Killing Grounds

KILLING GROUNDS

Kate Shugak 08

DANA STABENOW

G. P. Putnam's Sons Publishers Since 1838 a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Copyright 1998 by Dana Stabenow

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stabenow, Dana.

Killing grounds / Dana Stabenow. p. cm.(A Kate Shugak mystery)

ISBN 0-399-14356-4 (alk. paper)

I. Title. II. Series: Stabenow, Dana. Kate Shugak mystery.

PS3569.T1249K55 1998 , 97-23900 CIP

813'.54dc21 . , -

Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Book design by Ellen Cipriano

For Laura Anne Gilman

any writer's dream editor and certainly mine

AUTHOR'S NOTE

For those who persist in looking up Kate's home ground on a map, I would remind them that there is a reason we call it fiction.

However,

if it will make you feel better,

for the purposes of this book

the coastline of Alaska has been altered

to include Alaganik Bay,

two hours (or so) by bowpicker southeast of Cordova.

Cordova is a real place and it does exist. Shitting Seagull isn't a real person and doesn't. Real Cordovans are much more fun than he is.

It was a cloudless summer day. Salmon leapt free of the blue surface of the water, only to fall back with flat smacks that echoed across the bay. The fishing period had opened at twelve noon exactly and the tender wouldn't be taking delivery from fishermen for hours yet, although cork lines were already bobbing with the kind of frenzied energy that promised a busy and productive period.

Fishermen were making ready to launch skiffs, but on board the tender Freya there was time to open deck chairs in the bow, time to prop feet on the gunnel, time to eat roast beef sandwiches on homemade bread, heavy on the horseradish, time to make lazy comments on the skill or lack thereof shown by the skippers of the forty-odd boats setting drift nets as close as they could get to the markers of the creeks without setting off the fish hawk.

The fish hawk in question, a twenty-eight- year-old man named Lamar Rousch, hovered around the perimeter of the action, his little rubber Zodiac looking flimsy and vulnerable and outnumbered next to the battle-scarred hulls of the fishing fleet. Clad in the brown uniform of the Fish and Wildlife protection branch of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, Lamar stood rigidly erect at the controls of the Zodiac, as if by doing so his height might be mistaken for five-foot-one, instead of a mere five feet. Kate could relate. She saw him wave Joe Anahonak and the Darlene back from the markers on Amartuq Creek, the buzz of the outboard on the back of the Zodiac sounding like an irritated wasp.

Joe flashed an impudent grin, a jaunty wave, and moved maybe ten feet south of the mouth, the stubborn set of his shoulders clearly indicating his determination not to be corked. It happened, if you got careless or unlucky, a moment's distraction and another fisherman more on the ball would drop his net into the water between you and the creek markers, and you lost the advantage of being closest to the narrow funnel through which coursed hundreds of thousands of gleaming red salmon. Sleek and fat from five years of feeding off the nourishing depths of the north Pacific Ocean, the salmon were frantic now to regain that section of stream bed upon which they had been spawned, there to lay their own eggs and die, coming at last to rest and rot upon their ancestral gravel.

Not for the first time, Kate reflected on how improvident nature was. She couldn't remember the exact numbers, but it went something like this: Of the four thousand salmon eggs hatched by a single salmon each year, only two thousand made it downstream to salt water. Of those two thousand, only one

thousand made it out into the deep ocean. Of those one thousand, eight returned to Prince William Sound. Of those eight, two made it upstream to spawn. Two survivors from a clutch of four thousand. As always, looking out across a bay filled with a great school of leaping, gleaming salmon, all of whom had returned home against unimaginable odds, she was awed by a natural design engineered with this many built-in backups, and respectful of its continued success.

The local guarantor of that continued success ran his Zodiac in between the mouth of the creek and Yuri Andreev's Terra Jean. Without expression, Yuri removed his drifter from the area of contention. Joe Anahonak tossed out a cheery greeting, which Yuri ignored with dignity, narrowly avoiding the outer buoy of a setnetter. The setnetter yelled at him from the beach, and he ignored that, too.

The setnetters were out in force, launching their nets from shore instead of from a boat, trusting to the tides and currents and the salmon themselves to scoop up their share of the mighty schools swarming into the bay. From the Freya the setnetters' gear looked like one long uninterrupted line of white corks interspersed with orange anchor buoys, a carefully graded string of beads against the deep blue throat of the bay.

The day before, there had been no sun and that throat had been a dull, drab green. Kate washed down the last bite of roast beef with a long swallow of tepid water and, catlike, stretched her five feet to about five and a half, trying to expose as much of herself to the sun as was physically possible. Her brown skin had already taken on a darker hue, and in this idle moment she wondered if perhaps she ought to crop the bottom of her T-shirt after all. The sleeves were already gone, as was the collar, as well as most of the legs of her oldest pair of jeans. Too much effort on a full stomach, she decided, and closed her eyes against the glare.

She was content. Kate loved the fishing industry and everything to do with it, from the first gleam of silver scales beneath clear ripples of creek water in the spring, to catering to the separate idiosyncrasies of setnetter, drifter and seiner, to the hundred physical differences of the fleet itself, wooden and fiberglass hulls, Marco-made or rebuilt PT, dory to bow-picker to purse seiner. The hard work had yet to start for her, but when it did she would love that, too. It was deeply satisfying to play a part in what was essentially a rite that went back to the first time man went wading into the primordial soup whence he came, for the bounty left behind that, unlike him, had never known the incentive to grow legs and walk on dry land. Her family had been fishing in the Gulf of Alaska for a thousand years. It was a tradition she cherished, and honored in the practice thereof.

Next to her the old man grinned. "Ain't this the life?"

"Ain't it though." She yawned hugely. The sun poured down over everything like warm gold. Wavelets lapped at the hull, an ephemeral zephyr dusted her cheek. A small swell raised the hull and for a moment the Freya strained against the force of the incoming tide. Kate opened one eye, but the bow and stern anchors held and she closed it again. She heard a deep sigh, and let her hand slide down from the arm of the chair. With an almost voluptuous groan, Mutt rolled over on her side, legs in the air. Scratch my belly, please. Kate smiled, her eyes still closed, and complied.

There was a faint shout somewhere off to starboard.

Nobody moved.

There was another shout, louder this time, followed by others, growing in volume and alarm.

Mutt huffed out an annoyed breath and raised her head to look at Kate. Kate sighed heavily, opened her eyes and looked across at Old Sam, one deck chair over. Old Sam swore creatively and rose to walk to the railing, shading his face with one hand. Off the port bow he saw a bowpickerthe Tanya, he thought, narrowing his eyeswith two sweating, straining, swearing men in the bow. Most of the net was in the water and the men seemed to be playing tug-of-war with it. They pulled back on the net, the net pulled them and the boat forward, they pulled back, the net pulled them forward. Old Sam watched, amazed, as the bowpicker left a wake of tiny whirlpools, moving drunkenly but steadily southward, toward the mouth of the bay and Prince William Sound beyond.

"Goddam," Old Sam said respectfully.

Kate's chair creaked and footsteps sounded on the deck behind him. "What?"

The crow's-feet at the corners of the old man's bright brown eyes deepened. "Well, either Captain Nemo needs a shore launch, or Doug's got himself a halibut tangled in his lead line."

Kate squinted in the light. "It's pulling them against the tide." They watched, fascinated, as even the cork line was dragged below the surface. The net jerked suddenly and the bowpicker lurched left to scrape its port side along the starboard side of the Angelique. Rhonda Pettingill, looking up from untangling a fifty-pound king from her gear, was too astonished at the sight to do anything but stare. When the Tanya cut the cork line of the Marie Josephine, Terry and Jerry Nicolo were more forthcoming.

"Well, shit," Old Sam said, and scratched behind one ear. "Why don't they just cut 'er loose?"

"Urn," Kate said.

He looked over at her. "What?"

She shoved her hands in her back pockets, one hip cocked, as she admired the tan of one splayed knee. "The Tanya just lost a set of gear last week, didn't they? Got hung up on a deadhead off Strawberry Reef?" She let him think about it for a minute. "And you know how anal Doug gets about losing to a fish anyway."

"Well, shit," Old Sam said again, and sighed, his brown, seamed face settling into mournful lines. "And here I was just settling into a gentleman's life of leisure. Pull the goddam hooks, Shugak, while I yank her chain."

"Yes, boss," Kate said, grinning, and went to do as she was told.

The deck of the Freya shuddered as the last link of dripping chain rattled up. Moments later they were under way, threading a slow, careful, no-wake path through boats and cork lines and skiffs and frantically picking fishermen. Beneath the surface of the water enormous schools of salmon, their silver sides darkened to slate by the water, arrowed back and forth in ardent attempts to gain the mouth of the river.

The Tanya had reached the mouth of the bay by the time the Freya caught up with her. In the bow, Doug, a dark-haired man, all muscle and bone, worked in furious silence next to a short, rotund blond whose usually beaming face was set into equally determined lines.

A window rattled down and from the bridge Old Sam shouted, "I'll put us alongside, Kate, you swing the boom over!"

The mast rose up from the deck just aft of the focsle. Kate lowered the boom and freed the hook attached to the shackle. Both swung over the side. "Ahoy the Tanya!" she shouted, her husk of a voice carrying clearly across the water. "Doug! Jim!"

Doug looked up just in time to catch the hook as it swept by. Water boiled up from the stern as Old Sam put the Freya's engine into reverse and brought the tender to a sliding stop. Doug and Jim loaded the hook with as much cork line and net as it would hold. Kate gave the opposite end of the line a few turns around the drum and started the winch. It whined in protest at the heavy load, and the Freya listed some when the net cleared the water.

She listed some more, nearly enough to ship water over the starboard gunnel, when the mammoth halibut cleared the surface. The fish was flat, brown on top and white on the bottom, and had both eyes on the brown side. It flashed dark and light as it fought to be free of the net, succeeding only in tearing more holes in it. Kate was ready with the .22, but before she could raise it to her shoulder Doug had vaulted up onto the Freyas deck and snatched the rifle out of her hand. At the expression on his face she sensibly took a step back. It was an automatic rifle and the five shots came so rapidly they sounded almost like one, followed by a long, repeating echo.

Doug held the rifle against his shoulder, finger on the trigger, as seconds ticked down. The halibut gave a last convulsive heave, ripped out another six feet of mesh and subsided. Kate said nothing. As much satisfaction as Doug had taken in finishing off the monster that had finished off his gear and probably a week's worth of fishing, it was as much necessity as revenge. They didn't dare bring the halibut on board before it was dead. It was big enough to kick the Freya to pieces.

Laid out on the deck, the halibut's snout poked into the door of the focsle and its tail bent up against the front of the galley. The ventral fins almost but not quite overlapped either side.

They crouched over it in wonder. "Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," Old Sam said prayerfully. "How big do you think, Doug?"

Doug was still mad. "I think it's just too damn bad I can't kill it twice."

"It's a downright dirty shame we don't have a scale big enough to handle the sucker," Jim said wistfully. "Betcha ten bucks she weighs five hundred pounds."

"Six, maybe," Kate said.

"Seven," Old Sam said, and spat over the side for emphasis.

"This mother's eight hundred if she's an ounce," Doug snapped. Everyone else maintained a prudent silence, broken by the scrape of a boat against the portside hull. Kate looked around in surprise, and rose at once to her feet, her face lit with pleasure. "Auntie Joy!"

"Alaqah," Auntie Joy said, her round face peering over the gunnel, "that is some fish you got there, Samuel."

"It sure as hell is, Joy-girl." The old man stood to offer her a hand. "Get your ass on up here and grab a knife, we can use the help."

The old woman laughed, and Kate couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. It was matched by identical grins on the faces of the three other women still seated in the New England dory warped alongside the Freya's starboard hull. "Hi, Auntie Vi. Hi, Auntie Edna. Auntie Balasha, I didn't know you were in the Park."

Auntie Joy took Old Sam's hand and with an agility that belied both age and rotundity climbed over the gunnel to the deck. The other three women followed. Kate made the introductions. "Doug, Jim, this is Joyce Shugak, Viola Moonin, Edna Aguilar and Balasha Shugak. My aunties." She said it proudly, if inaccurately. Only one of them was really an auntie, the other three were great-aunts and cousins, but the relationships were so convoluted, involving Kate's grandmother's sister's husband who had divorced his first wife and married again and moved to Ouzinkie, that it would have taken half an hour to unravel. Balasha was the youngest of the four of them, a mere child of seventy-six. The rest of them were in their early eighties, although Auntie Vi never got very specific about it. They were as brown as berries, as wizened as walnuts and as round and merry as Santa Claus. It raised the spirits just to breathe the same air they did.