With her first breath her head began to clear, but her body was still being fought over by one self that wanted to drink hard, drive fast, chase men and shoot the pope, and another, more fuddled self that stubbornly insisted she listen to it, that something was wrong, that she had something important to do. She inhaled again, because it seemed like a good idea and because it was something she was capable of doing. The Air Pak was an escape unit. She had five minutes, that was all. The second voice gained in volume and urgency. Kate fumbled for a handhold, sent stern, specific mental commands to feet, ankles and knees, and by dint of strenuous effort, intense willpower and a minor miracle found herself on her feet.
She paused in momentary self-congratulations until her eye caught sight of the valve Toni had turned. Valve. Toni. Had. Turned. Valve. Turned. Alarms. Flashing. Lights. Her scattered consciousness coalesced into three separate pictures, one after the other, the first of the alarm board in the Communications Center, the second of the alarm board in Skid 7, the third of the alarm board in Skid 18. But no, Skid 18 was gas only. Or was it?
The voice raised itself to a shriek of warning that spurred Kate to stumble out the door, catching the tank of the air pak on the door frame, tripping on the top step and plunging headlong down the flight of stairs, catching herself on the railing at the last minute before she plowed up a foot of snow with her nose. Or rather her face mask. She felt rather than heard the door swing shut behind her.
Shielded by the modules from most of the exterior lighting around the center, Kate slumped down on the bottom step and pulled the mask free. She was in shirt and jeans and safety boots and nothing else, it was late March on the Slope, which meant spring was weeks and even months away, and yet she didn’t feel cold. The little voice whispered to her, warning her that this wasn’t right, she should get inside now, that even if she didn’t feel cold she was anyway, that people had died of hypothermia with more on. People like her mother. Also someone might come through the door at the head of the stairs at any minute, and if she didn’t want to be swept into the role of sabotage suspect she should get the hell out of there.
The little voice was growing more articulate by the moment, and was accompanied by a return of physical function, so the process of getting to her feet was less laborious than before. Walking, too, seemed less of an effort, and she moved, one halting step at a time, one piling at a time, under the module and out the other side. She peered around, squinting as if that might bring her eyes into better focus, trying to find a landmark. There it was, the glow of the most brightly lit and tiniest building on the pad, the guard shack. Fixing that glow with a stare, because if she blinked it might disappear, she plodded slowly toward it, now that she was out from under the module foundering over the odd drift, but always moving steadily and inexorably toward that glowing spot of bright promise.
It was a toss-up who was more surprised when she fell in the door, the guard or Kate. He sat on his stool, gaping, as she picked herself up off the floor. She opened her mouth and paused, afraid her tongue might not have caught up with the rest of her body. “Childress,” she managed finally to gasp. She was beginning to feel the cold, or rather the tingling that invaded her body that told her she had been very cold and in the warmth of the guard shack was now starting to thaw. “Call him.”
His mouth closed with something of a snap and an expression of disgust crossed his face, one she remembered from the mop girl at McDonald’s. “You’re drunk. Who are you? Who’s your supervisor?”
With a spurt of anger she lunged for the phone. “Goddammit,” she snarled, as out of patience as she was out of strength. She grasped the receiver and enunciated each word with great care. “I’m an undercover investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney. This is an emergency. Call your security chief.”
“You are drunk,” he said, his eyes running over her contemptuously. “You people will find it, won’t you, even on the Slope.” He gave a snort of disgust and reached a hand out to dial.
Rage, Kate discovered, was a great restorative.
She knocked him off his stool, picked him up by his shirt front and slammed him against the wall. “Stay put, don’t move, or I will hurt you,” she said through her teeth. The combination of the torn, husky growl of voice and his first sight of the ugly, twisted scar on her throat froze him momentarily, long enough for her to punch up an access line to Anchorage and dial Childress’s home number.
It picked up on the second ring. “Childress? This is Kate Shugak.”
“Shugak! What the hell is going on, it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning! What—”
“Shut up. I need you on the Slope. As soon as you can get here. And tell this kid to do what I say.”
His voice sharpened. “Have you found the dealer? Who is it? What—”
“Childress!” Kate bellowed. “Somebody just tried to kill me and I don’t have time for explanations! Just tell this kid to do what I say and get your ass up here!” She thrust the receiver at the guard, whose eyes were huge and his face paper-white and Kate only hoped he wasn’t going to faint.
“Mr. Childress? This is the security guard at Production Center Three. I—” He listened, his eyes going wider. “Yessir. Yessir. Yessir. Nossir. Yessir. Yessir.” He hung up and turned to her, an expression of awe on his face. He put out his hand and deepened his voice. “My name’s Poss. Dave Poss.”
Oh, fuck, Kate thought, I’ve just acquired me a British Secret Service wannabe. The pounding in her head increased. Her mouth was bone-dry. “Have you got something to drink?”
Mute, he held out a cup of cold coffee. Grateful, she drank it down without a whimper. He watched her, the rudimentary beginnings of a pencil-thin mustache, the Boston Blackie kind, twitching with excitement.
She put the cup down. “Thanks. Okay.” With the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes she tried to think. “Okay,” she said again. “Do you know, has there been anything out of the ordinary happen inside the center this morning?”
“Has there ever,” he said, “there was a leak in Skid 14 thirty minutes ago. We had enough bells and lights and sirens go off to make you think it was the Fourth of July.”
“Is anybody likely to check up on you for a while?”
“No.” He sounded faintly disgruntled. “Everyone else is in Skid 14. I have to stay here, make sure no one gets on the pad who isn’t supposed to.”
She frowned. “Is this the first time you’ve seen me tonight?”
He looked taken aback. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you ever.”
Kate painfully followed this statement to its logical solution. “So there is another way to get on this pad?”
He looked wary. Kate looked at the phone. He sighed. “Sure. There’s the access road to A Pad, that leads to the spur road that runs between Checkpoint Charlie and CPS.”
“Okay,” Kate said for the third time. “Can you get me back to the Base Camp without going through any checkpoints, without anybody seeing either of us?”
His eyes fired. “I can try.”
“Okay,” Kate said. She felt like a parrot, repeating the same words over and over again. “Okay. Get me back to the Base Camp without being seen.”
It took them an hour to get back to the Base Camp, a trip that yesterday had taken Kate twenty minutes in the bus. Most of the time she spent crouched beneath the dash on the passenger’s side of the security Suburban. Dave Poss by way of a disguise had donned a Raiders cap with the brim pulled low, with the result that every time Kate looked up from her cramped position she thought she was hallucinating again, this time entertaining visions of Daffy Duck. Daffy Duck at the wheel of a green Suburban with the words “RPetCo Security” painted two feet high in bright yellow paint on the doors was almost more than Kate’s rubbed-raw senses could handle.
But not quite. Poss crept up on the Base Camp like the Japanese crept up on Pearl Harbor; secretively, stealthily, almost hitting a Stores forklift whose night shift driver gave a cheery wave and yel
led an even cheerier, considering Dave had nearly sideswiped him into a pile of well casing, “Hi, Dave!”
“Hi, Mike!” Dave yelled back. He caught his breath, and looked down at Kate guiltily. “Sorry.”
“Drive by the safety module,” Kate growled in response. Poss did so. “See anything?” Kate said in a low voice.
“No,” Poss whispered. “All quiet on the northern front.”
“Keep going around to the front. Drive by the bull rail. Do you know what the PR van looks like?”
Poss was hurt. “Of course.”
“Is it there?”
The Suburban lurched into a hole and out of it again, banging Kate’s head against the dash. “Yup. Plugged in right where it’s supposed to be.”
I’m on call tonight, Jerry had said as he walked away from the pinochle table. Kate’s head throbbed with the effort to think. “Okay,” she said finally, “take me around to the administration annex. The outside door.”
“The cleaning crew might be in there.”
“I’ll have to chance it.”
A few moments later Poss drew up in the shadow of the building, the passenger side door a baby step from the bottom stair. Painfully, Kate uncurled herself from beneath the dash. “Okay, here’s where I get out. You”—a finger stabbed for emphasis—”you get back to Three and stay put and keep quiet until the day shift shows. After that, go back to your room and wait there until either I call or Childress does. What’s the extension in the guard shack?”
“Four-three-three-three.”
“Four-three-three-three. Good. Okay, you got it?”
He hesitated. “What if someone finds out I was gone?”
“Refer them to Childress.”
He looked at her, all youth and gung ho and sap rising. “Shouldn’t I come with you? You don’t look so good, maybe I—”
“No!” The last thing Kate needed was an underfoot puppy. He would have protested. She held up one hand. “What did Childress tell you?” He looked mutinous. “What did he say?” Kate repeated, feeling like his mother.
“To do what you said,” Poss said sulkily, feeling like her son.
“All right. Go. And for chrissake go back the short way this time in case I need to call you.”
Kate heard the Suburban’s wheels spin as she mounted the stairs. This door was not a safety door and did open from the outside; Kate opened it and stepped in, halting as the door closed silently behind her on its hydraulic catch. She held her breath, straining to hear movement inside the building.
There was none. She must have missed the cleaning crew. Good. Moving swiftly, with almost all her agility and grace restored and spurred by an ever-increasing sense of rage, she made her way through the annex and into the garage. The garage gave on to the front entrance and the security desk, but she kept her back turned and her head averted as she climbed the stairs. When she reached the first landing she risked a glance back. The guard had his feet propped on the desk, his head resting against the back of his chair, his eyes closed and his mouth open. If he wasn’t sleeping he was dead. Good again, either way. She padded silently up the rest of the stairs.
Luck, a fickle bastard who so far that evening had made himself conspicuous by his absence, was finally with her. The camp clerk was gone and the front desk deserted. She who hesitates is lost, and Kate nipped around behind the counter. The computer was on, the cursor blinking greenly at her from the screen. She sat down, typed “McIsaac, Jerry” and hit Return. Instantly the name appeared on the screen, followed by, Safety, North Slope Assigned, B Shift, Tuesday, and, glory of glories, a room number, OCX II 109. She typed in “Rogstad, Lillian,” and the darling little byte box informed her that Diamond Lil was in Anchorage on a medevac. Her room number was listed as OCX II 107.
“All right,” she muttered. “So Jerry’s on call alone and alone in his suite. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Prudhoe Hilton but were afraid to ask.” She exited and sat thinking for a moment. OCX II was the second operations center extension, the module between the main Base Camp module and the fire/safety module. One-oh-nine meant the room was on the first floor, and the low number meant it was probably off the left corridor, which sounded right since the left corridor led to the arctic walkway that led to the safety module. It made sense to locate the fire and safety teams close to the fire and safety module to cut down on response time.
She looked up at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes had passed since she had left Dave. All things being equal, she had as good a chance of the front desk clerk coming back and discovering her as she did of being nailed anywhere else in the building. The safest place to be was probably her room, Toni would never think of looking for her there, but she didn’t care to test the distance between.
She waited, abandoning the chair for the floor in case anyone walked by, folding her legs and hands. The minutes plodded by with excruciatingly agonizing slowness. Sitting there, she vowed never to buy a digital clock as long as she lived. An old-fashioned clock with a second hand counted the time down much faster.
She forced herself to wait twenty minutes, and then five minutes more, before dialing four-three-three-three. It picked up on the third ring. Dave Poss’s voice was breathless but blessedly there. “Production Center Three, guard shack. Poss speaking.”
“It’s Shugak, Dave.” An indrawn breath of pure joy greeted her. “Shut up and listen. I want you to call 911 and report a medical emergency at Three.”
“What kind of emergency?”
“I don’t care what kind of emergency, use your imagination!” Kate’s head hurt when she yelled and she lowered her voice. “Just do it, and make it bad enough that they’ll need to call out the medic.”
“What’ll I say when they find out it’s a fake?” his panicked voice demanded.
“Turn yourself in to the FCC for abuse of public airwaves,” she snapped and hung up.
She waited, eyes fixed on the clock. Five very long minutes from the time she hung up the phone a distant siren began to wail. Jerry’s response time was up. “Attaboy, Dave,” she muttered, and vaulted the counter to hit the hallway running. A moment later she heard voices and ducked into the doorway that opened onto to Toni’s office. She stepped inside and closed the door after her, holding on to the knob with her ear pressed to the door.
The voices grew louder, along with the clank of a cart and the creak of its wheels. “Did you hear about those two women who got thrown out of Coldfoot last night?”
“No, what about them?”
“They were selling magazine subscriptions.”
“So?”
“So they sold twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of magazine subscriptions. In four days.”
“Oh? Oh. Oh!” The two voices erupted with laughter, which carried on well past Hartzler’s door. From a distance Kate heard the second one, sober now, say thoughtfully. “Twenty-five thousand? In four days? Are we in the wrong business?”
Good question. Kate waited another minute for the voices to fade completely, and tossed the office on general principles, although she expected to find nothing. Aside from a bottom drawer filled with a set of jacks, a rubber slingshot, a little sandalwood box that if you slid back the lid too quickly a little wooden dragon jumped out and bit you on the thumb, and a box of Kix, there wasn’t much of interest. She closed the drawer, unsurprised. Toni was smarter than that. She opened the door and applied her eye to the crack.
This time the coast was clear and she ran lightly down the corridor, turning to cross the main module, pass by the serving line and dining hall and into the OCX II. Room 109 was an outside room at the end of the corridor on the left. Kate opened the outer door and went in.
It took her thirty seconds to find it. Jerry wasn’t half as smart as Toni was.
Ten
SHE WAS WAITING FOR HIM when he walked in the room an hour later, sitting in the straight chair with her feet crossed on his counter, the box sitting next to them. He stopped in the doorway, his face
going white. “Kate?” His voice was high, unnaturally so. “Kate? Is that you?”
The shock in his eyes dissipated some of her anger. “Surprise.”
“Kate?”
“Why, Jerry?” she said. “You’re making more money than God for working twenty-six weeks a year. Just tell me why.”
He didn’t move. “Kate? Is it really you?” His face crumbled and he tumbled to his knees, buried his face in his hands and began to sob. “Kate. Oh, God, Kate, when I got the call I thought it’d be you.” His shoulders heaved. “I thought it’d be you and I couldn’t bear it.”
“No thanks to you it wasn’t.” He sobbed harder, and she was disgusted. “Stop it, Jerry. Stop it!” She manhandled him onto his bed and shut the door. He was still sobbing when she turned back, and she slapped him, hard, across the cheek. The sharp crack of flesh on flesh resounded in the little room. The sobbing stopped abruptly and he stared at her out of wide, startled eyes. “That’s better.” Kate sat down again, knee to knee with him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“You mickeyed my drink, didn’t you?”
He nodded, unable to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry, Kate.”
The rage was back then, suffusing her entire body in a red, hot flush. With an effort she subdued it, tamped it back, screwed the lid down, with an effort she remained seated, with an effort she didn’t rise up out of her chair and come down on Jerry like the wrath of Shugak. But entirely against her will she heard herself say, “You know about my parents. You know what life is like in the bush. You know why I don’t drink. You know why I don’t do dope. And you mickeyed my drink. You son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry, Kate.”
When she could trust herself to speak she said, “Sorry doesn’t quite cut it.”
A Cold Blooded Business Page 18