White Heat (2 page)

    Closing
in, she could see things were more serious than she'd allowed herself to
imagine and suddenly she understood something of Taylor's panic. The injured
man was not moving. A large pool of blood had gathered under his right arm,
melting the surrounding snow, freezing into a purplish sorbet. A tiny skein of
steam rose from the spot.

    'What
happened?'

    'I
was over the other side,' Taylor muttered. 'I heard the sound, I ran.' He
pointed to some tracks, rapidly being erased by the wind. 'Look, look, see,
see?'

    
Think,
woman.
Despite the company - or maybe precisely
because
of the
company - she felt resolutely alone. The first thing to do was to call and
speak to Robert Patma or Joe on the sat phone. Darling Joe, who had been
volunteering in Patma's clinic for a year now and seemed to have accumulated
almost as much expertise as the nurse himself. She glanced over at the injured
man. No, on second thoughts, the
very
first thing would be to stop the
bleeding.

    She
went back to the snowbie, took out the first aid kit, and bustled back up the beach
towards the wounded man. Taylor was on his knees beside Felix Wagner now, a
look of terror on his face, his hands scuttling across Wagner's body, loosening
the fabric of the wounded man's parka. She fell to the ground beside him,
gesturing Taylor out of the way.

    'I
swear, the shot came out of nowhere.' Taylor's voice was querulous and
high-pitched. Something flickered across his face, a momentary despair, and, as
if sensing the implausibility of his observation, he repeated it. 'Nowhere.'

    Edie
had never seen a man so wounded before; foam bubbled from his lips, he was
panting and his eyes were darting blindly in their sockets. His face was the
colour of limestone. A smell of urine drifted upwards, but Edie didn't know
either man's scent well enough to tell which of them had pissed himself. She
pulled aside Wagner's parka and inspected the wound through his polar fleece.
It looked as though the bullet had penetrated his sternum, just above the
heart. The wound was oozing, not fountaining, which she took to mean that the
bullet had missed a major artery; the most immediate danger to Wagner's life
would be if the lung collapsed. She turned briefly to Taylor.

    'You
didn't see anything, anyone?'

    'I
didn't fucking do it, if that's what you think.' Taylor's voice faltered and he
held both palms out, as if surrendering. 'I told you, I was over there, taking
a leak.' She met the fellow's eye, remembering that she hadn't liked him when
he'd stepped off the plane two days ago. Nothing he'd done in the last couple
of minutes had made her change her mind.

    'Chrissakes,
this has
nothing
to do with me.'

    'Wrong,'
she said, turning her attention to the wounded man. 'This has plenty to do with
us both.'

    Wagner's
pulse was rapid and weak and he was sweating profusely. Edie had seen animals
like this. Shock. Even if his lung held, it would be hard for Wagner to pull
out of it. The immediate priority was to stem the blood flow and keep him warm.
Given the position of the wound it seemed extremely unlikely that Wagner had
shot himself accidentally but her instincts told her Taylor wasn't lying
either. She glanced over at him: no discharge stains on his gloves. Unless she
was very mistaken, the skinny one wasn't the shooter. Closing in on the wound
site she picked a couple of bone fragments from the flesh and beckoned Taylor
nearer. Wagner panted a little then calmed.

    'Press
on the wound and keep up the pressure. I'm going to call for help.'

    For a
moment Taylor looked like he was going to faint.

    'Press?
With what?'

    'Palm
of your hand, who cares?'
Use your dick if you have to.
She pulled the
scarf from round her neck to give him something to press into the wound. Taylor
reached for it with his left hand and did as he was told.

    'What
if the shooter comes back?'

    She
gave him a long, hard look. 'You're a hunter, aren't you?'

    The
sat phone was sitting in its insulated cover at the bottom of the pannier where
she'd packed it. It was Autisaq council of Elders policy that all local guides leading
foreigners carried one; otherwise she didn't bother with them. The cold made
the batteries unreliable and the line was often scrambled. In any case, she'd
never had cause to use one until now.

    Sammy's
voice came on the line. Edie took a deep breath. Today of all days, her
ex-husband was on duty in the comms office. She checked her watch. Another
southern habit, Sammy would say. It was 2 p.m.

    'We've
got a hunting accident.' Keeping it simple for now. 'It's pretty bad. Chest
wound. If we're lucky it won't bleed out, but the guy looks like he might go
into shock. We need Robert Patma and a plane.'

    'Where
you at?'

    'On
Craig. At Uimmatisatsaq. Patma knows it. Joe took him fishing there one time.'

    Sammy
sucked on his teeth. She could tell from the way the sound of his breath moved
that he was shaking his head.

    'Hold
while I check the plane schedule and the forecast.'

    Waiting,
Edie dug around in her pannier, drew out a sheet of polyurethane, took out her
knife and hacked off a rough square.

    The
phone crackled and for a moment she could hear the faint intimations of another
call, two voices speaking in some language she didn't understand, then Sammy's
voice tinkled through the handset.

    'Edie,
there's a blizzard coming.'

    'Yeah.'
Holy walrus, the man could be irritating. 'Looks like one of those spring
blow-overs.'

    'We
can't send a plane until it's gone through.'

    'Air
ambulance from Iqaluit?'

    'I
checked already. They're weathered out.'

    Edie
scrolled through the options. 'We get a medic here we might be OK. Robert Patma
could make it on a snowbie.'

    Silence
on the phone, then another voice:

    'Kigga.'
It was Joe. Edie felt her body give a little.

    
Kiggavituinnaaq,
falcon, his nickname for her. He always said she lived in her own world up in
the air somewhere. Strictly speaking she wasn't his stepmother any more, not
officially anyway. Still Kigga though.

    'Robert
Patma left for the south yesterday. His mother was killed in a crash, dad's in
hospital. They said they'd send a temporary nurse but no one's shown up.'

    Edie
groaned. 'They' as in feds, held to be responsible for everything and nothing,
as in, 'The spirits were angry with my sister so they made sure the feds didn't
get her treated for her TB in time.'

    'That
gets out, Autisaq can forget its guiding business.' She was angry, not with
Robert, but with a system that left them all so vulnerable.

    Joe
said: 'Right.' He sounded impatient with her for focusing on such a thing, even
for a moment. 'But your fellow's breathing, right?'

    'Just
about. If we can stabilize him and stop the bleeding ..

    'You
got any plastic?'

    'I
already cut a piece.'

    Some
energy passed between them. Love, admiration, maybe a mixture of the two.

    'Gonna
pack the clinic's snowbie and come myself,' Joe said. 'Meantime, if the
blizzard blows over, they'll send the plane. Keep doing what you're doing and
don't give him anything by mouth.' His voice softened. 'Kigga, nothing you can
do's gonna make it worse.'

    'Joe
. . .' She was about to tell her stepson to be careful, when she realized he'd
already hung up.

    Edie
went back to the two men, pulled out the bivvy from Taylor's trailer and in a
few minutes had it up and over the injured man. It had started snowing. In a
couple of hours the blizzard would be upon them. Pushing Taylor back, she
leaned over Wagner's face, fingered his neck for a pulse and temperature, took
the square of polyurethane from her pocket, opened up his fleece with her knife
and tamped the plastic over the wound. A small thought scudded across her mind.
Only three days ago this stout little man thought he was setting out on a grand
adventure, something to boast about at the clubhouse bar back in Wichita. The
odds on Felix Wagner ever seeing the clubhouse again had just lengthened
considerably. She turned to Taylor.

    'Do
everything you can to make sure no air gets into the wound or the lung could
collapse. I'm going to get a snow shelter up. The blizzard goes big, this bivvy
won't hold. Anything changes, call me, OK?'

    Taylor
said: 'You're not going to look for whoever did this?'

    Edie
bit back her irritation. One thing she couldn't abide was a whiner.

    'Look,
do you want to play detective or do you want your friend to live?'

    Taylor
sighed. She watched him disappear into the bivvy, then drove the snowbie to the
old drifts at the back of the beach beside the cliff and followed the shingle
up the slope to the high point, looking for footprints and shell discards. She
wasn't going to give Taylor the satisfaction of knowing that was what she was
doing. All the same, she wanted to be clear in her own mind that the shooter
wasn't still around. Up on the high ground, the wind was already blowing the
snow hard. If there had been any prints, they were gone now. She turned the
snowbie back and was passing beside a rocky outcrop when she spotted something
on the ground. She squeezed on the brakes, jumped off and went back to check.
There it was, the remnant of a single footprint, which had been protected from
the worst of the wind by a small boulder. She inspected it more closely,
bringing to mind Taylor's footprints from earlier. This was different. A man's
and recent. Wagner's perhaps. If not, most likely the shooter's. For a moment
or two she stood and took it in, memorising the zig-zag pattern with what
looked like the outline of an ice bear at its centre, as bit by bit the wind
blew snow over its surface. Up on her feet, now, she could just make out the
rapidly filling indentations where the trail of prints had once been, heading
away out onto the tundra. If it was the shooter, he was long gone.

    She
made her way back to the beach and focused her energies on finding the right
kind of building snow. Too hard and you'd never get the blocks to caulk
together, too soft and the whole structure would be in danger of collapsing. A
textbook she'd once read at the school listed the perfect building snow as
having a density of 0.3-0.35gm/cm
³
and a hardness of between
150-200gm/cm
³
. She'd remembered the numbers because they'd seemed so
abstract and absurd. Out on the land, you had to do your own calculations.

    As
luck would have it, she found precisely the right kind of three-layered snow in
a drift at the northern edge of the beach. For a while she worked, sawing the
walrus- ivory snowknife to and fro to form rectangular bricks the size of
breezeblocks, stacking them on top of the trailer and moving them in batches
out from under the cliff to where the bivvy currently stood. The job took her a
while, because she moved slowly to avoid breaking into a sweat. Bricks cut, she
dived back inside the bivvy to check on Wagner. The wounded man was quiet now,
his breathing shallow. She checked his boots. No ice bear.

    'He
still bleeding?'

    Taylor
shook his head.

    'That
case, you need to come help.'

    She
showed him how to place the bricks, then caulk between, and as he worked, she
dug out the ice floor and levelled it off. Finally they built the little
entrance tunnel, sloping down to prevent warm air escaping. It was crude, but
it would do. Together they heaved Wagner inside and laid him on a small pile of
caribou skins. Edie emptied his pockets of a white plastic ballpoint pen, a
pocket knife and a few coins and tossed them in her bag, then went back outside
to collect her things and untie Bonehead. The wind chill was formidable now,
-45 maybe, the air foamy with ice frost. She built a crude little annexe on the
side of the house, lowered Bonehead into it and bricked him in. The snow would
keep him cosy. Then she went inside, poured what remained of the hot tea from
the thermos and, handing a mug to Andy Taylor, raised hers in a toast:

    'Here's
to another fine mess,' she said.

    Andy
looked up from his tea, eyes glaring. Incomprehension, maybe. Contempt, more
like.