Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

“What to do with it, you mean?”

  She nodded. “It’s just sitting up there, falling down. Dan wants me to deed it over to the Park.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” Bobby said. “Ranger Dan would like every breathing Park rat to deed every piece of real Park property we own to the Park Service. Not happening.”

  She ignored the gibe, which was mostly bluster anyway. Chief Park Ranger Dan O’Brian had the distinction of being one of the few rangers in the entire National Park system who got along with the people whose property had been grandfathered in at the time of the creation of the Park around them. Or at least none of them had ever taken a shot at him, which amounted to the same thing. “Yeah, but maybe he has a point.”

  Bobby leveled an admonitory finger. “It hasn’t even been a year, Shugak. Don’t do anything in a hurry.” He paused. “And think first about what Old Sam would have wanted. And…”

  It was irresistible. “And?”

  “And,” he said slowly, “about what you really want, but hold that thought. I’m remembering I wanted to talk to you about something. A coupla things.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody’s running booze and drugs to the McMiners out at the Suulutaq.”

  She looked at him.

  He looked back.

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s news?”

  “You knew about it?”

  “I knew it was inevitable,” she said. “Young men plus too much money equals booze and drugs. It’s like a natural law or something. Definitely a mathematical certainty.”

  “Does Jim know?”

  “Of course he does.” She told him about the McMiner at the Riverside the day before, and her subsequent conversation with Maggie.

  “So we’re talking commercial quantities here,” he said thoughtfully.

  You would know, she thought but didn’t say.

  “Does Jim know who?”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Do you?”

  He wasn’t ready to share. “Just rumors.”

  “When you hear a name, let us know.”

  He cocked his head. “Us? Not just you? Not just Jim?”

  She flipped him off, and he laughed. “Where is Jim, anyway? Haven’t seen him around in a while.”

  “Kushtaka,” she said. “Tyler Mack was murdered.”

  “Ah, shit,” Bobby said.

  “Probably,” Kate said. “Jim’s waiting on the ME to say one way or the other.”

  “Man, I hope it’s the other. I thought we got over our Hatfield-and-McCoy phase when you settled things between the Kreugers and the Jeppsens with a D6 Cat.”

  Kate let her head fall back against the couch. “We don’t know what this is yet.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said, “we do.” He paused. “You ever told Jim—?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “Maybe—”

  “No.”

  He held up a hand, palm out. “Whatever. I’m all for a quiet life.” They sat for a few moments, listening to the sounds of the birds and the bees coming through the open door. “We ought to legalize and tax all drugs,” Bobby said. “Treat ’em like booze and smokes. If somebody wants to stick a needle in their arm or powder up their nose, that’s their business. Keep ’em out of the hands of children and people who operate heavy equipment.”

  “No argument here,” Kate said. “I’m all for treating people like grown-ups.”

  “You’ve never had a drink, Kate,” Bobby said. “I’m not sure you get a say.”

  “No,” Kate said, “but I’m alive and I’ve got eyes and I’ve read a little history. The last time we tried prohibition, it didn’t work out for us all that well. Forbidding something just makes it that much more attractive, especially to teenagers.”

  “They say it’s a disease.”

  “It isn’t one we have to contract, not with some positive reinforcement and responsible parenting.” She picked at a piece of lint on her jeans, feeling his eyes on her. When she spoke again her voice was quiet. “Both my parents were alcoholics. Which means I’ve got the gene. Alcohol killed them both, one way or another. It’s not getting a shot at me. Legal or not.”

  “You didn’t feel so relaxed about alcohol in the Park, once.”

  She gave a short laugh and drank coffee. “I was a lot more pissed off, once.” She changed the subject. “I saw a private jet land yesterday while I was checking my mail.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  She nodded. “He came over to say hi. My, he was friendly. It’s like he didn’t kidnap me or try to kill me or anything.”

  “He’s really cozying up,” Bobby said.

  “He’s trying,” Kate said.

  “You hear he bought into the Suulutaq?”

  She nodded.

  “Doesn’t bother you?”

  “Bothers the hell out of me,” Kate said, “but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

  “Gaea might,” he said.

  She laughed out loud this time, with genuine amusement. “What, you think I should join?”

  Gaea being the environmental organization of the glossy brochure in her mail the previous day. It had sprung into being full grown with the discovery of the Suulutaq Mine. They were headquartered in Anchorage, and Kate had had the personal dollar-and-a-quarter tour from its executive director. Thinking of that tour now, of how well funded the organization had appeared, she said, “I don’t think they need my money.”

  He shrugged. “Might be a way to stick it back to that fucker Erland. Seems like he’s had it all his own way for a while now.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “It’s what we do.”

  “What is?”

  She looked up. “Alaska. We pull stuff out. We pull stuff out of the water, and we pull stuff out of the ground. If we could figure out a way to pull stuff out of the air, we would. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. We don’t know how to do anything else.” A note of acid crept into her voice. “We certainly don’t know how to do anything else in Juneau.”

  “So?”

  “So, have you seen the price of gold lately?”

  “The mine’s going in no matter what, is that what you’re saying?”

  She leaned forward. “Look down the road a little, Bobby, even just a few years. The mine is up and running. They’re a fact of life. Hell, they’re a neighbor. How much time do you think they’re going to have for neighbors who have been drawing horns and tails on their pictures for three solid years?”

  She sat back again. “If it was me, zero.”

  He thought about it. “Yeah, well, you’ve always been an unforgiving bitch.”

  She laughed again. “True.” She drained her mug. “The EIS isn’t even done, Bobby. Let science have its say. And then we’ll see.”

  He looked at her, openly speculative.

  “What?”

  “What if they’d found the gold at Canyon Hot Springs?”

  She stared at him, her mug stopped halfway to her mouth.

  He smiled. “What I thought. And in the meantime?”

  Kate recovered herself with an effort. “We wait. We’re always waiting. It’s like Potlatch.”

  “Potlatch?” He looked surprised. “You mean Scott dragging up?”

  “I mean everybody dragging up because they’re tired of waiting. That is also who we are. Seward’s Folly, until for a while we aren’t. The Klondike Gold Rush. Those farmers who settled in the Matsu during the Depression. World War Two and Lend-Lease. The Swanson River oil field. Prudhoe Bay.

  “People have always followed the money north. They stick it out for long enough to make their pile, and drag up south again.” Even as she said the words, she felt more tired than indignant. “We’re a transient community, the people who stay being way in the minority. Nobody new to the state is going to vote for more taxes to build more roads or schools or put in more sewers. So villages like Potlatch are dying because they’re leaving, too, for the bigger communities like Bering and Barrow and Newenham and Juneau, Fairbanks
and Anchorage. Kushtaka, they just lost their school because they ran out of kids. Cheryl Moonin, one of Auntie Balasha’s nieces, Cheryl moved out to Wisconsin with her husband and three daughters. They’ll grow up there, they’ll go to school there, they’ll probably marry there. For sure they won’t be coming back to the Park.” She raised a hand, palm up. “Easy equation. No jobs, no people. No people, no kids. No kids, no schools. No schools, no community. No community, no jobs, and the snake eats its tail and consumes itself.”

  His smile was crooked. “Adapt to the Suulutaq Mine or die?”

  “Maybe that is what I mean,” she said, her voice rueful.

  “You do know,” he said, “that some people would rather die.”

  “I know,” she said, and thought again of Canyon Hot Springs.

  She got up and refilled the kettle. With her back to him, she said, “That true, what you heard about somebody making a movie in the Park?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “But we’ve already had Drew Barrymore and John Cusack making movies in Anchorage. Probably just a matter of time before some Hollywood honcho discovers just how photogenic we are by comparison.”

  She sincerely hoped not.

  Ten

  THURSDAY, JULY 12

  Kuskulana

  The skiff swamped ten feet short of the bank, and Jim pulled his phone out, grabbed the bowline, and went over the side, holding the hand with the phone in it over his head. The water was up to his shoulders and so cold, he felt like an instant Creamsicle. The current, swollen with snowmelt after two warm days, was running strongly downriver.

  He turned his body sideways to it to reduce drag and fought the current to shore, where he stumbled out and fumbled with numb hands to fasten the bowline to a convenient willow branch. He looked back in time to see Roger Christianson’s beautiful skiff and brand-new outboard sink beneath the surface of the river with a long, slow death gurgle.

  His hair and hat and his phone and the bottom half of his left sleeve were still dry, but he was freezing cold and starting to shiver. He thought briefly about starting a fire, but there wasn’t an app for that and rubbing two sticks together seemed like a lot more trouble than getting to his feet and starting to walk.

  In the very little time allotted to him to think when the skiff had begun to fill with water, he’d thrown the kicker hard over and headed straight for the Kushtaka side of the river. Not only was it closer, but if he had to walk out, the Kushtaka side was a better bet. The Kuskulana side dead-ended in the confluence of Cataract Creek and the Gruening River, and he would have had to wade across, which given the force of the creek’s current (not for nothing had it come by its name) was to say the least inadvisable.

  The Kushtaka side of the creek, on the other hand, had Kushtaka village south and the Kushtaka fish wheel north of where he’d put to shore. The fish wheel was across the river from Kuskulana and his aircraft, but it was at least within shouting distance of Kuskulana landing.

  The traffic on the Gruening was nowhere near what it was on the Kanuyaq, so his chances of thumbing a ride were not good. He thought of heading back to Kushtaka, but empirical evidence recently acquired advised him to head north instead.

  The next two hours were among the longest he ever recalled living. Apart from a few game trails that meandered off into the woods too soon, the brush next to the river was so thick as to be nearly impenetrable, and it became immediately obvious that the reason Kushtaka’s fish wheel was two miles upriver from the village was that it was on the first stretch of open gravel above water between there and Kushtaka.

  It was a long, slow slog. His clothes stayed wet and his boots squelched with every step and the trees were almost malevolent in their attempts to blind him and the mosquitoes swarmed around him like starlets around a Hollywood producer. He did his best to ignore current conditions and tried instead to concentrate on how he got there. He was pretty sure he knew.

  While he’d been busy interviewing people in Kushtaka, someone had unsnapped the drain plug.

  All skiffs had drains, a small hole beneath the outboard that drained the bottom of the skiff when it was hauled out of the water. When the skiff was in use, as in on the water, the drains were plugged with a drain plug that usually had some kind of simple locking mechanism.

  Someone had unlocked the drain plug on Roger’s skiff while Jim was in Kushtaka. They’d probably loosened it, too, just enough so that the forward motion of the water beneath the hull would tug out the plug when he got well and truly up to speed on the river. The results were always fairly spectacularly fast, so he could rule out someone from Kuskulana having done it or he would have sunk on the way to Kushtaka.

  His first year in the Park, he had responded to what was eventually called an accidental drowning when the same thing happened downriver from Niniltna. In that case, it was an old skiff with an older plug and an even older boat driver, who had drowned before he could make it to shore. Alaskan fishermen were notorious for not knowing how to swim, general opinion holding that you’d be dead from hypothermia before you figured which way was up, so why bother?

  Jim could have been dead of hypothermia himself, and in a little while he was going to be warm and dry enough to be well and truly pissed off about that. There was zero chance of finding out who had pulled the plug, and he wondered if the guilty party had done it on his own or if it was a joint decision by the entire village of Kushtaka. The message was equally clear either way: Keep your nose out of our business, Trooper.

  Except that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t anyway, if what he suspected was true about Tyler Mack’s death.

  He blundered through a stand of diamond willow, stepped into a saltwater marsh up to his knee, and swore, loudly and profanely, offending the delicate sensibilities of a cow moose who had until that moment been indulging in a peaceful nibble at some tender new willow shoots. She gave Jim an indignant look and turned to depart with dignity, shepherding her calf before her in an effort to shield her innocent offspring from the bad, bad man.

  “Yeah, you’re just lucky I’m a law enforcement professional,” he said to her retreating back, and bushwhacked on. Twenty minutes later, he muscled through the thick underbrush out onto the beach where the Kushtaka fish wheel had returned to its stately circle, dripping water and the occasional fish down the chute into the holding pen.

  He had his first bit of real luck of the day when he saw a skiff passing downriver. He staggered down to the edge of the water and waved his arms like semaphores. “Hey! Hey!”

  The skiff driver, by a miracle from neither Kuskulana nor Kushtaka but a sports fisherman from Eagle River, gaped at him for thirty seconds before recovering enough to put the kicker over to the right and come to the rescue of the bedraggled trooper. Safely ashore on the right side of the river, Jim said thanks and offered him a sodden twenty-dollar bill peeled out of his wallet. The Good Samaritan took it gingerly by one corner and said, “Really, Sergeant, you shouldn’t have,” without conviction. Jim knew the day he’d picked up the soaking wet Park trooper off the side of the Gruening River was about to enter into Park, if not Alaska, legend and lose nothing in the telling, either.

  He shook his sodden uniform into some semblance of order and hoped he had no cause to draw his weapon anytime soon. He stared across the river at the Kushtaka fish wheel.

  Kuskulana didn’t have a fish wheel. Kuskulanans fished for salmon in Alaganik Bay from fishing boats they owned. He wondered if it was partly because the Kushtakers were originally Athabascan in ancestry, Interior dwellers with an innate distrust of salt water. Although it was probably more due to the difference in their median income.

  He wondered, too, what someone standing where he was right now might have seen across the river early Tuesday morning.

  * * *

  Carol Christianson invited him in with exclamations of concern, relieved him of jacket, shirt, boots, and socks and sat him down at the kitchen table, and offered him his choice of coffee, tea, or cold beer. He was g
reatly tempted by the beer. “Better be coffee,” he said regretfully. “I’m flying.”

  “Then how about a latte?” she said, and demonstrated on a big cube of stainless steel, with spouts, that she said was from Switzerland. While the drink was creating itself, she produced half of a coffee cake that smelled of lemon and proved to be frosted with cream cheese icing. Jim hadn’t had anything since pie for breakfast, and he dug in. The cake was moist and chewy and tasted of fresh lemons, and the latte was a perfect brew, hot and aromatic and revivifying.

  Roger, next to him, was similarly occupied, and Carol pulled up a chair and observed them both with satisfaction. “Love me a man who likes to eat,” she said.

  “Marry me,” Jim said, spluttering crumbs.

  “Hey,” Roger said, spluttering his own crumbs, “I’m sitting right here.”

  Carol laughed, a mellow sound full of good humor. “It’s okay,” she said. “I think Kate Shugak got in there ahead of me.”

  “At least give me the recipe,” Jim said, and Carol wrote it out on a three-by-five index card forthwith. He tucked it carefully away and sat back looking around him with new eyes. The sugar and the caffeine together produced a low-level simmer just beneath the surface of his skin. “I might live,” he said, as if it were a new idea.

  Carol regarded him anxiously. “Are you sure you don’t want some dry clothes, Jim? I’m sure I can find something of Roger’s to fit.” She eyed their respective sizes. “Or maybe Ryan’s.”

  “Hey,” Roger said, indignant, and Carol laughed again.

  “I’m sorry about the skiff, Roger.” Jim had already said it once, but, considering the lemon coffee cake, he felt that it bore repeating.

  “Not your fault, Jim,” Roger said, all trace of humor vanishing. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone from Kushtaka took their mad out on someone from Kuskulana.”

  Which was the first time Jim considered that pulling the drain plug on Roger Christianson’s skiff might be regarded as a twofer in Kushtaka.

  The kitchen was painted white with sunny yellow accents in the backsplash and curtains, and the floor was white and black tiles. The appliances were white, a six-burner propane stove, a massive refrigerator, they even had a dishwasher. He felt warmer and drier just looking around the room.