Dead stared at his bound hands in stupefaction. "What the fuck?"
The door to the cabin crashed open. Kate looked at Mutt and signaled. "Go."
Mutt went around one side of the cabin and Kate went around the other, just in time to see Gus and Icarus Johansen emerge, jostling each other in the doorway to be first to their brother's aid. Both were holding rifles. Ick was facing Kate, Gus behind him, and behind Gus Mutt let loose with another chilling howl. "Ou-ou-ouooooooooo!"
"Fuck!" Ick said, or maybe he screamed. "Shoot it, Gus, shoot it!"
And then he saw Kate. After one incredulous second, his shoulders slumped. "Oh, fuck me," he said.
Mutt jumped Gus and his rifle went flying. Gus fell backward on Ick, who stumbled and fell to one knee. Kate took one step forward, got a toe beneath the stock of his rifle, kicked it out of his hands and into the air, and caught it neatly before it hit the ground. She raised it smoothly to her shoulder, looking down the sights at Ick's face, lit reasonably well from the sullen glow of the fire streaming out the open door of the cabin. Some part of her noticed that Ick had a shiner to rival Matt Grosdidier's, two of them, in fact. "Kate?" Ick said. "Kate Shugak?"
"Ou-ou-ouOOOOOOOOO!" Mutt said, standing with her paws on Gus's shoulders and sharp, gleaming teeth right down in Gus's face. Gus seemed incapable of either speech or movement. A moment later the acrid smell of urine filled the air.
"And that'd be Mutt," Ick said.
Dead came shuffling around the corner of the cabin, wrists still bound in front of him, pants down around his ankles, weenie wagging in the wind and accompanied by a strong smell of excrement. "Ick? Gus? Are you okay? What the hell's going on?"
From behind the cabin came a long, descendiary groan, followed by an even louder, splintering crash.
Ick Johansen started to laugh.
Kate raised her right foot. "Do you like your teeth where they are, Ick?"
Ick stopped laughing and started to whine. "Ah, c'mon, Kate. It's funny."
"You know what isn't funny?" Kate said. "Your dad, starving to death in his own cabin because his asshole brats can't be bothered to feed him." She could feel her hands tightening on the stock of the rifle, and the smile faded from Ick's face.
Mutt's head raised from Gus's throat, ears pricking. From the next mountain over came the lonesome, faraway cry of a wolf. There was another, and then another, until the pack was in full chorus. It also sounded like it was coming in their direction.
Kate looked back down at Ick, and even in the faint light cast through the cabin door she could see him start to sweat. Like all Park rats, he'd heard the story about Kate Shugak and the bootlegger. "Jesus, Kate, you wouldn't. C'mon."
She had zip-strips for Ick and Gus, too, and she used them. She picked up Gus's rifle and tossed it into the nearest pool, where it made a muted splash. Ick's rifle followed. "Mutt," she said. "Guard."
Mutt returned her attention to Gus and snapped agreement, canines gleaming. Gus whimpered.
Kate turned and headed down the little canyon.
Ick's voice followed her out of the clearing. "Kate? C'mon, Kate! Come back here! Jesus, you can't leave us like this, Kate! At least leave us a rifle! Kate! KATE!"
TWENTY-THREE
Jim was standing in the doorway of the trooper post when she drove up at noon the next day with the Johansen brothers in tow. Literally in tow, as she had packed the three of them into their sleeping bags and tied them into their individual snow machine sleds and hitched the sleds on behind her own in a train. The combined weight was a strain on the engine of her machine, which had not been built to pull that many pounds at once. Although the slow uphill slogs were more than made up for in the exhilarating downhill runs, when she had to go as fast as possible so the sleds didn't overtake her and the whole shebang didn't jackknife and kill them all.
Ick, Dead, and Gus, funnily enough, didn't appreciate the need for speed, instead having somehow gained the impression that she was hoping to kill the three of them before they could be put safely under arrest. They screamed a lot at first, and when that didn't do any good they closed their eyes and waited for death.
A fifth sled hitched last carried evidence, items of interest found in the hot springs cabin that Kate felt might be identified by the Rileys and the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons and Gene Daly as having been stolen from them during the attacks. Since several boxes, now mostly empty, had been clearly marked in black Sharpie RILEY-RED RUN and KEN KALTAK-DOUBLE EAGLE-WAIT FOR PICKUP, she felt fairly confident they would be.
They acquired something of a parade as they came through Niniltna, and Ick didn't think anything was funny anymore. He was swearing a blue streak by the time Jim got him out of his sled, although that turned out partly to be because he'd had to pee for the last twenty miles and bouncing up and down on the sled over bumps and berms was not kind to the kidneys. Gus and Ick, of course, were already past praying for in that direction, and Jim recoiled when he unpeeled them from their sleeping bags. "Jesus, Kate," he said.
"I know," she said, "sorry, Jim."
She didn't sound very sorry. She didn't look it, either. He finished extricating the Johansens and at arm's length marched them one at a time through a cheering crowd of Park rats. They had all heard the story of the attacks on the river and had correctly deduced the reason for this morning's perp walk.
"I could cuss you out myself," Jim said to Kate inside. "They're going to smell up my post something fierce."
Kate, feeling much calmer now that she'd taken some direct action against somebody deserving, yawned widely, jaw cracking, and said with a lazy stretch, "Quit whining. I got your guys for you."
"Holy shit," Howie Katelnikof said, wide-eyed as Jim hustled the boys into the facing cell. "It's a three-Johansen salute." When he got a better look at them his eyes went even wider. "Jesus. What'd they do to piss you off, Kate?"
Kate didn't deign to answer. Howie got a whiff of the brothers then and took a step backward, nose wrinkling. "Jeeeeeesuz, I can feel my lungs melting down. Come on, Jim, you can't lock me up with that smell."
In fairness, Kate couldn't blame him. Weeks spent holing up at the hot springs without soap or running water had left the Johansen brothers smelling pretty ripe before Kate got there, and from what she'd seen in Tikani, she had some question as to their fidelity to personal hygiene anyway. Their subsequent reaction to apprehension hadn't helped.
"Where'd you find them?" Jim said, closing the door to his office.
"The hot springs."
"Really. Heard about them. Never been there. Kinda thought they were a myth."
"No," Kate said, pulling first one arm past the opposite shoulder, and then the other. Her joints popped in protest. "They're real all right." She jumped up to grab the trim over the office door, and hung there, letting her spine unkink, while she counted to thirty. "Hard to find, is all, and you can pretty much only get there in winter, unless you want to spend a month bushwhacking through the undergrowth with a machete. I'll take you up there sometime if you want to see it."
"Sure." He sat down. "They confess?"
She relaxed into the chair opposite him. "To what?"
"To anything," he said dryly. "They look pretty beat up, Kate."
"I know," Kate said. "I didn't do that."
"What did you do?"
She told him. When he stopped laughing he said, "Okay. You didn't whale on them. Who did?"
She gave him a look.
"Yeah," he said, "we don't have to talk about that right now. Or maybe ever. So did they confess to anything?"
She shook her head. "Ick shut up Gus and Dead. You should probably separate them."
"I've only got two cells."
"Not my problem," she said. "My work here is done."
"Need a statement." He opened a document on his computer and gave her an expectant look. She sighed and started talking. Half an hour and some questions later he printed it out and she signed it. By way of payback she made him type up an invoice from Kate Shugak to the Department of Public Safety for services rendered and made him sign it in front of her. "Okay," she said, rising to her feet, "absent any further objection, I'm headed for the barn and a hot shower and a hot meal, and then I'm going to bed."