Midnight come again (37 page)

"Start the bidding!" yelled one man who had yet to look above her chin.

"Yeah, stop talking and start bidding!"

"But," she said, raising one white, well-tended hand without breaking away from the stare of the blue-eyed stranger, "I reserve the right to accept the next lowest bidder if I do not like the highest." Her eyes lingered on the Greek, who looked at her out of cold, acquisitive eyes that held no lust for her personally, only for the money she could make him when he put her to work.

"You'll like me all right!" someone yelled.

"The man who buys me must provide a decent cabin and a good stock of food. I'll cook for him, and I'll clean for him, and I'll--" she paused

"--dance for him," and again, she was forced to wait for the noise to subside.

"But understand this," she said, smile vanishing, and there was something in her expression that caused all comment to pause. "The man who buys me, and lifts a hand tome ... "

"I'd like to see him try!"

"We'd fix him for you, Darling, never you worry!" She waited, and then repeated, "The man who buys me, and lifts a hand to me, will have attended his last auction on this earth. Am I understood? "

She looked at the Greek, whose calculating expression didn't change.

She waited long enough for her words to sink in, and smiled again to take the sting out of them. "You ' want to know," she said, dropping her voice, "I'm not exactly an iceberg." She turned, contriving so that the top fold of chiffon covering her breasts slipped down to be caught and held, barely, by her nipples.

No one looking at her doubted that she was telling anything but the absolute truth.

Into the dead silence that had fallen, she said softly, "So here I am, boys. Ready and willing." She smiled, making a slow, graceful pirouette, caressing the faces in the crowd with a warm, welcoming gaze. "What are you waiting for?"

Big Ben had a hard time getting them quieted down after that. The bidding opened at one thousand. It was at five thousand thirty seconds later, offered by a squat, dark man with a matted bush of greasy hair and a mouthful of rotted teeth. She repressed a shudder and paraded down the catwalk again. "Now, boys," she said, laughing, "that last bid was only five thousand. Aren't you going any higher than that?" She paused at the edge of the catwalk and put up a hand to the thick auburn hair tucked into a graceful swirl. When the hand came down, it traced an invisible line from throat to breast to waist, to settle again on her hip.

"Sure, girlie," called out an Irishman with a handlebar mustache and a white, wide-brimmed hat, "I was only waiting for the pikers to drop out.

Ten thousand, and that's only two days'cleanup on my claim!"

"Twelve!" the squat man growled.

"Thirteen!" yelled a man in spectacles and bib overalls with a watch chain made from gold nuggets hanging from the front pocket.

"Fifteen," the Greek said, his voice as flat as his eyes. There was neither lust nor longing in his tone, only a look that calculated how much she could earn for him when he turned her out. She repressed a shiver, and reminded herself that she had right of first refusal.

"Sixteen," the banker snapped. She met his eyes, startled. He shrugged.

She couldn't help it. She laughed. "Sixteen," he repeated, looking faintly irritated at the sound of the word forced out of his own mouth.

"Seventeen," a new voice boomed, and she looked up to lock eyes again with the tall blond man at the door. "Seventeen thousand dollars," he said again. His voice was deep with no trace of an accent.

Second-generation Swede, perhaps? He was strong-featured rather than handsome. His face was impassive, but she sensed that he was angry. She didn't know why, but it made her chin come up.

"Seventeen-five!" the squat man snapped. His eyes were little and cruel and calculating.

"Eighteen," the tall man said imperturbably.

The squat man swore in a foreign tongue--Italian ?-- and said in a rising voice, "Nineteen!"

"Twenty," the Greek said.

Everyone else seemed to have dropped out and were now swiveling their heads between the three bidders. There would be a fight before the evening was over, and they all knew it. Lust and blood lust, thwart one and the other stepped in.

She wasn't going home with the squat man, but she had a good idea of what six months of her exclusive attention was worth, and it was more than twenty thousand dollars. "The last bid stands at twenty thousand, boys," she called out into the silence, and when they turned to look at her, she shook her head once. The single pin, artfully placed, loosened itself, and her hair tumbled down in a thick, gleaming fall to her waist. "I know you can do better than that."

One auburn strand fell forward to curl around her breast. The crowd watched it, mesmerized. Someone gave a little moan. Someone else swore not quite beneath his breath.

"Twenty-five," the man at the door said.

The room fell silent. He drained his mug and said into it, "Oh hell, what's the use of wasting time." He looked up to run a possessive look over the Dawson Darling and said, "Thirty thousand dollars." He smiled, showing strong white teeth. He didn't seem angry anymore.

She couldn't help herself. She had always had a weakness for good teeth.

She smiled back.

The Greek said nothing. The banker looked as if he were performing a complicated mental calculation. The squat man saw her smile and screamed, "You crooked, dirty whore!"

He struggled to reach her and was thwarted by the crowd, as protective of her now as they had been avaricious before. With a sudden change of direction, he rushed the man at the door, and this time the crowd parted eagerly before him so that his opponent was grabbed up in a crushing grip immediately. The tall blond man struggled and got one arm free to fend off the hands reaching for his throat.

"I break him! I smash him!" the squat man shouted. His arms quivered, muscles bulging. He lifted the tall man so that his feet dangled afoot above the floor. Everyone watching expected to hear the snap of the tall man's spine.

Instead, when the tall man went limp, the squat man's grip slipped, and the tall man smashed him instead, one large-knuckled fist to the squat man's jaw with a force that laid the squat man flat on his back on the floor, out cold. The tall man almost went down with him, then caught his balance and remained on his feet.

There was a roar of approval and a surge toward the tall man, who held up one hand, and such was his presence that they halted. "My name's Sam Halvorsen," he said, looking across the room to where she stood on the catwalk, skin gleaming through white chiffon and auburn curls. " You going to exercise your right to the next lowest bidder, ma'am?"

She could barely speak around the lump in her throat. "No, Sam," she managed to say. "I am not."

The crowd, silent again, parted before him as he walked to the edge of the stage. She didn't have to look down that far and realized he was even taller than she had thought. He held up one hand, and she placed hers into it, only to give a startled shriek when he yanked on it, jerking her off balance. She fell forward, and he caught her neatly in his arms.

He grinned at her. "We've only got until June 24th," he said. "Time's a-wasting."

And, carrying her easily, he shouldered his way out of the bar.

More than one pair of envious eyes followed them until they were out of sight. I'M WATCHING YOU.

"That's all?' Jim Chopin said.

Darlene Shelikof handed over a manila file folder, and Jim leafed through half a dozen similar missives, all on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheets of plain white paper folded in thirds.

He held one up to the light and read the watermark out loud. "Esleeck Emco Bond, twenty-five percent cotton content." He lowered his arm.

"Available by the ream from Costco at six-seventy-nine a pop, the last time I looked."

"Can't you tell something from the writing?"

He shuffled through the sheets again. "Looks like he-- or she--used a black Marksalot."

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

"The big block printing is an obvious attempt to disguise the handwriting." ABORTION IS MUDRER.

"I take it Anne's pro-choice?"

"She started the family-planning clinic in Ahtna."

"That does tend to make the nuts fall from the tree." He held the letter closer. "Probably printed with the left hand, or whatever hand is not their hand of choice in writing poison-pen letters. Also, he can't spell."

YOUR HUSBANDS CUTE.

Jim's eyebrows went up. "Is he?" Darlene smiled. "Not as cute as you are, Jim." His smile was swift and predatory in return. "Why, Darlene, I didn't know you cared." Even to himself the words sounded formulaic, and tired as well, and he looked back down at the file. Well, hell, he was tired. It had been a long week, with a rape in Slana, a death by arson in Copper Center, and a suicide by cop in Valdez that he would have missed if he hadn't had to overfly Cordova due to weather and overnight on the Valdez chief-of- police's couch. He focused on the papers in his hand.

YOUR DAUGHTER WEARS HER SKIRTS TOO The writer had written in letters so large he or she had run out of room before finishing his or her thought, and had had to add "SHORT" in smaller letters in the lower right-hand corner of the paper.

STAY HOME AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR KIDS.

"Ah, a traditionalist," Jim said.

The seventh letter was more direct. run for senator AND ILL KILL YOU.

He held it up so she could read it. ' the one that made you bring them all in?"

She nodded. "They've been coming in one at a time ever since she announced. Then last week, we got two."

"All date-stamped except the first one, and you kept the envelope for that one, too. Smart," Jim said. "We appreciate smart in law enforcement." She smiled again. He examined the envelopes, all of them stapled to the backs of the letters. "All postmarked Ahtna. Well, I'll give the post office there a call. You never know, somebody might have noticed something." "You don't sound very optimistic," she observed.

"I'm not. The Ahtna post office handles all the mail that goes into and comes out of the Park. That's, what, three thousand people, a little less? And these are pretty anonymous letters, Darlene."

"What about the handwriting? Isn't there an expert you can send them to, figure out who wrote them?"

"Sure, and I will," he said, stuffing them into an evidence bag. "Today.

But unless and until the state crime lab already has a sample of the perp's writing to compare them to, we're SOL as far as identifying the writer."

"What about fingerprints?"

He looked at her. What he wanted to say was, "You've been watching too much television," but what he said instead, patiently, was, "Who opened these?" "The candidate, the first one." She thought. "The rest were opened by volunteers, I think. Oh."

"Right. And then they got passed up or down the food chain to you, and then your assistant had to file them. There are probably ten sets of fingerprints on every letter, and we can't even be sure that every letter has the same set of ten." He sealed the bag. "Have you fingerprinted your staff?"

An expression of revulsion crossed her face. It was a very nice face otherwise, black eyes set in a broad, flat face with a tiny pug nose and a merry mouth, hair in a permed black frizz standing out around it. She was thick through the body and short, although her erect posture made her seem taller. She carried weight, did Darlene Shelikof, and not necessarily just body weight. Her jeans were faded but clean, the blazer over it a conservative navy blue, the shirt beneath a paler blue and open at the throat. Ivory dangled from her ears and adorned her lapel and both wrists.

She had been leaning forward, just a little, and now she leaned back, just a little, not enough to give the impression she was in any way relaxed. "What about protection?"

"What about it?"

For the first time she allowed herself to look angry. He admired her control. "How much can you give us?"

"Darlene, you worked for the AG. You know exactly how much protection we can give you." Her mouth thinned. "The threats are escalating, in delivery and in degree."

"Yes."

"Chances are he--or she--will try to make contact."

"Chances are he--or she--already has."

"What do you mean?"

He shrugged. "How long has Anne been on the campaign trail? She announced in June, didn't she?"

"Yes."

"What day in June?"

"The sixteenth."

"The first of those envelopes is dated June twenty-seventh." She thought about it. "So he's been following her since the beginning?"

"That'd be my guess. She's been doing the usual things politicians do, going to church in Chitina, walking the bars in Cordova, shaking hands and kissing babies and promising to throw the burns out, like they all do." Darlene looked indignant. He waved away whatever comment she had been about to make about her candidate being all new and improved and completely different. He'd been an Alaska state trooper for going on twenty years; he'd seen a lot of political campaigns whistle-stop through; he had seen every single candidate of every political party (and in Alaska there were about seventeen separate and distinct political parties with more springing up every year), and he had seen every successful candidate as a first order of Juneau business cuddle up with the lobbyist with the most money to spend. Call him a cynic, but he didn't see anything changing just because this candidate was a woman and a Native and homegrown.