So was the heart. “Jesus,” Old Sam said. “Look at that, will ya.”
He handed it to Kate. She needed both hands to hold it.
The dark red lump of grainy flesh pumped once against her palms. In one leap she was at the railing, where she dumped the still-beating heart down on the gunnel and backed away. Old Sam cackled with laughter, and the four old women giggled. A tinge of color darkened Kate’s face. She should have tossed the damn thing over the side and be damned to it.
Mutt came to her rescue. She stood two feet from the rail, neck stretched to its farthest limit, the stiff hairs on her ruff raised, lips curled back from her teeth, nostrils flaring. She looked at Kate, eyes wide, and didn’t find any help there. She turned back to the halibut heart, extended her neck another inch and sniffed once at the jerking flesh. Her lip curled even farther and she backed up a step, uttering a low “woof” deep in her throat. That sound had been known to stop a brown bear in its tracks; unintimidated, the halibut heart beat on without pause. A rumbling growl and Mutt backed away on stiff legs, yellow eyes never leaving the palpitating lump of red flesh, and retreated to the bow, where she stayed until they got back to Cordova the next morning.
Kate felt like joining her. Cut out from its chest, separated from its body which even now was being boned and sliced into steaks behind her, the organ beat on relentlessly, heaving up and down on the black-painted surface of the gunnel. “How long’s it keep doing that?” she said.
Old Sam shrugged. “I seen ‘em beat for hours after getting cut out of a body. Just ain’t ready to give up, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Bothering you, girl?”
Kate drew herself erect and lied like a trooper. “Of course not.”
Old Sam laughed, and the damn halibut heart kept beating while she hauled buckets of water up over the side to wash down the deck. It kept beating as she wrapped and stowed the halibut fillets in the walk-in freezer next to the engine room below aft, and it was still beating when Old Sam moved them back to their original anchorage just in time to meet the first laden bowpicker as she waddled up, hold spilling a mound of fish from gunnel to gunnel.
“Okay, girl, get them hatch covers off,” Sam bawled from the bridge. “Time to hunt and gather.”
Biography
Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time working in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.
Her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar award, her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel, Restless in the Grave, will be released in February 2012.
Find her on the web at stabenow.com.
Bibliography
Kate Shugak Mysteries
A Cold Day for Murder
A Fatal Thaw
Dead in the Water
A Cold-Blooded Business
Play with Fire
Blood Will Tell
Breakup
Killing Grounds
Hunter’s Moon
Midnight Come Again
The Singing of the Dead
A Fine and Bitter Snow
A Grave Denied
A Taint in the Blood
Whisper to the Blood
A Night Too Dark
Though Not Dead
Restless in the Grave (2012)
Liam Campbell Mysteries
Fire and Ice
So Sure of Death
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Better to Rest
Star Svensdotter Series
Second Star
A Handful of Stars
Red Planet Run
Other Novels
Blindfold Game
Prepared for Rage
Copyright
If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy. They are reasonably priced and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.
This digital edition (v1.0) of “Conspiracy” was published by Gere Donovan Press in 2011.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Errata
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