Part 22 (1/2)

Kate felt disoriented, frayed at the edges, and in self-defense she withdrew, took a step back, out of herself. It changed her perspective, as if she were perched on her own shoulder.

”At the very least, aggravated a.s.sault,” Jim added. ”With intent. So let's go.”

Kate's second self whispered in her own ear. ”I've got a better idea,”

she said.

Bobby was inspecting Dinah for wounds over her exasperated protests when the tone of Kate's voice got through to him. His head snapped around.

”Kate?”

The second self whispered again. Kate got to her feet and smiled across the room at Mark Stewart. ”Mr. Stewart? Would you like to come with me?”

She sounded like Mae inviting Cary to come up and see her 208 sometime, like Circe convincing Odysseus to stay an extra year on Aeaea, like Eve encouraging Adam to take just one bite.

Dan sighed.

Bernie s.h.i.+vered.

Jim Chopin, not a fanciful man, felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

”Jesus, Kate,” Bobby muttered.

”Down, boys,” Dinah said, and wondered if Kate was aware of the power she had, when she bothered to use it.

Jackie Webber gave Kate a dirty look.

As the events of the past forty-eight hours-of the past year- had demonstrated, Mark Stewart was not a stupid man. Careful, methodical, a planner, he was a man who did nothing on impulse, a man with no nerves to speak of and no conscience to bother him after the fact. He had to know what Kate suspected, why the trooper had asked him to return to the mine, that they had learned at least some of the truth and guessed at the rest. But they had no proof, and as long as he continued to say as little as possible, they never would have. It would be foolish to go anywhere but back to Anchorage by the first available transport, and sheer madness to accompany this woman anywhere else.

But he was still a man who saw himself reflected in every woman he met, and the challenge in Kate's invitation made his hunting instincts sit up and howl.

As she had been certain they would. ”I think you might enjoy it,” she added, and smiled, a lush, lavish smile that promised him everything.

”Kate,” Bobby repeated, this time a wealth of warning in the single word.

Her second self stopped her ears. ”Stay,” she said to Mutt, and sauntered to the door. She turned to look over her shoulder at Stewart, and smiled again. ”You coming?”

No fool, Mark Stewart wasn't a coward, either.

And she was only a woman, after all.

He picked up her gauntlet and followed her into the night.

209.

The road wasn't much more than a tractor trail, full of deep ruts, yawning potholes, treacherous glaciation and the occasional malevolent washout. It didn't help that it was now full dark before moonrise, but by that time Kate's second self had firm hold of the scruff of her neck and was whipping her unrelentingly onward. Lights flashed in the rearview mirror, showing one vehicle faint but pursuing. Branches sc.r.a.ped against metal. Tires cracked through thin layers of ice to splash into puddles beneath. The cab of the truck rocked back and forth.

In the pa.s.senger seat Mark Stewart rode silently, one hand braced against the dash. A thread of tension, taut and humming, quivered between the two of them, but he didn't speak. Neither did she. The challenge had been made and accepted, and they were both infected with a kind of reckless madness.

210 Twenty minutes later the convoy pulled up in front of a snug little cabin next to a two-story barnlike structure at the base of a hill.

Halfway up the hill was the timbered entrance to a mine; from the entrance ran a wooden sluice that was falling apart, one twelve-foot plank at a time. The sluice ended in a creek, next to where an old steam engine stood, shedding flakes of rust into the water.

Bobby's truck pulled up next to her, and people literally poured out of both doors. Kate walked past them as if they weren't there, marching up to the large building like she owned it and tugging at the doors. They gave but wouldn't open all the way. Her second self noticed the Yale padlock hanging from the hasp, and whispered to her that the key was probably in the cabin.

The cabin door was unlocked, the cabin itself unoccupied, Mac Devlin probably away on a mission to strip-mine an especially scenic part of the Park. Inside, a key rack hung from the wall next to the door. She sorted through them until she found a Yale key and brought it back to the barnlike structure. The key slid smoothly into the padlock and turned without a hitch. The padlock snapped open, and she folded the double doors back one at a time.

Her second self began to hum the ”Hallelujah Chorus.”

It was a D-6 Caterpillar tractor. The body was a bright and gleaming yellow, the ten-foot blade a ton of s.h.i.+ning silver steel. Two, almost three years before, Mac Devlin had been enjoined from excavating mining claims on Park lands, grandfathered or otherwise, and since then this gleaming monster had not been used for its original purpose. Mac never failed in the hope that one day restrictions would ease, or in cursing the memory of Park Ranger Mark Miller, whose murder had been, in Mac's view, timely, if not downright providential. In the meantime, the Cat paid for its keep by building access roads and digging foundations for construction.

The perfect weapon, and in excellent repair. Kate checked the gas tank.

Full. Her opinion of Mac Devlin rose. She went back to 211 the cabin, traded the garage key for the ignition key and clambered up into the Cat's roomy seat.

Mark Stewart stood next to the right tread. She held out an imperious hand. ”Well, Mr. Stewart?”

A smile spread slowly across his face, a smile that, again, physically jarred her with its appeal. It was almost enough to kick her second self out of the driver's seat, but not quite. ”It's Mark,” he said, and took her hand, following her up.

Lined up outside the barn, waiting for what they hoped might be a little less than Armageddon, Bobby, Dinah, Dan, Bernie and Chopper Jim watched Kate and Stewart settle into the cab of the Cat.

”I want to make one thing perfectly clear,” the trooper said. ”Which is?” Bobby said. ”I am not here.”

”s.h.i.+t, Jim,” Dan said, ”none of us are.”

The key in the master switch turned easily and just in time Kate remembered to preheat for thirty seconds. The engine turned over on the first try and a cloud of black smoke issued from the exhaust. A great throaty bawl rattled the rafters in the roof and the teeth in Kate's head. Her heart thumped in her breast, and there was such a rush of blood to all the extremities of her body that she felt even more light-headed than she had before. All she could feel was the shuddering, rumbling beast beneath her, straining at the leash. The sense of power that comes with sitting up on a Caterpillar tractor is absolute. At the controls of 31,000 pounds of metal with the power of 140 horses behind it, you become unstoppable, invincible, omnipotent. In a day you can alter the course of a river, in a week you can demolish an entire forest, in a month you can move a mountain. You can reshape your entire physical world with the s.h.i.+ft of a lever, the roll of a track, the bite of a bright, sharp blade. It is the ultimate toy in the biggest sandbox of them all.

With a D-6 Caterpillar tractor and enough gas, you might even be able to demolish a blood feud by building a road to nowhere 212 and back again. In the driver's seat of this growling yellow monster, neither Kate nor her second self had any doubts. She reached for the master clutch. There wasn't one.

Kate had driven a Cat only once before in her life, the summer she was sixteen, when Abel had apprenticed her and his third oldest son to a miner outside Nizina for casual labor. The miner had been in the process of shoving the bottom of a creek down the maw of a sluice box with a D-5. At first he wasn't going to let Kate drive it, but he needed Seth to cut supports for the tunnel he was digging into the hill above the creek, so, mumbling and cursing and spitting a lot of tobacco juice, he put Kate up on the D-5. She learned to drive it and drive it well, because the old miner had a habit of shoving her off the seat and taking over himself whenever he was displeased with her performance. It wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't usually been in the middle of the creek at the time, but then she wouldn't have learned so well or so quickly if they'd been on dry ground, either. Kate really did hate getting her feet wet.

Cat skinning was not a skill forgotten in a moment, or even in years, but an old D-5 was not a new D-6, and it took some time to figure out the controls, long enough for some of her audience to become restive.

”Kate,” Bobby said, raising his voice over the sound of the engine, ”maybe this isn't such a good idea.”

”Yeah, Kate,” Dan said, ”maybe we ought to-”

Jim said nothing, because he wasn't there.

Dinah said nothing, because she knew it wouldn't do any good.

, Bernie said nothing, because he was beginning to have an idea of what Kate was going to do, approved Wholeheartedly and wasn't about to do anything that might cause her to think twice.

Her second self scoffed at all of them and instructed Kate to pay no attention. She obeyed without question. It seemed there was no master clutch on this Cat. A pedal in front of her right foot acted as a decelerator and allowed her to change gears. There were 213 still two tracks, right and left, and two steering levers, one for each, and two brakes, one for each. The hydraulics on the blade control lever took some getting used to and after she dropped the blade for the second time she was glad Mac hadn't put a floor under his tractor shed.

She stepped on the decelerator, raised the lockout bar to put the tracks in gear and let out the decelerator. The wide metal tracks began rolling beneath the bright yellow body of the machine, right out the door. She found a switch for the lights. In the sudden glare people scattered like marbles.

”Shugak,” Bobby yelled, ”you are out of your f.u.c.king mind!”

The Cat rolled forward, in a direct line for Mandy's truck. After all it had been through during the last two days, Kate could almost hear it give a pitiful moan. At the last possible moment she stopped grabbing for the nonexistent master clutch, stepped on the decelerator, thought her way into a left turn, pulled back a little on the left track lever and pushed forward a little on the right lever, took her foot off the decelerator and started forward again. The Cat swerved abruptly away from the truck and onto the tractor trail leading from the mine, leaving no more than a six-inch gouge down the right-hand side of the pickup.