Whisper to the Blood (2 page)

"The usual suspects," he said, in answer to Kate's question.
"Pretty quiet on the northern front." He frowned down at the
gingerbread, which didn't deserve it. "I have to say, it's been an odd
summer all around, though."

Between the case and deckhanding for Old Sam on the
Freya
during
the salmon season, Kate was a little out of touch on current Park happenings.
"How so?"

He meditated for a moment. "Well, I guess I could sum it up by saying
people haven't been calling me."

She looked up at that, amused. "What, are you bored? Suffering from a
deficiency of mayhem?"

He smiled briefly and without much humor. "I guess what I mean is I'm
getting called out a lot, but only after the fact."

She was puzzled. "I'm sorry? You're always called out after the fact. A
crime is committed, victim calls the cops. That's the way it works."

"That's the way things are supposed to work." He put the Saran
Wrap back over the cake and leaned on the kitchen counter. "I'll give you
an example. Just today, Bonnie had to call me down to the post office to break
up a fight between Demetri and Father Smith."

"What happened?"

"Smith dug up a section of Beaver Creek." Kate thought for a
moment. "Demetri has a trapline on a Beaver Creek."

"This would be the same creek. Demetri was seriously pissed off, big
surprise, but instead of getting me, or maybe Dan O'Brien, chief ranger of this
here
Park
, to call Smith to account, Demetri
tracks him down on his own and proceeds to beat the living crap out of
him."

The Smiths were a large family of cheechakos who had bought a homestead from
Vinnie Huckabee the year before and had come close to federal indictment for
the liberties they had taken with the Park land across their borders,
principally with a Caterpillar tractor they had rented from the aforesaid Mac
Devlin. "Really," Kate said. "What a shame."

"Yeah, I know, that's why I didn't toss the both of them in the clink.
Anyway, I only meant the story as kind of an example of what's been going
on."

"A lot of people been messing around on Park lands?"

"No, a lot of people taking the law into their own hands. Demetri alone
wouldn't make me think, but when Arliss Kalifonsky shoots Mickey the next time
he raises a hand to her, when Bonnie Jeppsen tracks down the kid who put the
rotting salmon in the mailbox and keys his truck, and when the aforementioned
Dan O'Brien kicks a poacher's ass all over downtown Niniltna when said poacher
tries to sell Dan a bear bladder, then I think we can say we might maybe got
something of a trend going on."

"Sounds like breakup, only the wrong time of year."

"God, I hope not. One breakup per year is my limit."

He brought cake and coffee to the table and just as he was sitting down she
said, "While you're up . . . ," and pushed her mug in his direction.
He heaved a martyred sigh and brought her back a full cup well doctored with
cream and sugar.

"They're really moving," Kate said. "Global Harvest. Buying
out Mac this quick. When did they buy those Suulutaq leases?"

Jim thought back. "When was the final disposition made on the
distribution of lands in Iqaluk?"

Iqaluk was fifty thousand acres of prime Alaskan real estate tucked between
the
Kanuyaq
River
and
Prince William Sound
, in the southeast
corner of the Park. It boasted one of the last unexploited old-growth forests
left in the state, although the spruce had been pretty well decimated by the
spruce bark beetle. There were substantial salmon runs in the dozens of creeks
draining into the Kanuyaq, and there wasn't a village on the river that didn't
run a subsistence fish wheel. With several small caribou herds that migrated
between feeding grounds in
Canada
and breeding grounds on the delta, Iqaluk had been aboriginal hunting grounds
for local Alaska Natives for ten thousand years.

It was equally rich in natural resources. Seventy-five years ago oil had
been discovered on the coast near Katalla and had been produced until it ran
dry. A hundred years ago, the world's largest copper mine had been discovered
in Kanuyaq. All that was left of the mine was a group of deserted, dilapidated
buildings. Niniltna, the surviving village four miles down the road, had as its
origins the Kanuyaq miners' go-to place for a good time. It was a productive
mine for thirty-six years, until World War II came along and gave the owners an
excuse to close down the then depleted mine and rip up the railroad tracks
behind them as they skedaddled Outside with their profits.

With a history like that, it was no wonder that ownership of Iqaluk had been
fiercely contested for nearly a century before title was settled, which
settlement had satisfied no one. Dan O'Brien, chief ranger, had wanted Iqaluk's
total acreage incorporated into the existing Park. The state of Alaska wanted
Iqaluk deeded over wholly either to Alaska's Department of Natural Resources
or, failing that, to the U.S. Forest Service, famed for its aid and comfort to
timber and minerals management companies. The Niniltna Native Association
wanted it as a resource for hunting and fishing, if possible solely for its own
shareholders and if not, at least for
Alaska
residents only, managed by a strict permitting process that gave preference to
local residents.

Land ownership in
Alaska
was, in fact, a mess, and had been since Aleksandr Baranov stepped ashore in
Kodiak in 1791. Until then Alaska Natives had been under the impression that
land couldn't be owned, of which notion Baranov speedily disillusioned them.
After the Russians came the Americans, with their gold rushes, Outside fish
processors, and world wars, which brought a whole bunch more new people into
the territory, including Kate's Aleut relatives, resettled in the Park after
the Japanese invaded the
Aleutian Islands
.

Statehood came, due mostly to political machinations involving
Hawaii
becoming a state at the same time and Eisenhower
wanting to field three Republicans to Congress to balance out the expected
three Democrats from the
Aloha
State
. After statehood
came the discovery of oil, first in Cook Inlet and then a super-giant oil field
at
Prudhoe Bay
. The new rush was on, to build
the Trans-Alaska

Pipeline to bring the crude to market, which project came to a screeching
halt when Alaska Natives cleared their collective throats and said,
"Excuse me? A forty-eight-inch pipeline across eight hundred miles of
aboriginal hunting grounds? That's going to cost you," and made it stick.
Passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and later, the Alaska
National Interest Lands Conservation Act, pulled a bunch more acreage off the
table, which left less than ten percent of Alaska in private hands. Wildlife
refuges, national parks, state parks, yes. Farms, ranches, corporate preserves,
no.

Of course, a lot of people had made their way to Alaska long before the
wherefores and whyases of said acts were a twinkle in Congress's eye, many
under the auspices of the Homestead Act, others who came north with the gold
rush and stayed, who came north with the army and the air force and returned
after mustering out, who came north as crew on fishing boats or canneries,
married locally, and settled in for the duration. Their holdings were
grandfathered in and the parks and refuges created around them. Which was why
Dan O'Brien's map of the Park, on the wall of his office in Park HQ on the Step,
had all those minuscule yellow dots on it, each one signifying private
ownership.

Land in
Alaska
,
who owned it, and who could do what on it where was in fact a subject that
preoccupied an embarrassing amount of everyone's time and attention-public official,
corporate officer, and private citizen. Any discussion of the subject was
generally preceded by all combatants producing driver's licenses and comparing
numbers. The lower the number, the longer they'd been in the state, and the
longer they'd been in the state, the louder and longer they got to talk.

"Land ownership in
Alaska
is like time travel in science fiction," Kate said out loud. "How
so?"

"Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. Where's Martin now?"

"Sleeping it off in the lockup. I'll let him out in the morning."
He thought for a moment, and added, "If the aunties have calmed down by
then. The quilt was for Auntie Edna's granddaughter."

"Yeah, I know. Elly. She's ready to pop any time."

"Who's the dad?"

"She won't say."

Jim took a long look at Kate's closed expression. There had been some
muttering about a priest at the private school Elly had attended in Ahtna. No
doubt he'd hear all about it in time from Ahtna police chief Kenny Hazen,
whether he wanted to or not. He just hoped that if the rumor was true, Auntie
Edna wouldn't follow the current trend and settle accounts with the man
herself. He shuddered to think of the damage the four aunties could inflict if
they put their minds to it. "Any luck on a vehicle for the kid?"

Johnny Morgan, son of Kate's dead lover Jack Morgan and Kate's foster son,
had achieved the ripe old age of sixteen, and was now in the market for a
vehicle of his very own.

Kate's face cleared. "Bobby's putting it out on Park Air this
afternoon. I imagine somebody's got a junker they want to unload."

"You care if it runs?"

She made a face. "I'd rather it didn't."

He laughed out loud this time, and she was forced into a chuckle herself.
"I didn't mean it that way," she said. "Or mostly not. I'd just
rather he spent some time under the hood before he started driving himself. He
should know how to change the oil and a flat and the points and plugs. You
know."

"No," he said.

She looked at him, amazed and a little scornful. "You don't know how to
change a flat?"

"In theory, I do," he said. "Never had to, though. And I
would rather I never had to."

"You will," Kate said with certainty and perhaps with some
smugness mixed in. "Probably in winter. Probably January. The middle of
the night. You'll be barreling down the road and one of your tires will pick up
an old railroad spike and that'll be it, you'll have to stop and get your hands
dirty."

"Or I could call you for help," he said. "You do know how to
change a tire."

"That I do," she said.

"I'd expect there to be a price," he said.

"You'd expect correctly," she said.

"And I'd expect to pay it," he said, "in full," and he
grinned at her.

The combination of wide grin, crinkled blue eyes, and rumpled dark blond
hair was enough to make a grown woman sigh, but if Kate did sigh she kept it to
herself. No point in giving Chopper Jim any leverage. Six-foot-four to her five
feet, he outweighed her by seventy pounds and was as white as she was Native.
Not to mention that he was a serial womanizer and she was strictly a one-man
woman. He'd never expressed any interest in having children and here she was, a
foster mother, and the kid was the son of Jim's ex-rival for Kate's affections,
no less. Plus Jim was a cop and she was a PI.

By any sane standard of measurement, they shouldn't be here. Wherever here
was. It's not like either one of them knew.

He ate the last bite of cake and washed it down with the rest of his coffee.
"So, where is the kid?"

"At Annie's, splitting wood for her winter supply."

He snorted. "Sure he is."

Annie Mike was the guardian of one Vanessa Cox, Johnny's best bud ever since
he'd arrived in the Park. Vanessa had been a gawky and awkward child who was
growing into a very attractive young woman. Neither Jim nor Kate held out much
hope that Johnny hadn't noticed. "That's my story and I'm sticking to
it," Kate said.

"You two have the talk?"

"About seventeen times. I even gave him a box of condoms." She
smiled at the memory. "He nearly died."

He laughed. "I bet." He stood up and pulled her to her feet, stepping
in close. "Did we have the talk?"

His teeth nibbled at her ear. Her eyes drooped, her nipples hardened, her
thighs loosened. 'Twas ever thus with Jim, and it would have annoyed her if she
hadn't seen the pulse beating frantically at the base of his throat. "We
did," she said, her voice the merest thread of sound.

"Thank god for that," he said, and led her upstairs.

Mutt returned from an extended lope around the homestead, her daily
constitutional, nosed the lever handle on the door open, and bounded inside.
She had been alerted to the presence of her favorite trooper by his truck in
the clearing outside and was impatient to demonstrate her affection upon his
person.

Instead, she paused just inside the door to cock a sapient ear at the
ceiling. She listened for a moment, and then, displaying a tact it was a shame
no one was there to see, quietly let herself out again.

TWO

T
he following weekend Kate and Johnny
were under the hood of a 1981 Ford F-150 short-bed pickup truck, acquired from
the son of one of Auntie Balasha's childhood friends, who had died in Ahtna at
the age of ninety-seven after a life spent smoking like a chimney, drinking
like a fish, and marrying seven times, which, as the son told Kate,
"should be a lesson to us all." The truck had less than 75,000 miles
on it and the son had sold it to Johnny for $2,500. It was dark blue, the bed
offered up only a few rust spots after the most minute inspection, and Kate had
thought on the day of purchase and thought now that it was a steal. She had
even made a half-hearted attempt to offer the seller more money, an offer the
son, an affable man in spite of being named Zebulon Porkryfki, had waved off.
"I think Gramps'd like to see it go to a young man all full of juice and
go. No, $2,500'll do."