Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  “Which means he knows how to use a rifle,” Old Sam said, echoing Senta’s words. “Eberhard and Klemens are the only two of this bunch who do.”

  “Dieter?” Demetri said.

  “Dieter has read way too much Robert Ruark,” Kate said. “He knows which bells to push and which whistles to blow, but if I had to bet, I’d say this is his first shot—you should pardon the expression—at hunting. He gut-shot that moose yesterday.”

  “That don’t count, girl.” Old Sam curled his lip. “Dieter isn’t a hunter, he’s a collector. He wasn’t going to mess up his trophy. He wants to hang it on the wall of the boardroom for all his flunkies to admire. He probably hit right what he was aiming at.”

  “You could be right, uncle,” Kate said. “I think we can safely say we shouldn’t turn our back on any of them. Now, can any of you remember if Klemens helped arrange things so that Jack’s and Old Sam’s groups would be hunting side by side? Specifically, to arrange it so he’d be hunting next to Fedor?”

  The three men looked at each other. “I don’t remember anything definite,” Jack said. “Klemens did disappear on me, like I told you.”

  Demetri shook his head. Old Sam shrugged. “If he did, I didn’t hear him.”

  “Hell,” Kate said. “Okay, how do we get them out of camp?”

  “I’m going to go out there,” Jack said, “and suggest that we take the four-wheelers up the trail to the ridge. We’ve got, what, eight passengers, four each in the trailers.”

  “Who’s gonna drive ’em?” Old Sam demanded.

  “You and Demetri.”

  “While you and Kate will be doing what, exactly?” Old Sam inquired suspiciously.

  For the first time Jack grinned. “I wish. Get your mind out of the gutter, old man. Kate and I will be rounding up the weapons and locking them down.”

  “Oh,” Old Sam said, his sarcasm elaborate, “we’re going to tell them their weapons are not needed, headed up into bear country?”

  “We’re going to tell them it’s a sight-seeing trip, that the guides will be armed, and that they don’t need to lug theirs along, too.”

  “Eberhard won’t go for it,” Demetri said.

  Jack looked at Kate. She shook her head. “Okay, so he doesn’t, that’s still only one weapon in the bunch.” He paused. “And you might want to keep watch. If he sets it down somewhere at the edge of a cliff, it’d be nifty if you could sort of accidentally knock it all the way over.”

  Old Sam winced. “I hope George insures these trips.”

  “Dieter will probably want to take his, too,” Kate said. “I don’t get a feeling from the rest of them that they’d much mind never picking up a gun again.”

  “Then that’s two against two,” Jack said, “and what I said about Eberhard goes for Dieter, too, especially if he’s the one who pushed Klemens’s button. If you can separate either or both men from their weapons, do it. In the meantime, like Kate says, don’t turn your backs on any of these bastards, at least not unless you’ve got someone else with you.”

  “I heard that,” Old Sam said. “There are three people I trust enough to turn my back on in this camp, and two of ’em won’t be with me this afternoon.” He grinned at Kate. “And sometimes I’m not so sure about you, girl.”

  The plan developed a snag right away, of course, as such plans always do.

  Seven of the hunters acquiesced in the plan for their afternoon’s entertainment, especially after Kate pointed out the band of gray cloud engulfing the eastern horizon and noted its progress toward them since morning. “Might be your only chance to look at the view this trip,” she said. “Lots of critters to look at, too.” Probably not the best argument to use, as some of them had already been as up close and personal with a variety of Alaskan critters as they cared to get.

  No one said so, though. It would have been unanimous except for Klemens, who declined the invitation to go sight-seeing politely but firmly. Kate frowned. This would mess everything up. “No, you should go, Klemens. The view is breathtaking, you can see all the way to Anchorage. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Klemens smiled but spoke with finality. “I have seen enough of the Alaskan Bush, thank you, Katerina. And the others won’t want me. I will go to the creek and fish.”

  Before she could expostulate Jack pinched her on the ass. He had never before done anything like that, or at least not in company. He was saved from almost certain annihilation only when Old Sam and Demetri rolled out the four-wheelers and the trailers. When she turned back, Klemens had picked up rod and reel and was walking to the creek.

  On first sight Kate had admired the way he carried himself, pride made manifest in the squareness of his shoulders, the straightness of his spine, the angle of his chin. Now there was a definite trace of a stoop, something awkward and uncertain about his movements. His face was devoid of feeling, the lines in it deeply carved, the eyes sunken and blank.

  Jack’s voice murmured in her ear. “Probably just as well. Better he should stay here where we can keep an eye on him.”

  She rounded on him. “If you ever pinch me like that again, I’ll—”

  His eyes laughed down into hers, and the words died on her lips. “I guess I can pinch my roommate once in a while if I want to.”

  She opened her mouth again to remove any such bizarre notion from his puny little mind, and heard some stranger say, a smile in her voice, “Only once in a while.”

  Good god, she thought afterward, watching him help load the trailers. Was this what cohabitation did to you, turn you into a simpering idiot, ready, willing and able to be pawed by the obnoxious male you permitted, under protest and only after long apprenticeship, to reside in your once supremely inviolate home? A home that had known no permanent testosterone since Kate’s father died?

  She grinned suddenly. Maybe it did.

  Dieter and Eberhard, both armed, climbed into the first seat behind Demetri. Gunther got into the seat behind them, brown nose as usual never far from Dieter’s ass. Senta chose to go with Old Sam, who saw her into her seat with devoted attention to how well her slacks fit. She smiled at him in thanks, giving it her all. Old Sam rolled an appreciative eye in Jack’s direction. Hubert and Gregor got into the seat behind Senta, and Berg behind them.

  Jack tucked a full pack, coolers of pop and beer and a couple of thermoses into each trailer. “Snacks and drinks,” he said. “Enjoy the view. I promise you, it’s a beaut.”

  There were a few strained but polite smiles. The engines on the four-wheelers turned over and the little caravan rolled out of camp and up to the top of the airstrip. Kate and Jack stood still until the sound of the engines had faded away. She jerked her head toward the creek. “Did you notice Klemens?”

  “Not particularly,” Jack said. “Why, what?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, he looked a little gray around the edges. All of a sudden older and kind of, I don’t know, shakier.”

  Jack stared at the diminishing cloud of dust retreating up the strip. “It’s one thing to kill in war, Kate. Usually whoever you’re trying to kill is trying to kill you, too, and you can make it out to be a matter of simple self-defense. Besides, you’re under orders, sworn to uphold and defend the constitution of whatever your country is from all enemies foreign and domestic. And usually your government has done a pretty good job of demonizing the enemy so that they’re hardly human to you anymore.”

  He paused. “It’s another thing entirely to kill, either accidentally or in cold blood, in peace time, someone you work with every day.” He looked at her. “In my more fanciful moments, I like to think that when you commit a crime as heinous as murder, you lose some part of yourself. Some piece of you is forever broken, some ingredient essential to the composition of your humanity, that one thing that keeps you a step ahead of the apes is irrevocably lost to you, and you can’t ever get it back.” He paused. “Most perps never know it’s gone. Some do, though. Klemens would be one of those guys. I’m no
t surprised he’s looking old. He should.”

  “Maybe. Probably.” Still, Kate was troubled.

  “Let’s get those rifles under wraps.”

  “I want to toss the cabins, too.”

  He grinned. “Great minds think alike. Although I doubt these bozos packed in a motive for murder with them.”

  “Probably not. I still want to look.”

  “Agreed. What do we do if Klemens catches us at it?”

  Kate shrugged. “We don’t let him.” She eyed him measuringly. “What did you give them for snacks?”

  He looked limp with innocence. “Peanut butter on pilot bread.”

  “Jack. Shame on you.” Kate’s voice was shocked. “Feeding someone peanut butter on pilot bread isn’t just manslaughter, it’s premeditated murder.” She knotted a hand in his shirt and hauled him down to her level for a kiss.

  *

  The rifles were easy to find, most of them leaning up against the walls of the cabins with the ammunition stacked neatly on the floor or table beside them. Dieter’s Purdeys were in their gray carrying case beneath his bunk. “Where do we put them?” Jack said.

  There was a pile of old burlap gunnysacks in the garage, marked with the faded logo of the Mat-Su Valley Spud Coop and the year 1968. Clouds of dust billowed forth when they were picked up and they smelled of mold, but they were still sound of fabric. Kate filled them with rifles and ammunition and tied off the mouths of the sacks with duct tape. There were six sacks when they were done, fastened together in bundles of two with another length of duct tape.

  Jack regarded the result with satisfaction. “Some people say that the computer is the finest product of human civilization. Others argue that it’s the VCR remote, or maybe Ziploc bags. I say it’s hundred-mile-an-hour tape. I’ve seen it secure a splint around a bone, keep the roof on a house during a chinook and the strut of a plane together in the air.”

  “I feel like I should start singing the national anthem or something,” Kate said, giving the duct tape around the mouth of the last gunnysack a final twist.

  Jack held up a forefinger. “I’m not done. Duct tape, it is said by I forget who, is like the Force. It’s light on one side, dark on the other and it binds the universe together.”

  Kate groaned. “Are you done now?”

  “There is no finer example of the mind of man at work,” Jack proclaimed. “Now I’m done.”

  A pair at a time, they carried the gunnysacks down to the empty fuel tank next to the runway. There was an access hatch on top of the tank, and after much sweat, swearing and the vigorous application of the largest monkey wrench to be found in the garage, they got it open.

  Jack sniffed. “Smells like diesel.”

  “To fuel the generator,” Kate said, nodding. “I thought I told you.”

  “No, I mean there is probably still some down there on the bottom. All sealed up like this, it hasn’t had a chance to evaporate, and even if it had there would still be some residue.”

  They were kneeling side by side in front of the hole. He looked at her. “So how do you want to do this? You want to just toss them in?” He looked at the case holding the Purdeys.

  Kate looked down into the black well of the tank. “If they are in this tank with the hatch on tight, they can’t shoot at us with them.”

  “Works for me,” Jack said, and didn’t even flinch when the first bundle landed on the bottom of the tank, with not exactly a splash but certainly with a sodden sort of splat. The gray case was too wide to fit in and the Purdeys went in one at a time and the case was tossed into a thick stand of alder growing nearby.

  “Okay,” Jack said, standing at the foot of the ladder and wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans. “Where do we start?”

  “With Dieter’s cabin,” Kate said. “And let’s do a good job. Jack. Eberhard isn’t the kind of a guy not to have a second piece for backup.”

  “I’ve always loved the way your mind works,” Jack said. “Thank God you never took up a life of crime.”

  She remembered thinking much the same thing when she was burgling his ex-wife’s house the previous October and flashed him a brazen and totally unrepentant grin.

  His heart skipped a beat. It didn’t bother him. He was used to it.

  *

  The cabins were lined up on both sides of the trail paralleling the creek, bisecting the triangle of land between airstrip and creek bed. Six of them were in good repair. The seventh was falling into the Nakochna, restrained only by the same length of cable that was holding up a retaining wall built of all the junk George and his procession of lady friends and admirers had hauled from the camp and thrown over. There was an old boiler, a ton of toothed gear wheels and other engine parts, what looked like the rusted cylinders off an old steam engine, a dozen truck and tractor tires and other, less identifiable items mixed in with a lot of loose gravel. There were also half a dozen boulders two and four feet across. For now, the current had been balked of its prey.

  “A good effort,” Jack said, surveying the scene, “but one heavier than usual snowfall and a warm, fast spring and it’s good-bye, cabin. Can you see Klemens?”

  Kate grabbed a branch of an alder and leaned out over the bank, peering up the creek. The bank was ten feet high at this point and Jack winced and looked away as she swayed out over the edge. “Nope.”

  “Maybe I should check on him one more time.”

  “You’ve already snuck down there twice, Jack, and he hadn’t moved from one time to the next. Let’s just keep watch, all right? If we hear him we can duck into the brush.”

  “Fine,” Jack said. “It’s thick enough. Why doesn’t George cut it back here the way he does the yard?”

  “And ruin the berry picking?” Kate said, shocked.

  “Forgive me, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Jack said, dodging a patch of devil’s club at the last minute.

  The cabins were lined up three and four on a side and staggered among the trees and brush. While no cabin was directly across from the next, neither was it more than twenty or thirty feet from its neighbor, thus satisfying the needs of both privacy and safety. Jack took a moment to admire the care taken in the arrangement.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Kate said, “come on.”

  Jack muttered something about ferrets and holes and dogs and bones. Kate ignored him and led the way into Eberhard and Dieter’s cabin.

  “Dieter likes toys,” Jack observed, who in five minutes had unearthed a cellular phone, a personal pager and a Game Boy with a color screen loaded with Tetris in 3-D. He tried the phone. It wasn’t working. The battery on the Game Boy was dead. There was a selection of tapes, all opera, mostly Wagner with a few Mozart thrown in for variety, or maybe just for Dieter to prove how cosmopolitan he was. Unfortunately, Jack thought with a hidden smile, there was no longer anything available on which to play them. Such a shame.

  There was a Global Positioning System locator, a piece of equipment that worked out its position from triangulation with satellites twenty miles up. This toy did work, flashing their precise latitude and longitude on the digital display, and, when asked, giving the location of the nearest airport, Skwentna.

  “This puppy looks high-end enough to pinpoint our position on the moon,” Jack said, not without admiration. “Dieter likes his toys, all right, and he doesn’t mind paying top dollar for them, either.”

  There was also a handheld computer that told the time in all twenty-four zones, changed Deutschmarks into dollars, francs, pounds, lira, ringgits, won, yen and yuan, and had an address book with over three hundred names in it.

  “What the hell’s a ringgit when it’s at home?” Jack said. He scrolled through the names without recognizing any. “I suppose we wouldn’t, unless Dieter has been donating large sums of money to American political parties whose agents’ names have been lately headlined in sound bites on the ten o’clock news.”

  “What?” Kate said.

  Jack, seated on Dieter’s bunk, looked at her for a
pensive moment. “I think the sooner I move to the Park the better. The world is too much with me in Anchorage.”

  Boxes of ammunition with RWS markings were stacked haphazardly on the table. Jack tipped the only open one over, spilling out the nickel-plated shells. Kate fished out the round she’d found in the creek.

  “A perfect match,” Jack said.

  “Perfect.”

  “In the immortal words of Linda Ellerbee, I’m whelmed by your enthusiasm. Hey. What’s this?”

  “What?” She peered around him.

  There was a folded sheet of paper in the bottom of the ammunition box, as if someone had dumped the shells, put in the paper and loaded the shells back in on top of it. Jack opened it up and laid it flat on the table. They stood staring down at it.

  It was a letter addressed to Herr Dieter Ulbricht with a logo at the top, and no matter how many times Kate read it, it still said the same thing: INTERPOL, in large black block letters.

  “Interpol?” Kate said, stirring herself to speak. Awed silence was all very well but, really, it was just another law enforcement organization. “I feel like I’ve just wandered into the middle of a James Bond movie.”

  It was two sheets long with neatly spaced paragraphs, unfortunately all in German. “Shit,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, blueberry bear shit,” Kate said, holding the letter down by the corners with the tips of her fingers. “Dieter must have had this on him yesterday. Look. Every paragraph begins with a name, and look at the names.” Her forefinger traced down, flipped the page, traced down again.

  Jack whistled. “What do you know, the gang’s all here. Eberhard, Klemens, Hendrik, Fedor, Hubert, Gregor, Berg.” He flipped back and forth. “But no Senta. Why not, I wonder?”

  She looked up at him. “What does Interpol do, exactly?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. It’s an international police organization, run out of Switzerland, I think.”

  “Can you hire them?”