by Неизвестный
“She came by to tell me. Your office is only a couple of blocks out of the way.”
Justin stared back at him.
“Justin, dammit. This isn’t a game. Lambale may be hurt or dead. If Kris knows—”
“All right,” Justin said irritably, sitting up. “We found about twenty-four hundred dollars in twenties in a cookie tin under the floor.”
Jackpot. “You took it?”
“Kris did. I tried to talk her out of it. Tampering with evidence, but she wouldn’t listen and made me keep quiet.”
Made you? “What else?”
“There was a letter from Kris to her mother in there and a card with a number on it.”
“Letter?”
“It was the letter Kris wrote to her mother telling her when she was coming up. I think Vern intercepted it before Evie saw it.”
“What was the address?”
“Evie, care of the AWARE shelter.”
“The AWARE shelter? Then how did Vern get hold of it?”
Justin grinned wickedly. “Maybe they’re not as liberated as they make out.”
“And the card with the number?”
“It was a five-digit number that started with a nine. I thought it was a valley phone number, but when Kris tried it she got a recording saying the number was not in service.”
“Did you hear it?”
“No.”
“Do you have the number?”
“Kris took it.”
Barrett looked at the phone at the other end of the table and then at the shelves. “Get me a phone book.”
Justin left the room. He was back in a second with one, which he handed to Barrett. Barrett flipped through it, found the page he wanted and ran his finger down the “L’s.”
“Does 789-1378 sound right?” he asked.
“No. It had two sets of double digits in it.”
Barrett thumbed through the book again, found the number for the Rain Country Gallery and reached across the table for the phone. He punched it in and waited, listening to the rings. Alvilde Lambale answered.
“This is Barrett. Do you have a second line at home that’s unlisted? You do?” He wrote a number on his pad, thanked her, and hung up. He wrote several similar numbers above and below it, spun the pad around and pushed it in front of Justin.
“Is it one of these?”
Justin picked it out immediately.
Barrett hit the speaker button on the phone and keyed the number. After the fourth ring, Alvilde’s accented English assured them that their call would be returned promptly. Barrett broke the connection.
“She lied to me,” Justin said.
Sunday he’s a hero, Wednesday he’s a sap. “You better hope your girlfriend is a reasonable girl,” he said, “or you’re in trouble. Vern had to be blackmailing Lambale, probably for something he did to Evie. Kris is bright enough to figure that out and impulsive enough to do something unpleasant about it.”
Barrett’s blood began to move—this girl would be one wild ride.
__________
“That one there.” The bartender partly uncurled his forefinger and pointed back into the far corner. “The one with the beard.”
Kris looked and saw five men seated around a table with glasses of beer in front of them and blue smoke coiling up from cigarettes. “They all got beards,” she said, but she knew which one he meant. Ash’s beard was thick and gray and squared off a few inches below his chin; it rose in front of his ears in neat lines and merged into a gray fringe that circled his head. His face was lined and leathery like Ben’s; he sat quietly, listening to the others.
He spotted her as soon as she started toward them, squeezing around the packed chairs, a beer in her hand. His eyes followed her, but she avoided them, looking down at the chairs she was pushing through. As she approached, he spoke to one of the others, who looked around at her in surprise, then pulled an empty chair from a neighboring table. Kris slipped into it and the men quieted, looking her over.
Ash leaned forward, his hand lifting from his lap and reached across the table. “Jake Ash.” He shook her hand. The others in turn stretched out their hands and spoke their names.
Kris introduced herself when she’d shaken the last hand. From Jake, she felt an instant sharpening of interest.
“Ben Stewart used to be friends with a Gabriel,” he said.
“Evie, my mother,” Kris said.
“Good man, Ben.”
And Evie? Kris shouldered out of her parka, letting it flop over the back of the chair.
“Where’s Ben been? I’ve haven’t seen him since last winter.”
“Isn’t he up the Alatna?”
“I thought he threw it in.”
“Yeah, when he met Evie and had the kid.”
“Did they go Outside?”
“Ben, Outside? It’d be kinder to shoot him.”
“Didn’t the kid die or something?”
Kris sipped her beer and let them talk around her. As she listened, she realized that they didn’t know what to do with her. A stranger, a woman at their table, a break in their routine they didn’t know how to handle. It didn’t bother her and she sat with her beer listening to the conversation rise and fall. It wandered from Ben, without anybody asking her what she might know about him, or why she’d suddenly appeared at their table, to nights on the trail, makes of snowmobiles, gossip about other trappers, getting ready for the season, the price of furs, Outsiders in the bush—weekend trappers catching each other’s dogs, leg hold traps, environmentalists…
“Never seen a wolf kill.”
Kris sensed a change of tone. The man speaking was younger, in his mid-thirties, with several layers of gray and blue woolen underwear showing at his neck, under a worn flannel shirt. He turned toward her, his elbow on the table and finger outstretched.
“What do they think? That it’s Disneyland out there? Ever see wolves rip the belly out of a living moose? Ever hear a moose scream? A leg hold trap is like dying in your sleep by comparison.”
The others had dropped out of the conversation and were watching her. It was clear to Kris that they’d heard this before.
“Fucking greenies don’t know what nature is. Got to keep the balance of nature they say. What do they think the wolf do? Say OK, boys, we’ve eaten enough caribou, time to lay off and eat mice until the herd grows back?
“You know,” he whitened around the base of his nose, “once a man could raise a family in the bush. He’d hunt his moose in the fall, trap during the winter, and work a little placer claim in the summer. Now you can’t do any of that: the wolf have eaten the moose, the greenies have knocked fur prices too low to make it pay, and they’ve shut down mining because they’re upset about a little dirty water. Have you ever seen the Yukon? What’s another ton of dirt going to do to it?”
He pulled into himself, stretching his lower lip and showing his bottom teeth. “It makes me so mad, I could kill somebody.”
Kris set her glass on the table, twirled it with her fingers. “Why don’t you?” she asked evenly.
“I’m going to,” he said, but his bluff had been called and he sat back his chair, quietly fuming. Kris caught hidden smiles on some of the other faces.
Jake looked over their heads to the bar and made a circular motion with his finger.
“Are you looking for Ben?” he asked Kris.
“No. Ezekiel Damon. Do you know where I can find him?”
“Ezekiel,” said another. “There’s a strange one.”
“Is he still out on the Sixtymile?”
“No, he quit a few years ago. Run out by the tourists.”
“What he’d do with his team?”
“Still has it. He’s off the Elliott, up toward Livengood.”
“That was one amazing team. I saw him come into Bettles at the end of the season back in the nineties. He said “whoa” once and the dogs just stopped. He didn’t set a brake, tie off. or nothing. He was in the store for half an hour and when he came back they were sit
ting there waiting for him.”
A waitress appeared with a pitcher of beer and fresh glasses. Kris reached for her wallet. Jake caught her eye and shook his head.
When they’d finished pouring the beer, she asked, “What mile on the Elliott?”
They started arguing again until finally one pulled a napkin out of the stack in the center of the table and began drawing a map. When he’d finished, he turned it around in front of Kris. “This is where it takes off from the Steese.” He pointed to a branch off the main road. “It’s more than twenty, but less than thirty miles after that. Look for a hill. You’ll come over the top of it and on the left is an old pit.” He drew it in. “Go another half mile or so and his road will take off to the left. He doesn’t plow it so his truck will be up by the road. That’s as close as we can get you.” He pushed the napkin toward her.
“Thanks.” She folded the map and stuck it in her pocket.
“You’re welcome,” he said formally.
They looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to tell her story now. Kris lifted her glass and drank. The silence lingered, but before it grew uncomfortable they turned back to each other and started up their stories of the bush again. When Kris had finished her beer, Jake reached across the table, pointing to the napkin in her pocket. She handed it to him. Borrowing the pen, he wrote his name and number in the corner.
“If you need anything,” he said and pushed it back to her.
“Thanks,” she said and got up, lifting her parka off the back of the chair. She nodded to the table and left.
Thursday, November 19
Kris punched the trip meter.
More than twenty and less than thirty miles. She turned north off the Steese on to the Elliott Highway. The lights of an occasional car raced past her heading into town. Her lane was free and Kris kept the Subaru moving. She’d gotten a later start than she’d hoped for. Ringer’d wanted the truck today and there had been a whispered tiff between him and Annie this morning. In the end Kris had dropped Annie off at the library and promised to be back to pick her up by four. “Don’t leave me waiting on a street corner,” Annie said. But if Ezekiel wasn’t at his cabin, she wasn’t going to leave until he came back, even if it meant abandoning Annie and huddling all day in front of the Subaru’s heating vents.
The cabin had been dark when she’d gotten back last night. But Wally started barking as she drove in and she’d tripped over some construction of the boys’ while groping in the dark for her bed. She felt everyone in the cabin rouse, mutter, and twist around in their sheets. The boys had dropped off again, but rustlings and caught breaths from the curtained bed continued for a long time, leaving her stiff and awake long after Ringer and Annie had quit.
The road bobbed and weaved over the hills. The oncoming yellow lights thinned out to one or two cars every five minutes or so and had disappeared completely by the time she reached twenty mile. She slowed, peering into the trees on the left, looking for the pit after each hill she’d topped. At twenty-seven mile, she found it and a little farther on she saw a pickup parked off the road in a space that had been shoveled out of the snow thrown up by the plows.
Kris turned around in the road and pulled up behind the truck against the snow bank. She got out of the car, leaving it idling—she wanted it to start when she got back—and closed the door quietly. If he still had his team, they’d scent her soon enough. She walked around the truck and found the path. The morning had grayed enough to see it cut through the smooth, unmarked snow. It led down off the road, twisting between the slender, widely-spaced aspen and birch. Footsteps had beaten the path into the snow, and the air was cold enough—maybe ten or fifteen below—that the packed snow squeaked under her feet.
Kris headed down and when the path leveled out, she stopped. Sharp and unmuffled, she heard the rhythmic thwack of an ax striking wood. Farther down the path, something rippled in the dim light. She tensed, ready to run. A white shape the color of the snow jogged toward her. It was a dog. It stopped, not making a sound, and watched her. Then it came forward, its paws flicking in and out at the end of long forelegs, its ears pointed and alert. Ten feet away it leapt off the path and hopped through the deep snow around her, jumping back into the path behind her. Kris stepped forward and it followed, shepherding her into a clearing ringed by the small, leafless trees. It was lighter here, the morning gray unfiltered by the branches. A cabin sat to one side of the clearing and next to it a man stood with his back to her and an ax over his head. He snapped it down, exploding a round of spruce into splinterless halves, which spun off the chopping block into the snow. He reached down, lifted another round from the pile at his feet, set it butt-end on the block and lifted the ax; it fell and the cycle repeated.
Next to the cabin were stacks of split wood; across the clearing were two open sheds, stuffed with scraps of lumber, stacks of old shingles, stove pipes, PVC tubing, a window frame, and other junk. Between the sheds, capped with snow, was a row of fifty-five gallon drums. Littered around them were empty blue Blazo cans. She missed it at first, but when her eyes came back around she saw the dog yard through the trees at the far end of the clearing. The dogs were on top of their houses, staring at her, quivering silently; their tension explosive.
The white dog that had followed her in trotted past her around the pile of split halves and sat in front of Ezekiel. He lowered his ax and twisted around, staring into the trees toward Kris. She moved to give him something to see and with a short swipe he lifted and buried the ax in the chopping block and walked toward her.
He was tall and came closer than a stranger should. Standing over her in the half-light, he looked dried and desiccated, like jerked meat. His face was scarred and pitted; blood vessels had broken in his nose and cheeks, black framed glasses hid his eyes and a grayed, untrimmed beard fell in spikes from his chin. Ice rimmed the mustache under his nose and a ball of frozen breath dangled from the hairs at the corner of his mouth.
Kris looked steeply up at him and, for a moment, she quailed. In him was an authority that his ravaged face and the baleful lenses of his glasses pressed down on her.
“Why are they quiet?” she asked impulsively, nodding to the dogs.
He lifted his fist and opened a finger. The dogs exploded. Their violence unleashed, they charged, surging against their chains, their hind legs thrusting against the snow, front paws flailing the air. Some barked, most howled, their muzzles lifted to the sky. He closed his hand and the dogs stopped instantly.
“My minions,” he said.
Kris fought to relax her shoulders. “I’m Kris Gabriel, a friend of Ben’s,” she said. “You’re Ezekiel Damon?”
“I am.” He took off his gloves, they were cotton. He didn’t offer his hand. “Come in.”
Kris followed him into the cabin. It was dark. Ezekiel struck a match, lifted the glass chimney of a kerosene lantern, and lit the wick. He set it on a table by a window—a gray square in the wall. He lifted another lantern off a shelf and lit it, placing it on the other side of the table. But even with two lights, the cabin was buried in shadows. It was small and built by a person whose only interest was utility. The floor was unpainted plywood; the basin and slop bucket in the corner were framed by two-by-fours toe-nailed into the floor and side wall. Shelves made out of peeled spruce poles were fastened onto two of the walls. On them were bottles and cans, loose tools, scraps of tin, spools of thread, coils of string and twine and books. Row and row of books browned and greasy-looking from the soot of winter fires. Under the shelves were open boxes and crates of fabric, dried food, pots and pans, old magazines and clothes and forgotten projects.
In the bush, Kris knew, nothing is thrown away. She sat in a chair made of slab wood, pulled off her mittens, and unzipped her parka, throwing it over the back of the seat. Ezekiel removed his glasses and, with a thumbnail, scraped off the frost that had grown on the lenses when they’d hit the warm and moist indoor air. After they were clear, he opened the damper on the wood stove, li
fted the top, and put several sticks of split spruce, fiddling with the logs to get them right. To the side of the stove, was a ladder nailed to the cabin wall leading up to a loft.
Ezekiel pulled a small cook stove from under the plywood counter by the basin and set it on top. He poured Blazo on it and touched a match to the gas. The flame flared high, lighting Ezekiel’s face with wild yellow streaks. He was older than Kris had imagined. The skin over his cheeks was sunken and when he spoke again, she saw black gaps between stained teeth.
“Ben is a good man,” Ezekiel said, turning on the stove when the flame died down; it roared like a tiny jet engine. He put an enameled pot over the blue flame and reached up to a shelf for mugs.
“Yeah.” Kris wasn’t sure what to say. “He hurt his back.” Ezekiel didn’t respond and Kris felt awkward. “They had to take him to the hospital,” she added.
“Ben ran a good line,” Ezekiel said. “He could skin out a mouse without nicking the hide.”
They were quiet, waiting for the water to boil. Ezekiel filled the mugs and dropped in tea bags. Red Rose. They sat at the table by the side window. Behind Ezekiel, the undampened fire took off and Kris could hear the snap of exploding pitch. Ezekiel sat straight in his chair and gazed down at her. The wavering flames of the lanterns reflected in his lenses.
“Evie Gabriel was my mother,” Kris said.
Ezekiel didn’t respond.
“She was murdered last week.”
“It is better that way,” Ezekiel said unexpectedly. “The burden that he has had to bear.”
“What burden?”
Ezekiel said nothing.
“I’m looking for Corvus.”
“He’s not here,” Ezekiel said.
“I know that. What do you know about him? Do you know how he disappeared?”
“Talk to Ben.”
Was Ben still angry at her? If she’d risked another day in Juneau before coming north, would he have calmed down enough to talk to her; would he have known things about Corvus that hadn’t been in the police reports?
“Why did you forge Ben’s name on his Longevity Bonus stubs?” she asked.