PME held no majority in any of these concerns except for outright tide to their various gold mines, enough to exert a healthy influence over the board of directors, but not enough to concern themselves with anything except the bottom line. The gold mines were the only part of their mineral-producing empire that required them to pay salaries and benefits to employees. There had been union problems, which led to problems with the color of the bottom line, which had led to layoffs, which had led to more union problems, and then the price of gold, which had reached a high of $615 dollars an ounce, began to fall. The company had racked up a lot of zeros in legal debt. By then, the mines were, without exception, in serious need of some heavy investing in new mining technology and infrastructure. Their debtors were unwilling to wait for payment, and PME’s legal staff advised declaring bankruptcy to give the corporation breathing space to get back on its financial feet.
At this point, Kate’s stomach growled loudly enough to draw a condemnatory glance from the reference librarian. Kate busied herself with loading up on quarters from the change machine and printing out the relevant stories.
It was one o’clock, and Kate headed for Thai Kitchen on Tudor, where the best pad thai in town was served. She was head-down in it when her backpack started to vibrate. She jumped, dropping her chopsticks and knocking over her Coke. The backpack fell off the chair and scattered its contents across the floor and under the next table, which was, fortunately, unoccupied. One of the things that fell out was her new cell phone, which vibrated even farther across the floor, where it was scooped up by a white-haired matron in flowered polyester. “Is this yours, dear?” she said.
“Thanks,” Kate said. She couldn’t remember which button to push to answer it. The matron said, “Need some help there, dear?” and took the phone back. “I’ve got the same phone,” she said with a smile. “Costco, right? It takes a while to figure the little devil out.”
Kate retired to her table, kicking cash, notebook, pens, an address book, pencils, Tampax, Blistex, a comb, and a roll of cherry Lifesavers toward her backpack, and said into the phone, “Hello?”
“Kate?” Kurt said. “Is that you?”
“Yes.” She tried to keep her voice low. She’d been around too many people who seemed to think their cell phones were bullhorns. She knelt down and restuffed her backpack. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got some news for you.” Kurt paused for dramatic effect.
Kate sighed. “What?”
“I want to show you.”
“Kurt-”
“Come on, Kate, you’ll love it, I promise.” He gave her directions somewhere out near Jewel Lake. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. I’m starving, I’ve got to grab some lunch.”
“Kurt, wait a-” There was a click and after a moment a dial tone.
Kate pulled the phone from her ear and looked down at the keypad. She sighed again and went back to the white-haired matron, who showed her how to turn it off.
12
Arriving in Jewel Lake fifteen minutes later, Kate drove through a subdivision of prepackaged cracker-board houses that all looked exactly alike and were all painted the very same shade of ash gray with the exact same white trim. The pavement ended in a forest of scrub spruce and spindly birch. A gravel road with more bumps and grinds than a stripper dodged tree-trunks as it passed by what looked like the original homesteads, which were closeted in stands of lilac and honeysuckle that had been there long enough to grow into trees thick enough to reduce the evening sunshine to an occasional dapple. Wouldn’t be long before the taxes got too high and some developer showed up with a fistful of cash and the plans to another cookie-cutter subdivision, where all of the houses had exactly the same floor plan and where the neighbors could lean out of their windows to exchange a cup of sugar instead of having to walk all the way down the sidewalk and knock on the door.
She maneuvered the Subaru around an old Pontiac someone had left parked not very close to the side of the one-lane road, and found the address on a mailbox. She turned into the driveway next to it, found a winding and rudimentary path between a thicket of birch trees, and pulled up in front of a log cabin, right behind the white Ford Escort Kate had rented for Kurt yesterday morning. She got out. “Kurt?” she called.
Mutt took three paces forward and froze in place, one paw elevated. She raised her nose a fraction of an inch, testing the air.
Kate, about to head for the cabin, stopped. She shut the door of the Subaru and took a long stride away from the vehicle, arms held slightly out from her sides, doing a sweep of the clearing. There was nothing in it except a few dried-up flower beds and a gravel parking area where the dandelions were fighting a last-ditch battle for primacy with the horsetail. The house was a small cabin made of logs gone the dull dark gold of age. The windows had no drapes, probably because the house looked out on no neighbors.
Mutt’s head drooped down beneath her shoulders, and she began a low, menacing whine. She stalked forward, nostrils twitching.
“Hold up, girl,” Kate said, and Mutt’s growl changed from a whine to a snarl. “Hold on just one damn minute, Mutt,” Kate said. She’d seen Mutt like this before, and what happened next was never pretty. She looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing, not a shovel or a broom; this had to be the neatest yard she’d ever seen around a log cabin. She went back to the Subaru and found a box in the back holding a bottle of Windex, a roll of paper towels, a first-aid kit, flares, and a pair of jumper cables. She took out one of the cables and doubled it into kind of a short whip, with the clamps hanging free. She held it hip-high in her right hand, ready to swing, and kept her center of gravity over her feet in a kind of knees-bent glide, which contrasted with the sidling, stiff-legged movement of the dog shadowing her every step.
The steps up to the porch creaked. She saw no movement through the windows, but it was pretty dark inside. “Hello,” she said, raising her voice. “Anybody home?”
There was no answer. When she rapped on the door, it opened. Mutt’s growl intensified, but Kate didn’t need Mutt’s nose to smell the rich coppery scent of blood. She crouched down and hit the door a sharp rap with her left palm.
She caught a confused glimpse of a lumpen mass on the floor inside. There was a muffled curse and the door came back at her hard. Her head slammed against the jamb, and in the split second granted her for reflection she saw little bluebirds flying around in a circle. She even heard them tweeting. In the next second, instinct and training kicked in and she tucked and rolled into a forward somersault. It was a move designed to have her back up on her feet, and it would have worked if she hadn’t somersaulted right into the body of Kurt Pletnikoff. She scrabbled to get up and slipped in his blood.
Mutt’s growl cut off and someone screamed. Someone else cursed. Kate, slipping around like Abbott and Costello as she tried to regain her footing, heard Mutt’s teeth snapping together like a cleaver chopping up a chicken. There was another scream, louder this time. A gun fired and a bullet slammed into the stovepipe of the stove against the back wall of the living room.
Kate ducked and rolled behind a seedy old couch-dubious protection, but better than none-at the same moment the stovepipe came crashing down, raising a cloud of soot. There was another menacing growl and three more shots snapped off quickly. One shot thudded into the couch she was crouching behind and the other two into the wall over her head.
Mutt erupted into a fury of savage barks and snarls and there was the distinct sound of teeth tearing into flesh, and then another scream.
“Get it off me! Get it off me!” a panicked voice yelled, and then he screamed.