Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  He paused in the door of his office. “What?”

  She looked at him with wide eyes. “It’s not the only one.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Jim didn’t make it home until the next evening. “How come you didn’t know about this?” he said, walking in the door.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, honestly bewildered, and not a little aggrieved. It wasn’t often she was this out of the loop in Park affairs. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d been out of the loop at all. It was the Association board meeting in October all over again, leaving her swamped in an ignorance so complete she felt like she was going down for the third time. “I haven’t been into town longer than it takes to check the mail and grab a cup of coffee since I got back. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t heard anything.”

  “I thought Auntie Vi was the town crier when it came to bad news, and what Auntie Vi knows, you know.”

  “I can’t explain it,” she said again. Mutt leaned her head on Kate’s knee and looked up at her with sympathetic yellow eyes. “I haven’t heard a word about it, Jim. Nothing. I would have told you.”

  “Bet your ass,” he said, still smarting. He didn’t like it when shit was dumped in his own backyard and he didn’t smell it. He went to the map of the Park Kate had recently attached to a piece of cork and framed with colonial molding left over from the house raising. It was smaller than the one in the Global Harvest trailer, and in much worse shape, but it was adequate to the purpose. He traced the course of the Kanuyaq River with his forefinger.

  “Attack the first,” he said. “Ken and Janice Kaltak on November sixth, headed home to Double Eagle from a trip to Ahtna, doctors’ appointments and shopping. Stopped in Niniltna for a mugup at the Riverside Café. There was some light snow but no wind so visibility okay and not cold enough not to keep going. About a mile from home, three snow machines barreled out of a willow thicket, one of the drivers coming straight at them like he’s playing chicken with them, while another one, this one with a two-by-four, comes up from behind and hits Ken across the side hard enough to knock him off his sled. Janice is riding behind and she rolls off with him. It all happens too fast for Ken to get to his rifle. The third snow machine roars around them in circles, loud, distracting, scary, while the first two guys disconnect the trailer, loaded with groceries from Safeway and Costco, and they’re gone. Lucky they left them the snowgo, they woulda been dead otherwise and it would have been murder along with assault and robbery.” He paused. “What amazes me is they didn’t take the rifle.”

  “Was it registered, maybe?” she said.

  He looked at her.

  She closed her eyes and held up a hand. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Attack the second. On November ninth, three days later—” He moved his finger downriver. “—just outside Chulyin, maybe a mile from their house, Ike Jefferson and his kid, Laverne, are hauling home a fifty-five-gallon drum of diesel fuel when what sounds like the same three assholes on snow machines show up, whack Ike with the two-by-four, terrorize the kid, and take off with the diesel.”

  “Did they hurt her?” Kate said.

  He shook his head. “She’s only eight and they laid her dad out in front of her a mile from home. She got him back on the sled and home all right. She was pissed by the time I got there yesterday.” He gave a reluctant smile. “Told me I had a shiny new gun but it didn’t look like I used it much.”

  Kate smiled, too. “Good for her.”

  “Yeah, she’s a feisty little pup. I can see why Ike is so proud of her. And I’ll tell you, Kate, if I’d had one of the bastards at point-blank when her dad was telling me the story, I might have pulled the trigger on my shiny new gun then and there.”

  “You said there were three incidents.”

  “Yeah, attack the third.” He looked back at the map and slid his finger farther down. “November fifteenth. They waited a week this time, by which time they had upgraded their arsenal.” He held up a small, innocuous-looking black cylinder. “Don’t move,” he said, and gave his hand a casual flick. A telescoping rod cracked out with astonishing speed and Kate jerked back instinctively.

  “It’s weighted on the end,” he said.

  A chill went up Kate’s spine. “I know,” she said quietly. “It’s a collapsing baton, isn’t it? I’ve heard about them but I’ve never seen one before.”

  “It’s lethal force, Kate. You whack someone with this, you can hurt them badly, you can even kill them. And you can order them off Amazon for twenty bucks apiece.” Another wrist flick and the baton collapsed in on itself again. “They used it on Christine and Art Riley of Red Run when they were on their way home from a trip to Niniltna to bring Art’s mother home. Grandma Riley has been feeling poorly lately, and wanted to go downriver once more before she died.”

  Kate closed her eyes briefly. “Grandma Riley is something like ninety years old, isn’t she?”

  “Ninety-three. Evidently these assholes are no respecters of elders. They jumped the Rileys halfway between Potlatch and Red Run. Christine managed to get their rifle out of the scabbard but this thing knocked it out of her hands. The good news is, it knocked this out of the attacker’s hands, too. Christine picked it up and brought it home. I had to talk her into giving it to me. I think she was planning on using it on them if the Rileys ever ran into them again. Can’t say I blame her.” He ran a hand over his face. “I’m figuring that’s why they went back to the two-by-four for the attack on Johnny and Ruthe and Van thirteen days later. Attack the fourth.”

  “Although they’ve probably already ordered another of those batons.”

  “They’ve probably already ordered another dozen,” he said. “Fifty-five gallons of diesel fuel at, what’s the most recent Bush price, four sixty a gallon? That’s almost two hundred and fifty-five bucks. They could sell that off a couple of gallons at a time, buy a dozen of these fuckers, and have enough left over for a case of Windsor Canadian.” He tossed the baton into the glove and hat box behind the door and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Art Riley says it was the Johansens.”

  The spatula paused in the act of flipping a steak. “He identified them?”

  “They were wearing helmets. But he says it was them.” He scrubbed his face again. “God, I’m tired.”

  Kate decided it was time to relax, regroup, and reassess, and for her that always began with food. “The question is, are you hungry?”

  He gave her a tired smile. “Is the answer to that question ever no?”

  She smiled back at him. “I just started a fire. You want something to drink?”

  “I’d love some Scotch, but I better not. I’ve alerted all the village councils about the attacks, up and down the river, and I’ve called Kenny Hazen and got him excited about it, too. I better be sober if any of them call back.”

  “Grab a shower, then. You’ve just about got time.”

  Demonstrating the innate ability of the adolescent to arrive just as dinner was put on the table, Johnny walked in the door as Kate served up a large and redolent offering of country fried caribou steak and gravy, mashed potatoes, and canned green beans drained and stirred into caramelized onions and crispy bacon bits. Served with bread baked fresh that morning, everyone dug in with a will, and everyone felt better afterward.

  “You do groceries well,” Jim said to Kate.

  “Yes, I do,” she said, and looked at Johnny. “Things okay at school today?”

  He hunched a shoulder. “Yeah, fine.”

  They both looked at him, Jim pausing in the act of loading up dishes for a trip to the sink. “What?” Kate said.

  “It’s all anyone is talking about,” Johnny said. “I’m a hero for getting beat up coming up the river. Poor old Mac gets shot and hardly gets a mention.”

  Jim started stacking dishes again. “It’s a matter of setting priorities, Johnny. Folks are on the river every day, going hunting, buying fuel and supplies, visiting relatives, going to basketball games. Safe passage o
n the river is essential to the life of the ’Burbs.”

  “And what’s one miner more or less?” Kate said.

  “Oh man, Kate,” Johnny said in dismay. “That’s kind of harsh.”

  “Pretty harsh, yeah,” she said. “Also true. And, you know, it’s life. Or at least it is around here.” She looked at Jim. “Have you tracked Howie down yet?”

  Jim let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Howie. No. No, I haven’t. He isn’t at home, and Willard claims he hasn’t seen him. Of course we all know that Willard can’t remember today what happened yesterday, unless yesterday was Darth Vader’s birthday. Howie hasn’t been to the Roadhouse for the last five days, according to Bernie, which fits because he was supposed to start his shift at the trailer on Monday. You’ll remember that storm we had just before Thanksgiving?”

  “No tracks?” Kate said.

  Jim gave a gloomy nod. “No tracks.”

  “Who’s out there now?”

  “At the trailer? FNG name of Gallagher.”

  “What?” Johnny said, looking up from his trig homework.

  Jim looked at him. “Talia Macleod hired Howie and a new guy, a Dick Gallagher, to babysit her trailer a week on, a week off. This was supposed to be Howie’s week.”

  Johnny opened his mouth and Kate said, “Is he armed?”

  “I didn’t ask. He’s a fool if he isn’t. And Macleod would probably insist.” He hesitated.

  “What?” she said. “You want me to find Howie for you?”

  He gave an irritated wave of his hand. “No, I’ll find Howie. I always find Howie whether I want to or not.”

  “Uh . . .” Johnny said.

  “No,” Jim said, “I want you to go talk to the villagers for me.”

  “But you already have.”

  “Come on, Kate. They’ll say things to you that they won’t say to me.”

  “Oh. You think the highwaymen have to be the Johansens because that’s who Art Riley said they were. Even if he couldn’t identify them.”

  He winced. “Please don’t call them that. People’ll start romanticizing them, think they wear cocked hats and carry swords and fall in love with the landlord’s daughter, and the next thing you know there’ll be stories about them robbing from the rich to give to the poor.”

  “Okay,” she said obligingly, “you think Art’s right about who the assholes on the snow machines are.”

  He nodded. “If not know, then suspect. Hell, don’t you? Maybe the Kaltaks or Ike saw something. Find me an eyewitness and I’ll lock up those sonsabitches and throw away the key.”

  “Usual rates?”

  He grumbled. “Yeah, fine. You’re getting to be my single biggest budget item, Shugak.”

  She batted her eyelashes. “But you know I’m worth it.”

  Johnny opened his mouth for the third time and Jim said, “You got a mouth on you, Shugak, I’ll give you that. A disease for which there is only one known cure.” He leaned forward and kissed her.

  Johnny made the obligatory gagging noises and departed for less saccharine climes, otherwise known as his room.

  It was furnished in a style Kate called Late American Adolescent, which is to say that the original of no horizontal or vertical surface showed through the clutter of clothes, shoes, boots, books, toys, posters, gadgets, CDs, DVDs, truck parts, snow machine parts, four-wheeler parts, notebooks, X-Men comic books, but only the ones written by Joss Whedon, used bowls containing leftovers in a communicable state of congealment, and many different varieties of shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream, pimple unguent, and cologne, all of which had been used once before being tossed aside in favor of the next new thing.

  Not on view was the pile of Penthouse and Playboy magazines that both he and Kate pretended she didn’t know were under the head of his bed. Not that she ever came in here anyway. “Your room, your mess,” she had said cheerfully when they moved in. “My prime request, which I do last pronounce, is that anything that breeds in there? Stays in there.”

  He cleared his bed by the simple expedient of lifting one corner of the tangled spread and shaking it. Everything on it fell, slid, or crashed to the floor, and he flopped down on his back to stare at the ceiling.

  So Doyle—Dick—had scored a job with Talia Macleod. That was good. “It is good,” he said to the ceiling.

  He tried to remember some of the stuff they’d talked about over the night and day they’d spent in the cab of that semi, more than two years ago now. He’d been homesick and filled with longing for the clean, cold air, the lack of crowds, the empty roads, the silence. Yes, he’d raved about Alaska, he remembered that much, and evidently Doyle—Dick!—had believed every word. Well, why not? Johnny hadn’t lied.

  He was worried, though. Alaska wasn’t easy. It was beautiful enough to break your heart, but there was a price. It didn’t tolerate fools gladly. “Suicide by Alaska,” Kate called it whenever a cheechako did something particularly stupid that got them killed, like planting a tent on a known bear trail, or moving into the backcountry with no experience in a subsistence lifestyle, or climbing Denali without a radio, or taking off in an overgrossed chartered floatplane for a fishing trip that ended with the people inside as bait.

  Dick was tough, though. You didn’t spend years driving an eighteen-wheeler across country without learning how to take care of yourself.

  Johnny still hadn’t told Kate about Dick being in the Park, much less about him changing his name. That was partly because she went into orbit every time he mentioned his hitchhiking home that August. But he’d had to do it, there was no other way to get home, and he’d had to get home.

  If he’d still been living in Anchorage he could have tolerated living with his mother, too, but Jane had dumped him with his grandparents. He’d met them twice in his life before that, and they lived on a golf course, for crying out loud! Who lived on a golf course? Nobody under seventy-five, that was for sure. It might not have been so bad if he’d been old enough to drive, the country looked interesting farther out, but there he was, stuck between the golf course and school. He had nothing in common with the kids in his classes, he wasn’t into sports or shopping. In the summer you couldn’t even go outside or the heat would come down on you like a sledgehammer. You couldn’t even breathe in heat like that.

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t asked his mom, repeatedly, if he could come home. His appeals had gone unanswered, and his grandparents hardly spoke to him. The three of them never sat down to a meal together except when they went out to Denny’s for the senior special. There had been a bunch of Stouffer’s frozen dinners in the freezer, cereal and Top Ramen in the cupboard, milk in the refrigerator, and bananas in a bowl on the counter, and that was it. He’d felt like he was starving to death.

  That August night he had left the house well after midnight, a daypack over his shoulder filled with clean underwear and every penny he had. It wasn’t much, and, he was ashamed to remember, the sum had included two twenty-dollar bills he’d stolen out of his grandmother’s purse. The first thing he’d done after Kate gained legal title to him and it was okay to tell them where he was was to borrow forty bucks from her and enclose it with a card, apologizing for the theft.

  They hadn’t answered. That was okay with him, because it indicated a reassuring lack of interest in having him back.

  He got his first ride on a pickup full of Hispanic day laborers, heading up to Wickenburg looking for work. His second ride had been the drunken car salesman, and the less remembered about that brief ride the better. His third had been Doyle Greenbaugh—Dick Gallagher, dammit—at that truck stop just outside Phoenix on Interstate 10. They’d swung right through Utah, left and up through Idaho, cut across the northeastern corner of Oregon, and he’d gotten off in Seattle. There had been a lot of stops, it seemed as if Dick—that’s right, Dick—couldn’t see a truck stop without stopping to say hi to somebody. “Half a mo, kid,” he’d say, shoving the semi into neutral with a grind of gears, yanking on the pa
rking brake, and giving Johnny a broad wink. “I see a friend I hafta say hi to.”

  After that, it was easy. He’d taken a bus to the border, walked into Canada, and hitched a series of rides on RVs. Most of them were with older retired couples, which got tricky a couple of times when they’d ask where his parents were. It was lucky he was tall and looked older than he was. Mostly they believed him when he told them he was eighteen, although one woman had demanded to see some identification. He pleaded time in the john and skinnied over the KOA campground fence just in time to hitch a ride with another trucker, this one hauling building materials to Fairbanks. He was an incurious, middle-aged man who sang along to country-western music, which got tiresome after a while.

  He walked into Alaska, avoiding the border crossing at Beaver Creek by sneaking around through the woods and catching a ride on the other side with a couple of moose hunters, who gave him a ride and a meal and let him sleep in the cab of their pickup in exchange for chopping wood for their campfire that night. In Ahtna, the fuel truck had been making its fall run into the Park, and he caught a ride on it to the turnoff to Kate’s cabin.

  And he’d been here ever since.

  But it was that long ride Dick Gallagher—say it again, Dick Gallagher—had given him that had set the tone of his journey home. He owed Dick a great deal. They weren’t best friends or anything but nevertheless Johnny felt the heavy responsibility of a debt unpaid.

  He wasn’t proud of thinking it, but he hoped the nut with the gun really had been aiming at Mac.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jim and Johnny left early the next morning, one for work, the other for school. Kate busied herself with packing up for the trip, extra clothing, food, tent. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone, and while she expected the usual Bush welcome mat, if things got awkward she wanted to be able to survive a night or two out on her own.

  Rifle, ammunition. A lot of ammunition.

  Then she traded the rifle for the 12-gauge pump action. If the highwaymen—excuse her—if the assholes on snow machines wanted to rob her, they’d have to get close to do it. Nobody got close to the business end of a shotgun, not if they were sane.