A Cold Day for Murder (12 page)

Xenia said, “But the store closes at six.”

He gestured vaguely. “Well, then, I’ll go borrow a cup from Mickey Komkoff. Back in a flash.” He disappeared into the shack and reappeared attired in pants, parka and boots. He gave Xenia a loud, smacking kiss, Kate a pointed look daring her to object, and headed up the path.

Kate pushed her reluctant cousin into the shack and closed the door on Abel’s bright, inquisitive gaze. Xenia went to the room’s only chair and sat down, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

“I want the truth this time, Xenia,” Kate said sternly. “All of it.”

The girl was silent, hugging herself.

“What do you think happened to Mark Miller that you’re not telling me?” Xenia said nothing. Kate, suddenly furious with the selfish little brat, strode across to where she was sitting and hauled her up out of her chair by the front of her shirt. “He said he loved you, Xenia, and he’s missing and he might be dead, and now someone’s shooting at me probably because they don’t want me to find out. Don’t you care? If not about Miller, then about me?” She snarled out the last words.

Xenia looked at her out of brown eyes bright with tears. She looked about six years old. Kate loosened her grip on Xenia’s shirt, and the girl slid out of her grasp and onto the floor as if her legs were made of warm wax. She pulled her knees up and hid her face in them and spoke without looking at Kate. “You’ll find me a job in Anchorage? You promise? You’ll get me away from here?”

Kate unzipped her snowsuit and peeled it down to her waist. She sat down next to her cousin and tried to temper the disgust and exasperation she felt. “I’d do that anyway. From what I’ve seen in the last eight hours, the sooner you get out of Niniltna the better. No, no, never mind that now. Just tell me what happened the night Mark Miller disappeared.”

What happened the night of October 26 was that Xenia and Mark Miller had made a date to meet at Bernie’s Roadhouse, since Ekaterina had made it clear the ranger wasn’t welcome in Ekaterina’s house, Xenia’s home since her mother and father had died in a plane crash three years before. “Then Martin came in,” Xenia said, tears in her brown eyes, “and caught us dancing together. He grabbed Mark and hit him, and Mark hit him back, and pretty soon the whole bar was fighting.” The tearful brown gaze fell back to her knees. “I was scared, so I ran.”

“You left the Roadhouse?”

“Yes.”

“You left Mark behind?”

“I told you I was scared, and he’s a man, he could take care of himself.”

“An Outsider, a greenie, against a bar full of Moonins and Shugaks?”

The girl gave a petulant shrug. “What about me? I had to walk home all alone, from the Roadhouse back to town, in the cold. You know what happens to people who do that.” She gasped and bit her lip, looking at Kate with frightened eyes.

“Yes, I know,” Kate said without emotion. “What happened next?”

“Like I said, I started walking home. I was almost to the Lost Chance Creek bridge before I heard a car. I turned around to wave and I saw that it was Martin’s pickup and so I ducked down next to the bridge railing and waited for it to go over the bridge. But it didn’t.”

“What did it do?” The girl’s shoulders shook, and Kate repeated implacably, “What did the truck do?”

“It stopped in the middle of the bridge and two men got out and started messing around with something in the back. It was dark and I couldn’t see very well and besides I was—”

“You were scared,” Kate said.

The girl gave her a resentful look and said sullenly, “Well, I was.”

“So you were scared,” Kate said impatiently. “So would I have been, so would anyone. I’m not judging you.” At least I’m trying like hell not to, she thought. “What happened next?”

“So I ducked down and waited. The guys were grunting and staggering like whatever was in the back was heavy. I heard footsteps go from the pickup to the side of the bridge, and then I heard the splash.” She started to cry again. “Martin’ll kill me if he knows I told you. I’ve got to get out of here, Katya!”

“You’re sure it was Martin’s truck?” Kate said relentlessly, ignoring the tears.

Xenia gulped back a sob. “Yes. I saw the license plate and that dented tailgate he got when the fish hawk ran him off the road to serve that warrant, you know, for that time Martin got caught seining behind the markers on Teglliq Creek. Martin always said those markers were too far out—”

“Never mind the fish hawk and the Teglliq Creek markers. Did you see who the second man was?”

“No, I told you, I was too scared to look, and they didn’t talk much, except to swear.”

Kate was silent for a long time. At last she stirred and stood up. “All right, Xenia.”

“Are you going to talk to Martin?”

Kate looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Of course I am.”

“Are you going to tell him I told you?” Xenia trembled and began to cry again. “You can’t tell him, you can’t, he’ll kill me!”

“Don’t whine, for God’s sake,” Kate snapped. “If he didn’t see you and you haven’t told him you were there, all I have to tell him is that there was a witness. He doesn’t have to know who.”

“And you’ll get me that job in Anchorage, Katya? And maybe a place to stay?”

“Shut up, Xenia,” Kate said from between clenched teeth. “Just shut up.”

“Oh, it’s always been so easy for you,” the girl cried, “old Snow White! You never do anything wrong and you’re never afraid! Katya! Where are you going?” she said, the tears beginning to flow a third time.

“Bobby’s.” Kate turned, and added over her shoulder, “If anyone asks for me and they’re carrying a rifle, try not to tell them where I am, okay?”

He had his headphones on, lost in a wide-band frequency fog, and didn’t answer when Kate knocked, so she opened the door that was always unlocked and went in and tapped him on the shoulder.

He jumped about a foot off his chair and slewed around to glare at her. Recognition came at once. “Goddam, woman,” he roared, ripping his headphones off and slamming them down, “I told you a million times not to sneak up on me like that!”

Mutt jumped up to rest her forepaws on his shoulders and swiped at his face with a long pink tongue. “Goddam, woman,” Bobby roared again, fending her off, “you got that fucking wolf with you! I told you before, no fucking wolves in the house!”

Unintimidated, Mutt swiped at him again and, formal greetings duly exchanged, got down and trotted over to the fireplace to root purposefully through the wood box, eventually producing something roughly on the scale of the femur of a stegosaurus. Bobby, a forward thinker, always had something in the wood box to keep the wolves at bay. Mutt settled down in the front of the fireplace and began to gnaw with an expression of almost sinful content.

Kate wiped Bobby’s scowling face and leaned forward to kiss him. The roar shut off and he leaned into the kiss with enthusiasm. He opened one eye in the middle of the kiss to make sure she was enjoying it as much as he was and saw Abel standing in the open doorway regarding them with deep disapproval and a terrifying scowl.

“Oh,” Bobby said, freeing his lips but not noticeably terrified and not releasing Kate. “Hello, Abel.”

“Bobby,” Abel said, nodding. “I got you here safe, girl. I’m heading over to Ekaterina’s now. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“You’re welcome to stay here, Abel,” Bobby said. He let one enormous paw settle on Kate’s left hip.

The old man bent his head stiffly. “’Preciate it, Bobby, but it’s been a bit since I stirred up the old broad. I’m looking forward to it.” He looked around Bobby’s cabin with raised brows. “And she’s always got a room”—he emphasized the word pointedly—“for me.”

“Abel?” Kate said, twisting in Bobby’s hands to look at him. “Thanks.”

Abel bent his head again, and left.

Bobby watched the door close behind him. “Don’t mind him, Bobby,” she said in a low voice. “He’s just old.”

“I don’t,” he said, and then, surprisingly, “He reminds me of my old man. He wouldn’t approve of this either.” Bobby grinned lecherously and kissed Kate again, and then a sneaky third time before she could wriggle free.

“Who are you talking to tonight?” she said, breathless, tugging away from him with difficulty and indicating the radio.

“King Hussein of Jordan,” he said. She laughed, and he raised his eyebrows and said, “You want to say hello?”

Diverted, she said, “Really? Hussein’s a ham?”

“Virginia smoked, like myself,” he said. “Want to talk to him?”

“I’d rather talk to Viktor.”

“Ah, that sumbitchin’ spy must have got himself arrested in the latest coup; he ain’t been on the air for six months now. Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

He scratched his head and said, “Now that I come to think of it, I haven’t had my supper. How about some food?”

She smiled wanly. “Come to think of it, I haven’t had my supper either.”

“What sounds good?”

“Everything,” she said fervently.

“Lemme seventy-three His Majesty and I’ll get right on it.” He spoke into his mike, holding one side of the headphones to one ear, and switched his set off.

Kate watched him. He had the typical bulk of the wheelchair jockey, thick through the shoulders, chest and arms. Coal black from head to thigh, skin, eyes and hair, tonight he was dressed in black as well, jeans, shirt, even the T-shirt showing beneath his collar. “Why do I get the feeling that if you had feet you’d be wearing black socks and shoes, too?” Kate said as he hung up his headphones.

“Color coordination is everything,” he said, smoothing his tight black curls complacently.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Also makes me easier to spot from the air if I get lost in a daytime blizzard,” he told her and grinned the friendly, infectious grin that could blind you if you weren’t careful.

The wheels of his chair squeaked on the polished hardwood floor. There were no carpets in Bobby’s house, unusual even in the poorest Alaskan home. No real Alaskan liked putting his or her bare feet on a barer floor on cold winter mornings. Bobby didn’t care, mainly because he had no feet, having lost both legs up to and including the knee in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. Ten years later he materialized in the Park, six months before Jimmy Carter created seventeen new national parks out of fifty-six million Alaskan acres, and therefore just in time to stake a claim on Squaw Candy Creek, a tributary of the Kanuyaq two miles upstream of Niniltna.

Kate never learned what he had been doing during the intervening decade, but since he had enough money to import lumber and a water pump and an electric generator and a thousand-gallon fuel tank from Anchorage, and hire labor from the town to construct his homestead, and had shown nary a sign of starving since, she had her own suspicions. He was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s weather observer inside the Park, monitoring all the tedious statistics of temperature and wind speed and wind chill and humidity and precipitation and barometric pressure, and making the delicate daily differentiation between cumulus, altocumulus and fracto-cumulus every six hours. The pittance received for this sedentary and very boring job was enough to keep Bobby in controlled recreational substances that came twelve fifths to a case with “Product of Kentucky” stamped on the outside, but the rest of the time he seemed to subsist, and subsist well, on barter and air.

Bobby wheeled his chair around on the bare wood floor, popped a wheelie just to remind Kate he could, and scooted over to the kitchen. Bobby liked speed in non-chemical form, on his snow machine, in his specially modified, souped-up Cessna 170 and in his two customized wheelchairs around the house.

“Two?” Kate had commented the first time she saw the second one. “Why two?”

“Well, it’s this way, Kate,” he’d said expansively, wheeling around her in a tight circle to show off his precision cornering. “This one’s for when I feel like chasing something.” He sent her a friendly leer, and she laughed. “Like today. The other one has a motor.”

“For when you don’t feel frisky,” she’d suggested.

“Or for when I have a hangover,” he added, clarifying things.

Bobby’s house was one big, square room without any inner walls or doors except to the bathroom. The center of the room was taken up by a four-sided work area crammed with electronic equipment and books, with multiple cables leading up the center pillar and through the roof to a forest of antennae and instrumentation and wiring that in daylight looked as if it were ready to lift into orbit. There was a teak shelf running the length of one wall, filled with record albums in their original jackets and almost in their original state at sale. No one handled them except Bobby, and he took them out only to record them on new cassettes after the old cassettes wore out. He was waiting for DAT to come out, at which time he intended to convert to CDs, but in the meantime he defiantly maintained his record collection and made life for the clerks at Robber Joe’s Records in Anchorage a living hell tracking down out-of-print albums. Kate had placed some of his orders there, and the expressions on their faces when they saw her coming always made her feel a little sorry for them.

An enormous bed was shoved up against one wall, a couch and couple of easy chairs against another, with an open rock fireplace between them. In the kitchen the sink, the stove top and the counters didn’t quite come up to Kate’s hips but were perfect for Bobby to reach from his chair. There were windows from floor to ceiling on the wall that faced south. Through those windows, the full moon cast a serene glow over the ice-encrusted spruce, outlining the Quilaks’ snow-crowned peaks to the east and teasing at the thin current of water running swiftly between the frozen shores of Squaw Candy Creek.

Kate built up the fire, which while meeting his radio schedule Bobby had as usual forgotten to feed, so that the inside of the house was almost as cold as the outside. The flames caught and crackled, and she subsided on the couch with a grunt of relief. The tension coiled in her belly began to ease.

“So what brings you into Niniltna, Katie?” he asked, zipping across the room with a steaming mug balanced on one arm of his chair. Before she could answer or thank him he zipped back to the kitchen to load up with a grill, ground caribou patties, buns and the rest of the makings.