Breakup (26 page)

Wayne, a stocky, olive-skinned man with a jutting chin and a scowl, recovered from his shock and yelled, "That depends on the Jeppsens! They started it!"

"I'll take care of the Jeppsens! You've got your road! Put away those frigging guns and start acting like civilized human beings, or I'll be back with this Cat and I won't stop until this valley has been returned to its natural state!"

The Cat made known its intentions to start forward again, with or without Kate, and she grabbed the controls and hung on for dear life. The right side of the blade ripped the rear bumper off the old International pickup parked in front of the porch and the tractor swept out of the Kreugers' yard and back down the trail, nearly sideswiping Bobby's blue pickup.

It was a lot smoother going back, Kate noted with satisfaction. Her second self radiated warm approval.

The turnoff for the Jeppsens came so fast she almost missed it, and it was considerably wider than it had been once the Cat passed through. She kept the blade down, mowing down everything that got in the way, including a raspberry patch, an empty drum of thirty-weight and a boy's bike, right into the Jeppsens' front yard.

Stewart laughed again. He sounded excited, even aroused, and why not? He would revel in outlawry, in destruction.

In murder.

As Kate herself was reveling in this very moment. The realization should have stopped her, at the very least given her pause. Instead, she pushed both levers forward with a cry that raised an answering yell from the man next to her.

The sound of the Cat's 140 horses must have been audible fo r miles, because the floodlights caught Joe and Cheryl Jeppsen standing on their front porch with much the same expression on their faces as the Kreugers had had on theirs. The Cat gave Kate just enough time to notice that Cheryl's twin shiners had achieved a yellowish purple of truly historic hue.

More practiced now, she drew the tractor around in a magnificent sweep, barely nicking the bottom stair of the porch steps, and stepped once more on the decelerator. The engine idled and the yellow monster slowed to a reluctant halt, its menacing growl muted.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, Kate?" Joe yelled. He was a thin, bony man with a cadaverous face and dark, burning eyes. One calf was in a cast, one hand held a shotgun. Cheryl had a rifle. The edge of the lights reached just far enough to illuminate Petey on the throne of the one-holer outhouse, reading a copy of Road and Track. Stunned, he gaped through the open door.

"I think I'm building a road," Kate yelled back. "You people have taken enough shots at me in the last forty-eight hours to run out my luck for a lifetime! You put those goddam guns away and start trying to get along with your neighbors!"

"They started it! They-"

"I don't give a rat's ass who started it! It stops today!"

Forever after, Kate would swear she hadn't meant to do it, that she'd once again forgotten the lack of a master switch and the substitution of a decelerator, not to mention that it was pitch black at the time and she couldn't really see where she was going. No one ever believed her, but whether she meant to or not, the Cat took the turn too wide. Petey, with a front-row seat, so to speak, recovered from his stupefaction in time to leap for safety, although it was difficult for him to move very fast with his jeans around his knees. His ass flashed white in the Cat's mercilessly bright halogen floodlights, denim hobbling his steps as he hopped awkwardly out of the way, as the wide steel blade mowed down the thin walls, the tracks crunched over them and the aromatic fragrance of the outhouse filled the clearing.

To Kate's profound relief the Cat did not founder in the hole left behind. She pulled back on the left lever and pushed on the right and the Cat turned left. Joe and Cheryl, joined by Petey, pants up now, stood watching in open-mouthed silence as she passed in review before them and rolled out of sight. No one shot at her, probably, she decided, because of the two truckloads of people following her, not that that had ever stopped the Jeppsens before.

The air was cool on her cheek. A few stars were beginning to peer warily through the torn wisps of April clouds. The now full moon emerged from behind Angqaq and threw the peaks of the Quilaks into jagged relief against the eastern horizon. Deaf from the noise of the engine, hoarse from shouting over it, Kate was exhilarated and drunk with power.

"I love breakup," she told the full moon rising up over the Quilaks.

The noise of the engine overwhelmed the words, and Kate half stood and shouted out to the entire Park, "I love breakup!"

A warm, firm hand settled on the back of her neck. She didn't so much as jump, merely turned her head to meet Stewart's eyes. He smiled at her, his teeth a white slash in the dark cab. She smiled back.

If anything, the trip back to the Cat's garage was even faster and more reckless than the trip out. Kate knocked down three cottonwoods and graded a five-hundred-foot section of roadbed along the way. She pulled into Mac Devlin's yard with a grand flourish and drew to halt in front of the open doors of the garage.

She didn't turn the Cat's engine off, liking its dangerous growl, as if at any moment it might throw off the leash and head out on its own.

The warm, heavy hand on the back of her neck tightened. She felt rather than saw the almost feline ripple of awareness that ran over him, and smiled to herself.

"That's how we take care of problems in the Park, Mr. Stewart," she said, leaning back against the seat, and with the word s her several selves merged back into one. Her mind felt extremely clear. She turned toward the man seated next to her, her left hand resting casually on the gearshift, her other moving to lie almost naturally along the back of the seat, causing his to drop away. A breeze rippled through the tops of the trees, and in the distance they could hear the sound of the two trucks laboring down the track toward them.

"We have a problem, and we take care of it. We don't bother the troopers if we don't have to. We try not to have to."

"So I see." His voice was thick, and he shifted in his seat. He began to lean toward her.

"The way I figure it happened is this," she said.

He paused, his face in shadow.

"When you found out your wife was screwing around, you decided to teach her and her lover a lesson they would never forget. The last lesson they would ever learn." She began to sound less and less like the Lorelei and more and more like the big trooper with the cold blue eyes. "And you decided to teach it to them where you were surest of your ground."

He didn't move, and she couldn't make out his expression. "So, last fall, you brought her lover up here, probably on a hunt. And you left him here to die."

She raised her left hand and tucked back a stray lock of hair that had come free during their wild ride. The motion pulled the fabric of shirt and wind breaker tight against her breast, and she saw his eyes drop involuntarily. If he were standing in front of a firing squad and one of the shooters was a woman, he would die taking her measurements with his eyes. Kate knew a sudden sympathy for his dead wife.

She let the hand lying on the back of the seat slip down to his thigh. He started. "And then you went back to town, and you watched your wife grow frantic at the loss of her lover, and you were probably just sympathetic enough to keep her from leaving you altogether." Something in the quality of his silence changed , and she said quickly, "Or perhaps you smothered her with affection. It's always fun to make someone who has wronged you feel guilty."

She felt a muscle flex beneath her hand, and was satisfied. "Of course. So that this spring, you could seduce her into coming to the Park for a second honeymoon. To get away from it all, I think you said yesterday. And you took her up to the mine. For a picnic lunch, you told her."

Her voice was like sandpaper, scraping at all the rough edges. "You killed her there, and you made enough of a mess to fetch every bear within ten square miles."

She gave his thigh a gentle squeeze, and dropped her voice to a raspy whisper. "And then you came looking for me, or someone like me, to tell your sorry story to." She paused, waiting.

He wanted to test her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, feel it in the tension of his thigh, could almost taste it on the tip of her tongue.

The wind was increasing in volume, a real chinook by the warm feel of it, the leading edge of the storm brewing in the Gulf. A cloud crossed the face of the moon. The trees rustled, snow melted from branches like rain, and a chunk of ice slid suddenly from the cabin to crash to the ground beneath.

It broke his spell. He reached for the hand on his thigh and flattened it against his crotch. He was hard, but then she'd known he would be. "You can't prove anything."

"No, I can't," she said. The first ray from Bobby's headlights hit the clearing. She tightened her hand and he gasped. "I don't have to prove anything, Stewart. I know what happened. I've told you because I can't bear the thought that you think you're so smart you've committed the perfect crime and gotten away with it. You haven't."

Her hand tightened further. "Hey," he said, alarmed, and tried to pry her loose.

She squeezed, hard, with her right hand and with her lef t grabbed for a handful of his throat, her nails sinking deep into his skin.

Stewart's whole body jolted with shock, and the first inkling of how much he had underestimated her. This was not how he had imagined this prolonged period of sexual titillation would end. The shock was closely followed by fury, with the sudden realization that she'd played him like a harp to just this end, but the fury was quickly supplanted by fear. Her grip was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong for such a small woman.

He went limp, like an animal playing dead so the bear won't be interested. It didn't work all that well with bears, as he had cause to know, but it was the only option he had.

It wasn't working with this woman, either. Kate chuckled, and he shivered at the sound. She tightened her right hand, and he whimpered. She leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear, and dropped her voice. "You think with your dick, Stewart. Not all that impressive an organ, is it? After all, it led you here."

That stung his pride, and he choked and tried to twist away. She tightened her grip again. He was still erect, he didn't seem to be able to help it, but the skin of his throat gave beneath her nails, and a warm trickle of fluid ran between her fingers. "This is how we take care of problems in the Park, Stewart," she repeated. "We see something wrong, we fix it. Don't come back here, or I'll fix all your problems, once and for all." She squeezed again. "Got it?"

He gave a half-gasping, half-choking kind of gurgle. She took that as a yes. "Good boy," she said, for all the world as if she were praising a not very bright pet dog. She smiled at him for the last time and, one hand on his crotch, one at his throat, raised him up and pitched him out of the cab of the Cat.

He fell hard, and lay still for a moment, long enough for the trucks to slam to a halt and empty their occupants into the yard. "Jesus Christ, Shugak," Bobby said, trying to unfold his chair and stay between Dinah and Stewart at the same time.

"He's not dead, is he?" Dan said, aghast.

"No," Jim said with more assurance than he felt, and was immensely relieved when Stewart staggered to his feet.

When Jim would have helped him to one of the trucks, Kate's voice, a low rasp of sound, came clearly over the sound of the Cat's idle.

"No. Let him walk."

Jim's hand dropped as he stared up at the dark figure in the cab.

The full moon was up high enough for the rest of them to watch in silence as Stewart limped shakily out of the clearing, shoulders hunched, hands clasped protectively over his crotch, something dark staining the front of his shirt.

He bore only the very slightest resemblance to the tall, good- looking, confident ladies' man who had left the Roadhouse two hours before.

The next morning she finished her taxes and made an early trip in to the post office to drop her tax form into the mailbox, a whole day before the deadline. She exited the post office feeling efficient and virtuous and every inch the franchised American, and very nearly saluted the flag.

She got the hell out of Dodge unambushed by anybody bent on drafting her to do good and returned to the homestead to rebuild the base of the couch with plywood and two-by-fours. There was no more of the blue canvas she'd used for upholstering fabric when she'd built it years before, so she improvised with a piece of olive drab Army blanket. She hated sewing; consequently her stitches were small and neat, so as to get the job done as fast as possible and not have to go back and redo it later. Finished, it looked like a splotch of pond scum floating on a blue lake. Or, i f she squinted, maybe a lily pad. She'd have to check the Sears catalog for new material and reupholster the whole thing. Oh. Right. There was no more Sears catalog. Great.

She set up the ladder again and sanded the Spackle on the ceiling patch. There was a little less than a gallon of the flat white latex paint in the garage, left over from the last time she'd painted the interior of the cabin, more than enough to cover the area involved. She had been right; the paint had faded and she had to paint the whole ceiling to make it match. Fortunately, the cabin was only twenty-five feet square and the loft ceiling was easily reached. At noon she took down the ladder for what she devoutly hoped was the last time and trundled everything back out through the slush to the garage.

The chinook had blown itself out by six that morning, leaving temperatures in the upper forties and climbing. The roar of runoff down the creek had increased and she climbed down the bank, shotgun in hand, to assess the boulder situation. It looked solid, and a good thing, too, because there would be no muscling of rocks against the force of that water. Her judgment may have been influenced by the rustling of brush she heard across the creek, and the infrequent grunts and groans of her local grizzly, letting her know he was there.

The Park was just lousy with bears this spring.