A Cold-Blooded Business Read online

  She reached for her water, sipped and rolled the glass back and forth between her palms. "All right."

  Breathing heavily, he stared at her. "All right?" he said, unconsciously mimicking her calm tone.

  She raised her eyes from her glass and met his. "All right, I'll do it."

  It was nearly impossible to get John King off the attack once he'd begun a charge. "You sure you can handle it?" he shot at her.

  "Yes."

  "You'll be working a week on, a week off." He gave Jack an unfriendly look. "I wanted you up straight through until you caught the fuckers, but Morgan says that'd jeopardize your cover. You'll be hired on through UCo, can you--" "UCo?" Kate said sharply. "Who's them? I thought I was going up for RPetco."

  John King shook his head. "All our roustabouts are contract hires nowadays. Saves on paying benefits. Universal Oilfield Service Company's our main contractor, and if I'm right and I usually am"--his glare dared her to contradict him--"if I'm right, the drugs are coming in in some contract hire's toolbox and going out into the field the same way." His fists clenched and his face reddened. "I want you to go through UCo like crap through a goose. It's gotta be them. Those fucking contractors are about as loyal to the brand as Billy the Kid."

  Kate wondered how much of that was the truth and how much wishful thinking, but she held her peace.

  "You'll be hired on as a roustabout, which ain't a goddam Elvis movie.

  A roustabout does every dirty job that comes along, from signing out tools to running parts to driving bus to wellhead cleanup to picking up garbage. You seem in good shape." He looked her over critically, and this time it was a look devoid of that congenital speculation of when and how he'd get her into the sack intrinsic in any first meeting between any human male and any female who rejoiced in a functioning pulse. "But I'm here to tell you, lady, that you'd better be fit if you're gonna be outside at forty below in a fifteen-knot wind, humping a drill bit off the back of a pickup truck. Can you drive a pickup truck?"

  Jack rolled his eyes. Kate nodded. "A flatbed?" She nodded.

  "A bus?" She nodded again, lying this time. At this point if he'd asked her if she could launch a Saturn V rocket her answer would have been the same.

  "Roustabouts' regular rotation day is Tuesday, which means you fly to Prudhoe Tuesday morning and back to Anchorage the following Tuesday afternoon. That means you leave here day after tomorrow. Got a problem with that?"

  "No."

  "It's one woman to five men in the Base Camp. The rest of the time you'll be out in the field where the ratios more like ten to one and some of the guys working construction been up there since Christmas and you're gonna look like a stocking stuffer to them. Think you can handle that?"

  As he spoke, John King looked at Jack Morgan, a shaggy, dark-haired, amiable giant who was the chief investigator for the Anchorage D.A. He didn't look like he could muster up enough energy to get out of his own way, but his reputation as an investigator was rock solid, even if he did look more like Paul Bunyan than Sam Spade. King looked from Morgan to Shugak and remembered something else Gamble had said. There's something going on there. I don't know what it is, and I don't think they do, either, but don't get between them. It could be hazardous to your health. King set his jaw. He wasn't going to take back a by-God word.

  It wasn't necessary. Morgan looked even more imperturbable than Shugak, possibly even more so than that damn dog. Maybe it was a family trait.

  "Well?" he demanded. "You think you can handle it?"

  Kate wondered if she should tell King about her last job, on a crabber in the middle of the Bering Sea, all her crewmates male, including her bunkie, three of them with murder, not seduction, on their minds. She nodded instead. It was easier.

  "You better be sure, Shugak. You better be awful goddam sure. I want that fucking dope off my Slope." He subjected her to another long glare, which she endured without flinching. He transferred the glare to Jack.

  "You sure you can't send up one of your own?"

  Without heat, Jack said, "What I said before still goes.

  We don't have the personnel available to work the caseload in town and mount a full-scale investigation on the Slope at the same time. When Kate turns up some solid evidence, then we can move in officially. But not before."

  Kate could almost hear the wheels in John King's head turn to the last ratchet, engage and lock. "All right. I still don't like it, Shugak, but you're the best I can come up with. Lou's got the address. Be there at eight tomorrow morning for orientation." Childress passed a slip of paper across the coffee table, holding it by the tips of his fingers, looking as if he wanted to hold his nose. "One more thing," King said.

  "Can you pass a drug screen?"

  For the first time Kate lost some of her composure. "I beg your pardon?"

  Her voice was a rasping growl of sound and King's eyes dropped once again to the white, twisted scar that ran across her throat literally from ear to ear. The tense set of his shoulders eased for the first time in months. Someone who had survived an attack that vicious, and had disposed so speedily and efficiently of her attacker, wasn't likely to keel over the first time a horny Sloper made a heavy handed pass.

  She might just do, at that. "You'll have to pass a drug screen. And you'll be required to sign a loyalty oath."

  Jack had the rare pleasure of seeing Kate Shugak at a complete loss for words. The pleasure was fleeting. She got her jaw back up into working order and inquired in a tone of lethal sweetness, "Am I going to work on the North Slope or am I joining the American Nazi Party?"

  Childress flushed a dark red. "It's standard procedure for all prospective employees to sign a loyalty oath."

  Kate looked at Jack. "I drove fifty miles on a snow machine and spent eight hours on a train that stopped for moose every two feet so I could pee in a bottle, pledge allegiance to the corporate flag and freeze my ass off on the edge of the Arctic Ocean?"

  "Now, Kate," Jack began soothingly.

  Kate opened her mouth to melt his ears off.

  "A thousand a day," John King said.

  "What?" Childress said.

  Startled out of her composure for the second time, Kate gaped at King.

  "Plus expenses, of course," he added. "Should run you"-he looked at her consideringly--"oh, say, around two-fifty a day?" "What!" Childress said.

  Jack closed the door behind King and Childress and leaned against it with crossed arms. "Way-un. Ah giss now you air in thuh erl bid ness

  "And Ah cain't even spell it," she replied, but her Southern accent wasn't as good as his. "What really pisses me off is how sure he was I'd say yes."

  "Ah, that's just because you've never sold out before." "Doesn't take long, does it?" she said with a small, rueful smile.

  He grinned. "You hungry?" She shook her head, kicked off her Nikes and crossed her stockinged feet on the coffee table. Jack stretched out next to her, sober now. "You mean it when you said you could handle this job?"

  She shrugged, and this time he pushed harder. "What would your grandmother say?"

  "I don't plan on telling her." She shifted smoothly from defense to offense. "If you were so sure I wouldn't take a job working for an oil company, why did you haul me all the way into town?"

  He kissed her. It took a while. When he let her come up for air, she said, "Oh."

  He was more than ready to haul her into the bedroom but she wasn't ready to go, and one of Jack Morgan's many talents was an acute ability to read Kate Shugak sign. Still, there was no harm in some friendly persuasion. He slid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. She felt good. He'd missed her. He wondered if she'd missed him, but that way madness lay and he dispatched the thought before it was fully formed. "How's the homestead?"

  "Soggy during the day, frozen at night. Breakup SOP."

  "Like town."

  His hand wandered. "Is the creek clear yet?"

  Kate shook her head. "It's jammed with ice all the way back up to Twiste
d Lake."

  "Going to flood?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised." She grabbed his hand and looked at his watch.

  "What time is it?"

  "Want to know where the leaders are?" Jack used the remote to turn on the television. "I see Mandy and Chick aren't making the run this year."

  "Half the team's down with some kind of virus. Look, there. Turn it up."

  The cheery twinkie in seed pearls and big hair and shiny earrings the size of manhole covers ran down the Iditarod leaders so quickly it was hard to make sense of the names and cut immediately to another twinkie via satellite reporting local color from Kaltag. This twinkie was enveloped in an oversize parka with the hood pulled so far forward that all that could be seen of his face was a frostbitten nose and a microphone. The picture cut to footage of a barking dog being loaded onto a Cessna 206 and a few grave words from a gloomy veterinarian, followed by an interview with the Alaskan head of the SPCA, who unburdened himself of an unequivocal and comprehensive denunciation of the sport of dog mushing in general, the race to Nome in particular, all fifty mushers individually and collectively, the Iditarod Trail Committee, the race sponsors and, last but not least, ABC's Wide World of Sports.

  He paused for breath and Jack turned off the set. "Next stop Shaktoolik, about time for a storm. Who does Mandy say looks good for this year?"

  "She says it's Dee Dee turn but that Martin may have other ideas."

  Greatly daring, Jack said, "About time for the guys to win a few back-to-back." Kate refused the lure, and he rebaited the hook and cast again. "Besides, the only reason them girl mushers win all the time is because they don't weigh as much as the guys do and they can go faster with fewer dogs."

  "Is that so?" Kate said, fascinated with this new insight into the art of dog mushing. "And here I always thought it was because they trained better teams and ran better races."

  Jack was betrayed into a laugh.

  "Something else I've always wondered," Kate pursued, "why is it that when Rick Swenson mushes into a blizzard to win the Iditarod he's fearless and heroic, but when Libby Riddles does the same thing she's reckless and foolhardy?"

  Jack surrendered unconditionally. "Just lucky, I guess." He let his hand slip again. "Did I tell you Michael Armstrong asked me to fly for him this year?"

  "Is that right? You could have been a member of the Iditarod Air Force?"

  He nodded, and she said, "Well? What the hell are you doing sitting here?"

  He pointed at the TV screen. "Did that look like fun to you? When they're sick them dogs run from both ends. No, thanks. The Cessna'd never smell the same again."

  They sat quietly for a few moments. After a bit Kate let her head rest on Jack's shoulder. Encouraged, he said in a low voice, "I know how torn up you were over that damn spill. If you think you can't handle this, I can find someone else."

  He couldn't see her face, and she didn't answer at first. Eventually she stirred and said, "We knew the spill was going to happen."

  He looked down at the top of her head. "Who's we?"

  "The people who live on the Gulf. The Cordova Aquatic Marketing Association, the Cordova District Fishermen United, the Lower Cook Inlet Fishermen's League. Locals. They're fishermen. They know the Narrows.

  They know the Mother of Storms. They knew it was just a matter of time.

  They spent a lot of their own money lobbying for the pipeline to go overland through Canada."

  Jack kept silent, knowing she wasn't finished. "I wrote a letter to the governor after the spill, did I tell you?"

  "No." "I told him we ought to kick RPetco out of the state as an example to other oil companies. Thou Canst Not Shit in Our Nest and Get Away With It. I suggested that with all the lawyers running around Juneau surely to God there had to be some kind of provision in the leases requiring the oil companies to maintain at least minimal environmental standards on pain of revocation of their lease agreements, and that RPetco had as surely violated that provision, and let us boot them out forthwith."

  "You get any answer back?"

  "No. So I went down to the offices of the Division of Oil and Gas and looked up the leases, and of course, it's not that simple."

  "It never is."

  "No. The lessors have to post bonds, but some of the bonds for the smaller contractors are as low as ten grand. The highest one I found was for a million, and that one was for a drill site on the Slope. Some of the leases even say that restoration of the site shall be ' the discretion of the commissioner."

  "The commissioner of the Department of Oil and Gas?"

  "Yeah."

  "Who is a political appointee."

  "Yeah."

  There was another silence, which Jack broke. "So you would kick RPetco out of the state if you could."

  "Yeah."

  "But you can't."

  "Nope."

  "So you'll work for them instead."

  "For a thousand a day."

  "Plus expenses."

  Kate stretched. "You heard him. Won't be any."

  "I guess you'll just have to make up some to justify that two-fifty allowance, then."

  "I guess." He felt good against her side, warm and hard. "Besides, given the restricted access and the restricted employee roster, I can't imagine this job is going to take very long. I'll probably be up and back in forty-eight hours."

  "You think King really thinks it's a UCo employee?"

  "No, and neither does he, or he'd have Childress handling it. Tell me about the DB."

  Jack tucked her head back into his shoulder. "Chuck Cass, thirty-four, production operator, worked for RPetco since 1980, they brought him up to Prudhoe in 1987 from their Lima plant."

  "Lima, Peru?"

  "Lima, Ohio."

  "Oh. Did he drown?" "Yeah. But the coroner says he was ready to fly. He was probably on takeoff when he fell into the pool. Childress--"

  "He sure is on the prod." Jack grunted. "Sloper syndrome."

  "What's that?"

  "Childress makes too much money. He's afraid King's going to take some of it back if you find the dealer before he does." He paused. As security chief Childress was in a perfect position to spot the weak links in the security chain between Slope and town. And Kate was right, he had been on the prod. It might only have been the territorial imperative; it could as easily have been apprehension, even fear.

  Kate moved restlessly against him and he said, "Anyway, Childress says a guard found traces of a couple lines of coke on one of the benches in the sauna. They figure he tooted up there and--"

  She raised her head. "Wait a minute. A saunat

  Deadpan beneath that incredulous gaze, he said, "Certainly a sauna.

  It's right off the pool. No well-dressed oil field should be without one."

  "A sauna?" she repeated, unable to keep the amazement out of her voice.

  "A banya, an honest-to-God sweat on the North Slope?"

  "Yup."

  She considered. "This job might not be so bad after all."

  "Can't you think about anything except work?" he complained. "I was hoping to adjourn this encounter to the bedroom and discuss how long it's been since I've seen you. Possibly over a snifter or two of brandy."

  She stretched her arms over her head, pulling her shirt tight in interesting places. "Real women drink Diet 7UP." He was just lovesick enough to climb back in the Blazer and slip and slide on up to Carr's for a case of the carbonated beverage of her choice. She was just grateful enough to bestow a suitable reward.

  CHAPTER 2.

  Kate presented herself at Anchorage International Airport Tuesday morning after a whirlwind Monday spent getting everything but an RPetco-certified, Grade A stamp on her forehead, only to be turned away at the RPetco ticket counter. The flight had been canceled due to bad weather at Prudhoe. "

  "Bad weather' in March means blizzard," she heard someone say gloomily.

  "Who cares?" someone else replied. "Let's head for La Mex. I got a three-for-one coupon for ma
rgaritas."

  Wednesday morning Kate called the airport first, to be assured the flight would take off as scheduled. The whole experience felt anticlimactic as she accepted her boarding pass and walked down to the gate, where the plane was already loading. At one minute past nine, the nose gear lifted off Runway 18, northbound. The rest of the passengers dozed; Kate, keyed up and restless, rooted through the seat pocket in front of her and found a brochure published by RPetco's Department of Public and Government Affairs. The North Slope, she read, stretched across northern Alaska for six hundred miles, from the Chukchi Sea to the Canadian border. A hundred-mile slide north from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, the Slope was one enormous delta for the hundreds of rivers and streams that rose in the Brooks and flowed into the Beaufort Sea.

  Eighteen inches of delicate, spongy tundra insulated two thousand feet of permafrost, five thousand feet below which was the oil formation.

  Seven inches of annual precipitation froze the tundra into a barren, inhospitable desert for ten months out of the year, and then in June and July relented to melt into a soggy garden of arctic poppies and northern primroses and Siberian asters, where trumpeter swans and Canadian honkers and snow geese and green-spectacled eider ducks fed and bred with equal abandon.

  There followed a series of pictures in glorious living color of said wildlife frolicking through various ponds and streams. Lest visions of Thanksgiving dinner begin to dance in the head of the reader, the brochure hastened to add that firearms were not allowed within the boundaries of the oil field. For all intents and purposes, the text intoned sternly, Prudhoe Bay was a wildlife refuge. There was a picture of John King standing in the middle of the tundra, with a drilling rig rearing its derrick discreetly in the distant background, and a caribou cow and calf grazing between them, a perfect example of industry and environment coexisting in harmony. The caption read, "