Breakup (5 page)

Kevin Bickford stood where he was, white face streaked with mud and oversize parka stained with slush, looking as if he couldn't believe he was still alive and in one piece. Kate didn't blame him, but she had other things on her mind, like murder.

She started forward and a third four-wheeler leapt out of the brush, this one driven by Dan O'Brian. Skidding to a stop in the center of the clearing, he killed the engine and was one step ahead of Kate to the four-wheeler drivers, who were sitting up and beginning to take hilarious notice of their surroundings. Whoopee had lost his bottle, so Powder River hoisted himself up and fished a silver flask from a hip pocket. Whoopee greeted this with a loud cheer and a wet, noisy kiss on Powder River's cheek.

They had just enough time for a gulp apiece before Dan fastened a hand in each collar and jerked them to their feet, causing them to spray whiskey all over the Earlybird man, for whom Kate, against her will, was beginning to feel a little sorry.

"GOTCHA," Dan roared, "you drunk-driving, wildlife-poaching, great-white-hunter-wannabe sonsaBITCHES!"

He slung Whoopee down ungently at the base of a tree and fastened his wrists together with a plastic restraint. Powder River received the same treatment. They recovered enough to protest.

"SHADDUP!" Dan roared again.

They shaddup.

Dan, quivering with outrage, smoothed a trembling hand over the red hair standing straight up all over his head and turned a wrathful gaze on Kate to say one infuriated word.

"Breakup."

At that moment the sound of another engine was heard, and with a single bound Mutt gained the center of the clearing, where she stood barking up at the sky, tail wagging furiously. Kate didn't look. She, too, knew the sound of that engine.

Sure enough, over the tops of the trees came a Bell Jet Ranger, a small helicopter with the insignia of the Alaska Department of Public Safety emblazoned on the doors. It set down a little to one side of the center of the clearing, rotors only just missing the top of the wrecked engine and the eaves of Kate's garage, cabin, greenhouse and outhouse. It would have taken a chunk out of the cache's roof had the cache still been standing, but it wasn't, and if Kate had been in a fair mood, she would have admired the artistry of the landing.

She wasn't. She didn't.

Seconds later the trooper emerged in all his blue-and-gold glory. He conferred first with Dan, then with Stewman, then with Brandon and Selina, while Kate watched from her front doorstep, scowling and keeping her distance. Wasn't her land. Wasn't her body. Weren't her hunters. She didn't want anything to do with any of it, and she was prepared to tell Jim Chopin so, at length, but she never got the chance, because he loaded Selina into the chopper and took off.

Well. It was obvious that her help was neither wanted nor needed. Fine. She stamped inside and made a fresh pot of hot water, just in time to pour out for Dan O'Brian, who had calmed down enough to stare into his mug and say incredulously, "Since when do you drink tea?"

"Since I ran out of coffee and a jet engine fell on the only transportation I've got to get me to the store for supplies."

He caught the ferocity behind the misleadingly mild words, and said hastily, "Hey, I live for tea. Serve it up. Got any sugar?" It was immediately obvious that that was the wrong thing to say too, so he fell back on something he knew for certain she would agree with. "I hate this time of year."

"I heard that," Kate said, with feeling.

He nodded at the wreckage in the yard. "Looks like Chicken Little was right."

"Looks like."

"Jim says they found a body."

"That's the rumor," Kate said, studying the swirling liquid in her mug with absorption.

He grinned. "Amazing how you don't have to go looking for work, Shugak, how it comes looking for you."

"I wasn't looking," she stated. "I'm not looking. It's breakup, for crissake, I've got nineteen different things to do without taking on trying to figure out why some doofus wound up dead wandering around the back of beyond."

His grin faded. "I thought he got brained by a piece off that engine."

"I don't know," Kate said stubbornly, stifling the memory of Stewman saying, This guy's been there longer than last night. "I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. All I know is the engine missed me."

He got up to look out the window, measuring the distance between the engine and her front door. "Barely."

She was tired of the subject, or so she told herself, and nodded through the cabin's open door at the two men sitting at the base of the tree. They had stopped shouting obscenities with the arrival of the trooper. Now they were silent and glum. "What's with Rocky and Rambo?"

"Couple of Arco engineers from Anchorage." Dan turned to raise an eyebrow in her direction. "On a hunting trip," he added blandly.

"In a manner of speaking," Kate agreed dryly. "How'd you get onto them so fast?"

It was a legitimate question. The Park comprised twenty million acres and the year-round ranger staff was so small that most of the time irresponsible hunters did their damage and were long gone by the time Dan caught up with them.

"You'll like this." He drank tea, repressing a shudder. "They flew into Niniltna in a Cessna 180, loaded-you should pardon the expression-for bear. They got a ride to the Roadhouse last night and started asking around for the best place to go hunting."

Kate laughed. She couldn't help it.

Dan grinned. "Yeah, I know. Like anybody at the Roadhouse would steer them toward a bear they'd already marked out for themselves. So somebody told them Fish and Game hasn't issued permits for a bear hunt in ten years, the grizz population in the Park being down to what it is and all."

Kate was of the newly formed opinion that the Park's grizzly population was in definite need of a brisk culling, but the Park's chief ranger was highly unlikely to enter into her feelings on the subject. "I guess they didn't take the warning to heart, did they?"

"Nope." Dan shook his head. "First they got drunk, and then they got a couple of four wheelers-"

"Where from?"

Dan looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said, "Bought them off Dandy Mike. Cash on the barrelhead. Twice what they were worth."

"Ouch." Like all Park rats open to opportunity, Kate prudently refrained from asking him if the four-wheelers had belonged to Dandy in the first place, and, like a good friend, Dan avoided burdening her with that information. "Anyway, Dandy counted the cash, twice, made a few suggestions as to where they might look for bear, and as soon as they were out of sight he called me. I flew down and borrowed Billy Mike's four-wheeler, and here I am."

Kate sat up straight. "Dandy sent them up here?" Dan grinned again, an answer in itself. "That son of a bitch!"

"Now, Kate," Dan said soothingly. "To be fair, I'd rather they tangle with you than anyone else in the Park, and Dandy knows it. Hell, they all do."

Kate looked around at the shambles of her homestead, and her burst of anger died away. "I don't feel all that formidable today, Dan."

The ranger raised his mug in salute. "A temporary setback, Shugak. You'll have all this up and running again in no time, I guarantee it. These go teams move fast, from what I hear."

They watched the NTSB work in silence for a moment. "So if he didn't get brained by a piece off your engine-"

"It's not my engine."

"-what was he doing out here anyway? Hunting bear, do you think? That's the only thing worth hunting this time of year."

"Don't know how long he has been there," Kate said, and shrugged. Okay, she'd play. "If he really has been out there over the winter, he could have gotten lost hunting, got hurt. Happens all the time."

"Maybe a bear ate him," Dan suggested.

Kate thought of Mama Bear coming at her flat out across the creek the morning before. Maybe the sow's eagerness and speed hadn't entirely been due to her protective instincts, but to the sight of what she had already found to be an easy snack. Ursine finger food. Kate repressed a shiver. "Maybe. Although it's not like a hungry bear to leave enough to show whether a body is male or female, and Stewman was definite that it was a man." She shrugged again.

"Aren't you even curious?" Dan was joking when he added, "What kind of sleuth are you anyway, Shugak?"

She wasn't when she snapped out her reply. "A retired one."

Dan looked as if he'd like to argue the point but Chopper Jim's return spared her. The helicopter settled into the clearing in the exact same spot as before, this time with a body bag strapped to one of the skids and a stretcher with a sandbag strapped to the other for ballast. Selina got out the instant the skids touched down and walked away very fast without looking back. Dan went to retrieve Whoopee and Powder River. Jim waved Kate over. She went, reluctantly.

He opened the door as she approached, his earphones around his neck. "What you got?" Kate shouted over the noise of the engine, the rotors whapping at the air over her head.

He grinned at her. "Looking for business, Kate?"

Her expression told him what she thought of that question and he laughed, kind of heartlessly, she thought, given she was standing like Dido in the middle of Carthage after the sack. He nodded at the jet engine. "It seems Chicken Little was right."

"So they tell me." She jerked her chin at the body bag. "What'd he get hit with?"

"What do you mean, what'd he get hit with?"

"Didn't he get clobbered by a piece off that engine?"

"Kate. We found him three miles from here."

"When you drop an airplane engine from thirty thousand feet, I imagine the parts tend to scatter just a tad."

"True, but he didn't get hit with a piece of your engine. He's been there all winter."

Shit, she thought. "Who is he?" she said out loud, adding immediately, "Not that I'm all that interested."

"No ID left on him. For sure he isn't my missing hiker."

It took her a minute. "You mean the guy you were looking for last June? The one up in the Mentastas?"

He nodded.

She almost smiled. "Come on, Jim. The Mentastas are seventy miles north of here. That would have been one hell of a hike."

Jim grinned again, unrepentant. "I hate open cases. And he almost fits the description."

Kate nodded at the body bag. "How long's he been dead?"

"Longer than last night. Long enough for the critters to chow down some on him." He raised an inquiring eyebrow. "Mutt bring home any suspicious-looking femurs lately? He's only got one left, and it looks kind of gnawed on."

"Yuck," said Dan O'Bftan, in the process of forcing the Great White Hunters into the back of the chopper. Whoopee started to complain that his butt was wet. The trooper turned his head and gave him a narrow-eyed look that reminded Whoopee that he was soon to be two thousand feet up with one potential witness dead and the other already snoring in a drunken stupor. He shut up.

Kate heard a faint staticky noise and Jim raised one of the earphones to his ear. "Roger that," he said into the microphone. "I'm on my way."

He resettled the headset in place. "Gotta run," he said, raising his voice over the increasing whine of the helicopter's engine. "A Nizina fisherman just shot his father over a Prince William Sound drift permit. Seems he thought it was time for Dad to retire, only Dad disagreed." He adjusted something on the dash and raised his voice over the increasing whine of the engine. "I just love breakup, don't you?"

Kate and Dan duckwalked beneath the props to one side of the clearing as the rotors spun into a blur. A tossed salute through the windscreen and Jim was gone.

The sound of the chopper faded into the distance. "Well," Dan said, "time I moved like I had a purpose." He surveyed her trashed yard one more time and cocked an eye at Kate. "You going to b e okay?"

"Yeah."

"We got a bunk up on the Step with your name on it, if you need it."

She relaxed enough to smile, and mean it. "Thanks, Dan. I'll keep it in mind."

"Come to that, there's a bed with my name on it you're welcome to, when you've a mind to it." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

The attempt to commit lechery was tempered with too much humor to take offense. It always was, but today found her wondering what Dan would do if she took him up on his offer. The thought of his probable reaction made her laugh out loud and she waved him off with a shooing gesture. He mounted Billy Mike's four-wheeler with a swagger, pressed the starter and was off in a roar of sound.

It faded just in time for her to hear a truck grind to a halt at her trailhead, a quarter of a mile through the woods. She heard Dan shout something, and a voice she recognized shout back. All amusement gone, Kate swore out loud.

John Stewman, writing something on his clipboard, looked around- "Like Grand Central Station around here today."

Mutt took off up the trail to investigate, and returned shortly with three people in tow. One was Amanda Winthrop Baker, known to friends as Mandy, to mushing fans as the Brahmin Bullet and to the couple behind her as Amanda dear.

"Amanda dear," the woman said, "do you have to walk quite so fast?"

"Yes," the man said, "your mother isn't used to-what did yo u call it?-bushwhacking. Try to keep it down to just under a gallop, if you don't mind."

Only a friend who called her Mandy would have noticed the look of quiet desperation that gleamed in her eyes. Only a friend who called her Mandy would not have remarked on it. Kate, a very good friend, bade a mental goodbye to any prospect of peace this day and with true nobility-because she'd been listening to Mandy's stories of her parents for years-stepped once more into the breach, holding out a hand and saying heartily, "Hi, Mandy. And these must be your parents. Nice to meet you, folks, I've heard a lot about you."

She didn't add what she'd heard. With the innate wisdom of all parents everywhere, they didn't ask.

Mandy's parents huddled as close together as they could get without actually sitting in each other's lap, not because there wasn't room on the one undamaged arm of Kate's couch to spread out, but because they were mesmerized by the unwavering yellow eyes of the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf lying in the middle of the floor. The expression on their thin-boned, aristocratic East Coast faces was identical, and if each hair of the immaculately groomed, distinguished white caps on both their heads wasn't standing straight up, it was only because their fear of letting down the side exceeded their fear of being ripped to shreds by a wild animal.