Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw
Page 19
nonsense and down the hatch. He pivoted and hooked it in, swish. "Oh,
nice one!" Kate called involuntarily, and the crowd, appreciative of
good basketball whoever was doing the playing, gave the Otters an
enthusiastic hand.
No player on either team was very tall but all the players were quick,
agile, and had a bad case of the wants to win. During the next half hour
the lead changed hands with the ball. There was very little fouling and
Eknaty Kvasnikof's legendary free throw ability was sidelined. Kate
approved; she didn't want the Kings to give the ball away but if she
wanted to see a Fist fight she'd go to a hockey game. The score at the
half was 40--41, and both teams' looked it. The players hit
the locker rooms and the crowd surged outside, to enjoy the cool night
air and smoke and talk and recap each play of the first half with all
the gravity of Jim McKay recapping an Olympic playoff. A group of young
men was passing a pint bottle around, until one of them saw Kate. The
bottle disappeared. She held them motionless with a fixed, bleak stare,
until they decided they had business elsewhere.
In response to a short, sharp whistle, Mutt cantered around a corner,
ears up and an expectant expression on her face. Kate fed her a handful
of caribou steaks she'd pocketed from the buffet. "Sorry it's taking so
long, girl."
Mutt, her mouth full of caribou, uttered a muffled `woof' that gave Kate
to understand that she was well on her way to being forgiven.
"Hey there, you dancing fool," somebody said, and she turned to find
Bobby skidding dangerously across a thick layer of slush that was
rapidly refreezing with each dropping degree of temperature. He half
rolled, half slid to a stop next to her, barely missing her toes. Mutt
sent a cold, yellow stare his way, and he said hastily, "Now you know I
wouldn't dare to roll my chair across your toes, Mutt old girl. It has
never been my ambition in life to serve as first course at a wolf
banquet." He looked up at Kate, and she squatted down next to him,
leaning against the arm of his chair. "You really know how to shake your
booty, woman. You have unsuspected talents." She smiled with an effort,
and he examined that smile. "You okay?"
On a long sigh, she said, "Max Chaney's been shot." He nodded. "It's all
over the crowd."
"Who told?" she said, annoyed.
He shrugged. "You know the bush telegraph. It was all over the Park a
hour after. What are you going to do, Kate?"
"What I have to," she said, staring past him, unseeing. "What I should
have done in the first place."
A big, large-knuckled hand gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze.
"Don't tear yourself up over it. That whole situation was a mess. That
whole family was a mess. We all knew it was just a disaster waiting to
happen. Hell, Kate, we've had earthquakes that were
less of a surprise than Lisa Getty's shooting."
"But now Chaney's dead. If I'd moved quicker, he might not he." She
thought of the dead man the only time she'd seen him alive, his
burned-out eyes exhausted in a face streaked with black makeup, his.
thin body tense beneath worn fatigues. "To have come all the way through
the war, to have made it this far, and then to die like that."
"Your grandmother would say you were only trying to take care of your own."
Her head snapped up. "My grandmother would say a lot of things I
wouldn't agree with. My grandmother would say a lot of things I would
say were full of shit."
He left his hand on her shoulder, a warm and sympathetic presence.
"Looks like people are going back in," he said after a while. "You coming?"
She roused herself and gave him a wan smile. "You bet I'm coming. This
game's going into overtime. I wouldn't miss it for the world."
Mutt gave a long-suffering sigh and collapsed in a heap with her nose
buried pointedly beneath her tail as Kate followed Bobby inside.
The second half was as hard fought as the first, with increasing fouls
as each team tired and the final quarter ran out. With twenty seconds on
the clock Eknaty Kvasnikof was fouled going in for a lay-up, and the ref
called for a one-and-one. Swish, swish, and the score at the buzzer was
tied, 73-73. Overtime was quick and dirty and the Kanuyaq Kings took it,
much to the delight of the hometown crowd, which got to its feet and
cheered both
teams impartially, and indeed seemed reluctant to leave the gym at all.
As his victorious team trotted off the floor with much less energy than
they had shown trotting on, Bernie looked up and found Kate in the
stands. He held up five fingers and pointed at the door. She nodded and
slipped outside.
People were standing around in excited groups, shivering in the now cold
night air but reluctant to bring the evening to an close. Proud parents
reenacted particularly brilliant plays made by their offspring, built up
Seldovia's defensive capabilities so that it was a miracle of talent and
guts every time Niniltna scored, and argued heatedly over each and every
referee call. Kate saw money change hands more than a few times.
"Kate." She turned to find Bernie with Eknaty
Kvasnikof, the latter bundled in sweats. The coach
hovered protectively over his player, reminding Kate of nothing so much
as a mother duck shepherding her duckling across a pond.
There was a tendency on the part of the crowd to muscle in next to
Eknaty. Kate signaled to Mutt. Mutt rose and stretched and stalked
purposefully between Kate, Bernie and Eknaty and everyone else on the
school grounds. Everyone else on the school grounds halted their forward
motion. Mutt didn't bark, she didn't even growl, she just grinned at
them, her tongue lolling out between two rows of extremely large and
pointed teeth, as Kate and Bernie and Eknaty disappeared around a corner.
They found some privacy between the school's utility outbuilding and a
World War II Quonset hut that served as the administrative annex.
"Bernie tell you why I wanted to talk to you?" she asked the boy.
He was tall and slender, with smooth skin and troubled brown eyes. His
straight brown hair fell over his Forehead, and brushing it back was a
nervous habit. He nodded without looking at her.
"Were you at Lisa and Lottie's that morning? The morning Lisa was shot?"
He nodded again.
"What time?" He said nothing, and she said, "Eknaty, what time were you
there?"
He remained silent. Kate looked at Bernie. Bernie said, "'Natty."
That was all, but the word of a boy's basketball coach carries a weight
with that boy that will not be denied. "Early," the boy said, mumbling
the single word.
"How early?"
He swallowed, his Adam's apple bouncing. "Lottie wanted me there at
sunrise. I got there a little late, around seven."
"To do what?"
He shrugged, hands dug in his pockets, kicking at the snow. "Whatever
needed doing. Chop wood, do the spring service on the tractor. She said
something about scraping the hull on the boat, too. She was going to
tell me what to
do, but she wasn't there when I got there." He flushed
painfully, and in the harsh, pitiless glare of the school's outdoor
lights Kate saw that his eyes were filling up with tears.
Suddenly, she knew. "Lisa was there, though, wasn't she?" she asked him.
He hesitated, then nodded.
Kate's eyes met Bernie's. She gave her head a tiny, significant jerk.
His brows drew together and he opened his mouth as if to protest.
Something in her set, stern face dissuaded him. He hesitated, looked
from her to the boy, and moved out of earshot.
A quick look around satisfied her that no one had discovered them, and
in a low voice Kate said, "Okay, Eknaty. What did she do?"
He dug the toe of his sneaker into the snow. "Nothing."
"Eknaty, somebody shot her"
"I didn't!"
"I know you didn't," Kate said soothingly, "but some. body did, and I've
got to find out who, and that means I need to know everything about her.
Talk to me. What did Lisa do that day?"
He looked hard at the blue tin side of the gym. "One of the things
Lottie told me she wanted me to do was haul their winter's trash to the
dump. I'd been working at it for an hour, hour and a half, and I was
bagging it up in the backyard when Lisa came out. She-" He stopped, his
face scarlet.
But Kate knew. "Did she touch you?" He nodded. "Kiss you?" He nodded
again. "Maybe more than that'? Maybe make love to you?"
"It wasn't making love," Eknaty said in an agonized voice. There was a
brief, pain-filled pause, and then the words seemed to burst forth,
tumbling one over the other, as if the story had been dammed up for too
long behind a barrier of shame and embarrassment and the overwhelming
uncertainty and awkwardness of adolescence. "When I touch Betty"-Kate
identified Betty as Betty Moonin, one of her cousins on her mother's
side, a plump, sweet-faced girl of sixteen-"it feels good. Lisa was like
... she was like an animal, like ... like a dog dragging its butt on the
ground when it comes in heat. She smelled funny, like, I don't know,
almost sour, but sweet, too, only too sweet. She kept touching me, all
over. I ... I didn't want to, but she kept touching me, all over, and I ..."
"Ssshh," Kate said, stemming the flow of near hysteria with a soothing
voice. She didn't make the mistake of forcing another unwanted embrace
on the boy. " Ssshl-, now, Natty. It's all right now."
"No, it's not," he flared, wiping tears away with it clumsy hand. "I
hated it, but I couldn't stop doing it, I know they say teenagers never
think about anything else, but I really didn't want to. But I couldn't
tell her no. She
wanted me and she made me want her. I thought I was going to ... I had
to go along. I couldn't stop it."
He hung his head. Kate saw another tear slip down his cheek and suddenly
felt very old. There were a number of things she could have said then.
She could have pointed out how a seventeen-year-old boy was more in the
charge of his hormones than of his head. She could have explained how
much distance there was between having sex and making love. She could
have run down the notches on Lisa Getty's bedpost for him.
She waited until he'd regained some of his composure. "Eknaty," she
said, "somebody shot her. Somebody looked down the barrel of a 30.06 and
sighted in on her
the way you or I would a moose. Somebody pulled
the trigger, knowing they were aiming at a person, a human being." She
raised her hand, pointing to her bandage. "When I started trying to find
out who, they took a shot at me." He looked up, startled out of his
misery. She nodded. "I was lucky. Max Chaney, the new ranger, wasn't.
They found his body this afternoon." He sucked in a breath. His face,
already bleached out in the merciless glow of the electric lights, went
white to the lips. "We have to find out who did it, Eknaty, all of it.
We have to make sure they never do it again."
His head bent. She waited. When he raised it again, the shame had not
altogether faded from his features but at least now he didn't look as if
he would crumple at a harsh word. "She took me ... we were in the barn,"
he said, steadily enough. "Then we heard the shots. Lottie came around
the cabin." He flinched. "She saw us coming out of the barn," he said
painfully. "She could tell what we ... what we ... well, she didn't say
anything, but you could tell what she was thinking." He swallowed. "Lisa
laughed at her. I was watching Lottie, and for a second I thought ..."
"What? What did you think?"
He took a deep breath and said, "For a second I thought Lottie was going
to hit her." He shook his head. "You know how big Lottie is? Well, when
she's mad, she looks about twice that big. She looks ... she looks as
big as a grizzly. Only more scary." Kate didn't laugh, and he shivered.
"Lisa didn't even back up. She just kept looking at Lottie, like, like
"Like what?"
"Like Lottie wasn't her sister at all, like Lottie was this, like, joke
she lived with, and had to put up with, but one she didn't have to pay
any attention to, or ...
or respect. You know? It was like in Lisa's world, Lottie didn't count."
He looked up at Kate, his young face sick. "She even nudged me and
winked at me when Lottie was yelling at her, like I was supposed to laugh
at Lottie, too." "Did you?"
"No." He shook his head back and forth violently. "No way Jose. Lottie
must outweigh me by seventy-five pounds, and she was mad enough. Besides
..."
"Besides what?"
He smiled, a brief, weak, sad little smile Kate's heart ached to see. "I
always liked Lottie. When she went on a hunt with Uncle Chick and me one
time, up back of the Tellglligs, she taught me how to shoot, with her
own rifle. I was just a kid, and Uncle Chick had a bottle along for
company. She was pretty disgusted with him, so she took me out alone the
next day. She helped me get my first caribou. I guess she felt sorry for
me or something because after that she let me go fishing with her, and
even bear hunting one time. She always hires me on for
odd jobs around their place every spring. She
talk much, but she's always nice to me. I like her," he repeated
Kate waited patiently until he finished. "But, on that
He shivered. "I'd never seen Lottie mad before. When she finished
yelling at Lisa, she told us about finding Steve Syms's body at his house."
"Why had she gone there?"
"She was going to hire him to help scrape the hull
on the bowpicker so we could copper paint it. Anyway, when she stopped
yelling at Lisa, she went back in the house and came out with their
parkas and rifles and threw Lisa's at her. And then she went to the
garage and-" "They each had their own rifle?"
He looked over at her, surprised at the question. "Sure, Kate. They
always each took their own. Sometimes I thought Lottie'd had hers welded
to her shoulder."
"Eknaty, are you sure? You remember seeing Lisa and Lottie each with
their own rifle?"
He looked bewildered. "Yes. I'm sure. Lottie
had her new rifle, the one
Max gave her for her birthday. They were still going together then."
"What!" The exclamation was forced out of Kate. He jumped and looked at
her, and she forced her voice down. "Max and Lottie were going together?"
"Sure. Didn't you know? Max met Lottie first. He even went sheep hunting
with us last November." Kate, feeling as if the world were shaking a little
beneath her feet, was barely able to restrain her incredulity. "Were
they ... did they ... was it ... romantic?" she said finally.
He blushed and ducked his head. "He slept with her in her tent."
Kate sighed, a long, deep sigh. "I guess that's romantic enough."