KS00 - Nooses Give Read online

  Nooses Give

  Dana Stabenow

  Author’s Note

  I’d just gotten home from the Edgar Awards in New York City, grasping mine in a sweaty palm, when a letter landed in my post office box. It was a request for a short story for an anthology called The Mysterious West, to be published by Harper Collins. And it was from someone who signed himself Tony Hillerman.

  Now, I certainly knew who Tony Hillerman was, but I had never met him, and I knew he couldn’t possibly have ever heard of me. Someone was obviously swanning around taking Tony Hillerman’s name in vain and that was not allowed. I called my agent in high dudgeon and insisted that we had to DO something about this.

  There followed a puzzled silence, after which my agent asked me to look at the letter again. I did so. It was actually signed for Tony Hillerman, not by him, by a gentleman named Marty Greenberg.

  I heard a long sigh. “Dana,” my agent said, “Marty Greenberg is very well known in the industry. His nickname is the anthology king. If he says he’s putting together an anthology that Tony is editing, he is.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You will respond immediately, and you will say yes, you will be happy to contribute a short story to an anthology with Tony Hillerman’s name on the cover.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  And wrote “Nooses Give.”

  THE BODIES HAD FALLEN around the table like three cards from a spent deck. Jeremy Mike, the jack of spades. Sally Jorgenson, queen of hearts. Ted Muktoyuk, the king of diamonds. The King of the Key, they called him from the bleachers, at five feet ten the tallest center Bernie Koslowski had ever had the privilege of coaching.

  Bernie’s mouth was set in a grim line. “What happened?”

  Billy Mike had a mobile moon face, usually beaming with good nature and content. This morning it was grim and tired. The jack of spades had been a nephew, his youngest sister’s only child. She didn’t know yet, and he didn’t know how he was going to tell her. He told Bernie instead. “They were drunk. It’s Jeremy’s pistol.”

  “How do you know?”

  Billy’s face twisted. “I gave it to him for Christmas.” Bernie waited, patient, and Billy got himself under control. “He must have brought it from home. Sally’s parents are in Ahtna for a corporation conference, so they came here to drink.”

  “And play Russian roulette.”

  Billy nodded. “Looks like Ted lost. He was left-handed—remember that hook shot?”

  “Remember it? I taught it to him.”

  “Sally was on his right. She couldn’t have shot him in the left side of his head from where she sat.” He pointed at the pistol, lying on the table a few inches from Sally’s hand. “You know Ted and Sally were going together?”

  Bernie grunted. “You figure Sally blamed Jeremy? For bringing the gun?”

  “Or the bottle, or both.” The tribal chief’s nod was weary. “Probably grabbed the gun and shot Jeremy, then herself.” He stooped and picked up a plastic liquor bottle from the floor.

  He held it out, and Bernie examined the label. “Windsor Canadian. The bootlegger’s friend. Retail price in Anchorage, seven-fifty a bottle. Retail price in a dry village, a hundred bucks easy.”

  “Yeah.” The bottle dropped to the table, next to the gun.

  “You talk to him?”

  “I tried. He shot out the headlights on my snow machine.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Town’s tense. You know the DampAct passed by only five votes. There’s plenty who think he’s just doing business, that he’s got every right to make a living, same as the rest of us.”

  “No,” Bernie said, “not the same as the rest of us.”

  “No,” Billy agreed. “Bernie, the trooper’s chasing after some nut who shot up a bank in Valdez, and the tribal police… Well, hell, the tribal policemen are okay at checking planes for booze and getting the drunks home safe from the Roadhouse. Like I said, the town’s tense. Anything could happen.” A pause. “We’re not going to be able to handle this on our own.”

  “No.” Bernie’s eyes met Billy’s. “But we know someone who can.”

  The tribal chief hesitated. “I don’t know, Bernie. There’s some history there.”

  Bernie gave the bodies a last look, a gaze equal parts sorrow and rage. “All the better.”

  · · ·

  The next morning Bernie bundled himself into parka, gauntlets, and boots, kissed his wife and children goodbye, and got on his snow machine. There had been a record amount of snow that winter, drifting twenty feet deep in places. Moose were unable to get at the tree bark that was their primary food source and were starving to death all over the Park, but the snow machining had never been better. An hour and thirty-five miles later, his cheeks frostbitten and his hands and feet numb, he burst into a small clearing. He cut the engine and slid to a stop six feet from the log cabin.

  It sat at the center of a half circle of small buildings, including a garage, a greenhouse, a cache, and an outhouse. Snow was piled high beneath the eaves of the cabin, and neat paths had been cut through it from door to door and to the woodpile between cabin and outhouse. Beyond the buildings were more trees and a creek. Beyond the creek the ground fell away into a long, broad valley that glittered hard and cold and white in what there was of the Arctic noon sun, a valley that rose again into the Teglliq foothills and the Quilak mountain range, a mighty upward thrust of earth’s crust that gouged the sky with 18,000-foot spurs until it bled ice-blue glaze down their sharp flanks.

  It was a sight to steal the heart. Bernie Koslowski would never have seen any of it if he hadn’t dodged the draft all the way into British Columbia in 1970. From there it was but a step over the border into Alaska and some fine, rip-roaring years on the TransAlaska Pipeline. By the time the line was finished, he had enough of a stake to buy the Roadhouse, the only establishment legally licensed to sell liquor in the twenty-million-acre Park, and he settled down to marry a local girl and make babies and boilermakers for the rest of his life.

  He sold liquor to make a living. He coached basketball for fun. He had so much fun at it that Niniltna High School’s Kanuyaq Kings were headed for the Class C State Championship. Or they had been until Ted Muktoyuk’s resignation from the team. Bernie’s eyes dropped from the mountains to the clearing.

  She hadn’t been off the homestead in the last four feet of snow; he’d had to break trail with the machine a quarter of a mile through the woods. The thermometer mounted next to the door read six below. He knocked. No answer. Smoke was coming from both chimneys. He knocked again, harder.

  This time the door opened. She stood five feet tall and small of frame, dwarfed by the wolf-husky hybrid standing at her side. The wolf’s eyes were yellow, the woman’s hazel, both wary and hostile. The woman said, “What?”

  “What ‘what’?” Bernie said. “What am I doing here? What do I want? Whatever happened to this thing called love?” He gave a hopeful smile. There was no response. “Come on, Kate. How about a chance to get in out of the cold?”

  For a minute he thought she was going to shut the door in his face. Instead she stepped to one side. “In.”

  The dog curled a lip at him, and he took this as tacit permission to enter. The cabin was a twenty-five-foot square with a sleeping loft. Built-in bookshelves, built-in couch, table and chairs and two stoves, one oil, one wood, took up the first floor. Gas lamps hissed gently from brackets in all four corners. She took his parka and hung it next to hers on the caribou rack mounted next to the door. “Sit.”

  He sat. She poured out two mugs of coffee and gave him one. He gulped gratefully and felt the hot liquid creep all the way down his legs and out into his fingertips, and as if she had only been waiting for that, sh
e said, “Talk.”

  Her voice was a hoarse, croaking whisper, and irresistibly his eyes were drawn to the red, angry scar bisecting the smooth brown skin of her throat, literally from ear to ear. None of the Park rats knew the whole story, and none of them had had the guts to ask for it, but the scar marked her throat the way it had marked the end of her career seven months before as an investigator on the staff of the Anchorage district attorney’s office. She had returned to her father’s homestead sometime last summer. The first anyone knew about it was when her mail started being delivered to the Niniltna post office. Old Abel Int-Hout picked it up and presumably brought it out to her homestead, and the only time anyone else saw her was when she came into Niniltna for supplies in October, the big silver wolf husky hybrid walking close by her side, warning off any and all advances with a hard yellow stare.

  Her plaid shirt was open at the throat, her long black hair pulled back into a loose braid. She wasn’t trying to hide the scar. Maybe it needed air to heal. Or maybe she was proud of it. Or maybe it was only that she wasn’t ashamed of it, which wasn’t quite the same thing. He looked up from the scar and met eyes beneath an epicanthic fold that gave her face an exotic, Eastern flavor. She was an Aleut icon stepped out of a gilt frame, dark and hard and stern. “I’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So I’m hoping you’ll make it your problem too.” He drank more coffee, preparing for a tough sell. “You know about the DampAct?” She shook her head. “In November the village voted to go dry. You can bring in booze for your own consumption but not in amounts to sell.” He added, “I’m okay because the Roadhouse is outside tribal boundaries.” She didn’t look as if she’d been worrying about him or his business. “Well, Kate, it ain’t working out too good.”

  There was a brief pause. “Bootlegger,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She doubled her verbal output. “Tell me.” He told her. It must have been hard to hear. She was shirttail cousin to all three of the teenagers. Hell, there weren’t very many people in the village of Niniltna or the entire Park for that matter she couldn’t call cousin, including himself, through his wife. It was the reason he was here. One of them.

  “You know who?” she said.

  He snorted into his coffee and put the mug down with a thump. “Of course I know who. Everybody knows who. He’s been flying booze into remote villages, wet or dry, for thirty years. Wherever there isn’t a bar—shit, wherever there is a bar and somebody’d rather buy their bottle out of the back of a plane anyway—there’s Pete with his hand out. God knows it’s better than working for a living.”

  Her face didn’t change, but he had the sudden feeling that he had all her attention, and remembered Billy Mike’s comment about history. “Pete Liverakos,” she said. He gave a gloomy nod. “Stop him. The local option law says the state can seize any equipment used to make, transport, sell, or store liquor. Start confiscating.”

  This time a gloomy shake. “We don’t know where to start.”

  A corner of the wide mouth turned down. “Gee, maybe you could try his plane. You can pack a lot of cases of booze into the back of a 180, especially if you pull all the seats except the pilot’s.”

  “He’s not using it,” Bernie said. “Since the DampAct passed, the tribal council has been searching every plane that lands at gunpoint. Pete’s been in and out in his Cessna all winter, Billy Mike says clean as a whistle every time.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a week, sometimes twice.” He added, “He’s not even bringing in anything for personal use, which all by itself makes me suspicious, because Pete and Laura Anne are a couple what likes a little caribou with their cabernet.”

  “Get the trooper.”

  “Kate, you know and I know the trooper’s based in Tok, and his jurisdiction is spread pretty thin even before he gets within flying distance of Niniltna. Besides, he’s already in pursuit of some yo-yo who shot up a bank in Valdez and took off up Thompson Pass, on foot, no less. So much for state law. The DampAct—” He shrugged. “The DampAct is a local ordinance. Even if they catch him at it, all the council can do is fine him a thousand bucks. Like a speeding ticket. In any given year Pete spends more than that on olives for martinis.”

  “He got somebody flying it in from Anchorage?”

  Bernie gave a bark of laughter. “Sure. MarkAir.” At her look, he said, “Shit, Kate, MarkAir runs specials with the Brown Jug in town. Guy endorses his permanent dividend fund check over at the local MarkAir office, MarkAir carries it to Anchorage and expedites it to the Brown Jug warehouse, Brown Jug fills the order, MarkAir picks it up and takes it out to the airport and flies it to the village.”

  “Competition for you,” she said.

  He met her eyes levelly. “That isn’t what this is about, and you know it. I serve drinks, not drunks, and I don’t sell bottles.”

  She looked away. “Sorry.”

  He gave a curt nod.

  There was a brief silence. She broke it. “What do you want me to do?”

  He drained his mug and set it on the table with a decisive snap. “I got a state championship coming up. I need sober players who come to practice instead of out earning their next bottle running booze for that asshole. Preferably players who have not previously blown their brains out with their best friend’s gun. I want you to find out how Pete’s getting the booze in, and stop him.”

  · · ·

  The next morning she fired up the Polaris and followed Bernie’s tracks up the trail to the road that connected Niniltna with Ahtna and the Richardson Highway. The Polaris was old and slow, and the twenty-five miles between her homestead and the village took the better part of an hour, including the ten-minute break to investigate the tracks she spotted four miles outside the village. A pack of five wolves, healthy, hungry, and hunting. The 30.06 was always with her and there was always a round in the chamber, but she stopped and checked anyway. One wolf was an appetite with attitude. Five of them looked like patrons of a diner, with her as the blue-plate special.

  The tracks were crusted hard, a day old at least. Mutt’s sniff was interested but unalarmed, and Kate replaced the rifle and continued up the road. It wasn’t a road, really; it was the remains of the gravel roadbed of the Kanuyaq and Northwestern Railroad, built in 1910 to carry copper from the mine outside Niniltna to freighters docked in Cordova. In 1936 the copper played out, the railroad shut down, and locals began ripping up rails to get to the ties. It was an easy load of firewood, a lot easier than logging out the same load by hand.

  The rails and ties were all gone now, although in summertime you could still pick up the odd spike in your truck tires. Twice a year, once after breakup, again just before the termination dust started creeping down the mountains, the state ran a grader over the rough surface to smooth over the potholes and the washouts. For the rest of the time they left itself to itself, and to the hundreds of Park rats who used it as a secondary means of transportation and commerce.

  In the Alaskan bush, the primary means was ever and always air, and it was to the village airstrip Kate went first, a 4,800-foot stretch of hard-packed snow, much better maintained than the road. A dozen planes were tied down next to a hangar. Across the strip was a large log cabin with the U.S. flag flying outside, which backed up the wind sock at the end of the runway. Both hung limp this morning, and smoke rose straight up into the Arctic air from a cluster of rooftops glimpsed over the tops of the trees.

  Kate stopped the snow machine next to the hangar, killed the engine, and stripped off her fur gauntlets. The round white thermometer fixed to the wall read twelve below. Colder than yesterday. She worked her fingers. It felt like it. Mutt jumped down and went trotting inside. A moment later there was a yell. “Goddamn!” Kate followed the sound.

  A tall man in a gray coverall leaned up against the side of a Cessna 206 that looked as if it had enough hours on the Hobbs to put it into lunar orbit. The cowling was peeled back from the engine, a
nd there were parts laid out on a canvas tarp. Both man and parts were covered with black grease. He scowled at her. “The next time that goddamn dog sticks her nose in my crotch from behind, I’m going to pinch her head off!”

  “Hi, George.”

  Mutt nudged his hand with her head. He muttered something, pulled a rag out of a hip pocket, wiped his hands, and crouched down to give her ears a thorough scratching. She stood stock-still with an expression of bliss on her face, her plume of a tail waving gently. She’d been in love with George Perry since she was a puppy, and George had flown Milk-Bones into the setnet site Kate fished during her summer vacations. Kate had been in love with George since he’d flown Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Morsels into that same site.

  The bush pilot gave Mutt a last affectionate cuff and stood to look at Kate. “I heard you were back.”

  She nodded in answer to his question, without offering an explanation. He didn’t ask for one. “Coffee?”

  She nodded again, and he led the way into his office, a small rectangular corner walled off from the rest of the building, furnished with a desk, a chair, and a Naugahyde couch heavily patched with black electrician’s tape. The walls were covered with yellowing, tattered maps mended with Scotch tape. George went into a tiny bathroom and came out with a coffeepot held together with three-inch duct tape. He started the coffee and sat down at the desk. “So—how the hell are you, Shugak? Long time no see.” His eyes dropped briefly to the open collar of her shirt. “Long time. You okay?” She nodded. “Good. Glad you’re back anyway. Missed you.”

  “Me too.”

  “And the monster.” He rummaged through a drawer for Oreo cookies and tossed one to Mutt. The coffeemaker sucked up the last of the water, and he poured out. Handing her a mug, he said, “What brings you into town?”

  She nodded at the wall. “Wanted to take a look at your maps.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Be my guest.” Mug in hand, she rose to her feet and began examining the maps beneath his speculative gaze, until she found the right one. Pete Liverakos’s homestead was on Beaver Creek, about a mile downstream from the village. She traced a forefinger down the Kanuyaq River until she found it. The map indicated the homestead had its own airstrip, but then what self-respecting Alaskan homestead didn’t?