Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell

by Blood Will Tell(lit)

  He didn't quite believe it yet. "You know about the leases?"

  She nodded. "And then of course there was my cousin Martin."

  "Your cousin Martin?" King said. "Who the hell's your cousin Martin?"

  "Martin Shugak. He was carp entering for one of your subcontractors at Prudhoe last spring when I went up to the Slope for you. He told me he got the job on a trade, half a dozen Slope jobs for Association shareholders in return for permission for RPetco to do seismic testing on tribal lands." She sighed. "It's a habit with you, isn't it, King?

  Just like with that exploration well on Tode Point. You just can't resist poking holes where you aren't supposed to, where you've got no right to. Iqaluk butts up against Association land, and Katalla butts up against Iqaluk, and there'd been oil produced at Katalla before. You got curious, and what the hell, it was out in the back of beyond. So you stepped over the line. And you found something that looked promising, promising enough that you talked about it to Dischner. Looking for financing, maybe? Maybe looking to step out on your own? Maybe because of his connections through Lew Mathisen to the board of the Niniltna Native Association? All of the above?"

  She waited, watching him. He waited, watching her. "Martin said Billy Mike did the deal with you. Is that true?" He didn't answer and Kate said, "You and Dischner and a bunch of your cronies decided to file on what you thought was there in anticipation of a discovery well. Only there was this one, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little problem. The land had no clear title. It was still being fought over by the federal government, which wants it for a national park, and the Niniltna Native Association, which wants it to remain as is, a traditional, tribal subsistence area. "Or some of them do. Some of them want to develop it.

  There was a conflict between members of the board which you and Dischner and Mathisen exploited, because you and Dischner didn't want it to be a national park, and you didn't want it to be property of a native corporation. You wanted it to become a national forest.

  Because national parks are all of them closed to mining. There is no mineral leasing in national parks, at all, period, except for those mines that were extant at the time of the creation of the park. It takes an act of Congress to change the status of park land, a fact with which you are intimately acquainted because of the difficulty your whole industry has been having with opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the North Slope to oil exploration.

  "But a national forest, now, that's different. National forests are put to economic use under policies dictated by Congress. They are administered by the National Forest Service, a bureau of the Department of Agriculture. The Forests sell lumber and grazing." Kate leaned forward. "A friend of mine, a career ranger, told me this, and I looked it up to confirm it. National forests can also be developed for hydroelectric power, and for irrigation, and for mining.

  "Dischner knew, and you did, too, that after the RPetco Anchorage spill you had about as much chance as a snowball in hell of getting Niniltna permission to drill for oil in Iqaluk. But logging, now. Trees are a renewable resource. Selective cutting and streambed maintenance and all that. The Niniltna Association lawyer told our chairman that it didn't look good for the Association to gain title to the land, so you were lobbying the board to lobby Congress and Interior to have it designated a national forest instead of a national park. And once Iqaluk was designated a forest, your toe was in the door."

  King's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat.

  "So, Dischner turns Mathisen loose on the board of the Niniltna Native Association. The wishes of local native associations carry a lot of weight with the new administration in Washington, and Dischner wanted to be sure that the local spokesmen, read the Niniltna board and probably the Raven board, too, saw the advantages of turning Iqaluk into a national forest. His pitch was that they could negotiate timber rights in the new forest so that all UCo's--yet another Dischner sideline, I discover--so that all UCo's construction contracts with the Niniltna Native Association would be fulfilled using local lumber from local lands. And local labor to get it out, I'll bet. A powerful incentive for some of those Prince William Sound fisherman still trying to come back from the RPetco Anchorage spill. "State ownership would have been best of all, since the legislature for the last twenty years has been the best one oil money can buy, but of course relations between the state government and Alaska Natives have never been worse, so you knew they wouldn't even think of supporting state ownership. You probably even promised them that they'd keep their subsistence rights to Iqaluk, and why not? Oil fields don't take up that much room. All you wanted was a strip of the shore." King's eyes flickered and Kate nodded, satisfied

  "It was a good pitch. Even my grandmother went for it at first, didn't she?"

  She watched him carefully. He made no outward sign, but by the very shocked stillness of his body he confirmed every word she had said, every half-assed guess she had put together from the scanty evidence available to her. Never had she felt less triumph or less satisfaction in uncovering the truth. Oh, emaa, emaa, she thought. This was what you were afraid of telling me. It wasn't Axenia, it wasn't the board, it wasn't Sarah or Enakenty, it wasn't even Iqaluk. It was you, and the deal you almost made with the devil. Were you so ashamed that you could not tell me? Were you afraid that when I found out you would lose my respect?

  She took a deep, unobtrusive breath. "Then she smelled a rat." Kate shrugged. "It might have been Harvey's house, it might have been that so many contracts were sole-sourced to UCo, it might have been that ridiculous lease Arctic Investors gave Enakenty Barnes on that condo that must be worth three times that in rent. I don't know what it was.

  But she knew something was wrong, and then Sarah died, and it was all just too, too convenient. And she asked me to find out what was going on. And I started looking, and then Enakenty died." King said quickly,

  "There's nothing to say that those deaths weren't accidents."

  Kate raised one skeptical eyebrow. "The timing is very interesting, though, don't you think? The two votes guaranteed to go with my grandmother if she chose to lobby the federal government to making Iqaluk a part of the Park, instead of a national forest? That was a three-vote majority, King, even if you did get to Billy Mike. They pretty much had it sewn up. Now two of them are dead, and the remaining members of the board will have to call a special election to fill the vacant seats."

  She let the silence lie between them like a dead fish. It smelled about that bad. The brunette came back upstairs and went to the refrigerator.

  "Get out," King barked.

  Her voice was a soft Southern drawl. "But honey, I just wanted my Coca-Cola--"

  "Get out!"

  Something dangerously close to a pout very nearly creased the smooth face, but then the brunette remembered that all she had was her face and banished the pout back into oblivion and herself back down the stairs.

  King looked at Kate. "What are you going to do?" "It's not what I'm going to do," Kate said, "it's what you're going to do. You're backing off Iqaluk. You're shit canning any reports on whatever prospects you think Iqaluk might have."

  "How will I justify the expense to my board?"

  Kate snorted. "Come off it, King. The oil industry has punched enough dusters in this state. You can even make a speech on how we're all of us environmentalists, and how some natural places are so untouched and pristine they ought to be left alone, and how Iqaluk is one of them.

  You'll probably make the news on all four networks, not to mention every thirty minutes on CNN." Kate got to her feet.

  "For Christ's sweet sake," he burst out, "there might be--"

  "I don't give a damn what there might be!" The furious grating shout halted him halfway to his feet, eyes wide. "Any interest you had in Iqaluk is over," she ground out. "Live with it, or I'll see you tried for murder in a court of law." She turned.

  "Shugak." She looked over her shoulder. He was all the way up on his feet now, teetering back and forth on his mustard-yellow cowboy boo
ts.

  "What's the point?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean what is the fucking point?" He looked into her face as if she were a puzzle with too many pieces missing to ever see the whole design.

  "We're poking holes in Cook Inlet. We're looking for a way back into Kachemak Bay. Norton Sound and Bristol Bay look promising, Amerex is still sinking dusters in Big Lake, and you know we're not giving up on Congress letting us into ANWR. So what's the fucking point? The oil industry's not getting out of Alaska anytime soon. We're going to be here for a long time to come."

  "But not in Katalla," she said. "And not in Iqaluk." She turned to go.

  "Oh, I wouldn't be too all-fired sure of that, honey," another voice said.

  The brunette was standing at the head of the stairs, a pistol in her hands. An automatic, Kate noticed, a nine millimeter. With her luck, it wouldn't jam. A memory flicked in her mind, Dischner bending over the trophy brunette's cleavage at the Raven party, close enough to lick. She swore to herself. "It wasn't you, after all," she said to King.

  "Of course it wasn't," the brunette said, amused.

  "Wasn't what?" King said. "What the hell is going on here? You put that thing down before you hurt yourself, you hear?" "You and Dischner," Kate said. The brunette smiled. "Just what the hell is your name, anyway?"

  The brunette's smile thinned and made her smoothly perfect face look nearly ugly. "He never did bother to introduce me, did he? He never does, even if I am his lawful wife?" The thin smile widened. "Well, I don't reckon it matters much now."

  "Goddam you, you stupid bitch," John King bellowed, "what the fuck do you think you're doing?"

  The brunette shot him a glance so filled with contempt it silenced him.

  "Why, what you should have, sweetie, I'm removing the last obstacle in our path to fame and fortune? Do you know how much money we're talking about?" she said to Kate. "We're not talking about a few lil-bitty kickbacks from a few white-trash contractors?" She had the southern habit of ending sentences with a question mark. "We're talking about millions of dollars, hundreds of millions? We're talking about royalties that will last us the rest of our lives?" She looked at John King. "And you were just going to let her walk away, let her destroy everything we've worked for all this time?" She shook her head. "Sometimes I swear my mama was right when she told me I never would understand men."

  "You killed Enakenty Barnes," Kate said. The brunette gave a slight shrug. "He wouldn't listen to reason. He was willing to fuck me until the cows come home, but he wouldn't change his vote? I even went to Hawaii with him? I mean, did y'all ever see him in a pair of swim trunks?" She shuddered. "It was a sacrifice just to be on the beach in company with him, let me tell you, honey. Not to mention he was the original one-minute man?"

  "And Sarah Kompkoff?"

  The brunette shook her head. "No, that was just your everyday ordinary low gravy good luck, as my mama used to say? Eddie told me about it, and that's when I got the idea for Enakenty."

  Oh no you didn't, Kate thought with absolute certainty. Eddie P. put that jewel of an idea right into your head, and you sucked it up all unknowing. That smooth, smooth prick. She thought, too, that Dischner had probably called this house during her drive to it this morning after all; he just hadn't talked to King.

  John King, overcome by too much horrific information too rapidly disseminated, managed a strangled, disbelieving sound. The brunette huffed out an impatient breath. "Oh hush up, honey, do y'all think I would have slept with a colored for the fun of it? It was just business?

  Bullshit. Kate could see right where this was going and it wasn't to either her or King walking out of this house alive. She looked at him.

  "You really marry her, King?"

  He tore his gaze away from his wife and licked his lips. He nodded once.

  "So," Kate said meaningfully, "if you die, she gets everything?"

  He nodded again.

  Kate said, even more meaningfully, trying to prod him to awareness of their mutual danger, "Including those leases in your name?"

  The realization was slow in coming. His eyes jerked back to his wife, wide and alarmed. She smiled at him with an expression Kate assumed she thought was reassuring, and in that moment Kate moved, one step ahead of a long dive, for the shelter of the kitchen island.

  Her toe caught on the sheepskin underneath the coffee table. It was the only thing that saved her. She pitched forward as the pistol shot cracked through the room. As it was a hot wind fanned her cheek. She recognized it instantly and fell and kept on falling, scrabbling for cover. Another shot rang out and the lamp on the coffee table exploded and rained ceramic bits down on her. "What the fuck!" John King yelled.

  Kate scuttled behind the kitchen island like a crab. She peered cautiously around the corner. The pistol jerked in the brunette's hand, the sound of the shot boomed off the ceiling and Kate felt something tug at her left arm. She looked down to find it soaked in blood.

  "Jesus Christ!" John King cried.

  The brunette cursed and raised the pistol, holding it in both hands, elbows locked in the best approved TV-cop style, and walked slowly toward the kitchen. Kate heard the steps and yanked open a cupboard. It was filled with copper bottomed Revereware, the same kind she'd seen in Enakenty's rendezvous. She grabbed the first thing to hand, a one-gallon stewpot, and hurled it over the top of the island in the direction of the footsteps. There was a satisfactory sound of metal smacking against flesh followed by a wild curse and a clang as the pot hit the floor.

  Kate grabbed a saucepan in each hand and stood up and threw them with all her strength, one after the other. The left hand was slippery with blood and that pot glanced harmlessly off one wall, although it did make the brunette flinch and the gun waver. Her right hand was dry and her aim was true; the second pot impacted the brunette squarely in the chest and forced her to stagger backward. She flung up her arms for balance and shot a round through the roof before toppling backwards down the stairs in a series of bumps and thumps and curses. Kate took the stairs two at a time behind her, her momentum increasing to the point that she overshot the corner and crashed into the opposite wall, and again sheer clumsiness saved her life because the brunette was already on her feet and waiting at the bottom of the next flight. Another shot reverberated off the ceiling and another bullet thudded into the wall behind Kate.

  She looked down the barrel at Kate, and Kate could see her hand start to squeeze.

  There was a crash as the sliding glass door behind her shattered and then Mutt was there, a streak of gray menace, going for the hand holding the gun. Her teeth met around the brunette's wrist. There was a crunch of bone. The brunette's scream was high and piercing. The pistol fell to the floor and Kate pounced on it.

  "What the fuck!" John King said from the top of the stairs.

  "Mutt," Kate said, all at once feeling very old and very tired. "Off."

  Mutt, having wanted to sink her teeth into something, anything, anyone, since the first shot fired in anger the night before, didn't want to let go, and Kate had to repeat herself twice before she was obeyed. The brunette curled herself into a fetal position around her wounded wrist, a steady, animalistic moan coming from her throat.

  Heavy footsteps descended the stairs. Kate sat down suddenly on the bottom step and said without looking up, "Call the cops, King."

  The footsteps hesitated.

  Her back to him, Kate held up the pistol she still held. "Call the cops before I shoot you."

  There was a slight pause, a long, slow sigh. The footsteps retreated up the stairs.

  Mutt had little shards of glass embedded in her muzzle. Kate picked them out, one by one. Beyond them, the brunette lay on the floor where she was, moaning.

  "It's not that I don't appreciate it," Kate told her roommate, "but you've got to stop rescuing me through glass." She eased a sliver free.