Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

She’d been lucky so far and she knew it. Well, she thought, there’s no point in not pushing your luck when it was running in your favor. She peed where she’d slept, just to underline her determination to sleep between clean sheets that night, and pushed her way through the dead branches and into the open.

The sky was light with the anticipation of sunrise. The three-note descant sounded again, sounding like an all clear, and Kate smiled. “Thanks, Emaa,” she whispered, and began to creep forward, keeping her head at the level of the poushki while avoiding their spiked leaves. The forest floor was dense with pine needles, all the better to muffle her steps, but she watched where she placed her canvas-shod feet anyway.

She passed a cow moose with a yearling calf, so close that she could have touched them. The cow’s ears went back, but she didn’t get up, and Kate faded into the trees before she could.

The forest ended at the road. Kate peered out beneath a clump of wild roses. No sign of the truck. She had a choice here. She could start down the road, chancing discovery to move faster, or stick to the trees, where it would take much longer but would be much safer.

Erland Bannister wasn’t the type to cut his losses and get on the next jet for Rio. He had too much property and too much money and too much power to leave it all behind. His only choice, as he would see it, would be to kill Kate before she had a chance to take that all away from him.

And it probably wouldn’t hurt him to take her out. Somewhere down deep inside, the practical businessman resented the hell out of these upstart Natives, these people who hadn’t done a lick of work in three hundred years’ worth of Alaskan history and who had had it all handed to them on a platter thirty years before and now were a force with which to be reckoned-a political force, a social force, a governmental force-dangerous to offend, impossible to ignore. They were even marrying into the goddamn families of the power elite, bastardizing a line of entrepreneurs and visionaries going back a hundred years.

Well. One woman’s merchant adventurer was another woman’s pirate. Kate grinned to herself.

If she were Erland, she would have driven down to where this road intersected with the next road. There was only one way into the cabin and the same way out. Kate had to stay on or near the road to get back to Anchorage, and help. Yes, that’s what she would do.

Kate stepped out into the road and stood there for a moment.

No one shot at her.

The three notes sounded from a nearby branch, and Kate looked up to catch the cocky eye of a golden-crowned sparrow. The tiny, plump brown bird launched from the bobbing branch it had been perched on and flitted down the road from tree to tree. Kate followed.

It was a long road and the sun was sliding up over the horizon when Kate rounded a corner and saw the intersection. She stepped into a thicket of alder and peered through the leaves. She didn’t see the truck, or any other vehicle. But then, she wouldn’t have parked in sight, either. She would have wanted to lure her quarry into the open.

Okay. She was lurable. She soft-footed it down the little incline. The intersecting road was two lanes wide and the gravel hadn’t been graded in awhile. She still didn’t see the truck, so she stepped out on it, and again, no one shot her. Life was good.

She put her back to the rising sun and set off down the road at a slow trot, working out the kinks of sleeping in the woods and working up some body heat while she was at it. She’d had peanut butter and crackers for breakfast, so she wasn’t hungry, strictly speaking, but she would have killed for a big plate heaped with bacon and eggs over medium, with a big pile of crisp home fries on the side. She was fantasizing over the home fries-with onions and green, red, and yellow peppers and garlic mixed in-when she rounded a corner and saw the truck, parked with its nose downhill.

Without thinking about it, she dived for the side of the road and tumbled down a small bank, fetching up hard against a tree trunk.

“Shit,” she said before she could stop herself. She got to her feet and found herself looking down the barrel of a pistol held in the shaking hand of Oliver Muravieff.

He looked, if possible, even more terrified than Kate felt. “Uncle Erland?” he called over his shoulder. “Uncle Erland, I’ve got her.”

“Shoot her, you moron,” Kate heard Erland say, and that was all she needed to hear. She made a diving tackle for Oliver’s bad knee. It cracked when she hit it and she knew a fierce satisfaction in the sound. Amazingly, he didn’t drop the gun. He tried to point it at her, but she had his wrist in both hands. They struggled, rolling back and forth, and Kate’s biggest fear at that point was the crashing of underbrush that signified Erland’s approach.

“Drop it, you little weasel,” she said through her teeth, and at that moment the gun went off.

Kate’s ears rang with the sound of the shot, and her nostrils stung from the smell of burnt powder. She jerked back and felt her torso, her legs, her arms. There was blood on her left hand and she stared at it, horrified, before realizing that it wasn’t her blood.

She looked down at Oliver, at Oliver’s belly, where a huge red bubble was growing. “Oh fuck,” she said, and turned to meet the bull rush of Erland Bannister as he came crashing through a diamond willow. He looked past Kate to Oliver and said, “Goddamn you, Oliver, you useless little shit!” Given that moment of distraction, Kate grabbed for an overhead branch, hoisted herself up, and kicked Erland Bannister right in the chin. His jaw clicked shut and he fell backward most fortuitously against a white birch that had grown so tall its branches were a good eight feet above the ground. His skull hit the birch’s trunk with a very satisfying smack, a sound that Kate would have been happy to hear again, but there was no time. She rifled his pockets for keys and found them, and then she ran for it, flat out, right to the truck. It started at a touch and she put it in gear and floored the gas pedal.

Halfway down the hill, she met Mutt and Jim Chopin coming up in one of those anonymous black SUVs that had government issue written all over it. Fred Gamble was driving.

“Who took out the insurance policies on the kids?” Jim said.

“ Victoria did,” Kate said, “just like everyone said she did. They were maturation policies, generating funds for when the kids got old enough to retire, or to provide financing for their burials, should that be necessary before their time.”

Brendan shook his head. “She never denied taking them out, did she?”

“She never denied much of anything,” Kate said. “Erland told her he’d turn Oliver in if she did.”

“Tell me that part again. I’m having a hard time with it.”

Kate sighed and let her head fall back. “Oliver was in love with Wanda. He thought she was in love with William. Oliver drugged William with his mother’s sleeping pills, took a couple himself so they’d show up in the drug scan, and siphoned some gas out of his mother’s car, which he then ran from the fireplace to both sets of drapes. Then he put the gas can back in the garage, went upstairs, and climbed in bed to wait for the fire to catch and the smoke to rise to the second floor.”

“I still don’t get it. He broke his leg trying to get out the window.”

“I don’t think that was part of the plan.”

“Going out the window?”

“No, he meant to do that all along. It would have looked funny if he’d come down the stairs without trying to bring William with him. William’s bedroom was between his and the stairs. No, Oliver had to go out the window to make it look good.”