Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

“Did you have to shoot half a dozen bears just for their gallbladders?” Kate said. “I mean, Jesus, Kurt. Where are they, by the way?”

“I worked hard for those bladders, Kate. You can’t just-”

“Yeah, I can. Where are they?” When Kurt looked stubborn, Kate surveyed the cabin. “Well,” she said, “if’s not much, but it’s home, and I have to say I like your housekeeping. Be a shame if I had to start tearing it apart.”

Kurt muttered something. “I beg your pardon?” Kate said, and sipped her tea. “This is pretty good tea. I’ll have to get some for myself.”

He stretched out one shaking hand for the other mug. She waited until he’d gotten on the outside of the better part of it. “Come on, Kurt,” she said with a patient, even kindly air, “I’m giving you a choice. I can either take them in or I can take you in.”

He looked up from his mug, hope in his eye as he fixed on the one relevant point in her dialogue. “You’re not taking me in?”

“Not if I don’t have to,” she said. She let the pleasant smile on her face fade. “Not this time. You pull this again, Kurt, and it’s federal prison for you-no passing go, no collecting two hundred dollars.”

He looked back into his tea. “I’m broke, Kate,” he said in a low voice.

“We’re all broke,” she said, “so what else is new? Being broke is part of living in the Park. You want to get rich, move to Anchorage and get yourself a job with the state.”

“You should talk,” he muttered. “You’ve got a brand-new house you don’t even have to-”

“Stop right there, Kurt.” Kate took another sip of tea. It really was quite good, soothing the instinctive embarrassment that threatened to overwhelm her at his words. He was right. With a house like that, she was nowhere near as broke as he was. She forced herself to speak evenly. “My house has nothing to do with you shooting bears to harvest their gallbladders and sell them on the black market. It’s illegal, and you know it. It’s harmful to maintaining a viable population of grizzlies in the Park, and you know that, too. And if you don’t understand that if you do this again Jim Chopin is going to have to take you into protective custody so that Dan O’Brian won’t feed your ass to those same grizzlies, you’re too stupid to live.”

He remained silent, head down.

“Where are they?” Kate said. “And don’t make me ask again.”

They were in a game bag secreted beneath a loose floorboard. They smelled pretty ripe.

Kurt watched her, glowering. She paused in the doorway, game bag in hand. “I don’t want to have to come back out here, Kurt.”

He maintained a surly silence. He wasn’t holding his head anymore, but he looked a little green. Nausea was a frequent companion to blunt-force head trauma, as Kate knew only too well, and she decided to leave him to it.

As she drove out of the clearing, she had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be her last visit to Kurt’s cabin.

She spent that night at home, putting together a bag for Anchorage and reading the file Jim had handed her when she stopped by the trooper post in Niniltna with the bladders. His attitude amused her (a sort of “Here’s what you wanted, now don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out” kind of thing), but she didn’t have time to ride him, so she let it go with a knowing smile, which she knew full well annoyed the hell out of him.

The file was thick, the pages yellow and frayed, and the text in IBM Selectric typescript, with multiple errors fixed with X’s or whiteout. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a court document that wasn’t a computer printout, if ever. Jim had even managed to acquire a copy of the police file, probably as a means of avoiding her asking him for it.

She read steadily, cover to cover on both files, and was done before the lengthening shadows crept across the floor and she looked up“ to see the jagged blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains rearing up on the eastern horizon like destriers charging into battle, teeth bared, manes flying. Beneath their poised hooves, the Step dropped off abruptly to glacial moraine, which gave way to a long, wide valley crisscrossed by eight hundred miles of Kanuyaq River and attendant tributaries draining southward to Prince William Sound.

She sat there for a moment, just looking. It was still a source of amazement that she could sit on a couch in her own living room and without moving look up and out on such an incredible vista. “I am the luckiest person in the world,” she said out loud.

Kate Shugak wasn’t an especially humble person. She had a good opinion of her own intelligence and capabilities, and there was very little she had set out to do in life that she had not accomplished. She thought of the man she’d caught in the act of torturing a child as a prerequisite to murdering her, and she fingered the scar at her throat. She had killed him with his own knife, after he’d marked her for life. She’d saved the child, though, and what was a scar compared to the life of a child? It wasn’t the only time she had killed. The fact did not weigh heavily upon her. In each case, she had been defending herself or someone else. She had no regrets, and the only nightmares she had involved the children she hadn’t been able to save.

She was comfortable with who she was and what she had done to get there. Mostly, she did things for people. Most of the time, it helped, enough of the time it earned her a living, and she was comfortable with that, too.

She was, she admitted to herself, uncomfortable with being done for. The Park had come together as one unit, ranger and developer, subsistence and sport and commercial fisherman, lumberjack and tree-hugger, wildlife biologist and hunter, Native and white, all to build her, little old Kate Shugak, her own house. She still had trouble believing it. Old Sam had helped her to a vague understanding, but she feared she would never feel worthy of it.

She turned and looked at the living room, into which all of her former cabin could have fit with room to spare, never mind the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathrooms. It still felt odd to have separate rooms for things, and doors into them.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “I guess I got you by doing what it is that I do, and I guess if I want to earn it out, I keep doing what it is I do.”

Mutt had mastered the art of opening the door on the first try, and she came in in time to hear the last of Kate’s announcement. She cocked a quizzical ear in Kate’s direction, received no enlightenment, and flopped down on the sheepskin in front of the couch with a sigh whose satisfaction might have had something to do with the tuft of parka squirrel fur adhering to her muzzle. “Been up on the hill again, have you, girl?” Kate said.

She made herself a cup of tea, seasoned liberally with honey, which was also low in the container, and she added that to her Costco list for town. She curled up with the tea and the two files again, leafing through them at random this time, pausing here and there to reread a section.

Whether the fire had been set in Victoria Muravieff’s house was not at issue. Traces of a trail of gasoline led from the fireplace in the living room downstairs to two different sets of drapes hanging at two windows on either side of the fireplace. It was a typically amateur attempt to hide arson, trying to simulate a wood fire in the fireplace sparking out of control and consuming the house. Kate was no arson investigator, but even she knew that it had been a long time since one had fallen for that trick.

She looked at the picture of the house in the police file. It was big and rectangular, with two stories and what had been a white paint job with pale green trim. She knew less than nothing about burn patterns, but from the smoke and char marks on the exterior of the house, it looked like the fire had started on the first floor and worked its way upstairs. A window on the extreme left of the second floor was open. The rest of the windows were broken, jagged pieces of glass still evident in the frames. What had been a nice yard had been trampled into a muddy mire.