A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  “Kate.”

  His low voice stopped her at the door.

  “Don’t tell him.”

  She looked back at him, towhead bent over his sandwich, and felt a wave of weariness sweep over her. How many children had she interviewed in her time, how many broken, bleeding babies had she seen in a panic, begging her not to put their parents in jail, begging her not to hurt the monsters who had hurt them. It never changed. Sometimes she lost hope it ever would. “Okay.” He looked up, relief in his face, and she said, “On one condition. I won’t tell him if you will.”

  His face twisted. “I can’t.”

  She kept her tone gentle, the words undemanding. “Yes, you can.”

  He was silent, and she turned again. “Kate.” She turned back. He raised his head and met her eyes with a look in his own that shouldn’t have been there for another ten years, if ever. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, no prob. Shugak’s the name, rescue’s my game,” she said, keeping it light.

  When he joined her in the living room she put The Terminator on the VCR and they settled down to watch one of two movies in which Arnold Schwarzenegger had been perfectly cast. When the first one ended they started the second, and had Sarah Connor nearly out of jail when the doorbell rang.

  Johnny jumped, paled and looked at her, mute. Kate gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze and went to answer it.

  To Kate’s surprise, it wasn’t Jane, it was Axenia, her cousin and a younger, shorter, plumper edition of herself. “Axenia,” Kate said, surprised. “Why aren’t you at work? And what are you doing here tonight? I thought you weren’t coming to dinner until Saturday.” A movement caught the corner of Kate’s eye and she looked around.

  Oh, joy, O rapture, O bountiful Jehovah. Axenia had brought Ekaterina with her.

  “Come vid me iff you vant to liffe,” commanded Arnold Schwarzenegger from the living room.

  Kate took a deep breath. “Hello, Emaa,” she said, and stood back, holding the door open.

  Axenia beat them both to the first punch. “What are you doing here, Kate? I’m fine, I really am, I’m all grown up now and I can take care of myself. I don’t need my big cousin checking up on me every five minutes to see if I—”

  “Time,” Kate said mildly, closing the door. “Axenia. Axenia, just hold it!” Axenia did and, if the expression on her face was anything to go by, was furious at herself for doing so. “I’m not here to check up on you. I’ve got a temporary job, and I’m staying with Jack while I do it. That’s all.”

  Axenia wasn’t convinced. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Then how come you sicced her on me?”

  Kate looked at her. Just looked, one long, paralyzing stare out of suddenly very cold, very hard hazel eyes. When enough color had climbed into Axenia’s face to satisfy her, she said in a voice no less deadly for its mildness, “If I ever hear you speak of your grandmother in that way again, in or out of her presence, I will personally kick your ass from one side of this town to the other. You show respect for your elders. Is that understood?” Axenia hung her head, her face sullen, and inexorably Kate repeated, “Is that understood?”

  Axenia mumbled something Kate chose to hear as “Yes.” Ekaterina, her lined face impassive, watched Kate out of calm eyes, hands in the pockets of her black cloth coat. Kate took a deep breath and got out her self-control. She even managed a smile. “Emaa. It’s good to see you. Come in, sit down. I’ll make some tea.”

  The door knocker was plied with vigor. Kate’s smile felt as if it had been pasted on. “Excuse me,” she said to her grandmother. Wonderful. Now she got to fight with Jane in front of emaa.

  But it wasn’t Jane this time either, it was Childress, carrying a large cardboard box and wearing a bad-tempered scowl. “Here,” he said without preamble, shoving the box at Kate, who staggered a little beneath its weight before shoving it back. “Just remember, Shugak, you’re responsible for these files. They are by God confidential and I expect them to be treated as such or I’ll by God fire your ass no matter what John King says.”

  Ekaterina took one look at the RPetCo logo on his cap and stiffened into a short, stout pillar of outrage. If she’d been wearing skirts she would have gathered them up to keep them from any contaminating contact.

  “I should be done with them by Monday,” Kate told Childress. “You can come get them then.”

  “We can’t have them out of the office over the weekend,” he informed her with no little relish. “If you’re working for me, you’ll have to follow procedure.”

  “Why, those files turn into a lot of little pumpkins Friday night at five?”

  Next to her, Ekaterina drew in an audible breath and in spite of herself Kate cringed inside. “You are working for him?” her grandmother demanded, an inch of frost on every syllable. “You are working for an oil company? And for RPetCo?”

  “And what’s so terrible about that?” Childress demanded pugnaciously.

  “Don’t yell at my grandmother!” Axenia said, bristling.

  The door slammed back—really, Kate thought, proud of her detachment, Jack’s house was beginning to resemble Toni Hartzler’s office on the Slope—and Jack roared into the room. “What’s all the shouting about? I could hear you from the car! Oh. Hello, Ekaterina.”

  The older woman inclined her head. “Jack.”

  “I’m sorry I yelled, I—”

  “Hi, Dad!” Johnny made a standing jump from the living-room doorway that landed him with both legs wrapped around Jack’s waist.

  “Johnny? Hey, hi, kid. I thought I didn’t get you until Friday afternoon, I was going to—”

  Someone hammered at the door. “How delightful,” Kate told Jack with an extremely sweet smile he instantly and intelligently distrusted, “it’s going to be a party.”

  She opened the door and, finally, there stood Jane.

  Once again Kate was struck by Jack’s ex-wife’s resemblance to a medieval gargoyle, and an early thirteenth-century gargoyle at that, back when pre-Renaissance sculptors harbored no illusions about the material shape of evil. It wouldn’t have been all that bad a face, really, Kate thought, trying to be fair, if Jane could just get the jealousy and the malice out of it.

  “Hello, Jane,” she said, determined to maintain at least the bare minimum of civility Ms. Manners called for in these situations.

  “Kate,” the tall, thin blonde spat. Her eyes were small and near-together and Kate could barely make out their cold blue color between the heavy eyeliner and the heavier mascara. There was so much of both that Kate was surprised Jane could keep her eyelids up beneath the weight. She could, though, and her gaze was first surprised and then venomous. “I might have known you’d be here.”

  At this point Mutt decided it was time to make her presence felt and padded forward. Kate put a restraining hand on her head. “So you might,” she replied affably.

  “You kidnapped my son!”

  “For shame, Katya,” Ekaterina said, and for a moment Kate thought she was talking about Kate’s alleged kidnapping of Johnny. “For shame.” She singed Childress with a look. “To take money from these people, how could you?”

  “I guess our money’s as good as anybody’s,” Childress snapped, bristling, “and the salmon and the herring are coming back into the Sound, our biologists say so.”

  Jane yanked Johnny out of his father’s arms—shoeless, Kate noted, Jane made a habit of that—and propelled him toward the door. “I’m sure the judge will have something to say about your living arrangements when it’s time for the hearing. Jack,” she said, with what Kate felt Jane was sure was a magnificent sneer, preparatory to making a grand exit.

  The effect was spoiled by her recalcitrant son and the equally recalcitrant door, which had a built-in bitch detector in the knob and stuck. Jane tugged, cursing. It sprang open unexpectedly and the leading edge caught Jane a hell of a crack across the forehead. She paused, momentarily stunned.

  Nose in the air, Ekaterina swept through the open d
oorway as if she were wearing a long satin train and Jane was only one of many footmen. Axenia followed, looking less majestic and, Kate was glad to see, a little embarrassed. “See you Saturday,” Kate said. It was as much threat as it was promise, and from the expression on Axenia’s face, she knew it.

  Johnny wriggled free, and coming to, Jane grabbed him.

  “Don’t let her take him, Jack,” Kate said.

  Improving on her sneer, Jane said, “I’ve got custody, he can’t stop me.”

  So much for Ms. Manners. “I can.” Kate separated Jane from her son, spun Jane around by her shoulders, planted a foot in Jane’s derriere and pushed. Jane flew outside, arms outstretched, to fall face forward in four inches of new, wet snow that must have fallen since Kate had brought Johnny home because Kate didn’t remember it being there before.

  Neither did Johnny. “Hey, cool,” he said, “I didn’t know it was snowing. Can we go sledding, Dad?”

  Jane scrambled to her feet, spit snow out of her mouth and began screaming a predictable mixture of obscenities and threats. Axenia’s car door slammed, Ekaterina’s car door slammed, Jane’s car door slammed, and Kate kicked Jack’s front door and it slammed shut for the last time with a loud, satisfying thud.

  “I’ll be back,” Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned from the living room.

  Jack looked from his still-reverberating front door to his wide-eyed son to a thin-lipped, furious Kate. “So how was your day, dear?”

  Next to him, Childress observed, “For an old, fat broad that dame moves pretty fast. Now where do you want these goddam files?”

  *

  Jack was right. The next morning Kate dropped him off at work, ran a few errands and by a quarter to ten had commandeered a parking space strategically located near the Army-Navy store. She waited for four hours, plugging the meter, the box of ivory in the seat next to her, a wad of bills in her pocket from the cashing of her first Slope paycheck. The old man never showed.

  Seven

  FRIDAY MORNING KATE BEGAN the Augean task of wading through the RPetCo files. The medical logs overflowed with the jargon so dear to the hearts of all medical practitioners, a translating job that was not aided by the cuneiform calligraphics equally dear, but a morning’s worth of sifting, a lot of coffee and the stubborn conviction that she could in fact read English brought to light several interesting observations.

  One was that there had been two previous rashes of drug-related incidents on the west side of the Prudhoe Bay field, each occurring within a twenty-four-hour period. There were other drug-related cases spread out throughout the year, but these two were the most concentrated and bore a striking similarity to the experiences of Wednesday night of the previous week. Kate read the list of injuries suffered by the A Shift physician’s assistant on the first occasion with a sympathy tempered by relief she hadn’t been the one on the receiving end of the pool cue.

  With a tablet and a pencil she made a list of dates and names. Cross-checking the names against the employee roster she’d filched from the Slope the previous week, she placed each employee on the list in his department or, in the case of contractors, with his employer, and on his assigned shift. Finishing, she stacked the medical logs and reached for the pile of manifests.

  There were a lot of them, one per flight for the last year. There were nine flights in an ordinary week, one on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays, two on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The manifests were fairly straightforward: lists of passengers in alphabetical order, varying from 63 to 102, depending on whether the 727 had been reconfigured to carry freight and passengers or passengers only. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays it usually carried two igloos of freight on all four flights. An example of an exception was the day the plane had been delayed due to weather, Kate’s first flight north. Wednesday morning the Transportation Department had been faced with changing out three shifts of employees at once instead of just one, and the plane had been reconfigured to fly all seats to accomplish this feat with the greatest dispatch. She rifled through the stack until she spotted another canceled manifest and paged forward to the next flight. As she had expected, reconfiguring the plane to all passengers appeared to be standard procedure the day after a canceled flight, unless there was a medical evacuation, in which case the medevac igloo usurped the extra seats.

  By eleven her eyes were beginning to cross and she rose from the kitchen table and stretched. Mutt was on her feet immediately, eyes pleading. They took the left fork of the bike trail this time, and the left tunnel, toward Point Woronzof. Wednesday’s snow had melted and the trail was down to the pavement in most places, but the sky was a leaden gray and a brisk wind nipped at Kate’s ears and stung her cheeks, as if to remind one and all that though the calendar might say spring, it was only March, and not to get too cocky or the inevitable April blizzard could just as easily be two feet deep instead of one.

  The sound of jets taking off increased as they neared the end of the north-south runway of Anchorage International. It was Friday, one of RPetCo’s one-flight days, Kate remembered, departing at nine A.M., returning to Anchorage at three P.M. There were benches next to the trail, and she kicked one free of a layer of ice and sat down to watch a Federal Express 747 hurtle into the air a hundred feet over her head. The roar of the engines struck her like a blow, and as she plugged her ears with her fingers Kate remembered the gas screaming through the pipes at the Production Center. It occurred to her that this might be the noisiest job she had ever taken on, on or off the Slope. The jet climbed up and outward and Kate unplugged her ears. The smell of jet fuel exhaust stung her nostrils, but the resulting quiet was a physical relief. She leaned her head against the back of the bench, tucked her hands in her pockets and closed her eyes.

  When John King had made his unenthusiastic offer of employment eleven days ago, she had accepted it as a lighthearted romp through RPetCo’s discretionary fund, nothing more, with the added bonus of a look at the North Slope. She’d never been farther north than Fairbanks before, and like Dutch Harbor, it was a trip beyond her wallet if it went unsubsidized by a job. She’d even toyed with the idea of demanding a bonus, depending on how fast she brought the dealer down. Jack, damn his eyes, had been right in his assessment of her initial lack of concern over what Slopers might or might not be inhaling, snorting, popping or mainlining. As far as Kate was concerned, they all had more money than God and they all thought they owned the world. If they couldn’t handle it, too bad.

  Something had turned that indifference around. It might have been the sight of Martin, ill and hostile in that hospital bed. It might have been the pipeliner yanking on the bear’s tail—if he hadn’t been on drugs he should have been. It might have been the thought of the two Naborhoff roughnecks throwing that chain up on the rig floor, higher than kites and in danger of losing more than a few fingers.

  She realized, with a growing sense of annoyance, that this job had put a face on the monster. No longer could she think of the oil companies at Prudhoe Bay as monolithic corporate juggernauts getting the oil out of the ground no matter whose nest they shit in along the way. Instead there was Dale Triplett, a production operator who could tell you how many barrels of oil there were within the walls of her separation center at any given moment. There was Sue Jordan, who came into the communications center after hours to give the night operator a coffee break and stayed on until morning to handle the medevac and notification of next of kin. There was Gideon Trocchiano, convinced that a good meal could cure anything that ailed you, from homesickness to the Prudhoe Bay galloping crud, and who was determined to prove it with liberal doses of thyme, garlic and parmesan. There was Jerry McIsaac, on call 24 hours a day, 180 hours a week, hand never very far from his medical bag, self never very far from his ambulance, ready to respond at a moment’s notice to any injury, no matter how slight. There was Toni Hartzler, whose supply of humor never ran out, no matter what the provocation from ignorant Outsiders.

  Sure, they only worked one week of
every two. Sure, they pulled down more in a year than Kate would see in her lifetime. Sure, they washed no dish nor made no bed during their week up. They still spent half their lives six hundred miles from home and family and any semblance of a normal life, and most of them never drew a breath of fresh air from the day they got off the plane at Prudhoe until the day they got on it again.

  She wouldn’t go so far as to say she admired them. but she’d damn well take her best shot at ridding their workplace of the drug of their choice.

  Not that she was convinced she’d get any thanks for it. A jet clawed its way into the sky over her head and she plugged her ears automatically. The sheer volume of product she’d seen during the post-race celebrations Saturday night was enough to stagger anyone. The universal casual acceptance of its presence was equally staggering. If something wasn’t done, and soon, someone was going to get killed. She remembered Chuck Cass. Someone already had been.

  Again she thought of that delayed charter, and the events which followed, and wondered if there was a correlation or if it was all just coincidence. She didn’t think so. Kate wasn’t big on coincidences.

  Mutt went looking for trouble and found it, stampeding a mangy-looking cow moose out of the undergrowth. To Kate’s relief Mutt decided either that she wasn’t that hungry or that the cow looked a bit stringy for her refined palate, and allowed the cow to escape into a clump of alders. A while later she came back with a satisfied expression on her face and a bit of rabbit fur sticking to her muzzle. “Shame on you,” Kate told her. “Terrorizing these poor little citified rabbits and mooses.”

  Mutt uttered a short, joyful bark and bounced forward to nip at the hem of Kate’s jeans. Another leap away, and she paused to look hopefully over her shoulder.

  “Oh, ho, so it’s going to be like that, is it?” Kate gave chase, catching Mutt’s tail and giving it a brief tug before running for her life. Mutt nipped the left cheek of her behind and streaked ahead to run three times around a conveniently placed birch. She stopped, looking at Kate expectantly, ears up. Using a long patch of ice yet to melt in the shade of the birch, Kate took a long running jump and slid past Mutt and the tree, giving Mutt a smack on the butt as she skidded by.