"I don't know many people round these parts," Gallagher said, "not yet, anyway. But if they stop in, I can ask."
"Appreciate it," Jim said, and set the still full mug on the counter. "Thanks for the coffee."
"Anytime." Gallagher showed him out without haste. He even waited in the open doorway to wave as the Cessna rose into the air.
Jim circled the trailer as he gained altitude and waggled his wings in a friendly good-bye, but as he straightened out and put the nose back on three-one-five, he was sure of one thing, and maybe two.
Gallagher was nervous about something.
And he sure didn't like cops.
FOURTEEN
The weather held, granting an ephemeral warmth outside if you were bundled up in dark clothes and standing still, but Kate was almost constantly in motion, visiting the downriver villages of the 'Burbs, in order-Double Eagle, Chulyin, Potlatch, and Red Run.
Ken Kaltak had taken to carrying his rifle with him wherever he went. He listened with a stone face as Kate pleaded for time to find the robbers, but she could see he wasn't listening to a word she said. His wife Janice, the lone schoolteacher for the Double Eagle School, which had ten students in seven grades, sent her husband outside on the pretext of getting some moose out of the cache and said bluntly, "Times are tough, Kate. Ken says he's never seen so many fish go up the river, and he's never caught less. Fish and Game gives preference to sports and subsistence fishers and by the time the drifters are allowed to put a net in the water the fish are all up the river. We've got a fish wheel and we catch enough to eat most years, but we rely on what we catch driftnetting in Alaganik to pay for groceries and fuel. We had almost a thousand dollars' worth of food on that sled." Her eyes filled up. "How are we supposed to eat this winter?"
Ken saw Kate to her snow machine, where he exchanged cautious greetings with Mutt (they'd howdied but they hadn't shook), and said, "You know who did this, Kate. Why waste time? Why don't you just head straight for Tikani?"
Kate settled onto the seat. "Can you identify any of your attackers, Ken?"
His lips tightened. He didn't answer.
"Didn't think so," Kate said. "They were wearing helmets, is what I understand."
"Yes."
"So you didn't see their faces. And you didn't recognize the machines."
"No."
She pressed the starter. "When there is evidence that points toward Tikani, I'll go there."
In Chulyin Ike Jefferson was incandescent with rage and treated Kate with something that bordered on contempt. It would have hurt her feelings if she hadn't been so shocked. "Where the hell have you been?" he said. "These guys have pretty much turned the river into a free-fire zone, and you've been where? Because it sure as hell hasn't been anywhere around here!"
"I just found out about them yesterday," she started to say.
"And where's the trooper?" He directed a pointed look over her shoulder. "Sorta conspicuous by his absence, now, ain't he?"
Ike Jefferson was another fisherman, who supplemented his summer earnings by working construction in Anchorage during the winter. A finish carpenter, he was an artist and a craftsman and was better off financially than any of the other victims, but his wife had died giving birth to Laverne and he was raising her alone. "I moved us to Anchorage in the winter because of the work," he told Kate tightly, "but whenever we can, we spend the weekend on the river. It don't happen anywhere near as often as either one of us would like. All I was doing was hauling in some fuel so the place don't freeze up while we're gone. Who pulls this kind of shit, Kate? Since when do Park rats prey on their own? This used to be a good place to live, with good neighbors that'd look out for the place while we're gone, but I might as well live in Anchorage full time and let Laverne hang out at the Dimond Center for all the peace we're getting here."
The Dimond Center mall in Anchorage was a notorious hangout for gangbangers, with APD responding to shoot-outs there half a dozen times a year. No Park rat regarded Anchorage itself as anything more than a place to get your eyes checked, your teeth fixed, to buy food, clothing, and parts, eat fried chicken at the Lucky Wishbone and pizza at the Moose's Tooth, and maybe see a movie if enough things were blown up in it. That Ike had been reduced to winters there only added insult to this newest injury in his eyes.
Laverne, a chunky little girl with a self-possession that belied her years, calmly corroborated her father's description of the attack and the perpetrators, and added the interesting detail that all the snow machines were new.
"Did you recognize what kind?" Kate said.
The girl nodded. "They were all Ski-Doos, and they were all black."
Ike's lips were pressed into a thin line. "Somebody's making money doing this," he said. "Good money. Where you headed now?"
"Red Run," she said.
He snorted. "Why bother? We both know where you shoulda gone first."
She said the same thing to him that she had to Ken Kaltak. "Did you recognize your attackers, Ike?"
He let loose with a string of profanity and stamped off toward the outhouse. " 'Bye, Kate," Laverne said, and went back in the cabin.
Dismissed, Kate pressed the starter, negotiated the steep trail over bank to river, idled for a few moments to give Mutt time to catch up and hop on, and headed south.
She got to Red Run that evening and spent the night in her sleeping bag on the floor of the school gym, courtesy of the new teacher who lived alone in a little cabin out back and who was so hungry for company three months into the school year that she insisted Kate join her for dinner and Notting Hill on DVD afterward. They both agreed they liked Hugh Grant's friends more than they liked Hugh Grant, and Kate went to sleep that night thinking Red Run School would be lucky if Alice Crawford lasted out the year.
Kate was at the Rileys' home at first light, a small, snug house that Art had built himself from the ground up over the past thirty years. It had begun life as a one-room log cabin, added on to as the children came, and then when Art's father died of lung cancer he built a mother-in-law apartment on the side facing the river. It had its own kitchen where she could make agutaq and fry bread for the granddaughter, the child of Art and Christine's eldest son, an Alaska National Guardsman stationed in Anchorage who was presently serving in Iraq. The mother had vanished shortly after the child's birth and the child had never lived with anyone else.
They welcomed Kate and invited her to share their breakfast. Art was a trapper who ran lines up a couple of creeks in the Quilak foothills, one of them in the Suulutaq Valley. "Best wolf run I've ever had, and last year the best prices I've ever got," he said. "Seems all the Hollywood types are trimming their coats with wolf nowadays, and where they go everybody follows. 'Course the mine'll put paid to all that."
"Doesn't have to," Kate said. "Not if we watch them."
He shook his head. "Don't kid yourself, Kate. It'll change everything."
"Only if we let it," she said, but she was put forcibly in mind of Mandy's certainty on the same subject. "About that attack, Art, she said. "I was wondering if you'd remembered anything else about them. For starters, do you have any idea who it was?"
"No," he said, "no idea."
His tone was oddly tranquil. The five of them were at the kitchen table surrounded by the remnants of bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and toast, the granddaughter absorbed in constructing a house from her potatoes. "You told Jim Chopin you thought the Johansen brothers were the people he ought to talk to."
"Did I?" He shook his head, and produced a sheepish grin. "Probably a hangover from them corking me last summer. The Johansen brothers are a waste of space, true, but I didn't have any reason to suspect them more than anybody else. Still don't."