A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  He wondered if Jack Morgan had known of this secret identity. If Jack had, it would explain his willingness to cleave only unto her, even to serve out an eighteen-month hiatus in their relationship, waiting for her to come back to him.

  Lucky, lucky bastard, he thought, not for the first time, and then pulled himself together. He wasn’t getting sucked into that, no matter how much—yes, he’d admit it—no matter how much he wanted her. It was just sex; that was all. Nobody ever died because they didn’t get laid. And it wasn’t like there was no one else he could go to for aid if such were the case. Laurel Meganack, for example. She’d batted enough eyelash his way to start a small tornado.

  That was a plan. If there was anyone who could drive the ghost of Kate Shugak out of his mental attic, Laurel was the girl most likely.

  With commendable resolution he ignored the little voice in his head that told him it had already been tried. The summer was strewn with the corpses of women who had heard on the Bush telegraph that Chopper Jim Chopin was once again open for business. The problem was that none of them seemed to hold his interest past “Hello.”

  He spoke abruptly, hoping to divert her attention. “Have you talked to Dan lately?”

  This would be Dan O’Brien, chief ranger for the Park, avowed Park rat, and longtime friend of Kate’s.

  She didn’t exactly cease and desist in giving off pheromones, but he did sense a certain alertness that hadn’t been there the second before. “Somebody’s been trapping brown bears,” he said, his voice still sounding hoarse to his own ears.

  “Have they,” Kate said, letting her eyes linger on his lower lip. She touched her own with her tongue.

  He took a deep breath. “Yes, they have. Dan has found a dozen carcasses all over the Park. He says whoever it is is using cable snares.”

  Kate abandoned her vamp stance for a moment. “Gutted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gallbladders removed?”

  “Yeah.”

  She swore.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You know who it is,” she said.

  “Of course I know who it is,” he said, annoyed. “So do you, and so does Dan. Knowing and proving are two different things, as you also know very well.”

  She smiled at him again. “You want me to help you prove it, or you want me to stop it? Which are also two very different things.”

  “If we never had this conversation, I want you to stop it,” he said. “If we did, I need evidence.”

  “Why don’t you find some?”

  “I could,” he said, his jaw tight. “If I wanted to track down a judge who is most probably pulling kings out of a river somewhere in the Bush on the other side of the state at the moment. I could put together some kind of probable cause and get him to issue a warrant. And then of course I’d have to go out and serve it, and do a search, and make a list of all the property taken into evidence, and photograph the scene before and after, and put him under arrest, and transport him to Tok, because they still haven’t shipped the goddamn bars in for the cells in my brand-new Niniltna post, and all this would take me probably two days!”

  His voice had been rising steadily throughout this peroration. He glared at her.

  Kate laughed. It even sounded like genuine humor, as opposed to a come-on. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. Now, you can do something for me.”

  He stiffened. “What?” he said warily.

  She laughed again, and the siren was back. “Relax,” she said, still laughing, “I need a trial transcript.”

  He was hugely relieved and at the same time bitterly disappointed. “Give me a name.”

  “Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff.”

  “Got a date?”

  “How about a year? Count back thirty years.”

  He stared at her. “Jesus, Shugak, we were barely a state thirty years back.”

  “And I don’t want microfiche, I want it printed out on paper. I don’t think they were doing tapes back then, but who knows. I want a transcript, something I can read.”

  “It’ll cost you.”

  “Not me. My client.”

  “You’ve got a client?”

  She nodded. “I’m headed into Anchorage in a couple of days.”

  He couldn’t stop himself from saying, “How long you going to be gone?”

  She smiled. Oh yeah, the siren was most definitely back. “Just long enough for you to miss me some more.”

  Suddenly, the real Jim Chopin stood up. He stepped forward and bent down until the brim of his cap nearly touched her forehead. “I already do.”

  In real life, this was Kate Shugak’s cue to back off, to give ground, usually with dignity, sometimes in a hurry, and always with attitude.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t even blush. Instead, she leaned into him until the brim of his cap did touch her forehead, and said huskily, “There’s a cure for that.”

  The mouse roared and he was outbluffed into an undignified retreat. “Yes. Well. I’ll get to work on that file. You get to work on our alleged poacher.”

  “I want that file by tomorrow,” she said, raising her voice as he started the engine.

  He raised a hand in acknowledgment without looking around.

  She watched him vanish into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Who knew chasing Jim Chopin would be so much fun?

  She climbed the stairs and went into the living room. Johnny looked up from the couch and scowled at her. She halted in midstride. “Does it bug you?”

  “What?”

  “Jim and me.” She didn’t elaborate, but Johnny was going on fifteen and extremely intelligent.

  “There is no Jim and you.”

  She grinned. “Not yet.”

  His frown deepened. “He’s not good enough for you.”

  “Absolutely not,” she said cheerfully. “No one is.”

  “What about Dad?”

  She sat down next to him and looped an arm around his neck. “He almost made the grade.”

  The frown eased. “Only almost?”

  “Well,” she said. “I really am something, after all.”

  He was forced to laugh. “You sure are,” he said, and protested the headlock and the noogie she gave him.

  “We’ll drive into town tomorrow, get you registered for school.”

  He was not displeased by this news, as Vanessa Cox was in town, living with her adoptive parents, Annie and Billy Mike. “You gonna get that woman’s mom out of jail?”

  Kate felt for the check crumpled in her pocket. “I’m going to try. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that I’m going to succeed.”

  “You’ll do it,” Johnny said with boundless faith. “You always do.”

  That earned him another noogie, and he squealed and wrestled free. “Where am I staying while you’re gone?”

  “I figured Auntie Vi’s. She’s got the room, and it’s close enough for you to walk to school.”

  “Okay.”

  She gave him a suspicious look which he met with a bland stare. “I think it stinks that your love life is better than mine,” she said.

  He blushed beet red, and she laughed.

  Bright and early the next morning, they climbed into the cherry red pickup and lurched back up the twenty-five miles of road into Niniltna. The road ran through the heart of the Park, 20 million mostly pristine acres extending from the Canadian border on the east to Prince William Sound in the south to the TransAlaska Pipeline in the west to the Glenn Highway in the north. Plus maybe a little extra all the way around. It was sparsely populated, the biggest town being Ahtna, which technically wasn’t even in the Park but which was the market town for everyone who lived there—Park rats, rangers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, farmers, mostly Native and Anglo, living in tiny villages at the confluences of rivers, on land homesteaded by great- and great-great-grandfathers when the federal government strove to justify the expenditure of $7.2 million to purchase Alaska from Russia by offering incentives to Outsiders in the form
of free land. This free land was far north of the fifty-three, but it was free, and in spite of the frosty latitude, a few thousand took the feds up on it. A few thousand more stayed on after the gold rush in 1898, and a few thousand more stayed on after World War II, and a couple of hundred thousand more after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Most of them stayed around long enough to put in their twenty and then decamped with their pensions to Arizona and Hawaii.

  Fortunately, Kate thought as the truck lunged into a pothole and lunged out again, most of the six hundred thousand plus people living in Alaska today didn’t live in the Park. Nope, most of them lived in Anchorage.

  Oh. Wait. She was going to Anchorage.

  The sun always seemed to shine when she had to leave the Park. The Quilaks loomed less menacingly on the eastern horizon, the spruce, aspen, birch, cottonwood, alder, and willow never seemed more lush and profligate, everywhere she looked an eagle or a raven or a Canada goose was taking wing. Which reminded her: She needed a new shotgun; she’d look around for one in Anchorage. Moose with their sides bulging from a summer’s browse ambled across the road looking like a filled freezer. A freezer being something else she could get in Anchorage.

  She thought of the last time her meat cache had been knocked over, and the labor that had been required to put it back up again. To the uninitiated, it might look like Kate was turning her back on decades of tradition, but it wasn’t disloyalty. It was progress. Her father had always been for progress. At least she thought so, being as how he’d died when she was seven, and while she had many memories of her father, that wasn’t necessarily one of them.

  A freezer. What would Emaa have said?

  Kate hoped her grandmother would have hated it. She hoped Emaa would have said disapprovingly, “A cache was good enough for your father, Katya, and it was good enough for me.” But even though she hoped it, she wouldn’t have bet on it since Emaa’s house had been the first one in the village wired for electricity.

  She laughed suddenly.

  “What?” Johnny said.

  “Just promise me you’ll never become a professional againster,” Kate told him.

  He gaped at her. “A what?”

  “Never mind,” she said, and they pulled into the schoolyard.

  They emerged an hour later with a fistful of papers, which Kate immediately consigned to the glove compartment. “Or a school administrator,” she said, and they drove to Auntie Vi’s and knocked on the kitchen door.

  Auntie Vi opened the door and promptly closed it again.

  Kate sighed. “Auntie, open up. I promise not to cook anything or wash anything or fix anything.” She eyed the porch roof. “Or take a paintbrush to your soffits,” she said in a much lower voice.

  The door opened again. “What you here for, then?”

  Kate nodded at Johnny, duffle in hand. “I need a place to park the kid for a week or so.”

  An arm reached out, snagged Johnny by the collar, and hauled him into the house. The door closed firmly behind him.

  “Thanks, Auntie,” Kate said to the door.

  Mutt was already in Johnny’s seat when Kate got back to the truck. “At least you still love me,” Kate told her.

  “Woof,” Mutt said consolingly, and Kate drove to the airstrip. George was gone, and so was the Cessna. Okay, it was another twenty miles to the Roadhouse. “When she walked in, Bernie hid the bar rag.

  “It’s okay,” Kate said, “I’m looking for information, not Mr. Clean.”

  “And no more counselors. I’m not sharing with anybody else how I feel. Is that clear?”

  “It’s clear.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about that goddamn house, either,” he said menacingly, or as menacing as Bernie Koslowski, the mildest of the race of mild-mannered ex-hippie draft dodger-saloonkeeper-basketball coaches could get. “We built it. You’re living in it. Deal with it.”

  Kate patted the air with her hands. “I come in peace for all bear kind.”

  He examined her suspiciously, and when she made no sudden moves toward the push broom, he relaxed, sort of. “Bear kind?”

  “Has Kurt Pletnikoff been in lately?”

  Bernie shrugged. “As much as anyone during fishing season.”

  “Has he been keeping out-of-town company?”

  “Come on, Kate,” he said. “You know I don’t like to gossip about my customers behind their backs.”

  “I promise you, Bernie,” she said, “you’re going to have a lot more customers of the federal kind if you don’t help me now. And they won’t be as polite and refined as I am.”

  He snorted. “More business for the bar.”

  “Not from the locals, if Kurt continues to decimate the bear population.”

  “Who says he is?”

  “No one,” Kate admitted. “But according to Jim Chopin, there are degallbladdered bear carcasses all over the Park. And we all know what that means.”

  Bernie would rather by far be on Kurt Pletnikoff’s bad side than Kate’s. She never forgot and she never forgave, and she was related to half of his customers and had in one way or another helped out most of the other half. Besides, Kurt’s tab was at five hundred and counting, and Bernie wasn’t in the business of loaning money. “Kurt was in here a week ago.”

  “Alone?”

  “He had company, looked to be of the Asian persuasion. One man, late fifties, I’d say. He had plenty of hair, but it was all gray.” Bernie smoothed back a nonexistent hairline that ended in a long gray ponytail tied back with a strip of leather.

  “You know him?”

  “Never seen him before.”

  “He speak English, or have an accent if he did?”

  Bernie shook his head. “Kurt did all the talking.”

  “How long were they here?”

  “One drink, couple of beers. They didn’t finish them.” Bernie looked mildly annoyed. “Alaskan Amber, too. I hate pouring good beer down the sink.”

  “You notice anything else? Anything change hands?”

  Bernie shook his head again. “Not in the bar.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Bernie.”

  “No problem. You didn’t bring the wolf in to say hi?”

  Kate grinned. “She’s chasing geese.”

  Bernie swore. “Not Edna’s geese, not again, Kate.”

  Kate relented. “She’s in the cab.”

  Bernie looked relieved. “Thank god I won’t have to stop my wife from rioting in the streets.” He plucked a package of beef jerky out of a jar on the bar. “For the wolf.”

  “Thanks.”

  From the Roadhouse, Kate drove back to Niniltna and the airstrip, and this time she managed to arrive at the same time George Perry touched down. He was in the act of removing his headphones when he saw her. “Oh crap,” he said, “what now?” He headed immediately for the 1966 Ford Econoline van—held together by faith, dirt, and duct tape—which served as ground support for Chugach Air Taxi’s air-freight business. He backed it around to the Cessna and began unloading boxes from the one and stacking them in the back of the other.

  Normally, Kate would have given him a hand, but over the past twenty-four hours she had been made humiliatingly aware that she might have overdone it in the gratitude department. “Have you done any business with Kurt Pletnikoff lately?” she said to George’s determinedly turned back.

  “Nope,” he said, tossing a box into the back of the Econoline with a fine disregard for the FRAGILE sticker on its side.

  “Has he met any flights lately—say flights with unknown passengers of Asian origin on board?”

  George paused. “Maybe.”

  “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “He might have,” George said.

  Kate gritted her teeth. She wasn’t a patient person, but she was on probation and she knew it. “When might he have?”

  George gave a characteristic little wiggle, something between a shrug and the Shimmy. “An Asian gentleman could have flown in last Tuesday.”

&nb
sp; “And could he have said why he was here?”

  George shook his head.

  “Did he have you call a ride?” There wasn’t what you could call a cab in Niniltna, but George did have the names of people from the village who had vehicles and were willing to rent themselves out by the mile.

  He shook his head.

  “When did he leave?”

  “That evening.”

  “Did you notice if he was carrying something out that he didn’t carry in?”

  “Maybe a duffel bag.”

  “How big?”

  “Basketball-size. Maybe a little bigger. Had handles. Dark blue. Had a logo on it.”

  “What logo?”

  George screwed up his face. “Can’t remember. Some sports team maybe. Not the Kings.”

  As in the Kanuyaq Kings, the local high school team, and very likely the only team logo George could recognize on sight. He was dutiful in his devotion to the hometown boys, but he wasn’t the biggest sports fan. “And this was last Tuesday?”

  George nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. She started to thank him, then caught his eye, and thought better of it. “I need a ride into town,” she said instead.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  He thought for a moment before giving a short nod. “I can do that, if you don’t mind early.”

  “I don’t mind early. Seven?”

  He nodded again. “Don’t be late. I’ve got to be back here in time to bring the Grosdidier brothers home from Alaganik.”

  “You can fit them all into one plane?”

  He grinned, the most natural expression he’d shown her all summer. “I packs ’em tight,” he said, adding, “Don’t tell the FAA.”

  She drove up to the Niniltna Native Association headquarters, a prefabricated building beneath a metal roof that positively sang in the rain and to which even the heaviest snowfall did not stick, to the imminent danger of those walking into and out of the building through the set of double doors centered most precisely beneath its eaves. It looked as if someone had let Auntie Balasha off the chain because the side of the building facing the road was engulfed in flowers of every size and hue, from nasturtiums at the road’s edge to delphiniums tethered to stakes brushing the first-floor windowsills. It was a riot of color right across the spectrum, and it made the building look as if it housed something other than the organization that oversaw and administered the moneys and lands Kate’s tribe had received as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.