Breakup (3 page)

But for now, no bears, no bogeymen, not even any porcupines. Mutt came to stand next to Kate in the doorway. Against her knee, Kate could feel her quivering with unease. She knotted her fingers in the stiff gray ruff and gave it a reassuring tug. "What's wrong , girl?"

Mutt was looking up. Kate looked from her anxious yellow eyes to the sky. The hum of the jet engine was still there, although it sounded odd, a kind of increasing whine. "There's nothing out here, girl," she told Mutt. "Just your imagination working overtime."

Still, she took a long last look around before pulling the door shut, and she didn't rack the rifle, standing it instead against the doorjamb.

She was just turning back to the kitchen table when she became aware of an increasingly loud whistling sound, and then it hit.

It was a thump to end all thumps, a tremendous CRUNCH! of earth and metal. The ground shook beneath the impact, violently enough to knock Kate off her feet.

"Earthquake!" she shouted on the way down. She twisted to land on all fours and headed for the space under the table, knocking a chair out of the way and snaking out an arm to grab Mutt.

Both windows facing the yard shattered and several something s whizzed over her head and kaCHUNKed into the opposite wall. Books fell to the table and from there to the floor, scattering tax papers everywhere. Mutt, squealing like a frightened puppy, tore free of Kate's grasp and fled across the floor to dive beneath the couch. Since the bottom of the couch was only six inches off the floor and Mutt stood three feet at the shoulder, this was no mean feat.

A split second later there was another CRUNCH! and a piece of the cabin's roof fell in and onto the couch. Another distressed squeal and Mutt shot out, streaked across the room and straight up the ladder to the loft, her paws barely touching the rungs.

The couch fell in.

Well. Not all of it.

Just the section where Kate usually sat to read. The spot where she'd worn a Kate-shaped groove into the stuffing over the years. The spot where she'd fallen in sequential love with Wilfred Wetherall and Lazarus Long and Jamie Fraser.

She looked up.

The roof had fallen in, too.

Well. Not all of it.

Ears ringing, sense of balance iffy, Kate stumbled to her feet and put out a hand to grasp at nothing. "What the hell was that?" Her voice sounded distant and tinny. Nobody answered her. She blinked at the opposite wall, at what had impacted there. It seemed like a long thin piece of gray metal, several of them.

She shook her head, bemused, and made her way across the floor, knees wobbling as if she'd just gotten off a boat after six weeks at sea. The hole in the roof was jagged around the edges. She peered inside the matching hole in the couch below, to find a piece of oily gray metal, all knobs and nuts and bolts and flanges, resting squarely, even neatly inside the Olympia beer box where she stored those cassette tapes she couldn't find room for on her shelves. There wasn't much left of them but plastic splinters and snarled brown tape.

"What the hell?" she said, even more blankly than before. Sh e staggered to the door and wrenched it open, only to find herself nose to rivet with another shard of the metal, quivering with the motion of the opening door. "What the hell?"

It was a strip of gray metal nearly identical to the ones in the far wall, driven solidly into the wood of the door. She ducked gingerly beneath it, put one foot outside and froze.

Her truck was gone.

Well. That wasn't exactly true.

It was there, all right, or what was left of it. About all she could recognize were the four tires, evidently still attached to the axles, although all four of them were canted over, and all were ruptured and flat. The doors had burst open and were lying on the ground at odd angles. She couldn't even see the toolbox or the bed.

Because lying squarely on top of it was a jet engine.

Impossible.

Kate blinked and looked again.

It was a jet engine, all right. An enormous jet engine, or what was left of one.

Her mind fought a battle between denial and acceptance. She'd just managed to grasp the fact of the engine's existence when a second observation managed to insert itself into the turmoil of her thoughts.

It was a very large jet engine.

It must have come off a very large jet.

Now there was a comforting thought. She raised her head to look warily up into the darkening sky. If the rest of the plane was coming down she would see it before she heard it, because her ears were still ringing.

Long moments passed. No plane fell on her.

She let herself relax some, not much, just enough to unlock her knees and approach the wreckage, almost hopefully, as if closer examination might make it all go away.

No such luck. The engine wasn't round anymore, it wasn't even egg-shaped, it was a scrap heap of aluminum and steel or whatever they made jet engines out of nowadays. She craned her neck u p over the lip of the thing and peered inside. Well over half of the turbine blades seemed to be missing.

The shard of metal in her front door was one of them. So, she discovered as she stumbled numbly around the semicircle of buildings, were the shards of metal embedded in the bookshelves on the far wall of the cabin, in the outhouse door and inside the garage on the wall from which her tools hung (one of which had neatly severed the power cord to the hand drill), piercing the side of the snow machine, from which a trickle of gas ran to mingle with the slush beneath, and the roof of the cabin and in various tree trunks around the clearing.

Kate emerged from the garage and faltered to a halt, drawing in a shaken breath. The acrid smell of diesel fuel filled the air, from either the airplane engine or Ichiban or both. Or, no, of course not, jet engines ran on jet fuel. The diesel smell must be from the truck. In some detached portion of her mind, she was thankful there was no fire.

She looked up to see stars twinkling in the sky. The breeze ruffled the tops of the trees. A torn wisp of cloud slid to one side to reveal the moon, almost full, silver rays shining down, all the better to illuminate the complete shambles of Kate's yard. Her ears were still ringing with the sound of metal crashing into the earth, and she became aware that, yet again, her knees were trembling.

"Breakup," she said, with loathing.

The sun came up at 4:57 a.m. the next morning, or it would have if the sky hadn't been overcast.

By 4:58 a.m., the homestead was crawling with people.

Kate had progressed from speechless shock to speechless rage.

Mutt was still up in the loft, under the bed.

"Jesus, what a mess." A man of medium height, clad in jeans and a jacket with National Transportation Safety Board insignia on it stared around the clearing, at the turbine blades embedded in garage, greenhouse, cabin, outhouse and trees, at the hole in the cabin roof, at the flattened truck still obscured by the engine, at the severed and shattered tools in the garage, at the pierced gas tank on the snow machine, at the collapsed cache.

"I've seen worse, though." He saw Kate's expression. "No, really. Happens more often than you might think, a lot more often tha n the airlines like to admit. Big chunks of frozen sewage, access panels, doors and hatches, cowling, cones, turbine blades, they've all fallen off a plane at one time or another. It's kind of like a car losing a hubcap or a muffler."

Kate said nothing.

"Although," he said with a rueful smile, "generally speaking mufflers don't have time to accelerate at thirty-two feet per second per second." He paused expectantly, but something in her eyes must have told him not to explain that this was the acceleration of gravity, so he contented himself with adding, "Must have been one hell of a bang."

Kate said nothing. The line of her jaw was very tight.

He pursed his lips in a judicious expression. "You're lucky."

She looked at him.

"Yeah, believe it or not, you are. Outside, there are so many planes in the air at any given moment that it's next to impossible to track down the offending aircraft. In Alaska it's easier. Last night, there was only one 747 in the right place at the right time." He shrugged. "Easy to identify, and easier for you to demand restitution. By the way, the plane made it back to Fairbanks safely. Nobody hurt."

"You," Kate said, very carefully, "have obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit."

The speechlessness was beginning to wear off.

The NTSB man raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I'm sure you'll be reimbursed for damages."

"You bet your ass I will."

He offered his hand. She didn't take it. "I'm John Stewman, National Transportation Safety Board. I'm the head of the go team." When she didn't ask, he explained. "That's what we call our response-to-crash teams, Ms. . . . her," and he smiled, revealing deep dimples and a slight gap between his two front teeth. His eyes were brown and crinkled at the corners. Dark hair fell untidily over his forehead, increasing the resemblance to Tom Sawyer.

Alarmed and annoyed at this sudden awareness, she snapped , "Shugak." It was nothing more than a biological response to a nearly fatal experience, she told herself sternly. Ask any soldier left standing after a battle. Ask any pilot who walked away from a crash. Between the bear encounters and the jet engine, she was feeling a little rough around the edges, that was all. It would fade.

"Shuyak?" Stewman repeated in a louder voice, and she started and swore to herself. "Like the island?"

"S-H-U-G-A-K, Shugak, Kate." Besides, Stewman wasn't all that attractive, he just thought he was. "Make sure you spell the name right on the check."

The NTSB would not be writing her a check, Earlybird Air Freight would, maybe, but "S-H-U-G-A-K," he repeated, imperturbable, writing it down on the top of a form, "Kate. You live here alone?"

"No." She didn't elaborate.

His gaze lingered for a moment on the scar on her throat. "You married?"

"No."

"Children?"

"What are you, the census taker? No."

He sighed. "Ms. Shugak, we need to know who else lives here, so we can-"

She looked behind him and the taut lines of her face eased. "I've got a roommate."

He pivoted.

Mutt stood in the open door of the cabin, a distrustful expression on her face. The man extracting the turbine blade from the snow machine caught sight of her and stood straight up. "John," he said.

The man next to Kate said, "Yes, Brandon."

"Um, there's a wolf? Over there?" He pointed at Mutt, who regarded his pointing finger for a moment and then slowly, deliberately and thoroughly licked her chops.

Stewman looked at Kate for confirmation. "Is it? A wolf?"

He didn't look more than wary at the prospect, and Kate, damn his eyes, liked him for it. She gave a casual shrug and Jack Morgan's standard answer to that comment. "Nah. Only half."

This time the smile did more than crinkle his eyes. "Only half, Brandon," he said.

Brandon, a gaunt, pinch-faced albino blond, was not noticeably reassured.

"Mutt," Kate said. Mutt looked over at her but made no move. "Come on, girl. It's all right."

Mutt had her doubts about that. She took a long, careful look around the clearing. The half dozen men and women in it slowed their work to a halt, equally wary expressions on their faces. Brandon's nervousness was catching. "Come on, girl," Kate repeated. "It's okay now. Come on, come here." She patted her leg.

Mutt could face down a bull moose in rut, a brown bear waking up cranky from his winter nap, a mass murderer armed with a shotgun. The engine off a 747 falling from the sky was beyond her ken, and it was taking her a while to adapt. Her speculative gaze fell on a woman in a fur jacket standing next to what had been Kate's truck. The woman took an involuntary step backward. Satisfied that, jet engine or not, she hadn't lost her touch, Mutt strolled over to stand next to Kate. She looked up and cocked an ear, as if to say, What's all the fuss?

Kate caught Stewman's eye. He was grinning, and she almost laughed but caught it in time. There was no point in giving an inch until the check cleared the bank.

"John!" somebody yelled. "Come here, will you?"

"In a minute, Tim," he yelled back, and looked from Kate to Mutt and back again. "This your roomie?" She nodded. "And will she be filing a claim as well?"

Kate showed her teeth. "I'll be filing one for her."

He grinned again. Kate thought of the fence and the whitewash and resisted the charm in that smile.

"Introduce us," Stewman said.

"Huh?"

"Introduce us, so she doesn't take a bite out of me the next time I make a move in your direction."

Kate wasn't altogether sure that that was such a good idea, but she said, "Make a fist, hold your hand out, palm down."

He did so without hesitation. Mutt sniffed at it, sneezed once and looked up at Kate for approval, her plume of a tail waving back and forth in a gentle arc. Kate scratched behind her ears.

"That it?" the NTSB investigator asked.

"That's it."

He retrieved his hand and closed the notebook. "Look, Kate, I know this is tough, but we'll be out of your hair before you know it. We're really very good at putting the pieces back together."

"How long before you clear all this crap out of here?"

"One day, maybe two."

"How long before I'm reimbursed?"

"You'll have to take that up with the Earlybird representative."

"Which one is he?"

He pointed at a skinny man with a thin, harried face standing on the other side of the wreckage. "The name's Kevin Bickford. He's Earlybird's director of operations for the state."

"Thanks," Kate said, and walked around the wreckage to tap Bickford on the shoulder. He turned and stared at her uncomprehendingly.

"Kate Shugak, Mr. Bickford." He looked blank, and she added pointedly, "This is my homestead your jet engine just trashed."

He cringed inside his oversize parka, reminding her of nothing so much as a parky squirrel diving down the nearest hole. He even looked a little like a parky squirrel, with small, bright eyes set close on either side of an insignificant little nose that didn't look as if it could suck in enough oxygen to keep a gnat alive. His teeth, bared in a failed attempt at an ingratiating smile, were little and white, with the exception of the front two, which were big and buck. "Mr. Bickford, as far as I'm concerned, this could not have happened a t a worse time. I need my truck. When will I be reimbursed for the damage done by your engine?"