A Cold-Blooded Business Page 8

  Kate's jaw dropped.

  The bear roared indignantly and swung around on his haunches, one paw raised, a perfect pose for the pipe liner friend, who stood at the ready with a Canon Sureshot. The flash went off six feet from the bear's face, and he roared again, all four inches of claw extended.

  "You dumb son of a bitch!" someone growled. Stupefied and still gaping, Kate looked over and saw a man in a state trooper's uniform. He stepped forward, another big-bellied man with the added authority of age and uniform, and the crowd melted before him. He came to a stop in front of the two pipe liners The bears had turned back to the Dumpsters. With magnificent indifference, the trooper didn't even look their way.

  Instead, he hitched up his gun belt in the menacing gesture Kate was convinced all state troopers were taught their first day in trooper school. The pipe liners who had laughed in the bear's face and jeered at its anger, knew real danger when they saw it and snapped into an attitude of acute attention.

  The trooper hitched up his gun belt a second time, and said in the slow, caustic drawl cultivated by state troopers the world over, "Just now, I was of two minds who to shoot, you or the bear." He paused long enough for that thought to register. When it did, he leaned forward, nose to nose with the tail-puller, and dropped his voice but not the drawl.

  "Next time, I won't have any doubt." He paused again. "Now git."

  The pipe liner started backing up, treading on the toes of his camera-toting friend. "Yes sir no sir sorry sir whatever you say sir."

  The trooper watched them back and fill up the steps and inside the module with a merciless eye. It was the beginning of a virtual stampede.

  When the door closed behind the last pipe liner the trooper turned to the bears. "And as for you two, it's too early for you to be up!

  Hibernate, dammit!"

  The two bears, with an I.Q. a good ten points above that of the average pipe liner knew when they were outclassed. They extricated themselves from the Dumpsters and cantered out of camp.

  Kate let out a long sigh. The trooper heard it, turned and caught sight of Jerry. "Hey, Mcisaac."

  Jerry drew a shaking hand across a sweating brow and walked forward on unsteady feet. "Jesus, Joe. I thought for a minute you were going to be in need of my professional services."

  The trooper grinned, a white slash of teeth in the dim light. "Naw.

  They're just cubs, babies, yearlings. Wouldn't hurt a fly." He looked at Kate, and back at Jerry, "Kate Shugak, Joe Graham. Kate's just hired on with RPetco." "Shugak," the trooper said thoughtfully, "Shugak." He met her eyes.

  "You a friend of Jim Chopin's?"

  "We've met," Kate said reluctantly.

  The trooper snapped his fingers. "Kate Shugak, from Niniltna, right? I remember now. Jim was telling me about that deal with the bootlegger a while back. Nice job."

  "Thanks."

  Kate's monosyllabic response was unencouraging, and the trooper, about to expand on the subject, paused. "Right," he said. "Well, nice to meet you. Jerry."

  "Joe."

  The trooper drove off. Jerry looked down at Kate. "What deal with the bootlegger?" "It was a long time ago," Kate said dismissively. Jerry just looked at her, and she sighed. "A guy was selling whiskey inside tribal borders.

  Billy Mike asked me to stop him."

  "And?"

  "I did."

  "Oh." Like the trooper, Jerry didn't push it.

  Kate spent what was left of the night in the dispensary with Martin.

  He scowled at her from his bed. His skin was flushed, his pupils large and black and bottomless. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

  "Glad you know who I am now," she said dryly, and pulled up a chair.

  He twisted against the wrist restraints. "Get me out of these things."

  "Not a chance."

  He thrashed beneath the covers, the muscles of his face and throat distended. "Cut it out, Martin," Kate said, bored. "You know the drill.

  So do I. Next stop, detox."

  He stared at her, and relaxed. "Shit. Well, hell, it was worth a try."

  She grinned at him.

  "You're not here to lecture me, are you?"

  "Nope." She looked him over dispassionately. "You sure are a mess, though."

  "Fuck you."

  "Thanks anyway, I gave at the office." He snorted a laugh. "How long you been up here? I hadn't heard."

  "How could you, stuck away on the homestead like you are. You're a regular hermit, Kate."

  "How long?"

  He closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the pillow. "Forever.

  Five, six months, I think. Since October anyway."

  "So you came up right after fishing."

  "Uh-huh."

  "How'd you get the job?"

  He shifted restlessly. "Billy Mike put the word out, RPetco wanted to do some seismic testing on Niniltna Tribal Association grounds. He swapped permission for half a dozen jobs on the Slope."

  Kate nodded. She looked down at her clasped hands. "Where did you score the dope?"

  He shrugged irritably. "Where does anybody score dope?" He eyed her suspiciously. "You got any particular reason for asking?"

  She batted her lashes at him. "Who, me?"

  "Who, me?"

  " he mimicked her. "Yeah, you. I know you, Shugak, you never do anything without a reason. What the hell are you doing here?"

  She started a plausible lie but his body began to shake and sweat beaded on his brow. He swore weakly.

  "I'll get Jerry," Kate said, rising.

  "Kate," he called after her.

  She paused at the door, looking at him over her shoulder. "What?"

  The sweat was dripping off his forehead now. "It's not that I'm not glad to see you. It's just that whenever I screw up, you're always in the front row."

  "Yeah, I know, Martin. I've always been lucky that way," she said, and went out.

  CHAPTER 5.

  He drove Jerry and Martin and Martin's roommate, both of whom Jerry had judged needful of immediate medevac, out to the airport and saw them onto the Lear jet ordered up for that purpose. It took half an hour to help load all the various boxes and bags and stretchers and patients. A security guard stood at a distance, not offering to help as Kate sweated to get a small but very heavy box over the sill.

  "Careful!" Jerry leapt to help her and together they hoisted the cargo inside. Kate shoved it in with more vigor than care and Jerry said,

  "Careful," again.

  Kate craned her neck to see in. "Martin awake?"

  Jerry shook his head. "Both of them are out cold. Let's hope they stay that way."

  "If they don't, if Martin doesn't, tell him I'll come see him in detox next week. He'll be thrilled."

  "Okay." His face looked gray in the harsh light of the halogen lamps posted around the apron, and Kate said, "You look beat, buddy. Grab some Z's on the way home."

  His smile was watered down and his salute weak. "I'll do that.

  Thanks, Kate."

  "Wouldn't have missed it for the world. Please, don't think of asking me again anytime soon."

  The strain on his face lightened and he laughed and waved as the Lear's engines began to whine.

  She made it back to camp safely, floating in a kind of euphoria beyond exhaustion, and was on her way to breakfast when Toni scooped her up outside the dining room and swept her down the hallway. She was back in fast forward mode. "Come on Kate we have to get to the airport,"

  "We're going to the airport?" Kate was forced into a trot to keep up with Toni's long-legged strides. "I haven't had breakfast yet." I haven't even been to bed yet, she thought, blinking to clear bleary eyes.

  "That's okay you probably won't get lunch either."

  "What, more hookers to deport?" Kate said grumpily. She wanted a meal and a bed, in that order. She wanted time to think about what the episodes at the construction camps and the rig meant to her investigation. She wanted to slow down to a walk, but when she tried to Toni urged her back into a trot.

  "I believe they prefer the term '," " the other woman said blandly. She thumped the swinging doors wide and strode into the great arctic outdoors as if she owned it. "How long have you known Jerry?"

  Kate woke up enough to stare at the back of Toni's head. The brunette had twinkie hair, big, shiny, blow-dried, every perfect strand in artful place. "Oh, I don't know, six, seven years. Eight." She yawned, a jaw-cracker that wasn't entirely faked. "Don't ask me to do complicated mathematical computations this early in the morning." "He told me you worked together in Anchorage."

  "We did. Sort of."

  Snow crunched beneath their feet. Toni paused next to the door of the bus and turned to look at Kate. "Jerry and I are involved."

  "I noticed." Kate couldn't help herself. "There seems to be a lot of that going around."

  Toni fluffed her hair and gave Kate a flirtatious look from beneath her lashes. "There's a lot of me to go around."

  Irresistibly, Kate laughed. She held up both hands, palms out. "Okay, all right, Jerry's a big boy. It's none of my business."

  Toni refrained from the obvious reply, and they got in the bus amicably if not in perfect accord.

  For the rest of the week Kate was assigned to drive Toni's bus, and for every day of the rest of that week Toni made ruthless use of her services. No sooner had one tour departed than another arrived. A dignified group from Bahrain who wanted to see if oil came out of the ground any differently in the Arctic than it did in the Persian Gulf, a Texas oil man who almost wept at the sight of seven-inch tubing (the largest his East Texas fields used was one-inch), a rollicking crowd of Russians who wanted to drill for oil in Siberia and who wanted to take Toni with them when they went home, a delegation from Colombia who told hair-raising stories of local drug lords strafing drill rigs and who regarded the North Slope as a haven of peace and security, a coven of mixed media reporters, an Israeli paratrooper on maneuvers with the Alaska Air National Guard, and a lone RPetco stockholder who was vacationing in Alaska and on impulse hopped a plane to Prudhoe, arriving Friday afternoon on Mark Air and calling the Base Camp for a look around before his plane left at seven that evening--Toni met, fed and toured them all, seraphic smile and composure unshaken. It was all Kate could do to keep up with her, to muscle the big bus around the soft-shouldered gravel roads, to not get lost in the vast, flat expanse of arctic tundra.

  That vast expanse daunted her, going on forever, horizon to horizon, with miles and miles of gravel roads heading off in every direction on the compass. "You should have been here in the beginning," one of the roughnecks told her, "when all that was up here were the rigs and if one of them moved to a new pad overnight, the next morning you didn't know where the hell you were." The local landmarks were more stationary now, and more individual. The Base Camp was easy to spot, backed up as it was by the 112foot communications tower. It sprouted a dozen microwave shots, deep, round frames with what appeared to be white cloth stretched across their surfaces, and looked like small drums. Jungle drums, Kate thought. The bush telegraph. If the power goes out, we could pull the shots down and beat on them.

  When she got them, her off hours were nothing less than decadent. Every night she regularly drove others out of the sauna by turning the thermostat up as high as it would go and ladling water on the fake coals with a lavish hand, although she had to get used to sharing it with men.

  At home, a sweat was segregated by sex. It felt uncomfortable wearing a suit, too, but it was still better than no sweat at all. She was unable to hide the scar on her throat, and it occasioned curious, sometimes appalled looks, and a few blunt queries, but she ignored both and after a while the questions stopped, if not the looks. Something about the scar, combined with the husky edge it gave her voice and her composure concerning both, caused the men to pull back a little, for which she was profoundly grateful. Reaction on first meeting her had varied, from those who assumed she had been hired to fulfill a quota and treated her with barely concealed contempt, to those who only saw one more woman to take a shot at and wouldn't leave her alone. Kate felt alternately like live bait in a shark pool and a test case for affirmative action. It was wearing. She consoled herself with the reminder that it was also temporary.

  She didn't swim, the undeniable temptation of getting wet all over cooled by the gruesome recollection that the pool was the site of Chuck Cass's last lap. Evidently the rest of the inmates felt the same way; that first week she never saw anyone in the pool. From the markings, it was exactly five feet deep all over. She wondered how tall Cass had been.

  Somewhat to her surprise there wasn't a lot of talk about Cass's death, and the few times she tried to raise it in general conversation were countered with what was the main topic on everyone's mind, the rumor of a rif, a reduction in force. A man named Bert Something, Kate gathered a communications technician, was very concerned about a balloon payment coming up on his Anchorage bowling alley. "I just can't afford to get laid off right now," he told Kate earnestly.

  Thwarted, Kate tried to raise Chuck Cass with Jerry and again he turned the conversation into another channel. Out of respect, Kate desisted.

  Jerry never had liked discussing his failures. She discovered Cass's room number and found the room empty, the closets and drawers cleaned out and the corners denuded of so much as a hairball. "A loner," Dale Triplett said briefly, adding, "At least he wasn't like a lot of the other guys, always coming on, always groping for a feel."

  "He was a good operator," she got his boss to say after thirty minutes of dancing around the subject. "The equipment he worked on ran." When Kate tried to touch delicately on the cause of his death, the man said, voice rising, "I run a clean shop." He gulped down the rest of his coffee and left the table, and left Kate with as much information as she had had to begin with, zero.

  Ranking right up there on the plus side of the job with the sauna was of course the food. Gideon had taken a fancy to Kate, and Thursday night saw to it that she received the tender est cut of beef on the grill, as well as the most perfectly steamed fresh asparagus. Dinner Friday was lasagna, heavy on the mozzarella, and Gideon made sure that Kate received an extra-large slice and prompt seconds. Kate had always had a distressing tendency to think with her stomach and was now beginning to wonder if she'd died and gone to heaven, but it didn't distract her from noticing that the kitchen was a place where everyone in the Base Camp eventually and inevitably came, and would make a fine distribution point for retail sales of illegal substances. The serving line seemed a bit public, though, and the offices, storage rooms and freezers, a cramped maze tucked behind the kitchen, offered little privacy, either. She was glad. She'd never eaten food this good before in her life, and she rebelled at the prospect of busting the chef who cooked it over a trifle of drug dealing.

  At this rate, Kate realized glumly, she was going to be incapable of fingering anyone for dealing dope on the Slope.

  Friday, in between the Texas oil man and the RPetco stockholder, she was occupied in fending off the attentions of a mechanic from Field Maintenance who appeared to have fallen deeply in love with her at first sight in the sauna the night before, in spite of the wide gold wedding band on his left hand. She had pointed this out to him and he had looked amazed and wounded. "But, Kate, all wedding licenses are revoked north of the Arctic Circle!"

  "Frank," she had said gravely, "I had no idea. I beg your pardon."

  "Then we're on for that drink?" Friday morning produced a pinch on the ass as she was stretching to clean the windows of the bus. She didn't rip his arm out of its socket and jam it down his throat only because the action might draw inconvenient attention her way.

  Instead, that evening over dinner she explained the matter to Dale Triplet!.

  At the end of her story, Dale patted her mouth with her napkin and looked around the dining room. "Sandy? Marie? Almeda? Judy? Sue?

  MCP alert."

  Five women, pretty much the entire female population of the room at that moment, rose from their tables and made their way over to stand next to Dale, who unclipped her beeper and slapped it down in the center of the table. Five beepers slapped down next to it.

  "Who?" Sue Jordan demanded.

  "Frank Jensen."

  There was a unanimous chorus of approval and Sue said, "It's about time.

  When?"

  "Tonight."

  "How do we get him out of his room?"

  "We'll get Billy Bob to get up a pinochle game."

  At nine that night, Kate handed Dale a screwdriver and inquired in a mildly curious voice, "Mind telling me what we're doing?"

  Dale unfastened the screws holding a screen to the wall. "We're hiding beepers in Frank Jensen's room." "Uh-huh," Kate said, taking the screen.

  Frank Jensen's room decor consisted of Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds, a plaster nude on its own three-foot pillar (Kate couldn't begin to imagine how Jensen had gotten it up to the Slope) and a wine rack, the contents of which Sue examined and sneered at. She was now maneuvering a second beeper behind the heater, Almeda was burying a third beneath socks in a drawer ("We have to make one easy," she explained), Judy a fourth between the mattress and the springs on the bed and Sandy was taping (with duct tape, naturally) a fifth to the side of the window shade facing the window.

  "Then," Dale said, reaching for a beeper and secreting it in the vent,

  "we'll set them off." She reached for the screen and screws.

  "Uh-huh," Kate said, passing up the screwdriver again.

  "At about, oh, four in the morning would be about right, wouldn't you say, girls?" She finished tightening down the last screw and smiled at Kate's brightening face. "One at a time." "Yes!" Kate said.

  "But wait, there's more," Sue said.