Whisper To The Blood Part 16

A pause as George looked up and back. "Oh yeah, I gotcha. Where you coming from?"

"Up the valley. Sightseeing. Did you just drop somebody off at the Suulutaq trailer?"

"Yeah."

"Macleod?"

"I wish. No, one of her caretakers. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. They're marooned out here for a week at a time, with only a bunch of Debbie Does Dallas Debbie Does Dallas DVDs for company." DVDs for company."

"But I hear she pays well."

Jim could hear the smile in George's voice when he replied. "That she does."

"Think I'll go down and say hi." "Guy makes lousy coffee."

"I have been warned. Cessna seven-nine Juliet, out."

"See you back at the ranch, Jim. Super Cub one-three Tango, out."

Jim dropped down to a hundred feet, buzzed the trailer to alert the occupant of his imminent arrival, and landed.

Gallagher was waiting in the open door. He didn't look happy when he saw Jim coming, but he was civil. "Sergeant Chopin, isn't it? d.i.c.k Gallagher."

"That's right, we met at the Club Bar in Cordova, didn't we?"

"That we did, sir. What can I do for you?"

Jim shrugged. "Just stopped by for a cup of coffee."

Gallagher didn't believe him, but he stepped back and let Jim inside.

George was right, the coffee was awful, but then Jim, who ordered his Tsunami Blend direct from Captain's Roast in Homer, was something of a coffee sn.o.b. He hid his wince and said, leaning against the counter, "Nice job you scored here."

"Pays well," Gallagher said, sitting behind the desk.

Jim nodded at the desk. "You heard what happened here, I guess. We always try to keep that kind of thing quiet while the investigation is ongoing, but. . ." He shrugged.

"Yeah," Gallagher said with feeling, "I heard, all right. I had to clean up the mess. Jesus." He seemed to grudge the mess more than the murder.

"You're new in the Park, aren't you?" Jim said.

Gallagher went wary again. "Yeah. Couple of months."

"New to Alaska, too, I take it."

Gallagher shrugged.

Now, it was a maxim of Alaskan etiquette never to ask where somebody was from, but Jim had a badge that said he could ask anyone anything anytime. "Where you from?"

"Arizona," Gallagher said promptly.

Jim smiled. "Jeez. It's a lot warmer there come this time of year. What brought you north?"

"Heard there were jobs here."

Jim gestured at the trailer. "You heard right."

"Yeah," Gallagher said. "It pays well."

"It must, you said that twice," Jim said. "Maybe I should quit troopering and hire on with Global Harvest."

Gallagher grinned, but it seemed forced. "Maybe you should. Although I hear state employees do okay in Alaska."

Jim laughed. "We do all right," he said. "Wonder if you could do me a favor."

Whatever Gallagher was expecting, it wasn't that. "Sure. I guess. If I can."

"Might be some guys driving snow machines down the valley later on. Two, maybe three of them. If they stop in, be helpful if I knew who they were."

"I don't know many people round these parts," Gallagher said, "not yet, anyway. But if they stop in, I can ask."

"Appreciate it," Jim said, and set the still full mug on the counter. "Thanks for the coffee."

"Anytime." Gallagher showed him out without haste. He even waited in the open doorway to wave as the Cessna rose into the air.

Jim circled the trailer as he gained alt.i.tude and waggled his wings in a friendly good-bye, but as he straightened out and put the nose back on three-one-five, he was sure of one thing, and maybe two.

Gallagher was nervous about something.

And he sure didn't like cops.

FOURTEEN.

The weather held, granting an ephemeral warmth outside if you were bundled up in dark clothes and standing still, but Kate was almost constantly in motion, visiting the downriver villages of the 'Burbs, in order-Double Eagle, Chulyin, Potlatch, and Red Run.

Ken Kaltak had taken to carrying his rifle with him wherever he went. He listened with a stone face as Kate pleaded for time to find the robbers, but she could see he wasn't listening to a word she said. His wife Janice, the lone schoolteacher for the Double Eagle School, which had ten students in seven grades, sent her husband outside on the pretext of getting some moose out of the cache and said bluntly, "Times are tough, Kate. Ken says he's never seen so many fish go up the river, and he's never caught less. Fish and Game gives preference to sports and subsistence fishers and by the time the drifters are allowed to put a net in the water the fish are all up the river. We've got a fish wheel and we catch enough to eat most years, but we rely on what we catch driftnetting in Alaganik to pay for groceries and fuel. We had almost a thousand dollars' worth of food on that sled." Her eyes filled up. "How are we supposed to eat this winter?"

Ken saw Kate to her snow machine, where he exchanged cautious greetings with Mutt (they'd howdied but they hadn't shook), and said, "You know who did this, Kate. Why waste time? Why don't you just head straight for Tikani?"

Kate settled onto the seat. "Can you identify any of your attackers, Ken?"

His lips tightened. He didn't answer.

"Didn't think so," Kate said. "They were wearing helmets, is what I understand."

"Yes."

"So you didn't see their faces. And you didn't recognize the machines."

"No."

She pressed the starter. "When there is evidence that points toward Tikani, I'll go there."

In Chulyin Ike Jefferson was incandescent with rage and treated Kate with something that bordered on contempt. It would have hurt her feelings if she hadn't been so shocked. "Where the h.e.l.l have you been?" he said. "These guys have pretty much turned the river into a free-fire zone, and you've been where? Because it sure as h.e.l.l hasn't been anywhere around here!"

"I just found out about them yesterday," she started to say.

"And where's the trooper?" He directed a pointed look over her shoulder. "Sorta conspicuous by his absence, now, ain't he?"

Ike Jefferson was another fisherman, who supplemented his summer earnings by working construction in Anchorage during the winter. A finish carpenter, he was an artist and a craftsman and was better off financially than any of the other victims, but his wife had died giving birth to Laverne and he was raising her alone. "I moved us to Anchorage in the winter because of the work," he told Kate tightly, "but whenever we can, we spend the weekend on the river. It don't happen anywhere near as often as either one of us would like. All I was doing was hauling in some fuel so the place don't freeze up while we're gone. Who pulls this kind of s.h.i.t, Kate? Since when do Park rats prey on their own? This used to be a good place to live, with good neighbors that'd look out for the place while we're gone, but I might as well live in Anchorage full time and let Laverne hang out at the DimondCenter for all the peace we're getting here."

The DimondCenter mall in Anchorage was a notorious hangout for g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, with APD responding to shoot-outs there half a dozen times a year. No Park rat regarded Anchorage itself as anything more than a place to get your eyes checked, your teeth fixed, to buy food, clothing, and parts, eat fried chicken at the Lucky Wishbone and pizza at the Moose's Tooth, and maybe see a movie if enough things were blown up in it. That Ike had been reduced to winters there only added insult to this newest injury in his eyes.

Laverne, a chunky little girl with a self-possession that belied her years, calmly corroborated her father's description of the attack and the perpetrators, and added the interesting detail that all the snow machines were new.

"Did you recognize what kind?" Kate said.

The girl nodded. "They were all Ski-Doos, and they were all black."

Ike's lips were pressed into a thin line. "Somebody's making money doing this," he said. "Good money. Where you headed now?"

"Red Run," she said.

He snorted. "Why bother? We both know where you shoulda gone first."

She said the same thing to him that she had to Ken Kaltak. "Did you recognize your attackers, Ike?"

He let loose with a string of profanity and stamped off toward the outhouse. " 'Bye, Kate," Laverne said, and went back in the cabin.

Dismissed, Kate pressed the starter, negotiated the steep trail over bank to river, idled for a few moments to give Mutt time to catch up and hop on, and headed south.

She got to Red Run that evening and spent the night in her sleeping bag on the floor of the school gym, courtesy of the new teacher who lived alone in a little cabin out back and who was so hungry for company three months into the school year that she insisted Kate join her for dinner and Notting Hill Notting Hill on DVD afterward. They both agreed they liked Hugh Grant's friends more than they liked Hugh Grant, and Kate went to sleep that night thinking RedRunSchool would be lucky if Alice Crawford lasted out the year. on DVD afterward. They both agreed they liked Hugh Grant's friends more than they liked Hugh Grant, and Kate went to sleep that night thinking RedRunSchool would be lucky if Alice Crawford lasted out the year.

Kate was at the Rileys' home at first light, a small, snug house that Art had built himself from the ground up over the past thirty years. It had begun life as a one-room log cabin, added on to as the children came, and then when Art's father died of lung cancer he built a mother-in-law apartment on the side facing the river. It had its own kitchen where she could make agutaq and fry bread for the granddaughter, the child of Art and Christine's eldest son, an Alaska National Guardsman stationed in Anchorage who was presently serving in Iraq. The mother had vanished shortly after the child's birth and the child had never lived with anyone else.

They welcomed Kate and invited her to share their breakfast. Art was a trapper who ran lines up a couple of creeks in the Quilak foothills, one of them in the SuulutaqValley. "Best wolf run I've ever had, and last year the best prices I've ever got," he said. "Seems all the Hollywood types are tr.i.m.m.i.n.g their coats with wolf nowadays, and where they go everybody follows. 'Course the mine'll put paid to all that."

"Doesn't have to," Kate said. "Not if we watch them."

He shook his head. "Don't kid yourself, Kate. It'll change everything."

"Only if we let it," she said, but she was put forcibly in mind of Mandy's certainty on the same subject. "About that attack, Art, she said. "I was wondering if you'd remembered anything else about them. For starters, do you have any idea who it was?"

"No," he said, "no idea."

His tone was oddly tranquil. The five of them were at the kitchen table surrounded by the remnants of bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and toast, the granddaughter absorbed in constructing a house from her potatoes. "You told Jim Chopin you thought the Johansen brothers were the people he ought to talk to."

"Did I?" He shook his head, and produced a sheepish grin. "Probably a hangover from them corking me last summer. The Johansen brothers are a waste of s.p.a.ce, true, but I didn't have any reason to suspect them more than anybody else. Still don't."

She stared at him, puzzled.

The Riley kitchen was a warm, crowded, and friendly place, with a woodstove for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The table was homemade beetle kill spruce and big enough to seat eight comfortably, covered with a tacked-down sheet of blue-checked oilcloth. The cupboards were homemade beetle kill, too, like the table a little clunky but sanded and polished to a smooth finish that had been darkened by years of cooking oil and wood smoke. Faded linoleum covered the floor and the walls were a pale yellow, chipped and peeling, on which faded patches showed signs of photographs added and moved around over the years. Dishes were stacked in a wide porcelain farmer's sink that was rather the worse for wear. Underneath the table were two dogs of indeterminate breeding, still and wary but unafraid of Mutt, who was sitting next to Kate, her ears up as if she were listening to and understanding the conversation. She looked up at Kate, yellow eyes meeting hazel, and one ear went back inquisitively. Kate put a hand on her ruff, and looked back at the table.

Grandma Riley looked like one of the aunties, round, brown and wrinkled, a woman of spirit and substance. Like the aunties, she had time served in the Park, and was a repository of knowledge about all the rats who lived therein going back generations, extending to fourth cousins five times removed who now lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky. When a Park rat wanted to draw a family tree, Grandma Riley was everyone's first stop. She'd been failing lately, which was why the extended stay in the elder health care facility in Ahtna, and Kate had the feeling that this might be her last trip south.

Art was the grandson of a white stampeder, a handsome, reckless fellow with a slight limp, known in DawsonCity as Riley the Gimp, from New York, who had met and married a local beauty from Tok. They'd moved to the Park to work at the Kanuyaq copper mine, and had stayed on after the mine had closed in 1936, to homestead on the river and raise a family. Grandma Riley had married their son, Arthur Sr., and their children, beginning with Art Jr., had inherited their share of their grandparents' looks.

Christine Riley had been an army brat, born in Anchorage. She had met Art at the University of Alaska and he had brought her home to the river the year they graduated. She was a woman of quiet beauty, still slim and with a full head of pure white hair that was always neatly dressed in a braid wound around her head like a crown. Kate didn't think it had been cut in Christine's lifetime. She worked in the tanning shed next to the house, curing the wolf and mink and beaver and lynx skins Jim brought home, preparing them for sale at fur auctions in Anchorage.

It was, in short, an almost idyllic life for the three of them, two born to it and one who had adopted it wholeheartedly. Kate would have thought that any threat to the life they had built so painstakingly over the years would have roused them to the same incendiary level as the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons.

Instead, she was surrounded by a calm so placid it was almost grating. She looked at each of them in turn and was met by an identical bland stare. "What's going on here?" she said.

Art made an elaborate show of perplexity. "Why, nothing, Kate. We're not happy about what happened, but we know you and Jim will catch whoever did this and make it right."

Christine and Grandma Riley nodded and chorused their agreement, though Grandma Riley wouldn't look up from her mug.

"What about the grandbaby?" Kate said. "You gonna let an attack on her slide, too?"

Art's eyes hardened momentarily, and then his face smoothed out. "We'd left her with a neighbor, as it happens," he said. "We wish we could help you, Kate, but you know how it is. It all happened so fast. I wouldn't worry." He glanced at his mother, smiling. "Grandma always says, what goes around comes around." He drank coffee and grinned. "I hear you had a high old time of it at your first board meeting."

"Jesus," Kate said, "did somebody take out an ad?"

Art laughed and rose to his feet.

Kate, caught by surprise, rose, too. Since when did folks in the Bush urge winter visitors out the door? Usually they were so glad to see anybody they insisted they stay for a week.

It was almost eleven when she hit the river, Mutt on the seat and the sled attached, hiding from the windchill created by her forward motion behind the windshield.

What the h.e.l.l had that been all about? It was almost as if. . .

The snow machine slowed abruptly as her thumb relaxed on the throttle.

It was almost as if they hadn't wanted her to find the attackers.

No, she thought, that wasn't it, not exactly.

It was as if they were recommending that she not waste her time.