Though Not Dead (31 page)

“We could mount up, pick up their trail,” Mark said eagerly.

Kate shook her head. “They left by the river.”

They exchanged another glance over her head, this time one fraught with meaning. “Kate,” Matt said, “let me take another look at your eyes.”

She waved him off. “They took the snowgo off on a boat. I found the tracks.”

There was a short silence. “Jesus,” Matt said.

“Risky, this time of year,” Mark said.

Luke cast an involuntary look over his shoulder, as if he could see the river through the walls. “That sucker can freeze solid overnight.”

“You probably didn’t see the boat go by yesterday, either,” Kate said.

Nope.

“What the hell did they want?” Peter said.

They all looked at Kate with a marveling eye, incredulous that anyone in their right mind would take a shot at Kate Shugak.

“I don’t suppose it’s any use to say you should stay overnight for observation,” Matt said.

“I need a ride out to where I left my snowgo,” she said. “Can one of you give me a lift?”

Luke could and did. He towed her machine and trailer into town, at her request stopping briefly at the airstrip so she could talk to George Perry before heading for Herbie Topkok’s garage. Herbie came out as Luke pulled away. “Kate.” He looked at her eyes and at the bandage but he didn’t say anything.

“Hey, Herbie,” she said, and dismounted, groaning a little as she stretched out the kinks. “Ran into a little trouble. I was hoping you could help me out.” She leaned forward and ripped the duct tape off the gas tank.

He stared at the neat hole that any Park rat except maybe Willard Shugak would instantly recognize as having been made by a bullet. He looked up at her again to contemplate the shiners, olds ones fading, new ones weighing in, bandage covering up something, probably bad. “Who’d you piss off this time?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just making this up as I go along.”

Herbie’s usually lugubrious expression lightened into what might have been almost a laugh.

“Can you fix it?”

Herbie was one of the newer members of the NNA’s board of directors, but for his day job he ran what amounted to a garage for all makes and models of snowgo and four-wheeler in the Park, with a side dabble in boat engines. He shrugged. “Sure. I can patch the hole or I can replace the tank. Replacing it’s quicker and more expensive. Patching it’s cheaper and slower. Take your pick.”

Kate took patching. Herbie ran up the garage door and they disconnected the trailer and pulled the snowgo inside. “Can I leave the trailer in the driveway until I can get Bobby over here to pick it up?”

Herbie shrugged, already mentally sparking his welding torch. What was it about men and fire? “Sure.” He did look up for just a moment to say, “I was sorry to hear about Old Sam. I’ll miss that cranky old bastard.”

“So will we all.”

“Heard he left you the whole shebang.”

“He did.”

“You want to sell that Honda FourTrax and that Polaris 800 of his, you come see me first. I’ll make you a good offer.”

She gave the Arctic Cat a rueful glance. “I might need a new snow machine myself, but I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks, Herbie.” She shouldered her rifle and she and Mutt hitched a ride with a couple of Park rats headed for the Roadhouse as far as Squaw Candy Creek. She snowshoed in from there, crossing the wooden bridge over the creek twenty minutes later.

The door to the A-frame opened and Dinah, an angelic blue-eyed blonde lacking only the wings and a harp, looked out with a welcoming smile. “Hey, Kate.” Mercifully, she refrained from the obvious comment.

“Hey, Dinah.”

Mutt eeled between Dinah and the door frame and disappeared into the house. There followed shortly thereafter a stentorian bellow. “God DAMN, Shugak! Fucking WOLVES in the fucking HOUSE again!”

Kate shed her snowshoes and entered the house to see Bobby sitting at a circular console loaded with electronic equipment, connected by a snake’s nest of cables whose ends slithered up a pole through the roof, and by extension to the 112-foot metal tower out back. From here the word went forth to the Park from Park Air, the pirate radio station that featured music (“None of that shit recorded after CCR broke up”), a continuing swap-and-shop where Park rats bartered services for goods (“I’ll cut your blowdown into firewood for smoke fish, one case per cord, straight trade”), and current events, including interviews with elected representatives like Pete Heiman that frequently ventured into the profane but were always entertaining and sometimes even informative.

Bobby had no license, of course, much less a dedicated bandwidth for broadcast, so he changed frequencies daily. So far he had eluded detection and arrest by the FCC. It probably helped that he broadcast from the back of beyond.

“Shugak!” he said, from beneath the enthusiastic tongue lashing he was receiving from Mutt, who was standing with her paws on his shoulders. “Shugak! Call OFF the fucking WOLF!”

Kate, grinning, did no such thing.

Bobby Clark had come into the Park many years ago by means that would not bear close scrutiny. Kate Shugak knew more about his past than most, and certainly more than she let on, but Kate wasn’t talking. He was big and black and had lost both his legs below the knee to a land mine in one of America’s many and apparently endless Asian wars. His head was shaved, his grin was broad, his shoulders and arms were roped with muscle, and he had a voice that sounded like a cross between those of James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart, with a shivering timbre than made most women want to strip out of their clothes and fall flat on the nearest horizontal surface.

Kate Shugak knew more about that than she let on, too.

Mutt dropped back to the floor and laughed her lupine laugh up at him. “Fucking WOLVES in the house,” Bobby said, but he was all bluff and bluster and she knew it. She sneezed, gave herself a vigorous shake, and trotted over to the wood box next to the big stone fireplace, where Bobby made a habit of keeping items that could be relied upon to keep the wolves at bay. Nor did this confidence betray her—she rooted around with such purpose that presently she emerged from the jumble of firewood with something that looked like the vertebrate of a finback whale. She settled happily in front of the fire and prepared to gnaw.

“Like woman, like dog, always thinking with her stomach.” Bobby gave the wheels of his chair a quick, firm shove and then with a quick twist skidded to a hockey stop, as usual making Kate hop back so he wouldn’t run over her toes. He inspected her face. “You look like you went three rounds with Muhammad Ali.”

“Worse than I expected,” Dinah said, looking her share.

“What’s going on?” Bobby said.

“I got shot,” Kate said, tactful as always, and then of course had to explain. Bobby got dangerously quiet, and Kate said, “Don’t even think about it. Whoever it was is long gone.”

“Might take a ride out there myself,” Bobby said. “See what you missed.”

“I didn’t miss anything.” Kate looked around the house, which seemed oddly empty. “Where is the child?”

Unconsciously, Dinah tracked her gaze, as if she wondered where Kate’s four-year-old namesake was, too. “Auntie Balasha’s granddaughter, the school nurse, what’s her name?”

“Desiree.”

“Yeah, Desiree. Anyway, Desiree, who has evidently decided that a life of administering oral vaccines and treating epidemics of the galloping crud is not enough for her, has pried funds loose from somewhere to create an after-preschool tumbling class. Katya, god help them all, is there.”

“Really? She enjoys it?”

“Since she goes into a screaming fit every time I go to pick her up, my guess is yes.” Dinah glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Another hour.”

“Getting the feeling you’re not going to be one of those parents who suffers from the empty nest syndrome when Katya goes to school full-time.”

“Not hardly,” Dinah said.

“Speak for yourself,” Bobby said, glowering at his wife.

“Coffee,” Kate said.

Caffeine accompanied by pound cake and stewed rhubarb did much to restore everyone’s good mood.

“So what’d you do that pissed off someone so bad they felt they had to whack you between the eyes? Not that on occasion I haven’t felt like doing the same thing myself.” Bobby’s grin was taunting.

Kate waggled her eyebrows. “Beats the hell out of me.”

She looked at their expectant expressions. There was no one in the Park she trusted more to keep their mouths shut when she asked them to, and no one whose counsel could be more relied upon. Neither was a shareholder, and therefore they were not subject to the shifting allegiances of either shareholders or Park rats. Going into the beginning of an Alaskan winter was no time to start any rumors or fights. There were six long dark months ahead and they all needed each other to survive. “You don’t tell anyone this,” she said. “I don’t care who comes asking, I didn’t tell you anything, and you don’t know anything.”

Her voice dropped unconsciously and they leaned in. Kate told them everything, beginning with the first of Judge Anglebrandt’s journals found on Old Sam’s bookshelf ten days ago, and ending with the second, found secreted in the wall of his homestead cabin yesterday morning. The documents shown to her by Dan O’Brian, the talk with Jane Silver, followed by her death less than twenty-four hours later, the note Old Sam had left for her with his attorney, getting run off the road on the way home, Auntie Joy, Mac McCullough, and the manuscript, Demetri, Ruthe, the attack at the cabin yesterday morning, her suspicions of Pete Wheeler and Ben Gunn, all of it. When she was done she folded her arms and sat back, awaiting judgment and hoping for advice.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Bobby said, which was not unexpected. What followed was. “You’re thinking it’s the icon they’re after.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Not necessarily.” He pushed back from the table and rolled over to the console, pulling himself around to his computer, slapping the mouse to lighten up the screen. He had a satellite dish on the tower outside and he was never not online. Kate got up to peer over his shoulder, to see a Google for Dashiell Hammett give way to five hundred thousand hits. Five minutes’ worth of clicking and Bobby sat back from the computer. “Get a load of this.”

By this time Kate had been joined by Dinah and they read down the screen together. Dinah let loose with a long whistle. “A hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars is pretty steep. Even for a signed first edition of
The Maltese Falcon
.”

“I had no idea,” Kate said, and kicked herself. The problem was that she thought like a reader, not a collector, but even she had heard of Sotheby’s. “So you think they’re after the Hammett manuscript, not the icon?”

“No,” Bobby said, “I think they’re probably after both of them. Wouldn’t you be? Double the treasure, double the score.”

“Great,” Kate said glumly. Of course he was right.

Bobby led the way back to the table, where Dinah refreshed their mugs and Bobby cut a second piece of cake to hide beneath the rest of the rhubarb. “About the icon,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re not thinking big enough.”

“How do you mean?”

“Yeah, it’s a historical artifact. Yeah, it’s a cultural artifact. Yeah, it might even have real value, if the description in the story is accurate and those stones are jewels and if nobody’s prized them loose and sold them off individually since it was lost.”

“Okay, and?”

Bobby’s expression was uncharacteristically serious. “What you haven’t taken into account is that it is also a political artifact.”

Kate was silent for a long moment, and they let her be while she thought it through. “You mean … by tradition the chief held it in trust for the tribe.”

“According to Ruthe’s research, and to the ruckus Auntie Joy said the tribe raised when it was stolen. I bet Old Sam wasn’t considered ineligible by Joy’s parents only because he was part Filipino. I bet he was considered ineligible because his mother was the one who lost the icon.”

“So it’s like some holy grail for Park Natives,” Kate said.

“Might be overstating it just a little, but yeah.” He shook his head. “You’ve always been a little blind to symbolism, Kate. Symbols are important.”

“You mean like the cross?”

He pointed a finger at her. “There it is, that knee-jerk assumption that symbolism has to be about religion. Well, people have been suborning religion to their own purposes since the first guy decided pouring a few drops on the ground from every bottle of wine they drank was an honor to Zeus.”

“Zeus?”

“Whoever. You know what I mean.”

“The thing I don’t get,” Kate said, “is why have I never heard of this icon before now? I am indisputably an Alaska Native, an Aleut and a Park rat. I’ve got more relatives than I ever wanted going back ten thousand years, and sometimes it feels like most of them are still alive and well and living within mug up distance of my house. Why, if this thing is this important to my people, to my tribe, has no one in my generation ever heard a peep about it?”

Bobby and Dinah exchanged glances. “Good question,” Bobby said. “For which I do not have an answer.”

Kate thought some more. “Okay,” she said at last. “So you’re saying that someone is looking for the icon who wants the power it will give them, inherent or implied or imagined.”

He shrugged. “I’m saying it’s motive. You remember motive, don’t you, Kate?”

“Smart-ass,” Kate said without heat.

“It’s what I do,” Bobby said with modesty unbecoming. “And, you know, I’m good-looking.” And he grinned.

Dinah rolled her eyes, and beneath the table rubbed her foot against her husband’s thigh.

“And,” Bobby said, serious again, “if that is the motive, then it’s someone close to home, someone you know, someone we all know. Which would explain why he or she knew just where to wait to run you off the road, and had the mad skills to sneak up on you.”

“The guy yesterday morning could have shot me in my sleep,” she said. It still rankled that she hadn’t heard anything, not even the door opening.

“And he didn’t,” Bobby said.