Free KS00 - Nooses Give by Dana Stabenow Page A

the Arctic noon sun, a valley that rose again into the Teglliq foothills and the Quilak mountain range, a mighty upward thrust of earth’s crust that gouged the sky with 18,000-foot spurs until it bled ice-blue glaze down their sharp flanks.
    It was a sight to steal the heart. Bernie Koslowski would never have seen any of it if he hadn’t dodged the draft all the way into British Columbia in 1970. From there it was but a step over the border into Alaska and some fine, rip-roaring years on the TransAlaska Pipeline. By the time the line was finished, he had enough of a stake to buy the Roadhouse, the only establishment legally licensed to sell liquor in the twenty-million-acre Park, and he settled down to marry a local girl and make babies and boilermakers for the rest of his life.
    He sold liquor to make a living. He coached basketball for fun. He had so much fun at it that Niniltna High School’s Kanuyaq Kings were headed for the Class C State Championship. Or they had been until Ted Muktoyuk’s resignation from the team. Bernie’s eyes dropped from the mountains to the clearing.
    She hadn’t been off the homestead in the last four feet of snow; he’d had to break trail with the machine a quarter of a mile through the woods. The thermometer mounted next to the door read six below. He knocked. No answer. Smoke was coming from both chimneys. He knocked again, harder.
    This time the door opened. She stood five feet tall and small of frame, dwarfed by the wolf-husky hybrid standing at her side. The wolf’s eyes were yellow, the woman’s hazel, both wary and hostile. The woman said, “What?”
    “What ‘what’?” Bernie said. “What am I doing here? What do I want? Whatever happened to this thing called love?” He gave a hopeful smile. There was no response. “Come on, Kate. How about a chance to get in out of the cold?”
    For a minute he thought she was going to shut the door in his face. Instead she stepped to one side. “In.”
    The dog curled a lip at him, and he took this as tacit permission to enter. The cabin was a twenty-five-foot square with a sleeping loft. Built-in bookshelves, built-in couch, table and chairs and two stoves, one oil, one wood, took up the first floor. Gas lamps hissed gently from brackets in all four corners. She took his parka and hung it next to hers on the caribou rack mounted next to the door. “Sit.”
    He sat. She poured out two mugs of coffee and gave him one. He gulped gratefully and felt the hot liquid creep all the way down his legs and out into his fingertips, and as if she had only been waiting for that, she said, “Talk.”
    Her voice was a hoarse, croaking whisper, and irresistibly his eyes were drawn to the red, angry scar bisecting the smooth brown skin of her throat, literally from ear to ear. None of the Park rats knew the whole story, and none of them had had the guts to ask for it, but the scar marked her throat the way it had marked the end of her career seven months before as an investigator on the staff of the Anchorage district attorney’s office. She had returned to her father’s homestead sometime last summer. The first anyone knew about it was when her mail started being delivered to the Niniltna post office. Old Abel Int-Hout picked it up and presumably brought it out to her homestead, and the only time anyone else saw her was when she came into Niniltna for supplies in October, the big silver wolf husky hybrid walking close by her side, warning off any and all advances with a hard yellow stare.
    Her plaid shirt was open at the throat, her long black hair pulled back into a loose braid. She wasn’t trying to hide the scar. Maybe it needed air to heal. Or maybe she was proud of it. Or maybe it was only that she wasn’t ashamed of it, which wasn’t quite the same thing. He looked up from the scar and met eyes beneath an epicanthic fold that gave her face an exotic, Eastern flavor. She was an Aleut icon stepped out of a gilt frame, dark and hard and