Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 07 - Breakup

by Breakup(lit)

  of what Kate was going to do, approved Wholeheartedly and

  wasn't about to do anything that might cause her to think twice.

  Her second self scoffed at all of them and instructed Kate to pay no

  attention. She obeyed without question. It seemed there was no master

  clutch on this Cat. A pedal in front of her right foot acted as a

  decelerator and allowed her to change gears. There were

  213 still two tracks, right and left, and two steering levers, one for

  each, and two brakes, one for each. The hydraulics on the blade control

  lever took some getting used to and after she dropped the blade for the

  second time she was glad Mac hadn't put a floor under his tractor shed.

  She stepped on the decelerator, raised the lockout bar to put the tracks

  in gear and let out the decelerator. The wide metal tracks began rolling

  beneath the bright yellow body of the machine, right out the door. She

  found a switch for the lights. In the sudden glare people scattered like

  marbles.

  "Shugak," Bobby yelled, "you are out of your fucking mind!"

  The Cat rolled forward, in a direct line for Mandy's truck. After all it

  had been through during the last two days, Kate could almost hear it

  give a pitiful moan. At the last possible moment she stopped grabbing

  for the nonexistent master clutch, stepped on the decelerator, thought

  her way into a left turn, pulled back a little on the left track lever

  and pushed forward a little on the right lever, took her foot off the

  decelerator and started forward again. The Cat swerved abruptly away

  from the truck and onto the tractor trail leading from the mine, leaving

  no more than a six-inch gouge down the right-hand side of the pickup.

  Not fatal, not even serious, and she accepted her second self's

  congratulations with pride.

  Everyone else ran for the trucks. They all thought she was insane but

  nobody wanted to miss a minute of it, not even Chopper Jim, who removed

  his hat and jacket and tie so as to be less identifiable as the

  enforcement arm of the law.

  Choking from the exhaust, deafened by the engine, eyes straining to see

  beyond the floodlights mounted on the cab, Kate took the Cat down the

  tractor trail that separated Devlin's mine from the road and roared into

  an enthusiastic left turn that doubled the size of the intersection with

  one swipe.

  The light-headed feeling persisted. She laughed once, a mad sound that

  should have alarmed her but didn't. It should have

  214 alarmed Stewart, too; instead, he laughed back at her, a husky,

  deep-voiced sound of pure male enjoyment. "Jesus," he said. "You really

  are something."

  A responsive shiver traveled up her spine. The aches and pains of her

  various wounds were hushed. She didn't question what put her in the

  Cat's seat, she didn't try to rationalize inviting Stewart along for the

  ride, she didn't attempt to talk herself out of any of it. She couldn't

  bring Carol Stewart back to life; worse, she couldn't bring Carol's

  murderer to justice. Ben and Cindy Bingley might kill each other before

  the solution she had set in motion this evening reached them. She

  couldn't unwreck George's plane, she couldn't give Margery and Richard

  Baker the society babe daughter they had always wanted, she couldn't

  make the jet engine not fall off the 747, she couldn't make spring be

  over and summer begin.

  She couldn't bring her grandmother back to lighten her own increasingly

  heavy load.

  But there was something she could do to make things a little safer for

  her family and friends and neighbors, to restore a little order to the

  Park.

  She laughed again.

  Stewart's deep voice was amused. "Ride 'em cowgirl."

  A bright, slashing smile was her reply. His grip tightened on the dash.

  It was two miles up the old railroad roadbed to the turnoff to the

  homestead area, and along the way Kate practiced moving the enormous

  steel blade on the front of the machine up and down, remembering as she

  did most of the vocabulary required to skin a Cat, some of which would

  have put George Perry to the blush. She even tried her hand at grading a

  section of the roadbed, digging up fifty feet of it before she got the

  hang of just where the bottom edge of the blade was in relation to the

  controls.

  "She really is out of her fucking mind," Bobby said, wrestling his

  pickup over one of the speed bumps Kate had inadvertently left behind.

  215 Dinah and Dan did not disagree.

  Jim, right behind him in Kate's truck with Bernie riding shotgun, had an

  inconvenient attack of responsibility and wondered if perhaps, after

  all, he ought to stop this before it went any farther. "Think I should

  stop her?" he asked Bernie.

  "Think you can?" Bernie said.

  They looked at each other. "Nah," they said in unison.

  The turnoff to the homestead area appeared and Kate cautiously

  negotiated the Cat onto it. By then it was purring beneath her hands,

  the purr of a Bengal tiger, one prepared to turn on her the minute her

  attention was distracted, but a purr nonetheless.

  She remembered pretty much how the homestead area was laid out and who

  owned what from the flyer the state had mailed everyone in the Park. The

  sixteen forty-acre lots were crazy-quilted over a short, broad valley

  and a gradual rise ending in a small plateau. The plateau dropped off to

  the Kanuyaq River, into which all the streams in the area drained. The

  Jeppsens were lower down and on the left, the Kreugers a little higher

  and on the right. The only place their properties touched was northeast

  corner to southwest corner. According to the terms of the sale, the

  disputed road was supposed to have right-of-way over both borders, as

  was standard in state land transactions-Kate was pretty sure that it was

  in fact the law-but the Jeppsens had in their infinite wisdom decided to

  deny the Kreugers access to their own property; that is to say, access

  over the portion that belonged to them, right of way or no. This would

  have entailed the Kreugers building an entirely new road from some other

  access point, an access point located on Park land, a plan to which Dan

  O'Brian could be expected to take instant and vociferous exception.

  It was obvious where the Jeppsens' land ended and the Kreugers' began,

  even in the lurching light of the Cat's floods. As soon as the one-lane

  track crossed into Kreuger territory, the scenery changed from overgrown

  Alaskan bush to near lunar desolation. Kate stepped on the decelerator

  and paused to size up the situation, the Cat rumbling a protest.

  216 The Jeppsens had dug holes big enough to float a boat, and a

  winter's worth of snow had melted inside them, the water in several

  coming up almost to the top of the Cat's treads. Breakup, with its

  twenty-four-hour freeze-and-thaw cycle, had nibbled around the edges of

  the original holes and doubled the size of some of them. Entire trees,

  not an asset frivolously uprooted in the Bush, had been felled across

  the track, trunks splintered by an inexpert but indisputably thorough

  hand. Sev
eral crooked manmade ditches traversed the width of the road,

  and in one stretch the floodlights winked off a scattering of metallic

  objects. Kate didn't stop; if someone had sprinkled a handful of screws

  or nails-galvanized steel, from the silver reflection-across the path,

  it wouldn't matter to the Cat's metal treads. She hoped.

  Even in a Caterpillar tractor the ride was rough and rocky, as much

  because of the attempts made at repair as the initial sabotage. The

  Kreugers had used the felled trees and what loose, unfrozen gravel they

  could find to fill in the holes, rerouting the track around the ones

  that weren't stable enough to drive over, but it looked as though they

  were fighting a desperate rearguard action against a superior and much

  more destructive force, with little hope of victory.

  "No wonder they went to the mattresses," Kate said out loud, a fine

  phrase she'd picked up from Mario Puzo.

  Stewart chuckled, and again she felt that shiver of response ripple up

  her spine. She dropped the Cat's blade with a solid CHUNK! and let out

  the decelerator.

  The enormous blade scooped up mud, snow, dirt, boulders and trees

  regardless of size, weight or shape, filled in holes and tamped them

  down again beneath the crushing weight of the tracks. This continued all

  the way up the gentle incline past the turnoff for the Jeppsens'

  homestead and well into the Kreugers' front yard, where Kay and Wayne

  Kreuger, one holding a rifle, shirt bulging from the bandaged shoulder

  beneath it, the other with a bandage around his head, stood on their

  front porch, faces white with shock.

  217 Kate swept into the yard, taking out a corner of garden fence along

  the way, and remembered just in time where the decelerator was. The Cat

  rolled to a halt, shuddering and shaking unhappily in neutral, tugging

  at the reins. Raising her voice over the noise of the engine, she

  shouted, "This is the end of it, do you hear? You've got a road now.

  This fight between you and the Jeppsens is over, as of today."

  Wayne, a stocky, olive-skinned man with a jutting chin and a scowl,

  recovered from his shock and yelled, "That depends on the Jeppsens! They

  started it!"

  "I'll take care of the Jeppsens! You've got your road! Put away those

  frigging guns and start acting like civilized human beings, or I'll be

  back with this Cat and I won't stop until this valley has been returned

  to its natural state!"

  The Cat made known its intentions to start forward again, with or

  without Kate, and she grabbed the controls and hung on for dear life.

  The right side of the blade ripped the rear bumper off the old

  International pickup parked in front of the porch and the tractor swept

  out of the Kreugers' yard and back down the trail, nearly sideswiping

  Bobby's blue pickup.

  It was a lot smoother going back, Kate noted with satisfaction. Her

  second self radiated warm approval.

  The turnoff for the Jeppsens came so fast she almost missed it, and it

  was considerably wider than it had been once the Cat passed through. She

  kept the blade down, mowing down everything that got in the way,

  including a raspberry patch, an empty drum of thirty-weight and a boy's

  bike, right into the Jeppsens' front yard.

  Stewart laughed again. He sounded excited, even aroused, and why not? He

  would revel in outlawry, in destruction.

  In murder.

  As Kate herself was reveling in this very moment. The realization should

  have stopped her, at the very least given her pause. Instead, she pushed

  both levers forward with a cry that raised an answering yell from the

  man next to her.

  The sound of the Cat's 140 horses must have been audible for

  218 miles, because the floodlights caught Joe and Cheryl Jeppsen

  standing on their front porch with much the same expression on their

  faces as the Kreugers had had on theirs. The Cat gave Kate just enough

  time to notice that Cheryl's twin shiners had achieved a yellowish

  purple of truly historic hue.

  More practiced now, she drew the tractor around in a magnificent sweep,

  barely nicking the bottom stair of the porch steps, and stepped once

  more on the decelerator. The engine idled and the yellow monster slowed

  to a reluctant halt, its menacing growl muted.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing, Kate?" Joe yelled. He was a

  thin, bony man with a cadaverous face and dark, burning eyes. One calf

  was in a cast, one hand held a shotgun. Cheryl had a rifle. The edge of

  the lights reached just far enough to illuminate Petey on the throne of

  the one-holer outhouse, reading a copy of Road and Track. Stunned, he

  gaped through the open door.

  "I think I'm building a road," Kate yelled back. "You people have taken

  enough shots at me in the last forty-eight hours to run out my luck for

  a lifetime! You put those goddam guns away and start trying to get along

  with your neighbors!"

  "They started it! They-"

  "I don't give a rat's ass who started it! It stops today!"

  Forever after, Kate would swear she hadn't meant to do it, that she'd

  once again forgotten the lack of a master switch and the substitution of

  a decelerator, not to mention that it was pitch black at the time and

  she couldn't really see where she was going. No one ever believed her,

  but whether she meant to or not, the Cat took the turn too wide. Petey,

  with a front-row seat, so to speak, recovered from his stupefaction in

  time to leap for safety, although it was difficult for him to move very

  fast with his jeans around his knees. His ass flashed white in the Cat's

  mercilessly bright halogen floodlights, denim hobbling his steps as he

  hopped awkwardly out of the way, as the wide steel blade mowed down the

  thin walls, the tracks crunched over them and the aromatic fragrance of

  the outhouse filled the clearing.

  219 To Kate's profound relief the Cat did not founder in the hole left

  behind. She pulled back on the left lever and pushed on the right and

  the Cat turned left. Joe and Cheryl, joined by Petey, pants up now,

  stood watching in open-mouthed silence as she passed in review before

  them and rolled out of sight. No one shot at her, probably, she decided,

  because of the two truckloads of people following her, not that that had

  ever stopped the Jeppsens before.

  The air was cool on her cheek. A few stars were beginning to peer warily

  through the torn wisps of April clouds. The now full moon emerged from

  behind Angqaq and threw the peaks of the Quilaks into jagged relief

  against the eastern horizon. Deaf from the noise of the engine, hoarse

  from shouting over it, Kate was exhilarated and drunk with power.

  "I love breakup," she told the full moon rising up over the Quilaks.

  The noise of the engine overwhelmed the words, and Kate half stood and

  shouted out to the entire Park, "I love breakup!"

  A warm, firm hand settled on the back of her neck. She didn't so much as

  jump, merely turned her head to meet Stewart's eyes. He smiled at her,

  his teeth a white slash in the dark cab. She smiled back.

  If anything, the
trip back to the Cat's garage was even faster and more

  reckless than the trip out. Kate knocked down three cottonwoods and

  graded a five-hundred-foot section of roadbed along the way. She pulled

  into Mac Devlin's yard with a grand flourish and drew to halt in front

  of the open doors of the garage.

  She didn't turn the Cat's engine off, liking its dangerous growl, as if

  at any moment it might throw off the leash and head out on its own.

  The warm, heavy hand on the back of her neck tightened. She felt rather

  than saw the almost feline ripple of awareness that ran over him, and

  smiled to herself.

  "That's how we take care of problems in the Park, Mr. Stewart," she

  said, leaning back against the seat, and with the words

  220 her several selves merged back into one. Her mind felt extremely

  clear. She turned toward the man seated next to her, her left hand