Free A Cold-Blooded Business by Dana Stabenow

feebly, "but they told us in orientation we weren't supposed to feed the wildlife."
    "We're not," Toni said.
    "It makes the wildlife dependent on us, they told us. Makes them forget how to hunt their own food."
    "It does." Toni looked at her watch. "It's seven o'clock, end of shift.
    Didn't you say you were meeting Dale for dinner?"
    Dumbly, Kate followed her down the hall to the dining room, to find Dale already in line.
    Tonight, the serving line was presided over by a swarthy man with a luxuriant mustache clad in an immaculate white jacket that buttoned down one side and a towering chef's hat that tilted rakishly over one bushy black eyebrow. "Kate Shugak, Gideon Trocchiano," Dale introduced them.
    Gideon beamed at Kate. "Rare, medium or well done?"
    "I beg your pardon?" Kate stared past him at the immense grill, where rows of New York steaks sizzled merrily.
    "How do you like your steak?" Gideon repeated.
    "Steak?"
    His smile faded a bit. "Yes. It's Tuesday." "So?" Kate said warily.
    "So Tuesday and Thursday are steak nights," Dale said impatiently, "how do you want yours cooked?"
    Lunch had been rushed and nothing out of the ordinary: a choice of cold fried chicken, make-your-own sandwiches and a small salad bar. Dinner evidently was going to be different. For dinner, there was not only steak. There was deep-fried halibut in case she didn't like steak.
    There were steak fries, long and thick and perfectly browned and with the peel still on, a sight that nearly made Kate moan with delight.
    There were green beans sauteed in bacon and onions. There was a salad bar as big as the first floor of Kate's cabin, heaped with lettuce and tomatoes and mushrooms and green peppers and sprouts and a bunch of other vegetables Kate couldn't have identified at gunpoint, and no turtles (she checked). There was a cart piled high with desserts, apple pie and lemon meringue pie and cherry pie and chocolate pudding and pound cake, all of which Dale turned up her nose at, saying they could make hot fudge sundaes in the break room after dinner, if Kate wanted.
    "If I want?" Kate said. "If?"
    Holiest of holies, there was a dispenser armed with two spouts that gave forth an inexhaustible supply of fresh milk. Kate filled four glasses; by then her tray was heavier than Belle's bag. She staggered from the serving line into the dining room with the growing conviction that working for an oil company had its advantages.
    The first person she saw in the dining room was Jerry Mcisaac .
CHAPTER 4.
    He looked up from a table groaning beneath the weight of an equally well-laden tray and saw her at the same time. He surged to his feet.
    "Kate? Kate! What the hell are you doing here?"
    "Jerry!" She put her tray down on his table and returned his hug with extra.
    With a final thump on her shoulders he pulled back to look at her. "How long has it been, two, three years?"
    "Too long," she said, sitting. "What are you doing up here?"
    "The same thing I did in Anchorage, for a lot more money. Anyway, I asked you first." He eyed her. "You aren't--working, are you?" She smiled at him, a vague, unfocussed smile that should have warned him.
    She remembered the first time she had seen Jerry Mcisaac. It had been in an apartment in Mountain View where a baby-sitter had arrived to find the parents had already left. Her charge, an eighteen-month-old boy, had been beaten unconscious in his crib and the baby-sitter, a frightened fourteen-year-old who couldn't stop shaking, had nonetheless retained the presence of mind to dial 911. Jerry, lead paramedic on call out of the Airport Heights fire station that evening, had been first on the scene, two minutes from the time the call came in. Even so, he was too late. The baby was pronounced DOA at the hospital.
    He was looking at her with a quizzical expression; she said, "I was remembering Petey Washington."
    Jerry was a tall, plump, rubicund man with big blue eyes and a wide-open smile that faded at her words. Like her, his