A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  He straightened. “Coke?” The big-bellied man’s red face became redder. He gave a curt nod. “On the floor?” Another nod. “And in the chopper? And the forklift? And the Suburban, too, I suppose?”

  Bear nodded again, although Kate couldn’t see how he managed, so rigid with wrath was he.

  “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” one of the men mumbled inopportunely behind them.

  The kitchen helper froze. In the next instant he began to sidle around the serving line. Next to Kate, Jerry sucked in an audible breath and with a show of amiable briskness inquired, “I suppose you’ll be making their services available to the industry? Fine, good, I’ll just call Security, get them taken off your hands.” Without waiting for the other man’s permission he pulled his radio out. “Security guards have been dispatched to the scene,” Sue assured him, twice. Kate could tell he wanted to ask how many and how soon, but he managed to restrain himself.

  They waited until the security guards showed, whiling away the interim two hours by making one-sided conversation with Bear, whom Jerry introduced as Bear Honeysett, RPetCo’s rig representative on Naborhoff 63. Those two hours, two of the longest in Kate’s life, were just long enough for her to decide she was glad John King hadn’t hired her through a drilling contractor. She might have had to pee in a bottle in front of a witness, but at least she was alive to tell the tale. If she and Jerry had left the two roughnecks alone with Bear Honeysett, she wasn’t sure they would have been.

  Back in the ambulance she said, “Just so I’ve got the sequence of events straight—those two got higher than kites, got kicked off the rig floor and took off in the Suburban?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And when they ran it off the road, they came back and took the forklift?”

  “Yup.”

  “And when they wrecked the forklift, they came back for the helicopter?”

  He grinned at the windshield. “Looks like.”

  Kate sat back in her seat. “Why are they still alive?” She wasn’t talking about the damage the three separate vehicle crashes should have inflicted on the roughnecks’ hapless bodies.

  Neither was Jerry when he replied, “Good question.”

  Kate said, and it wasn’t entirely part of her investigation when she did, “You people have a real problem with drugs.”

  The engine caught and turned over. “Oh, hell, Kate,” Jerry said easily, “you know if you had your way you’d bring back Prohibition. Looks like the weather’s clearing a little.”

  It was. During the next thirty minutes the snow ended and the wind died down, enough to see the commotion outside Construction Camp One as they drove by on the Backbone. “Now what’s going on?” Jerry wondered when they caught sight of the crowd standing outside one of the modules.

  “A block party?” Kate guessed, but in her defense it must be said that by now it was the wrong side of two o’clock in the morning and she had never been a night person.

  They parked ten yards behind the crowd and, the evening’s experiences beginning to have their effect, tiptoed up behind the gathering of men. Kate caught a whiff of deep-fried fat and identified the kitchen module, which indeed it proved to be, as attested to by the two enormous garbage Dumpsters flanking the double doors, as well as by the two not less enormous grizzly bears with their heads down in them.

  “Oh, shit,” Jerry said, backing up. He was alone. Kate stood rooted in place, staring as the crowd of men, most of them in their T-shirts and clutching cameras to their chests, shouted and whistled and stamped, trying to get the bears’ heads out of the Dumpsters long enough to snap their picture. Flashbulbs were going off like firecrackers. With what Kate thought was extraordinary self-control for a grizzly bear in March, the bears ignored them until one man crept up behind one and yanked his tail.

  Kate’s jaw dropped.

  The bear roared indignantly and swung around on his haunches, one paw raised, a perfect pose for the pipeliner’s friend, who stood at the ready with a Canon Sure Shot. The flash went off six feet from the bear’s face, and he roared again, all four inches of claw extended.

  “You dumb son of a bitch!” someone growled. Stupefied and still gaping, Kate looked over and saw a man in a state trooper’s uniform. He stepped forward, another big-bellied man with the added authority of age and uniform, and the crowd melted before him. He came to a stop in front of the two pipeliners. The bears had turned back to the Dumpsters. With magnificent indifference, the trooper didn’t even look their way. Instead, he hitched up his gun belt in the menacing gesture Kate was convinced all state troopers were taught their first day in trooper school. The pipeliners, who had laughed in the bear’s face and jeered at its anger, knew real danger when they saw it and snapped into an attitude of acute attention.

  The trooper hitched up his gun belt a second time, and said in the slow, caustic drawl cultivated by state troopers the world over, “Just now, I was of two minds who to shoot, you or the bear.” He paused long enough for that thought to register. When it did, he leaned forward, nose to nose with the tail-puller, and dropped his voice but not the drawl. “Next time, I won’t have any doubt.” He paused again. “Now git.”

  The pipeliner started backing up, treading on the toes of his camera-toting friend. “Yes sir no sir sorry sir whatever you say sir.” The trooper watched them back and fill up the steps and inside the module with a merciless eye. It was the beginning of a virtual stampede.

  When the door closed behind the last pipeliner, the trooper turned to the bears. “And as for you two, it’s too early for you to be up! Hibernate, dammit!”

  The two bears, with an I.Q. a good ten points above that of the average pipeliner, knew when they were outclassed. They extricated themselves from the Dumpsters and cantered out of camp.

  Kate let out a long sigh. The trooper heard it, turned and caught sight of Jerry. “Hey, McIsaac.”

  Jerry drew a shaking hand across a sweating brow and walked forward on unsteady feet. “Jesus, Joe. I thought for a minute you were going to be in need of my professional services.”

  The trooper grinned, a white slash of teeth in the dim light. “Naw. They’re just cubs, babies, yearlings. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He looked at Kate, and back at Jerry.

  “Kate Shugak, Joe Graham. Kate’s just hired on with RPetCo.”

  “Shugak,” the trooper said thoughtfully, “Shugak.” He met her eyes. “You a friend of Jim Chopin’s?”

  “We’ve met,” Kate said reluctantly.

  The trooper snapped his fingers. “Kate Shugak, from Niniltna, right? I remember now. Jim was telling me about that deal with the bootlegger a while back. Nice job.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kate’s monosyllabic response was unencouraging, and the trooper, about to expand on the subject, paused. “Right,” he said. “Well, nice to meet you. Jerry.”

  “Joe.”

  The trooper drove off. Jerry looked down at Kate. “What deal with the bootlegger?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Kate said dismissively. Jerry just looked at her, and she sighed. “A guy was selling whiskey inside tribal borders. Billy Mike asked me to stop him.”

  “And?”

  “I did.”

  “Oh.” Like the trooper, Jerry didn’t push it.

  *

  Kate spent what was left of the night in the dispensary with Martin.

  He scowled at her from his bed. His skin was flushed, his pupils large and black and bottomless. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Glad you know who I am now,” she said dryly, and pulled up a chair.

  He twisted against the wrist restraints. “Get me out of these things.”

  “Not a chance.”

  He thrashed beneath the covers, the muscles of his face and throat distended. “Cut it out, Martin,” Kate said, bored. “You know the drill. So do I. Next stop, detox.”

  He stared at her, and relaxed. “Shit. Well, hell, it was worth a try.”

  She grinned
at him.

  “You’re not here to lecture me, are you?”

  “Nope.” She looked him over dispassionately. “You sure are a mess, though.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Thanks anyway, I gave at the office.” He snorted a laugh. “How long you been up here? I hadn’t heard.”

  “How could you, stuck away on the homestead like you are. You’re a regular hermit, Kate.”

  “How long?”

  He closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the pillow. “Forever. Five, six months, I think. Since October anyway.”

  “So you came up right after fishing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How’d you get the job?”

  He shifted restlessly. “Billy Mike put the word out, RPetCo wanted to do some seismic testing on Niniltna Tribal Association grounds. He swapped permission for half a dozen jobs on the Slope.”

  Kate nodded. She looked down at her clasped hands. “Where did you score the dope?”

  He shrugged irritably. “Where does anybody score dope?” He eyed her suspiciously. “You got any particular reason for asking?”

  She batted her lashes at him. “Who, me?”

  “‘Who, me?’” he mimicked her. “Yeah, you. I know you, Shugak, you never do anything without a reason. What the hell are you doing here?”

  She started a plausible lie but his body began to shake and sweat beaded on his brow. He swore weakly.

  “I’ll get Jerry,” Kate said, rising.

  “Kate,” he called after her.

  She paused at the door, looking at him over her shoulder. “What?”

  The sweat was dripping off his forehead now. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you. It’s just that whenever I screw up, you’re always in the front row.”

  “Yeah, I know, Martin. I’ve always been lucky that way,” she said, and went out.

  Five

  SHE DROVE JERRY AND MARTIN and Martin’s roommate, both of whom Jerry had judged needful of immediate medevac, out to the airport and saw them onto the Lear jet ordered up for that purpose. It took half an hour to help load all the various boxes and bags and stretchers and patients. A security guard stood at a distance, not offering to help as Kate sweated to get a small but very heavy box over the sill.

  “Careful!” Jerry leapt to help her and together they hoisted the cargo inside. Kate shoved it in with more vigor than care and Jerry said, “Careful,” again.

  Kate craned her neck to see in. “Martin awake?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Both of them are out cold. Let’s hope they stay that way.”

  “If they don’t, if Martin doesn’t, tell him I’ll come see him in detox next week. He’ll be thrilled.”

  “Okay.” His face looked gray in the harsh light of the halogen lamps posted around the apron, and Kate said, “You look beat, buddy. Grab some Z’s on the way home.”

  His smile was watered down and his salute weak. “I’ll do that. Thanks, Kate.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Please, don’t think of asking me again anytime soon.”

  The strain on his face lightened and he laughed and waved as the Lear’s engines began to whine.

  She made it back to camp safely, floating in a kind of euphoria beyond exhaustion, and was on her way to breakfast when Toni scooped her up outside the dining room and swept her down the hallway. She was back in fast forward mode. “Come on Kate we have to get to the airport.”

  “We’re going to the airport?” Kate was forced into a trot to keep up with Toni’s long-legged strides. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.” I haven’t even been to bed yet, she thought, blinking to clear bleary eyes.

  “That’s okay you probably won’t get lunch either.”

  “What, more hookers to deport?” Kate said grumpily. She wanted a meal and a bed, in that order. She wanted time to think about what the episodes at the construction camps and the rig meant to her investigation. She wanted to slow down to a walk, but when she tried to Toni urged her back into a trot.

  “I believe they prefer the term ‘entrepreneur,’” the other woman said blandly. She thumped the swinging doors wide and strode into the great arctic outdoors as if she owned it. “How long have you known Jerry?”

  Kate woke up enough to stare at the back of Toni’s head. The brunette had twinkie hair, big, shiny, blow-dried, every perfect strand in artful place. “Oh, I don’t know, six, seven years. Eight.” She yawned, a jaw-cracker that wasn’t entirely faked. “Don’t ask me to do complicated mathematical computations this early in the morning.”

  “He told me you worked together in Anchorage.”

  “We did. Sort of.”

  Snow crunched beneath their feet. Toni paused next to the door of the bus and turned to look at Kate. “Jerry and I are involved.”

  “I noticed.” Kate couldn’t help herself. “There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

  Toni fluffed her hair and gave Kate a flirtatious look from beneath her lashes. “There’s a lot of me to go around.”

  Irresistibly, Kate laughed. She held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, all right, Jerry’s a big boy. It’s none of my business.”

  Toni refrained from the obvious reply, and they got in the bus amicably if not in perfect accord.

  *

  For the rest of the week Kate was assigned to drive Toni’s bus, and for every day of the rest of that week Toni made ruthless use of her services. No sooner had one tour departed than another arrived. A dignified group from Bahrain who wanted to see if oil came out of the ground any differently in the Arctic than it did in the Persian Gulf, a Texas oilman who almost wept at the sight of seven-inch tubing (the largest his East Texas fields used was one-inch), a rollicking crowd of Russians who wanted to drill for oil in Siberia and who wanted to take Toni with them when they went home, a delegation from Colombia who told hair-raising stories of local drug lords strafing drill rigs and who regarded the North Slope as a haven of peace and security, a coven of mixed media reporters, an Israeli paratrooper on maneuvers with the Alaska Air National Guard, and a lone RPetCo stockholder who was vacationing in Alaska and on impulse hopped a plane to Prudhoe, arriving Friday afternoon on MarkAir and calling the Base Camp for a look around before his plane left at seven that evening—Toni met, fed and toured them all, seraphic smile and composure unshaken. It was all Kate could do to keep up with her, to muscle the big bus around the soft-shouldered gravel roads, to not get lost in the vast, fiat expanse of arctic tundra.

  That vast expanse daunted her, going on forever, horizon to horizon, with miles and miles of gravel roads heading off in every direction on the compass. “You should have been here in the beginning,” one of the roughnecks told her, “when all that was up here were the rigs and if one of them moved to a new pad overnight, the next morning you didn’t know where the hell you were.” The local landmarks were more stationary now, and more individual. The Base Camp was easy to spot, backed up as it was by the 112-foot communications tower. It sprouted a dozen microwave shots, deep, round frames with what appeared to be white cloth stretched across their surfaces, and looked like small drums. Jungle drums, Kate thought. The bush telegraph. If the power goes out, we could pull the shots down and beat on them.

  When she got them, her off hours were nothing less than decadent. Every night she regularly drove others out of the sauna by turning the thermostat up as high as it would go and ladling water on the fake coals with a lavish hand, although she had to get used to sharing it with men. At home, a sweat was segregated by sex. It felt uncomfortable wearing a suit, too, but it was still better than no sweat at all. She was unable to hide the scar on her throat, and it occasioned curious, sometimes appalled looks, and a few blunt queries, but she ignored both and after a while the questions stopped, if not the looks. Something about the scar, combined with the husky edge it gave her voice and her composure concerning both, caused the men to pull back a little, for which she was profoundly grateful. Reaction on first meetin
g her had varied, from those who assumed she had been hired to fulfill a quota and treated her with barely concealed contempt, to those who only saw one more woman to take a shot at and wouldn’t leave her alone. Kate felt alternately like live bait in a shark pool and a test case for affirmative action. It was wearing. She consoled herself with the reminder that it was also temporary.

  She didn’t swim, the undeniable temptation of getting wet all over cooled by the gruesome recollection that the pool was the site of Chuck Cass’s last lap. Evidently the rest of the inmates felt the same way; that first week she never saw anyone in the pool. From the markings, it was exactly five feet deep all over. She wondered how tall Cass had been.

  Somewhat to her surprise there wasn’t a lot of talk about Cass’s death, and the few times she tried to raise it in general conversation were countered with what was the main topic on everyone’s mind, the rumor of a rif, a reduction in force. A man named Bert Something, Kate gathered a communications technician, was very concerned about a balloon payment coming up on his Anchorage bowling alley. “I just can’t afford to get laid off right now,” he told Kate earnestly.

  Thwarted, Kate tried to raise Chuck Cass with Jerry and again he turned the conversation into another channel. Out of respect, Kate desisted. Jerry never had liked discussing his failures. She discovered Cass’s room number and found the room empty, the closets and drawers cleaned out and the corners denuded of so much as a hairball. “A loner,” Dale Triplett said briefly, adding, “At least he wasn’t like a lot of the other guys, always coming on, always groping for a feel.”

  “He was a good operator,” she got his boss to say after thirty minutes of dancing around the subject. “The equipment he worked on ran.” When Kate tried to touch delicately on the cause of his death, the man said, voice rising, “I run a clean shop.” He gulped down the rest of his coffee and left the table, and left Kate with as much information as she had had to begin with, zero.

  Ranking right up there on the plus side of the job with the sauna was of course the food. Gideon had taken a fancy to Kate, and Thursday night saw to it that she received the tenderest cut of beef on the grill, as well as the most perfectly steamed fresh asparagus. Dinner Friday was lasagna, heavy on the mozzarella, and Gideon made sure that Kate received an extra-large slice and prompt seconds. Kate had always had a distressing tendency to think with her stomach and was now beginning to wonder if she’d died and gone to heaven, but it didn’t distract her from noticing that the kitchen was a place where everyone in the Base Camp eventually and inevitably came, and would make a fine distribution point for retail sales of illegal substances. The serving line seemed a bit public, though, and the offices, storage rooms and freezers, a cramped maze tucked behind the kitchen, offered little privacy, either. She was glad. She’d never eaten food this good before in her life, and she rebelled at the prospect of busting the chef who cooked it over a trifle of drug dealing.