KS13.5 - Wreck Rights (2 page)

“Okay, Bert,” Jim said. “Why’d you hit the brakes?”

She narrowed her eyes against the smoke. “So I wouldn’t hit her.”

“Hit who?”

“Whaddya mean, who? A woman ran out in front of the tractor, I hit the brakes so I wouldn’t hit her.” She looked from Jim to Hazen. “What, you haven’t talked to her?”

“This is the first we’ve heard of her, Bert,” Jim said.

Bert stiffened. “She was like inches off the goddam front bumper. I hit the brakes and jacked the wheel around. There’s no shoulder on that sonofabitchin’ hill or I might have saved the cargo.” She saw their expressions and her voice rose. “There fucking was a fucking woman, goddammit!”

“What did she look like?” Jim said.

Bert shrugged. “Shit, who could tell at that speed?” She sucked in smoke. “Skinny, dark clothes, why I didn’t see her until the last minute.”

“You sure it was a woman?”

“Long hair flying out behind her like a goddamn kite. Don’t know many men with hair that long.” Bert shook her head. “She was a woman. She moved like one.”

“Did you hit her?”

“No, goddammit, I didn’t hit her, I put the cargo over the side of that fucking hill so I wouldn’t hit her.”

“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

She shook her head. “It was too dark and everything happened too fast.” The cigarette burned down to the end. Bert tossed the butt on the floor and ground it out beneath her heel. She looked at Hazen and tapped two fingers against her mouth. Hazen tossed her the pack and the matches. “Keep them,” he said.

“Thanks.” Bert lit up again. The fingernails of her stubby hands were stained yellow. She walked to the door and they parted so she could get to it. Halfway through, she paused. “Funny thing.”

“What?”

“She didn’t look scared.”

“You didn’t see her long enough to recognize her again,” Hazen said, “but you saw her long enough to see she didn’t look scared?”

Bert frowned, not rising to the bait. “She didn’t
move
scared, I guess is what I mean. Something sort of, I don’t know. Deliberate? When she showed up in the headlights.” She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and dropped her arms to her sides, bending her elbows into right angles and clenching her hands into fists. “Like she was in a goddam race instead of getting the hell out of my way.” She shook her head, ash dropping off the end of the cigarette clamped in a corner of her mouth. “Crazy fucking story. I don’t believe it myself. Probably losing it. Thanks for the smokes.”

· · ·

He heard her footsteps long before she appeared and his mouth went dry. His breath shortened and his heart might even have skipped a beat. Was that any way for a grown trooper to act? Thank god Hazen was back in his office making some calls. It certainly wasn’t any way for a grown trooper to be observed to be behaving by a fellow law enforcement professional.

The door swung inward and there she was, all five feet nothing of her. A short, sleek cap of hair as black as night framed a face with tilted hazel eyes, high flat cheekbones and a full, firm mouth. She wore a dark green parka with a wolf ruff around the hood open over a white T-shirt and a navy blue fleece vest, and faded blue jeans tucked into Sorels.

She had to be the only woman alive capable of looking sexy in a morgue. Somehow the scar that bisected the otherwise smooth, golden skin of her throat literally from ear to ear, faded from its original ugly red gash to today’s thin white rope, only added to the effect.

There was a scrabble of toenails on linoleum and a gray furry torpedo launched itself at him. “Okay, Mutt,” he said, fending off the attentions of the 140-pound half-husky half-wolf. A long pink tongue got in several swipes before she was satisfied and dropped back down to all fours. Her big yellow eyes were filled with love and her tail was wagging hard.

He looked up and swallowed, trying to work up some saliva. “Kate,” he said, and hoped it didn’t sound like the croak he was sure it did.

She gave a short nod. “Jim.” Her voice was a low husk of sound, the effect of the scar. She nodded at the body beneath the sheet. “That him?”

He took a deep and he hoped unobtrusive breath. “That’s him.”

She walked to the table. He followed, coming to stand opposite to her. He raised his hand to lift the sheet, and paused. She met his eyes. “It’s all right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

He raised the sheet. She didn’t flinch. She did sigh, and shake her head. Mutt curled her lip and went to sit down next to the door, her back pointedly to them. “Put it back.”

He did. “You know him?”

She nodded. “It’s Paul Kameroff. Some kind of third cousin’s son to Auntie Vi.” She sounded tired. “How did he die?”

“A bullet to the back of the head. No exit wound.”

Her gaze sharpened. “Small caliber weapon?”

“A twenty-two, we think. Haven’t recovered the bullet as yet.”

She was silent for a moment. “Where’d you find him?”

“At the bottom of Hell Hill.”

She frowned. “Someone shot him and then tossed him out of a car window?”

“Looks like. We’d never have found the body if it weren’t for a semi jack-knifing over the side on top of him.”

“Another one? That’s the fourth this winter.”

“And the state says there’s nothing wrong with the grade of that curve,” he said. “So anyway, the seagulls were out, scavanging like mad, and some of them stumbled over Paul here. His hands and feet were tied, by the way.”

“Tied, and then shot, and then tossed,” she said.

“Yeah. What was he into?”

“Nothing.” She saw his expression. “I mean it, Jim. Nothing. Paul was, well, to tell the truth he wasn’t too bright. He was a couple of years behind me in school, and he never would have made it through if his sister hadn’t carried him. Sonia,” she added. “They were a year apart, I think.”

“He live in the Park?”

“She stayed, he left when someone—probably Emaa or Auntie Vi—finagled him a Teamsters’ card. Last I heard, he was working roustabout for RPetCo up in Prudhoe Bay. Week on, week off, free food and board while he was working, good salary, pretty cushy deal all around. Paul might not have been very bright but he was smart enough not to screw that up.” She looked down at the body. “Or so I would have thought.”

“What does a roustabout do?”

She shrugged. “Whatever they ask him to. Oilfield cleanup, moving flow pipe around the Stores yard, on the emergency response team for fires, loading and unloading luggage for the charter, driving crew change buses, supervising the stick pickers.”

“What kind of trouble could he get into on that job?”

“I told you—”

“Yeah, you told me.” He jerked his chin at the body. “And yet here he lies with a bullet in his brain.” He let the silence lie there like a wet, heavy blanket, and knew a fleeting gratitude that at least she didn’t turn his knees to water when he was on the job.

“Let’s go out there,” she said.

“Out where? You mean where we found the body?”

“Yeah.”

· · ·

It was as gray and drizzly at the scene as when he and Hazen had left it. You wouldn’t have known that a ragged ridge of tall mountains was holding up the edge of the eastern sky if you hadn’t seen them on a clear day, or that a river draining twenty million acres of national park was winding its serpentine way through the valley below. No, this was just a barely two-lane road hacked out of the side of a steep hill, with one too many switchbacks in it for safety.

As witness the wrecks of the two trailers below. “You’re not going to make me climb down there again, are you?” he said dismally, but she was already over the snow berm and scaling the snow-covered hillside. Mutt gave a short, joyous bark and leaped the berm in a single bound, vanishing into the underbrush in search of the elusive arctic hare. Sighing heavily, Jim followed less gracefully, grabbing for bushes and tree limbs to slow his descent. He reached the bottom of the ravine just as she was climbing inside the remains of one of the trailers. “Kate!” he said sharply, “wait, don’t go in there, the whole damn thing’s probably ready to collapse!”

She went in anyway and cursing, he followed. “For crissake,” he said, picking a gingerly path through twisted boards and splintered pallets, “what’s left to look at in here? Everything got tossed outside when the trailers went over.”

She’d brought the flashlight he carried with him in the Blazer, and she was quartering what was left of the floor of the trailer, not an easy task because the trailer had come to rest upside down. He crunched through a pile of chocolate chips, fuming. “What are you looking for?” he said. “What the hell’s the wreck got to do with Paul Kameroff?”

She clicked off the flashlight and clambered back outside. He gritted his teeth and followed her through the trees still standing to the second trailer. This one was resting on its side, or what was left of it. Jim noticed that, like the other trailer, all the tires were missing. The Park rats hadn’t wasted any time, but he did wonder what they thought they were going to use them on. It wasn’t like you could mount the tire of an eighteen-wheeler on a Ford Ranger F150 pickup truck. Not and go unnoticed, at any rate.

He had time to think all this as he slogged through the knee-deep snow, and time to wish he’d never called Kate in, or better yet, never met her in the first place ever in his whole life. Trouble, that’s what she was, nothing but trouble. And the proximate cause of his boots being wet through to his socks. He swore.

“Give me your hand.”

He looked up and she was standing in the hole of the trailer, looking perfectly natural surrounded by twisted metal and torn wood. “Why?” he said. “Wasn’t anything in the other one, everything the trailer was hauling is now piled up in some Park rat’s cache, what the hell is there to see?”

“Come up and find out,” she said.

It was a challenge, and he took her up on it, using her hand and the rickety side of the trailer to pull himself up. A can of cream of mushroom soup came rolling out from a dark corner and he stumbled over it to bump into Kate.

He froze.

She smiled up at him, not moving. “Gosh,” she said, “you’ve picked up some snow, Jim.” She leaned over to brush a clump that clung to his pants leg, and she took her time standing up again. There was the inevitable reaction, fight it though he would. He stood very still, his jaw working. She smiled again, and the pitiful thing was she wasn’t even working him at full power.

“What,” he said through his teeth, “was so all-fired important in here that you just had to see?”

“Over here,” she said, leading the way.

The surface beneath his feet shuddered and shook. He wasn’t sure if it was the wreck or him. What’s the difference, he thought, and almost laughed.

She played the flashlight over an intact corner of the trailer. “Look. You see it?”

Jim tried to focus. “What? Wait.” His voice sharpened. “What’s that?”

“Blood, I think. On what used to be the floor.”

Jim had a lowering feeling that he knew what she was getting at, but he said stubbornly, “So what? Maybe there was a side of beef strung up in that corner. Maybe it dripped a little.”

“This isn’t a reefer, Jim, it’s straight storage. Nothing but dry or canned goods. I think you should take a sample and get the lab to run it through their magic machines.”

· · ·

“You’re a witch, aren’t you,” he said two days later. “Go ahead, you can say it, I won’t tell. I may personally burn you at the stake, but I won’t tell.”

They were sitting at the River Street Café in Niniltna, where Laurel Meganack presided over grill and table and dispensed not awful coffee out of a large stainless steel urn. The village of Niniltna (year-round population, 403) wasn’t large enough for a street sign but the Niniltna Native Association board of directors, which had been persuaded to front the money for the café against their better judgement, didn’t want to be publicly coupled to the business. The Kanuyaq River was about twenty feet from the front door, and there was a kind of a game trail that ran between the two, and that was enough for Laurel.

“Whose blood was it?” Kate said.

Mutt sat between them, pressed up against Jim’s leg, looking back and forth between her two beloveds. Jim gave her ears an absent-minded scratch. “It was Paul’s,” Jim replied. “But then, you knew that.”

“I thought maybe,” she said.

“Yeah. So his body wasn’t on the ground when the trailer went over, it was in the trailer and got thrown out when the trailer hit bottom and broke open.”

“Yeah.”

“So Paul Kameroff wasn’t killed in the Park. He was probably killed in Anchorage and loaded into the trailer there.” Jim brooded over his coffee. “To what purpose?” he said. “To be unloaded with the rest of the groceries in Tok?”

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“No.” Jim sat back and looked at her, and there was no trace either of seduction or of a susceptibility to seduction in his steady gaze. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

Laurel Meganack swished by with the coffee pot and a bright smile. “You sure you folks don’t want something to eat? I make a mean asparagus omelet.”

Jim had a hard time controlling his expression. “Thank you, no.”

Kate didn’t bother hiding her grin.

“What?” Laurel said.

“He hates asparagus,” Kate said.

“Hmmm.” Laurel topped off their mugs and said to Kate with a grin of her own, “And you would know this how?”

Jim noted with interest the faint color in Kate’s cheeks, and kept watch as she became involved in doctoring her coffee with evaporated milk until the coffee was a nice tan in color. After that came the sugar, a lot of it. Jim averted his eyes and tried not to shudder. “Ballistics took a look at the bullet.”

“And?”

“They ran it through every possible data base going back to the Civil War. No matches.”

“There wouldn’t be,” she said. “This was a hit, Jim. Whoever did this was a pro.”

He thought of the neat knots on Kameroff’s wrists and ankles, the equally neat placement of the bullet in the back of the head. It was all very, well, neat. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty obvious. Tell me something.”