Killing Grounds

Dana Stabenow

KILLING GROUNDS

Kate Shugak 08

DANA STABENOW

G. P. Putnam's Sons Publishers Since 1838 a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stabenow, Dana.

Killing grounds / Dana Stabenow. p. cm.(A Kate Shugak mystery)

ISBN 0-399-14356-4 (alk. paper)

I. Title. II. Series: Stabenow, Dana. Kate Shugak mystery.

PS3569.T1249K55 1998 , 97-23900 CIP

813'.54dc21 . , -

Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Book design by Ellen Cipriano

For Laura Anne Gilman

any writer's dream editor and certainly mine

AUTHOR'S NOTE

For those who persist in looking up Kate's home ground on a map, I would remind them that there is a reason we call it fiction.

However,

if it will make you feel better,

for the purposes of this book

the coastline of Alaska has been altered

to include Alaganik Bay,

two hours (or so) by bowpicker southeast of Cordova.

Cordova is a real place and it does exist. Shitting Seagull isn't a real person and doesn't. Real Cordovans are much more fun than he is.

It was a cloudless summer day. Salmon leapt free of the blue surface of the water, only to fall back with flat smacks that echoed across the bay. The fishing period had opened at twelve noon exactly and the tender wouldn't be taking delivery from fishermen for hours yet, although cork lines were already bobbing with the kind of frenzied energy that promised a busy and productive period.

Fishermen were making ready to launch skiffs, but on board the tender Freya there was time to open deck chairs in the bow, time to prop feet on the gunnel, time to eat roast beef sandwiches on homemade bread, heavy on the horseradish, time to make lazy comments on the skill or lack thereof shown by the skippers of the forty-odd boats setting drift nets as close as they could get to the markers of the creeks without setting off the fish hawk.

The fish hawk in question, a twenty-eight- year-old man named Lamar Rousch, hovered around the perimeter of the action, his little rubber Zodiac looking flimsy and vulnerable and outnumbered next to the battle-scarred hulls of the fishing fleet. Clad in the brown uniform of the Fish and Wildlife protection branch of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, Lamar stood rigidly erect at the controls of the Zodiac, as if by doing so his height might be mistaken for five-foot-one, instead of a mere five feet. Kate could relate. She saw him wave Joe Anahonak and the Darlene back from the markers on Amartuq Creek, the buzz of the outboard on the back of the Zodiac sounding like an irritated wasp.

Joe flashed an impudent grin, a jaunty wave, and moved maybe ten feet south of the mouth, the stubborn set of his shoulders clearly indicating his determination not to be corked. It happened, if you got careless or unlucky, a moment's distraction and another fisherman more on the ball would drop his net into the water between you and the creek markers, and you lost the advantage of being closest to the narrow funnel through which coursed hundreds of thousands of gleaming red salmon. Sleek and fat from five years of feeding off the nourishing depths of the north Pacific Ocean, the salmon were frantic now to regain that section of stream bed upon which they had been spawned, there to lay their own eggs and die, coming at last to rest and rot upon their ancestral gravel.