A Cold-Blooded Business (22 page)

Luck, a fickle bastard who so far that evening had made himself conspicuous by his absence, was finally with her. The camp clerk was gone and the front desk deserted. She who hesitates is lost, and Kate nipped around behind the counter. The computer was on, the cursor blinking greenly at her from the screen. She sat down, typed

"Mcisaac, Jerry" and hit Return. Instantly the name appeared on the screen, followed by, Safety, North Slope Assigned, B Shift, Tuesday, and, glory of glories, a room number, OCX II 109. She typed in

"Rogstad, Lillian," and the darling little byte box informed her that Diamond Lil was in Anchorage on a medevac. Her room number was listed as OCX II 107.

"All right," she muttered. "So Jerry's on call alone and alone in his suite. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Prudhoe Hilton but were afraid to ask." She exited and sat thinking for a moment. OCX II was the second operations center extension, the module between the main Base Camp module and the fire safety module. One-oh-nine meant the room was on the first floor, and the low number meant it was probably off the left corridor, which sounded right since the left corridor led to the arctic walkway that led to the safety module. It made sense to locate the fire and safety teams close to the fire and safety module to cut down on response time.

She looked up at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes had passed since she had left Dave. All things being equal, she had as good a chance of the front desk clerk coming back and discovering her as she did of being nailed anywhere else in the building. The safest place to be was probably her room, Toni would never think of looking for her there, but she didn't care to test the distance between.

She waited, abandoning the chair for the floor in case anyone walked by, folding her legs and hands. The minutes plodded by with excruciatingly agonizing slowness. Sitting there, she vowed never to buy a digital clock as long as she lived. An old-fashioned clock with a second hand counted the time down much faster.

She forced herself to wait twenty minutes, and then five minutes more, before dialing four-three three-three. It picked up on the third ring.

Dave Poss's voice was breathless but blessedly there. "Production Center Three, guard shack, Poss speaking."

"It's Shugak, Dave." An indrawn breath of pure joy greeted her. "Shut up and listen. I want you to call 911 and report a medical emergency at Three."

"What kind of emergency?"

"I don't care what kind of emergency, use your imagination!" Kate's head hurt when she yelled and she lowered her voice. "Just do it, and make it bad enough that they'll need to call out the medic."

"What'll I say when they find out it's a fake?" his panicked voice demanded.

"Turn yourself in to the FCC for abuse of public airwaves," she snapped and hung up.

She waited, eyes fixed on the clock. Five very long minutes from the time she hung up the phone a distant siren began to wail. Jerry's response time was up. "Attaboy, Dave," she muttered, and vaulted the counter to hit the hallway running. A moment later she heard voices and ducked into the doorway that opened onto to Toni's office. She stepped inside and closed the door after her, holding on to the knob with her ear pressed to the door.

The voices grew louder, along with the clank of a cart and the creak of its wheels. "Did you hear about those two women who got thrown out of Coldfoot last night?"

"No, what about them?"

"They were selling magazine subscriptions."

"So?"

"So they sold twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of magazine subscriptions. In four days."

"Oh? Oh. Oh!" The two voices erupted with laughter, which carried on well past Hartzler's door. From a distance Kate heard the second one, sober now, say thoughtfully, "Twenty-five thousand? In four days? Are we in the wrong business?"

Good question. Kate waited another minute for the voices to fade completely, and tossed the office on general principles, although she expected to find nothing. Aside from a bottom drawer filled with a set of jacks, a rubber slingshot, a little sandalwood box that if you slid back the lid too quickly a little wooden dragon jumped out and bit you on the thumb, and a box of Kix, there wasn't much of interest. She closed the drawer, unsurprised. Toni was smarter than that. She opened the door and applied her eye to the crack.

This time the coast was clear and she ran lightly down the corridor, turning to cross the main module, pass by the serving line and dining hall and into the OCX II. Room 109 was an outside room at the end of the corridor on the left. Kate opened the outer door and went in.

It took her thirty seconds to find it. Jerry wasn't half as smart as Toni was.

She was waiting for him when he walked in the room an hour later, sitting in the straight chair with her feet crossed on his counter, the box sitting next to them. He stopped in the doorway, his face going white,

"Kate?" His voice was high, unnaturally so. "Kate? Is that you?"

The shock in his eyes dissipated some of her anger. "Surprise."

"Kate?" "Why, Jerry?" she said. "You're making more money than God for working twenty-six weeks a year. Just tell me why."

He didn't move. "Kate? Is it really you?" His face crumbled and he tumbled to his knees, buried his face in his hands and began to sob.

"Kate. Oh, God, Kate, when I got the call I thought it'd be you." His shoulders heaved. "I thought it'd be you and I couldn't bear it."

"No thanks to you it wasn't." He sobbed harder, and she was disgusted.

"Stop it, Jerry. Stop it!" She manhandled him onto his bed and shut the door. He was still sobbing when she turned back, and she slapped him, hard, across the cheek. The sharp crack of flesh on flesh resounded in the little room. The sobbing stopped abruptly and he stared at her out of wide, startled eyes. "That's better." Kate sat down again, knee to knee with him.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"You mick eyed my drink, didn't you?"

He nodded, unable to meet her eyes. "I'm sorry, Kate."

The rage was back then, suffusing her entire body in a red, hot flush.

With an effort she subdued it, tamped it back, screwed the lid down, with an effort she remained seated, with an effort she didn't rise up out of her chair and come down on Jerry like the wrath of Shugak. But entirely against her will she heard herself say, "You know about my parents. You know what life is like in the bush. You know why I don't drink. You know why I don't do dope. And you mick eyed my drink. You son of a bitch."

"I'm sorry, Kate."

When she could trust herself to speak she said, "Sorry doesn't quite cut it."

He didn't answer because there was no answer to that and they both knew it.

"Tell me about it, Jerry," Kate said more calmly. "Tell me all about it.

From the beginning." She folded her hands in her lap and regarded him with a steady, dispassionate gaze in which he could find no hint of past affection or friendship, and no trace whatever of sympathy. He shivered, sniffling and wiping the back of his hand across his face in a gesture more suited to a ten-year-old, and surprised them both with a half smile. "You look like somebody carved you out of stone."

"Tell me about it," she repeated. "From the beginning."

He rubbed nervous hands down his thighs. "The beginning? The beginning was a year ago, the first time I came up and sat next to Toni on the charter. I fell for her." His eyes met Kate's, shamed but defiant. "I fell hard. She's-she's--oh, the hell with it, it's none of your goddam business anyway."

"It isn't when she doesn't fuck you into breaking seventeen different laws," Kate agreed. "Keep talking."

He kept talking. As much as he tried to shield her, a picture of Hartzler emerged that was less than flattering. Jerry may have thought he'd fallen for Toni, but Toni had made sure of it, zeroing in on the poor jerk the way the B-17s had on Berlin. It was a pity, Kate thought, how even the best of men thought with their cocks. Toni had certainly led Jerry by his, down a garden path that may have looked winding enroute but that in hindsight showed a straight line straight down. "At first it was just a favor; would I take a package down for her that she didn't want to go through security. Of course I said yes.

I figured it was something out of the kitchen, Gideon's always making angel bars for people to take home, or maybe a package of T-bones or lobster tails. I remember Sally and Sandy and Hugh hiked the Chilkoot Trail once with nothing but RPetco raisins and nuts and peanut butter in their packs." At first, Jerry said, such favors were requested once every six or seven weeks. After a while it became routine to take a package down for Toni on every medevac. "Security never looked at anything I took out on a medevac. It was easy just to stuff it into a box with a red cross on it and toss it in with the rest of the gear."

She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of the small, heavy box she had helped load onto the Lear during Martin's medevac. She wondered if the stone lamp and the ivory bear were what had made it so heavy. "Jerry.

Did you never, ever, even one time, stop to think about what you were doing? Did you never, ever, even one time, think it might end with you in jail? Did you never, ever, even one time, Jerry, just one time, call yourself a grave-robbing son of a bitch!"

He stared at her, mouth agape. "Grave robber?"

"What else would you call it?" she demanded.

"What grave? I thought we were talking about the money."

It was Kate's turn to stare. "Money?"

"Yes, money," he said, faltering at her expression. "The cash from selling the cocaine." "Cocaine?" Kate said.

They stared at each other in silence, Jerry surprised, Kate confused.

It was sad but true, and a fact Kate would later blush to remember, but she hadn't thought seriously of the original reason for her presence on the North Slope since the morning she spent at the dig. The scratcher, the stone cairn, the idealistic enthusiasm of the young archaeologists and their dismay at the disappearance of the artifacts had displaced her concentration until all she had been able to think of was the missing ivory bear and the missing stone bowl, and whatever else it was that was missing but that Chris Heller would not tell her about. Her suspicions had inevitably zeroed in on Otto, and after the scene at the bull rail on Toni and Jerry, but for grave robbing, not for dealing.

She had figured Ann Mccord for the dealing. Mccord could have smuggled it up somehow with Catering's food orders, and run it around camp in her steward's cart. The pieces fit together, but they weren't all of the puzzle.

It's not like we haven't done it before, Mcisaac. Unbidden, the memory of Toni's comment in the truck earlier that evening surfaced in Kate's mind, and the last wisps of the drug-induced fog in her brain were swept away, leaving nothing but a razor-edged awareness behind. "Of course," she said. "You wouldn't kill me over a little thing like grave robbing."

A wave of tiredness swept up and over her and she felt it seep all the way down deep into her bones. "Toni's been dealing the coke in camp."

"Yes."

"And you've been her bag man." His eyes fell and he nodded. She said only one word and she said it softly, but his face went scarlet.

"Jerry."

Another silence fell, one she had to sum up all her resources to break.

"What about Chuck Cass?"

"What about him?" Jerry said woodenly.

"I heard what Toni said in the truck tonight, Jerry."

He met her stare defiantly for a moment, then his shoulders slumped and he muttered, "He was using big time, and he wanted a way to help pay for his action. He said he'd turn us in if we didn't cut him in."

Kate didn't ask him who had pushed Cass into the pool. She didn't want to hear the answer. "When did you start smuggling out the artifacts?"

Involuntarily his eyes darted to the box on the counter. His voice was dull. "Right after Leckerd opened the dig on Tode Point. I thought, what the hell? It was just junk, a bunch of old rocks and bones and walrus teeth. She used some of what we made dealing to buy it from Leckerd." As he spoke the name, Jerry's face darkened.

"A piece of that junk auctioned for fifty-five thousand dollars," Kate said.

Jerry gaped at her. "What? Fifty-five grand?"

"Fifty-five thousand." Disbelieving, he said, "For a piece of bone that looked like it was hacked by a seven-year-old with a butter knife?"

Suddenly Kate felt sorry for him. "Afraid so." "She didn't tell me," he said numbly.

"No," Kate said, "she didn't, did she? Who else?"

"What?"

"Who else was dealing the dope, besides you and Hartzler?" He looked at her. "I know most of it, Jerry, you might as well tell me the rest.

It'll be a lot better for you in the long run."

He slumped against the wall, all the energy gone out of him. "Ann Mccord. I left it in my office, Ann picked it up that night and put it on her cart. She's head steward; she rolled that cart all over the BOC doing rooms that weren't on regular change-out. Buyers would leave the money in their rooms, she'd take it and leave the dope."

As she had been doing a room off Hartzler's hallway the previous morning, Kate remembered. "Anybody else?" She thought of the report Jack had dug up on Childress's finances. "Anybody in town?"

Jerry shook his head. "Toni wanted it kept small. She said the smaller the operation, the less chance of attracting attention."

"Whose idea was it to kill me?"

His eyes slid away. "Mine."

Kate remembered the dispatch with which Toni had sent the fox pup off to that Great Den in the Sky, and was disgusted. "Jesus Christ, Jerry, I might as well hand you the noose right now. You're going to take the fall for her, aren't you? You're going to waltz right in and lay your head on the chopping block and wham." She leaned forward. "We're not talking about the love of your life here. We're talking about a woman who will spread her legs for any man she thinks she can use to make a buck. She's screwing Leckerd. I saw her halfway into the sack the night of the turtle races with a production supervisor who, for all you know, is running hits out to the production centers for her. Hell, I saw her all over Gideon Trocchiano, who's probably sprinkling it on the cereal in the mornings." "It was my idea to kill you," he said clearly, and Kate wanted to hit him, hard. He saw it and couldn't help shrinking back out of reach, but he said, "She said it was a shame, that she really liked you, but after you saw her get the box from Leckerd and give it to me, we didn't have a choice."