A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  He didn’t answer because there was no answer to that and they both knew it.

  “Tell me about it, Jerry,” Kate said more calmly. “Tell me all about it. From the beginning.” She folded her hands in her lap and regarded him with a steady, dispassionate gaze in which he could find no hint of past affection or friendship, and no trace whatever of sympathy. He shivered, sniffling and wiping the back of his hand across his face in a gesture more suited to a ten-year-old, and surprised them both with a half smile. “You look like somebody carved you out of stone.”

  “Tell me about it,” she repeated. “From the beginning.”

  He rubbed nervous hands down his thighs. “The beginning? The beginning was a year ago, the first time I came up and sat next to Toni on the charter. I fell for her.” His eyes met Kate’s, shamed but defiant. “I fell hard. She’s— she’s—oh, the hell with it, it’s none of your goddam business anyway.”

  “It isn’t when she doesn’t fuck you into breaking seventeen different laws,” Kate agreed. “Keep talking.”

  He kept talking. As much as he tried to shield her, a picture of Hartzler emerged that was less than flattering. Jerry may have thought he’d fallen for Toni, but Toni had made sure of it, zeroing in on the poor jerk the way the B-17s had on Berlin. It was a pity, Kate thought, how even the best of men thought with their cocks. Toni had certainly led Jerry by his, down a garden path that may have looked winding en route but that in hindsight showed a straight line straight down. “At first it was just a favor; would I take a package down for her that she didn’t want to go through security. Of course I said yes. I figured it was something out of the kitchen, Gideon’s always making angel bars for people to take home, or maybe a package of T-bones or lobster tails. I remember Sally and Sandy and Hugh hiked the Chilkoot Trail once with nothing but RPetCo raisins and nuts and peanut butter in their packs.”

  At first, Jerry said, such favors were requested once every six or seven weeks. After a while it became routine to take a package down for Toni on every medevac. “Security never looked at anything I took out on a medevac. It was easy just to stuff it into a box with a red cross on it and toss it in with the rest of the gear.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of the small, heavy box she had helped load onto the Lear during Martin’s medevac. She wondered if the stone lamp and the ivory bear were what had made it so heavy. “Jerry. Did you never, ever, even one time, stop to think about what you were doing? Did you never, ever, even one time, think it might end with you in jail? Did you never, ever, even one time, Jerry, just one time, call yourself a grave-robbing son of a bitch!”

  He stared at her, mouth agape. “Grave robber?”

  “What else would you call it?” she demanded.

  “What grave? I thought we were talking about the money.”

  It was Kate’s turn to stare. “Money?”

  “Yes, money,” he said, faltering at her expression. “The cash from selling the cocaine.”

  “Cocaine?” Kate said.

  They stared at each other in silence, Jerry surprised, Kate confused.

  It was sad but true, and a fact Kate would later blush to remember, but she hadn’t thought seriously of the original reason for her presence on the North Slope since the morning she spent at the dig. The scratcher, the stone cairn, the idealistic enthusiasm of the young archaeologists and their dismay at the disappearance of the artifacts had displaced her concentration until all she had been able to think of was the missing ivory bear and the missing stone bowl, and whatever else it was that was missing but that Chris Heller would not tell her about. Her suspicions had inevitably zeroed in on Otto, and after the scene at the bull rail on Toni and Jerry, but for grave robbing, not for dealing. She had figured Ann McCord for the dealing. McCord could have smuggled it up somehow with Catering’s food orders, and run it around camp in her steward’s cart. The pieces fit together, but they weren’t all of the puzzle.

  It’s not like we haven’t done it before, McIsaac. Unbidden, the memory of Toni’s comment in the truck earlier that evening surfaced in Kate’s mind, and the last wisps of the drug-induced fog in her brain were swept away, leaving nothing but a razor-edged awareness behind. “Of course,” she said. “You wouldn’t kill me over a little thing like grave robbing.” A wave of tiredness swept up and over her and she felt it seep all the way down deep into her bones. “Toni’s been dealing the coke in camp.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been her bag man.” His eyes fell and he nodded. She said only one word and she said it softly, but his face went scarlet. “Jerry.”

  Another silence fell, one she had to sum up all her resources to break. “What about Chuck Cass?”

  “What about him?” Jerry said woodenly.

  “I heard what Toni said in the truck tonight, Jerry.”

  He met her stare defiantly for a moment, then his shoulders slumped and he muttered, “He was using big time, and he wanted a way to help pay for his action. He said he’d turn us in if we didn’t cut him in.”

  Kate didn’t ask him who had pushed Cass into the pool. She didn’t want to hear the answer. “When did you start smuggling out the artifacts?”

  Involuntarily his eyes darted to the box on the counter. His voice was dull. “Right after Leckerd opened the dig on Tode Point. I thought, what the hell? It was just junk, a bunch of old rocks and bones and walrus teeth. She used some of what we made dealing to buy it from Leckerd.” As he spoke the name, Jerry’s face darkened.

  “A piece of that junk auctioned for fifty-five thousand dollars,” Kate said.

  Jerry gaped at her. “What? Fifty-five grand?”

  “Fifty-five thousand.”

  Disbelieving, he said, “For a piece of bone that looked like it was hacked by a seven-year-old with a butter knife?”

  Suddenly Kate felt sorry for him. “Afraid so.”

  “She didn’t tell me,” he said numbly.

  “No,” Kate said, “she didn’t, did she? Who else?”

  “What?”

  “Who else was dealing the dope, besides you and Hartzler?” He looked at her. “I know most of it, Jerry, you might as well tell me the rest. It’ll be a lot better for you in the long run.”

  He slumped against the wall, all the energy gone out of him. “Ann McCord. I left it in my office, Ann picked it up that night and put it on her cart. She’s head steward; she rolled that cart all over the BOC doing rooms that weren’t on regular change-out. Buyers would leave the money in their rooms, she’d take it and leave the dope.”

  As she had been doing a room off Hartzler’s hallway the previous morning, Kate remembered. “Anybody else?” She thought of the report Jack had dug up on Childress’s finances. “Anybody in town?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Toni wanted it kept small. She said the smaller the operation, the less chance of attracting attention.”

  “Whose idea was it to kill me?”

  His eyes slid away. “Mine.”

  Kate remembered the dispatch with which Toni had sent the fox pup off to that Great Den in the Sky, and was disgusted. “Jesus Christ, Jerry, I might as well hand you the noose right now. You’re going to take the fall for her, aren’t you? You’re going to waltz right in and lay your head on the chopping block and wham.” She leaned forward. “We’re not talking about the love of your life here. We’re talking about a woman who will spread her legs for any man she thinks she can use to make a buck. She’s screwing Leckerd. I saw her halfway into the sack the night of the turtle races with a production supervisor who, for all you know, is running hits out to the production centers for her. Hell, I saw her all over Gideon Trocchiano, who’s probably sprinkling it on the cereal in the mornings.”

  “It was my idea to kill you,” he said clearly, and Kate wanted to hit him, hard. He saw it and couldn’t help shrinking back out of reach, but he said, “She said it was a shame, that she really liked you, but after you saw her get the box from Leckerd and give it to me, we didn�
�t have a choice.”

  Tight-lipped, Kate said, “Yeah, a real shame. I liked her, too, and I’m real sorry I have to bust her ass.”

  She looked at her watch. Incredibly, it was five-fifteen. Through the window she saw that it was still dark out. It shouldn’t still be dark at that hour at that time of year, but the fact didn’t register with her. She picked up the phone and dialed the extension for the guard shack at Three. “Dave? Shugak again. When do you get off shift?”

  The young voice at the other end of the line held a guarded excitement. “My relief will be here at six.”

  “Do you come straight back to the Base Camp then?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I want you to come to room 109 in the OCX II. I’ve got someone I want you to baby-sit until Childress gets here.”

  Kate hung up and Jerry regarded her with wry exhaustion. “What, you don’t trust me to stay put?”

  “Why should I?” Kate’s tone wasn’t accusatory, merely matter-of-fact, but he winced. “How did she get the dope up on the Slope?”

  “At first? I don’t know. For the last six months I’ve been bringing it up for her.” He saw her expression and actually smiled. “I’ve been through Anchorage International so many times I know most of those security guards by their first names. Most of the time they just wave me through. Even if they looked, all they’d find in my bag is instruments and bandages and medicine. When you’re cutting it ten times before you sell it, it doesn’t take much to turn a profit.”

  He said it so casually, so entirely without guilt, that Kate stared at him, half in disgust, half in wonder. “I thought I knew you.”

  His shoulders moved in a barely perceptible shrug. “I don’t guess anybody knows anybody. Not really.”

  “I don’t guess,” she agreed.

  She didn’t make the mistake of asking him why again, and they sat in silence until six-twenty, when Dave Poss hammered at the door. “Hi, Dave,” Jerry said.

  “Hi,” Dave said. “Jerry?”

  “Watch him,” Kate said, hooking a thumb over her shoulder.

  He stared from her to Jerry and back again. “Watch Jerry? Why?”

  “Because I say so. He doesn’t leave this suite, he doesn’t make any phone calls and if he has to use the John he does it with the door open and you watching. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Kate’s voice cracked like a whip. “Is that clear?”

  His shoulders braced. “Yes.” He wanted to add “sir” so badly his teeth clenched with the effort it took to hold it back.

  “When does the airport tower open, do you know?”

  “Six, I think.”

  “Do you know the number?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate sighed inwardly. “Dial it, please?”

  “All right.” Dave stepped to the phone and punched nine to exit the Base Camp and seven more digits. It was picked up on the first ring. “Hey, hi, Clint. This is Dave Poss, RPetCo Security. I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you. Her name’s Kate Shugak and she’s cleared all the way through to Childress.” He handed the receiver to Kate.

  The voice was stiff and a little suspicious. “Ms. Shugak?”

  “Hello. Do you have a flight inbound with Childress on board?”

  “Yes.”

  “ETA?”

  Silence.

  “Do you have an arrival time?” Kate asked.

  Reluctantly, the voice said, “Yes.”

  Kate looked at Dave Poss and wondered if obstructionism was hereditary or just plain infectious. “And what might be that arrival time?”

  Even more reluctantly, the voice said, “They departed from Anchorage at six, they should be on the ground here by seven-twenty.”

  “Thank you so much for all your help,” Kate said sweetly, and hung up. “Childress is due in at seven-twenty. If I’m not back before then, you can turn Jerry over to him.”

  The guard looked down at Jerry, who looked at Kate with a half smile. “I don’t guess I have to ask who’s next.”

  “Cheer up,” Kate said, “maybe they’ll give you adjoining cells. Then you could be sure of having her all to yourself.”

  And with that singularly low blow, Kate turned on her heel and left the room.

  *

  Toni wasn’t in her room. She’d been there, the bed was rumpled and the towels used. The suite door banged open behind her and she turned. “Hello, Ann,” she said.

  Something in her calm expression made the other woman hesitate. “Hello. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for Toni. You know where she is?” “No,” Ann said automatically, but Kate was watching her closely.

  Kate looked back down at the empty bed. “She’s with Otto,” she said. “At the dig.” She raised her eyes. “Isn’t she?”

  Ann took a step back. Kate shook her head. “Too late. Jerry told me everything. Go to your room and wait for Security.”

  Ann swung her head from side to side, still backing up. “Forget it.”

  Kate gave a short, unamused laugh. “Run, then.” She brushed by the other woman and stopped in the hall to look over her shoulder. “But ask yourself. Where?”

  Toni’s van was missing from the bull rail and Kate headed for the garage. It seemed her fate to intercept Cale Yarborough each time he backed his truck out and Kate waved to get his attention. He halted, a displeased expression on his face as he rolled down his window. “What d’you want?”

  “Your truck,” Kate said, opening his door. It seemed colder now than it had been at any time all night and she had to work on not letting her teeth chatter. “Get out.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “Get out of the goddam truck, Yarborough. I’m Kate Shugak, in case you don’t remember.”

  “I remember,” he said furiously, “and I also remember you ain’t nothing but a goddam roustabout. Who the hell do you think you are, telling me to get out of my own goddam truck?”

  “I think I’m a special investigator personally hired by John King to find out who’s running drugs into your side of the field,” Kate said bluntly. “I have found them, and I’d like to catch one of them before she heads for Rio on the next available plane.”

  Yarborough stared at her, stunned into immobility. She caught his elbow and yanked him out of the driver’s seat.

  “Childress is on his way up, he’ll be on the ground at Prudhoe at seven-twenty. Pick him up and meet me at Tode Point.” She climbed behind the wheel.

  “Pick him up? How’m I supposed to pick him up when you’ve got my truck?” he yelled after her.

  “You’re the field manager, you figure it out!” she yelled back.

  As she fishtailed off the pad onto the Backbone she noticed that it seemed to be getting darker instead of lighter, as if the sun were setting instead of rising. A shiver of fear chased down her spine as she wondered if she was reacting to Jerry’s mickey again, and then realized the darkness came from a weather front rolling down off the Arctic ice pack, a great boiling mass of fog and snow that engulfed everything in its path: rigs, modules, flow lines, roads. Her first reaction was a wave of relief that she was in her right mind. Her second was to swear and thump the wheel, before flooring the gas pedal, trying to outrun the menacing wall of weather.

  No one could have. It was the grandmother of all spring storms and it hit her windshield at exactly and precisely the moment she turned off the Backbone onto the Tode Point access road.

  Instantly it was whiteout conditions. She couldn’t see a foot in front of the windshield, much less the milepost markers lining the sides of the roads. The temperature in the cab dropped thirty degrees in as many seconds. The wind struck the truck like a blow, rattling her inside it like the last nut in a can of cocktail mix. She had to slow to a crawl, feeling her way with the front tires, praying the next gust of wind wouldn’t roll the truck and her with it right off the road. If that happened, she thought with a touch of hysteria, it might be best if she j
ust kept on going east until she wound up in Canada. The longevity of the average Sloper after she had wrecked the field manager’s truck was problematic at best.

  The drive, fifteen minutes from the access road the last time she’d traveled it, this morning took nearly an hour. Her feet were blocks of ice, cold sweat beaded her forehead and her hands felt permanently attached to the wheel when finally the blowing snow in front of the hood took on a more substantial quality. She slammed on the brakes with both feet. The truck skidded and stalled, fetching up with a light bump against the thin metal of the trailer wall.

  It took all her strength to get the truck’s door open against the push of the wind, and it caught her once, painfully, across the shins, right in the same spot she’d nicked them on the stairs to Skid 14.

  Once outside, the truck door slammed shut behind her and she knew she’d never get it open again. It was the trailer or death from exposure. A fitting end, some would say, for her mother’s daughter. She fought to keep her balance against the force of the wind, against the voice that said, “But I’m so tired, can’t we just sit down and rest for a while, just a little while?”

  There is danger, Cindy Sovalik’s voice said clearly. There is danger.

  Kate peered around, eyes slitted against the snow that stung her cheeks, half expecting to see the old woman materialize out of the storm. She didn’t, but the certainty in that voice spurred her to action. Head down, she struggled through the drift rapidly piling up around the truck and felt her way down the wall of the trailer to the door. She banged on it with her fist. After a moment it opened, and an incredulous voice exclaimed, “Kate! Jesus, what are you doing out in this?”

  Hands pulled her inside and she collapsed on the floor, panting and blinking ice out of her eyes. When she could see, she found four concerned faces staring back. “Chris,” she wheezed.

  “Kate, what are you doing here? You could have been killed in this storm. Karen, where’s the thermos? Pour her some cocoa.”

  A steaming mug was thrust into her hands. She almost dropped it. “Here, I’ve got it,” someone said, and the mug was held to her lips. She gulped the liquid gratefully.