Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

“Is what?”

“He’s just so damned smug.”

“I don’t think you can arrest someone for aggravated smugness, Kate.”

“His whole attitude is-it’s like he’s got all his exits covered, and he knows it, and he’s making sure I know it, so that there is nothing left for me to do but go home or…”

“Or?”

She thought of the party at Erland’s house. “Or stay here and join his herd.”

“”His herd‘?“

“You should have seen the people at his party. Talk about suck-ups, brownnosers, and hangers-on. You should have heard how he talked about them. Guests in his house, for whom he had no liking and no respect. It was sickening.”

His hands paused. “You turning this into some kind of class warfare, Kate?”

“What?” she said, her head whipping around. “No! What the hell are you talking about?”

“The Bannisters have, you don’t. Is that what this is about?”

It was so ridiculous, she laughed out loud. “No. That is not what this is about.”

Jim resisted an urge to cover his balls. “Well, then, how about race warfare?”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Jim said steadily, still kneading her shoulders. “Is there possibly a little bit of ‘us versus them’ going on here? The residue of three hundred years of white power?”

“You think this can be reduced to skin color?” Kate said hotly.

“No,” Jim said. “I don’t.”

There was another, longer silence. “Okay,” Kate said. “I heard you.”

Jim remained silent.

Kate glared at him. “Why are you still here, anyway?”

“I told you.” He mustered up a lazy grin. “I got your back on this one, Shugak.”

Never happy on the defensive, she was delighted to switch on the siren. “You sure that’s all it is?” she said, mimicking him. She leaned back against him, and smiled when she felt his erection settle into the crack of her ass.

He didn’t move away, but he said, “This has nothing to do with us.”

“Oh.” The gluteus maximus, properly employed, was a well-muscled instrument of torture.

He caught his breath. “Because there is no us.”

“No?”

“No. This is about you pissing off one of the most powerful men in Alaska, Kate, a man with his fingers tied to every Alaskan string there is. It won’t be long before he starts pulling those strings. If you’re determined to carry on with this, you’re going to need backup. I’d do the same for any friend in this situation.”

Kate smiled.

“I’ve got to pee,” Jim said.

“I cannot begin to tell you how much I am enjoying this,” Kate said to his vanishing back.

She followed him up the stairs, unbuttoning the glittering red jacket. He came out of the bathroom as she walked into the bedroom.

“You know,” Kate said, “from the beginning, this has been all about family. There’s Erland and Victoria, brother and sister. Erland married Alice, and from what I picked up at the party, they had no children. Which may be a contributing factor to why she carves up her face every six months.” Remembering Alice’s pale, taut skin, as firm and smooth as a Barbie doll’s, if not quite so forever young, Kate shivered. There was something frightening in such a single-minded pursuit of a semblance of youth. She walked over to the dresser and peered into the mirror.

Her skin was firm and smooth and a pale brown that had turned its usual gold after a summer spent outdoors, but it was thirty-five-year-old skin, no getting around it, with at least the hint of squint lines at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were the sort of indeterminate hazel that could seem anything from gray to green, depending on where she was and what she was wearing. She examined her temples. Still black as an October night, but it wouldn’t be long. She raised her chin and looked at her throat. Nope, she would never be mistaken for sixteen again.

“So what?” she told her reflection.

Jim, at first wary and then baffled, thought the best option available to him in this situation was to remain silent. Nobody ever got into trouble by keeping their mouth shut.

“Okay,” Kate said, turning from the mirror and removing the jacket to hang it in the closet. He watched her every move with close attention, his gaze lingering on the lace cups of her bra, cut almost down to her nipples.

She walked over to the bed and turned on the lamp, back to the door to turn off the overhead. Half in shadow, she slipped out of the silk slacks, leaving her dressed in the bra and a pair of matching panties. He swallowed hard. Now he understood why they called them briefs.

“Erland and Alice had no kids,” Kate said, wandering back over to the dresser. She raised her arms to run both hands through her hair. The line of her back arched and he could see in the mirror that her breasts were threatening to spill out of the bra.

She met his eyes in the mirror. Did she know what she was doing to him? Her voice was so cool, so controlled, so matter-of-fact. “Victoria, Erland’s sister, married Eugene, had three kids- William and Charlotte dead, Oliver still living. Victoria divorced Eugene-according to Max, at least in part due to family disapproval over their lily white daughter marrying an Aleut. Victoria then went to work in the family business, helping keep the books. Prior to that, though, she’d had a very public falling-out with them over their plans to lay off union workers and replace them with contract hires. In the meantime, her husband, Eugene, gets himself elected to head the employees’ union. This must have been pretty annoying to a man like Jasper Bannister, not to mention his son and heir.”

She walked over and got the straight-backed chair out of the corner and carried it back to the dresser. She straddled it and rested her arms along the back and her chin on her arms. His eyes dropped to the graceful line of her leg, knees bent, toes pointed. She rolled her head one way and then another, and met Jim’s eyes again in the mirror, an obvious invitation in her own. He walked over to put his hands on her shoulders again, this time with no fabric, no beads between his skin and hers.

“Is that enough, in and of itself, to cause Erland, a highly respected and greatly feared member of the community, to gallop out to the valley and torch his sister’s house?” Kate closed her eyes and tipped her head back. “Maybe my neck a little. Yeah, right there.”

Her body seemed to hum with pleasure beneath his hands.

“I could understand that,” Kate said, “if the attempt hadn’t been so clumsy. One thing you can be sure of, Erland would hire good help. If Erland had meant to burn down Victoria’s house as a warning to her, he would have hired someone smart enough to check that the house was empty. Arson is one thing. Murder is quite another.”

He held her neck firmly but gently and began working at her spine with the other.

She let her head fall forward again and moaned a little. The sound went straight to his cock, which he had thought couldn’t get any harder. “Not to mention which,” she said, gasping a little, “Victoria and Eugene’s actions on behalf of the union were fruitless. PME did in fact lay off all its union employees and replace them with contract hires, and now it’s one of the top twenty business concerns in the state. It’s hard to quarrel with that kind of success, and certainly Victoria’s daughter, Charlotte, and her son Oliver both have had some kind of financial stake in the success of the family firm. And so does Victoria. Now that she’s out.”

He had to clear his throat to speak. “You’re thinking he didn’t do it, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He knows who did, though. Hey.”