a Night Too Dark (2010) (5 page)

Kate’s search for words adequate to the purpose was futile and brief. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. There was never any getting one up on the old man. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Old Sam raised a critical eyebrow. “You’re crankier than usual, girl. What’s going on?”
Kate, exasperated, said, “We’re like two seconds away from vivisection and you want to have a conversation?”
She turned and got one foot out before he grabbed her arm and spun her around like a top. “I taught you better than that, girl,” he said, Old Sam at his sternest. “You speak respectful to your elders.”
“There isn’t a bay handy you can toss me into today, Uncle,” she said. “Let’s move.”
“We’ll move when I say we move and not before, girl.” Again with the stare that seemed to see all the way through to her bones. “That boy okay?”
“Johnny’s fine,” Kate said. “Johnny’s great.” The truth of that statement made her voice soften, and they both relaxed some. Neither noticed when Mutt’s head whipped around. “Johnny’s a gift. Jack left me the best part of him. There’s no trouble there.”
Old Sam grew more forbidding. “Jim giving you a hard time?”
“No! No,” Kate said. “There’s nothing wrong, Uncle, or there won’t be, so long we get moving.”
Mutt’s eyes, fixed on the edge of the woods, narrowed, and the hair on her back began to rise. Again, nobody noticed.
“It’s the job then,” Old Sam said.
“It’s not the damn job, Uncle,” Kate said. “I can handle the job, and even if I couldn’t it’s only another year.”
He squinted down at her, steady dark eyes on either side of a hawk nose, that and his height handed down through four generations from a Norwegian whaler on his mother’s side, brown skin already darker from a day in the spring sun inherited from a series of Native ancestors starting with Park rats—and if you went back far enough there was probably some Inupiat and Yupik in there somewhere, too. Old Sam was a mongrel, like Kate. And like Kate, he knew bullshit when he heard it.
He wasn’t hearing it now. He cocked his head and said with unaccustomed gentleness, “What is it, girl?”
He was the only one who had noticed. Or the only one who asked. “I’m just feeling, I don’t know.” She hesitated.
“What?”
“Crowded,” Kate said.
Her answer surprised them both, Old Sam because it wasn’t the one he was expecting, and Kate because she hadn’t known it was there. She tried to make a joke of it. “The world is too much with us nowadays. It didn’t used to be.”
“Crowded,” he said. “Huh.” Old Sam looked thoughtful. “Mine getting to you, girl?”
“No!” He cocked an eyebrow at the explosive emphasis of the word. “No,” she said again. “It’ll be a good thing, Uncle. There will be industry, and a tax base, and jobs to keep the kids home. Villages are dying up and down the river because the kids are leaving. Chulyin, Potlatch, Red Run. There’s no one left in Tikani except for Vidar Johansen, and he’s older than you.” She paused. “Auntie Vi sold her B and B to the Suulutaq Mine people this morning. She’s going to run it for them.”
“No shit?” He shook his head, it looked as if in admiration. “How ’bout that old broad. I hope she held them up for all the traffic could bear.”
Kate told him about the zeroes on the check.
He whistled, long and low. “All right, Vi.” He looked down at Kate’s woebegone expression. “ ‘All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage.’ ” That grin broke out again at her look of astonishment. “Sam’l Johnson. What, you thought you were the only one in the family who ever read a book? Girl, I got—” He broke off, looking over her shoulder.
Kate turned to follow his gaze and beheld a Mutt who had retreated all the way back down her genome to the Jurassic era. Her ears were erect, her hackles were standing straight up, her back was arched, and her lips were drawn back to expose all of her teeth all the way up to her gums. Her head was sunk down between her shoulders, her front legs were spread and planted, and she was en
pointe. As if she had only been waiting for their complete and undivided attention, she let forth with something between a snarl and a sonic boom.
Which was about when the noise registered on Kate’s consciousness, a not-distant-enough sound of brush crunching underfoot from beyond the edge of the lower side of the clearing. It seemed to all three of them to be coming nearer, fast.
Kate looked around. The guys were long gone.
Mutt took a step forward. “No, Mutt,” Kate said as forcefully as she could. “No.”
Mutt snarled, yes, snarled at her, and Kate cuffed her once, hard on the side of her head. “Mutt! No!” Mutt whined once but she didn’t drop and roll, and Kate knew she had to get them out of there pronto or there would be blood spilled. She didn’t want it to be Mutt’s. She jerked her head at Old Sam. “Come on, Uncle, time to go.”
They retreated backward, away from the increasing crashing and thrashing in the bushes, the tops of which were now moving violently, as if in a strong wind. Whatever it was was moving pretty fast, and to move that fast through that primeval old-growth forest it had to be pretty big.
Old Sam carried his Model 70 at the ready, the business end pointed at the noise, backing up, mouth spread in a rictus of a grin, a demonic light in his eyes the twin of the one in Mutt’s eyes. His legs were twice as long as Kate’s but he was moving half as fast. “Uncle, come on,” Kate said through her teeth.
Old Sam spoke without looking around. “What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”
“Not one inch,” she said.
He threw back his head and laughed, a resonant sound that rolled across the clearing and did not go unnoticed by whatever it was that was coming down on them like a freight train. There was an immediate protest from the violently moving brush, a cross between a
pig’s squeal, chalk on the blackboard, and screaming tires on pavement. Kate had heard that sound before.
“Sounds cranky, don’t he,” Old Sam said. He was very calm. “Don’t know how comfortable I’m going to feel with that breathing down my neck on the way back out to the road.” He looked at the shaking brush, calculated the trajectory of the force behind it, and then made the mistake of looking at Kate. She stood there, all five-foot-nothing and 120 pounds of her, a scowl on her face that would have put the fear into Hannibal Lecter. “Mutt,” she said, the name cracking like a lightning-struck tree, but he knew she meant it for both of them.
Old Sam sighed, lowered his rifle, and turned to slide past Kate, moving with a swiftness and a silence remarkable for the same man who had come crashing out of the brush an hour before. He was noticeably lacking any of the unseemly haste displayed by the Grosdidier brothers and Dan O’Brian in their retreat, of course. It was a matter of pride.
Well, pride goeth before a fall, because Old Sam tripped over something and went sprawling flat on his face. He flung out his hands to catch himself and lost his grip on his rifle, too, an unpardonable sin, a Park rat would rather lose his life than his firearm. It disappeared into the edge of the forest.
“Uncle!”
“Shit,” he said, more in disbelief than in anger.
Mutt went from malevolent to hysterical, barking and growling and snapping at the air, straining forward as if against a leash. “Mutt! No!” In a moment, Kate knew, there would be no restraining her. There was nothing else left to do, so she planted herself in front of Old Sam’s prone form and raised her rifle, pulling the stock into her shoulder and sighting down the barrel on the tiny bead at the end of it. Her heart was beating so fast and so hard it felt like it was going to explode out of her chest. She ignored it as best she could and concentrated,
taking in a long, deep breath, blowing it out again slowly through pursed lips, another.
There was a long, lingering moment where everything seemed to sloooooow down, to decelerate, where the world stepped on the brakes with a firm, insistent foot. It was a moment, too, where someone seemed to have turned the volume button all the way down to one. On Kate’s peripheral vision she could see Mutt barking savagely, spittle flying from between her teeth in an almost graceful arc. Behind her she could sense Old Sam scrabbling to his feet. She knew he must be cursing, knew that the brush was rustling as he searched for the Winchester, but she couldn’t hear it.
Her attention never wavered from the opposite side of the little clearing. She was ready when she caught just the merest glimpse of sunlight on a rich shining hide before the grizzly exploded into the clearing. He was running flat out, straight at them, squealing and growling a challenge, turf kicked up behind him by those long, sharp, deadly claws. Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, Kate could feel his weight hitting the ground, a steady, rhythmic vibration up through the soles of her feet. His thick, gleaming hide rolled in loose, flapping folds around flesh diminished by a winter’s hibernation.
He couldn’t possibly have been moving that fast before, the thickness of the brush would have impeded him as surely as it would have stopped Kate and Old Sam’s escape. Once he was in the clearing he moved at a flat-out four-gaited gallop, the hind legs following the forelegs in a dedicated integration of muscle and bone and attitude that she would have recognized as sheer beauty if she hadn’t been the prize at the finish line. He was the size of a Humvee, coming at her with the hammer down and armored with teeth and claws, and she concentrated all her awareness on the tiny bead at the end of the barrel of her rifle. She blew out another breath, and held it.
The bead wavered a little before steadying. Bead and bear’s head
sprang into acute and equal focus. His head came up in mid-stride, some instinct as primeval as the forest behind him alerting him to the danger. For a fleeting moment their eyes met, and it flashed through her mind that she had seen that expression or something very like it before. The eyes, dark, near together, nearsighted, and bent on the annihilation of his target.
Looked just like Harvey Meganack when he was intent on scoring against Kate at an NNA board meeting.
She pulled the trigger without volition, an act of instinct and self-defense. As if it came from a great distance, she heard the report of a rifle shot. After what seemed like forever felt the rifle’s butt kick into her shoulder.
The bullet penetrated eye and occipital bone and ricocheted around the inside of the skull. The bear’s head flung back with such force that it broke his neck. His front legs went out from beneath him, but the forward motion backed by his mass was so great that he slid the remainder of the twenty feet between them.
When his body slid to a halt, his head flopped forward. The tip of his short, blunt nose was just touching Kate’s boot.

Three

Most of the time I just love being a ranger,” Dan said. “But I admit there are days that do test that love.”
Jim saved the document and hit the Print button.
Kate had given her statement first. Then, because she was still seeing the world through a transparent veil dotted with large dull black spots that kept fading in and out, she walked down the hill on shaky legs to the Niniltna Native Association headquarters. Annie Mike kept a cache of Stouffer’s frozen mac and cheese in the break room freezer. Kate felt like she hadn’t eaten in a week.
She was a little closer to human again when she and Mutt walked back into Jim’s office, just in time to hear Dan say, “Do you believe that George Perry? Saying you’d have to wait to ship the body to the crime lab in Anchorage until a later flight?”
“He got it on the plane,” Kate said.
“Sure, after you leaned on him,” Dan said, looking around at her.
“He’s a busy man these days.”
“He sure as hell is,” Dan said. “Suulutaq has him on contract, did you hear? Freight flights and crew changes every day of the week. And did you hear about the grader?”
“No, what?”
“They’ve brought in a grader dedicated to keeping the airstrip out there level. A John Deere motor grader, six-wheel drive. And they bought it new. Brand-new. Just like that, walked in, plunked down a check, and drove it off the lot.”
Kate looked at Jim. “Grader envy,” she said.
“Ever been on that moose trail to the Step?” Jim said.
Kate had just that morning. She desisted.
“Demetri was telling me that he wanted to go to Anchorage on Monday and George told him he didn’t have a seat open until Thursday,” Dan said. “And Bobby said George told him he was in the market for a couple more airplanes and to spread the word. Plus, he wanted to hire Bobby to fly for him.”
Jim pulled Dan’s statement from the printer. “Sign here.”
Dan signed.
“What was going on up at the Kanuyaq Mine?” Kate said.
Jim rolled his eyes. “Some of the guys from the Suulutaq camping out in the mess hall.”
“Doesn’t sound so awful.”
“Wouldna been, if they hadn’t brought a dozen cases of Oly with them, along with four of the local girls.”
“Which girls?” Dan said.
Kate gave him a halfhearted glare. “I thought everything up there was boarded up.”
“Yeah, well, you know how that goes. Anyway, I ran them off.”
“No arrest for trespassing?” Kate said.
Jim snorted. “What’s the point? There isn’t anyone from here to Anchorage who hasn’t been up there, sifting the ruins for souvenirs.”
“How many people are working out at Suulutaq now?” Dan said.
“A hundred as of May first.”
“A hundred and ten, if you count the admin crew that got here in March,” Kate said.
“Bernie’s thinking of hiring a bouncer,” Jim said.
“Not a bad idea. You can barely wedge yourself into the Roadhouse these days. It has increased the fight-or-flight reflex.” Dan reflected. “Not to mention the competition for women.”
“How many women out at the mine?” Kate said.
“Eleven,” Dan said.
Kate looked at him, an eyebrow raised.
“Yeah, okay, I’m paying attention, so sue me. I’m single and of age.” He leered.
“Sounds like Prudhoe Bay,” Kate said. She had worked undercover in the Alaskan oil fields some years back. She remembered only too well what being the only woman in a room full of a hundred men felt like.
“I’m getting run ragged by Park rats who aren’t used to having this many people around, and who want me to lock up every second person they meet just on general principle,” Jim said. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen when the road to Ahtna opens this year. Going to be one hell of a summer.”
“What kind of trouble are the new mine guys getting up to? Other than trashing the old mine, that is.”
“Nothing big, at least not yet. Chickenshit stuff, drunk in public, reckless driving, trespassing, coming on too strong to the local girls, who aren’t used to it. And whose parents definitely aren’t used to it.”
“Drugs?”
“Some, but picayune so far, retail, not wholesale.” He grinned at Kate. “We got the only aspiring wholesaler last year.” The grin faded. “That’ll change, though. Young men and money. Recipe for recreational drug use.”
“Kate, when are we getting cell phone service in the Park?” Dan said.
Kate was taken aback by this abrupt change of subject. “How the hell should I know?”
“Since you’re the Lady High Everything around these parts these days, is how. I hear thirty-six villages in the Y-K Delta have cell phone service now and they’re expecting to add another fifty-nine villages between Dillingham and Barrow before the end of next year. What the hell’s the holdup with the Park?”
“Do you really want to be that much in touch with the rest of the world, Dan?”
“It’s either that or the rest of the world passes us right on by, Kate.”
“Let them pass,” Kate said.
Dan looked at Jim and spread his hands. “What’re ya gonna do?”
Jim, who had already had this conversation with Kate, more than once, kept his mouth shut.
“Did you hear Global gave the school a grant for a satellite link and a computer for every kid?”
“I heard,” Kate said.
“Starting this fall, every kid in Niniltna Public School is going to be online.” They could hear the envy in Dan’s voice. He would have a lot easier time holding on to employees if he could offer them Internet access on the Step.
“I heard,” Kate said.
Dan grumbled. “You heard, you heard. Probably get cell phones in the Park just about the time the rest of the world is upgrading to communicators with a universal translator.”
“Geek,” Kate said.
“Luddite,” Dan said.
“Children,” Jim said, keeping it mild. “Play nice.”
Dan looked at Kate’s mulish expression and decided he’d pushed things far enough for one day. The seed had been planted. Now time for some fertilizer. “How about a cup of coffee and a doughnut on the Parks Service?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, although she recognized it for the peace offering it was. She’d been charged by bears before and suffered
the same adrenaline rush followed by the subsequent enervation and the same onset of ravenous hunger. The only remedy was massive caloric intake. “Laurel’s packing them in these days. You think we can get a seat?”
They opted to walk down the hill, and had to jump out of the way of a four-wheeler being driven too fast by a young man clearly inexperienced in its operation, with three whooping friends hanging precariously off the back.
“I didn’t see that,” Jim said, “and neither did you.”
A booth emptied out in the Riverside Café as they walked in. They scooted into it just ahead of a couple of young men Kate had never seen before. Mutt’s unblinking yellow gaze might have had something to do with the perceptible pause in their rivals’ step. She waited for her humans to take their seats, and then trotted past them. Kate turned to see Auntie Balasha, who was sitting alone at a corner table with bright fabric draped over the other three chairs. She was making change out of a gray metal cash box for a young man holding a recycled grocery bag. Through the thin plastic of the bag Kate could see more bright fabric.
“Excuse me,” she said, and got up to follow Mutt. Auntie Balasha’s color heightened at their approach, but she smiled at the young man as she put his change in his hand. “There, authentic Native dress perfect present for girlfriend. You come back for present for your mother and your auntie sometime, too, okay?”
The young man mumbled his thanks and took himself off.
“Ha, Mutt,” Auntie Balasha said, and looked up to meet Kate’s eyes. “Katya.”
“Hi, Auntie,” Kate said. On closer examination the drapes of fabric resolved themselves into kuspuks, essentially a Yupik hoodie in various lengths worn by both sexes and more often of late by Alaska Natives of all tribes. To the educated eye they bore distinct signs of having been mass-produced. There were only three different fabric
patterns and the rickrack had evidently been a bulk purchase because it was the same on every sleeve edge and hem. Each one conformed to the same minimalist design with no skirts and no pouch pockets. “You’re making and selling kuspuks?”
Auntie Balasha, her color still high, gave a defiant nod, and Kate realized with something of a shock that she was embarrassed to have been caught out in mid-enterprise. “Young mens want Alaska presents for their womens,” Auntie Balasha said. “So I make kuspuks.”
“How much you charging?” Kate said.
“Hundred dollars each.”
Kate was impressed. “All right, Auntie,” she said, in a tone she tried to make admiring rather than condemnatory. First Auntie Vi, now Auntie Balasha.
“Handmade,” Auntie Balasha said.
“So I see.”
“Authentic Alaska Native souvenir.”
“It sure is.”
“Made in Alaska by Alaska Native.”
“No question about that.”
Auntie Balasha, relieved, relaxed into a confidential mood. “I give Laurel ten dollar each sale for table rent.” She leaned forward and said in a lowered voice, “I talk to Thor. Maybe we open gift shop in town.” She beamed past Kate. “Ha, young man, you like?”
Kate allowed herself to be elbowed aside and returned to the booth, sliding in next to Jim. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Bloody Mary over there is taking the sailors for all they’ve got.”
Dan craned his neck to look. “What’s she selling, quilts? Oh, I see, kuspuks.” He sat back. “I should pick up a couple of those for my mom and my sister.”
“You absolutely should,” Kate said. He was looking over her shoulder, and she looked around and saw Holly Haynes sitting at the counter in front of a half-eaten patty melt and a mug of coffee, the mug
featuring the current NNA logo, which at this distance looked like a kindergartner’s finger painting. Kate tried not to wince at the sight, instead exchanging a nod with Haynes, who nodded back. There was a man she didn’t know sitting next to Haynes in conversation with Demetri Totemoff sitting next to him, but the rest of the café’s clientele were young men in their twenties, scruffy and none too clean, loud of voice and rough of manner. They had money and they were determined to spend it, even if the only places in Niniltna to spend it were the Riverside Café, which didn’t serve alcohol, Bingley’s one-room store, which did not sell alcohol, and the gift shop located mostly on a corner shelf in the post office, which didn’t ship alcohol. There was no road from the mine to Niniltna and Suulutaq picked up an employee’s airfare only when they were changing shifts, every two weeks. Since the snow had melted and the ground dried out, four-wheelers had been sprouting like weeds from Niniltna to the Roadhouse. Kate had dark suspicions as to where the vehicles had sprouted from, most of them involving Howie Katelnikof.
All of the miners and Park rats present were there for the only espresso drinks served between Niniltna and Ahtna. They also lusted after the lovely and nubile Laurel Meganack, too, almost as much as they lusted after her green chile cheeseburgers.
Today Laurel wasn’t working alone. “You’ve got new talent,” Dan said, craning to see around Laurel when she brought them menus.
“Hands off,” Laurel said. “Heather’s working out, and I’d like to keep her a little longer than the last three girls I hired. Hey, Mutt.”
They nodded at each other, woman to woman.
“Kate,” Laurel said.
“Laurel,” Kate said. Laurel was still a trifle peeved with Kate for the verbal roughhousing Kate had given her father last year during a murder investigation, but since then they had conspired together with Auntie Vi and Matt Grosdidier for the greater good, and as it happened for Laurel’s greater good in particular. Both Jim and Dan were
aware, in their dim male way, that constraint had existed, and that it was now gone. Good, they got to eat.
Laurel took their orders and swiveled off, a pocket Venus with thick dark hair sleeked back into a severe ponytail, a thin white T-shirt that displayed to advantage every detail of the low-cut, lacy bra beneath, and jeans that looked as if they’d been sewn to her body. Laurel was a good fry cook and a world-class barista but she knew what brought them in the door.
“Truth in advertising,” Dan said, mesmerized.
“No misleading of the consumer there,” Jim said, rapt.
Both men recalled themselves at the same moment and gave Kate identical guilty looks.
She laughed at them.
It was an incongruous and yet somehow outrageously sexy rasping rumble of amusement. Laurel and Heather weren’t the only women in the room worth a second look, and Kate was worth a third.
She wasn’t a classic beauty, five feet, 120 pounds, and, compared to Laurel, modest curves. Her black hair was cut very short and gleamed beneath the fluorescent lights with an almost iridescent sheen. Her olive skin was clear and looked velvety to the touch. Her Aleut cheekbones were flat and high and her eyes were a changeable hazel she had inherited from multiple multiethnic forebears, beneath the eyelids she had inherited from the Asian ancestors who had crossed the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska twenty-five thousand years before.
Her mouth was wide and full and when she bothered it was capable of curling into a sensual smile that revealed a set of white, even teeth that had everything to do with heredity and nothing at all to do with the dentist. On closer inspection, beneath a rounded but very firm chin, there was a white, roped scar that bisected her throat halfway between chin and clavicle, almost from ear to ear. The more
alert might have figured out it was the cause of the husky voice and the rasping laugh. She didn’t dress to attract, clad in jeans that fit comfortably and a cream-colored mock turtleneck beneath a navy blue sweatshirt with UAF NANOOKS on the front. Her feet were shod in worn boots with steel toes.
An ordinary getup on an ordinary Alaskan woman. Still, that laugh sent out a siren call that appealed viscerally to the testosterone in every male within earshot. Once heard, it was never forgotten, and men wanted to hear it again, preferably from a horizontal position. Heads turned, eyes narrowed, butts shifted in chairs, and Jim closed his eyes and shook his head.
Conversation at the round table in the center of the room was rising in volume and the laughter was becoming raucous. Kate watched as a pint bottle was produced from the pocket of a pair of grimy overalls and passed around the table in a stealthy manner. She nudged Jim with her elbow.
“I’m begging you,” he said. He was seated on an inside seat with his back to the revelers, both deliberate and determined choices. Laurel arrived at tableside, bearing their orders, appearing to him as an angel from upon high. All he wanted to do was eat and drink his meal in peace, if not quiet.