A Taint in the Blood

3

Mutt, of course, bounced up to the white Blazer with the state trooper’s seal on the door, generating enough energy with her tail to open a portal into the fourth dimension. Kate strolled after her, and Jim, fending off Muffs attentions with an absent pat, watched her approach with a reluctantly fascinated eye.

Kate was only five feet tall. She didn’t have enough leg to be able to stroll toward him with that much sexual menace. Nevertheless, he felt himself taking an involuntary step back, at which he was thwarted by his vehicle. He swallowed hard and, unable to do anything else, watched her come toward him.

It was true Kate Shugak was only five feet tall. It was true that taken individually her features-high, flat cheekbones, narrow hazel eyes that slanted up just a hint and that were sometimes brown and sometimes almost green and sometimes gray, a wide, full-lipped mouth, pale gold skin with an olive tint that tanned easily to a warm honey color-were nothing that would excite a Paris designer into hiring her as a model for his next show. Her hair, thick and short and impossibly black, trimmed to her ears and swept back from a broad brow by an impatient hand, was nothing a trendy New York stylist couldn’t improve upon with a hacksaw. Her clothes, white T-shirt, faded jeans, a worn brown leather belt, thin white ankle socks, black-and-white tennis shoes, were so unselfconsciously nondescript as to be almost characterless.

The scar, a thin rope of pale, knotted skin that bisected her throat almost literally from ear to ear, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called arousing. If anything, one look at that, one listen to the rusted voice that throat produced ought to have a sensible man beating feet in the opposite direction at once, if not sooner.

Instead, when she smiled at him, a wide, knowing smile that revealed a set of healthy white teeth whose incisors seemed to him to be noticeably longer than they had been the last time he’d seen them, he had an inexplicable desire to fall to his knees and bare his throat and let her suck right out of him the last drop of any bodily fluid he had on offer.

Maybe it was the way her hips moved beneath the denim, or the way the knit fabric outlined her breasts, or the way her hands curled slightly at her sides, as if in anticipation. Maybe it was the way she moved, a smooth, confident fusion of muscle and bone that did a good job of hiding the strength, the quickness, and the agility latent beneath.

He’d known other women who exuded sex. He’d known other women who had been able to slay men with a single smile.

Kate smiled at him now. “Hey, Jim,” she said, and the two words ran like a rasp right up his spine to the base of his skull.

He’d just never known one like this. Everything he had was at attention. He cleared his throat. Hormones. He was male, she was female. He’d react the same way to any woman. “Kate.”

He was helpless to stop the single syllable from sounding like a plea, and he watched her smile widen. Desperately, he sought for something to say. “I haven’t seen you around the Park lately.”

She laughed, a low, intimate sound in the increasing dusk. A strand of hair fell into her face and she tucked it behind an ear, holding his eyes all the while. “Is that what you came to tell me?” She took a step closer. “Have you been missing me?”

“No,” he said, “no, not at all. I’ve been too busy to miss anybody.”

“Really? What with?”

He tried to think of something noteworthy he’d accomplished over the summer. “Oh. Well. You know. Claim jumping. Fishing behind the markers. Hunting out of season. Rape, robbery, murder. The usual.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t look away from him, either. He started to sweat. It was getting harder and harder to remember why he’d walked away from her last May, why he’d announced an end to his ongoing pursuit, why he’d renounced his goal of getting her into his bed.

It was something about love-he remembered that much. Well, he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to, wasn’t going to get anywhere near it, or her, damn it.

Johnny Morgan, elbows on the railing, watched from the deck. It was pitiful, was what it was. Here was this tiny little woman, couldn’t weigh 120 pounds wringing wet, facing down this big, strong, good-looking guy, an Alaska state trooper no less, a man accustomed to command, a man who hunted down criminals and brought them to justice, a man to whom Park rats of every age, culture, and occupation looked to lay down the law of the land. He had to be at least six two, although the Mountie hat he used to wear had made him look even taller than that, and he had to weigh two hundred pounds easy, although the bristling arsenal of badges and guns and epaulets and handcuffs and nightsticks added heft. He was good-looking, too, with heavy dark blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and strong features-jaw, cheekbones, nose. He didn’t look like a wimp, and if half of the Park gossip Johnny had heard was true, he’d had a ton of girlfriends. He just wasn’t a needy kind of guy.

Kate glided another step forward, moving in a way that reminded Johnny irresistibly of a large, powerful cat. Jim looked like cat food, inches away from leaping into his vehicle and roaring off.

Wimp, definitely.

An object lesson was what his teacher, Ms. Doogan, would have called it. No way was he ever going to fall into that honey trap, which was what Old Sam Dementieff called it. The irresistible force meeting the not-quite-immovable object was what Bobby Clark called it.

He shook his head, half in pity for a fellow man, half in shame, and went back inside. It was just too painful to watch.

Just for the hell of it, just because she could, just because her mere presence affected Jim Chopin in a manner that she had to admit she found deeply satisfying, Kate took another step forward, bringing her into physical contact. She could feel his badge, his belt, what she thought might-or might not-be his gun pressing against her. She smiled up at him and purposely dropped her voice to a whisper. “How can I… help you, Sergeant Chopin?”

“Knock it off,” he said through clenched teeth.

She blinked innocently at him. “Knock what off?” She ran one finger down the buttons of his shirt.

He caught her hand before she could start messing with his belt buckle. “Damn it, Shugak, knock it off.” He shoved past her and found a safe, Kate-free place in the exact center of the clearing, free of corners into which she could back him.

No law she couldn’t stalk him, however, pacing after him with that slow, deliberate, unmistakably predatory stride. Her hair gleamed in the last rays of the setting sun like the coat of a healthy, proud animal reveling in her prime. “Hot for this time of year, isn’t it?” she said. She pulled the tail of her T-shirt free and knotted the hem beneath her breasts, leaving a good six inches of smooth, taut, golden-skinned midriff exposed.

Jim thanked God her jeans weren’t low-riders. He wasn’t sure he had a spine that would stand up to the seductive power of Kate’s belly button.

He also felt slightly shell-shocked. It wasn’t that no one had ever seduced him before, usually with his active and enthusiastic cooperation, it was just that he’d had no idea that Kate Shugak could turn it on like this. She was always so sensible, so matter-of-fact, so businesslike. Not to mention hostile, antagonistic, and downright bitchy. It had been clear from the beginning that if she let a man into her life, it would be on her terms, and now, suddenly, she was revealing a secret identity, the Circe inside the Shugak.

He wondered if Jack Morgan had known of this secret identity. If Jack had, it would explain his willingness to cleave only unto her, even to serve out an eighteen-month hiatus in their relationship, waiting for her to come back to him.

Lucky, lucky bastard, he thought, not for the first time, and then pulled himself together. He wasn’t getting sucked into that, no matter how much-yes, he’d admit it-no matter how much he wanted her. It was just sex; that was all. Nobody ever died because they didn’t get laid. And it wasn’t like there was no one else he could go to for aid if such were the case. Laurel Meganack, for example. She’d batted enough eyelash his way to start a small tornado.

That was a plan. If there was anyone who could drive the ghost of Kate Shugak out of his mental attic, Laurel was the girl most likely.

With commendable resolution he ignored the little voice in his head that told him it had already been tried. The summer was strewn with the corpses of women who had heard on the Bush telegraph that Chopper Jim Chopin was once again open for business. The problem was that none of them seemed to hold his interest past “Hello.”

He spoke abruptly, hoping to divert her attention. “Have you talked to Dan lately?”

This would be Dan O’Brien, chief ranger for the Park, avowed Park rat, and longtime friend of Kate’s.

She didn’t exactly cease and desist in giving off pheromones, but he did sense a certain alertness that hadn’t been there the second before. “Somebody’s been trapping brown bears,” he said, his voice still sounding hoarse to his own ears.

“Have they,” Kate said, letting her eyes linger on his lower lip. She touched her own with her tongue.

He took a deep breath. “Yes, they have. Dan has found a dozen carcasses all over the Park. He says whoever it is is using cable snares.”

Kate abandoned her vamp stance for a moment. “Gutted?”

“Yeah.”

“Gallbladders removed?”

“Yeah.”

She swore.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You know who it is,” she said.

“Of course I know who it is,” he said, annoyed. “So do you, and so does Dan. Knowing and proving are two different things, as you also know very well.”

She smiled at him again. “You want me to help you prove it, or you want me to stop it? Which are also two very different things.”

“If we never had this conversation, I want you to stop it,” he said. “If we did, I need evidence.”

“Why don’t you find some?”

“I could,” he said, his jaw tight. “If I wanted to track down a judge who is most probably pulling kings out of a river somewhere in the Bush on the other side of the state at the moment. I could put together some kind of probable cause and get him to issue a warrant. And then of course I’d have to go out and serve it, and do a search, and make a list of all the property taken into evidence, and photograph the scene before and after, and put him under arrest, and transport him to Tok, because they still haven’t shipped the goddamn bars in for the cells in my brand-new Niniltna post, and all this would take me probably two days!”

His voice had been rising steadily throughout this peroration. He glared at her.

Kate laughed. It even sounded like genuine humor, as opposed to a come-on. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. Now, you can do something for me.”

He stiffened. “What?” he said warily.

She laughed again, and the siren was back. “Relax,” she said, still laughing, “I need a trial transcript.”

He was hugely relieved and at the same time bitterly disappointed. “Give me a name.”

“Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff.”

“Got a date?”

“How about a year? Count back thirty years.”

He stared at her. “Jesus, Shugak, we were barely a state thirty years back.”

“And I don’t want microfiche, I want it printed out on paper. I don’t think they were doing tapes back then, but who knows. I want a transcript, something I can read.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Not me. My client.”

“You’ve got a client?”

She nodded. “I’m headed into Anchorage in a couple of days.”

He couldn’t stop himself from saying, “How long you going to be gone?”

She smiled. Oh yeah, the siren was most definitely back. “Just long enough for you to miss me some more.”

Suddenly, the real Jim Chopin stood up. He stepped forward and bent down until the brim of his cap nearly touched her forehead. “I already do.”

In real life, this was Kate Shugak’s cue to back off, to give ground, usually with dignity, sometimes in a hurry, and always with attitude.

She didn’t move. She didn’t even blush. Instead, she leaned into him until the brim of his cap did touch her forehead, and said huskily, “There’s a cure for that.”

The mouse roared and he was outbluffed into an undignified retreat. “Yes. Well. I’ll get to work on that file. You get to work on our alleged poacher.”

“I want that file by tomorrow,” she said, raising her voice as he started the engine.

He raised a hand in acknowledgment without looking around.

She watched him vanish into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Who knew chasing Jim Chopin would be so much fun?

She climbed the stairs and went into the living room. Johnny looked up from the couch and scowled at her. She halted in midstride. “Does it bug you?”

“What?”

“Jim and me.” She didn’t elaborate, but Johnny was going on fifteen and extremely intelligent.

“There is no Jim and you.”

She grinned. “Not yet.”

His frown deepened. “He’s not good enough for you.”

“Absolutely not,” she said cheerfully. “No one is.”

“What about Dad?”

She sat down next to him and looped an arm around his neck. “He almost made the grade.”

The frown eased. “Only almost?”

“Well,” she said. “I really am something, after all.”

He was forced to laugh. “You sure are,” he said, and protested the headlock and the noogie she gave him.

“We’ll drive into town tomorrow, get you registered for school.”

He was not displeased by this news, as Vanessa Cox was in town, living with her adoptive parents, Annie and Billy Mike. “You gonna get that woman’s mom out of jail?”

Kate felt for the check crumpled in her pocket. “I’m going to try. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that I’m going to succeed.”

“You’ll do it,” Johnny said with boundless faith. “You always do.”…

That earned him another noogie, arid he squealed and wrestled free. “Where am I staying while you’re gone?”

“I figured Auntie Vi’s. She’s got the room, and it’s close enough for you to walk to school.”

“Okay.”

She gave him a suspicious look which he met with a bland stare. “I think it stinks that your love life is better than mine,” she said.

He blushed beet red, and she laughed.

Bright and early the next morning, they climbed into the cherry red pickup and lurched back up the twenty-five miles of road into Niniltna. The road ran through the heart of the Park, 20 million mostly pristine acres extending from the Canadian border on the east to Prince William Sound in the south to the TransAlaska Pipeline in the west to the Glenn Highway in the north. Plus maybe a little extra all the way around. It was sparsely populated, the biggest town being Ahtna, which technically wasn’t even in the Park but which was the market town for everyone who lived there-Park rats, rangers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, farmers, mostly Native and Anglo, living in tiny villages at the confluences of rivers, on land homesteaded by great- and great-great-grandfathers when the federal government strove to justify the expenditure of $7.2 million to purchase Alaska from Russia by offering incentives to Outsiders in the form of free land. This free land was far north of the fifty-three, but it was free, and in spite of the frosty latitude, a few thousand took the feds up on it. A few thousand more stayed on after the gold rush in 1898, and a few thousand more stayed on after World War II, and a couple of hundred thousand more after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Most of them stayed around long enough to put in their twenty and then decamped with their pensions to Arizona and Hawaii.

Fortunately, Kate thought as the truck lunged into a pothole and lunged out again, most of the six hundred thousand plus people living in Alaska today didn’t live in the Park. Nope, most of them lived in Anchorage.

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.”

“What logo?”

George screwed up his face. “Can’t remember. Some sports team maybe. Not the Kings.”

As in the Kanuyaq Kings, the local high school team, and very likely the only team logo George could recognize on sight. He was dutiful in his devotion to the hometown boys, but he wasn’t the biggest sports fan. “And this was last Tuesday?”

George nodded.

“Okay,” she said. She started to thank him, then caught his eye, and thought better of it. “I need a ride into town,” she said instead.

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

He thought for a moment before giving a short nod. “I can do that, if you don’t mind early.”

“I don’t mind early. Seven?”

He nodded again. “Don’t be late. I’ve got to be back here in time to bring the Grosdidier brothers home from Alaganik.”

“You can fit them all into one plane?”

He grinned, the most natural expression he’d shown her all summer. “I packs ‘em tight,” he said, adding, “Don’t tell the FAA.”

She drove up to the Niniltna Native Association headquarters, a prefabricated building beneath a metal roof that positively sang in the rain and to which even the heaviest snowfall did not stick, to the imminent danger of those walking into and out of the building through the set of double doors centered most precisely beneath its eaves. It looked as if someone had let Auntie Balasha off the chain because the side of the building facing the road was engulfed in flowers of every size and hue, from nasturtiums at the road’s edge to delphiniums tethered to stakes brushing the first-floor windowsills. It was a riot of color right across the spectrum, and it made the building look as if it housed something other than the organization that oversaw and administered the moneys and lands Kate’s tribe had received as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

Billy, chief of said tribe, looked up from his desk when Kate walked in, and, it must be said, paled at the sight of her. Kate, weary of this reaction, held up a hand. “It’s all right, Billy. You get to help me this time.”

He failed to hide his relief. “What do you need, Kate?”

Billy Mike’s face used to be as round as his body, and his smile at least as broad. He was thinner now, paler, too, and there was a bruised look in his eyes that had not been there before and that hurt Kate to see. It was only three months since he’d lost his youngest son, Dandy, and Billy and his wife, Annie, were both still grieving. They had taken in another child, a fourteen-year-old named Vanessa Cox, who was Johnny Morgan’s boon companion and who, Kate greatly feared, was rapidly becoming rather more than that. This was in addition to the Korean baby they had adopted when Annie began to suffer from empty nest syndrome, not to mention the six children who had grown up, gone to school, and, instead of moving back home, had stayed in Anchorage, where there were jobs and bars and cable television, and who were proving remarkably dilatory in providing the Mikes with the grandchildren both of them were vociferous about wanting.

That Billy and Annie didn’t blame Kate for Dandy’s death was a mystery for which she would be eternally grateful. That they had opened their home and hearts to Vanessa, the killer’s child, was even more extraordinary, but it was a fact that Vanessa, orphaned when both her parents had been killed in a car crash Outside and then shipped to Alaska to live with her nearest relatives, was looking more like a kid and less like a prematurely aged old woman than she had since she arrived in the Park the year before.

“I’m looking for Kurt Pletnikoff,” Kate said. “He’s not in the same old cabin out on Fool’s Gold Creek, is he?”

Billy shook his head. “He moved. He came into some money when his father died. The father evidently couldn’t figure out anybody better to leave it to. Kurt bought Luba Hardt’s property off Black Water Road and built himself a house. Sort of.”

“I didn’t know that,” Kate said. “Did Luba move out of the Park?”

“No, she just got thirsty, and Kurt happened to be standing next to her at the Roadhouse with a fistful of his daddy’s cash when she did.”

“Where’s she living now?”

“Last I heard, she was on the street in Anchorage. I got George to put the word out at Bean’s Cafe and the Brother Francis Shelter that when she wants to come home, we’ll foot the bill.”

“I’m going to Anchorage myself tomorrow or the next day,” Kate said. “I’ll look around.”

Billy nodded. “Appreciate it. Why do you want to know where Kurt is?”

Kate looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

He waved her off. “Yeah, I know, ask a dumb question. Don’t kill him, okay?”

“No promises,” Kate said, and left.

Kurt Pletnikoff’s home, if you could call it that, had been built on an elevated foundation of cement blocks around a frame of two-by-fours in a space in the middle of a thick stand of tall, heavy spruce that blocked out the sun. It was a gloomy little clearing, but neat, the wood stacked and the trash picked up.

The steps to the front and only door were made of more two-by-fours, in which there were a lot of nail pops to catch at the soles of Kate’s shoes. The building shook slightly when she knocked on the door. “Kurt?”

There was no answer.

She knocked again. “Kurt Pletnikoff? It’s Kate Shugak.”

Still no answer. She tried the handle. It was unlocked. She peered inside.

It was one room, about the size of her former cabin, with neither the loft nor the charm. The inside was even less prepossessing than the outside. A narrow iron cot with a thin mattress stood beneath the only window, a couple of green army blankets smoothed across it. A broken-down couch stood on one side of an oil stove made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. On the other side of the stove stood a table made of an old door, with two-by-fours for legs. There was a pile of magazines, nothing too sophisticated- Guns & Ammo, Sports Illustrated, Penthouse. A cupboard minus the doors had been screwed to one wall and was filled with canned and dry goods. A bag of apples, the top knotted off, sat on top of a bag of dog food.

The floor was clean, and a big galvanized garbage can sat next to the cupboard. A bowl, a spoon, and a mug were upended on a dish towel spread next to the apples.

Kate touched the bowl. A drop of water coalesced on her fingertip. She felt rather than heard motion behind her, and she stepped quickly to the left, dropping to the floor in a shoulder roll and regaining her feet in the same movement. She picked up the chair and brought the seat down on the head of the man who had been sneaking up behind her, not hard enough to knock him out, just hard enough to get his attention.

“Ouch!” the man yelled. He grabbed his head.

“Hi, Kurt,” Kate said, and put the chair down. It had been a while, and it pleased her to know that she still had the moves. Especially after she’d gotten blindsided by that shovel in May, an event she still couldn’t think of without a certain amount of shame. Mutt, galloping up to the door, her tongue lolling out to one side, surveyed the situation with an expert eye, gave a short congratulatory bark, and went back to sniffing out the moose cow and calf who had left such an intriguing scent trail crisscrossing the yard around the cabin. She wasn’t all that hungry, but like Kate she liked to know that she still got game.

Fifteen minutes later, Kurt was sitting on the bed and Kate was sitting on the chair. Two mugs of steaming chamomile tea-Kurt was into herbal teas-sat on the table, along with a box of sugar and a spoon.

“Did you have to hit me so hard?” Kurt said plaintively, rubbing the crown of his head with a careful hand. “I mean, Jesus, Kate.”

“Did you have to shoot half a dozen bears just for their gallbladders?” Kate said. “I mean, Jesus, Kurt. Where are they, by the way?”

“I worked hard for those bladders, Kate. You can’t just-”

“Yeah, I can. Where are they?” When Kurt looked stubborn, Kate surveyed the cabin. “Well,” she said, “if’s not much, but it’s home, and I have to say I like your housekeeping. Be a shame if I had to start tearing it apart.”

Kurt muttered something. “I beg your pardon?” Kate said, and sipped her tea. “This is pretty good tea. I’ll have to get some for myself.”

He stretched out one shaking hand for the other mug. She waited until he’d gotten on the outside of the better part of it. “Come on, Kurt,” she said with a patient, even kindly air, “I’m giving you a choice. I can either take them in or I can take you in.”

He looked up from his mug, hope in his eye as he fixed on the one relevant point in her dialogue. “You’re not taking me in?”

“Not if I don’t have to,” she said. She let the pleasant smile on her face fade. “Not this time. You pull this again, Kurt, and it’s federal prison for you-no passing go, no collecting two hundred dollars.”

He looked back into his tea. “I’m broke, Kate,” he said in a low voice.

“We’re all broke,” she said, “so what else is new? Being broke is part of living in the Park. You want to get rich, move to Anchorage and get yourself a job with the state.”

“You should talk,” he muttered. “You’ve got a brand-new house you don’t even have to-”

“Stop right there, Kurt.” Kate took another sip of tea. It really was quite good, soothing the instinctive embarrassment that threatened to overwhelm her at his words. He was right. With a house like that, she was nowhere near as broke as he was. She forced herself to speak evenly. “My house has nothing to do with you shooting bears to harvest their gallbladders and sell them on the black market. It’s illegal, and you know it. It’s harmful to maintaining a viable population of grizzlies in the Park, and you know that, too. And if you don’t understand that if you do this again Jim Chopin is going to have to take you into protective custody so that Dan O’Brian won’t feed your ass to those same grizzlies, you’re too stupid to live.”

He remained silent, head down.

“Where are they?” Kate said. “And don’t make me ask again.”

They were in a game bag secreted beneath a loose floorboard. They smelled pretty ripe.

Kurt watched her, glowering. She paused in the doorway, game bag in hand. “I don’t want to have to come back out here, Kurt.”

He maintained a surly silence. He wasn’t holding his head anymore, but he looked a little green. Nausea was a frequent companion to blunt-force head trauma, as Kate knew only too well, and she decided to leave him to it.

As she drove out of the clearing, she had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be her last visit to Kurt’s cabin.