Part 7 (1/2)
He nodded miserably. ”I gave her a leg up the side of one of those old houses. I told her to stay there while I went for help. It-the bear must have climbed up after her. I never would have left her if I'd thought- I never- Then I heard your truck and-” His face twisted.
”It's okay,” Dan said with quick sympathy. ”Never mind. We can talk about it later.”
Stewart hid his face in his hands.
Dan was right, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d probably was in shock. Coldly ashamed of her momentary awareness of him as an attractive man, and disregarding his equally obvious appreciation of her as an attractive woman, Kate said, ”The trooper's on his way.”
Stewart's head snapped up. ”Trooper?”
”Chopper Jim?” Dan said, and Kate nodded. ”The trooper from Tok,” he told Stewart. ”Jim Chopin.”
”How'd you talk to him?” Stewart said. ”I thought- Are there phones in Niniltna?”
”I called him from the NorthCom earth station.” Kate indicated the tower just visible over the tops of the trees cl.u.s.tered between the airstrip and the village.
”The troopers are always called in on cases of accidental death,” Dan said.
”Of course,” Stewart said, head bent again. ”Of course they are. Sorry, I'm still a little out of it.”
Dan regarded him with a puzzled air. ”You know, I could swear- We've met before, haven't we?”
Stewart shook his head. ”I don't think so.”
Dan's brows came together but he shrugged. ”If you say so.”
The Bakers had wandered across the strip to watch George swab out the inside of his plane. Kate hoped George had simmered 75 clown some, but the rigid set of his shoulders didn't look promising, in which case she hoped the Bakers would restrain any impulse they might have toward commentary. She wondered what Mandy was going to say when she heard the tale of the day's adventures. Somehow she felt that a fatal bear attack, a plane wreck and an attempted homicide were not what Mandy had had in mind when she sent her parents out that afternoon.
Dan strolled a little way down the runway, inviting Kate with a jerk of his head to join him. ”So what did Mandy bribe you with to get you to play tour guide?”
She fell into step next to him. ”The loan of her truck.”
Dan grinned. ”That's right, yours is slightly out of commission, isn't it?” He looked at Mandy's brand-new Ford. The winds.h.i.+eld had a horizontal crack in it that started in front of the steering wheel and progressed all the way across to the pa.s.senger side. The driver's-side door was crumpled in and sported two bullet holes. The black plastic b.u.mper was cracked right down the middle. Dan inspected the claw marks on the hood with a professional eye.
”Yeah,” Kate said, ”we had our close encounter with the bear, too.
His head snapped up. ”Same bear?”
She nodded. ”I think so. The way the road switches back, about the time she hit us she could have come straight down the slope from where I found the body.” She paused. ”She had blood on her face and muzzle, and what looked like flesh between her claws.”
”Jesus.”
”Not a pretty sight,” Kate agreed, and took a deep breath to steady her stomach. ”Still, hard to get too upset over bears acting like bears.”
”Yeah.” He didn't believe it any more than she did, but in the face of nature red in tooth and claw he was d.a.m.ned if he'd let Kate outmacho him. ” 'She?' ”
”It was a female, a big one, six, seven hundred pounds.”
”Which way was she heading?”
76 ”West, last I saw.”
Dan's brows snapped together. ”West from the mine?”
”West from a mile or so down the mine road.”
”Heading away from the village, then.”
”Last I saw,” Kate repeated. They both knew how futile it was to try to predict the path a bear might take.
”You scare her off her kill?”
”I don't know. Maybe. You know what the road's like, and I had the truck in second gear. We were pretty noisy.”
”And bears do tend to get a little cranky when their meals are interrupted,” Dan observed.
Kate remembered the enraged grizzly, standing on her hind legs, claws extended, showing off a very long, very sharp, very fine set of teeth and an even finer set of lungs.
Dan stood back and surveyed the truck again. ”You're awful G.o.ddam hard on trucks, Shugak.” He poked a finger into one of the bullet holes, and looked at Kate with a raised eyebrow.
She made a face. ”Ben Bingley went on a toot on his kids' corporation dividends, apparently. George had just brought him back-” She told him about the ground loop and from his delighted grin knew his next stop would be George's hangar. ”Anyway, they'd just flown in from Ahtna when Cindy showed up. She wanted to discuss the matter. Over a Smith and Wesson.”
”My, my,” Dan said. ”Bet the Bakers enjoyed that.” He smiled slowly.
”Kate Shugak, tour guide. Wish I could have been along for the whole ride. Did they say if they enjoyed themselves? They signed up for a raft trip down the Kanuyaq yet? You could probably dump them in along about Chitina without half trying, get 'em wet all over, maybe even get 'em drowned. Worth a try, don't you think?”
Chopper Jim's arrival spared her the necessity of a suitably discourteous reply. The Bell Jet Ranger settled down and Jim was out before the rotors stopped turning. To Kate he said, ”Just couldn't wait to see me again, could you?”
Dan laughed. ”My words exactly.”
77 Jim hitched up his gun belt. ”What have we got?”
They told him. He walked over to the truck and unwrapped the body. He looked at it without expression, and listened to Mark Stewart's story with even less expression.
Kate and Dan helped Jim load Carol Stewart's body into the back of the chopper. Stewart got into the pa.s.senger seat and the trooper closed it after him. Instead of walking around to the pilot's side, he walked out from beneath the rotors and motioned to Kate. ”He say the bear come after him, too?”
”He said something about shoving her up on the roof of one of the staff houses out back of the mine while he went for help. Other than that, he hasn't said much of anything.”
Chopper Jim was silent for a moment, staring at the end of the runway, brows knit. ”Okay. I'll fly him and the body to Tok. I got an emergency call about a wreck on Sikonsina Pa.s.s. Some a.s.shole's boat slid off the trailer and front-ended a tractor-trailer full of liquid oxygen.” He adjusted the brim of his hat with a flick of his fingers, in a crisp, somewhat exasperated manner that suggested he'd like to square away life in all of rural Alaska, or at least that part under his jurisdiction, in the same no-nonsense, no-action- wasted fas.h.i.+on. ”I just love breakup.”
They looked at the helicopter, Stewart waiting, silent and staring, the tarp-wrapped body of his wife invisible behind him.
”He said they came up here to get away from it all,” Kate said.
Jim's grin was taut and mirthless. ”Didn't get quite far enough, did they?”
78.
There was a lot more traffic on the road between the village and the Roadhouse than there was on the road between the village and the mine, so it was in better shape, with most of the winter's ice broken up and potholes smoothed out to no more than on average a foot deep. It was twenty-seven miles from Niniltna, and exactly nine feet and three inches outside tribal jurisdiction, which location made it the only legally licensed purveyor of liquor in twenty million acres of Park. A square, solid building with a corrugated tin roof, a satellite dish perched on one corner and a haphazard jumble of tiny rental cabins and Bernie's home out back, it made up in atmosphere what it lacked in architectural aesthetics.
There were no dogsleds and no snow machines visible in the parking lot.