Bad Blood Read Online Free PDF

yellow eyes bright, her tail a drumbeat against the side of the couch. She betook herself to the tumbled quilt in front of the fireplace, scraped it into a new pile, turned around three times, and subsided into a boneless, somnolent heap of gray fur. Kate, watching, thought it was like someone throwing a switch on a perpetual-motion machine.
    She turned back to the windows that covered the southern wall of the house. The house, this two-story Lindal Cedar home that the Park rats built for her in three days three years before, was cool and quiet. Jim hadn’t made it home last night—again—and Johnny was working at the Suulutaq Mine, saving up for his freshman year of college at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Van, his girlfriend, was attending UAA, too, and this fall they would both be living in the town house on Westchester Lagoon that Johnny had inherited from his father. Kate wasn’t sure what she thought about any of that, in order high school sweethearts, going to the same college, and sharing living quarters. She wasn’t going anywhere near the fact that after four years, Johnny was moving out of her house.
    Not that she had any say in it. He was eighteen, a legal adult. He couldn’t drink but he could vote, and the town house and the Subaru now belonged to him free and clear. Not to mention Jack’s retirement, which Kate as executor had invested in a modest little investment fund recommended by Victoria Muravieff that had at least not lost any money during the recession.
    Johnny was, she was glad to see, determined not to touch it unless and until he had to, which was why he was working his second summer two weeks on, two weeks off as a Suulutaq stickpicker. He’d sworn he wouldn’t work during the semester, but she wasn’t quite sure she believed him. A paycheck was a powerful stimulus. She’d managed to save some money toward his education herself, and she wondered now if she offered to pay him by the credit if he’d stick to his promise.
    Johnny, she told herself firmly, would be fine. The question was, would Kate? For a kid who’d been with her for only four years, he had become a remarkably permanent fixture in her life. He was the best thing Jack had given her.
    That big ugly man who knew all the lyrics to every Jimmy Buffett song ever recorded, who had been her boss in the Anchorage DA’s investigative branch for five and a half years, who had been her lover for almost that long, and who had known her better than any man ever had before or since, would have been a constant presence in her life with or without his son. The son he had committed to her care a few seconds before he died of wounds sustained while saving her own life. The pain of his loss had been so great that she had abandoned everything and everyone she knew to hide out on the YK Delta in western Alaska. Where, of all the unlikely people, Sergeant Jim Chopin, Chopper Jim, the so-called Father of the Park, had found her, and shocked her back into some semblance of sanity, and harried her back to the Park, where she had found Johnny on her doorstep.
    She came to herself with a start. Kate wasn’t one to look back. There was nothing to be done about the past, and what happened next was always so much more interesting. But the nights of an Alaskan summer seemed to encourage introspection by virtue of their very length.
    She grimaced. The only remedy to maudlin navel-gazing was to get in motion and stay in motion. She was good at both.
    She went upstairs to shower and dress and came downstairs again clean and full of purpose, there to make an enormous breakfast of deer sausage and eggs and toast loaded with butter and nagoonberry jam, washed down by another cup of that fabulous Javaloha coffee that Brendan had sent her from Hawaii. Of course, he had also sent her a six-pack of Spam-flavored macadamia nuts, which did not accompany breakfast and, absent starvation, would very probably never make it out of the can. She drank this