Bad Blood (11 page)

Kate’s heart skipped a beat.

“No, no names, we don’t know yet if it’s Robert Downey, Jr., Hugh Jackman, or Gabe McGuire who will be starring in our very own personal Park epic, but I’m holding out for Denzel to play me, and I’m kinda hoping Zoe Saldana plays the love interest.” He dropped his voice. “Just don’t tell Dinah.”

He reached for a knob. “Okay, that’s it for now. Might be back on tonight, might not, but right now let’s go out on somebody who knew their way around a song.”

He flipped a switch, turned another knob, ran some sliders in opposite directions, and the first bars of the Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” rocked out of the speakers.

Mutt couldn’t stand it one minute longer and took the intervening space between the door and the man in one smooth leap and reared up to rest her paws lightly on the back of the wheelchair and swipe a long, agile tongue right up Bobby’s bare spine, ending with a loving tickle behind his right ear that took the headphones the rest of the way off. Bobby jumped so violently that he knocked the brakes loose on his wheelchair. The wheels rolled forward and he rolled backwards, right out of the chair to land on his back on the floor. Where Mutt took merciless advantage.

“God
damn
!” The roar went right out over Park Air, west to Ahtna and all the way down to Cordova when the skip was good, or it would have if the mike had still been hot. “Fucking
wolves
in the fucking
house
again! Shugak! Get this beast off me! Goddammit, Shugak, I know you’re there!”

Kate, hands in her pockets, strolled over to grin at him upside down, where he was feebly trying to stave off Mutt’s efforts to remove the skin from his face with her tongue. “You rang?”

“
Get
this fucking wolf
off
me!”

“Only half,” Kate said.

“Shugak!”

Kate gave an elaborate sigh. “Mutt?” she said, but really it was only a suggestion, and all three of them knew it.

Mutt moved back maybe an inch and laughed down at Bobby, a lupine laugh, tongue lolling out of her mouth.

“Shugak! Goddammit, call her off!”

Kate sighed. “Well, okay. If you insist.”

“Shugak!”

Kate signaled Mutt, and Mutt gave Bobby one last, loving swipe, shook her coat into elegant layers, and trotted over to the wood box, where she knew Bobby stored the occasional mammoth clavicle to stave off marauding wolves.

“God
damn
,” Bobby said, wiping the face in the crook of his arm and blinking up at Kate. “How many times have I told you about fucking
wolves
in the fucking
house,
Shugak?”

“Lots and lots of times, Clark,” she said, giving him a hand up.

Slyly, he took that hand and held on while using the other to right his chair and slip into it, managing in the same motion to yank her into his lap and give her a lavish kiss.

She gave as good as she got, and when he pulled back she smiled up at him, a siren’s seduction in her eyes, and said in a come-hither voice, “Where’s your wife?”

He boomed out a laugh and dumped her on her feet. “She left me. Her and the kid both. Abandoned. Bereft.” He waggled lascivious eyebrows. “All by myself.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“I’d put on some Eric Carmen to prove it if I could stand to listen to the fucker.” He rolled over to the kitchen to put on the kettle. “They’re in Anchorage. Eye doctor, dentist, shots, like that. Dinah wants to get a jump on the paperwork for school this year.”

“Right, first grade,” Kate said. “You, uh, volunteering at the school again?”

“Damn right I am.”

She sighed. “You’re going to give the kid a complex before she’s ten.”

“Then she has a complex. Nobody messes with the kid, Shugak.”

“Understood, Clark. But really, who would dare?”

“Exactly,” he said smugly. He opened the bag of coffee—Kaladi Brothers French Roast, not bad—and poured it into the filter without measuring. “What’re you doing in town?”

“You know. This and that. Checking the mail. Buying some groceries. Visiting my best bud.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder and grinned. “Where’s Jim?”

“Up yours,” she said, annoyed.

He laughed. The kettle whistled and he poured the water through the filter, doctored a mug with cream and sugar just the way she liked it, and they moved to the long couches in the living room, where Mutt was gnawing on a monster bone that looked fresh out of a Jack Horner dig with an expression of pure bliss.

“Did you ever meet Anne Flanagan?” she said after a moment to properly appreciate the magic elixir in her mug.

He cocked his head. “Minister? Down Cordova way?”

She nodded. “Ran into her outside the post office yesterday, we went for coffee. She’s the new flying pastor for the Park.”

“Yeah? A woman pastor?” He snorted. “I wonder how some of the old farts in the villages are gonna take to that.”

“Old Sam liked her.”

“Old Sam is no longer here to run interference for her,” Bobby said, and added, “Sorry,” when Kate didn’t quite wince.

She waved off the apology. “She’s excited. They fronted her the money for a Piper Tri-Pacer. Said she’s always wanted to fly.”

“Good on her,” he said, nodding. He had a specially modified, exquisitely maintained Piper Super Cub on call on his own strip behind the tower in back of the A-frame. She’d known it well, at one time, and they smiled at each other in mutual remembrance of a certain sunny day beside a certain sparkling stream with a conveniently placed dirt strip nearby.

“I’ve been thinking about Canyon Hot Springs,” she said.

“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.”