Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21) Read online

  Less Than a Treason

  the 21st Kate Shugak novel

  Dana Stabenow

  for

  John Sims

  1950-2016

  Kate 21 beta reader

  and

  Danamaniac forever

  One

  Six years ago

  the Park

  The body had been found early on by a raven, that inevitable first responder to carcasses in the wild. It perched on a crag and waited for signs of life before calling in the rest of the unkindness. The wolves followed the ravens. A grizzly sow with two cubs fresh out of their den followed the wolves, after which the smaller predators moved in, the coyotes and the Arctic foxes. A marmot sniffed, sneezed her disgust, and tore off one of the sleeves of the jacket to line her den. A flurry of feathers drifted out and was picked off one plume at a time by sparrows for their nests.

  Encouraged by a tiny stream of snowmelt that trickled down a rusty crack in the nearby rock face, dwarf willow grew up over the remains, hiding it from anyone looking from the ridge above. A hearty stand of devil’s club filled in the mouth of the cleft canyon, discouraging even the occasional moose who wandered by. A pair of enterprising black-capped chickadees, testing the northernmost reaches of their range, had built a nest on the narrow ledge that projected above the trickling stream. One year they didn’t return, and their cache was found by voles, messy eaters who scattered seeds everywhere. The next spring and every spring thereafter, western columbine, chocolate lilies, wild geranium, dwarf fireweed and monkshood carpeted the strip of south-facing slope. One of the chickadees had pooped out a nagoonberry seed which had taken immediate root and runnered into a handsome patch, waiting only for a wily berry picker to discover it one August and claim it for their own.

  None had, yet.

  Two

  July 16th, late

  the Park

  Darkness.

  Light. Bright, dim, bright again, dim again.

  Vomit. Hers? Diesel exhaust. Fish. Rubbing alcohol. Wood smoke. Shit. Hers?

  Beeps. Clanks. Thumps. Rubber on linoleum. Charlie Brown’s teacher talking. Darth Vader breathing. Siren. Charlie Brown’s teacher talking. Squawk squawk squawk.

  “Ah, our favorite frequent flyer, back again.”

  “No, Jim, Jesus, don’t, don’t! Christ!”

  “Get him the fuck out of here, Chief.”

  “Jim, goddammit, come on outa there. Let them do what they do.”

  Bumps. Pain. Weight on her chest. Crushing weight. Throat frozen. Who put the horseshoe on her face? And why the fuck?

  Darkness.

  · · ·

  July 17th

  Ahtna

  Jim was having difficulty both seeing and hearing but when he heard the doc’s voice again some tiny part of his brain switched back on, enough to distinguish individual words.

  “She was unbelievably lucky. The bullet was small and jacketed and it didn’t even tumble, so most everything is still more or less intact and in the right place. Lungs, heart, intestine, liver, spleen, spine, all good. That doesn’t mean she didn’t suffer trauma, including a massive amount of blood loss, but we got her in time to avert hypovolemic shock. We’re keeping her tubed and under for the next twelve hours while we pour fluids into her. She should be off the ventilator tomorrow and we expect a full recovery, at least physically.”

  “And mentally?”

  “Well, it’s not like this is her first visit to the ER, but this is about as close as I’ve ever seen her come to knocking on the pearly gates. There will be a price.”

  “What kind of price?”

  “Who the hell knows with her? She’ll have to deal with the realization that bullets don’t bounce off her chest, just for starters. For her, that’ll be news.”

  “Jim. Jim! Back off!”

  “Make that fucker keep his distance, Chief. I didn’t shoot her. Jesus. Look, she may be mentally the toughest patient I’ve ever treated. Her recovery times have broken every medical estimate. And at least she wasn’t hit on the head again. But so far as I know this is the first time she’s been shot, and at pretty goddamn close range, too. She’s in excellent physical condition, which will help. He got her here in time. We’re handling the physical injury. The rest is up to her.”

  A babble of voices.

  “Goddamn it! Shut up, all of you! There are other patients in this hospital!”

  The babble ceased, more or less.

  A deep, long-drawn out sigh. “All right then. She won’t wake up until tomorrow so everybody go home now. Or at least half of you. Make some room for other patients’ families and friends.”

  Another babble, shouted down. Muttering, followed by a shuffling of feet and the huff of automatic doors.

  “Jim,” a voice said. He became aware that it wasn’t the first time that this voice had called his name. “Where’s Mutt?”

  Jim stared at the craggy face of Ahtna’s chief of police.

  “Jim.” Hazen gripped his shoulders and forced the trooper to look at him and enunciated each individual word with care. “Where. Is. Mutt.”

  “Mutt?”

  “The dog. Where is she? It’ll be the first question Kate asks when she wakes up.”

  “Mutt.”

  “Yes, Mutt. Where is she?”

  His eyes slid off Hazen’s face to wander around the room. Why was mint green always the go-to for hospital interiors?

  “Jim? Jim! Goddammit, where’s Mutt?”

  “He shot her, too.”

  Hazen swore. “Is she dead? Jim? Is Mutt dead?”

  “I don’t—” He blinked. “I don’t know, I just—I got Kate in the vehicle and on the road. I didn’t stop to think, or…”

  “Okay.” Hazen took another deep breath. “You need to go check on the dog.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Yeah. You are. For one thing, you’re frightening the docs. But mostly you’re leaving because she’s out of surgery and they’re going to keep her under for at least a day.”

  “I don’t want her to wake up alone.”

  “For sweet Christ’s sake. Kate isn’t alone. Bobby and Dinah and Katya are here, and all four aunties, and Laurel Meganack and Matt Grosdidier, and Bobby Singh and Tony Elizondo, and Reverend Anne is flying in tomorrow, and Johnny Morgan and Kurt Pletnikof won’t get off the goddam phone and neither will Brendan McCord. Plus some kid I never heard of keeps calling from Bering, and so does some guy named Andy from Dutch. It’s like somebody sent out a fucking tweet and it's fucking trending. Kate’s not alone. No one has ever been less alone. So go home, please, and check on the dog and get a shower and put on some clean clothes because, frankly, you’re beginning to smell a little ripe.”

  Jim glanced down and noticed vaguely that his uniform jacket and pants had turned a stiff, spotty brown. The color of dried blood. Kate’s blood. He swayed on his feet and the next moment found himself in a chair, an imperative hand on the back of his neck forcing his head down between his knees. “Breathe,” Hazen said. “Just breathe, big, deep breaths, in and out. Good, good.” The hand left his neck and he sat upright, closing his eyes.

  When he opened them again the world seemed brighter around the edges and not in a good way. There were many haloed people in it he vaguely recognized—Bobby? Dinah?—and a murmur of indistinguishable conversation. He blinked, opened his mouth, and closed it again without saying anything.

  “Yeah, okay,” Hazen said. “I’m driving you home. I’ll get Tod to follow in my vehicle.”

  Hazen’s hand under his arm, urging him to his feet, propelling him down the hallway, forcibly quelling Jim’s visceral need to stay where he w
as.

  Where she was.

  · · ·

  “What the…”

  The first thing he saw when Hazen’s truck cleared the alders that annually threatened to overwhelm the lane connecting the homestead to the road was Willard Shugak coming down the outside stairs. Behind him, it looked like every light in the house was on, none of which had been on when he had slung Kate into his vehicle and floored it for Ahtna.

  “What the fuck!”

  “Jim—”

  Willard’s arms were full. A twelve-pack of Alaskan Amber, one corner crushed where the beer inside was gone. The old-fashioned hand crank egg beater that so far as Jim knew Kate had never used, but kept because it had belonged to her mother. A pair of Jim’s sneakers. Kate’s .30-06 under one arm and her twelve-gauge double clutched by the barrel in the other hand. Some books.

  Willard’s big round face looking washed out in the early morning light. His mouth hung slack and the tilted eyes beneath their flyaway eyebrows were fixed on Jim with an expression of rapidly increasing terror.

  Jim found his vision blanked out by a deep, red haze.

  “Jim!”

  The next thing he knew he was being held a foot off the ground, Hazen’s arms so tight around him he couldn’t breathe. Gradually he heard Hazen’s voice. It seemed to Jim that he had been speaking for a long time but only now were his words making sense. They came in a steady, soothing stream. If all his senses had been functioning normally he would have heard the thread of panic running beneath. “Take it easy there, Jim. Come on. You know this wasn’t Willard’s idea. You know that. Come on. Calm down. Calm down now. Calm down.”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath and looked at Willard, who was crouching against the bottom stair with both arms over his head. Jim could hear him sobbing breathlessly, smell the beer from where Willard had dropped the six-pack and one of the bottles had broken on the step. For whatever reason the smell of beer recalled him forcibly to his senses. “I’m all right, Kenny,” Jim said. “Let me down.”

  “You sure?”

  “Let me down,” he said, and surprised himself at how calm he sounded.

  Hazen set him back down on his feet but he didn’t step away.

  Jim realized he was within arm’s reach of Willard, and looked over his shoulder at his vehicle, stopped all the way across the yard, on the other side of the cache even. He remembered no part of how he’d gotten from the passenger seat to here.

  He looked back at Hazen. “Where’s Howie?”

  “Long gone. He probably heard us coming and took off leaving Willard to hold the bag. A pickup passed us going their direction. I’m guessing it was his.”

  Jim nodded. Of course this hadn’t been Willard’s idea. Willard suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. He was mentally still a child and always would be. His roommate and primary caregiver, Howie Katelnikof, had a habit of loading and firing Willard whenever he thought of something particularly nasty that needed doing. Nobody ever arrested Willard but everyone arrested Howie every chance they got.

  Willard peeked over his arm, his eyes wide and terrified. “Are you going to hurt me, Jim?” He gulped and hiccuped.

  Suddenly Jim felt every single year of his age and then some. “No, Willard,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Willard sniffled and smeared snot across his face with his shirt sleeve. “You looked awful mad,” he said, and added accusingly, “I was scared of you.”

  “I’m sorry, Willard,” Jim said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t look so mean.”

  “You’re right, Willard. I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  Willard hesitated, and then lumbered to his feet, a big, hulking six-year old child. “Howie said—”

  In spite of his best efforts Jim felt his face change and Willard stuttered a little before he went on. “Howie said Kate was shot. Is that true, Jim? Did she get shot?”

  “Yes, Willard. She did.”

  “Howie said she was dead. Is she dead, Jim?”

  “No, Willard.” Jim took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Kate isn’t dead.”

  “Oh.” Willard thought about it for a moment, and then smiled a beatific smile, one with enough glow in it to rival the morning sun just now cresting the bristling edge of the Quilak Mountains. “I’m glad Kate’s not dead, Jim. Are you glad she’s not dead?”

  “Yes, Willard,” Jim said. “I’m glad Kate isn’t dead.”

  “Willard,” Hazen said.

  “Yes, Kenny?”

  “You know Tod?”

  “Deputy Tod?” Willard said happily. “Sure, I know him. Me and Anakin beat him at Knights of the Old Republic! We beat him bad, didn’t we, Anakin?” He patted his shirt, where an old-school action figure of the Jedi knight looked over the edge of Willard’s pocket.

  “That’s great, Willard. Deputy Tod is up at the turnoff. Why don’t you go on up there and wait for me, and we’ll give you a ride home.”

  “But what about Howie?” Willard looked around the clearing and his face fell. “Oh. I guess Howie left.” He looked saddened but not surprised. This wouldn’t have been the first time Howie had stranded Willard at a scene. He looked back at Jim and his face got scared again. “Jim?” he said, his voice wavering. “You’re looking mean again, Jim.”

  Jim got his expression under control again and shrugged out of Hazen’s grip. “It’s okay, Willard. Go on up to the turnoff, see if Tod has a candy bar for you.”

  Willard brightened again. “Maybe a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh boy!” Willard stood all the way up and shoved past them, one enormous foot crunching the remains of the broken bottle of beer. He moved pretty fast for such a big man but then incentive had always worked well with Willard.

  Jim stepped forward and bent over the mess Willard had left behind. He picked up a small maroon colored book with the title in gilt letters. Robert’s Rules of Order (Newly Revised). His hand clenched on it, the knuckles white.

  “Jim?”

  “I should have shot him the moment he came into the clearing, Kenny.”

  The Ahtna police chief knew immediately that Jim wasn’t talking about Willard. “Jim—”

  “He was carrying a weapon,” Jim said, his voice rising. “I don’t recognize serious threat when I see it? What the fuck, Kenny?”

  “Jim—”

  Jim heard the warning in Hazen’s voice and got himself back under control. “I mean. What. The absolute. Fuck. It’s not like we don’t train for that.”

  “No,” Kenny said. They were silent for a moment. “I’ve never fired my sidearm in the line. I’ve never even drawn it. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been here.”

  Jim dropped his head, shaking it slowly from side to side. “I’d better clean up this mess. I don’t want her to see it if—when—”

  A big hand clasped his shoulder. “When, Jim. You heard the doc. When.” A sigh. “You going to be okay?” It wasn’t a question, exactly.

  “Yeah,” Jim said, although he was pretty sure his life as he knew it was totally fucked.

  “Jim.”

  “What?”

  “When you come back to the hospital later…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t stop off at Howie and Willard’s, will you?”

  Howie. Jim looked down at the two long guns and the broken bottles and the beer-stained books and Zoya’s egg beater, which looked little more dented than it had before. “Willard didn’t walk away with anything, did he?”

  “No, Jim. He was so scared when you—he was so scared he dropped everything.”

  The old Deem place was right on the way to Ahtna, not fifteen, twenty minutes off the road. So tempting. And twenty million acres of Park in which to bury the body. People went missing in the Park all the time. Hell, in Alaska they went missing by the planeload. No one would ever know.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t be stopping
off at Howie’s. Don’t worry, Kenny.”

  “Well, then.” Kenny scuffed one boot. “Well, then, I’ve got to get back.”

  For the first time Jim looked for Halvorsen’s body. Hazen followed his gaze and said, “Tod bagged the body last night. Well. Pretty early this morning, I guess that would have been.”

  A vague memory surfaced. “Yeah, that’s right, he told me at the hospital. He took my weapon and Halvorsen’s rifle, too.”

  “And,” Hazen said, thinking out loud, “we’ve bagged and tagged the bullet.” The bullet the docs had extracted from Kate Shugak’s chest. He shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat. “It was a clean shoot, Jim. You have nothing—”

  “To worry about?” Jim gave a short laugh that had no humor in it.

  “You gonna be okay?”

  “I’m fine. Go.”

  Hazen looked at him for a long moment through narrowed eyes, and then nodded once before heading back up the trail to where Tod and Willard waited.

  Jim watched the Ahtna police chief out of sight, and then turned to look at the house. It seemed remarkably unchanged from when he’d seen it last. Well. Except for all the lights on and the mess on the stairs. A two-story Lindal cedar home with a prow front, the entire south-facing wall made of glass, two bedrooms, one up one down, and two baths, one up one down. Steps leading down from a deck that surrounded the entire first floor. The steps Willard had been coming down when they pulled into the clearing. Jim had been on those same steps when—

  He set his teeth and looked away, only to see the four-wheeler where Kate had been shot. There was a dry brown stain on the seat that continued down the side of the gas tank.

  He forced himself to look away from that, too, and it was only then that he noticed. Mutt was not where she had fallen when Halvorsen had shot her, where Jim had left her when he bundled Kate into his Blazer and floored it for the hospital in Ahtna.

  Mutt wasn’t, he discovered over the course of that very long day, anywhere on the homestead. He spent every second of daylight, a little over nineteen hours, cross-quartering the entire hundred and sixty acres where they were passable and slogging through bog and bushwhacking through alders where they weren’t. He only quit looking when he woke up on the four-wheeler, still in gear and still in motion as it neared the edge of the cliff on the east side of Zoya Creek. By then it was as dark as it got in Alaska in July.