She buckled her snowshoes on over her boots and said to Mutt in a quiet, firm voice, pointing, “By me.”
She gave Mutt a hard look and said it again. “By me, Mutt.” Mutt’s yellow eyes narrowed and she gave a hard look back, but she did not stray from Kate’s side as Kate set out.
The last dogleg in the canyon was an abrupt, narrow vee, where in one spot erosion or maybe an earthquake had knocked down part of the canyon wall. In summer, it was a tumble of sharp-edged and unexpectedly and treacherously mobile boulders, impassable by anyone who wasn’t wearing steel plate armor and chain mail gloves. In winter, beneath a continually replenished layer of snow that was steadily being packed down, it was by comparison an interstate highway, albeit with one hell of a grade. Kate took her time, stopping often to breathe before her heart burst out of her chest. She also took a moment to be proud of her foresight in purchasing a new pair of lightweight snowshoes, rectangular ovals of hollow metal with a continuous strap that zigzagged across her foot from toe to instep to heel, fastened with three quick-release plastic buckles. They certainly weighed less than the old wooden ones, and were narrow enough that she didn’t waddle like a penguin when she wore them. When she wasn’t climbing a mountain in them, they even gave her a fairly good turn of speed.
While she was thus congratulating herself the boulder slope flattened into a tiny saddle, the other side of which looked down on the steaming ponds of the hot springs, small, dark, lustrous pools nestled in perfect snowy settings, joined one to the other like a string of black pearls displayed on a rich rumple of white velvet. At the head of the canyon she was mildly surprised to see the log cabin still standing, and was further heartened when she saw smoke wisping from the rudimentary rock chimney.
There was no one stirring outside the cabin but she lay down on her stomach anyway and wriggled forward until she had a panoramic view. She fished out the binoculars residing in one of the parka’s inside pockets, where they would stay warm for use. They were anti-frost, anti-fog, digital day and night vision, and effective over three hundred yards, which view had cost her almost two dollars a yard. Not one penny of which did she grudge when through the lenses and the inexorable onset of the dark Arctic night the individual logs of the cabin sprang into view, revealing that much of the moss and mud chinking between the logs had dried up and fallen out. She could actually see inside the cabin from here, at least in places. It reminded her of Vidar’s ramshackle cabin in Tikani, and she was pissed off all over again.
It was only marginally lighter inside the cabin than it was outside, a sullen glow coming from what appeared to be a stove crafted from the black curve of what was probably a fifty-five-gallon drum. A shadow moved and she jerked involuntarily. Mutt started, too, and then whuffed out a breath and gave her a reproachful look.
“Sorry,” Kate said, her voice barely above a whisper, and looked through the binoculars again.
The shadow was a dark, bulky figure, which moved out of sight after a moment. What might have been a pair of legs were stuffed into a sleeping bag, whose owner might be leaning into a corner. That’s where she’d be, too, given how well ventilated the cabin was, her back tucked into a corner she’d padded with her sleeping bag and probably anything else she had on hand.
She didn’t see a third man. She scanned the area outside, and identified various mounds of new-fallen snow that might be hiding snow machines and sleds. There appeared to be a well-trodden path around the back, where she dimly remembered there was an outhouse.
To pee, all men had to do was hang it out the front door and shake afterward. Women required at minimum a bush and, best-case scenario, toilet paper. But sooner or later, everyone had to take a dump, and there nature had leveled the playing field. It was one of the reasons the passing of the Sears catalog had occasioned more mourning across all genders in Alaska than anywhere else in the world.
An hour later she’d worked her way around behind the cabin, mostly on her belly, leaving her snowshoes on the saddle. For once she damned the silence of the great unknown, sure that every accidental crunch of snow, every rasp of spruce bough over her parka was resounding off the walls of the cabin like the gong of a temple bell. But no one called out in alarm or came to the door, and she hunkered down against the back wall of the outhouse to wait. It had developed an ominous tilt to starboard and Mutt wrinkled her nose at the smell, a sentiment Kate heartily if silently endorsed. At least at this time of year there were no flies. She only hoped the damn thing didn’t fall over before someone came out to use it.
There were fewer chinks in this more sheltered wall of the cabin, so she couldn’t see inside as well when she peeped around the corner of the outhouse. She heard the occasional murmur of voices, and eventually sorted them into three distinct identities. It was enough to keep her there, muscles slowly atrophying from inaction and cold. She was grateful for the warm weight of Mutt, leaning against her, impervious to the snow and the cold.
Finally, after an hour or so, there was the sound of a heavy tread from inside the cabin, a corresponding protesting groan from the floor, a toe hitting something and kicking it across the room, a stumble and a curse, and then a creak and a thump as the dilapidated door was wrenched open. The crunch of footsteps in the snow came around the cabin and directly for the outhouse Kate and Mutt were crouched behind.
The door to the outhouse creaked open and slammed shut again, bouncing a couple of times on a door spring that sounded as if it were on its last legs. There followed a rustle of clothing, the sound of flesh smacking down on wood, and a “Jeeeeesus Key-rist, that’s cold.” The outhouse as a whole gave an ominous creak.
Mutt looked at Kate with eyes that shone bright even in the dark. Kate opened her mouth and leaned her head back, took a deep breath, and at the top of her lungs let out with an “Oooooh ooooh oooooooh!”
Mutt didn’t think much of this imitation wolf howl, and she leaped to her feet and raised her muzzle to the sky to show Kate how it was really done. “OuououOUOOOOOOOOH!”
Wolves howling miles away were scary enough. It wasn’t fun when you were right next to one putting her all into it, even when you were expecting it. Kate couldn’t imagine what it sounded like on the other side of the aging and insubstantial wall of an outhouse in the middle of nowhere where you were sitting with your pants down around your ankles, very probably, or so Kate hoped, unarmed.
“Holy SHIT!” the man in the outhouse cried. There was sudden movement from inside, punctuated by a thud when he leaped to his feet. The outhouse shuddered and protested again. “Ouch! Fuck! Ick! Ick, do you hear that! Ick, there’s a wolf out here!”
There were more thuds and then the door slammed back with a crash. Something fell off the outhouse with a loud thud. Against her back Kate felt it lean over a little more.
“Ick, get the rifle, get the fucking rifle!”
From the cabin came a series of startled shouts and thuds and bumps and crashes. Kate motioned to Mutt and crept around to the front of the outhouse.
“Ou-ou-ouoooWOOOOOOO!” Mutt said.
“Get that fucking rifle out here, Ick! Gus! Help!”
The door to the outhouse crashed back and Daedalus Johansen stood in the opening.
“Hey, Dead,” Kate said. “Your fly’s open.”
He gaped at her and she dropped to the snow, catching herself on her right hand, and hooked a foot behind one of his ankles and rolled, catching both his ankles in both of hers. Off guard, off balance, and tender parts well on their way to being frostbitten, he toppled backward, one wildly floundering arm catching the door frame to arrest his fall only partially. When he hit the rim of the toilet seat the outhouse groaned another protest and teetered another couple of inches to starboard.
Kate was instantly on her feet. She grabbed both his hands and slipped a plastic tie over his wrists with the end already thoughtfully threaded through the clasp. She yanked on the free end and it tightened up instantly and very nicely indeed.
It was great
when a plan worked out.
Dead stared at his bound hands in stupefaction. “What the fuck?”
The door to the cabin crashed open. Kate looked at Mutt and signaled. “Go.”
Mutt went around one side of the cabin and Kate went around the other, just in time to see Gus and Icarus Johansen emerge, jostling each other in the doorway to be first to their brother’s aid. Both were holding rifles. Ick was facing Kate, Gus behind him, and behind Gus, Mutt let loose with another chilling howl. “Ou-ou-ouooooooooo!”
“Fuck!” Ick said, or maybe he screamed. “Shoot it, Gus, shoot it!”
And then he saw Kate. After one incredulous second, his shoulders slumped. “Oh, fuck me,” he said.
Mutt jumped Gus and his rifle went flying. Gus fell backward on Ick, who stumbled and fell to one knee. Kate took one step forward, got a toe beneath the stock of his rifle, kicked it out of his hands and into the air, and caught it neatly before it hit the ground. She raised it smoothly to her shoulder, looking down the sights at Ick’s face, lit reasonably well from the sullen glow of the fire streaming out the open door of the cabin. Some part of her noticed that Ick had a shiner to rival Matt Grosdidier’s, two of them, in fact.
“Kate?” Ick said. “Kate Shugak?”
“Ou-ou—ouOOOOOOOOO!” Mutt said, standing with her paws on Gus’s shoulders and sharp, gleaming teeth right down in Gus’s face. Gus seemed incapable of either speech or movement. A moment later the acrid smell of urine filled the air.
“And that’d be Mutt,” Ick said.
Dead came shuffling around the corner of the cabin, wrists still bound in front of him, pants down around his ankles, weenie wagging in the wind and accompanied by a strong smell of excrement. “Ick? Gus? Are you okay? What the hell’s going on?”
From behind the cabin came a long, descendiary groan, followed by an even louder, splintering crash.
Ick Johansen started to laugh.
Kate raised her right foot. “Do you like your teeth where they are, Ick?”
Ick stopped laughing and started to whine. “Ah, c’mon, Kate. It’s funny.”
“You know what isn’t funny?” Kate said. “Your dad, starving to death in his own cabin because his asshole brats can’t be bothered to feed him.” She could feel her hands tightening on the stock of the rifle, and the smile faded from Ick’s face.
Mutt’s head raised from Gus’s throat, ears pricking. From the next mountain over came the lonesome, faraway cry of a wolf. There was another, and then another, until the pack was in full chorus. It also sounded like it was coming in their direction.
Kate looked back down at Ick, and even in the faint light cast through the cabin door she could see him start to sweat. Like all Park rats, he’d heard the story about Kate Shugak and the bootlegger. “Jesus, Kate, you wouldn’t. C’mon.”
She had zip-strips for Ick and Gus, too, and she used them. She picked up Gus’s rifle and tossed it into the nearest pool, where it made a muted splash. Ick’s rifle followed. “Mutt,” she said. “Guard.”
Mutt returned her attention to Gus and snapped agreement, canines gleaming. Gus whimpered.
Kate turned and headed down the little canyon.
Ick’s voice followed her out of the clearing. “Kate? C’mon, Kate! Come back here! Jesus, you can’t leave us like this, Kate! At least leave us a rifle! Kate! KATE!”
CHAPTER 23
Jim was standing in the doorway of the trooper post when she drove up at noon the next day with the Johansen brothers in tow. Literally in tow, as she had packed the three of them into their sleeping bags and tied them into their individual snow machine sleds and hitched the sleds on behind her own in a train. The combined weight was a strain on the engine of her machine, which had not been built to pull that many pounds at once. Although the slow uphill slogs were more than made up for in the exhilarating downhill runs, when she had to go as fast as possible so the sleds didn’t overtake her and the whole shebang didn’t jackknife and kill them all.
Ick, Dead, and Gus, funnily enough, didn’t appreciate the need for speed, instead having somehow gained the impression that she was hoping to kill the three of them before they could be put safely under arrest. They screamed a lot at first, and when that didn’t do any good, they closed their eyes and waited for death.
A fifth sled hitched last carried evidence, items of interest found in the hot springs cabin that Kate felt might be identified by the Rileys and the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons and Gene Daly as having been stolen from them during the attacks. Since several boxes, now mostly empty, had been clearly marked in black Sharpie RILEY—RED RUN and KEN KALTAK—DOUBLE EAGLE—WAIT FOR PICKUP, she felt fairly confident they would be.
They acquired something of a parade as they came through Niniltna, and Ick didn’t think anything was funny anymore. He was swearing a blue streak by the time Jim got him out of his sled, although that turned out partly to be because he’d had to pee for the last twenty miles and bouncing up and down on the sled over bumps and berms was not kind to the kidneys. Gus and Ick, of course, were already past praying for in that direction, and Jim recoiled when he unpeeled them from their sleeping bags. “Jesus, Kate,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “sorry, Jim.”
She didn’t sound very sorry. She didn’t look it, either. He finished extricating the Johansens and at arm’s length marched them one at a time through a cheering crowd of Park rats. They had all heard the story of the attacks on the river and had correctly deduced the reason for this morning’s perp walk.
“I could cuss you out myself,” Jim said to Kate inside. “They’re going to smell up my post something fierce.”
Kate, feeling much calmer now that she’d taken some direct action against somebody deserving, yawned widely, jaw cracking, and said with a lazy stretch, “Quit whining. I got your guys for you.”
“Holy shit,” Howie Katelnikof said, wide-eyed as Jim hustled the boys into the facing cell. “It’s a three-Johansen salute.” When he got a better look at them his eyes went even wider. “Jesus. What’d they do to piss you off, Kate?”
Kate didn’t deign to answer. Howie got a whiff of the brothers then and took a step backward, nose wrinkling. “Jeeeeeesuz, I can feel my lungs melting down. Come on, Jim, you can’t lock me up with that smell.”
In fairness, Kate couldn’t blame him. Weeks spent holing up at the hot springs without soap or running water had left the Johansen brothers smelling pretty ripe before Kate got there, and from what she’d seen in Tikani, she had some question as to their fidelity to personal hygiene anyway. Their subsequent reaction to apprehension hadn’t helped.
“Where’d you find them?” Jim said, closing the door to his office.
“The hot springs.”
“Really. Heard about them. Never been there. Kinda thought they were a myth.”
“No,” Kate said, pulling first one arm past the opposite shoulder, and then the other. Her joints popped in protest. “They’re real all right.” She jumped up to grab the trim over the office door, and hung there, letting her spine unkink, while she counted to thirty. “Hard to find, is all, and you can pretty much only get there in winter, unless you want to spend a month bushwhacking through the undergrowth with a machete. I’ll take you up there sometime if you want to see it.”
“Sure.” He sat down. “They confess?”
She relaxed into the chair opposite him. “To what?”
“To anything,” he said dryly. “They look pretty beat up, Kate.”
“I know,” Kate said. “I didn’t do that.”
“What did you do?”
She told him. When he stopped laughing he said, “Okay. You didn’t whale on them. Who did?”
She gave him a look.
“Yeah,” he said, “we don’t have to talk about that right now. Or maybe ever. So did they confess to anything?”
She shook her head. “Ick shut up Gus and Dead. You should probably separate them.”
“I’ve only got two
cells.”
“Not my problem,” she said. “My work here is done.”
“Need a statement.” He opened a document on his computer and gave her an expectant look. She sighed and started talking. Half an hour and some questions later he printed it out and she signed it. By way of payback she made him type up an invoice from Kate Shugak to the Department of Public Safety for services rendered and made him sign it in front of her. “Okay,” she said, rising to her feet, “absent any further objection, I’m headed for the barn and a hot shower and a hot meal, and then I’m going to bed.”
“Kate.”
She turned, hand on the doorknob. “What?”
“Nice job.” He smiled.
She smiled back, smug. “I know.”
Outside, enough of the crowd remained to offer up another round of applause, approving comments, and pats on the back. Mutt stalked next to her, tongue lolling out in a canine grin, receiving her share of adulation with less than appropriate humility. George Perry was there, laughing out loud, Demetri Totemoff with one of his rare smiles creasing his dark face, Laurel Meganack and her father, who looked less than thrilled, Old Sam, Keith Gette, and Oscar Jimenez. Kate realized that they must have hit town the same time as the mail plane. At the edge of the crowd she saw the four aunties, huddled together, chirping away at each other in whispers. Auntie Joy saw her looking at them and the usual radiant smile faltered at Kate’s expression. She said something and the other three aunties turned to look at Kate.
She returned their gaze for a long moment, her eyes traveling from one face to another. Auntie Edna, the bully, strong, unyielding, always right, always willing to say so, always with that anger simmering away beneath the surface. Auntie Balasha, the sentimentalist, soft, tender, a heart made for unconditional love. Auntie Joy, the idealist, who saw good in everything, impervious to evil.
Whisper to the Blood Page 27
