Though Not Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

acquired that property for no reason. Too bad Mac Devlin wasn’t still around. While he’d never been one of her favorite people, he’d had a good nose for the viability of a gold claim. Just never one of his own.
    She looked at the clock. Nine thirty. Jim was taking the redeye to Los Angeles, departing at 1:00 A.M. Three-hour layover in Seattle. If you were flying Alaska Airlines and you wanted to go to hell you had to fly through Seattle to get there. He was scheduled to arrive in Long Beach at ten thirty tomorrow morning, Pacific time. Thirteen hours from now, less one for the time zone change. Around two thousand air miles. Three thousand six hundred miles if you were driving.
    Wilson Pickett weighed in on the midnight hour.
    Johnny looked up and caught her staring at the clock. “If we had cell phones in the Park you could call him,” he said.
    She jumped, startled. His grin was sly.
    “Smart-ass,” she said.
    He snickered. “That would be me.”
    She looked at the gangly sixteen-, no, seventeen-year-old with the almost ugly mug and the carefully groomed thatch of hair streaked with remnants of the summer sun. His father had been a giant teddy bear of a man with a deep, rumbling voice, eyes as bright and blue as his son’s, a jaw as firm. Almost his last living act had been to entrust his son to Kate’s care. Four years later, she didn’t know who she loved more, the man then or the boy now. “Want some cocoa?”
    “Sure. Long as I get some of those no-bake cookies to go along with it.”
    “Chocolate, more chocolate, and peanut butter, may God forgive me,” she said, and got to her feet.
    While she was waiting for the milk to heat on the stove she went out on the deck. It was cold enough to see her breath, clear enough to follow Merak and Dubhe to the North Star almost directly overhead, no mosquitoes and as of yet no snow. A perfect September evening. The sun set farther to the south every night after less time in the sky every day, but in compensation the stars were back, the Pleiades fleeing across the sky as Orion climbed up over the jagged bulk of the Quilaks in hot pursuit. Ever wilt thou love and they be fair. Johnny would be getting out his telescope when the homework was done.
    Far overhead a light moved steadily from north to south. A jet? A satellite, more likely. How many did the state have now, three? She hadn’t kept track, and for all she knew by now it was probably twice that. All those cell phones.
    She sighed. As chair of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association, she had already instructed Annie Mike, the Association secretary, to begin talks with the two major cell phone companies in Alaska, as well as to put out feelers to any other telecommunications companies who might be interested. If nothing else, maybe Kate would be able to score an iPhone out of the process.
    But before long, perhaps even before winter set in, one of them could be building the first of their galvanized steel Tinkertoy towers, in a string that would follow the Kanuyaq River from Ahtna to Chulyin, and from there overland to the Suulutaq Mine, where the world’s second largest deposit of gold had been discovered two years before. When they were done, Annie assured Kate, cell phone coverage would cover at minimum half of the twenty million acres of the Park, leaving only the remotest areas out of reach. In exchange for sponsoring their requests for leases on the likeliest locations in the best areas to locate their towers, the companies were even willing to discuss the possibility of constructing towers and providing coverage to the more outremer Park rats. They wanted the business, they’d left the NNA board in no doubt about that. And Ranger Dan had no intention of Park HQ being left in a no-service area, so whoever their cell phone provider wound up being would also be running towers up to the Step.
    Kate wondered what the elders had thought when the discovery of copper at Kanuyaq in 1900 had