Blood Will Tell (27 page)

"Of course it wasn't," the brunette said, amused.

"Wasn't what?" King said. "What the hell is going on here? You put that thing down before you hurt yourself, you hear?" "You and Dischner," Kate said. The brunette smiled. "Just what the hell is your name, anyway?"

The brunette's smile thinned and made her smoothly perfect face look nearly ugly. "He never did bother to introduce me, did he? He never does, even if I am his lawful wife?" The thin smile widened. "Well, I don't reckon it matters much now."

"Goddam you, you stupid bitch," John King bellowed, "what the fuck do you think you're doing?"

The brunette shot him a glance so filled with contempt it silenced him.

"Why, what you should have, sweetie, I'm removing the last obstacle in our path to fame and fortune? Do you know how much money we're talking about?" she said to Kate. "We're not talking about a few lil-bitty kickbacks from a few white-trash contractors?" She had the southern habit of ending sentences with a question mark. "We're talking about millions of dollars, hundreds of millions? We're talking about royalties that will last us the rest of our lives?" She looked at John King. "And you were just going to let her walk away, let her destroy everything we've worked for all this time?" She shook her head. "Sometimes I swear my mama was right when she told me I never would understand men."

"You killed Enakenty Barnes," Kate said. The brunette gave a slight shrug. "He wouldn't listen to reason. He was willing to fuck me until the cows come home, but he wouldn't change his vote? I even went to Hawaii with him? I mean, did y'all ever see him in a pair of swim trunks?" She shuddered. "It was a sacrifice just to be on the beach in company with him, let me tell you, honey. Not to mention he was the original one-minute man?"

"And Sarah Kompkoff?"

The brunette shook her head. "No, that was just your everyday ordinary low gravy good luck, as my mama used to say? Eddie told me about it, and that's when I got the idea for Enakenty."

Oh no you didn't, Kate thought with absolute certainty. Eddie P. put that jewel of an idea right into your head, and you sucked it up all unknowing. That smooth, smooth prick. She thought, too, that Dischner had probably called this house during her drive to it this morning after all; he just hadn't talked to King.

John King, overcome by too much horrific information too rapidly disseminated, managed a strangled, disbelieving sound. The brunette huffed out an impatient breath. "Oh hush up, honey, do y'all think I would have slept with a colored for the fun of it? It was just business?

Bullshit. Kate could see right where this was going and it wasn't to either her or King walking out of this house alive. She looked at him.

"You really marry her, King?"

He tore his gaze away from his wife and licked his lips. He nodded once.

"So," Kate said meaningfully, "if you die, she gets everything?"

He nodded again.

Kate said, even more meaningfully, trying to prod him to awareness of their mutual danger, "Including those leases in your name?"

The realization was slow in coming. His eyes jerked back to his wife, wide and alarmed. She smiled at him with an expression Kate assumed she thought was reassuring, and in that moment Kate moved, one step ahead of a long dive, for the shelter of the kitchen island.

Her toe caught on the sheepskin underneath the coffee table. It was the only thing that saved her. She pitched forward as the pistol shot cracked through the room. As it was a hot wind fanned her cheek. She recognized it instantly and fell and kept on falling, scrabbling for cover. Another shot rang out and the lamp on the coffee table exploded and rained ceramic bits down on her. "What the fuck!" John King yelled.

Kate scuttled behind the kitchen island like a crab. She peered cautiously around the corner. The pistol jerked in the brunette's hand, the sound of the shot boomed off the ceiling and Kate felt something tug at her left arm. She looked down to find it soaked in blood.

"Jesus Christ!" John King cried.

The brunette cursed and raised the pistol, holding it in both hands, elbows locked in the best approved TV-cop style, and walked slowly toward the kitchen. Kate heard the steps and yanked open a cupboard. It was filled with copper bottomed Revereware, the same kind she'd seen in Enakenty's rendezvous. She grabbed the first thing to hand, a one-gallon stewpot, and hurled it over the top of the island in the direction of the footsteps. There was a satisfactory sound of metal smacking against flesh followed by a wild curse and a clang as the pot hit the floor.

Kate grabbed a saucepan in each hand and stood up and threw them with all her strength, one after the other. The left hand was slippery with blood and that pot glanced harmlessly off one wall, although it did make the brunette flinch and the gun waver. Her right hand was dry and her aim was true; the second pot impacted the brunette squarely in the chest and forced her to stagger backward. She flung up her arms for balance and shot a round through the roof before toppling backwards down the stairs in a series of bumps and thumps and curses. Kate took the stairs two at a time behind her, her momentum increasing to the point that she overshot the corner and crashed into the opposite wall, and again sheer clumsiness saved her life because the brunette was already on her feet and waiting at the bottom of the next flight. Another shot reverberated off the ceiling and another bullet thudded into the wall behind Kate.

She looked down the barrel at Kate, and Kate could see her hand start to squeeze.

There was a crash as the sliding glass door behind her shattered and then Mutt was there, a streak of gray menace, going for the hand holding the gun. Her teeth met around the brunette's wrist. There was a crunch of bone. The brunette's scream was high and piercing. The pistol fell to the floor and Kate pounced on it.

"What the fuck!" John King said from the top of the stairs.

"Mutt," Kate said, all at once feeling very old and very tired. "Off."

Mutt, having wanted to sink her teeth into something, anything, anyone, since the first shot fired in anger the night before, didn't want to let go, and Kate had to repeat herself twice before she was obeyed. The brunette curled herself into a fetal position around her wounded wrist, a steady, animalistic moan coming from her throat.

Heavy footsteps descended the stairs. Kate sat down suddenly on the bottom step and said without looking up, "Call the cops, King."

The footsteps hesitated.

Her back to him, Kate held up the pistol she still held. "Call the cops before I shoot you."

There was a slight pause, a long, slow sigh. The footsteps retreated up the stairs.

Mutt had little shards of glass embedded in her muzzle. Kate picked them out, one by one. Beyond them, the brunette lay on the floor where she was, moaning.

"It's not that I don't appreciate it," Kate told her roommate, "but you've got to stop rescuing me through glass." She eased a sliver free.

"Maybe you should learn how to open doors. You think?"

Mutt blinked at her, motionless, endlessly patient. When all the glass was out Kate muscled the brunette upstairs and shoved her down on the couch next to her husband, who sat numbly with his elbows on his knees, hands dangling over his mustard-yellow, silver-toed cowboy boots. She found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom and swabbed Mutt's nose with a washcloth soaked in the stuff. Mutt flinched but stood it. Afterward, she unearthed a clean dishcloth to tie around her wounded arm. It was only a graze, although it stung like fire, and she winced, pulling the cloth tight.

"What about her?" King roused himself enough to say, jerking his head at his wife, who rocked back and forth next to him, holding her wrist and moaning.

"What about her?" Kate said without looking at them. While they waited for the police and the ambulance, Kate used John King's phone to call Spiegel's 800 number and order Jane a king-size brass bed.

FRIDAY WAS THE NEXT TO THE LAST DAY OF THE CONVENtion, so that everyone with jobs they couldn't get out of came anyway and brought their families with them. They had just broken for lunch and the hum of conversation had taken on the shape and size of a roar. A man with a television camera surgically attached to his shoulder made a slow path through the crowd, moving from one face to another, lingering on the faces of the elders.

Kate spotted Axenia talking hard to a middle-aged man who looked like one of Grandma Kvasnikof's many grandsons from Cordova. Jerry? Terry?

Cy, that was it. Axenia's back was to her as she walked up, and she heard her cousin say, "Yes. We estimate three hundred thousand board feet per year for the first five years, selective cutting, of course, and with buffer belts along the creeks to prevent erosion. And shipping is no problem, the Katalla is navigable all the way up to Iqaluk. And the lagoon at the mouth of the river will make a natural log boom. Plus, there are already bunkhouses in place from the old Katalla oilfield days. What? Well, of course, they'll have to be renovated and brought up to speed, but the cost is negligible next to starting from scratch.

There is no down side to this project, and we'll be using local timber to make lumber for local construction. I--" Kate grasped Axenia's arm firmly above the elbow and smiled at the man. "Hello, Cy. I'm terribly sorry, I need to borrow my cousin for a moment. Will you excuse us?" Her smile widened with deliberate charm and he wilted and effaced himself.

Axenia tried to pull free without attracting attention. "Let me go, Kate."

"Nope." Kate pulled her through the door and out onto the sidewalk.

"Come on."

"Where are we going? Dammit, you're hurting me! Let me go!"

Kate looked up Fifth, estimated the chances of making it across the street to the Town Square Park before the traffic thundering through the light at B caught them, and jerked. To keep from falling Axenia had to go with her. They made it across with feet to spare (it helped with Mutt nipping at Axenia's heels) and Kate led the way up one of the paved paths and found a seat on the edge of the fountain, now turned off. She slammed Axenia down on it hard enough to crack her tailbone.

"Ouch!" Tears sprang to Axenia's eyes, which made her look very young and vulnerable but not young and vulnerable enough to rouse any of Kate's protective instincts. When Axenia saw the lack of effect, she sucked her tears back up into her eyeballs and demanded, "What's wrong with you? I've got people to talk to in there!"

She half rose to her feet before Kate slammed her down again. "How much did you know about Iqaluk?"

"What? Iqaluk?" Axenia's angry bewilderment seemed genuine, but then she'd had two years in Anchorage to practice, not to mention an apprenticeship with Lew Mathisen. "We're lobbying to make it a national forest so we can lease the timber rights and use it for construction projects for the association. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," Kate said grimly, "if that was all it was." She searched Axenia's face for signs of knowledge of the seismic tests, the exploration wells, and found only bewilderment. Honest or assumed? Would she ever know? Did she want to know the answer badly enough to ask?

"What are you talking about?" Axenia looked at Kate's face, really looked at it for the first time, and said, less certainly, "Well? What is wrong with it?" The dishcloth caught her eye. The blood stains had dried to a ruddy brown. She paled, reaching out a finger to almost touch it, drawing back when Kate flinched away. "Kate, what's that? What happened? Are you hurt?" "Never mind," Kate said. "Is that story you just told me what you got from Lew Mathisen?" Axenia didn't answer.

"When did you two start dating?"

"None of your damn business."

Kate leaned down and snarled in Axenia's face, "It is if it's adversely affecting emaa in some way, and trust me, Axenia, it is."

Axenia swallowed and looked away. There was a long pause. When she spoke her voice was muffled. "Almost a year ago. Last December. We met at the CIRI Christmas party."

Well after the time Billy Mike turned John King loose on tribal grounds with a seismic truck, and right around the time Axenia went to work for the federal government. En akenty had signed his lease on December 1, Kate remembered. A lot of things, none of them good, had happened in December.

"Did Mathisen come after you, Axenia?" Another pause, then a nod.

Dischner, Kate thought. She'd bet her last dime that Mathisen dating Axenia had been Dischner's idea. She couldn't quite bring herself to say so, though, and knew a fleeting regret that she hadn't turned Mutt loose on old Eddie P. He had hurt her family in so many ways, the toll mounting hourly. She said, "Lew's using you, Axenia. He's using you for your place in Niniltna and for your job with the Forest Service. He's been in hog heaven this last year, with inside information coming at him two ways through one source. At work you must have heard about Iqaluk going public almost the same time emaa did through the Association lawyer. He couldn't afford not to romance you."

"I don't believe you."

"Axenia, listen. He's a member of the board of UCo. You know all those construction projects UCo has with Raven and Niniltna? They were approved and signed off by either Harvey Meganack or Billy Mike. One was signed off by Enakenty last December, probably the same day he moved into that condo that cost a third of what it should in rent. It was a fee, Axenia. Just like Harvey's house and his watch and Billy's campaign financing."

Axenia's chin went up. "He asked me to marry him."

Kate looked at her.

"I said yes."

Kate looked at her.

Axenia's voice rose. "And you can't stop me!" Kate looked at her and said in a silken voice, "Was marriage your fee, Axenia?"

Axenia hit her, open hand against Kate's cheek, with all the strength of her arm behind it. The crack of skin on skin echoed off the sides of the Performing Arts Center.

Eyes full of tears, Axenia ran back to the convention center.

Kate sat down suddenly on the stone bench. Mutt leapt up on the bench, too, and nosed at her with a bruised and battered snout. "It's all right, girl," Kate said, putting her arm around Mutt's shoulders and leaning into the solid, furry warmth. "It's all right."