Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “Tell me about it.” She hesitated. “Actually. Tell me about something else.”

  “What?”

  “You know Howie Katelnikof?”

  “Everybody knows Howie,” he said casually, suddenly on the alert.

  “What do you know about him?”

  He shook salt onto his plate and started mopping it up one fry at a time. “A lot more than I can prove.”

  “Shit,” she said. It was a long, drawn-out expression of annoyance and frustration, and it was heartfelt.

  “What’d he do?”

  “I think he’s been stealing stuff from the trailer out on the leases.”

  “You think?”

  “I know stuff is gone, a computer monitor, a telephone, some other office supplies. I don’t know that Howie took them, but he was the guy out there when they went missing. It was his shift.”

  “His shift?”

  “Yeah, I hired Dick Gallagher to work a week on, a week off with Howie.”

  “Guy just here.”

  “That’s him.”

  “You don’t think Gallagher is responsible?”

  “Wrong weeks.”

  Jim thought of the wariness in Dick Gallagher’s eyes. He and Howie could be ripping off the place together. “Those snow machines don’t work only on the river.”

  “You got something against Dick?”

  “Just met the guy. Don’t like to jump to assumptions, is all.” He ate another french fry. Salty goodness. “Howie never was the brightest dog on the gangline. Come to think of it, that was probably an insult to any dog on a gangline. Actually, maybe anything on four feet.”

  “I guess I should have talked to somebody before I hired him,” she said moodily.

  “That would have been good,” he said.

  She smacked him halfheartedly on his arm. “What’s more, he’s decided he’s in love with me.”

  “Only a matter of time,” Jim said.

  “Why, thank you, Sergeant Chopin.”

  “Howie falls in love pretty easily,” Jim said. “A working pulse is pretty much all it takes for him.”

  She smacked him again, less halfheartedly this time, and they both laughed. “Well, I’m not all that hard to please, but I’m a lot harder to please than that,” she said. “How mad at me are the Park rats going to be if I fire him?”

  “Not very. You might even get some more converts on the strength of it.”

  “Oh, well, then I’ll fire him the next time I see him.”

  “Where is he?”

  She made a face. “Out at the lease site. It’s his week on.”

  The bartender came with the check. “Anything else?”

  “I’ll get that,” Macleod said.

  Jim managed to snag it a second before she did. “I’m here on business. I’ll expense it.”

  The bartender stood there, waiting. “I’ll have another glass,” Talia said. “Jim? Want a beer?”

  Jim shook his head. “Can’t. I’m flying home this afternoon. Can’t drink and fly. I might hurt myself. Not to mention that three-hundred-thousand-dollar plane they gave me.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Simple. Don’t fly.”

  He took a deep breath, and let it out before turning his head to meet her eyes. They were large and very blue, and the lashes were long and thick and heavy. They weighed her eyelids down, giving her a slumberous, sexy look. Her face was flushed and her lips were shiny with gloss and half parted, and as he watched, her tongue came out to tease delicately at one corner.

  He swallowed hard. “You know I’m with somebody now.”

  She didn’t look away, and the smile didn’t falter. “I’ve heard. So?”

  She was making it clear she knew the score. An evening spent enjoying each other’s company, and then parting the next morning with no promises on either side.

  How uncomplicated that sounded, how downright relaxing.

  How tempting.

  She slid from her stool and leaned close to whisper in his ear. “Room 204. Come up the back stairs. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  She walked away and he watched her attentively, because he was a trained investigator and there might be a clue in the way her well-toned muscles moved together as they went away from him.

  He waited until she was out of the door and then turned and flagged down the bartender. “Could I have a receipt, please?”

  CHAPTER 9

  It was always a bad idea to sit around brooding, so when the bread came out of the oven Kate went outside to split kindling until her nose and her toes were numb. She came back inside to thaw out beneath a steaming shower and dress. She called to Mutt and the two of them went into town to check the mail. She hadn’t checked it since before the holiday so her mailbox was jammed and there was an overflow notice. She took it to the window and Bonnie gave her a hurt look and came staggering back with a plastic tub full to the brim. Kate detoured to the Niniltna dump and tossed nine-tenths of it into the ever-growing pile presided over by a flock of sleek, fat ravens and another of cranky-looking eagles, all of whom went silent as the tomb when they saw Mutt.

  There were only a few people at the Riverside Café that morning, and Kate got the best table by the window. Through it she could keep an eye on Mutt, who was sitting on the seat of the snow machine, surveying the passersby with a lofty air and accepting tentative greetings with a regal condescension and, when someone dared to take liberties, a baring of teeth.

  “Americano double tall, with lots of half-and-half,” Kate told Laurel, and added two packs of sugar when it arrived.

  “Damn, girl, how can you do that to an innocent little espresso? Sorta defeats the purpose of caffeine, you know?”

  She looked up to see Pete Heiman standing next to her table, a grin on his face.

  “Ah,” Kate said, “Pete, hello. Still unindicted, I see.”

  His grin didn’t falter. “I remain free on my own recognizance. Isn’t that how you cop types put it?”

  “Not quite,” Kate said dryly, “but it’ll do for going on with.”

  He indicated the seat across from her. “You mind?”

  Kate shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “Just coffee, honey,” he told Laurel, and sighed when Laurel winked at him and put extra into her hips as she departed their table. There was a reason the Riverside Café was so popular with men.

  Kate sipped her Americano and schooled her face into an expression of cool neutrality as she regarded Pete over the rim of her mug.

  Pete Heiman was a third-generation Alaskan with an irreproachable Alaskan family tree that included a stampeder, a Bush pilot, and one of Castner’s Cutthroats. Grainy newspaper photographs going back a hundred years showed a succession of Heiman men who looked like they’d been cloned, the same coarse dark hair clipped short, the same merry eyes in the same narrow face, the same shovel-shaped jaw, and the same grin somewhere between ingratiating and shit-eating. The president and CEO of Heiman Transportation, a trucking firm that was responsible for a minimum of twenty percent of all goods moved between Fairbanks and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, and a lifelong resident of Ahtna, Pete was also in his third term as the Republican senator for District 41, which included the Park.

  Laurel brought his coffee and swished away again. “How you faring this winter?” he said.

  “Like always,” Kate said. “Fuel bills are killing me, but they’re killing all of us. I’ll get by.”

  “Heard about that PFD fraud ring you broke up.” Pete gave an approving nod. “Good work there. Hate people who rip off the PFD.”

  “Everybody does,” Kate said. “Helps that everybody gets one. Makes them feel real proprietary about the fund. If their lawyer had wanted them to get a fair trial, he should have petitioned for a change of venue, to a courtroom out of state.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pete said, clearly not attending.

  “Something you wanted, Pete?”

  He did his best to look wounded. “Can’t I just sit down and ha
ve a friendly cup of coffee?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  To his credit, Pete laughed. “Yeah, okay, you never were one for the bullshit, Katie. Okay.” He faced her squarely. “I hear you’re the new chair of the Niniltna Association board of directors.”

  “Interim,” Kate said. “Interim chair. The membership may decide differently when they vote in January.” As she devoutly hoped they would.

  “Yeah, okay, interim. But you’re chair now.”

  “I am. What do you want, Pete?”

  He cocked an eye. “Word is it was a pretty interesting first meeting.”

  Kate stiffened. “That wouldn’t be any of your business, now, Pete, would it?”

  “No,” he said hastily. “None at all.”

  His thoughts were pretty plain on his face. Kate Shugak had once had a pretty robust sense of humor, and instead of squashing his interest in the board meeting she had only ratcheted it up a notch. He wouldn’t rest until he got all the gory details, and he’d probably be telling the story for years to come, too. Him and Harvey, it would be like getting it in stereo. Wonderful. “So?” she said.

  He shrugged, but the tension in his shoulders gave him away. “Well, as the new NNA chair, a lot of us are wondering what kind of stand you’re going to take on the Suulutaq Mine.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “That would be my business,” she said blandly. “And the board’s, and the shareholders’. Why do you ask?”

  He snorted. “Ah, Jesus, Katie, you know damn well why I’m asking. Global Harvest is going to bring a lot of jobs into my district.”

  “And a three-by-five-mile open pit mine into my backyard,” Kate said.

  “Ah, shit,” he said, half in distaste, half in dismay. “You ain’t gonna fight them on it, are you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, Pete,” Kate said. She drained her mug and rose to her feet. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you before I told the board and my fellow shareholders.”

  He snatched up her check as she was reaching for it. “I’ll get that.”

  “No.” The receipt tore a little as she pulled it from his hand. “I’ll get it.”

  His hurt feelings were well simulated, she had to give him that much. “Shit, Katie, I’ve bought you coffee before.”

  “I wasn’t chair of the board, before,” she said.

  She paid for her espresso and left.

  Outside Auntie Balasha was making obeisance to Mutt, who was accepting it with a gracious air. “Hey, Auntie,” Kate said, giving her a hug.

  “Katya,” Auntie Balasha said. “The dog, she look good. Nothing bad left over from last year?”

  Last year Mutt had been shot and almost killed, requiring surgery and a week’s recovery at the vet’s in Ahtna, a traumatic period that Kate even now had difficulty reliving. “She’s fine, Auntie.” Kate looked up and down the narrow little street to see if anyone was in listening distance. There wasn’t, but she lowered her voice anyway. “Listen, Auntie, have any of you seen anything of the Smith girls?”

  Auntie Balasha’s face darkened. “Vi keeping watch. She go out to Smith place once a week. She even get parents to say okay for the girls to come to her house after school sometime. When they come, they talk to Desiree.”

  Desiree was the school’s nurse practitioner, and Auntie Balasha’s granddaughter. “What does Desiree say?”

  Auntie Balasha’s lips tightened and she said sternly, “Desiree never talk about patients.”

  “Auntie.”

  Auntie Balasha sighed. “Desiree say they don’t talk much, but they do talk some. She say this is little bit of good. Maybe better later.”

  Kate felt a tightness in her chest ease. “Good. That’s good, Auntie. I was keeping tabs last winter, but this summer I was fishing and then I was working and—” She stopped making excuses. “I’m glad you and Desiree and Auntie Vi are keeping tabs on them.” She hesitated. “Do they still refuse to tell their parents about what Louis did to them?”

  “They don’t tell parents nothing,” Auntie Balasha said succinctly.

  There were twenty-one kids in the Smith family. Kate wondered if it was harder or easier to keep secrets in a family that size. Easier to hide them in the noise, or harder to hide because of all the noses standing by to sniff them out? She hoped for Chloe and Hannah’s sakes that when their parents did find out, the girls got all the love and support they needed, but she’d seen the family in action and she doubted it. She had Father Smith pegged as a greedy opportunist, and Mother Smith as someone who had perfected the art of going along. “How about you, Auntie?” she said out loud. “Everything okay?”

  “All well.”

  But Auntie Balasha seemed preoccupied. Kate looked at her, standing there in her homemade calico kuspuk, lavishly trimmed with gaudy gold rickrack and lustrous marten that she had probably trapped and tanned herself. Like all the aunties she was comfortably plump, with long graying hair she kept bundled out of her face, round cheeks a pleasing walnut brown, clad in skin that was by now wrinkled like a walnut, too. She was missing a tooth, and there was a faint scar on her left cheek, remnants of her marriage. It had ended when he had gone down the boat ramp in Cordova, drunk as a skunk, tripped over his own feet, and drowned in the harbor, leaving her with three children to feed and clothe and shepherd into adulthood. She had succeeded, partly because she’d had the love and support of the extended family of Park rats, and partly because she would have sold herself on the streets of Spenard before she let her children go cold or hungry. What Kate considered most remarkable was that she’d never heard Auntie Balasha whine or complain. She just kept on keeping on, and when her own children were grown and gone, like Auntie Joy she had progressed to an enthusiastic and indiscriminate adoption of every stray that wandered across her path, strays like Martin, and Willard, and evidently now Howie, who of course lost no time in exploiting the situation.

  That thought roused Kate’s protective spirit like nothing else. If Willard and Howie were stealing fuel from Auntie Balasha again, this time she wouldn’t just beat Willard to the ground, she would eviscerate him. “What is it, Auntie? Is there a problem? Something I can help you with?”

  Auntie Balasha raised her enormous brown eyes, liquid with love and concern. “I worry about you, Katya.”

  Kate was taken aback. “Worry about me?” She even laughed a little. “Why? I’m fine.”

  “You live so far out of town.” Auntie Balasha gestured vaguely in the general direction of Kate’s homestead. “If you get in trouble, who help you? Who come when you call? You should live in town. I live here. Vi live here. Joy, Edna live here. You get in trouble, we help you. We drop by more often, check up on you, see if you okay.”

  The prospect of the aunties dropping in at any hour of the day or night to check up on her froze the blood in Kate’s veins. Trying to speak amiably, she said, “That’s a nice thought, Auntie, and I thank you for it, but you know I’ve got Johnny with me now.” Driven to it, she added, “And Jim Chopin stops by now and then.”

  This artless addition got the skeptical look it deserved. “But you chair of Association now, Katya.”

  Kate stiffened. “Yes.”

  Balasha, ignoring the warning signs, carried on. “Position of responsibility. People need to talk to you about something, where you are? Far away! Can’t walk there, have to drive truck or snowgo. If shareholders need you, if emergency happens, long time it takes to come get you. You should move to town.”

  “Auntie,” Kate said, “I’ve got to go, I’ve got some business down the road. I’ll see you later, okay? Mutt. Up.”

  It came out as more of an order than a request and a startled Mutt scrambled to her feet. Kate climbed on in front of her and pressed the starter. The roar of the engine drowned out Auntie Balasha’s further remonstrances. Kate smiled tightly, tossed her a cheerful wave, and got the hell out of town.

  But not out of Dodge, as it turned out. One step into the Roadhouse she walked sl
ap into Martin Shugak, who smirked at her. “Madam Chair. Got a motion I’d like to run by you. Or do I mean over you?”

  She told him what to do with his motion and marched up to the bar, ears burning from the snickering that came from Martin’s knot of misfits, malcontents, and misdemeanors in waiting, a group that encouraged Martin to temporarily forget all the ways she could hurt him if she put her mind to it.

  “Kate,” Bernie said. He’d undoubtedly heard the story, too, but he was a little wiser in the ways of Kate Shugak than Martin was and he refrained from comment. With her usual insouciance Mutt reared up, paws on the bar, and panted at Bernie, who snagged the usual package of beef jerky and tossed it her way. He put a can of Diet 7UP and a glass full of ice in front of Kate and moved down to the end of the bar, where Nick Waterbury sat, arms around what appeared to be not his first beer of the day. She frowned and checked the clock on the wall. Not even three o’clock. Nick was a lot of things but he wasn’t a boozer. “Hey, Nick,” she said. “How you doing.”

  “Fine, Kate. No worries.” He didn’t look up and his dreary voice contradicted his words.

  “How’s Eve?”

  “She’s fine. We’re just fine.”

  Since they’d lost their daughter Mary two years before at the hands of Louis Deem, who had walked on the charge, Kate doubted the veracity of that statement. “Tell her I’ll be out in a couple of days. I’m jonesing for her coffee cake.”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “Whatever.”

  Now that it seemed safe, Bernie slid back down the bar. “How are you holding up?” she said.

  He didn’t blow her off and he didn’t sugarcoat it. “I’m maintaining.”

  “Just maintaining?”

  “It’ll do. For now, it’ll have to.”

  “The kids?”

  He thought about his answer for a moment or two. “Quieter,” he said finally.

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It isn’t,” he said without rancor. He raised a hand, palm up, and let it drop. “But what can we expect. Their mother and brother were murdered last year. And they don’t even get to spit in the eye of the asshole who did it.”