Midnight Come Again

by Dana Stabenow

  Glukhov blinked. “I suppose it could be. I hadn’t thought. Yes, I guess it was,” he said, marveling.

  Footsteps sounded in the passageway, and Kamyanka rose to his feet, Glukhov a beat behind him.

  “Senator!” Glukhov surged forward, hand outstretched. “Is delight to see you again!”

  “Armin! Your English is wonderful! You must have worked very hard.” Overmore pushed back the enveloping hood of his dark blue sweatshirt and smacked his hands together. “Where’s the vodka?”

  The Herc came in late, delayed by an emergency caused by a Reeve Aleutian 727 limping into Anchorage from Dutch Harbor on one engine. All traffic had been suspended as the 727 dumped fuel over the upper Inlet. They’d landed safely, and when they rolled to a stop the pilot turned to the crew and said, “Let’s show a little class, boys and girls, put on your jackets and caps and straighten your ties.”

  All this Larry Maciarello related to Kate with relish. Pilots loved stories about near disasters. Actual crashes were okay so long as they knew no one on board and could second-guess the pilot, but near disasters, where everyone walked away, were best. Larry would be reflying the Reeve flight for years, and so would every other pilot who heard about it. Before too long, they’d have been on board, and before much longer, in the left seat.

  He helped move the load of groceries out of the Herc and onto the back of the AC flatbed. “I hear you’re really Kate Shugak,” the driver of the flatbed said to Kate.

  She looked at him.

  His smile faded. “Yeah, well, I guess it doesn’t matter much,” he mumbled, backing up to the cab. He climbed in and the flatbed would have kicked dirt if the apron of the airport hadn’t been paved.

  “Kate Shugak?” Larry said behind her. “What, you’re here incognito?”

  She turned to see him smiling.

  “Kind of like Mata Hari.”

  Kate looked at him. “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Kind of sexy, having an alias. Like your scar.”

  The next thing she knew he had grabbed her and was trying to kiss her. It wasn’t necessarily disgusting, but it was irritating. “Larry, knock it off.” She squirmed. He countersquirmed. “Larry, damn it, I mean it, knock it off!” She stiff-armed his shoulders and he retaliated by grabbing her waist and pulling her in tight.

  “Okay,” she said through her teeth, “that’s—mmmph—it.”

  She raised both feet off the ground, and suddenly he was holding her entire weight with two hands. It threw him off balance and he staggered back a step. He couldn’t hold her and she slid down. She got her feet planted just in time and stood straight up fast without bothering to move away first.

  The top of her head connected with his jaw. His teeth snapped together with enough force to chip two of them. His head flew back and they both heard the distinctive Snick! as his back went out.

  He shrieked. There was no other word for it. Kate found herself free. One hand went to his head, one to his lower back. “Ouch, oh damn, oh shit, oh damn! Look what you did to me, oh god, my back, my head, my back!”

  He looked to be in real and serious pain, and Kate began to feel sorry for him, just a little, not a lot. He wasn’t a big bad wolf, after all; in the predator hierarchy he barely ranked at rabbit. “Look, Larry—”

  “Don’t touch me!” he shrieked again. “Don’t help me, don’t come near me!”

  He hobbled away, moaning.

  Kate turned to see Mutt standing in the doorway of the hangar. “You were a big help.”

  One eyebrow quirked. Like you needed it, the amused yellow gaze said.

  Kate retired to the office to make some coffee. All the planes were in the barn or at the dock for the night, save the DC-3, which was on the ground in Iliamna while the Native association board whooped it up with the Iliamna association board. Kate wondered who Cal Kemper had found to seduce. There was always someone.

  Unfortunately, with nothing coming in or going out, that left only paperwork. She brought the various logs up to date, aircraft, engine and business, and entered future trips on the four calendars on the wall of the hangar, one for each plane. It was going to be a busy July. She toted up checks amounting to seven thousand dollars—a slow day—made out a deposit slip and tucked them into an envelope for Baird to take to the bank the next day, if he didn’t forget.

  The Alaska First Bank of Bering, that was. Kate wondered if she should hint Baird into banking elsewhere. She wondered if the bank were FDIC insured. The FBI had no jurisdiction over banks that weren’t.

  For all she knew, Baird and Sullivan were drinking buddies. Best to leave it alone for now, watch what happened, but she might have to take steps at some point. Baird was often obnoxious in both his personal and his professional habits and he showered far too rarely to suit Kate, but he worked hard to make his business a success, and he didn’t deserve to lose it all to a crooked banker.

  She was going to have to tell Jim about Sullivan, though, and Overmore, and soon. She would have earlier if he hadn’t reverted to his usual pain-in-the-ass persona. It was only a hunch, backed by some interesting coincidences and some even more interesting past history. If she could just hold onto her temper long enough in Jim’s presence to get the words out.

  It didn’t occur to her until much later how long it had been since she’d lost her temper.

  It was four in the morning when she yawned and decided it was time to stretch her legs on the way to the outhouse. Mutt, laid out on a rug in the hangar like a sack of potatoes, opened one eye to a slit and promptly closed it again as Kate went past.

  It was late enough to do her business with the door open, and she sat for a few moments and contemplated the distant lights of Bering, three miles to the northeast, nearly obscured by the length of the swamp grass and the density of the alders between. A small town, tight knit, as witness the continuous flow of people in and out of the Chevak house the day before. It reminded her of Niniltna. On a larger scale, of course, as Niniltna had less than five hundred people and Bering had over five thousand.

  But it had the same kind of village feeling. If everybody knew everybody else’s business, then everybody was ready to help in times of trouble. And they were just as ready to help celebrate in times of joy. The four aunties and their quilting bee, who provided every new bride in the Park with a handmade quilt on her wedding day. Dinah’s had had the cover of one of her favorite books painstakingly embroidered in every square, twelve squares in all. Bernie, the bar owner who pretended a fidelity to the bottom line that was proved false time and again, when he refused to serve alcohol to women he knew were pregnant, when he cut off known drunks well before closing time, and confiscated their truck keys into the bargain, when he memorized the birth dates of every kid in the local school and threw them steadily and repeatedly out the door of the Roadhouse when they tried to lie their way in. George Perry, who rivaled Jim Chopin for skirt-chasing but who had been known to get up at five A.M. on a February morning to preheat the engine on his Cessna so it would take off in twenty-below weather and the Niniltna High School student council could get to a conference in Anchorage.

  Bobby, who pirated radio air to broadcast snippets of Park news, who’d been born, who got married and who died, and notices for the bake sales and car washes the basketball team staged to earn money for away games. Dinah, who edited home videos for Park rats to send to relatives Outside, accepting for payment a quart of blueberries or a promise of one of next year’s kings. Mandy and Chick, who brought glory to Niniltna when they raced in the Iditarod.

  Old Sam, who had been with her on the hunt, who’d helped get Demetri down from the ridge in spite of a bullet wound and a broken arm, who had helped bring back Jack’s body. Old Sam, that crusty Alaskan old fart, who’d been the only one whose company she’d been able to tolerate on the homestead last winter.

  Why, I miss them, she thought, surprised.

  The horizon brightened. She remembered a poem, one of Roethke’s. In a dark time, the
eye begins to see, in broad day the midnight come again, something like that. What was the other line? All natural shapes blazing unnatural light? Some people might call the Arctic’s midnight sun unnatural light.

  In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

  Was she?

  Bird calls began to sound, chirps to song to honks, but not the one she was listening for.

  Birds know their own place.

  She was five steps from the outhouse when somebody threw a blanket over her head.

  “Hey!” Her shout was loud and immediate and completely muffled by the blanket.

  She fought, kicking, struggling. A rope was thrown, fastened tight. “Mutt!” she tried to yell, and then somebody unloaded a ton of bricks on her and she knew no more.

  She woke up in the bed of a pickup truck.

  At least that’s what she thought it was when it bounced over a rut and tossed her a foot in the air. She came down hard with her head jammed into a corner and her shoulder against something that felt uncomfortably like the fender of a wheel well.

  She was glad that her head was jammed into a corner because it felt only tentatively attached to her body and might otherwise have fallen right off her shoulders. There was a dull, insistent pain making its presence known to someone, somewhere, but her most pressing concern was her need to breathe. The blanket over her head was smothering her. Her hands had been bound to her side beneath it, pulling her elbows into the indentation of her waist, a natural curve between breasts and hips that resisted efforts to inch the rope up or down.

  She was still fighting it when the driver of the truck slammed on his brakes and she slid forward into the cab, hard. She was still dazed when the tailgate went down, although she could hear that he had left the engine running.

  Hands grabbed her feet and she resisted the instinctive urge to kick. It hadn’t helped last time, and her only advantage might be in leading her captor to believe that she was still unconscious. So far as she could tell, straining her ears, there was only one person.

  She was thrown unceremoniously over a shoulder in a fireman’s lift. The breath went out of her in a whoof, the pain that had been happening to somebody else was not so distant anymore and she was unable to restrain a faint groan. She gritted her teeth and counted as the man carrying her walked, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven steps in all. There was a grunt, a shift of weight and she fell backwards, knocking her right shoulder on something round and hard and landing on a surface softer than the truck bed but which knocked the breath out of her just the same.

  Which was fortunate, as she couldn’t move or exclaim as she felt hands at the rope binding her arms. There was a moment of clarity, of realization. He was untying her. This was it, her chance for escape. Her breath returned and she fought to hide it though her lungs were starving for oxygen.

  Throughout her captor remained silent, no word, no sound, and for some reason his silence told her that she was about to die. The realization steadied her, cleared her head, and she didn’t move as the rope and the blanket were stripped away. She kept her eyes closed, and let herself utter an artistic little moan when she was hauled upright to sit behind a steering wheel. So that was what had hit her right shoulder when he’d dropped her. She was in the cab of the pickup.

  He draped her limp body over the steering wheel, and reached around her for the gearshift.

  She beat him to it, sitting upright, throwing in the clutch and slamming the gearshift into reverse. Only there was no clutch, and no reverse; the goddamn thing was an automatic.

  Hands grabbed her again. Somebody swore roughly in Russian and she turned to see her friend Yuri, her midnight caller, her Snerts opponent, her genial host on board the Kosygin, face creased in an open-mouthed snarl that made him almost unrecognizable.

  Still, she couldn’t help herself, she paused for one stunned second. “Yuri? Not you!”

  He hit the side of her face hard with his fist. Her ears rang. He launched himself into the cab and they grappled, struggling. He was bigger and stronger than she was, but she was more frightened, and more angry. His hands came around her throat. She kept her hands on his wrists, ignoring the steadily tightening pressure as her right foot fought for purchase against the dash. She felt a knob break off beneath her sole, concentrated on finding a surface her foot wouldn’t slip on, and then straightened her right leg with an abrupt movement.

  It didn’t have the force she had hoped for because the steering wheel was in the way, but it was enough to send him off balance and staggering backwards. His hands loosened from her throat but didn’t let go, dragging her with him. She didn’t let go of his wrists, either, using her body weight to keep him off balance. She sagged to the ground and if he didn’t quite fall forward he could not stand straight up, either.

  And then Mutt landed on his back, a hundred and forty pounds of rage and fangs. She sank her teeth deep into the back of his neck and he screamed, a hoarse, horrible scream, and let go of Kate to reach back to try ineffectually to push Mutt away. She let go of his throat to bite one of his hands to the bone. He screamed again. Somehow he managed to shake Mutt off and stumble to his feet. Kate, on her knees and gasping for breath, pulled herself to her feet.

  The hour before dawn had come, bringing with it enough light to see everything clearly. There was no trace of the husky in Mutt now; she was all wolf, long, slender legs on tiptoe, ruff extended, long, sharp teeth bared, a steady, rumbling growl emanating from deep in her breast. She looked like the lupine version of Satan incarnate; murderous, deadly, relentless. Judgment had been rendered, sentence passed, and there was no appeal. Next to Mutt, Yuri looked like an amateur, and he knew it.

  Terrified, mesmerized, he backed away. Mutt stalked forward, matching him, step for step, crabbing sideways the way wolves do when they’re going for the kill. Kate tried to say something, tried to call Mutt off, but Yuri’s hands had been too strong and too effective and nothing emerged but a weak croaking sound. She tried again. “Mutt. Mutt!”

  Mutt either didn’t hear her or didn’t want to. She continued to shadow Yuri, who was too terrified to turn his back and run. He continued to back away, one careful, trembling foot feeling behind him at a time.

  He stepped back once more and his expression changed to surprise, and then panic. He lost his balance, waved his arms in a futile attempt to get it back, and suddenly, he was no longer there.

  With a howl of rage Mutt sprang after him.

  Galvanized, Kate scrabbled to her feet and staggered after them.

  The road ended abruptly, in a cessation of the gravel pad that was twenty feet thick and so made a steep twenty-foot-slope down which to fall. Clumps of alders and thin-boled birch grew here and there, a few poppies, some Alaska cotton and of course tall stalks of the ubiquitous fireweed.

  Yuri was lying at the bottom of the man-made bluff, Mutt standing over him in stiff-legged outrage, growling out her resentment at being balked of prey.

  Yuri’s head lay at an odd angle from the rest of his body. Sightless eyes stared at the sky. He was quite dead.

  14

  elusive

  as quiet steps

  at midnight

  —Drumbeats Somewhere Passing

  Mutt squatted over Yuri’s body, cut loose with a stream of urine, kicked a contemptuous pawful of dirt over him and bounded up the bank. She jumped up to place her paws on Kate’s shoulders, anxious eyes staring into Kate’s own. A steady, worried whine had replaced the menacing growl.

  “It’s okay, girl.” The words came out in a croaking whisper. “It’s okay.” She let her forehead rest on Mutt’s shoulder, and they stood there, leaning against each other.

  The truck was still running.

  Kate didn’t know when that fact impinged upon her consciousness, but it brought her back to herself with a start. Mutt’s paws dropped down to the ground, and she padded after Kate as she walked to the cab.

  Standing on the ground next to it was a bottle of Windsor Canadian,
the seal unbroken. So that was how she was supposed to go out, just another drunken Native boosting a truck, wrecking it and getting herself killed for her pains. Happened all the time, all over the Bush. What could be easier?

  She couldn’t have said why the realization made her literally shake with fury, but shake with fury she did. “Mutt,” she said, her voice a little stronger now. “Up.”

  With one leap Mutt was up and over the side of the bed. Kate picked up the blanket and the rope and tossed them in after her, along with the bottle of whiskey, and closed the tailgate.

  She was physically unequal at present to the task of bringing Yuri’s body up the bank, and besides, the idea of a few carnivores nibbling on him as he waited to be retrieved was attractive in the extreme.

  The truck was registered to someone named Paul B. Malloy, presumably the man Yuri had boosted it from. The tank was half empty, but roads leading from Bering never led far, and she turned it around and started back. She drove very slowly and very carefully, negotiating every bump in the road as if it were Denali. The journey seemed to take hours, when in reality it was only twenty minutes. She’d been gone from the hangar for less than an hour.

  She parked the truck very painstakingly indeed in front of the office door, descended from the cab with exaggerated care and walked slowly and precisely back to the bunkhouse. She even knocked on the door. She had to knock twice before he answered it.

  “Kate!” she heard somebody say, and suddenly what little strength she had left in her knees gave out.

  Arms caught her, and she was vaguely grateful. “Thank you,” she said politely. “You know, I think I need to sit down now.”

  Jim had lain awake for some time, puzzling over the accounts Kate had given him. He had debated whether he should go down to the docks in search of Carroll and Casanare to pass this information on, and had decided almost immediately against it. Carroll and Casanare were fixated on the idea that the Russian Mafia was preparing to turn western Alaska into a funnel for the importation of illegal arms and parts thereof to domestic terrorist groups within the United States. He would need more evidence if he was going to change their minds.