Play With Fire (19 page)

"Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences, with a major in justice." She smiled, a real smile this time. "My sophomore year, the same semester I found Wink lebleck, I took a police administration course, a three-hour-a-week class that met on Thursday nights, so at least one night a week I wouldn't have to spend in the dorm. It was a two hundred level course, Introduction to Criminal Justice. It was all about the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and civil and criminal law, and the difference between felonies and misdemeanors." "Bonehead cop," he said, and she laughed, and it was a real laugh, too.

"I guess. This guy taught it who'd been a cop in Chicago's Cook County--" Jack whistled "--yeah, I know, for sixteen years, and he had a few stories to tell, and he told us all of them. He was funny, and he was smart. The first class--the first class, mind you--he told us he thought all drugs should be legalized and taxed, that fighting against a victimless crime was a waste of the policeman's time and the taxpayer's money." Jack grinned and Kate saw it. "Yeah, I know, I was the only non-law enforcement person in the class, it was filled with cops and corrections officers going for their degrees, and I thought for a minute they were going to lynch him. But he ended up making us see his point, even me."

"Even you?"

"Even me. Abel raised me to believe that smoking marijuana led straight to mainlining heroin and mugging little old ladies for their social security checks, but this guy wound up convincing me he was right. The second class he told us stories about his favorite wienie wagger, and taught us how to deal with them."

Jack raised his eyebrows.

"Laugh. That was all. Just laugh at them, he said, and this is what happens." She demonstrated, forefinger at first erect, then slowly drooping forward, and grinned when he laughed. "The next semester I took Criminal Investigation from the same guy. I was hooked."

He caught her hand in his own. "I'm glad." She smiled at him. "Me, too."

They sat like that for a while, holding hands like a couple of college kids, watching the river flow by on its unhurried journey to confluence with the Tanana. "School shouldn't be like that," she said suddenly.

He agreed, wholeheartedly, only to discover she wasn't talking of her own experience. "No, I mean in Chistona. No one ought to be able to ban books, or color the learning process with their religious beliefs.

Can you imagine what those kids in Chistona are going to have to unlearn when they go away to college? They already know enough not to question or they'll go straight to hell." She shook her head.

"Winklebleck wouldn't give a bucket of warm spit for a class full of students who agreed with every word he said. He'd listen to any theory you had about what a poem meant, no matter how bizarre, as long as you could support it from the text. School is supposed to be like that, questions, challenges, discoveries. You don't just push the edge of the envelope, you push it to the red shift limit. Maybe I wasn't happy here, but I learned that much."

He studied her. "Is that why you're pursuing this thing with Seabolt?

Because he was a teacher?" Her wide mouth compressed, relaxed again. She shook her head. "I don't know. All I know is I have to find out what happened to him."

She met his eyes with determination hardening in her own. "I have to, Jack."

That night he made love to her as if she were made of the finest porcelain, one rough touch and she would shatter. It was the only solace she would allow.

During thunderstorms, flame comes from soft vapors. Deafening noises come from soft clouds. Why then, if two such violent forces could issue from softness, should not violent lightning, striking the ground, cause soft truffles?

--Plutarch n her way north to Fairbanks Kate had taken the long way around through Tok, partly because it was about the same distance as if she took the Richardson Highway but mostly because it had been a long time since she had driven that section of the Alcan. The preponderance of recreational vehicles with Georgia, Florida and New Jersey plates also driving that section of the road convinced her to take the Richardson home. She started early the next morning, the enticement of a warm bed filled with Jack Morgan notwithstanding. "You are a cold and heartless woman," he said, snagging her for one last, long, eminently seductive kiss.

"Get thee behind me, Satan," she said, wriggling free the moment his grip loosened to go in search of further inducements.

"Hey."

She stopped at the door and looked back, keeping one hand on the doorknob.

"There's a line from a Don Henley song." "Oh?" She smiled slightly.

He didn't return her smile. "Some guy has a vision and sees Jesus. Or, he decides, maybe it might be Elvis." Jack paused, and looked at her, sober, even stern. "He can't tell the difference."

The professorial effect was somewhat diminished by the fact that the teacher was lying naked in a rumpled bed, but Kate thought it over. "So the people who see Elvis are the same kind of people who see Jesus."

He cocked his finger and fired. "And they're just as nuts." "Thanks for the tip," she said, and swung the door open. Mutt padded past her into the hallway.

He leaned out of the bed to call after her, "I'm taking ten days around the Labor Day weekend."

She blew him a kiss. "See you then." The door swung almost closed and then opened again when she poked her head back in. "Bring the kid, if you want."

Fortunately for him, she was gone before the wide, pleased grin spread all the way across his face.

She stopped at Carr's for a cafe mocha, a sugar doughnut, and five pounds of green grapes, road food for herself and an apology to Bobby and Dinah for her short temper the morning she left. She found a truck stop with a diesel pump and filled up the Isuzu, which cost the grand sum of $14.37. Fourteen dollars for five hundred miles. "I hate Japan," she told Mutt, reholstering the diesel nozzle in the pump. "Or I hate their automobile designers."

She went inside to pay. "Little drizzly this morning," the man behind the counter observed.

"Yeah, but it sure feels good on the nasal passages," she replied.

The register ka-chunged and the drawer slid out. "Yeah, oughta lay a little of this smoke. That your dog?"

Kate looked up at Mutt, trotting back to the truck from a close encounter with the thicket at the edge of the parking lot. The limp was almost gone. Lucky for whoever had inflicted it. "Yeah."

"Female?"

"Yeah."

"Nice. Got some wolf in her."

"Half."

"Ever give you any trouble?"

"Trouble?" Kate looked at him, honestly bewildered.

"Guess not," he said, handing her the change. "Some of those half-breeds do. Always reading about it in the papers. People take them and try to make pets out of them." He shook his head. "Ever want to breed her, I've got a Shepherd mix I'd be interested to see crossed with her." "That's kind of up to her." She smiled and took her leave. It was raining, hard enough to put the wipers on hesitation but not enough to interfere with vision or traction. After the Eielson Air Force Base turnoff the traffic was negligible and Kate kept the truck at a steady sixty-five miles per hour straight through to Delta Junction. She thought about stopping for breakfast there, but the only restaurant she saw was on the wrong side of the road and there were plenty of Bobby and Dinah's grapes so she took the Richardson Highway turnoff and kept on going. The Richardson was a narrow, two-lane blacktop with even less traffic than the Alcan and Kate put her foot down and left it there. On one curve a sign told her to slow down to thirty-five; she slowed from seventy to fifty, what any Alaskan driver would have considered a reasonable compromise between the letter and the spirit of the law.

The sky stayed overcast, the rain kept drizzling down, and having left the Tanana behind at Delta Junction it was just one creek after another:

Ruby, Darling, Ann, Suzy Q, Gunnysack. Gunnysack? It was easy for her mind to wander back to the discovery of Daniel Seabolt's body six days before.

Why did it haunt her so? Why was she so determined on an explanation?

She'd heard stories all her life about cheechakos being caught out in the bush without proper clothing and going mad from the mosquitoes.

She'd heard stories all her life about sourdoughs going out into the bush with all the equipment in the world and still going mad from the mosquitoes, for that matter.

A yearling moose hesitated next to the guardrail in the oncoming lane.

Kate took her foot off the gas in case he decided he really did want to get to the other side, but when the truck came abreast of him he leapt the rail in a panic and crashed off through the brush. She put her foot down again.

The idea of murder in the case of Daniel Seabolt was ludicrous. There was no evidence, and there were no suspects.

But what the hell was Seabolt doing out there in the bush, a mile or more from the nearest cabin, without any clothing at all, proper or otherwise? She imagined the day: hot, the sun shining down, sweat trickling down his back as he bushwhacked his way from swamp to swamp, in search of-what? It had been too late for fiddlehead ferns and too early for hunting season. Not that it meant anything in the bush, and if Brad Burns was to be believed Seabolt might have had a subsistence permit. She imagined him taking off his shirt, his T-shirt, and then she imagined him putting them both back on again immediately when he realized what he'd let himself in for in the way of aerial bombardment.

The pants and the boots he would have left on regardless, the sharp brush taking too great a toll on exposed flesh, as Kate well knew from painful personal experience.

But he had had no clothes on, none. She wondered what his last moments had been like. She imagined him stripped to the skin, running frantically, crashing headlong over rock and stump, into bush and tree.

She imagined the whine of a thousand pairs of wings, the sting of a thousand bites, the frantic slap of hands in futile defense, the running, running, running, with nowhere to run to. She imagined him maddened beyond the point of following a slope down to a cooling stream, or perhaps the shadowing fire sweeping down on him in one such stream and chasing him out into the woods again. She imagined him exhausted, tripping, falling, facedown, the collapse, the settling swarm of insects hungry for blood.

A shiver began at the base of her spine and worked its way up under her skin. Mutt looked at her, cocking a concerned ear. "No one should die like that," she said, consciously loosening the grip she had on the steering wheel. "No one."

The rain had let up and she pulled over onto the nonexistent shoulder.

Buds barely open, a great drift of wild roses spilled over the slight rise on their right to pool in the hollow beneath. Kate reached across and opened the door. Mutt leapt out and plunged into the undergrowth.

Yes, the limp was almost gone. She rubbed the bruise on her thigh. It was still sore.

She got out of the truck and stretched, taking deep breaths of moist air. Her unforgiving sinuses had finally begun to relax, and it was the first breath she had taken in two weeks without a trace of burn in it.

Lush greenery clustered thickly at the edges of the pavement, just waiting for an opportunity to slipover the edge and take the road back.

No fires here for a while. She hoped it would be a while longer before there were.

Suppose he had been a serious jogger? A crosscountry runner? Maybe even an orienteer? Burns had said he was interested in the subsistence lifestyle; maybe he'd gone on a cross-country hike and gotten lost. It happened all the time; now that she remembered it, it had happened just this past week, that hiker lost in the Mentastas that Chopper Jim had cited as part of his case load.

The hood of the car was wet and the seat of her jeans became damp as she leaned up against it. She had a good imagination, all right, but even Kate could not imagine Daniel Seabolt stripping off his clothes for a jog through the Alaskan bush. Nothing of the admittedly little she had learned of him thus far led her to believe he was that stupid.

And he'd been taking sourdough lessons from Brad Burns to boot. He would have known that wild roses had thorns, and there were nettles, and Devil's club, and pushki, which could raise blisters if you got the juice on you and didn't wash it off fast enough. Not to mention no-see-urns and biting flies. And Dinah's twenty-seven known species of mosquitoes. She remembered again the instant swelling of Matthew Seabolt's arm after the mosquito bit him.

And Jim's amorous inclinations notwithstanding, she didn't think even he would strip to the buff deep in the heart of the interior Alaskan bush in summertime, not even to scratch what appeared to be a ceaseless itch of a different kind. And even if Sea bolt had been experiencing love au naturel, where was his girlfriend? Why hadn't she reported him missing?

Or, if she had perished in the fire, too, where was her body?

And why hadn't someone reported her missing?

From somewhere off to the right side of the road came a cluck and a hoot and a cackle and an explosion of wings. A caribou cow, looking harried, emerged from the leaves at the edge of the road and paused, one hoof on the pavement, looking at Kate. Deciding the human was no threat, she stepped out into the lane, followed by two more cows and four calves.

They looked good, all seven of them, new racks growing velvet, coats thick and glossy, bodies well filled out. Looked like Thanksgiving dinner to Kate, but it wasn't hunting season, and she made no move for the rifle behind her seat. They tip petty tapped across the road and vanished unmolested into the undergrowth on the other side.

Kate doubted that Seabolt had been sunbathing, either. Or swimming, since he was two-plus bushwhacking miles from the nearest creek. There was plenty of swamp nearby, but no running water to speak of. If he'd been taking a leak, only his zipper would have been open. If he'd been taking a dump, his pants might have been down around his ankles. In either case, he still would have had most of his clothes on.