATV trailer with product and sell it at Suulutaq for walking-around money. He found the hatch nailed down, thought what the hell, pried it up, and found Mitch’s body. He jumped to the same conclusion anyone who’d ever spent five minutes in either village would jump to, nailed the hatch back down, made himself visible in the village while he laid his plans. After which, he headed across the river looking for payback, which he satisfied by whacking Tyler over the head with a piece of rebar—”

  Jim paused for a moment, a memory tickling at the back of his mind.

  “—a piece of rebar,” he repeated slowly, and then said, “Son of a bitch!”

  And he didn’t apologize that time, either. “Kenny whacked Tyler upside the head with a piece of rebar,” he continued in a grimmer voice, “and stuffed his body into a bucket on the Kushtaka fish wheel, either to finish the job or try to make it look like an accident, or maybe even both, because that’s the kind of rocket scientists I’m dealing with here.” He looked at Roger and Carol. “How am I doing so far?”

  The answer, when it came, was unexpected. “What the hell else was Mitch supposed to do?” Roger said. “He was the sole support of his brother after his cousin died.”

  “That’d be Pete Liverakos?” Jim said after a moment. He didn’t know what this had to do with the subject under discussion, but at least they were talking to him.

  “Ask your girlfriend,” Carol said in a cold voice.

  “Carol,” Roger said.

  She looked at him, eyes bright, and folded her lips into a tight line.

  Roger turned back to Jim. “Okay, yeah, Kenny and Mitch were running a bootlegging operation.”

  “Roger!”

  “Carol,” Roger said in exasperation, “three men are dead. How many more before this is over?” He turned back to Jim and held up an admonitory hand. “Understand, we only heard things, we never saw them.”