Play With Fire (20 page)

A rainy gust of wind tore over the rise, swooped across the road and tossed up the leaves of a stand of birches, exposing their lighter undersides. A lusty laugh and the gust was gone and with a scandalized rustle the birches shook their skirts back down over their white boles, and all was still again, except for the patter of returning rain. Kate turned her face up and closed her eyes. The drops were cool on her skin.

She was left with only one solution. Daniel Sea bolt didn't have his clothes off by choice. Unless he was out of his mind.

Of course, with that father and that son, she wouldn't blame him if he was, and certainly that assumption was the easiest way out for her. Who can explain a nut's behavior? As his father had more or less said.

Which generated an entirely irrational impulse on her part to doubt it at once.

The only alternative to madness was that he'd been killed, stripped and dumped where she had found him. But there was no evidence of murder, why would his killer strip him anyway, and why on earth go to all the trouble of dragging him out there if they weren't going to bury him?

Even supposing last year's fire had been breathing down their necks? The area had been flooded with smoke jumpers odds were at least even that one of them would have stumbled over the body. Or the following year by a ranger assessing the damage.

Or her. Picking mushrooms.

Full circle, and still no answers. Giving a frustrated shake of her head, she called, "Mutt!" and climbed back behind the wheel. After a moment Mutt crashed out of the bushes and leapt up beside her, smelling exotically of roses. A ptarmigan feather hung from one side of her mouth. Kate started the truck and drove on.

An hour later the Isuzu topped a rise, the sun burst out of the clouds and Summit Lake appeared on the right. She stopped at the lodge to use the bathroom and get a cup of coffee. When she came out Mutt was lapping up some of the lake. She walked down to stand next to the dog and gaze out at the expanse of water, a pool of iridescent gray brimming over the sides of an elongated bowl of emerald green, behind which the Amphitheater Mountains leapt up and crashed down again in great waves of rock and ice.

Turning, she looked across the valley at the silver snake of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which had been with them most of the way south from Fairbanks, slithering up out of the ground here, outlined against the sky on the crest of a ridge there, outwardly stolid and serene, inside filled with the daily rush of a million barrels of Prudhoe Bay crude, from Pump Station One at the edge of the Arctic Ocean to the Oil Control Center in Valdez.

Eight hundred miles of it, crossing three mountain ranges, two earthquake faults, with a river or a creek for every mile of pipe. It was a triumph of engineering over terrain, in situ testimony to the human ability to manage the environment, and it meant a one-eighth share of Prudhoe Bay proceeds, measured in billions of dollars per year, for the state of Alaska.

Kate had no objection to that; the oil was there and because of it the state could afford big budget items like Molly Hootch without requiring her to pay state income taxes. She just wished the pipeline ran all the way south through Canada, as one of the original designs had called for, instead of terminating in Valdez. It was a route the Cordova Aquatic Marketing Association, the Cordova District Fishermen's United and the Lower Cook Inlet Fishermen's League, among others, had lobbied for and lobbied hard, on their own time and with their own money. No one had listened to them, of course; they were only the people out on those waters every day, who knew them better than anyone else living, who fed their families on the bounty nurtured therein.

Instead, the line went to Valdez and the oil was shipped out by tanker, and twelve years after oil in to the Operations Control Center the RPetco Anchorage went hard aground on Bligh Reef, and spilled nearly eleven million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude across Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, in the process proving the fishermen's fears all too true. Kate never saw the pipeline without thinking of them and the damage done to their homes and livelihoods.

For the coastal dwellers of the south-central part of the state, the Gulf of Alaska was one and the same.

But her last job had put a face on the monster, and now she looked at the pipeline and wondered how the people at the other end of the line were doing, the people living and working at the RPetco Base Camp at Prudhoe Bay. She wondered if Dale and Sue had gang-beeped anyone lately.

She wondered how the archaeological dig was progressing at Heald Point.

She wondered how Cindy Sovalik was getting back and forth to work now that the snow was gone. Four-wheeler, probably. She hoped Cindy would take it slow and easy over the thirty miles of tundra between her home in Ichelik, east of Prudhoe, and her job at the Prudhoe Hilton in Prudhoe Bay. Remembering the time Cindy, in a snow machine, had bluffed the fifty-six-passenger bus Kate was driving out of its right-of-way, she doubted it.

Mutt nudged Kate's hand with her head. "Okay, okay," Kate told her, and together they walked around the lodge and back to the truck. The parking lot was overflowing with a bicycle touring group, men and women in their thirties and forties wearing Spandex and helmets. One woman was loading her panniers as Kate approached. "Hi," Kate said.

"Hi," the woman said, looking up briefly.

"Where'd you come from?"

The woman secured the last strap and straightened, one fist rubbing the small of her back. "We came eighty-seven miles yesterday. We're doing sixty-nine today."

Kate had noticed this phenomenon in bicyclers before. Killer hills, dead man's curves, stubborn headwinds, flat stretches, record times, all these received intense attention and merited close and involved discussion, but

"Where did you come from?" never got a direct answer.

Bicyclers didn't care where they had come from, or where they were going, or anything that happened in between, except as how it related to their miles per day. They probably had not even noticed the frozen, striated flood of ice that was Gakona Glacier, spilling down from Mount Gakona east of the road, one peak in a queenly procession of peaks that formed the Alaska Range, a sight that, as many times as Kate had seen it, never failed to take her breath away.

She tested the theory. "Gakona sure looks pretty today."

"Yeah," the woman grunted, "with the sun up there'll probably be a hell of a headwind coming down off Rainbow Ridge, really cut into our time."

Mutt took a leak near her rear tire, but the woman was so involved with the quick release hub on the front tire that she didn't notice, and Kate would never tell. They climbed back into the truck.

Twenty miles past Paxson the clouds parted enough for Kate to catch a distant glimpse of the Quilaks, and she felt an easing of the close-held tension that always accumulated in direct proportion to the amount of time she'd been gone and the amount of distance between her and home.

The Kanuyaq River valley lay broad and deep, an immense gulf of forest and river that hardly went unnoticed, but the eyes tended to skip over it for the more striking profile of the Quilak Mountains, and maybe even a hint of the blue-white peak of Angqaq.

At any rate, Kate's eyes did.

At that moment of well-being, at just the point when the surface of the road deteriorated into one series of patches after another and its course began to twist and turn worse than one of the Kanuyaq's tributaries, they came upon a line of slow-moving vehicles. Closest to Kate was a Volkswagen bus with Washington State plates. The curtains were closed across the back window so she couldn't see who was driving it. Next car up was a white Ford four-door, a rental, through the back window of which she could see four white-haired heads, men in the front, women in the back. Ahead of them was an old black, rusty Ranchero with Alaska Veteran plates and no chrome left on it anywhere Kate could see.

In front of the Ranchero was a brave new Bronco with the sticker still on the rear window, and in front of the Bronco were three RVs from-Kate squinted--it couldn't be Alabama. She goosed the gas a little to close up on the Volkswagen's bumper.

It was, by God, Alabama, yet another redneck state with vowels on both ends. I wish I was in Dixie, hooray, hooray. And they drove like it, too, thirty-five miles an hour, except when they hit a straight stretch, when they reached speeds considerably in excess of the speed limit on German autobahns. Kate wished they were in Dixie, too. It didn't help matters when it began to rain again. She dropped back three car lengths and occupied herself by counting pull-offs the RVs could have taken to let the rest of the traffic pass.

She'd reached five when she looked in the rearview mirror and beheld a sight fit to strike terror into the heart of the most intrepid driver: a Toyota truck from Tennessee with two teenage boys in it closing rapidly on her rear bumper. They tailgated her for five minutes, waiting for a blind curve. When one came they pulled out into the left lane to pass. A pickup with a camper on the back lumbered around the curve and the Toyota truck from Tennessee slid back behind Kate with inches to spare.

As he came abreast of Kate the white-faced pickup driver was saying something that was undoubtedly educational for all concerned and flipped off the driver of the truck from Tennessee. The truck from Tennessee responded on the next curve, which turned out to be blind, deaf and dumb, by pulling into the oncoming lane again, flooring the accelerator and roaring past Kate, the Volkswagen bus from Washington State, the rented Ford sedan, the rusty Ranchero, the brand-new Bronco with the sticker in the window and was just fixing to take on the first RV from Alabama when a police cruiser driven by an Alaska State Trooper materialized on his front bumper.

Everyone slammed on the brakes.

Kate was in better shape than the rest of them because she liked living, had years of experience in driving Alaska highways and had been braking since the Toyota truck from Tennessee passed her. Even so, Mutt landed with her front paws on the dashboard and Kate was glad she was wearing her seat belt when her brakes locked up. The Isuzu bucked and stalled and the rear wheels skidded over the wet pavement and hit the grass and gravel of the very narrow shoulder and mercifully came to a halt just short of the mess rapidly accumulating inches in front of the passenger side door.

The cruiser hit lights, siren and the ditch simultaneously. The Toyota truck from Tennessee swerved to avoid going into the ditch on top of the cruiser and whizzed between the second and third RVs to run head-on into a tree. Due to the latitude and the thin layer of topsoil overlaying the permafrost, trees in interior Alaska never get very thick through the trunk, and this one snapped like a matchstick. So did the next three.

Scrub spruces, Kate noticed, gripping the wheel with both hands so tightly it felt like her arm muscles were going to burst out of their skin. A thicket of diamond willow proved tougher and the Toyota truck from Tennessee came to a stop buried in the middle of it.

The Volkswagen bus from Washington State rear-ended the rented Ford, which rear-ended the Alaska Ranchero, which rear-ended the brand-new Bronco with the sticker in the window. The brand new Bronco was hurled forward toward the last Alabama RV and the driver hauled on the wheel to avoid a collision and that and the high center of gravity on the vehicle rolled it over on its right side. It slid twelve feet down the yellow line and stopped.

The three RVs screeched to a halt, unharmed except for the fifteen feet of rubber they left behind them on the road.

For one frozen moment nobody moved.

Then everybody did, doors springing open, people leaping out onto the pavement, lots of yelling.

"Are you hurt?"

"Are y'all okay?"

"Yes! You?"

"We're all right!"

"The Bronco!"

"Yeah, check the Bronco!"

They reached the Bronco in a body. The engine was still running, the wheels spinning against air. Kate was the smallest and they hoisted her up on the side. She brushed ineffectually at the water streaming down the driver's window and knocked on the glass. "Hey! Hey in there, are you okay?" She tried opening the door, which of course was locked. "Hey, in the Bronco! You alive?" She thought she heard a reply and looked over the side. "You guys shut up!" She looked back in the window and saw movement, an arm maybe, reaching toward her. "Can you unlock the door?

The door, can you unlock the door so we can get you out?"

The arm moved lower. There was a low hum and the window descended. The Bronco had electric windows, and they still worked. The first thing Kate did was reach down and turn off the ignition. The engine sputtered and died and the rear wheels rolled to a stop. A man, blood trickling down his forehead, was crouched on the passenger side door, unfastening the seat belt of a woman in the passenger seat. "It's my wife. She's unconscious."

Kate yelled over the side, "Anybody got a first aid kit?" Half a dozen people scrambled for their vehicles. The white-haired driver of the rented Ford sedan said, "Miss.? I'm a doctor."

Relief washed over her. "Good." Her eyes fell on the woman standing next to him, the driver of the Volkswagen. "He's going to need help getting her out."

The woman, fiftyish and clad in jeans and a Pendleton shirt, swung up next to Kate. The Bronco rocked a little. The driver's side door opened, but it wouldn't stay open, so they left it closed and together with the unconscious woman's husband, maneuvered her through the window. "Put her in my rig," the driver of the Volkswagen bus said, and ran ahead to slide open the side door and pull down the bed in back.

They got her inside and on the bed and the doctor squeezed in next to her, his black bag fetched by one of the white-haired ladies who had been sitting in the backseat of the rented Ford. The Bronco driver wedged in between the refrigerator and the table, anxious eyes on his wife. The rest of them clustered around the open door, watching the doctor run competent hands down the woman's body. "Doesn't feel like anything's broken. She's got a lump on her right temple; she probably whacked her head on the window when you went over. What's her name?" he said, one hand on her wrist, eyes on his watch.