A Cold-Blooded Business (8 page)

"It does." Toni looked at her watch. "It's seven o'clock, end of shift.

Didn't you say you were meeting Dale for dinner?"

Dumbly, Kate followed her down the hall to the dining room, to find Dale already in line.

Tonight, the serving line was presided over by a swarthy man with a luxuriant mustache clad in an immaculate white jacket that buttoned down one side and a towering chef's hat that tilted rakishly over one bushy black eyebrow. "Kate Shugak, Gideon Trocchiano," Dale introduced them.

Gideon beamed at Kate. "Rare, medium or well done?"

"I beg your pardon?" Kate stared past him at the immense grill, where rows of New York steaks sizzled merrily.

"How do you like your steak?" Gideon repeated.

"Steak?"

His smile faded a bit. "Yes. It's Tuesday." "So?" Kate said warily.

"So Tuesday and Thursday are steak nights," Dale said impatiently, "how do you want yours cooked?"

Lunch had been rushed and nothing out of the ordinary: a choice of cold fried chicken, make-your-own sandwiches and a small salad bar. Dinner evidently was going to be different. For dinner, there was not only steak. There was deep-fried halibut in case she didn't like steak.

There were steak fries, long and thick and perfectly browned and with the peel still on, a sight that nearly made Kate moan with delight.

There were green beans sauteed in bacon and onions. There was a salad bar as big as the first floor of Kate's cabin, heaped with lettuce and tomatoes and mushrooms and green peppers and sprouts and a bunch of other vegetables Kate couldn't have identified at gunpoint, and no turtles (she checked). There was a cart piled high with desserts, apple pie and lemon meringue pie and cherry pie and chocolate pudding and pound cake, all of which Dale turned up her nose at, saying they could make hot fudge sundaes in the break room after dinner, if Kate wanted.

"If I want?" Kate said. "If?"

Holiest of holies, there was a dispenser armed with two spouts that gave forth an inexhaustible supply of fresh milk. Kate filled four glasses; by then her tray was heavier than Belle's bag. She staggered from the serving line into the dining room with the growing conviction that working for an oil company had its advantages.

The first person she saw in the dining room was Jerry Mcisaac .

He looked up from a table groaning beneath the weight of an equally well-laden tray and saw her at the same time. He surged to his feet.

"Kate? Kate! What the hell are you doing here?"

"Jerry!" She put her tray down on his table and returned his hug with extra.

With a final thump on her shoulders he pulled back to look at her. "How long has it been, two, three years?"

"Too long," she said, sitting. "What are you doing up here?"

"The same thing I did in Anchorage, for a lot more money. Anyway, I asked you first." He eyed her. "You aren't--working, are you?" She smiled at him, a vague, unfocussed smile that should have warned him.

She remembered the first time she had seen Jerry Mcisaac. It had been in an apartment in Mountain View where a baby-sitter had arrived to find the parents had already left. Her charge, an eighteen-month-old boy, had been beaten unconscious in his crib and the baby-sitter, a frightened fourteen-year-old who couldn't stop shaking, had nonetheless retained the presence of mind to dial 911. Jerry, lead paramedic on call out of the Airport Heights fire station that evening, had been first on the scene, two minutes from the time the call came in. Even so, he was too late. The baby was pronounced DOA at the hospital.

He was looking at her with a quizzical expression; she said, "I was remembering Petey Washington."

Jerry was a tall, plump, rubicund man with big blue eyes and a wide-open smile that faded at her words. Like her, his memory was good, far too good. He cut a bite of steak and chewed it thoughtfully.

"Yeah." He swallowed. "Your first call, wasn't it?"

She nodded. Arrested on duty at Fort Richardson, both parents had worked hard at blaming the other for their son's death, but Kate's meticulous recording of the detail of the bruising found on the child's body and the physical evidence surrounding the scene, plus patient, painstaking interviews with neighbors above and below stairs had resulted in time for both. Hard time. In fact--she made a quick mental count--Petey Washington's father shouldn't be eligible for parole for at least five more years.

None of it had brought Petey Washington back from the dead, though.

Their eyes met. "First time's always the worst," he said.

Her smile was involuntary and fleeting and more than a little sad. He had said that to her that awful night in Mountain View. He had said it to her while he was holding her head, as she vomited up the remains of the Lucky Wishbone jumbo cheeseburger and fries she'd had for dinner.

Jerry was intimately acquainted with her previous job, as well as with the circumstances surrounding her departure. Jack had kept her more recent activities from public notice, and she was fairly certain in this instance that Jack would qualify

Jerry as "the public."

"Yeah," she said, and busied herself with her food.

She could feel his eyes on her bent head. "So what brings you up to the frozen north?"

"Work. I got myself hired on as a roustabout. Just came up this morning." She gestured at her laden tray and met his eyes with a twinkle in her own. "I may never leave."

He laughed and, it seemed to her, relaxed a little. "I know. It does sort of give new meaning to the horn of plenty, doesn't it?"

Dale sat down between them. "Hi, Jerry. You two know each other?"

Kate filled her mouth with steak to avoid a reply. It was perfectly done, a moist, steaming pink on the inside and a thin crust of black on the outside.

"Yeah, we both used to work in town," Jerry said easily, and Kate thanked him with a glance. Swallowing, reluctantly, she wiped her mouth and said, "Why'd you quit?"

His wide shoulders moved in a small shrug. "Burnout."

"Bad?"

He grimaced. "Bad enough for me to make the move up here." "Here is better?" Kate asked, thinking of the drug overdoses, Chuck Cass's death.

"Up here only grown-ups get hurt, and usually they're only hurting themselves."

Kate saw his point.

"Anyway, I went back to school and got my physician's assistant degree--"

"Congratulations."

"Thanks, and Lil Rogstad--remember her?--was already up here and put in a good word for me, and the rest is history."

"Lil's here, too?"

"Yeah, she's my better half on this shift."

"Hi."

Toni's voice sounded next to Kate, and a note in it made her swivel around to look. The other woman's eyes were fixed on Jerry's face with what could only be described as a languishing expression in them. A half smile curled her mouth. "Looks like old home week. Mind if I join you?"

The table shook and slopped Kate's milks into her tray as Jerry leapt to his feet. "Hi."

"Hi. Didn't I already say that?" she asked Kate.

"At least once," Dale said, tucking into her salad.

Jerry pulled out a chair and Toni settled into it gradually, taking her time, snuggling back into it like a kitten curling up on a pillow. "You can sit down now," she told Jerry softly.

His face flushed. Dale giggled. Kate hid a grin. Toni looked from Kate to Jerry. "You two know each other?"

Before either of them could answer a beeper went off. A rustle went over the dining room as all 145 people in it checked their pockets.

Over the tinny speaker on Jerry's beeper Sue Jordan's gravelly voice said, "Jerry, medical emergency, call the operator, call the operator immediately." The last word was barely out before the same voice came over the loudspeaker. "Jerry Mcisaac, call the operator immediately, Jerry Mcisaac, call the operator immediately."

Jerry cursed fluently. "You can run but you can't hide." He went to a wall phone, dialed zero and listened. When he came back to the table he said, "Sorry, gotta go, got an emergency at CC2." He paused, tray in hand, and looked at Kate. "You up on your skills?"

Her fork stopped in midair. "I'm still rated in CPR, and I remember all the pressure points."

He grinned. "Good enough. Want to come with?" She looked down at her steak and back up at him mutely. He grinned again. "Plenty more where that came from. The night shift'll be happy to cook some up for us when we get back."

"In that case, you bet."

Toni pouted, almost as well as Belle. "Abandoned, deserted, forlorn, bereft." Dale sat up straight in her chair, a little indignant. Toni ignored her and sent a dazzling smile over to the next table. Four burly men trampled each other in her direction, one of them actually overturning his chair.

Kate was appalled when Jerry dumped all that food in the trash before setting his tray in the dishwasher's window. She herself managed to gulp down a glass and a half of milk before her tray was ripped ruthlessly from her hands. "What's going on?" she asked, trotting behind Jerry as they crossed the arctic walkway to the fire safety module. "I assume we're going on some kind of a run?"

"You assume correctly. Drug overdose at Arctic Construction." Kate's ears grew points. "He's locked himself in his room and won't come out.

He says he has a knife and that he'll kill anybody who tries to come in after him. He's already cut one guy, his roommate, and Lil's got him under sedation in her ambulance." The walkway ended in a large, two-story garage with offices to the sides. The garage contained one ambulance, space for another, a ladder truck and a water truck parked on the first floor. Jerry crashed down the steps two at a time, the metal staircase shaking beneath his weight, and ducked into his office long enough to grab one parka for himself and chuck another at Kate.

The garage door was rolling up and Jerry was backing the ambulance out of the fire station before Kate gathered her wits together enough to break into a gallop and tumble in through the passenger side door. She felt as if the William Tell Overture should be playing somewhere in the background.

Construction Camp Two had been built by RPetco to house construction crews for the length of their contract. It was twelve miles west of the Base Camp on the Backbone and the snow had begun to fall, with attendant winds bellowing encouragement, so it was a sweating, swearing forty-five minutes before Jerry could pull onto the gravel pad that housed the camp. A yellow grader, sounding a loud and indignant beep, materialized out of the gale like something out of Aliens and backed around the ambulance, leaving great mounds of snow curling in its wake.

The operator, peering grimly through the windshield, dropped the enormous steel blade with a muffled crunch inches from their front bumper and started another pass. Jerry parked at the camp's bull rail next to the other ambulance, and they waded through drifts up to their thighs, ducking their heads against the wind that blew icy trickles up their noses and down their necks. Jerry inhaled the wrong way and sneezed violently as they shoved through the front door. Kate dug a handful of snow out of her collar and stamped her boots. "Hey, Lil," she said to the dark-haired woman bending over a gurney. "Long time no see."

"Kate! What the hell are you doing here?" She looked past Kate to Jerry.

"The other guy's still in his room. Sam'll show you." She bent back over her patient.

"Nice to see you, too," Kate said mildly.

"Come on," the security guard standing to one side said, and double-timed it down a hallway, Jerry and Kate on his heels. They turned a corner and found another six guards and one man not in uniform standing outside a closed door.

"Kate, this is the camp supervisor, Tom Parry. Tom, Kate, she's riding with me for the evening. He in there?" Jerry said, gesturing toward the door.

"No," the camp supervisor, a dark, tense man with an unshaven Neanderthal jaw, said with asperity, "we're having a hall party. Of course he's in there, you silly bastard."

Jerry gave him a long look and the other man shut up. "What's he on, anybody know?"

"Just before he passed out his roommate said he's been doing a lot of coke," one of the guards volunteered.

"Why didn't his roommate tell somebody before it went this far?" Jerry grumbled. It was recognized to be a rhetorical question and went unanswered. "Well, what's his name?"

"Martin Shugak." "What!" Kate said.

Jerry looked at her. "You related?"

"If it's the same guy, he's my cousin."

"Good," Jerry said, "we can use it." "Maybe," Kate said, recovering some of her poise. "We don't exactly get along."

"Hard to believe," Jerry drawled. "Where's he work, Tom?"

"He used to be a carpenter for Arctic Construction. He's been up for nineteen weeks straight, since October." The thought of Martin behind a band saw was enough to turn every hair on Kate's head white. She struggled not to show her distress.

"Goddamnit!" Jerry was furious. "I've told those friggin' construction superintendents time and again not to let their people work back-to-back shifts. Fuckers never learn." He unclenched his fists and took a deep breath. His face smoothed into its usual, good-humored mask. Kate had never seen Jerry Mcisaac lose his temper with a patient, not even the time the drunken fisherman had run over Jerry's foot with a snow blower when Jerry insisted on treating the broken leg the fisherman had just given his six-year-old daughter. He signaled for silence and stepped forward to knock gently on the door.

"Martin? Martin Shugak? This is Jerry Mcisaac, the medic over at the Hilton. Why don't you open up the door so we can talk?"

From behind the door came a wild stream of hysterical profanity.

Jerry winked at Kate. "Tone it down, Martin. We've got a lady present.

Talk all you want, but watch the language, okay?"

There was a brief pause. The door opened a fraction. The voice, less close to cracking, said, "You really got a woman out there?"

With a sinking feeling Kate recognized his voice. It really was Martin.

"It's Kate, Martin," she said when Jerry nodded at her. There was no immediate response and she added, "Remember, your cousin? From Niniltna?"

The door opened wider. Through the crack Kate could barely make out Martin's face, but she could see all too clearly the queer blank look in his brown eyes. His voice sounded high and shaky. "What the hell are you doing here?"

The question of the day. She hoped he was too out of it to draw any conclusions. "Same as you, making a buck, roustabouting for RPetco.

Listen, Martin, it really is you, isn't it? I can't see your face too well."

The door opened wider. The ring of security guards closed in behind Kate. Martin's eyes bulged. He jumped back and the door slammed shut.

Another string of abuse poured out from behind it.

Jerry glared around. "Who the fuck do you assholes think you are, the A-Team? Back off!" The guards looked at him with stubborn faces.

Jerry shook his head angrily and nodded at Kate to continue.

"Martin, it's Kate again. No one is going to hurt you out here, I promise. Why don't you open the door?"

"I know what you're trying to do! I'm not stupid! You're talking nice to get me to come out! I'm not stupid!"

She winced at the raw sound of his voice. "Listen, Martin, nobody out here thinks you're stupid." There was no sound. Kate saw the sweat on Jerry's forehead, saw the fanatical desire for rape, pillage and plunder in the eyes of seven frustrated wannabe rent-a-cops. Her shirt was sticking to her back. "Sure is hard, Martin," she said, "talking to a door. Maybe you could open it up just a crack. Maybe I could come in."

Next to her Jerry shook his head violently. She ignored him. "Martin?

How about it? Just me?"

They waited. After a long time, during which Kate had nightmare visions of Martin cutting his wrists not five feet away with her powerless to stop him, her cousin spoke. That vulnerable quaver was back in his voice. "Get them goddam security guards farther back. You tell them I got a knife and I'll kill anybody who tries to mess with me!"

"They know, Martin," Kate said, straightening. "We don't want anyone to get hurt. Come on now, open the door."

The door opened abruptly and banged back against the wall. Everyone jumped. One guard took an involuntary step forward. Martin saw him and his face contorted and the eight-inch hunting knife whizzed between Jerry and Kate to stick, quivering, in the wall behind them.

For a single, paralyzed moment none of them could move. Then one guard made a low diving tackle through the door for Martin's knees, another went for his shoulders and the rest of them followed like a net dropping from the ceiling, and from then on the sequence of events became increasingly confused. Martin shrugged off the first two guards and tossed a third out the window. Fortunately the camp had only one floor, but the pilings holding the camp up off the pad still made it at least a ten-foot drop, not to mention the cuts the glass caused when she went through it. In the melee Jerry's fist caught Kate on the side of the head and he got himself kicked in the stomach for his pains. He doubled over, clutching his belly and wheezing. Kate sat next to him on the floor, holding her head, which had already taken enough abuse for one day. She caught sight of a two-inch roll of duct tape sitting innocently on top of one nightstand. The all-purpose, superduper utility cure for every bush ailment, including holding the Trans Alaska Pipeline together. She touched Jerry's arm and pointed. He realized her intent immediately and nodded. She snagged the spool of tape with one hand and they launched themselves back into the fray.

With one guard per arm and four others and the camp manager holding his legs and the seventh security guard climbing back in the window to sit on his chest, Kate and Jerry got Martin's wrists taped together. It wasn't a particularly neat job but it was an effective one, and from then on their task was relatively easy. They taped his legs together at the knee and ankle and then they let Martin lie in the middle of the floor while the Impossible Mission Force leaned up against the walls and each other, nursing their bruises and waiting for the shaking in their legs to quit. Both beds in the double room were broken, the door hung drunkenly from one hinge and snow was whirling in through the smashed window to form a small drift on the floor beneath. An interested crowd peered in from the hallway.

"Look at that little prick," Jerry said resentfully, still puffing for air. "He can't weigh a hundred and twenty pounds wringing wet."

"How you must love this job," Kate said, leaning her head against the wall and closing her eyes.

"I'd bet my left nut he was scoring his coke with a speed chaser."

"All grown-ups, and only hurting themselves, is what I think you said."

"Bastard better not have handed any of that crap out to his friends."

Jerry pushed himself to his feet and looked over at the guard who had gone out the window, now standing in a corner with blood trickling down her left temple. "You okay, Wedemeyer?"

Wedemeyer managed a weak smile, slid slowly down the wall to the floor and passed out.

"Well, shit," Jerry said, disgusted. His beeper went off again and the entire room, not excluding Martin, jumped a foot in the air. "Jerry Mcisaac, call the operator, Jerry Mcisaac , call the operator immediately."