A taint in the blood (21 page)

"That's great. I'm not the mayor, but I'll be sure to tell him when I see him."

"Down to there and up to here. She couldn't be more obvious if she was wearing her own billboard."

"That's not what they taught us at Harvard." Modest laugh. "I'm sorry, I went to Harvard. MBA. With honors."

"I believe you mentioned that already. Seven or eight times."

"Erland was telling me the other day that he's bidding on the leases opening up in the Beaufort next year."

"He thinks the tax breaks are getting through, then?"

"—and now he's going for full custody, and how he can ask for that with a straight face with that bimbo he's got living in his brand-new house—"

"Sounds like you could use an attorney. Mine took Phil to the cleaners for me. I've got his card here somewhere—"

"It's buried so deep in committee it'll never see daylight again."

"Who sits on that committee? Maybe Erland'll make a few calls."

"Harvard, schmarvard. Wharton's the place you want your kids to go to if you want them to learn anything about making money." Modest laugh. "Class of 'eighty-eight. I'll make a few calls for you."

'The union is just going to have to suck it up. The state can't foot the entire insurance bill. People are going to have to ante up their share. I'm telling you, it's not an option. If they don't like it, they can get a job in the private sector."

"The legislature makes one move on the permanent fund and Jay is going to rise up out of Lake Clark like Saint George coming after the dragon."

"I keep thinking if we just explain to people, educate them—"

"We've been sucking at the federal tit since Seward bought Alaska from Russia. We don't know how to do anything else."

"Erland says all we have to do is cut the fat out of the budget."

"So we got a granite countertop and, would you believe it, they've put it in three times and they've broken it every single time."

"Sounds like you could use a better contractor. Let me give you my card."

"I come from Seldovia. There used to be five goddamn canneries in Seldovia when I was growing up. You know where the name comes from?
Seldevoy.
Russian word, means herring town. No goddamn herring in Seldovia anymore. Not much goddamn salmon left, either. We used to be able to pull goddamn king crab right out of Seldovia Bay. They aren't even in the Kachemak anymore. What, you never read the book
Cod?”

"Yeah, but that was the Atlantic."

"The Pacific's just another ocean. I'm telling you, we need to go to a thousand-mile limit and start arming the goddamn Coast Guard with cannons so they can sink a few of those goddamn fish processors. And I ain't talking about just the foreign processors, either, 'cause the American processors are just as bad, if not goddamn worse."

"Well, as long as I can pull a king salmon out of the Kenai, I'm happy."

"Global warming's a myth."

"Right, and so's the Pribilofs remaining ice-free year-round, and golfing in Palmer in January."

"They were acting like they were at a slumber party, instead of prosecuting a rape-murder, with the victim's family right there in the courtroom. I sent the DA an E-mail and told her so."

"What’d she say?"

"The usual—the media blew it all out of proportion, it wasn't really that bad, Anchorage DAs are held to a high standard, yakety-yak."

"Erland went to school with her, didn't he? Maybe you should talk to him about it."

Glasses clinked, people put pinkish blobs of something into their mouths and kept talking around the blobs, and the air was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. Kate's sinuses gave a single vicious throb, and instinctively she made as if to turn back to the door, everything in her telling her to escape from this hellhole before she saw someone she knew.

"Kate!"

Inches from a clean getaway, she took courage in hand and turned back to face the room. "Oh," she said a little weakly. "Hi, Pete."

Pete Heiman elbowed through the crowd and stood grinning at her. "Couldn't believe my eyes when you walked in. What the hell are you doing here?"

"I was invited," she said, trying to talk without breathing.

"Really? You know Erland?"

She shook her head. Not breathing wasn't working, so she tried to breathe through her mouth instead. "His niece."

"Charlotte?"

"Yeah."

"Well, hell, small world." He was still grinning. He looked her over. "You clean up pretty damn good, Katie."

"Pete? Nobody calls me Katie."

"I know. It kinda puts me in a class by myself, don't it?"

He pretended to preen, and she had to laugh.

Pete Heiman was the legislative senator (for life, some people had started saying after the last election) from Kate's district, her mouthpiece in Juneau and like Max one of the original Alaskan old farts. He'd played pinochle with Abel and fished for salmon alongside Old Sam and swung a pick, if only for a photo op during an election swing, next to Mac Devlin. His politics were conservative but erratic; he was a member of the Republican party, but he voted against the majority in Juneau often enough to keep his liberal and Libertarian constituents happy, and he'd managed to weasel his way through the subsistence issue without having to take a firm stand in one camp or another. He was pro-choice, which always surprised the hell out of Kate, until she remembered that he was a longtime friend of Auntie Vi. Kate had a feeling that Auntie Vi had something on Pete, but she'd yet to find out what.

"Want a drink?" he said.

"Sure."

"Come on." He grabbed her hand and towed her through the crowd, nodding and smiling with that practiced politician's charm to clear a path. There was a bar with a smiling bartender, who seemed genuinely disappointed to pour her only a glass of club soda with a twist of lime.

"Want something to eat?" Pete said. "What am I saying, you always want something to eat," and he towed her forthwith to a buffet laden with shrimp, crab, salmon, and halibut, six different kinds of cheese, a dozen different kinds of crackers, chips and dips, and a dazzling display of Godiva chocolates.

Kate took one look and said, "Why are the plates so small?"

Pete eyed the column of shrimp leaning like the tower of Pisa from the tiny saucer held in Kate's hand and said, "Couldn't tell you." He turned to survey the crowd. "Eat up. There are some people I'd like you to meet."

"Some people" turned out to be every second person in the joint. Kate gulped her food—the pink blobs turned out to be cheese puffs, which didn't explain why they were pink—and endured handshakes that ranged from the limp noodle to the damp rag to the hearty grip to the bone crusher, and smiles that ranged from tight-lipped to a vast expanse of synthetic enamel, from the ingratiating to the predatory.

The women were impressed by her outfit, less so by her hair and lack of makeup, and greeted her with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Whose man was she there to take? Red was a power color. Whose attention would she usurp? The men wondered if she was Pete's protegee or his new girlfriend, or both, and what that might mean in the next legislative session in terms of lobbying. Would she be long-term or short? If long-term, how much influence would she wield over Pete's vote? Would she drink on their tab, or would her favor be more labor intensive to acquire? Would they have to sleep with her? Would she sleep with them? Some were clearly hoping for the latter.

One woman, a slender, hard-faced blonde, who wore a black blazer over a black silk shell, white leggings, and black boots with four-inch heels that buckled over the instep, looked Kate up and down and drawled, "Cute outfit honey. Your mother pick that out for you?"

"Sondra—" Pete said, or started to.

"That's all right, Pete," Kate said, and smiled at Sondra. "Not my mother, my man." She ran one teasing finger down the buttons of the glittering red jacket and back up again to trace the neckline. "He liked the idea of . . . buttons." She gave the man hovering at Sondra's elbow a languishing glance and ran her tongue slowly over her lower lip.

The man inhaled part of his drink and started to cough, spraying green liquid of some kind over Sondra's leggings. Sondra swore. "You moron!" She brushed ineffectually at her leggings and glared at Kate.

Pete threw back his head and roared with laughter.

"Um," the man said, his eyes watering a little, "I'm Greg Nowaka. And you are—"

The woman transferred the glare from Kate to him.

Still laughing, Pete waved him off. "Way out of your league, buddy boy. Run, run for your life."

He towed Kate away as she said to the woman over her shoulder, "Did you practice that nostril flare in the mirror? It's kinda cool, makes you look like you're about to charge a red cape."

"Jesus, Shugak, enough already." When they had achieved what Pete considered to be a safe distance, he stopped to grin down at her. "Where'd you learn to do that? I figured I was shepherding a lamb through the wolf pack, but I'm thinking now I got that backward."

"When in Rome," Kate said, and wondered how soon she could get the hell out of there.

A touch on the shoulder stopped her. She turned to see Charlotte, Emily at her elbow. Emily looked at Kate with the first expression of approval Kate had yet seen. Charlotte was even smiling. "Thanks," Charlotte said.

"For what?" Kate said.

Charlotte looked over her shoulder. "Hi, Pete."

"Hi, sweetie." Pete kissed her cheek and then Emily's. "How you doing?"

Charlotte's smile widened. "Better now."

Pete laughed. "I bet." He grinned down at Kate.

Kate, mystified, was about to inquire as to what had just happened, when Charlotte said, "Let me introduce you to my aunt." She nodded to Pete, who stepped back. Charlotte led Kate to a chair tucked into a corner next to the windows. "Aunt Alice?"

The woman seated in the chair wore a sleeveless scoop-necked mauve linen sheath and was chatting animatedly with a well-dressed, smooth-featured man twenty years her junior, who looked like he was trying not to appear bored. She looked around at Charlotte's greeting. Her hair had been artfully streaked, her large gray eyes were exquisitely made up, her fingernails were polished the same shade as her toenails, displayed in elegant sandals with delicate straps. Her collarbone was a knife edge above the neckline of her dress, her arms about the width of a piece of spaghetti, and there was something wrong with her face. The skin was very smooth and very taut, but it seemed to be pulling her lips open to show the fleshy inner lips inside. It tugged at the corners of her eyes and eyebrows, narrowing the eyes and elongating the brows. Kate wondered if perhaps Alice was recovering from burns of some kind. She'd seen burn victims grow just that kind of new skin.

"Aunt Alice, I'd like you to meet Kate Shugak."

Aunt Alice extended a hand, the back of which was mottled with age spots. "How do you do, Ms. Shugak."

Kate accepted the hand and wondered if she was expected to kiss it. "Kate, please," she said.

Alice gave a perfunctory smile and said to the bored-looking man, "Alvin, meet Kate Shugak."

Alvin took Kate's hand. "How nice to meet you." His eyes traveled down her throat. "Hmm." He raised one hand and, before she could step out of reach, traced her scar with impersonal fingers. "Who's your surgeon?"

"I beg your pardon?"