Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Uh-huh, Jim thought, and looked at Carol, chief of Kuskulana village. “Did you know Mitch’s body was lying up there in the crawl space of his half-built house?”

  “No,” Roger said with force.

  “You didn’t hear him yelling and trying to get out?” A shot in the dark, this, after he and Kate had tested the theory. But there was every reason for his relatives to wander up to the house now and then to make sure it hadn’t been messed with.

  Especially any relatives who might be involved in the family business.

  Roger looked appalled. “No!”

  “You didn’t just let him sit there and die in the dark, because you knew what he was up to, and you figured he deserved it?”

  Both Christiansons surged to their feet, shouting. In turn, Jim stood. He didn’t place his hand on the butt of his weapon, but just by raising it into view he lowered the decibel level.

  “He was ours,” Carol said, her voice choked. “He was ours,” she said again, thumping her breast with one fierce fist. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Jim said, “I think I do.” He let the silence gather for a moment. “That fight Ryan got into with Mitch Halvorsen, last winter over at the Roadhouse.”

  Both Christiansons froze. After a moment Roger said stiffly, “What about it?”

  “You can see how it looks,” Jim said. “They fight, and later Mitch winds up dead.”

  “Ryan did not kill Mitch,” Carol said, her voice high and strung very tight.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jim said. “He’s yours, too. Where is he?”

  There followed a silence that lasted just that bit too long. “You don’t know,” Jim said.

  “He’s fishing down on the Alaganik,” Carol said. Her hand reached blindly for Roger’s.

  “Sure he is,” Jim said.

  Twenty-two

  SATURDAY, JULY 14

  SUNDAY, JULY 15

  The Park

  The next two days brought Kate to an appreciation of air travel as she’d never had it before.

  Their journey was only a hundred miles as the crow flew, but they were on the ground. The first day was the easiest, beginning with the old track she had pointed out to Jim from the air two days before. In spite of what she told him then, Kate had grown up in the Park and there were few if any roads and tracks and game trails she didn’t know. Overgrown roads to defunct gold and silver mines, bushwhacked trails into abandoned homesteads, timber trails crumbling on the sides of clear-cut hills whose old-growth forest was only now slowly coming back, Kate knew them all and displayed an uncanny ability to connect one to the other in a track that however meandering in execution took them steadily toward the Quilaks and kept them mostly under the radar of Park rats. Mandy and Chick were cutting wood at the north edge of Mandy’s homestead and stopped to wave when the two ATVs came up over the ridge.

  “Do you know them?” Kate said, waving back but keeping any invitation out of the gesture.

  “She came to our school to talk about the mine,” Ryan said. “I didn’t meet her personally.” Jennifer nodded.

  “Good,” Kate said, and put the ATV back in gear and headed down the ridge and out of sight of the musher and her partner.

  They were lucky in the weather, which was cloudy and cool. The mosquitoes provided an incentive to forward motion because they swarmed to attack every time they stopped. Ryan was the worst off, and by the evening of the first day his eyes were very nearly swollen shut.

  They lost count of the moose they saw. The bears were like mice, everywhere they looked, on the edge of every creek, stream, and rill; asleep on the gravel or under a bush; batting fish out of the swift-running water, ripping them apart, fish eggs flying everywhere. The salmon had hit fresh water by now, thankfully, and none of the bears were hungry enough to do more than snap their teeth in warning, even the sows with cubs.

  The first night, she pushed the three of them until they crossed the Step Road and into the foothills, stopping a little after midnight to make camp. Jennifer proved adept at camp cooking and made a hearty meal of prepackaged chicken stew with dumplings made from Bisquick. They cleaned up, packed all the food away in the trailer, and tarped it. “We’ll have to stand watch,” Kate said. “Too many bears.”

  Ryan nodded. “I’ll go first.”

  “Both of you go first,” Kate said. “I’m an early riser, and I’m not going to let us sleep that long anyway.” She gave them a stern look. “I don’t want to hear any noises.”

  Her admonition produced two wan smiles, but when she woke herself three hours later, they were still fully clothed and, what surprised her even more, still awake. A honeymoon to remember, she thought as she watched them roll into their sleeping bags. They were both asleep almost instantly. Jennifer snored.

  Kate sat with her back against a tree, her sleeping bag beneath her, her .30-06 across her knees, and Mutt warm and solid by her side. The moon was a pale, last-quarter crescent. If she squinted, she could imagine that she saw a star or two, although it would be another month before it got dark enough at night to be sure.

  The lack of vehicle noise, by land, air, or water, allowed the Park at night to come alive around her. The rustle of spruce branches teased by a midnight zephyr, the white shadow of the outspread wings of a great snowy owl, the contented gurgle of the tiny stream at the foot of their campsite. A coyote’s howl, followed by a hare’s scream abruptly cut off. A porcupine rattled out of the underbrush and through their campsite, taking no notice of the puny intruders into her realm. There was nothing as impervious as a porcupine.

  A bear or some other large mammal—not a wolverine, Kate thought, please, not a wolverine—passed through some thick brush to the north. She had deliberately picked a campsite next to a stream too small for salmon, but her hands tightened on the rifle anyway. The sound faded, and she relaxed again to listen to the music of the forest.

  After a while, not greatly to her surprise, the ghosts began to appear.

  Her father, Stephan, short, stocky, a Park rat to his fingertips, he fished, he hunted, he trapped, he lived a subsistence lifestyle because he knew no other and no complaints. Her mother, short, slender, softer but as competent in her own skills of homemaking and skin sewing, beautiful before the drink took her looks and eventually her life and her husband’s soon after. Their ghosts came into the clearing hand in hand and smiled at her, young again, healthy again, eternal.

  Kate smiled back at them, unafraid.

  After them came first Emaa, solid and stately and stern, and Old Sam, thin and sharp as a razor blade, wearing his iconic shit-eating grin.

  Jack. Tall, homely, rumpled, looking slightly pissed off, as if he was still irritated that his time with her had been cut so short.

  We had almost ten years together, she thought. In the end you saved my life. And you gave me Johnny. No regrets.

  She closed her eyes against sudden tears. When she opened them again, the ghosts were gone.

  A wolf howled, another responded, a third. Mutt didn’t wake, but her ears twitched.

  The sky was lightening. She roused Ryan and Jennifer at four o’clock, and noted with approval and not a little relief that there was no whining. They ate a quick breakfast of peanut butter spread on apple slices, packed up the camp, and left, Kate again in the lead.

  This day the landscape was a lot steeper and the undergrowth a lot thicker. Kate had packed the chain saw and had it out half a dozen times when a too-large spruce had fallen in a way impossible to go around. Three times one of the ATVs got stuck in a bog and had to be pulled out by the other. The mosquitoes were even fiercer than the day before, to the point that they were beginning to bother even Kate, and they soaked bandannas in deet and tied them round their necks, wiping their skin with them as they sweated off the last application. Even Mutt looked a little sullen, although her thick fur was a better deterrent than their thin skin.

  Now and then they would find a clearing and on a few heavenly occasions a bald knoll high enou
gh for Kate to eyeball local landmarks and figure out where they were. The first time she’d gone back to Canyon Hot Springs after an absence of some years, she’d taken two wrong turnings before she’d found the right one. That was in winter on a snowmobile on thick snow that had covered most of their present obstacles, resulting in much easier going. Making the same mistake on this trip would involve a lot more manual labor, which she was determined to avoid if at all possible. She consulted map and compass frequently.

  As the day wore on, she had more cause to respect her companions. If somebody got stuck, they both got out and pushed without being asked. When the young cow moose crashed out of a stand of willow, on the run from some unidentified predator and prepared to take out everything in her path to get her two calves out of danger, Ryan had the shotgun up and had fired a discouraging blast in her direction before Kate had her rifle out. Jennifer spotted the lynx before Kate did, and twice was able to find a better way around a bog.

  There was little conversation and no complaining about fatigue or hunger and no stopping to spoon, either. Kate witnessed the occasional glance, but it seemed the young people were able to encompass the notion of delayed gratification. Life now, love later. She could only respect their choices, and the maturity it took to make them.

  The higher they climbed, the thinner the vegetation and the fewer the mosquitoes. By nine o’clock that night, they had found the entrance to the canyon. The 60 percent grade on the doglegs made it slow and tedious, but they made the springs before midnight.

  Kate had never been to the canyon in summer before. In winter, the sharp, V-shaped notch in the Quilaks was blunted by a white, smooth, easily navigable surface. In summer, not so much. The summer growth of grass and shrubs was so enthusiastically prolific that, even from the seat of an ATV, about all that could be seen of the cabin Old Sam had built so many years before was the moss-covered roof. Even then, it kind of blended in.

  Only the pools looked the same, creating a steamy string of black pearls draped along the notch of the vee.

  She pulled to a halt in front of the cabin and dismounted wearily. Her butt hurt from sitting on it for seventeen hours straight. Her thighs ached from straddling the vehicle. Her hands were numb from gripping the handles. Jennifer and Ryan weren’t in much better shape, and even Mutt looked tired.

  The cabin was built of logs and chinked with moss that had long since fallen out. Kate pushed open the door and went in.

  The interior was much the same as she had left it the previous winter. The blue tarps remained tacked to the walls. The woodstove made from an oil drum stood against the wall, next to a pile of firewood.

  She looked up into the corner, and only because she knew it was there saw the faint outline of the hidey-hole Old Sam had put there for her to find. She smiled.

  She felt Ryan and Jennifer come in behind her. “We’ll camp here tonight,” she said.

  “Tomorrow?” Ryan said.

  “Tomorrow,” Kate said, “we leave the four-wheelers behind.”

  They went outside to unpack without further question or comment.

  Really, she was liking the two of them more and more.

  * * *

  She let them sleep in all the way to eight o’clock, waking them to the smell of coffee and enormous bowls of instant oatmeal with a handful of raisins each, heavily doctored with brown sugar and canned milk. Afterwards, she stood over them as they jammed everything into their packs that would fit, including the rest of the deet and the sunblock and the lion’s share of the first-aid supplies. She made sure they took the water filter, the whetstone, all the matches, both lighters and all but one of the fire starters, and she gave them the map and the compass.

  For herself, she packed two bottles of water, a can of mixed nuts, and a bag of sweetened dried mixed fruit into her pack, picked up her rifle, and said, “All set? Okay, let’s go.”

  This time the direction was easy. They followed the bottom of the canyon up. When it doglegged right, they went right. Because of the altitude, the vegetation was thinner and lower to the ground, which made the walking easier, which was good because they quickly grew short of breath in the thin mountain air.

  It was high noon before they toiled to the top of the little saddle that bridged the two sharp peaks to the north and south. For a while all they could do was drink water and catch their breath. Kate insisted they eat something, although no one was very hungry and no one could taste anything, either.

  The view made up for it all. It felt as though if they stood on tiptoe they could scrape their fingernails on the roof of the world. The mountains, which looked like an impenetrable wall from the Park, here parted to reveal the tiniest of passes between two tall massifs, the width necessary to take one pair of feet and no more. It began in the west from Canyon Hot Springs and ended … “I don’t know,” Kate said when Ryan asked. “I haven’t hiked it. Canada, I can tell you that much.”

  They had almost enough energy to smile.

  She packed their trash into her pack. “Take my shotgun,” she said. “You’ll need a firearm for basic protection, and not just from the wildlife. Many people get themselves lost in the woods on purpose, so they can do whatever they want.” She thought of Crazy Emmett, and Father Smith, and Liam Campbell’s chilling stories about Clayton Gheen. “Be careful. Don’t just blindly trust the first person you meet. Or the second.”

  They gave sober nods. They were so damn young.

  “Canadians have strict laws about firearms, but you’ll be in the YT. They’re good people there. Almost Alaskans. Find a place that feels friendly, with as large a population as you can stand because it’s always easier to hide in a crowd, and settle in. Work for cash. Stay off the grid as long as you can, and when you’ve absolutely positively got to get that driver’s license, make sure the paperwork will stand up.”

  She pulled out an envelope full of twenties and fifties she’d brought from her stash at home. “Take it,” she said when Ryan would have waved it off. “American cash works everywhere, and no matter how self-sufficient you are, there will be some situations where only cash will do.”

  “We’ll pay you back,” Jennifer said.

  “No,” Kate said. “You won’t.” She nodded at the envelope. “There’s a name and a phone number in there, too. Make sure the first two words you say are my name or he’ll hang up. He can set you up with documents. He won’t be cheap, so hold off on that until you’ve got some money saved.”

  “Will he barter?” Ryan said.

  Kate shrugged. “You can ask. He’s pretty capable his own self, and a mean, nasty, suspicious bastard besides. He doesn’t put it past you or anyone else to hide a black helicopter under his woodpile.”

  She rose to her feet. They followed and shouldered into their packs, fastening chest and waist belts and pulling ball caps down over their eyes.

  “We’ll pay you back,” Jennifer said. “Someday, somehow, we’ll pay you back.”

  “No,” Kate said with more force this time. “No, you won’t. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t e-mail, don’t wire money, don’t mail it. Most of all, don’t get caught. If you get caught, you’re on your own. I’ve just aided and abetted in a felony escape. I’m trusting you not to bring that home with you.”

  “It was an accident,” Ryan said.

  “I believe you,” Kate said, and she mostly did. “But Rick Estes’s death is the third in a row, and Jim Chopin is not going to stop until he finds out why those three men died, and how. He can’t. He swore an oath.” Her expression was stern and inflexible. “And your villages need some sense shook into them anyway.”

  “Good luck with that,” Ryan said.

  Jennifer nodded, her eyes shadowed. “Kushtaka is dying, Kate. You know how, when you land the fish, it beats itself against the beach, trying to get back in the water? It doesn’t go peacefully. That’s Kushtaka.”

  “And Kuskulana…” Ryan looked despairing. “My folks won’t be happy until there’s cable TV in e
very house.”

  “And a liquor warehouse on every corner?” Kate said.

  Jennifer looked at Ryan.

  “Mitch and Kenny Halvorsen,” Kate said. “They were running a bootlegging operation out of Mitch’s crawl space.”

  Ryan’s eyes met Kate’s and fell. He gave a reluctant nod.

  “Who killed Mitch?”

  “We all thought he was fishing down Alaganik,” Ryan said, choosing an oblique answer. “Dad went up to check on his house while he was gone, and he saw that the hatch on the crawl space was nailed down. He thought that was odd, so he pulled it up.”

  “Why did he leave Mitch there?”

  “He had to talk to Mom. She’s the chief.”

  “And what did the chief decide?” Kate said in a very dry voice.

  “Mom said Chopper Jim could tell if we moved the body, and that before we called him, we had to get all that booze out of there.”

  Kate remembered the marks of multiple boxes in the dust.

  “Before we could, Kenny came home from Bristol Bay. It’s where he has his permit. He went to Cordova first, looking for Mitch. When he couldn’t find him, he came home. And then when he found Mitch, before anybody could stop him, he called Chopper Jim.”

  “Who killed Tyler Mack? Kenny?”

  A short silence fell. “Tell her,” Jennifer said.

  “He’s my cousin, Jennifer,” Ryan said.

  She held his eyes. “No,” she said gently. “That’s what she’s been trying to tell us. He isn’t your cousin anymore.”

  They stared at each other while Kate waited.

  “Tell her,” Jennifer said again.

  Ryan swallowed hard. Kate appreciated how much a betrayal this was, given the years Kuskulana had invested in him keeping his mouth shut, so she didn’t push.

  “We met that morning at the landing,” he said in a low voice.

  “I came up the river in my father’s skiff,” Jennifer said. “Tyler came up the river right behind me.”