A Cold-Blooded Business (9 page)

Jerry leaned his forehead in one shaking hand for a moment. "It's going to be one of those nights, isn't it?" he asked the floor.

It was. There was another medical emergency, this one at Rig 63, and the operator advised the senior physician's assistant on staff to betake himself there at once. Jerry made arrangements for Martin to join his bunkie in Lil's ambulance and asked Kate, "You want me to drop you off at the Base Camp?" Kate looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. He shrugged. "It's your funeral." But as they climbed into the ambulance he gave her a sideways grin. "Just like old times, ain't it?"

"Ain't it, though?" she agreed.

They fought their way through the wind and snow across the field to H

Pad. Where the access road turned off the Backbone they found a bright orange Chevy Suburban encrusted with years of drilling mud, though it didn't need to look its best since it wasn't going anywhere in the immediate future. Of the four tires, only one was still on the road, and from the looks of the front axle, it would be the only tire on the road for a while. Jerry got out and checked the cab.

"Nobody inside." He climbed in and got on the radio. "RPetco Base, this is Medic One, we've just turned off on the H Pad access road and there's a Suburban off the road here. Looks like the rig reps. It's partially in the way of oncoming traffic, you'd better get Transportation out here."

"Medic One, RPetco Base, we know about that, we have dispatched equipment."

Jerry raised an eyebrow. "Okay, RPetco Base, Medic One out."

A quarter of a mile farther on they came across a forklift, painted the same bright orange, "Naborhoff orange," Jerry said when Kate asked.

"They paint all their equipment that color, the same way Brinker paints all theirs Brinker blue."

"Why?"

"Keeps ' from stealing each other's equipment. Hey, look. It's missing a fork."

"It's also in the ditch," Kate said. "Upside down."

"You noticed that, too?" Again Jerry got out to look, and again there were no discernible bodies, although it was hard to be sure someone hadn't staggered off into the howling storm. He climbed back in the ambulance and reached for the radio. "RPetco Base, this is Medic One again, yeah, Sue, about a quarter of a mile down the access road from that Suburban is a wrecked forklift. It isn't as much of a traffic hazard as the Suburban, but you'd better notify Transportation anyway.

And maybe get the rig to run a nose count? I don't see anyone at the scene, but if the driver's wandered off somewhere we'd better find out."

"Yeah, Jerry, actually we know about the forklift, too, and the drivers have already been, ah, found."

This time both eyebrows went up. "Okay, RPetco Base, Medic One out."

A half mile more and they were on the well pad. A row of well houses passed on their right, and something that Kate thought at first was another well house, but when they approached closer and the headlights picked it out of the blowing snow, it resolved itself into a jim-dandy of a helicopter, or what had been one. It was painted the same Naborhoff orange as the Suburban and the forklift and was in about the same shape.

Canted heavily over on one side, one of the rotors was bent like a paper straw. The skin of the starboard pontoon had a large hole in it. The pilot's door was missing. The inside was already coated with a layer of fine, dry snow. It had missed coming down on the nearest well house by a scant twelve inches.

Jerry rubbed his chin, regarding the helicopter musingly. After a while he reached for the mike. "RPetco Base, this is Medic One. I bet you already know about the chopper."

"Roger that, Medic One." "Uh-huh," Jerry said. "Is it a full moon tonight, by any chance?"

"I'll check."

"Thanks, Sue, Medic One clear." He hung up the microphone and turned to Kate. "You remember Mclsaac's Three Laws?"

Kate, mesmerized by the downed chopper, said woodenly, "Uh-huh."

"Okay, what's the first law? Kate? What's the first law?"

Kate roused herself from her absorption. "Mclsaac's first law is to look out for myself."

"Okay, what's the second law?"

"Second law is to look out for my partner."

"The second and most important law," he corrected himself. "And the third?"

"Third law is to look out for my patient."

He gave her shoulder a rough thump. "That's my girl. I think tonight we'll make the second law the first law, though, okay? Let's go."

Kate wasn't sure whether she wanted to or not, but she couldn't let Jerry face whatever lurked inside Rig 63 all by himself. She raised a square chin, squared heroic shoulders and marched up the stairs leading to the rig's camp. She wasn't, however, quite so foolish as to take the lead, and when Jerry opened the door she waited until he was well inside and no audible blows had been struck or shots fired before she followed.

It was quiet inside. Too quiet. A tall, big-bellied man in striped gray overalls and an orange, duck-billed Naborhoff cap glared from beneath grizzled eyebrows. The subjects of his glare were seated back to back in the center of a room Kate identified as the rig camp's dining and recreation area. There was no one else in the room except for a white-clad kitchen helper, his back to them. He was scrubbing out the serving line as if his life depended on it. From the expression on the big-bellied man, Kate thought that it might.

"Hey, Bear," Jerry said to the big-bellied man. He sounded cautious, not without cause. Rage radiated off the big-bellied man like heat.

"Jerry," Bear said through his teeth.

Still cautious, Jerry inquired, "What's going on?"

Bear looked at him. Jerry didn't back up but only because pride wouldn't let him. Bear's gaze shifted to Kate, who received the distinct impression of being scorched. Lastly, Bear looked back at the two men in the center of the room, who weren't sitting still because they wanted to but because there were bound in place with enough rope to restrain King Kong. "Ask them," the big-bellied man replied, still between his teeth.

Jerry got a penlight out of his bag and shined it in the two men's eyes.

He looked at Kate. She reached for one man's wrist. His skin was cool and clammy to the touch, his pulse rapid and erratic. He was incapable of focusing on her upraised fingers, much less counting them.

He sported several bruises about his face and neck. His arms and legs looked whole, but she wondered if she should check for broken ribs.

Instead, she straightened and nodded in response to the question in Jerry's eyes.

He straightened. "Coke?" The big-bellied man's red face became redder.

He gave a curt nod. "On the floor?" Another nod. "And in the chopper?

And the forklift? And the Suburban, too, I suppose?"

Bear nodded again, although Kate couldn't see how he managed, so rigid with wrath was he.

"Fuck ' if they can't take a joke," one of the men mumbled inopportunely behind them.

The kitchen helper froze. In the next instant he began to sidle around the serving line. Next to Kate, Jerry sucked in an audible breath and with a show of amiable briskness inquired, "I suppose you'll be making their services available to the industry? Fine, good, I'll just call Security, get them taken off your hands." Without waiting for the other man's permission he pulled his radio out. "Security guards have been dispatched to the scene," Sue assured him, twice. Kate could tell he wanted to ask how many and how soon, but he managed to restrain himself.

They waited until the security guards showed, whiling away the interim two hours by making one-sided conversation with Bear, whom Jerry introduced as Bear Honeysett, RPetco's rig representative on Naborhoff

63. Those two hours, two of the longest in Kate's life, were just long enough for her to decide she was glad John King hadn't hired her through a drilling contractor. She might have had to pee in a bottle in front of a witness, but at least she was alive to tell the tale. If she and Jerry had left the two roughnecks alone with Bear Honey sett, she wasn't sure they would have been.

Back in the ambulance she said, "Just so I've got the sequence of events straight--those two got higher than kites, got kicked off the rig floor and took off in the Suburban?"

"Uh-huh."

"And when they ran it off the road, they came back and took the forklift?"

"Yup."

"And when they wrecked the forklift, they came back for the helicopter!"

He grinned at the windshield. "Looks like."

Kate sat back in her seat. "Why are they still alive?" She wasn't talking about the damage the three separate vehicle crashes should have inflicted on the roughnecks' hapless bodies.

Neither was Jerry when he replied, "Good question." Kate said, and it wasn't entirely part of her investigation when she did, "You people have a real problem with drugs."

The engine caught and turned over. "Oh, hell, Kate," Jerry said easily,

"you know if you had your way you'd bring back Prohibition.

Looks like the weather's clearing a little."

It was. During the next thirty minutes the snow ended and the wind died down, enough to see the commotion outside Construction Camp One as they drove by on the Backbone. "Now what's going on?" Jerry wondered when they caught sight of the crowd standing outside one of the modules.

"A block party?" Kate guessed, but in her defense it must be said that by now it was the wrong side of two o'clock in the morning and she had never been a night person.

They parked ten yards behind the crowd and, the evening's experiences beginning to have their effect, tiptoed up behind the gathering of men.

Kate caught a whiff of deep-fried fat and identified the kitchen module, which indeed it proved to be, as attested to by the two enormous garbage Dumpsters flanking the double doors, as well as by the two not less enormous grizzly bears with their heads down in them.

"Oh, shit," Jerry said, backing up. He was alone. Kate stood rooted in place, staring as the crowd of men, most of them in their T-shirts and clutching cameras to their chests, shouted and whistled and stamped, trying to get the bears' heads out of the Dumpsters long enough to snap their picture. Flashbulbs were going off like firecrackers. With what Kate thought was extraordinary self-control for a grizzly bear in March, the bears ignored them until one man crept up behind one and yanked his tail.

Kate's jaw dropped.

The bear roared indignantly and swung around on his haunches, one paw raised, a perfect pose for the pipe liner friend, who stood at the ready with a Canon Sureshot. The flash went off six feet from the bear's face, and he roared again, all four inches of claw extended.

"You dumb son of a bitch!" someone growled. Stupefied and still gaping, Kate looked over and saw a man in a state trooper's uniform. He stepped forward, another big-bellied man with the added authority of age and uniform, and the crowd melted before him. He came to a stop in front of the two pipe liners The bears had turned back to the Dumpsters. With magnificent indifference, the trooper didn't even look their way.

Instead, he hitched up his gun belt in the menacing gesture Kate was convinced all state troopers were taught their first day in trooper school. The pipe liners who had laughed in the bear's face and jeered at its anger, knew real danger when they saw it and snapped into an attitude of acute attention.

The trooper hitched up his gun belt a second time, and said in the slow, caustic drawl cultivated by state troopers the world over, "Just now, I was of two minds who to shoot, you or the bear." He paused long enough for that thought to register. When it did, he leaned forward, nose to nose with the tail-puller, and dropped his voice but not the drawl.

"Next time, I won't have any doubt." He paused again. "Now git."

The pipe liner started backing up, treading on the toes of his camera-toting friend. "Yes sir no sir sorry sir whatever you say sir."

The trooper watched them back and fill up the steps and inside the module with a merciless eye. It was the beginning of a virtual stampede.

When the door closed behind the last pipe liner the trooper turned to the bears. "And as for you two, it's too early for you to be up!

Hibernate, dammit!"

The two bears, with an I.Q. a good ten points above that of the average pipe liner knew when they were outclassed. They extricated themselves from the Dumpsters and cantered out of camp.

Kate let out a long sigh. The trooper heard it, turned and caught sight of Jerry. "Hey, Mcisaac."

Jerry drew a shaking hand across a sweating brow and walked forward on unsteady feet. "Jesus, Joe. I thought for a minute you were going to be in need of my professional services."

The trooper grinned, a white slash of teeth in the dim light. "Naw.

They're just cubs, babies, yearlings. Wouldn't hurt a fly." He looked at Kate, and back at Jerry, "Kate Shugak, Joe Graham. Kate's just hired on with RPetco." "Shugak," the trooper said thoughtfully, "Shugak." He met her eyes.

"You a friend of Jim Chopin's?"

"We've met," Kate said reluctantly.

The trooper snapped his fingers. "Kate Shugak, from Niniltna, right? I remember now. Jim was telling me about that deal with the bootlegger a while back. Nice job."

"Thanks."

Kate's monosyllabic response was unencouraging, and the trooper, about to expand on the subject, paused. "Right," he said. "Well, nice to meet you. Jerry."

"Joe."

The trooper drove off. Jerry looked down at Kate. "What deal with the bootlegger?" "It was a long time ago," Kate said dismissively. Jerry just looked at her, and she sighed. "A guy was selling whiskey inside tribal borders.

Billy Mike asked me to stop him."

"And?"

"I did."

"Oh." Like the trooper, Jerry didn't push it.

Kate spent what was left of the night in the dispensary with Martin.

He scowled at her from his bed. His skin was flushed, his pupils large and black and bottomless. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Glad you know who I am now," she said dryly, and pulled up a chair.

He twisted against the wrist restraints. "Get me out of these things."