Whisper to the Blood (27 page)

She paused, but he could tell she wasn't done, so he waited.

"I hate this," she said with a heartfelt intensity. She picked the
fork up again, evidently this time for the sole purpose of slamming it down.

"What?" he said.

"This!" she said, waving a hand that indicated the space between
the two of them. "I hate it that I care this much! That I care for you
more than either of us is comfortable with!" She glared at him. "If I
could snap my fingers or wiggle my nose or click my heels three times together
and make it all go away, I would!" She put a lid on the frying pan,
removed it, and slammed it back on again.

"I'm not loving it a whole lot, either," he said, stung, and his
voice rising with it. "You think this is easy for me? I've never had a
relationship last this long. Hell, I've never had whatever the hell that word
means before! But you're in my life, Kate, whether I like it or not, and there
doesn't seem to be a whole hell of a lot I can do about it!"

"Well, I'm sorry it's such a trial to you!"

"I didn't say that!" He registered that he was almost shouting
with a faint astonishment that failed to moderate his tone. "I'm okay with
it! But I'll tell you something I'm not okay with!"

"What?"

He took a deep breath, mastering his anger with an effort, the anger and the
effort both still a surprise. "I am not okay with you keeping evidence
quiet that pertains to an ongoing investigation."

It was her turn to say, "Huh?"

He gave it to her bluntly, without trying to soften the words. Maybe he even
meant to hurt her this time, and maybe that was because he was furious and
frightened that he felt guilty and maybe even a little hurt himself that she
had so immediately decided that the rumors were true, and he wanted to share
the pain. "I've got Howie Katelnikof sitting in a cell at the post."

"You arrested Howie?"

"Not yet, although I've got a pretty good case for him hunting caribou
out of season, in amounts that I can prove are commercial. No, Howie appears to
think he needs protection from whoever it is who's trying to kill him."

She stared at him for a moment. "So, who does he think is trying to
kill him?" And, Katelike, returning like a little homing pigeon to the
original item under discussion, "And what does that have to do with me
withholding evidence in an ongoing investigation? What investigation?"

"Louis Deem's murder."

She flushed and hung her head, looking undeniably guilty. "Oh,"
she said weakly.

Ruthlessly he pressed his advantage. "Howie says the four aunties hired
the job done, Kate."

Her head snapped back up and she stared at him, obviously shocked.
"What?"

"Just when were you going to let me in on that little tidbit of
information?"

At this inopportune moment, Johnny returned with the peas and onions.
"Here you go, Kate," he said with false cheer. "Sorry it took me
so long, the veggie box is kinda buried in moosemeat."

She was still staring at Jim with her mouth open and no sound coming out.
Jim was still glaring at her. Johnny looked from one to the other and said,
"You know what? Van's having some trouble with the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act, getting the movers and shakers straight, Willie Hensley,
Tyonek, all those guys. We've got a test on it tomorrow in History of Alaska
class. I think I'm going to drive over and help her out."

He fetched a daypack from his bedroom and swept the books and papers on the
dining table into it with more efficiency than finesse. "Don't worry about
me," he said, still cheery, "I'm sure An-nie'll give me dinner and a
bed for the night."

Still nothing from the tableau vivant at the kitchen counter.

Johnny looked at Mutt. "You want to come with?"

Mutt cocked one ear and bent a reflective gaze on Kate and Jim, but in the
end decided she didn't want to be compared to a rat deserting a sinking ship,
and sneezed a polite refusal.

"Yeah, well, just try to stay out of the line of fire," Johnny
said, and left the building. A moment later the Arctic Cat started up, followed
immediately by the sound of it moving up the track to the road and out of
earshot. Truth to tell, he was a little surprised at getting away with it, the
twenty-five-mile drive alone through a cold winter night. He was heartened at
this apparent evidence of faith in his maturity.

Meanwhile, back in the house, Kate had barely registered his departure.
"I—," she said. "I—"

He was suddenly and thoroughly fed up. "Yeah, you," he said,
rounding the counter. She slapped off the burners and turned to face him.
"You don't trust me not to be sleeping with anyone else. You don't trust
me enough to inform me of crucial evidence in an open murder
investigation."

"But I didn't—"

"What do you trust me for, Kate?" He looked down at her and the
anger whipped itself into a white-hot flame. "Oh hell, we both know what
you trust me for," and he picked her up off her feet and kissed her so
hard she felt her lip split.

She squirmed, her feet dangling a good foot off the floor, pushing against
his shoulders, bending herself backward so she could free herself enough to
speak. "No, Jim, wait—"

This only inflamed him further. "Wait, my ass," he said, and
started for the stairs to the loft.

Mutt came to her feet at that, her yellow eyes wide. "You stay right
there," he told her. "This is between us."

Mutt looked uncharacteristically indecisive. Attack or stay? Was Kate in
trouble or not?

Meanwhile Kate began struggling in earnest. "No, Jim, stop, you don't
understand—"

"I understand plenty," he said, starting up the stairs.

She was strong and slippery but he had more muscle mass than she did, as
well as a longer reach, and he managed to hold on until he got them upstairs.
He didn't so much drop her to the bed as throw her at it. She bounced once and
tried to scramble to the floor.

"Oh no you don't," he said, and 220 pounds of outraged male
dropped full on her, driving all the breath out of her body.

"Jim—," she said, her voice a squeak of sound.

"Shut up," he said, kneeing her legs apart. He was fully aroused,
hard against her. "Just shut the hell up."

She fought him, she really did, but he ripped the white T-shirt over her
head and left it to tangle her hands before he went for the buttons on the fly
of her jeans.

"Jim, don't," she said frantically, "not like this."

"Just like this," he said, ripping open her jeans and shoving them
down. He kissed her again, not so much a caress as a claiming, rough and
demanding.

This time she kissed him back, biting at his lips, his jaw, setting her
teeth into his throat almost hard enough to draw blood. He growled and bit back
and he wasn't gentle. Her bra went somewhere and his teeth were at her breast
and her panties went next, shredded and tossed. His hand was between her legs,
forcing entry, demanding a response, and she couldn't stop it any more than she
could stop the sun rising or the rain falling, she arched up into his caress
with an involuntary groan.

He laughed once, low in his throat, his hand moving. "Yeah," he
said. He could feel the heat rising up off her body in a scorching wave, and he
reached for his fly, only to find her hands there before him. A second was too
long to wait, and then he was there and sliding home, and she moaned, a long,
drawn-out sound compounded of pleasure, relief, and fury, arching up in demand.
He didn't bother with preliminaries, he started moving, long, slow, hard
strokes, in and out, in and out. "Jesus," he said, breathless,
"babe," he said, "Kate," he said, "oh Kate oh holy
shit Kate, Kate, Kate!"

His eyes went dim but he felt her body tense like a strung bow and he heard
her shout something, what he never knew and she couldn't remember. A blinding
flood of pleasure and release started at the base of his spine and flooded up
over his body like lava, burning out every living nerve end he had, leaving a
wasteland of scorched earth and gray ash behind.

SEVENTEEN

H
e was gone when she woke up the next
morning. On the whole, Kate was relieved. She rolled to the edge of the bed and
to her dismay her legs wouldn't support her at first. When she felt confident
enough to get to her feet, she staggered a little before she found her balance,
and though she hated to admit it she was walking a little splay-legged on her
way into the bathroom, where she ran a tub of water as hot as she could stand
it. She let herself down into the tub with gingerly care and soaked until the
water went tepid, by which time she was marginally mobile again and grateful
for it.

The clothes she had been wearing the day before were beyond repair, even the
jeans, the fly torn open and one of the buttons missing. She hunted for it but
it was not to be found. With a sigh she bundled up T-shirt, jeans, bra, and
panties and went downstairs. From her place in front of the long-dead fire,
Mutt looked up and gave her a long yellow stare, eyebrows pointedly raised.

"You just shut up," Kate said, and went into the kitchen to find
that Jim had left her a fresh pot of coffee. She thought about pouring it out
and making her own, one untainted by Chopin hands.

Wasteful, though, and hypocritical. All her anger at him had been seared
away over the long and tumultuous night. She winced into a seat at the table,
and sipped coffee and watched the sky lighten in the east. Mostly cloudy, and
the thermometer mounted outside the window showed the temperature at ten above.
She'd miss the sun of the past week but she would welcome the warmer weather.
They all would.

There was a tendency to dwell on the events of the previous evening. She
forced those memories into a corner of her mind and shut the door on them, for
now, turning her focus to the startling revelation Jim had made, that had
knocked her so sideways she couldn't even- No, Kate, she thought fiercely.
Focus.

All right. First, she had to consider the source. Howie was a congenital
liar. Truth was such an alien concept to Howie that it might as well have a
green card. Anything that came out of Howie's mouth had to be evaluated in the
context of Howie's life, known associates, current misdemeanors, and planned
felonies. There ought, in fact, to be a frequent felony plan for Howie. So many
felonies and he got so many free days in jail. Oh wait, they already had one of
those.

On the other hand, Howie was also capable of recognizing the truth as a
commodity, with market value, which value might be exchanged for protective
custody in the event Howie felt his life threatened.

Kate got up and poured herself some more coffee. She noted that half the
coffee cake was gone, as well as a loaf of the white bread, most of the fried
liver, leaving the rest congealed on the bottom of the frying pan, and all of
the mashed potatoes. Jim had been hungry this morning.

She stood still, staring down at the empty and half-empty dishes.

If he could be believed, he hadn't slept with Talia Macleod.

One of the reasons she had a hard time believing it was that she couldn't
understand why not. It was what Jim did, it was who he was. He was a dog. He
admitted it. For a long time, he had positively gloried in it. The Father of
the Park might be only an honorific, but it was certainly true in spirit. Kate
would need double the fingers and toes to count the names of the women he'd
been involved with over the years.

So, why wouldn't he sleep with Talia Macleod? The question was baffling, and
unanswerable.

The cinnamon in the streusel topping teased at her nostrils, and her stomach
growled in response. She started to cut a wedge and then put down the knife and
got out a fork. She carried the cake tin to the table with the fresh cup of
coffee and waded in.

Howie could have made it up. It wouldn't have been the first time he had
indulged in creative fiction to divert attention from his own indiscretions.

She shoved the coffee cake away. Then why did she feel so sick? So
apprehensive? So terrified?

She donned boots, parka, hat, and gloves and poured coffee into an insulated
mug, dosing it with enough half-and-half to make café au lait. Mutt
trotted over and Kate let them out the door, snagging a blue plastic boat
cushion from the bench on the deck on the way.

Around the back of the house she postholed through the snow to the little
bluff that overlooked the creek running in back of her house. Frozen solid, the
resulting chasm looked like a lightning bolt imprisoned in the earth. Bare
birch and aspen branches bent beneath the weight of frost, spruce trees slowly
dying from the spruce bark beetle infestation were transformed into fairy-tale
homes for elves and wizards. An arctic hare peeped out from a blueberry
thicket, nose quivering, and freezing into immobility when it felt the weight
of Mutt's interested eye. On the eastern horizon the Quilaks loomed large and
menacing, mercenaries in arms to the gathering clouds overhead. Another battle
for winter in the Park's near future was imminent, or the portents lied.

"Why do I think he's telling the truth?" Kate said out loud.
"I'm not even fighting it."

For some reason, she remembered the trip down the river, talking to the
Kaltaks, the Jeffersons, the Rileys. As sure as she was sitting here, they were
to the last man, woman, and child convinced that the Johansens were responsible
for the attacks. And to the last man, woman, and child they were equally
convinced that the Johansens had been brought to account for their crimes.

Kate was afraid that they were right. Someone had decided on their own to
take care of the problem.

"Like the aunties," she said out loud, feeling sick again. She
swallowed hard. "Like the aunties might have taken care of Louis
Deem."