Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  "For a caribou hunt, it's something like thirty-five hundred to five thousand apiece for ten days. And a bear hunt runs what? Twelve thousand a head? Fifteen? And these folks are here for all three and whatever else they can get. From their outfits I'd say they're pretty well heeled. George isn't the man I know he is if he isn't charging them the red-shift limit. With or without the dead kid, I'd be a mite reluctant to turn my back on that kind of money myself."

  Demetri came in.

  "So," Kate said, "you hear anything?"

  Demetri shook his head. "They see me, they shut up." "Really," Kate said slowly. "That's almost as interesting as what you're not hearing."

  "Our resident conspiracy theorist," Old Sam told Jack in a not-so-confidential tone of voice.

  "All right, all right, it's my imagination. Maybe I am spooked by Fedor's death."

  Jack was more understanding. "No, Kate, you just want there to be a reason for his death, and there isn't one, and it bothers you." He gathered the cards together. "It bothers me, too." "And me," Demetri said unexpectedly. "There is something wrong with these people."

  "I say it's a wild hair up their collective ass, and I say the hell with it," Old Sam said definitively, and closed the subject for the night.

  Kate stoked the stove with a couple of logs. Demetri retired to a chair to disassemble and clean an already immaculate Remington .30-06.

  Jack shuffled three times. Old Sam declined to cut, and Jack dealt six cards each. Old Sam turned up a jack and got an extra point. "Why do I bother?" Jack asked the ceiling and went on to be skunked again.

  Kate swiped Jack's copy of Mary Tallmountain's The Light on the Tent Wall. Careful to avoid

  "Light Bright Shining" as an emotional hotbed seething with sinkholes ready to swallow her up whole, she had very nearly committed

  "Good Grease" to memory by the time Jack gave up trying to beat Old Sam.

  Old Sam, cackling his triumph, raked in his winnings, which amounted to every spare penny Jack had on him, in addition to five dollars of Kate's and another five of Demetri's.

  "Where's George?" Jack said, pushing back his chair.

  Old Sam cackled again. "If that big old gal let the schnapps do the talking, probably with her."

  "She's got a roommate."

  "Tonight I'm betting that roommate is commiserating with Hendrik on the loss of his roommate," Old Sam said.

  Even Demetri smiled.

  Jack got to his feet. "Let's take a walk," he said to Kate.

  "Ain't love grand," Old Sam said.

  They strolled up the airstrip, hand in hand, Mutt trotting a little ahead of them, nose to the ground. Once she stopped in her tracks, looking off to the right. Following her gaze, they saw a pair of moonlit green eyes staring at them unblinkingly from the undergrowth.

  Jack adjusted the .357 riding on his hip and they paced slowly on. Mutt waited until they were ten feet away before breaking off the staring match and running to catch up.

  It was over a mile from the camp to the dam George had built to divert the wayward trickle of water whose original streambed formed the basis and provided much of the gravel and rock base for the airstrip. The dam was fifteen feet high, a curve of solidly packed dirt with a conveniently placed boulder at the top of the curve.

  "Could have been made for couples to lean against," Jack said.

  "Who says it wasn't?" Kate said. "This is George we're talking about here."

  Jack laughed and pulled her closer. There was a sudden squawk and thrashing of brush from somewhere behind them, followed by a splash and then, silence. "Dinnertime," Kate said.

  "Mutt never was one to eat too soon of an evening," Jack agreed, pulling Kate's thick braid through a lazy hand. "She might wake up hungry."

  "That would never do," Kate agreed. Jack's shoulder was very comfortable, and the moon was being very obliging in rising straight up the runway, face forward. "Can you see Copernicus?"

  "Where?"

  "Right there, that big meteor crater."

  "Oh, yeah," Jack lied. He was more interested in things earthly than lunar this evening. "You been thinking about it, Kate?"

  "I've been thinking about almost nothing else," Kate said readily.

  "This whole business smells, and I don't mean Dieter. Senta walked me around the circle that first night and she said Fedor worked for Klemens. Do you think--" His chest shook with laughter and she tipped her head back. "What? What's so funny?" Unsteadily, he said, "What I meant was, have you been thinking about the possibility of cohabitation?

  Cabin in the Park? You, me, the kid and the mutt?" "Oh," Kate said weakly.

  They both started to laugh at the same time. "Jesus," Jack wheezed, "I trained you and I still can't believe how single-minded you are. You're worse than a ferret at a hole, woman."

  Mutt reappeared, a satisfied look on her face, and arranged herself in an elegant curl, tucked her tail beneath her nose and to all appearances went soundly to sleep.

  Kate watched her and knew a flash of envy. Life was so much simpler for Mutt. A full stomach, a dry bed, get laid once a year. At the moment it seemed to Kate like the perfect life. "Yeah," she said slowly. "I've been thinking about it."

  "And?"

  She was silent for a long time, long enough for him to think that was her last word, but it wasn't. She sat up and laced her fingers around her knees. The moonlight turned her skin to cream silk, her hair to black rain. She closed her eyes and he could see the tiny shadows her lashes cast on her cheeks, the bones beneath high and slanting up.

  "When I was at school in Fairbanks," Kate said slowly, "I remember one time these two girls on the fourth floor--Lathrop, my dorm, I lived on the fourth floor-anyway, these two girls got into a fight. I don't remember what it was about, nothing, probably, but it ended when one of the girls shouted at the other, "At least I've got a man!"" She glanced around at Jack, a faint, wry smile on her face. "That was it. The other girl burst into tears and stumbled back to her room, humiliated.

  The first girl had won whatever the argument was, just because she had a man."

  She looked up, and he followed her gaze. The stars were brilliant in the autumn sky; Orion, the Dippers, Big and Little, the Pleides, Cassiopea, all the easily recognized constellations standing out in bold relief against a sky filled with other, lesser stars.

  Kate's voice was naturally low and made huskier by the scar tissue bisecting her throat. Her words were deliberate and precise, allowing no room for misinterpretation. Jack understood, and waited patiently, attentive, alert to every subtlety, every nuance.

  "I made up my mind then and there that I would never be defined by a man, made right by a man, given validity as a woman just because I had a man in my life." She turned to face him, dark of hair, tilt of eye, bone of cheek, curve of breast and hip all lit in tantalizing outline by the moon.

  "It was a pretty easy vow to make. Look at my life. I lost both my parents before I was out of grade school. My grandfather was long dead by the time I was born, and Emaa never talked about him. Then, because I kept running away from Emaa's house, back to the homestead, she agreed to let Abel take me, and Abel, other than seeing to it that I could take care of myself, my weapons and the homestead, in that order ... well, none of us, not me, not his own kids, got much affection. Inga died giving him his youngest son, so it was just him and the boys. I loved him, as much as I would any other childhood god, and I was grateful as hell, because him taking me on meant I could stay home. Home with my ghosts. But I didn't have any urge to go out and find someone just like him."

  Her face seemed somehow more in shadow. "There were a few men in college. I pretty much decided to lose my virginity there, because I figured it had to happen sometime, and because I sure as hell wasn't going to sleep with some second cousin once removed back home who would have the news all over the Park by noon the next day."

  She gave a faint sigh and shook her head, her smile rueful. "So I let myself be seduced by this guy who knew as much a
bout it as I did, which was nothing. It wasn't a great success. Later on, I found someone who did know all about it." She grinned.

  "I am forever in his debt," Jack said courteously. He was lying through his teeth, and they both knew it.

  "There was a guy at Quantico, a few others. You know about Bobby." She looked at him with a sudden smile, and his heart turned over. "And then I came to Anchorage, and there was you." "I remember," he said.

  He did, he could remember that day as if it had happened five minutes before. She had walked into his office and he had been struck with a need so sharp, so intense, so great it had caused an immediate physical reaction he had to stay seated to hide. It didn't help when he looked up to see her eyes fixed on him in recognition, alarm and, above all, a reflection of his own hunger.

  Fresh out of a hellish marriage, struggling to stay close to his only child, mindful of the necessity for professional distance between supervisor and employee, he managed to stay out of her bed for ten of the longest days of his life. It helped that her first day on the job a particularly nasty child abuse case had fallen apart in mid-trial due to negligence on the part of the arresting officer. The judge had granted the DA a one-week extension with the caustic admonition that the case would be summarily dismissed if at that time probative, as opposed to prejudicial, evidence was not produced. The assistant district attorney assigned to the case had been demanding results of Jack's office as in yesterday, or his job as in tomorrow.

  Working together only strengthened the attraction. He was very good at what he did, and she was a natural born snoop with an uncanny ability to get anyone to talk. They found their probative evidence and better, an eyewitness the police had missed, and the jury was out of the room for approximately nine minutes. The investigator's office celebrated the conviction that evening at the Fly-By-Jstight Club, where Kate and Jack discovered a mutual devotion to Jimmy Buffett. There was no going back after that.

  The truth was, Jack reflected, that Kate was a little too good at what she did, and had burned out on the sex crimes cases that invariably came her way. Her conviction rate was over ninety percent, a statistic she wasn't proud of because she thought it should have been a hundred.

  Yes, when Kate was good, she was very, very good, and when she wasn't, she quit. It had led to an eighteen month hiatus in their relationship, during which time they had both experimented elsewhere, pallid flickers that only mimicked the incendiary blaze that resulted when they came together.

  And now here they were, ten years later, still together, although he lived in Anchorage and she lived in the Park, hundreds of miles apart.

  He'd learned to fly, he'd bought a Cessna 172 so he could fly into the Park to spend weekends and vacations on her homestead. If she'd lived in Atlantis, he would have become a submariner.

  "I guess what I'm trying to say," Kate said, bringing him back to the present, "is that I haven't had a lot of object lessons in ... well, in coupling."

  He grinned at her, and she had to laugh. "I didn't mean that, idiot. I mean I haven't seen a lot of relationships that made me think, Hey, I want something like that."

  He knew a sinking feeling. "So? What's the verdict?"

  "I don't know," she repeated. Screwing up every ounce of courage she had and reaching for more, she took a deep breath, let it out and said with a rush, "Maybe I won't know until and unless we try it."

  Jack appeared to cease breathing. The next moment Kate found herself snatched up and nose to nose with him. "You mean it?"

  She wasn't sure she did, but she made another terrific effort. "I think so."

  He kissed her then. He'd had a lot of practice and he was very good at it, and by the time he was done they were missing most of their clothes and breathing hard.

  "Yeah," Kate wheezed, "I'm real sure I mean it now."

  He laughed, a deep rumble full of happiness and satisfaction. "I take it that was my rent?"

  "Let's call it the first installment." She smiled up at the moon.

  "Although I have had other offers."

  He raised up on his elbows and inspected her face. "What's this, I'm involved in a bidding war?" "Not exactly." She told him about Crazy Emmett.

  Displaying a complete lack of the manly man's need to defend his own, not to mention the law enforcement officer's sworn duty to protect, he laughed so hard he came out of her. "Damn," he choked, "why does all the fun stuff happen when I'm not there?"

  "I'm nearly raped and you think it's funny?" She shoved him and he rolled off her.

  She pulled her clothes on, smoothing her hair back and assuming an expression of wounded dignity, which wasn't easy because Jack was still laughing. "Yuk it up, jerk," she said, and marched off down the runway, or she did until he grabbed her hand and yanked her into his arms.

  He grinned down at her. "Crazy Emmett must really be crazy," he observed. "You'd have had his balls for breakfast."

  Because it was true, she relented. Seizing the moment, Jack yanked on his clothes with hasty hands and they walked back down the runway, Jack almost skipping with joy, Kate already wondering if she'd done the right thing. But she could always kick him out again, couldn't she?

  Nobody said this had to be permanent. He was so big he was bound to fill up the cabin more than she liked.

  And then there was Johnny. Any teenager took up all the space they occupied, ask any parent.

  But as Jack had pointed out, they could always build on an extension.

  She'd been thinking of adding on a bathroom anyway, with running water and maybe even a water heater she could run off the generator.

  But what if they wouldn't let her read in peace? What if Johnny insisted on listening to, what, Aerosmith or Kiss or some band of heavier metal at all hours? At least Jack liked Jimmy Buffett.

  His cooking skills were rudimentary at best. But he did have the endearing habit of cleaning up after she cooked, and unlike other men of her acquaintance the dishes were actually clean when she went to get them out of the cupboard again. Johnny was house-trained, too.

  He used her hand to pull her to a halt. "I can hear you thinking," he said. "Stop it."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

  He threw back his head and laughed so loudly Mutt came trotting up to see what was going on. "Don't bullshit me, Shugak, you're practically fossilized with fear." He wrapped an arm around her waist and raised her up so that they were eye to eye. "Don't even think about taking it back.

  We're going to do this, and we're going to make it work." Sez you, Kate thought..

  "Says me," Jack agreed, and she gaped at him. He laughed again. "Don't you know everything you think is written all over your face? Don't worry," he added as he set her back down on her feet, "the only other person besides me who could read your face is dead." "Good," Kate said.

  "I mean--"

  He laughed again, and Mutt sneezed once and trotted off, shaking her head. "Don't strain yourself. I know what you mean, and so would she."

  He grinned down at her. "And I guarantee you, your grandmother would be laughing her ass off, too."

  Back at the lodge, Kate made up an excuse to make a pit stop in the outhouse. In truth, for some reason she could not specify, she was shy about climbing into bed next to Jack this evening. Something in their relationship seemed to have passed out of her control and into his, and she knew a sudden strange skittishness in his company. Over what, she couldn't precisely say.

  She covered it up with a matter-of-fact gruffness that, if his wide grin were anything to go by, didn't fool him for a New York minute. She stamped off to the outhouse, grumbling to herself. She didn't walk in and out of his mind like it was her backyard; how dare he do it to her?

  "A woman," she informed Mutt, "is entitled to some privacy, at the very least between her ears."

  Mutt gave her a quizzical look. She escorted Kate to the outhouse and then vanished silently into the brush-raiding the refrigerator for a midnight snack.

  Kate medit
ated with the door open for a while, looking at the stars tangled in the treetops, listening to the night sounds. For a moment she thought she heard voices, one male, one female, but it was only the murmur of water running downhill all the way from Denali.

  When she had achieved once more her normal state of placid serenity she congratulated herself, pulled up her jeans and picked up the .357 Jack had handed to her before going off to the main lodge. She stepped outside and nearly jumped out of her skin when a voice said, "Hello?"

  She had the gun out of the holster and the hammer back before she saw that it was only Hendrik. "Christ!"