Dana Stabenow: A Taint in the Blood

Oh. Wait. She was going to Anchorage.

The sun always seemed to shine when she had to leave the Park. The Quilaks loomed less menacingly on the eastern horizon, the spruce, aspen, birch, cottonwood, alder, and willow never seemed more lush and profligate, everywhere she looked an eagle or a raven or a Canada goose was taking wing. Which reminded her: She needed a new shotgun; she’d look around for one in Anchorage. Moose with their sides bulging from a summer’s browse ambled across the road looking like a filled freezer. A freezer being something else she could get in Anchorage.

She thought of the last time her meat cache had been knocked over, and the labor that had been required to put it back up again. To the uninitiated, it might look like Kate was turning her back on decades of tradition, but it wasn’t disloyalty. It was progress. Her father had always been for progress. At least she thought so, being as how he’d died when she was seven, and while she had many memories of her father, that wasn’t necessarily one of them.

A freezer. What would Emaa have said?

Kate hoped her grandmother would have hated it. She hoped Emaa would have said disapprovingly, “A cache was good enough for your father, Katya, and it was good enough for me.” But even though she hoped it, she wouldn’t have bet on it since Emaa’s house had been the first one in the village wired for electricity.

She laughed suddenly.

“What?” Johnny said.

“Just promise me you’ll never become a professional againster,” Kate told him.

He gaped at her. “A what?”

“Never mind,” she said, and they pulled into the schoolyard.

They emerged an hour later with a fistful of papers, which Kate immediately consigned to the glove compartment. “Or a school administrator,” she said, and they drove to Auntie Vi’s and knocked on the kitchen door.

Auntie Vi opened the door and promptly closed it again.

Kate sighed. “Auntie, open up. I promise not to cook anything or wash anything or fix anything.” She eyed the porch roof. “Or take a paintbrush to your soffits,” she said in a much lower voice.

The door opened again. “What you here for, then?”

Kate nodded at Johnny, duffle in hand. “I need a place to park the kid for a week or so.”

An arm reached out, snagged Johnny by the collar, and hauled him into the house. The door closed firmly behind him.

“Thanks, Auntie,” Kate said to the door.

Mutt was already in Johnny’s seat when Kate got back to the truck. “At least you still love me,” Kate told her.

“Woof,” Mutt said consolingly, and Kate drove to the airstrip. George was gone, and so was the Cessna. Okay, it was another twenty miles to the Roadhouse. When she walked in, Bernie hid the bar rag.

“It’s okay,” Kate said, “I’m looking for information, not Mr. Clean.”

“And no more counselors. I’m not sharing with anybody else how I feel. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about that goddamn house, either,” he said menacingly, or as menacing as Bernie Koslowski, the mildest of the race of mild-mannered ex-hippie draft dodger-saloonkeeper-basketball coaches could get. “We built it. You’re living in it. Deal with it.”

Kate patted the air with her hands. “I come in peace for all bear kind.”

He examined her suspiciously, and when she made no sudden moves toward the push broom, he relaxed, sort of. “Bear kind?”

“Has Kurt Pletnikoff been in lately?”

Bernie shrugged. “As much as anyone during fishing season.”

“Has he been keeping out-of-town company?”

“Come on, Kate,” he said. “You know I don’t like to gossip about my customers behind their backs.”

“I promise you, Bernie,” she said, “you’re going to have a lot more customers of the federal kind if you don’t help me now. And they won’t be as polite and refined as I am.”

He snorted. “More business for the bar.”

“Not from the locals, if Kurt continues to decimate the bear population.”

“Who says he is?”

“No one,” Kate admitted. “But according to Jim Chopin, there are degallbladdered bear carcasses all over the Park. And we all know what that means.”

Bernie would rather by far be on Kurt Pletnikoff’s bad side than Kate’s. She never forgot and she never forgave, and she was related to half of his customers and had in one way or another helped out most of the other half. Besides, Kurt’s tab was at five hundred and counting, and Bernie wasn’t in the business of loaning money. “Kurt was in here a week ago.”

“Alone?”

“He had company, looked to be of the Asian persuasion. One man, late fifties, I’d say. He had plenty of hair, but it was all gray.” Bernie smoothed back a nonexistent hairline that ended in a long gray ponytail tied back with a strip of leather.

“You know him?”

“Never seen him before.”

“He speak English, or have an accent if he did?”

Bernie shook his head. “Kurt did all the talking.”

“How long were they here?”

“One drink, couple of beers. They didn’t finish them.” Bernie looked mildly annoyed. “Alaskan Amber, too. I hate pouring good beer down the sink.”

“You notice anything else? Anything change hands?”

Bernie shook his head again. “Not in the bar.”

“Okay. Thanks, Bernie.”

“No problem. You didn’t bring the wolf in to say hi?”

Kate grinned. “She’s chasing geese.”

Bernie swore. “Not Edna’s geese, not again, Kate.”

Kate relented. “She’s in the cab.”

Bernie looked relieved. “Thank god I won’t have to stop my wife from rioting in the streets.” He plucked a package of beef jerky out of a jar on the bar. “For the wolf.”

“Thanks.”

From the Roadhouse, Kate drove back to Niniltna and the airstrip, and this time she managed to arrive at the same time George Perry touched down. He was in the act of removing his headphones when he saw her. “Oh crap,” he said, “what now?” He headed immediately for the 1966 Ford Econoline van-held together by faith, dirt, and duct tape-which served as ground support for Chugach Air Taxi’s air-freight business. He backed it around to the Cessna and began unloading boxes from the one and stacking them in the back of the other.

Normally, Kate would have given him a hand, but over the past twenty-four hours she had been made humiliatingly aware that she might have overdone it in the gratitude department. “Have you done any business with Kurt Pletnikoff lately?” she said to George’s determinedly turned back.

“Nope,” he said, tossing a box into the back of the Econoline with a fine disregard for the fragile sticker on its side.

“Has he met any flights lately-say flights with unknown passengers of Asian origin on board?”

George paused. “Maybe.”

“Did he or didn’t he?”

“He might have,” George said.

Kate gritted her teeth. She wasn’t a patient person, but she was on probation and she knew it. “When might he have?”

George gave a characteristic little wiggle, something between a shrug and the Shimmy. “An Asian gentleman could have flown in last Tuesday.”

“And could he have said why he was here?”

George shook his head.

“Did he have you call a ride?” There wasn’t what you could call a cab in Niniltna, but George did have the names of people from the village who had vehicles and were willing to rent themselves out by the mile.

He shook his head.

“When did he leave?”

“That evening.”

“Did you notice if he was carrying something out that he didn’t carry in?”

“Maybe a duffel bag.”

“How big?”

“Basketball-size. Maybe a little bigger. Had handles. Dark blue. Had a logo on it.”