Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw

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by A Fatal Thaw(lit)


  room, walked through the entryway and opened the outside door. Standing

  at the top of the steps, she paused, looking down the length of the

  runway. Mutt trotted around the corner of the house and stood, looking

  up, tail curled in a question mark.

  Across the runway from the house stood a cleared and filled section of

  land that supported a square, two-story building. A faded sign beneath

  the eaves read, "Chugach Air Taxi Service, Inc." To the building's right

  were tiedowns occupied by a dozen small planes, most of them still on

  skis. Kate came down the steps and crossed the strip to the hangar. The

  large sliding doors were closed. She went into the office by the side

  door and through it to

  the hangar. A man in gray-striped coveralls was bent over the open

  cowling of a six-seater Cessna 206. The Cessna could have used a paint

  job, the man a bath.

  Something metal went crunch. "Shit!" he yelled. He wound up and threw

  the screwdriver as hard as he could in what turned out to be Kate's

  direction. She ducked and it whizzed over her head. Behind her Mutt

  jumped and caught the screwdriver's plastic handle neatly in her teeth.

  "Nice to see you, too, George," Kate said, standing straight. "What's

  the matter with the Loose Goose this time?"

  "Damn magneto's gone again," he said glumly, "and my frigging mechanic

  picked now to go work repairing

  equipment on a fish processor in Dutch Harbor." George Perry was tall

  and thin with shaggy brown hair and wire rimmed glasses, both liberally

  splattered with grease. He looked more like a CPA than a bush pilot, but

  he cursed pretty good. He was cursing when Mutt trotted over and lay the

  screwdriver carefully at his feet. "Thanks, Mutt," he said, stooping to

  pick it up with one hand and pull on Mutt's ears with the other. She

  stood where she was, an expression of blissful idiocy on her face. "What

  brings you to town, Kate?"

  "Came to pick up my mail. Ralph told me you'd just brought it in. I

  thought I'd stop over, say hi "

  He cocked his head at her. "You looking for work? I've got two groups up

  on the Bump already and a third coming in tomorrow. I could use another

  guide."

  "That's right, it is that time of year."

  "No shit sherlock." He gave the Cessna a damning glare. "That's why I

  need this old bucket of bolts up and running. So? What say? Can I put

  you on the payroll?"

  She shook her head. "Nah. I'm almost three hundred bucks to the good

  this year. I can wait for the kings to hit fresh water."

  He sighed. "Everybody's flush this spring. Whatever happened to the good

  old days, when you could count on half the Park rats drinking up their

  summer savings and being broke by February 1st?"

  "I don't know, I guess they really are the good old days."

  He eyed her with a gloomy expression. "It's your fault. You busted that

  bootlegger last winter and now everybody has to go to the Roadhouse. And

  Bernie won't let anyone mush home drunk."

  "Guilty as charged," she said with a faint smile. She paused. "I hear

  you tried to land in the middle of the fireworks last week." He looked

  blank and she gestured vaguely behind her. "When McAniff went ape and

  shot all those people."

  His face darkened. "Yes."

  "Can you tell me about it?" He looked at her, surprised and a little

  disgusted, and she shook her head at once. "No, it's not that." She

  hesitated. Jack had advised discretion, but the word was going to get

  around sooner or later. For all she knew, the police were holding a

  press conference in Anchorage as she spoke. "Lisa Getty was shot by a

  different rifle than the rest of the victims."

  It took George a moment. "A different rifle?" he asked. "You mean

  McAniff didn't shoot her?"

  "No. He looked a little at a loss. "Well then, who did?" She shrugged.

  "They.don't know. I'm looking into it.

  That's why I need to know what you saw that day." "Jesus, Mary and

  Joseph," he said slowly. "You mean we got another killer still on the

  loose?" She nodded. "Christ." He tossed the screwdriver into the

  toolbox. "You want some coffee?"

  "Sure." He led the way into his office, and she sat down on the old

  couch, patched so many times it was hard to tell where the Naugahyde

  left off and the duct tape began. He handed

  her a cup and sat behind his desk. "If you're working with the cops,

  you've probably seen my statement. I don't know what I can add to it."

  Kate settled back and sipped at her coffee. It tasted like

  three-in-one-oil. Just tell me what happened."

  He was right; he couldn't add much more than what he'd said in his

  statement. The Cessna, so full of mail he'd had to take out the two back

  rows of seats, had been maybe a hundred yards off the south end of the

  airstrip when a bullet smashed into the windshield. Another hit

  the fuselage, by which time he'd figured out what was happening. "I

  thought for a minute I was back on a short final at Khe Sanh," he said,

  shuddering. "I pushed in the throttle and pulled the stick as far back

  into my lower intestine as it would go and I was outa there."

  "I don't blame you," she observed. "In your statement, you say you

  circled for a while."

  "Yeah, I got up out of range and put her into a slow turn.

  saw two bodies laying out on the edge of the strip. I think

  caught a glimpse of Lisa's body through the trees. You

  know she always wears-wore those flashy fluorescent

  bibs and parkas from North Face that practically glow in

  the dark." He took a deep breath. "And I saw a guy take off through the

  woods on a Polaris. All the time I'm on the radio, trying to raise the

  troopers. I got Chopper Jim, and he told me to go to Tok. I was happy to

  oblige."

  "When'd you get back?" "That evening." He shook his head. "Place was a zoo.

  There was about a hundred cops crawling around with all that sumbitchin'

  yellow tape they like to string everywhere, couldn't taxi in a straight

  line without fouling in it to save your life. Body bags all over

  everywhere. Place looked like Tan Son Nhut in 68." He tried to shrug,

  but it turned into a shiver. "That guy McAniff was out of his fucking mind."

  "Guess so," she said in a neutral voice, trying not to think of the

  killer lying in the slush and snow at her feet, crying because his mouth

  was bleeding.

  George set his mug down and reached for a rag, wiping ineffectually at

  the grease on his hands. "It was creepy as hell, there at first. People

  standing around, too shocked to be angry. Cops all business, taking

  statements, putting everything they found in Ziploc bags. I saw one

  trooper bagging some snow." He paused, his eyes remote. "Everybody else

  was just standing around, watching. Steve Syms's girlfriend from Ahtna,

  what's her name-" "Cindy. Beerbohm."

  "Yeah, apparently Steve was due to fly out to see her that night. She

  flew in instead and had hysterics from one end of the strip to the

  other. Can't blame her, but it didn't help things much. Your grandma

  finally took her home and put her t
o bed."

  "Yes," Kate said. "Emaa does what needs to be done." "She is a good old

  gal," George agreed.

  I wouldn't go that far, Kate thought.

  "Everybody came from every homestead between here and Ahtna, and half

  Ahtna did, too. All standing around in a big circle like a herd of cows

  looking at some thing strange come into their pasture. Weird looking,

  you know?"

  Kate nodded. It sounded depressingly like any crime scene she'd ever

  been at.

  "They were here for days, the whole bunch of them, and then they all

  left, in something like ten minutes, in a couple of Twin Otters." He

  shook his head. "It was quiet out there for maybe a day, and then by God

  if they didn't all come back."

  "Who all?"

  "Everybody all. Cops to go over the ground again, who knows why.

  Everybody else came to watch the cops. I'm not sure Lottie ever did leave."

  Kate stirred. "Maybe she had more cause to stay than most."

  "Yeah, I know she and Lisa were pretty close. It was creepy though. She

  didn't move, she didn't talk. She just stood there, watching. When it

  got dark and the cops borrowed a generator and started stringing lights,

  some of the folks tried to get her to go home. I don't think she even

  heard them. She just stood there, like this huge statue. She looked like

  ... I don't know, Lot's wife, maybe?" He gave an involuntary shudder and

  looked over at Kate with a sheepish expression. "Sorry. Between Cindy

  screaming and yelling on one side and Lottie acting like the specter at

  the feast on the other ... it was, well, creepy," he repeated.-,"I'll bet."

  "Hell with that. You and I are alive, right?" "Right."

  "In spite of the fact that now we got us another crazy person on the

  loose with a gun." Kate got the impression he still didn't quite believe

  it, an impression confirmed by his next words. "You sure I can't talk

  you into a job? I got a bunch of Koreans-up at the base camp. Their

  second time," he added. "They didn't make the summit last year."

  She snorted and shook her head. "No, thanks. I never do second-timers."

  He sighed. "Can't say's I blame you. They're always so friggin'

  determined they're gonna make it this time, they don't care if it's

  blowing a blizzard up top and you can't see a foot in front of your

  face." He thought. "Maybe I can get Lottie to take'em up."

  Kate hesitated in the doorway. "You think that's a good idea?"

  "She's gotta eat, like the rest of us, and she's one of the best there

  is up on the Bump." He shrugged. "Probably be better for her to be

  working than sitting around the house moping."

  "She might not be in the right mood to entertain," Kate

  suggested. "Especially now."

  "She never is. But she will get my climbers up and back in one piece."

  "True. I'm going up to see her when I leave here," Kate said. "Want me

  to tell her to check in?"

  "Do that." He eyed her sharply. "She know yet?" Kate shook her head.

  "And you get to tell her. That's not a job I'd wish on my worst enemy.

  Well, tell her I'll be gone this afternoon but I'll be back here

  tomorrow morning, and to look me up if she wants the job."

  Kate walked down the airstrip and a little way into the stand of trees,

  and halted. She stood very still, looking around. There were birch and

  diamond willow and alder and cottonwood and scrub spruce. The branches

  of the deciduous trees were as yet leafless, but their bark was

  beginning to darken over the subcutaneous flow of running sap. The

  evergreens were thickly needled and a deep, dark green, except at the

  tip of each branch, where spring was beginning to emerge in a new growth

  of lighter green. It looked the very picture of serene renewal, not at

  all a scene for massacre, or for cold-blooded, opportunistic murder.

  She looked up and could barely see the sky through the branches tangled

  overhead. It was silly, she knew, but Kate suddenly felt as if she were

  intruding where she was not wanted. There was an almost conscious

  feeling of resistance, a feeling of ... what? Possessiveness? A hoarding

  of secrets hardly won?

  She shook herself. At this rate, her imagination would be putting in for

  overtime. Hearing a plane in the distance, she collected her mail and

  headed up the river at a decorous pace. She was not looking forward to

  her next interview.

  Next to Lottie, Kate felt dainty. Next to Lottie Getty, Sasquatch would

  have felt dainty. Lottie was big, six feet

  tall in her stocking feet, and weighed in at a hundred and

  ninety pounds, most of it muscle from years of hauling

  nets and packing game out through the bush. Her features

  were an odd contrast to the rest of her; she had large,

  widely spaced eyes of an innocent blue, fair skin showing not half her

  forty years, and a way of walking and talking slow that led the

  uninitiated into thinking she thought slow as well.

  "Hi, Lottie." At first Kate thought Lottie wasn't going to let her in.

  After a long, tense pause, Lottie stepped back and motioned her inside.

  Another wave of the hand directed her toward a worn easy chair sitting

  to one side of an old iron wood stove that Lottie's father must have

  brought with him when he came to the Park in 52. Kate sat down, got back

  up again and removed a box of rifle shells, a Prince William Sound

  tide-book, a half-eaten, molding Hostess fruit pie, a photograph album,

  a tattered Harlequin romance and a gray cat, and sat back down.

  Lottie sat opposite her, large, silent, impassive. Kate let her eyes

  wander around the interior of the cabin. It was larger than her own. The

  loft was enclosed, with a proper staircase leading up to it, doors led

  off a hallway in the back of the house, and the kitchen was separated

  from the living room by a counter lined with stools. Every available

  horizontal surface was covered with the detritus of bush life; Kate saw

  a dismantled beaver trap on the kitchen counter, with fur still stuck to

  the jaws. A dozen or more rifles, from a petite and, if the shine of its

  stock were any indication, brand new twenty-two to a silver-mounted

  over-and-under 12gauge-30.06 combination were stacked in racks nailed to

  every available vertical surface. Knives in leather scabbards dangled

  next to the rifles, salmon filleting knives with white plastic grips,

  skinning knives with handles of some kind of antler, what looked like a

  Bowie knife with a handle intricately carved from fossil ivory. A

  mounted moose head hung over the

  wood stove, and caribou, goat and sheep heads festooned

  the other walls, most with coats, mittens and more knives hung from

  their racks. Any wall that dared show a bare face to the world had been

  promptly veiled with a dusty

  hide; black bear, brown bear, wolf, wolverine, coyote, an unexpected

  rattlesnake.

  A wooden rocking chair with a splintered seat sat next to a couch,

  patched like George's where the springs had

  come through, this one with black electrician's tape. From what she

  could see of the kitchen, Kate didn't think the table had been cleared

  or the dishes was
hed in months. Every corner of the room was filled;

  with spider webs on the ceiling and dust balls on the floor.

  The house looked like Fairbanks after the flood and before the cleanup.

  A movement caught the corner of her

  eye; the gray cat was sitting at her feet with her tail curled

  around her paws, watching Kate with large, unblinking green eyes. "I'm

  not moving," Kate told her, although she did sympathize. The chair she

  was sitting in was, so far as she could see, the only place in the house

  where one could sit down in relative comfort.

  The cat yawned and began to wash. She could wait. "I heard you caught

  him," a voice like a dull knife said. It took Kate a moment to realize

  it was Lottie's voice.

  She looked up and met the wide blue stare. "Yes," she said. "I did."

 

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