Authors: Dana Stabenow
A brief silence, into which a shaken voice said, "Mom?"
"Your mom's okay. Put down that rifle before you hurt somebody else, Petey. Do it now."
"He had his gun out first!"
"Like hell I did!"
"I don't care who had whose gun out first," Kate roared again, "I want them both down on the ground! Now!" Too angry for caution she surged to her feet and swarmed down on Petey, a thin, pallid youth with the scraggly beginnings of a beard and an incipient whine. He shrank back against the truck as she approached and, lucky for him, wasn't fool enough to raise the rifle. She yanked it out of his hands and unloaded it. A fist knotted in hi s collar pulled him to his feet. "You dumb little shit," she said, and kicked his ass all the way across the parking lot. He uttered distressed yelps with every contact, which only made her want to kick him harder.
At the porch, Kate bent down to peer through the risers. "Wayne? Is that you?"
A burly bear of a man some twenty years the boy's senior crawled out from beneath the steps, soaked, shivering and covered with mud, still holding his pistol. Kate delivered a final kick up Petey's behind that propelled him headfirst into the side of the building. There was a thud, a groan, and he slid down on his butt in the mud, his head falling forward, tears streaking his cheeks.
Kate removed the .357 from Wayne's unresisting hand and unloaded it. "Where's the rest of it?" Wayne stared at her, uncomprehending, and she snapped her fingers impatiently. "Come on, Wayne, where's your ammo?" Mute, he produced a yellow cardboard box, half full of rounds. Kate stuffed it into the pouch of her wind breaker, feeling like a pregnant kangaroo, and tucked the pistol into her waistband at the small of her back. "How bad is Kay?"
Recalled to his wife's presence, the burly man dove down and hauled out a body that at first glance looked as if nothing could save it. Kay's entire right side was covered in blood. Kate, who had seen more than enough dead bodies for one day, swore and raised her voice. "Hey! Inside the bar! We need a medic out here on the double!"
Since the Ahtna Native Health Foundation had begun running EMT classes five years before, they had qualified ten Park residents in emergency medical training. As the most serious hunting, fishing and flying accidents tended to be instantly fatal, about the only thing the EMTs got to do was deliver babies, which led to a certain amount of professional frustration. Kate didn't have to ask twice; at least five doctor-wannabes, some the worse for liquor but if anything more enthusiastic because of it tumbled out of the Roadhouse to engulf the victim in TLC. Bernie produced blanket s and they formed a makeshift stretcher and carried Kay inside, where three tables had already been cleared to form an operating theater. The lady tourist was hovering on the fringes of the action, camera snapping, face flushed with excitement, her husband at her elbow. Mr. and Mrs. Baker, thankfully, remained in the background out of the way, glasses clutched tightly in their fists. Glasses, Kate noticed in passing, which testified to the consummate professionalism and dedication of their bartender. This was what, their fourth?
Kate was not an EMT and had no desire to become one. She shoved Petey into a chair and Wayne into a chair next to him, and went outside to fetch Mom, just regaining consciousness. When the three of them were lined up in front of her she said, "Okay, what the hell is going on here?"
Wayne, face white and strained and eyes fixed painfully on the crowd surrounding his wife, didn't answer. Mom was groggy but game. "Don't use that foul language around me, if you please."
"I don't please," Kate said unpleasantly. The woman returned no answer, and Petey's eyes slid away.
Behind her Bobby's voice said, "It's about the access road, isn't it, Petey?"
Petey wouldn't look at Bobby, either.
"The access road?" Kate said. "I thought you people got that settled last fall."
Mom, also known as Cheryl Jeppsen, Petey's mother and Joe's wife, raised a hand to her eyes, which were swelling into twin shiners of historic proportion and hue. "Godless heathens," she muttered.
A figure detached itself from the crowd around Kay and crossed the room. "Wayne?"
"Dandy?" Wayne looked up, dazed.
Slim and handsome with laughing brown eyes and an infectious grin, Dandy Mike had been one of the first Park rats to qualify as an EMT, from motives Kate was certain had more to do with getting women's clothes off them than ministering to the sick. H e was wiping red-stained hands on a bar rag. Wayne looked at the rag and his face went even whiter.
Dandy took a swift step forward and reached out to keep the big man from sliding off his chair to the floor. "Wayne, it's okay. Kay's going to be fine. The bullet hit her high up in the shoulder, from the looks of it small caliber, so there wasn't much damage." The .22, Kate guessed. "It's a through-and-through. We'll clean it and slap a bandage on it, and she'll be fine. She'll be hurting, but she'll be fine. Lucky thing Cheryl and Petey are such lousy shots."
Petey began to weep, long, sad tears rolling down his face and into his collar.
"Praise God," Cheryl said, although it didn't have quite the pious effect she'd hoped for.
"Oh for Christ's sake," Bernie said wearily, "stop with the everlasting Jesus-freaking, will you, Cheryl?"
Stiffening, Cheryl said, "You'll answer to the Almighty for that blasphemy, Bernard."
Dandy used his free hand to chuck Cheryl beneath her chin. "Cheryl honey, why don't you put a lid on it before I tell all these folks just how godless you could be in the old days?"
Cheryl's mouth snapped shut like a live trap and she flushed a deep red. "That life is all behind me now. I have confessed my sins to God and He has forgiven me."
Dandy gave an evil chuckle. "Even the night up on the bridge over Lost Chance Creek?"
Bobby, reprehensibly, grinned. "Tell us, Dandy. Sounds like a tale I'd sit still for."
"Okay?" Wayne said, belatedly fastening on the one word of Dandy's that mattered to him. "Kay's going to be okay?" His eyes fell on the bar rag again. "But I saw her, I-"
Dandy, reminded of his duties, turned back to Wayne and shook him once, gently, to stop the babble. "Wayne, Kay is going to be fine," he repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at Cheryl. Lucky for you, his eyes said. Cheryl's eyes held his for a momen t before sliding away. In that moment the family resemblance between her and Petey was very clear.
It sank in, and relief washed over Wayne's face. He got to his feet. "I want to see her."
"Fine," Dandy said soothingly. "Go ahead." They watched Wayne lumber off, and then Dandy turned to look Kate's drenched and muddy self over with a speculative eye. "Shugak, you are a mess." Gentle fingers touched her left temple and came away bloody.
She looked at his hand in surprise. "What's that?"
"Blood. Yours." He turned for a handful of cotton and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He dabbed at her temple and examined the result with a critical eye. "Yeah, she grazed you all right. As clean a crease as you'll ever want to see."
"I didn't feel it," Kate said blankly. The room took a half-turn around her. "I didn't even hear it."
Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that was probably better left untranslated, and came forward to grab Kate's arm and sit her firmly down in a chair, where she suffered not in silence beneath Dandy's ministrations.
"Oh, quit your bitching." Dandy shook his head, recapping the bottle. "It's just a scratch. It's not even bleeding now. You always did have more luck than you deserve, Shugak."
"You should talk," Kate retorted.
He looked her over again. "Anything else I should see to while I'm at it?"
Her head ached where she'd banged it against the side of the Roadhouse, but not bad enough to let Dandy Mike anywhere near her. "No way, Dandy. I don't need or want any more nursing."
He patted the air. "Fine, fine. Jesus, anybody'd think you were somebody's maiden aunt. I just wanted to help." The wounded sound of his voice was belied by a wide grin. "It's your loss, after all," he added, and sauntered off to prospect the crowd for a female patient with less resistance.
Kate remembered something still left undone. "I forgot about Joe. Watch these jerks," she said to Bobby, pointing at Cheryl and Petey, who she noticed for the first time was wearing a T-shirt inscribed "I Burn Banned Books." She wondered if she could turn Petey loose up around the Kanuyaq mine. Maybe the bear would get lucky a second time.
"Katya!" Auntie Vi said with indignation. Auntie Joy, who understood Kate better than her sister did, put a restraining hand on Vi's arm, although both aunties watched Kate leave the room in equally disapproving silence.
She found Joe groaning under a flatbed loaded with PVC. He'd tripped and managed to knock some of the PVC loose, which had returned the favor and rolled over on him, whereupon he'd fallen and fractured his tibia. Kate called Dandy out and he pulled an inflatable cast over the break with gentle hands. "There now," he told Joe, patting his shoulder comfortingly, "that'll hold you until you get to the clinic at Ahtna. You ought to be fine so long as you don't make any sudden-"
Kate grabbed Joe by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet. Joe screamed.
"-movements," Dandy finished. "Jesus, Kate," he added, but it was more in resignation than protest.
Inside the bar, Kate slung Joe down next to Cheryl and Petey, who was still sniveling. Kate would have liked to kick the boy again just on general principles.
"What you gonna do with them?" Bobby said, without much interest.
"I'm not doing anything," Kate said. "It's not my problem." Seemed like she'd been hearing herself say that same sentence all day, too. "You can call Chopper Jim if you want."
There was a brief silence.
"Well," Bobby said, "nobody's dead."
He looked at Bernie, who shrugged. No way was he going to swear out a complaint and have to be a witness at some trial in Glenallen or Palmer, or worse yet, Anchorage. Who would fill i n behind the bar? He looked across the floor at Enid, and shuddered. She was still pissed about Lisa Gette. Best not to push it.
No one else wanted to get tangled up witnessing and testifying, either, not with fishing season so close to starting. Wayne, asked if he'd like to press charges, shook his head numbly and accepted assistance in getting his wife into their vehicle. No one else stepped forward to lodge a complaint. Mr. Baker squinted into his empty glass. "Well, hell," Bobby said, disgusted. "Better get somebody to drive 'em to their place."
"We can drive ourselves," Cheryl said, sitting up.
"Right, and have you play bumper cars with Wayne and Kay all the way home," Bernie said. Just because he wasn't pressing charges didn't mean he wasn't thoroughly pissed off. "I'd as soon let a drunk out of here with his car keys in hand."
Kate had a fleeting wish that Ben Bingley confined his drinking to the Roadhouse. Bernie was the only bartender she knew who had a real conscience and acted on it. "You know, Cheryl," she couldn't resist saying, even knowing it would do no good, "the Bible says, Love thy neighbor. That's all it says. It doesn't say, Love thy neighbor only if he's a straight white antiabortion meat-eating bom-again right-wing Republican foot-washing Baptist. Love thy neighbor. That's all it says. You miss that verse, or what?"
"I didn't miss the verse that says even the devil can quote Scripture for his purpose," Cheryl snapped.
Feet wet, her head aching, Kate had to smile. "That's not in the Bible, Cheryl, it's in The Merchant of Venice."
She repaired to the bar, intercepted along the way by Frank Scully, who insisted on grasping her hand and shaking it warmly. "Goddam, if it isn't our trusty Eskimo protector! You do good work, Shugak! Saved all our asses yet again!"
The only reason he lived to see another dawn was that he was obviously drunk. "I'm not an Eskimo," she snapped, and shouldered him aside.
Bernie poured her a fresh Coke, the Bakers more Glenlivet, Bobby a bourbon and Dinah a glass of fizzy water with a twist o f lime. Steven Seagal was still on the television screen, now getting on a horse in the company of a Chinese actress playing an Eskimo woman, although judging by the thickness of the tree trunks in the background, she should have been a Tlingit or a Haida or maybe even a Tsimshian. "Can you ride a horse?" asked our hero, and the actress glowed and replied, "Of course! I'm a Native American!" at which point Old Sam Dementieff alarmed all the other old coots at his table by going off into what appeared to be an apoplectic fit. "Horses!" he recovered enough to wheeze. "In Alaska! Yah sure, you betcha! Head 'em up! Move 'em out! Ride 'em cowboy! Yeehaw! Just let me hitch my dogsled up to those oat-burners, yawl!"
"I beg your pardon, but what is all this concerning an access road?" Mr. Baker said. The weighty and meticulous manner in which he put his words together caused Kate's eyes to narrow in sudden suspicion.
Bernie jerked his head toward the trio in the corner. "Those are the Jeppsens. They homesteaded forty acres on Mad Mountain six years ago." He jerked his head at the front door through which Wayne and Kay had disappeared, Dandy helping her down the steps and copping a discreet feel while he was at it. "Those are the Kreugers. They got the forty acres next door to the Jeppsens, five years ago."
"Most of the problem," Bobby said, "is that Kay and Wayne have master's degrees and Joe and Cheryl dropped out of high school."
"Yeah," Dinah said, "the Kreugers actually read books, can you imagine?"
"Dreadful," Mrs. Baker said, very much the dowager duchess.
"Deplorable," Mr. Baker said, eyelids closing and opening again in a long, slow blink, like an owl.
"And of course," Bobby said, "the Jeppsens are your ordinary, everyday born-again Christian fanatics, who think the Bible is the only book necessary. They home-schooled Petey," he added, "so they could keep him away from all those ungodly teachers at Niniltna High."
"And you see how well it took," Bernie pointed out, but the n Bernie, the local basketball coach, always resented any reduction in the available talent pool for his team, and Petey was almost five foot ten.