A Cold-Blooded Business (2 page)

As he met that unblinking hazel stare, John King remembered something Gamble, the federal agent, had said. She's about as friendly as a double-bladed axe, but if she says she'll do a job, the job gets done.

It'll cost you, he'd added, but it'll get done.

At that moment John King would have sold his soul for a done job. He made up his mind. "Somebody's dealing drugs on my dime," he said bluntly. Childress gave an involuntary sound of distress. "Shut up, Lou.

There've been half a dozen overdoses in the last three months."

When her expression didn't change, he added, "And one death."

Kate's eyes widened. "You didn't tell me there had been a death," she told Jack.

He held his bottle to the light and inspected it for flaws. "Didn't know when I talked to you Friday at Bobby's that there'd been one."

"When did it happen?"

John King looked at Childress. "Saturday night," Childress said reluctantly, still scowling. "His body was found Sunday morning, floating facedown in the pool."

That got Kate's attention, but not in quite the way John King would have liked. "

"In the poof?" She looked at John King with an incredulity that wasn't entirely feigned. "You've got a swimming pool on the North Slope?"

"It doubles as a fire water reservoir," he growled.

"Of course it does," she agreed with a cordiality that set his teeth on edge. "Cocaine?" He nodded curtly. "What, was it pure and he couldn't handle it? Or is somebody cutting it with Borax?"

He shrugged impatient shoulders. "I don't know and I don't care."

"Any indications the death was not accidental?"

Childress went into orbit. "Jesus Christ, John! I've had about enough of this crap! She's never even been on the Slope and now she's got crazed murderers running around the Base Camp bumping people off! I told you this could get out of hand! I--"

"Show her what you got, Lou."

"John!"

"Show her, goddammit!"

The security man's jaw clenched and his lips tightened into a thin line.

After a long, tense moment he produced a small manila envelope and emptied it out on the coffee table.

Kate leaned forward to pick one of the items up. It was a creased square of waxed paper, folded into a tiny homemade envelope. She raised an eyebrow at Jack and he nodded. "That's how they're packaging the hits."

"The stewards swept up those last weekend in the common rooms of the Base Camp," John King told her, "and Christ knows that can't be even a fraction of the total." A sudden weariness assailed him, and he rubbed his hands over his face. "It hasn't been this bad since construction."

He dropped his hands and glared at her accusingly. "I want it stopped."

"What's the problem? Jack was telling me on the way here that Anchorage International was rated in the top ten for best airport security in the nation last year. Sic them on it." "We have," John King said grimly.

"It's still getting through."

"Then go at it from the other end, set up a checkpoint at Prudhoe. It's your oil field, you ought to be able to exert some kind of control over what comes in."

King snorted and Childress took over. "Deadhorse," the security chief said with awful sarcasm, "is a public airport. It has three commercial carriers flying in, besides the RPetco and Amerex charters. Not to mention the jets of every corporation flush enough to float a rubber necker for their board. Not to mention government amphibs bringing up U.S. senators and congressmen to go fishing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Not to mention one hundred fifty trucks up the haul road every month. Not to mention the six Native villages within snowmobile or outboard or Super Cub range."

He stopped, looking at John King, who was glowering at Kate, who was smart enough not to take it personally. "Drugs are coming into the Base Camp and the Western Operating Area, Shugak. My Base Camp and my Western Operating Area. Somebody's importing that shit wholesale and retailing it to my people and I want it stopped. I want it stopped fast, and I want it stopped now, before some asshole who should know better gets higher than a kite and bumps into the wrong valve in Skid 14 and sends a fucking production center into fucking orbit and shuts the whole fucking line down!" He was shouting before he came to the end of his sentence, his face mottled purple with rage.

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 Twisted 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."