No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Johnny’s different.” Vanessa sighed. “He knows what he wants to do. He took fifteen credits last semester and he’s taking twenty this one. Mostly I see him when he’s sleeping. He’ll probably have his degree in three years, if not sooner.”

  “You haven’t said anything to him? About how you’re feeling about college?”

  Vanessa drank some more coffee. “What about you? How are you doing?”

  Kate took the change of subject without protest. You never got the truth when you tried to force a conversation. First rule of interrogations, too. “Some days I feel like I got shot in the chest six months ago. Those days are becoming fewer, though.” She looked over at Mutt, sprawled out in front of the fireplace.

  “She’s fine, too?”

  “She raced us on the snow machine on our way back from Mandy and Chick’s the other day. By the time we got back she was sitting at the top of the steps. Jim swears she was laughing at us.”

  Mutt’s ear twitched but the comment wasn’t worth waking all the way up for. Besides, it was true.

  “And there is the incomparable benefit of living in an Erland Bannister-free world, which makes up for any amount of other drawbacks. So when I say I’m fine? I mean I am soooooo fine.”

  Vanessa watched Kate drink her coffee and, well, marveled. Five feet nothing and a hundred and twenty pounds, all of it muscle. Hazel eyes tilted up at the outside corners, high, flat cheekbones, a broad brow, a wide mouth with full lips, skin like bronze in the winter and dull gold in the summer. She had thick, raven black hair worn in a pixie cut allowed to fall from a natural, off-center part. No gel for Kate Shugak. No makeup, either, as her skin was wash-and-wear perfect and her lashes were already thick and black. She was what, thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? She looked thirty at most. She had to be cordially hated by all of her contemporaries.

  She was dressed in jeans and T-shirt, with thick socks for slippers. No rings or jewelry. It was practically a uniform, accessorized by windbreaker and sneakers in summer and parka and Sorels in winter. Vanessa tried to think if she’d ever seen Kate Shugak dressed in anything else, but if she had couldn’t remember when, so probably not.

  When Kate moved it was with a rough kind of grace and all the self-assurance of her place in the world that Vanessa longed for and didn’t have. Kate made her living as a private investigator, solving crime and catching criminals all over the state of Alaska. More than that, she was everyone’s go-to whenever there was any kind of trouble—personal, political, friend, family, local, state, federal—as she was related through her grandmother to half the state and had howdied and shook with most of the rest of it, in particular the law enforcement community.

  A fixer, Vanessa thought. Kate Shugak was everybody’s fixer. Not always without cost, however, as witness the shooting the previous July that had left both Kate and Mutt at death’s door. She thought about how close the Park had come to losing both of them and repressed a shiver. A world without Kate in it was not a world she cared to inhabit.

  Kate looked at her and Vanessa reddened at being caught staring. “What do you love?” Kate said.

  “What?”

  “What is it that you love to do?”

  “Well.” The color fading from her cheeks, Vanessa considered. “Talking to people and finding out their stories, I guess. The best part of high school was the year I edited the Chronicle.” She became animated. “Did you see that story I wrote about Niniltna’s history, as told by the elders?”

  “I did see that,” Kate said. “A solid piece of work.” Although the aunties had dressed up their parts of the stories considerably, she thought. Which was only to be expected. The aunties would never tell all the truth to anyone.

  “I loved doing that,” Vanessa said, glowing. “Going around to all the old folks and writing down their stories.” She giggled, an attractive sound. “Sometimes the stories didn’t gibe.”

  “I can imagine,” Kate said, her voice dry.

  “But following up was even more fun, even if I did get yelled at a couple of times.”

  Good thing Old Sam had died two years before, Kate thought, or you would have been yelled at a lot more, just on general principles. “If that’s what you love,” she said, “then that’s what you should do.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “What does that look like, exactly? And how does it pay the bills?”

  “Do what you love,” Kate said, “and the money will come.” Vanessa raised an eyebrow, and Kate shrugged. “All right, it’s a cliché, but it’s only a cliché because it’s true.”

  Vanessa leaned back and sighed. “I can tell you what I don’t love, and that’s living in Fairbanks.”

  “Why?”

  The girl shrugged. “No mountains. Too big, too many people. Only place worse would be Anchorage.”

  “You want to live in the Park?”

  “Yeah, but there aren’t any jobs. The mine’s pretty much stuck on exploration with development on hold, fishing’s down, the school’s losing students and it looks like the state’s going to stop funding education anyway.” She shook her head. “Feels like the town is dying.”

  Kate couldn’t argue the point because she felt the same.

  There was the sound of an approaching snow machine and they looked out the window to see one burst out of the trees and roar into the yard. “What the hell?” Kate said. “It’s New Year’s Day. People are supposed to stay home nursing their hangovers while they try to remember the name of the person in bed next to them.”

  Vanessa laughed. Mutt, meanwhile, bounced to her feet and galloped over to the door, dancing with impatience. Well, if the visitor was Mutt-approved. Kate went to answer the knock.

  It was Bobby Clark, wearing black shades that seemed to meld into his black skin. He was unsmiling and he made no move to come inside and even ignored Mutt’s advances, unheard of. “We need you in town pronto.”

  “I’m majoring in justice.” Johnny shrugged. “You know. With a minor in A&P so I can annual my own aircraft. When I save up enough to buy one. But I’m also thinking a suit and a tie is not a good look for me, and, besides, as I understand it most law is practiced indoors.”

  Jim laughed. “Well, you won’t go hungry with A&P as your minor.”

  “Yeah. You ever think about going into law?”

  “I was always all about the badge and the gun, and now you couldn’t get me back inside a classroom at gunpoint. And like you said. There is that whole inside thing.” Jim hefted a shovel full of wet, heavy snow, the only kind the Park seemed to get anymore, and did his best to toss it over the steadily growing berm surrounding the hangar doors. “Although inside does have its own attractions. I have got to get me a snow blower.”

  “Now, now, old man, you don’t want to get fat from no exercise.” With a laughing protest Johnny dodged the next shovel full of snow directed his way.

  Jim leaned on the shovel for a moment’s respite. The sun was a faint light behind a high gray overcast sky. There was no warmth or cheer in it, only the promise of occlusion followed by more snow. The Quilaks, a mountain range that looked like the offensive line for this year’s Los Angeles Rams, huddled in the east beneath protective gear made of snow falling pretty much nonstop since Thanksgiving. The rest of the twenty million acres of the Park was an eastward tumble of foothills and glacial moraines and mine tailings cut by the frozen slither of the Kanuyaq River and its tributaries. It lay quiet and still beneath a thick white blanket, waiting for the next big one to blow in off the Mother of Storms. From the look of the slate-colored horizon to the south, it wouldn’t be long.

  “You think I could get into the troopers?”

  “What?” He turned to look at the boy. Young man. New adult. Gen Z-er. Generation Text? Whatever.

  Johnny repeated the question. He looked so earnest and so very, very young in spite of all of eighteen years to his credit. Although everyone was looking younger to Jim nowadays. And Johnny’s face
was beginning to take on some of the ruggedness of his father’s in its hard planes and angles. “Tell me why.”

  “Well.” Johnny looked a little embarrassed. “Serve and protect.”

  The idealism of that response was almost debilitating and Jim had no way to immediately answer to it. It wasn’t that he’d left idealism behind him with the job; it was that it had never been what had motivated him to get into law enforcement in the first place. It was fun, it took him all over his chosen home, and it was a great way to meet women. Maybe, once in a great while, you were able to help, to make a difference in someone’s life, to get a bad guy out of the vicinity of decent citizens and keep him out. But it happened so seldom that you couldn’t count on it as a motivating factor. Unless you were Johnny’s age.

  “Jim?” Johnny’s manner was hesitant. “Why did you quit?”

  Jim closed his eyes and replayed the scene in his head as he had so many times before. “I had my weapon out, had it aimed, had my finger on the trigger. I told Kenny to drop his rifle and when he didn’t I said it again. Instead, he shot Mutt, and still I didn’t get a shot off in time before he shot Kate.” He opened his eyes and looked at Johnny. “I’d always been able to talk my way out of any situation. Never once had to fire my weapon in the line. So I was still talking when he shot them.” He shook his head. “Johnny, if you’re serious about this, one thing you have to remember above all others. It’s not your oath, it’s not any of that shit they teach you in college or even in the academy. It’s this. You’re the good guys. You serve the public, you protect the public, and it doesn’t matter one good damn if that public is trying to shoot moose out of season or shoot your woman dead—you’re now one of the good guys. You serve. You protect.” He paused. “That’s the ideal, anyway.”

  “You sound sad when you say that.”

  “I feel sad when I say that. I fell down on the job.”

  They shoveled more snow. The supply was endless. “You miss it?”

  “Sure. Parts of it are fun. Wearing the uniform.” He smiled a little. “The smoky hat was the best babe magnet ever invented. And then there’s that thing ordinary citizens do when you show up at a scene. Just your appearance can calm people down, ratchet back a situation going south. Great for the ego. And, yes, sometimes you can help, just by virtue of bearing the badge. Feels good to do that, to be that guy.” He looked at Johnny. “But people lie to you every day on the job. And sometimes they shoot at you, too. It can be… disheartening, and discouraging. You get your nose constantly rubbed in the worst of human behavior, some unimaginably bad. There’s a reason so many cops are drunks and divorced.”

  “I know I want to be involved in the justice system somehow. Make it work more for people than against them.”

  “Well. Your first choice was attorney. You have your pilot’s license, right?”

  “You know I do.”

  “You getting much flying in? Building any hours?”

  “I try to get in the air at least once a week. There’s a small flight school at the Fairbanks airport.” Johnny made a face. “Fuel’s not cheap, though.”

  “You okay for money?”

  “Sure, Dad left me pretty well set. But I don’t want to blow it, you know? I remember ’08, even if I was just a kid.”

  “Me, too,” Jim said with feeling.

  “Harsh.”

  Alaska had been insulated from a lot of what went down Outside but people had still lost jobs and homes and pretty much everything, and oil dropping to below $40 a barrel hadn’t helped the state’s budget any. Why there were only three hundred Alaska state troopers.

  He pulled his thoughts away from the job and back to the conversation at hand. An idea swam in from the ether. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “You say don’t want to work in an office. You know Anne Flanagan?”

  “Sure. The Flying Pastor. She was a friend of Old Sam’s. She spoke at his potlatch.” Johnny pulled a wad of Kleenex out of his pocket and gave his nose a ferocious blow. It was as red as Rudolf’s from the cold. Jim figured his probably was, too. “What about her?”

  “She got a grant from a nonprofit to buy that Cessna of hers and now she flies into all the villages in the Park, baptizing and marrying and burying.”

  “Yeah, so?” Johnny heaved a shovel full of snow up and over and then paused. “Oh. You mean why couldn’t I run a law practice the same way?”

  “Be a way to practice law, and fly, and be outdoors a lot. I don’t know how much money there would be in it.” Jim grinned. “Bet we could find something creative to name it. Aviating Ambulance Chasers sort of leaps to mind.”

  “Yeah, that’d be my very first choice.”

  “Soaring Shysters?”

  “Jim.”

  “Legal Eagles?”

  Johnny considered. “That’s not terrible. I could put an eagle decal on the plane.” He saw that Jim’s attention had wandered. “What?”

  Jim squinted into the gray sky at a rapidly approaching speck, increasing in volume from an irritated fly to the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now.

  “Is that George?” Johnny said.

  The Bell Jet Ranger settled down in front of the hangar, blowing half the snow back from where they’d just shoveled it. George stuck his head out the door and yelled, “Jim, you need to come with me now!”

  Three

  TUESDAY, NEW YEAR’S DAY

  Niniltna

  IT WAS A FAST TRIP INTO TOWN, KATE AND Vanessa on Kate’s Polaris behind Bobby on his Arctic Cat going away very fast. At least during the winter, with the road frozen under layers of ice and snow, there was little chance of picking up a stray spike from back in the day when the road was a railway lane shifting copper ore from Kanuyaq to Cordova.

  Although their speed was nothing compared to George and the boys in the Bell Jet Ranger. It buzzed them about five minutes after they turned from the driveway onto the main road and disappeared into the horizon like it had been launched from the USS Enterprise at the Battle of Midway.

  “I feel like I’ve been scalped!” Vanessa shouted over Kate’s shoulder.

  Or skinned, Kate thought. The tag on the Arctic Cat was getting harder to read and she hit the gas. Behind her Vanessa whooped, and on the trailer behind Mutt woofed. It didn’t sound like a protest.

  The two sleds roared across the hard-packed surface of the Park road, watched by a disinterested group of moose lying under a shelter of willow. A flock of Bohemian cedar waxwings were frightened by the noise into a susurrating cloud of brown fluff and yellow tail feathers, the snow stained by a scattering of red drops like blood from the mountain ash berries they’d been feeding on. A female lynx shoved her kits off the road at their approach, the heads of each kit popping up one by one and wide-eyed in a made-for-Disney moment as they flashed past. The air was still and the sky was gray and pregnant with menace.

  The road wound back and forth from the banks of the Kanuyaq to the beginnings of the foothills, through stands of dark green spruce and bare-limbed aspen over a roller-coaster of a route that had their asses floating above their seats at least half the time. Wearing his prostheses always upped Bobby’s MPH and they might have set the land speed record between Kate’s homestead and the village of Niniltna that morning. He slowed down and let inertia set a more decorous pace through town, a collection of old and new buildings from log cabins to prefabs lined up on the north side of the Kanuyaq River where road, town and river met. The surface of the river was frozen solid with cracks and crevices and ledges and ice sinks everywhere except straight down the middle, where the blade of the communally owned antique Cat 10 bulldozer kept one lane smooth by being in constant motion from December to February. It used to be March and sometimes even April and Kate remembered the first week of May from when she was a kid, but those days were no more.

  The town was buttoned up tight in advance of the coming—or continuing—storm and they saw no one as the two-sled caravan made its decorous way through the villag
e from one end to the other. Bobby pulled in in front of a large frame house on the river side of the village and Kate stopped next to him. “Inside,” he said, and they followed him in, Mutt padding behind. The four Grosdidiers and Laurel Meganack were sitting around the table in the kitchen, nursing mugs of coffee and unnaturally silent. Laurel’s eyes were red and none of the boys looked much better.

  Mutt went around the table and pushed her head between Matt and Laurel, and automatically Matt’s hand came up to knot in her mane. She rested her chin on his knee.

  Kate went to the coffee pot and filled mugs and set them on the table. She rummaged in the cupboards until she found a box of Thin Mints and another of Tagalongs and arranged them on a plate. She put them in the center of the table and sat down. Bobby leaned against the counter with his arms and ankles crossed. It was still odd to see him walking around on two legs.

  The coffee was hot and strong and welcome after the self-created wind chill of the trip in. She waited, and Van and Bobby took their cues from her and waited, too. It was silent in the kitchen for a long time.

  Finally Mark noticed the cookies and took one from the plate and ate it slowly, one bite at a time. “What do you know,” he said, “these are still good.”