A Cold Day for Murder (22 page)

“I said, what are you doing here?” she repeated.

“Every couple of weeks, I think you said.” He reached for her.

“No,” she said and made a halfhearted attempt to push him away. Ignoring her, he pulled her into his arms, pushed her chin up with one firm hand and kissed her. In spite of his outward assurance she felt his body tense in awareness at the touch of hers. It might have been just a reflection of his own need, it might only have been pity, but with a sensation of coming home after a long, cold journey into foreign and unfriendly lands, she relaxed and leaned into the kiss. He pulled her head into his shoulder and for the first time she allowed herself the luxury of grief, great, racking sobs that tore at her wounded throat and at his heart.

“The funeral was last Wednesday,” she said, when she could.

“I know. There was a big write-up about it in both Anchorage papers.”

“I counted over a hundred planes parked on the airstrip the day of the funeral. More than I’ve ever seen at his Fourth of July fly-ins.”

“Well. It’s one kind of testimonial.”

“The one he would have liked best.” Her voice was muffled in his shirt. “He left instructions that he wasn’t to be buried in the family plot. He’d picked out a space on top of the hill in back of the house, underneath a big spruce. When Abel Junior and Zach started to dig the hole they found this enormous rock. They couldn’t go through it or around it. They finally had to blow it out of the way with dynamite.” Jack’s chest shifted and she realized he was laughing, and she smiled in spite of herself. “Everyone said it was Abel’s last laugh.”

They sat quietly, listening to the fire crackle in the wood stove. Mutt curled up in front of it, her head on her paws, relaxed now that Kate was back in Jack’s lap and all was right with the world.

“We sent Ken home to Boston,” Jack said, “and Miller back to his daddy. The honorable representative from Ohio was inclined to make a fuss at first, but the press doesn’t look kindly on congressmen drafting the FBI into investigating their personal affairs. All Gamble had to do was work the
Washington Post
into the conversation and Miller deflated like a stuck balloon.”

“And Ken’s people?”

Jack shook his head. “They don’t make anything as vulgar as a fuss in Boston. I went out for the funeral. The sky wore gray; everyone else wore black. And pearls. Even the guys.”

“Even the guys?”

“Cuff links. Tie tacks.”

“Oh.”

“Afterward, there was a reception at his parents’ home, where no one drank too much or cried out loud. When it was over, his mother thanked me for coming all that way. His father shook my hand. His brother drove me to the airport and carried my bag to the counter.” Jack’s voice hardened. “I’d have felt a whole lot better if someone had taken a punch at me.”

They sat for a while, not moving. When she spoke again her ruined voice was so low he couldn’t hear her. “What?” he said.

“Thanks,” she said, louder but still gruff.

“For what?” he said, with more than a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Ekaterina was right. They’re all dead. There was no point in the whole story making the ten o’clock news.”

“Well. Thanks, anyway.”

He looked down at her. “Will you come back to work for me?” he said.

“No,” she said at once. “I’ll never live in Anchorage again.”

He looked at her for a long, searching moment. When he was done, he sighed, a long, drawn-out sigh, and nodded once, accepting her decision without comment.

“But I’ll work for you sometimes. When you need someone who knows the Park. Who’s related to half the bush.” She raised her head and added, “For four hundred a day, plus expenses.”

He had to grin. “Good enough.” He slid one gentle, seeking hand over a breast. “It has nothing to do with this,” he said. There would be no mistake. He wanted her. He had only been waiting.

“No,” she agreed on a long sigh, arching her back and rubbing herself against his hands. She pulled his head down and kissed him. It had been too long, and she had missed this so much, and they’d always fit together so well. Nothing else mattered.

“Kate,” he said, pulling back. “I came to Alaska because I wanted to see what it was like to live in a last frontier. I stayed because I wanted you. Just so you know, I feel pretty much the same today.”

“All right,” she said, unzipping his jeans and sliding one hand inside.

His hands closed around her upper arms in a painful grip. “I’ll be out whenever I can get away.”

“Yes.”

He sighed beneath the touch of her hand. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

It wasn’t going to get any better than this. He was a beggar at the gates, and he knew it. They had just opened, and if he hadn’t been deeded the castle at least Kate had come down from her tower. He would take what he could get, and be grateful for it, and show his gratitude as well as he knew how.

He followed her up the ladder to the loft and into her large, lonely bed, and if it wasn’t making love, it was as close to it as either one of them would ever get.

Now available as an eBook,
A Fatal Thaw
is the second Kate Shugak mystery.

It was six A.M. on the first day of spring, and although sunrise was still half an hour away, when Kate opened her eyes the loft of the cabin was filled with the cool, silvery promise of dawn. She sat up, stretched and yawned, and flung back the covers.

Pulling sweats on over her long underwear, she shimmied down the ladder from the loft into the cabin’s single, square room. “Hey, girl.” Mutt stood pressed up against the door, ears cocked, iron-gray ruff standing straight up around her face, yellow eyes wide and fixed imploringly on Kate. “In a minute. Hang on.”

Going to the stove, Kate opened the fire door and stoked the fire from the wood bin next to it. The coals from the night before were still hot and it only took a moment for the wood to catch. She went to the sink and pumped up some water to replace what had evaporated out of the gallon-sized kettle overnight. Straining a little, she set it back on top of the stove. “Okay, girl,” she said. Mutt danced with impatience as Kate stamped her bare feet into boots, and then, as Kate got down the choke chain and leash, her tail went between her legs and she whined, a soft, piteous sound.

“Forget it,” Kate said severely. The scar on her throat, a whitish, flattened rope of twisted tissue stretching from ear to ear, pulled at her vocal chords in protest at this early-morning use, and her voice rasped like a rusty file over her next words. “I saw that old he-wolf hanging around yesterday. I know you’re looking to get that itch of yours scratched but the last thing we need underfoot is a litter of pups.” Mutt flattened her ears and furiously wagged an ingratiating tail. “Don’t try that sweet talk on me. I remember what happened last time even if you don’t.”

Mutt heard the inflexible note in Kate’s voice. Her tail stilled, her muzzle drooped and she gave a deep sigh. Conveying the impression that she had been beaten into it, she submitted meekly to the leash, and slunk through the door and around the woodpile.

Kate let the leash run all the way out to give her some privacy and waited. She breathed in deeply of the cool morning air, smelling of pine resin and wood smoke. The big, round, flat-faced thermometer fixed to the wall of the cabin read twelve degrees, and it was only six-thirty. Yes, spring was finally here, at last.

She felt a single, experimental tug on the leash. One large yellow eye peered over the woodpile. “Not a chance,” Kate told her, and took her turn in the outhouse without loosing her grip on the leash.

· · ·

The killer woke a few moments later, twenty-five miles to the east, and rose at once, whistling. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, slowly methodically, a deliberate ceremony to his movements. Shaving was almost a ritual, and he was very careful not to nick himself with the blade. The new clothes—Levis, a Pendleton shirt, socks, T-shirt, shorts, bought the day before in Niniltna—had been painstakingly laid out on his bed in the order that he would put them on.

The clerk at Niniltna General Store hadn’t recognized him yesterday, in spite of his shopping there all winter long. He wiped the last of the shaving cream from his face and smiled at himself in the mirror.

· · ·

Kate ate the last of last week’s bread as toast dunked in her morning coffee. She mixed up a batch of dough and turned it into a buttered bowl. Covering it with a damp kitchen towel she sat it next to the wood stove to rise. Puttering around the cabin, she changed the sheets on the bed in the loft and the towels next to the sink, scoured out the sink, cleaned the top of the stove, took the rag rugs outside to shake, and swept the hardwood floor. Pumping up enough water to fill the washtub, she added soap and clothes and left it on the wood stove to heat through. She cleaned the chimneys and trimmed the wicks of all the propane lamps. It was her usual Monday morning routine and she performed it on automatic. It was good to have a routine. It got things done, and it kept her too busy to think too much on how isolated she was. In the middle of 20 million square acres of national park in Alaska, where her closest neighbors were the grizzly sow across the river just waking up after a long winter’s nap and the he-wolf sniffing hopefully around her horny husky, if she let herself she could get to feeling pretty lonely. Kate never gave herself enough time to feel lonely.

Chores complete, she sat down at the table next to the oil cookstove and pulled the one-pound Darigold butter can toward her. Dumping it out, she began to separate bills and stack coins. When she was through she had the grand sum of $296.61.

“Well,” she told Mutt, “better than at breakup last year. At least we’re going into this spring solvent.”

Mutt wagged her tail in halfhearted agreement.

· · ·

The Winchester Model 70 30.06 was new, purchased just the day before, from the same general store in Niniltna that had sold him his new clothes, from the same incurious clerk. The bullets were new as well, a dozen cardboard boxes of shiny new cartridges, 180-grain hunting ammunition, Winchester (he was loyal to the brand) Super X Silvertips, twenty rounds to the box. He succumbed to temptation and opened one of the boxes, pulling out a round. Even in that early light the brass gleamed, the copper glowed and the silver shone. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.

He set up a row of empty cans and bottles on a sawhorse placed across the road leading to the lane outside his cabin. From the crossbar he hung a paper target, a series of concentric circles.

He paced off 150 yards down the old, straight railroad bed that served as the Park’s main, and only, road. The hard-packed snow of winter was beginning to melt and break up beneath his feet. He squatted and set the boxes of ammunition to one side. Taking the rifle in both hands, he held it to his face for a moment, inhaling the fragrance of the oiled walnut stock, running an adoring fingertip down the gleaming black barrel. The bolt worked smoothly, the craftsmanship of the piece evident in each planed and polished surface, all the machined parts working together to form a perfect whole.

He pulled the stock firmly into his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. The tiny metal bead at the end of the barrel seemed at once so close and so far away. The metal was so new it glistened in the early morning light. He frowned, and felt around in his pockets for a match. Striking it, he held it so the smoke rising from it blackened the bead.

He looked at the factory sights and shook his head with an indulgent smile. From another pocket he produced a Williams Foolproof peephole sight and mounted it next to the receiver. He loaded the rifle, five in the magazine, one in the chamber, and stood. He pulled the stock in tight and sighted through the aperture, noting that in spite of the overwhelming whiteness of the surrounding snow pack the dulled black bead at the end of the barrel stood out clearly, with no distracting reflection of light. He squeezed off six shots, enjoying the cracking sound of the reports, the solid thump of the butt into his shoulder, the smooth action of the bolt between rounds. When the chamber was empty, he walked back up the road and inspected the target. Most of his shots were grouped above and to the left of the bull’s-eye. He adjusted the peephole sight with a small screwdriver, reloaded, and repeated the process. The third time he shot at the bottles and cans.

It took him less than an hour. When he was done, he had a killing machine that would reduce the three hundred yards between target and shooter to point-blank range. “A dead shot,” he said, and smiled. And his wife had accused him of having no sense of humor.

He reloaded, and was careful to switch on the safety afterward. He didn’t want to hurt himself.

· · ·

“No, I said, and no, I meant,” Kate told the door. Mutt whined mournfully behind it. “Besides, take it from me, men are nothing but trouble.”

She pulled hard on the knob to see that the door had, in fact, truly latched, and turned to walk to the garage. Its double doors swung open easily, now that a winter’s worth of ice and snow packed around the sill had melted down.

The building was an unheated shell made of three-by-six sheets of plywood on a frame of two-by-fours. A row of windows, encrusted with a year’s worth of grime and mosquitoes, shed little light on the interior. The inside was lined with long strips of fuzzy pink fiberglass insulation between the studs, and shelves bolted to the studs, floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The floor was made of rough, unplaned planks. There was a red metal tool chest as tall as Kate mounted on wheels standing in one corner, a table saw in another and a counter with a line of power tools hanging from a pegboard nailed up above it. Unfinished and utilitarian, the garage was neat, reasonably clean and arranged so that everything in it was immediately ready to hand. Kate swept the tools with a stern eye and was satisfied that none of them had rehung themselves carelessly in her absence.