Blood Will Tell by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online

opened her mouth to decline with thanks but Jack kicked her under the table. She gave him an indignant glare, which slid right off him, and he said to Ekaterina, smooth as silk in spite of the fact that he was a little afraid of her, too, "It sounds like fun, Ekaterina. What time?"
    "Seven o'clock." Ekaterina smiled, this time a real one. "There will be food." He grinned. "I'll be there."
    Ekaterina looked at Kate, who knew there was something else going on here, she just hadn't figured out what. The food arrived and she left the problem for another time. Ekaterina exclaimed over the lasagna, Jack went into raptures over the veal, Johnny was up to his eyebrows in fettucine and the lure of basil and pine nuts proved irresistible for Kate. Everyone was on their best behavior, there was much talk and more laughter and the evening looked as if it were going to be a social occasion of the first water.
    Until the arrival of the people who had reserved the table next to them.
    One of them was John King. The other two men made Ekaterina stiffen in her chair and Kate swear beneath her breath. Jack observed both reactions with a sense of impending doom and began cutting his remaining veal into very large pieces. "Dad," Johnny said, shocked, "slow down, you're being a pig." Jack said around a mouthful of veal, "Eat fast, kid, or you might not get to eat at all."
    Harvey Meganack saw Ekaterina at the same time she saw him and paused in the act of pulling out a chair for the trophy blonde who was definitely not his wife. A sheepish smile spread across his broad, brown face, a look not to be confused with the fierce expressions on the two solid gold rams' heads on either side of the gold nugget watch weighing down his wrist. "Ekaterina. Hello."
    Ekaterina inclined her head in a frigid, infinitesimal bow. "Harvey."
    The third man looked up and said ebulliently, "Ekaterina!" He was thin and fiftyish, with sparse fair hair standing straight up from the crown of his head. He bustled around the table and grabbed Ekaterina's reluctant hand in both of his, pumping it up and down with enthusiasm.
    "How the hell are you! Ha HAH!" His laugh was automatic, like a spasm or a tic, used to punctuate. He sounded like Woody Woodpecker.
    Kate held her breath but Ekaterina only recovered her hand and nodded again, twice as frostily this time. "Mr.--" She hesitated for so long that he rushed to supply the rest. "Mathisen, Lew Mathisen," he said,
    "ha HAH!"
    A third thin smile, as frosty as the first two. "Of course. Mr.
    Samithen."
    It was a Force 10 Arctic gale, impossible to mistake. Johnny's eyes widened. Jack ate faster. Kate waited, fatalistic, for Mathisen to dig himself in even deeper.
    He was smart enough not to correct Ekaterina. Instead, he assumed an expression of deep concern, and said, "Say, it's a damn shame about Sarah, isn't it? Harvey just told me, and I can't say how sorry I am. I know how much you're going to miss her." He smiled again, showing off six thousand dollars' worth of dental work in the upper incisors alone, and managed to restrain the laugh this time.
    At that Kate thought Ekaterina would say something and she braced for it, but just then John King looked over and saw Jack. "Morgan," he growled. His eyes traveled past Jack to Kate. "Shugak." He was square-headed, thickset and blond, wearing the same mustard-yellow, silver-toed cowboy boots Kate had seen in March. He looked exactly what he was, a roughneck who had started out throwing the chain on a rig floor in Louisiana and ended up, to his own and everyone else's bewilderment, not to say consternation, at the head of the board room of Royal Petroleum Company, throwing his weight around.
    "Hello, King," Kate said, leaping into Ekaterina's frozen silence with foolhardy abandon. "You get that wellhead off Tode Point yet?"
    Johnny looked puzzled. Jack choked on his veal and had recourse to his Chianti. Ekaterina looked on Kate with what might actually have been approval.
    King's