Authors: Dana Stabenow
At Huffman Business Park she found a pay phone and dialed a number from memory. He was home. Like Dischner, he must keep banker's hours. "Hello.
It's Kate Shugak. I want to talk."
She listened. "You owe me." She listened some more. "You owe me," she repeated. She listened again. "You owe me," she said for the third time.
This time she winced and held the receiver away from her ear. When the volume slackened she brought it back, in time to catch the street address bellowed at her.
For the second time that morning she drove up into the mountains, this time by way of O'Malley Road. When they got to where the trees thinned out and the floor space of the homes quadrupled in square feet she started looking for street numbers. She found the right one on a gray-sided, geometric monstrosity that looked so New Age it might translate into the Fourth Dimension at any moment.
Like Dischner's the view was superb, and from this angle included Mounts Redoubt and Iliamna. The hint of cloud in the southeast had become a definite, precipitative presence. Kate could feel the rise in temperature and humidity on the skin of her face. The air, so calm and still all week, was stirring itself to wakefulness, promising more to come.
Mutt peed in front of the right front tire of John King's brand-new Humvee and wandered around the side of the house, following her nose.
Kate walked a flagged path to the front porch. The door was made of oak.
The knocker was the head of a longhorn steer made of brass. It was heavy to lift and came down hard, and before the tremor it left in the earth died away the door was yanked open and John King stood before her, dressed as usual in a scowl and mustard-yellow cowboy boots. He growled something and yanked the door wide.
Kate took the growl as an invitation to enter and walked past him into a sunken living room furnished in brown leather and sheepskin. Varnished wooden stairs led upstairs and down. A counter with blue tile inlaid on the surface separated the living room from a kitchen with more appliances than Sears. The floor was wood polished to so high a gloss that the morning sun reflecting off it was almost blinding. More sheepskin beneath the coffee table did not alleviate the glare. The walls were festooned with the heads of a brown bear, a Dall sheep, a mountain goat, a wolverine pelt, a black bear hide and something rectangular and scaly it took Kate a moment to recognize as a rattlesnake skin. It still had its rattle. She gave it a flick of a finger, and the resulting sound made John King jump and say explosively,
"Jesus!" Beneath Kate's speculative gaze, he changed color and looked away.
Through the windows the inside view was everything the outside view had promised, with the added attraction of a fireplace big enough to roast a stalled ox. Kate had always wondered what a stalled ox was. She should have looked it up while she was at Loussac; Dan and Bruce would have known right where to find it.
The couch, an overstuffed affair quite twenty feet in length, was graced by the indolent form of the trophy brunette Kate remembered from Mama Nicco's and the Raven party. Today she was dressed in a black body suit that looked as if it had been sprayed on. Kate wondered how she got her breasts up in that position and how she kept them there. The miracles of modern medicine, probably. The longhaired Persian in her lap stretched and yawned.
King jerked his head. "Get lost. And take that goddam cat with you."
Her smooth face as usual blank of all expression, the brunette rose to her feet without haste. The Persian leapt down lightly, jerked her tail at King and together they disappeared downstairs, both pairs of haunches moving in similar sinuous precision. King took the brunette's place and jerked his head at the opposite chair. Ignoring his gracious invitation, Kate walked over to the window and contemplated the view. "Nice view," she said to the window. "Nicer than Ed Dischner's." She turned and looked at King. "You can't see Redoubt and Iliamna from his place." He went from stiff to frozen. She smiled faintly. "He didn't call? Don't worry, he will." Her smiled faded. "Believe everything he tells you, King. Everything. And then some."
She sat down across from him and linked her hands behind her head, body relaxed, eyes watchful. "When do you make the announcement about the new discovery at Katalla?" His head snapped up. A multitude of expressions crossed his face, shock, alarm, anger. Their gazes held for a long beat.
His head dropped and he confirmed everything she suspected with one heartfelt word. "Shit."
She waited, patient. He raised his head. "How did you find out?"
She shrugged. "It wasn't all that difficult." Felonious, she thought, but not difficult. "Once I knew Dischner and a bunch of his long-time pals were fixing to file for subsurface rights on that area if and when it became public property, all I had to do was look at the company he was keeping."
He didn't quite believe it yet. "You know about the leases?"
She nodded. "And then of course there was my cousin Martin."
"Your cousin Martin?" King said. "Who the hell's your cousin Martin?"
"Martin Shugak. He was carp entering for one of your subcontractors at Prudhoe last spring when I went up to the Slope for you. He told me he got the job on a trade, half a dozen Slope jobs for Association shareholders in return for permission for RPetco to do seismic testing on tribal lands." She sighed. "It's a habit with you, isn't it, King?
Just like with that exploration well on Tode Point. You just can't resist poking holes where you aren't supposed to, where you've got no right to. Iqaluk butts up against Association land, and Katalla butts up against Iqaluk, and there'd been oil produced at Katalla before. You got curious, and what the hell, it was out in the back of beyond. So you stepped over the line. And you found something that looked promising, promising enough that you talked about it to Dischner. Looking for financing, maybe? Maybe looking to step out on your own? Maybe because of his connections through Lew Mathisen to the board of the Niniltna Native Association? All of the above?"
She waited, watching him. He waited, watching her. "Martin said Billy Mike did the deal with you. Is that true?" He didn't answer and Kate said, "You and Dischner and a bunch of your cronies decided to file on what you thought was there in anticipation of a discovery well. Only there was this one, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little problem. The land had no clear title. It was still being fought over by the federal government, which wants it for a national park, and the Niniltna Native Association, which wants it to remain as is, a traditional, tribal subsistence area. "Or some of them do. Some of them want to develop it.
There was a conflict between members of the board which you and Dischner and Mathisen exploited, because you and Dischner didn't want it to be a national park, and you didn't want it to be property of a native corporation. You wanted it to become a national forest.
Because national parks are all of them closed to mining. There is no mineral leasing in national parks, at all, period, except for those mines that were extant at the time of the creation of the park. It takes an act of Congress to change the status of park land, a fact with which you are intimately acquainted because of the difficulty your whole industry has been having with opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the North Slope to oil exploration.
"But a national forest, now, that's different. National forests are put to economic use under policies dictated by Congress. They are administered by the National Forest Service, a bureau of the Department of Agriculture. The Forests sell lumber and grazing." Kate leaned forward. "A friend of mine, a career ranger, told me this, and I looked it up to confirm it. National forests can also be developed for hydroelectric power, and for irrigation, and for mining.
"Dischner knew, and you did, too, that after the RPetco Anchorage spill you had about as much chance as a snowball in hell of getting Niniltna permission to drill for oil in Iqaluk. But logging, now. Trees are a renewable resource. Selective cutting and streambed maintenance and all that. The Niniltna Association lawyer told our chairman that it didn't look good for the Association to gain title to the land, so you were lobbying the board to lobby Congress and Interior to have it designated a national forest instead of a national park. And once Iqaluk was designated a forest, your toe was in the door."
King's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat.
"So, Dischner turns Mathisen loose on the board of the Niniltna Native Association. The wishes of local native associations carry a lot of weight with the new administration in Washington, and Dischner wanted to be sure that the local spokesmen, read the Niniltna board and probably the Raven board, too, saw the advantages of turning Iqaluk into a national forest. His pitch was that they could negotiate timber rights in the new forest so that all UCo's--yet another Dischner sideline, I discover--so that all UCo's construction contracts with the Niniltna Native Association would be fulfilled using local lumber from local lands. And local labor to get it out, I'll bet. A powerful incentive for some of those Prince William Sound fisherman still trying to come back from the RPetco Anchorage spill. "State ownership would have been best of all, since the legislature for the last twenty years has been the best one oil money can buy, but of course relations between the state government and Alaska Natives have never been worse, so you knew they wouldn't even think of supporting state ownership. You probably even promised them that they'd keep their subsistence rights to Iqaluk, and why not? Oil fields don't take up that much room. All you wanted was a strip of the shore." King's eyes flickered and Kate nodded, satisfied
"It was a good pitch. Even my grandmother went for it at first, didn't she?"
She watched him carefully. He made no outward sign, but by the very shocked stillness of his body he confirmed every word she had said, every half-assed guess she had put together from the scanty evidence available to her. Never had she felt less triumph or less satisfaction in uncovering the truth. Oh, emaa, emaa, she thought. This was what you were afraid of telling me. It wasn't Axenia, it wasn't the board, it wasn't Sarah or Enakenty, it wasn't even Iqaluk. It was you, and the deal you almost made with the devil. Were you so ashamed that you could not tell me? Were you afraid that when I found out you would lose my respect?
She took a deep, unobtrusive breath. "Then she smelled a rat." Kate shrugged. "It might have been Harvey's house, it might have been that so many contracts were sole-sourced to UCo, it might have been that ridiculous lease Arctic Investors gave Enakenty Barnes on that condo that must be worth three times that in rent. I don't know what it was.
But she knew something was wrong, and then Sarah died, and it was all just too, too convenient. And she asked me to find out what was going on. And I started looking, and then Enakenty died." King said quickly,
"There's nothing to say that those deaths weren't accidents."
Kate raised one skeptical eyebrow. "The timing is very interesting, though, don't you think? The two votes guaranteed to go with my grandmother if she chose to lobby the federal government to making Iqaluk a part of the Park, instead of a national forest? That was a three-vote majority, King, even if you did get to Billy Mike. They pretty much had it sewn up. Now two of them are dead, and the remaining members of the board will have to call a special election to fill the vacant seats."
She let the silence lie between them like a dead fish. It smelled about that bad. The brunette came back upstairs and went to the refrigerator.
"Get out," King barked.
Her voice was a soft Southern drawl. "But honey, I just wanted my Coca-Cola--"
"Get out!"
Something dangerously close to a pout very nearly creased the smooth face, but then the brunette remembered that all she had was her face and banished the pout back into oblivion and herself back down the stairs.
King looked at Kate. "What are you going to do?" "It's not what I'm going to do," Kate said, "it's what you're going to do. You're backing off Iqaluk. You're shit canning any reports on whatever prospects you think Iqaluk might have."
"How will I justify the expense to my board?"
Kate snorted. "Come off it, King. The oil industry has punched enough dusters in this state. You can even make a speech on how we're all of us environmentalists, and how some natural places are so untouched and pristine they ought to be left alone, and how Iqaluk is one of them.
You'll probably make the news on all four networks, not to mention every thirty minutes on CNN." Kate got to her feet.
"For Christ's sweet sake," he burst out, "there might be--"
"I don't give a damn what there might be!" The furious grating shout halted him halfway to his feet, eyes wide. "Any interest you had in Iqaluk is over," she ground out. "Live with it, or I'll see you tried for murder in a court of law." She turned.
"Shugak." She looked over her shoulder. He was all the way up on his feet now, teetering back and forth on his mustard-yellow cowboy boots.
"What's the point?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what is the fucking point?" He looked into her face as if she were a puzzle with too many pieces missing to ever see the whole design.
"We're poking holes in Cook Inlet. We're looking for a way back into Kachemak Bay. Norton Sound and Bristol Bay look promising, Amerex is still sinking dusters in Big Lake, and you know we're not giving up on Congress letting us into ANWR. So what's the fucking point? The oil industry's not getting out of Alaska anytime soon. We're going to be here for a long time to come."
"But not in Katalla," she said. "And not in Iqaluk." She turned to go.
"Oh, I wouldn't be too all-fired sure of that, honey," another voice said.
The brunette was standing at the head of the stairs, a pistol in her hands. An automatic, Kate noticed, a nine millimeter. With her luck, it wouldn't jam. A memory flicked in her mind, Dischner bending over the trophy brunette's cleavage at the Raven party, close enough to lick. She swore to herself. "It wasn't you, after all," she said to King.