Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

Kate stirred. He watched with hungry eyes as her body slid inside the sleeping bag. If he were lying beside her, he could slide his hands over her breasts. He tried to remember what they looked like, but everything had happened so fast that afternoon, he wasn’t sure he’d even seen them. If he moved slowly enough, if he was smooth enough, maybe he’d get a look, before she ripped his balls off and Mutt ripped his throat out and Bobby shot him dead.

He rolled over and punched his pillow into a new shape. What about Dan O’Brian? What was going on there? He had worked cases with Dan O’Brian, he’d hoisted more than a few beers in his company, and he knew the man. Or thought he did. The last thing he wanted was to bring Dan O’Brian in and sweat him, but he was going to have to if Dan didn’t open up. He didn’t even want to think about the repercussions that would follow, both for Dan and for himself. He could just imagine what Billy Mike would have to say. And, oh god, Auntie Vi.

He didn’t really think Mutt would rip his throat out. He wasn’t 100 percent certain about Bobby. He was pretty sure Kate would rip his balls off, though.

Or not. She certainly had responded to him that afternoon at the cabin. No matter what she had said or done afterward, no matter how much she was avoiding the issue, no matter that she was twisting herself into a pretzel to deny the interlude, she had been with him all the way. He wondered how long it would take to get her back to that place.

On the plane back to Niniltna, he’d said, “So we’re not going to talk about it?” Silence had been her answer. Okay, fine. He probably would want conversation somewhere down the line, but just at the moment, all he wanted was a month in bed, just the two of them, and the rest of the world held at bay with a big red keep out sign. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

He wondered if, in the course of a normal sexual relationship, she was a talker or the quiet, intense type. The first time, she had called him Jack. The second time, she hadn’t said anything at all. Of course, he had not been spectacularly articulate himself.

He wondered what her favorite position was. He’d had some imaginative partners in his life. But face it, Chopin, he told himself. If acquiring Kate Shugak as a partner means the missionary position for the foreseeable future, you’ll take it and love it.

He wondered how long and what it took to make her come. He wondered if she screamed when she did. Well, he kind of knew the answers to both those questions now.

He stifled a groan and rolled over on his back.

He wondered if he was ever going to get laid again in his lifetime.

Why her? he asked himself for what might have been the thousandth time. Why this one stubborn, independent, irritating, exasperating woman? She was certainly far too short, especially for him. They’d look like Mutt and Jeff. Where had all the tall blondes in his life suddenly gone? The tall, charming, amenable, accommodating blondes, the ones who were waiting for him when he got to their houses and who let him go again without question the morning after?

The ones who cared as much for him as he did for them.

He remembered again that day in September when he and George had flown into George’s hunting lodge south of Denali and had found Kate Shugak, covered in blood and dirt, keening a dirge to the lifeless body of her lover clasped in her arms. No one had ever loved him that much.

Tell the truth, Chopin, he thought. You never knew it was possible until you saw Kate with Jack. You thought it was something you read in a book or saw at the movies. You never thought it could happen in real life.

He kicked free of the sleeping bag, feeling through his T-shirt the heat of the wood burning in the fireplace.

He was, he realized, circling perilously close to the L word. He’d stared down men with.357s with less fear. He thought of his parents, those two strangers in the split-level house in San Jose, one staring at the television, the other logged onto the Internet, looking for the next cruise they could take. They had been married for forty years, and he couldn’t remember an outward sign of affection more passionate than a chaste kiss, usually on the cheek. He supposed they loved each other, but he had long since decided that if that was love, no thank you. If he’d caught them groping each other in the kitchen, just once, maybe he would have looked at life and relationships a little differently. He didn’t know.

He didn’t know a goddamned thing.

Kate shifted and murmured something.

Except that he had a ferocious and apparently perpetual itch that it seemed only this woman could scratch. He raised his head. “Kate?” he said softly. “You awake?”

“No, she isn’t awake, you moron,” Bobby’s voice hissed from the far corner, “and if you don’t fucking shut up and settle down, I’m going to toss you outside on your goddamn ear.”

It was a long night.

He was shoveling in Dinah’s ambrosial French toast and Bobby’s caribou sausage links the next morning about nine o’clock when Dandy Mike came rushing up the steps.

Jim hung his head over his plate, wishing Dandy away. “No,” he said.

It didn’t work. “Jim!” Dandy said. “You’ve got to come!”

“Haven’t we done this before?” Jim wondered out loud.

“You have to come! John Letourneau is dead!”

There was an electric moment. Jim’s eyes met Kate’s. “I beg your pardon?”

“John Letourneau is dead!” Dandy said again, impatient. “Come on, you have to come!”

Jim, still holding Kate’s gaze-did she look as heavy-eyed as he felt, or was it just his imagination?-said, “John Letourneau is dead? Where?”

“At his house,” Dandy said, calmer now. “I went over to borrow his grill for a party I’m throwing this afternoon, and when he didn’t answer the door, I went around the back to find the grill, and I saw him through the window.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

Dandy flushed. “Yes. I checked this time. His heart’s not beating and he’s cold.”

“Anybody with you when you went?”

“Scottie Totemoff.” Naturally. Scottie Totemoff was Dandy Mike’s boon companion. He wondered how Demetri and Billy, both hardworking, responsible men, good providers, good husbands, good fathers, had managed to produce two of the biggest layabouts the Park had ever seen. “He was going to help me with the grill. And the party.”

“Of course he was,” Jim murmured. Undoubtedly, and the drinking.

“I left Scottie to keep watch, make sure nobody gets in to contaminate the scene.” He waited to see the effect caused by this mastery of the language of his newly adopted profession.

“There’s no hurry, then,” Jim said mildly, and drank his coffee. “I might as well finish my breakfast.”

Scottie was waiting for them on the deck, pacing back and forth. “About time you got here,” he told Dandy. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

“Why didn’t you go inside?”

“There’s a dead guy inside!”

“You’ll have to get used to that if you want to work with us,” Dandy said importantly. “Right, Jim?”

“What?” Kate said.

“Let’s take a look,” Jim said, and went inside.

John had been hurled backward out of his chair by the force of the blast, which had sheered off the left side of his chest. The room was spattered with most of it. Dandy’s tracks between door and body were very clear.

The shotgun had fallen with him. His finger was still hooked inside the trigger guard.

“Didn’t put it in his mouth,” Jim said.

“Sometimes they don’t,” Kate said. “Usually it’s because they don’t want to mess up their faces.”

“John probably didn’t want to mess up his hair,” said Jim. Kate looked at him. “Sorry. Cop humor.”