Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 04 - A Cold Blooded Business

by A Cold Blooded Business(lit)

  His shoulders braced. "Yes." He wanted to add "sir" so badly his teeth clenched with the effort it took to hold it back.

  "When does the airport tower open, do you know?"

  "Six, I think."

  "Do you know the number?"

  "Yes." Kate sighed inwardly. "Dial it, please?"

  "All right." Dave stepped to the phone and punched nine to exit the Base Camp and seven more digits. It was picked up on the first ring.

  "Hey, hi, Clint. This is Dave Poss, RPetco Security. I've got someone here who wants to talk to you. Her name's Kate Shugak and she's cleared all the way through to Childress." He handed the receiver to Kate.

  The voice was stiff and a little suspicious. "Ms. Shugak?"

  "Hello. Do you have a flight inbound with Childress on board?"

  "Yes."

  "ETA?"

  Silence.

  "Do you have an arrival time?" Kate asked.

  Reluctantly, the voice said, "Yes."

  Kate looked at Dave Poss and wondered if obstructionism was hereditary or just plain infectious. "And what might be that arrival time?"

  Even more reluctantly, the voice said, "They departed from Anchorage at six, they should be on the ground here by seven-twenty." "Thank you so much for all your help," Kate said sweetly, and hung up.

  "Childress is due in at seven-twenty. If I'm not back before then, you can turn Jerry over to him."

  The guard looked down at Jerry, who looked at Kate with a half smile.

  "I don't guess I have to ask who's next."

  "Cheer up," Kate said, "maybe they'll give you adjoining cells. Then you could be sure of having her all to yourself."

  And with that singularly low blow, Kate turned on her heel and left the room.

  Toni wasn't in her room. She'd been there, the bed was rumpled and the towels used. The suite door banged open behind her and she turned.

  "Hello, Ann," she said.

  Something in her calm expression made the other woman hesitate. "Hello.

  What are you doing here?"

  "I'm looking for Toni. You know where she is?"

  "No," Ann said automatically, but Kate was watching her closely.

  Kate looked back down at the empty bed. "She's with Otto," she said.

  "At the dig." She raised her eyes. "Isn't she?"

  Ann took a step back. Kate shook her head. "Too late, Jerry told me everything. Go to your room and wait for Security."

  Ann swung her head from side to side, still backing up. "Forget it."

  Kate gave a short, unamused laugh. "Run, then." She brushed by the other woman and stopped in the hall to look over her shoulder. "But ask yourself. Where?"

  Toni's van was missing from the bull rail and Kate headed for the garage. It seemed her fate to intercept Cale Yarborough each time he backed his truck out and Kate waved to get his attention. He halted, a displeased expression on his face as he rolled down his window. "What d'you want?" "Your truck," Kate said, opening his door. It seemed colder now than it had been at any time all night and she had to work on not letting her teeth chatter. "Get out."

  He stared at her incredulously. "Get out of the goddam truck, Yarborough. I'm Kate Shugak, in case you don't remember."

  "I remember," he said furiously, "and I also remember you ain't nothing but a goddam roustabout. Who the hell do you think you are, telling me to get out of my own goddam truck?"

  "I think I'm a special investigator personally hired by John King to find out who's running drugs into your side of the field," Kate said bluntly. "I have found them, and I'd like to catch one of them before she heads for Rio on the next available plane."

  Yarborough stared at her, stunned into immobility. She caught his elbow and yanked him out of the driver's seat.

  "Childress is on his way up, he'll be on the ground at Prudhoe at seven-twenty. Pick him up and meet me at Tode Point." She climbed behind the wheel.

  "Pick him up? How'm I supposed to pick him up when you've got my truck?" he yelled after her.

  "You're the field manager, you figure it out!" she yelled back.

  As she fishtailed off the pad onto the Backbone she noticed that it seemed to be getting darker instead of lighter, as if the sun were setting instead of rising. A shiver of fear chased down her spine as she wondered if she was reacting to Jerry's mickey again, and then realized the darkness came from a weather front rolling down off the Arctic ice pack, a great boiling mass of fog and snow that engulfed everything in its path: rigs, modules, flow lines, roads. Her first reaction was a wave of relief that she was in her right mind. Her second was to swear and thump the wheel, before flooring the gas pedal, trying to outrun the menacing wall of weather.

  No one could have. It was the grandmother of all spring storms and it hit her windshield at exactly and precisely the moment she turned off the Backbone onto the Tode Point access road.

  Instantly it was whiteout conditions. She couldn't see a foot in front of the windshield, much less the milepost markers lining the sides of the roads. The temperature in the cab dropped thirty degrees in as many seconds. The wind struck the truck like a blow, rattling her inside it like the last nut in a can of cocktail mix. She had to slow to a crawl, feeling her way with the front tires, praying the next gust of wind wouldn't roll the truck and her with it right off the road. If that happened, she thought with a touch of hysteria, it might be best if she just kept on going east until she wound up in Canada. The longevity of the average Sloper after she had wrecked the field manager's truck was problematic at best.

  The drive, fifteen minutes from the access road the last time she'd traveled it, this morning took nearly an hour. Her feet were blocks of ice, cold sweat beaded her forehead and her hands felt permanently attached to the wheel when finally the blowing snow in front of the hood took on a more substantial quality. She slammed on the brakes with both feet. The truck skidded and stalled, fetching up with a light bump against the thin metal of the trailer wall.

  It took all her strength to get the truck's door open against the push of the wind, and it caught her once, painfully, across the shins, right in the same spot she'd nicked them on the stairs to Skid 14.

  Once outside, the truck door slammed shut behind her and she knew she'd never get it open again. It was the trailer or death from exposure. A fitting end, some would say, for her mother's daughter. She fought to keep her balance against the force of the wind, against the voice that said, "But I'm so tired, can't we just sit down and rest for a while, just a little while?" There is danger, Cindy Sovalik's voice said clearly. There is danger.

  Kate peered around, eyes slitted against the snow that stung her cheeks, half expecting to see the old woman materialize out of the storm. She didn't, but the certainty in that voice spurred her to action. Head down, she struggled through the drift rapidly piling up around the truck and felt her way down the wall of the trailer to the door. She banged on it with her fist. After a moment it opened, and an incredulous voice exclaimed, "Kate! Jesus, what are you doing out in this?"

  Hands pulled her inside and she collapsed on the floor, panting and blinking ice out of her eyes. When she could see, she found four concerned faces staring back. "Chris," she wheezed.

  "Kate, what are you doing here? You could have been killed in this storm. Karen, where's the thermos? Pour her some cocoa."

  A steaming mug was thrust into her hands. She almost dropped it.

  "Here, I've got it," someone said, and the mug was held to her lips.

  She gulped the liquid gratefully.

  "Want more?" Rebecca said. "No? Okay. Here, Kevin, take this. Come on, Kate, let's get you up into a chair."

  When she was seated, she reached up a hand to feel her cheek. She had to press hard to register the touch of her fingers. She looked around.

  "Where is he? Where's Otto? Is Toni Hartzler with him?"

  Mention of Hartzler's name brought an instant, if temporary, silence.

  "How did you know?" Chris said, eyes wary.
/>   "Where are they, at the dig?"

  Chris looked at his colleagues, back to Kate, and nodded slowly. "We found a burial chamber yesterday afternoon. The rest of us've been here all night, but Otto left at about ten. When he came back this morning, he had Toni with him. They went out to the dig ahead of us and we were just about to join them when the storm hit."

  "You still missing those artifacts?"

  Chris stilled, a sick look coming into his eyes. "Yes."

  "Otto took them." She interrupted the exclamations of shock and dismay by getting to her feet.

  Chris knew instantly where she was going and didn't like it. "Kate, you don't have to go look for them, they can't go anywhere in this."

  It had been a very long night and was beginning to look like it was going to be an even longer day. Kate was operating on instinct and adrenaline. She'd come out to Tode Point to find Toni Hartzler and she wasn't going to stop until she had her right in front of her. She shook her head doggedly and pushed past him to the door. Behind her she heard him say, "Kevin, give me your mitts. Karen, toss me your balaclava."

  "Chris, are you nuts? If she wants to kill herself, fine, you don't have to--"

  "Just hand me the frigging mitts, will you?"

  Kate, unheeding, shoved the door open, stumbled down the two steps and struck blindly off into the gale. Chris came up behind her and grabbed her arm. "Not that way!" he shouted over the roar of the wind. "This way! We got a safety line rigged just before the storm hit!"

  Bent over, eyes almost shut, she blundered after him, clutching the hem of his coat. She tripped and almost fell half a dozen times. Each time he waited patiently for her to find her feet again. Finally he shouted,

  "Here!"

  She peered around him and saw a bulge in the snow that might have been the roof of the dugout. He pulled her down to the door and beat on it.

  "Otto! Otto, it's Chris! Let us in!"

  Without warning the door fell open and Chris fell through it and Kate fell through it on top of him.

  From a sprawling position on the floor, Kate looked up and met Toni Hartzler's astonished gaze. The brunette was crouched over a jumbled pile of dirt and bones and artifacts. The jumble looked as if it had been spaded up and dumped haphazardly, with no relationship to the neat, sectioned areas Kate had seen on her first visit. Toni held the scratcher in one hand, as if she had been using it to comb through the dirt.

  "Otto!" Chris yelled. "What the hell are you doing? You can't--"

  Toni leapt to her feet and cleared the tumble of bodies on the doorstep in a single bound, to vanish into the storm.

  Kate went after her.

  "Kate!" she heard Chris yell. "Kate! Don't! Kate!"

  Toni was struggling through the drifts, grunting with the effort, when Kate took three giant steps and came down on her with all talons extended.

  "Fucking bitch," Toni growled, trying to throw her off. She was bigger than Kate and she hadn't been drugged in the last twenty-four hours and she might have even had a few hours sleep, so she was fresher than Kate.

  But Kate was angrier. Toni tried to pull free and Kate rolled with her, over and over in the snow, until something hard struck her in the spine and halted their progress. She looked up, blinking, and recognized the stone cairn. They had dislodged some of the rocks. Toni grabbed for one and brought it down hard on Kate's head.

  Kate rolled and then had to duck away from the scratcher in Toni's other hand, the raven claws missing her face by inches. Toni jumped to her feet and took off, and Kate followed, taking half a dozen giant steps before tackling her again. The scratcher went flying. "Fucking bitch!"

  Toni jerked an elbow into Kate's ribs and, when Kate gasped and paused, turned and hit out at her face, connecting with the black eye she had previously given her.

  "Ouch!" Kate tried to get a hand around Toni's arm, difficult to do as it was clad in a thick parka. Toni kneed her in the gut. "Oooff!"

  Snow blew into Kate's eyes and down the neck of her shirt. Her jeans were wet through all the way up to her knees, her feet numb in her safety boots. She gathered all her strength and, just as Toni managed to free herself to scramble away, brought clenched fists down on the back of Toni's head. The other woman groaned and went limp for a moment, and Kate, who felt the reverberation of that blow all the way up her spine, let herself fall forward, a dead weight, across Toni's body. Another groan, another moment of blessed stillness beneath the roar of wind and whip of snow.

  And then damned if the bitch didn't start to fight again. Kate couldn't believe there was that much fight beneath that sleek, pampered exterior.

  "Shit!"

  They rolled together in the snow, each struggling to find a choke hold on the other, until Kate's back fetched up hard against something else.

  She thought it must be the cairn again and was surprised to look up and see the pipe and valve assembly of the abandoned wellhead.

  While she was distracted Toni slugged her in her right breast and pain radiated over her body in waves. Someone screamed. When she opened her eyes again Toni was scrabbling to her knees.

  A hot, visceral fury caught her up by the scruff of the neck and launched her at the other woman like a ball out of a cannon. They went over the fence surrounding the wellhead and down together at the foot of the wellhead, hard, Toni harder because she was underneath. Somehow in the middle of all that red rage Kate got her hands inside the neck of Toni's parka and began to squeeze. At first Toni fought, but as Kate's hands tightened she ran out of air.

  Still lost in that red mist, Kate squeezed harder. Toni choked and cawed, her clawing hands unable now to grab with any strength.

  "Kate!" Chris Heller's voice came from behind. "Kate! Stop it! Let go!"

  A new pair of hands reached around her to pull at her own. "Let go!"

  There is danger. Once again, Cindy Sovalik's voice rang in Kate's ears.

  There is danger.

  Shuddering, her grip loosened, falling away from Toni's throat, and with a great, hawking cough Toni sucked air into her lungs.

  "Jesus, Kate!" Chris Heller looked out at her from a terrified face.

  Kate crawled to her feet, to stand on unsteady legs.

  Toni looked up and saw her. "Fucking bitch," she croaked, and kicked out, connected with Kate's right knee.

  A sharp shooting pain shot up Kate's right leg and it almost buckled.

  At once the rage was back. Without stopping to think, she swooped down on the other woman and forced her to her knees in front of the wellhead.

  "Lick it," she shouted over the roar of the wind, shoving Toni's face close to the pipe.

  "Kate! Are you crazy?" Chris said, trying ineffectually to separate the two women.

  "No," Kate yelled, shrugging him off. "Lick it." The wind howled.

  The snow swirled around their heads and slipped beneath their knees.

  "No," Toni croaked.

  "Kate!" Chris said. "No!"

  "Lick it," Kate growled for the third time. She caught both Toni's hands in a grip that made the brunette cry out and with the other hand pinched Toni's nose between a thumb and forefinger. The tour guide thrashed about wearily, trying to free herself.

  Kate's gulping breaths scorched her lungs, her thundering pulse battered her eardrums, the muscles in her legs quivered in bewildered exhaustion, but her hands and her voice remained relentless. "Lick that pipe!"