No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “The kids are fine, guys. Go home.”

  They dispersed without argument, such was the power of Auntie Vi even in absentia.

  “Van asked Auntie Vi if she had any copies of an old local newspaper,” Kate said. “So Vi took Van over to Auntie Edna’s house and they found the kids and brought them back here.” She looked at Jim. “And she didn’t tell anyone because the story is all over the Park now about their circumstances.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but I’d like to actually see the kids. Just to be sure.”

  “Me, too.”

  A snow machine went by and someone shouted a greeting but they were going too fast to be identified. Kate and Jim walked up the path to the steps and up the steps to the door. Kate tried the handle and, no surprise, it was locked, possibly for the first time since Auntie Vi had built the house and opened the B&B. She knocked, waited, and then knocked again, louder this time. From inside there were the sounds of a frantic scramble of chairs scraping back and hasty footsteps. Silence again, until they heard footsteps come up to the other side of the door. “Who that?” Auntie Vi said.

  “It’s Kate, Auntie,” Kate said. “And Jim.”

  The door opened a crack and Auntie Vi peered out suspiciously. “Only you here?”

  “Only us, Auntie. And Mutt.”

  Auntie Vi opened the door a centimeter more and looked behind them. Satisfied, she opened it all the way. “Okay. You come in.”

  Auntie Vi waited until all three of them were inside before closing and locking the door behind them. Kate refrained from comment.

  Van leaned out of the kitchen. “Who was it, Auntie? Oh. Hi, Kate. Jim. Hey, Mutt!”

  “Van. Where’s Johnny?”

  “Back at the house.”

  “You come,” Auntie Vi said.

  They followed her into the kitchen. “You sit,” she said, and filled mugs with coffee and thunked them down on the table, along with a plate with two lonely rounds of fry bread on it. “So,” she said, pouring her own coffee and sitting across from them. “What is news?”

  “Not much, Auntie,” Jim said.

  “You eat,” she said, shoving the plate at them and got up for a moment to find the shaker with the powdered sugar in it. She applied it lavishly, as if it would cover up the fact that there were no seconds, a thing unheard of in Kate’s memory. “You find those kids yet?”

  “Not yet, Auntie,” Jim said.

  She snorted. “Not much use, you,” she said. “Good you quit the troopers.”

  “I think so, too,” he said, unperturbed.

  Kate got up to get a drink of water and saw two mugs stained with cocoa sitting in the sink. She filled her glass and returned to the table, contriving to give Jim a wink as she sat down. Auntie Vi missed it but Van didn’t, and looked apprehensive.

  “Did you find those copies of the Pick & Shovel over at Auntie Edna’s?” Kate said blandly.

  “Er, yes,” Van said uncomfortably, shooting a glance at Auntie Vi, who rose to her feet and began making a tremendous clatter and bang of pots and pans.

  “You eat dinner,” Auntie Vi said, her back to them. “I make secret ingredient.”

  Kate perked up at that, because secret ingredient was about her favorite dish in the whole wide world.

  “You chop.” Auntie shoved a package of pork ribs at her along with a large knife in a manner that made Kate grateful it wasn’t point first. Auntie Vi slammed into the pantry and slammed back out with a bag of rice, unearthed the rice cooker, and filled it and switched it on.

  Kate began separating the ribs between the bones. “This sure is a lot of ribs for four people, Auntie,” she said. She looked up to see Auntie Vi glaring at her. A lesser person might have quailed. “But then, kids that age eat at least twice their own weight every twenty-four hours.” She smiled. “Don’t they.”

  A deathly silence fell over the kitchen, to the point Kate could hear Jim and Van breathing. A couple of snow machines went by outside. She went on finding the meat between the ribs and slicing through it.

  Auntie Vi broke the silence finally, with some words of Aleut that sounded very choice and a couple of which Kate recognized as not repeatable in polite company. Auntie Vi slammed the pot she had been filling down on the stove, the water sloshing over the side and extinguishing the burner flame, and stamped out of the kitchen and down the hall.

  Kate wiped up the water, relit the burner, and put the pot back on. She finished slicing the ribs as the water began to boil and dumped them in and put the lid on, looking up to see Auntie Vi walking back into the kitchen trailed by the two kids Kate had last seen sleeping in one of the Grosdidier Clinic’s beds on New Year’s Day. Auntie Vi yanked two more chairs out and yelled at the kids in what was most certainly not Spanish. The kids seemed to understand it anyway and climbed up on chairs on either side of Vanessa. The little girl looked calm but the boy looked angry. Kate welcomed his anger. It meant he wasn’t beaten, that he was still fighting.

  She washed her hands and wiped them and went to the living room to roust Mutt off the couch. David’s eyes widened when Mutt came into the kitchen but Anna smiled. Kate sat down across the table from them and took out her phone. She tapped into the browser, loaded Google Translate, and turned on the voice input. “My name is Kate,” she said, and tapped on the speaker icon and waited for the program to translate. “What is your name?”

  The boy looked mutinous, glaring first at her and then at Auntie Vi, who swore at him some more in Aleut.

  “I’m Anna,” the girl said, so then he glared at her. The resemblance to Auntie Vi was uncanny.

  Auntie Vi shook her finger at him. “David,” he said sulkily.

  “Where are your parents?”

  Kate kept the questions short and simple. The story came out slowly and reluctantly, and what with the wait for the translator it took a while to be told and understood. David and Anna’s papi had been killed by the gangs, their mami had been hurt, and she had brought them to el norte where they would be safe. At the border someone took Mami away and two big men in blue jackets with white letters on the back took David and Anna and brought them to the place where there was snow like the book with the boy in the strange orange suit with the pointy hood. They drove them to the house with the star on the mountain next door and the two big men sold them to the Bad Man.

  Auntie Vi shoved her chair back and went over to the refrigerator to yank open the freezer and grab a package of snow peas. She slammed into the pantry and slammed back out again with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. She opened the can and dumped it into the pot with the ribs and stirred it vigorously enough that she burned herself on the hot liquid splashing out of the pot. This called for more Aleut. She ripped open the bag of snow peas and shook them violently into the pot and slammed the lid back on.

  Neither of the kids turned a hair. They knew she wasn’t mad at them.

  They had been with the Bad Man not quite a month when he took them on the plane. And then the plane crashed and they woke up at the clinic in company with a bunch of adults they didn’t know and David didn’t trust not to hurt Anna. So they left to find somewhere to hide. Auntie Edna’s was the first door they’d found that was unlocked.

  The rice was done and Auntie Vi pulled the liner out of the cooker and slammed it down on the table, Jim getting his fingers out of the way just in time. Plates came next followed by forks, a red-enameled cast iron trivet in the shape of a heart and the pot of ribs on top of that. She ladled food onto the plates and dumped one in front of each of them. Van got up and went to the refrigerator and brought back a bottle of soy sauce and Auntie Vi sent her a fulminating look like she was going to stab Van with her own fork right then and there.

  The kids ate with good appetite and asked for more. So did everyone else. Mutt waited, looking hopeful, until Anna gave her a bone. She accepted it delicately between her teeth and retired into the living room.

  Anna had already sur
vived a lot worse than a half-wolf half-husky begging at the dinner table.

  The kids started yawning after dinner and Van took them to their room and put them to bed. Kate texted Matt that the kids were fine. There was the distant buzz of a snow machine coming down the Step road.

  “We found them at Auntie Edna’s,” Vanessa said, coming back into the kitchen.

  Kate nodded. “I figured. Mutt sniffed out their trail.”

  “They didn’t want to go back to the clinic. Well, they didn’t really want to come with us, either, or David didn’t, but Auntie Vi made them.”

  “How?”

  “She just yelled at them. But I don’t think they’re afraid of her.”

  Kate didn’t think so, either. “They know their mom’s name. That’s something.”

  “ICE has probably already deported her back to Honduras,” Jim said.

  “We will find her,” Kate said precisely, “wherever she is.”

  He had enough of a sense of self-preservation to shut up.

  Van looked up. “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  A knock sounded at the door, louder this time, followed by a man’s voice. “Hey, is this Viola Shugak’s B&B? Our plane broke down and we need a bed for the night. Hello?”

  “Whole place full!” Auntie Vi yelled. “Go away!”

  “What? I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you, what did you say?” Another knock on the door. “Ma’am, it’s freezing out here. Could you at least let us in while we talk?”

  Auntie Vi, swearing again, stormed out of the kitchen and they heard the door open. “We’re full up! No beds! What—what are you—”

  The next moment the door to the kitchen was remarkably full of two very large men, Auntie Vi buzzing around like a hornet in back of them. One was tall and blond, the other shorter and stocky. They had similar buzz cuts and a similar look, disciplined, businesslike, and utterly lacking in warmth. They were dressed in identical blue jackets and Jim saw the bulge under the heavy fabric under both their left arms.

  They assessed the room: three women of three different generations and one man. Their eyes lingered longer on Jim and he took care to leave his hands motionless on the table. “Who are you and what do you want?” he said.

  “We’re ICE agents,” the tall one said. He produced a badge and flashed it briefly.

  “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the stocky one said, producing his own even more briefly. “I’m Agent Gaunt. This is Agent O’Hanlon. We understand you’re illegally harboring two undocumented aliens.”

  Auntie Vi shoved in between the two of them and marched around the table to the kitchen sink. One of the men almost reached for his weapon and then let his hand drop when she began furiously crashing the dirty dishes around, muttering in Aleut what Kate was certain were highly uncomplimentary comments about their uninvited guests’ ancestry and character.

  “Understand from whom?” Kate said. Vanessa looked at her with frightened eyes and Kate could tell by her body language that she was seconds away from bolting to the kids’ side. She gave a tiny shake of her head.

  “An anonymous tip,” Gaunt said.

  “Someone in the Park called you and alerted you to their presence?”

  “Yes.”

  She folded her arms loosely and leaned her chair back on its rear legs. “And you came all this way into the Alaskan Bush in the dead of winter to retrieve two illegal aliens. As reported by an anonymous source.”

  “It’s a serious matter, Ms.—”

  “Shugak. Kate Shugak.” The two men exchanged a glance. Jim looked at her and she knew what he knew, that these two men recognized her name. She had never seen either of them before.

  “As I said, it’s a serious matter, Ms. Shugak,” Gaunt said smoothly. “Harboring an illegal alien is a felony, punishable by up to twenty years in prison. Much better to hand them over to the proper authorities, don’t you think?”

  Kate smiled. “Well,” she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous purr, “yes, but I don’t think you are the proper authorities. Are you?” She saw Jim’s hands slide back to the edge of the table. She saw Van see him do it, too. She let her hands fall to her lap and pulled her feet back to plant them directly beneath her.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You wouldn’t have come all this way without contacting the local authorities. Since I know all the local authorities and I haven’t heard from any of them, I don’t think you’re legit.”

  She cocked her head. “My guess is you work for the people Gary Curley worked for. Gary Curley being the pedophile whose plane your two illegal aliens were on. Your two very, very underage illegal aliens.”

  Gaunt and O’Hanlon exchanged a glance. O’Hanlon shrugged. “We just want the phone,” Gaunt said. “Hand it over. There’s no reason for anyone to get hurt.”

  “What phone?” Kate said.

  “Don’t play coy, Shugak.” O’Hanlon reached for the gun under his arm at the same time Gaunt did.

  From the corner of her eye Kate saw Auntie Vi reach down to open a tall, narrow cupboard next to the oven where any reasonable person would have kept their baking sheets, from which she pulled out a single-barreled pump-action shotgun. She brought it up and racked it. “You will leave this house. You can walk out or you can be carried, but you will leave.”

  As children the aunties had all been forced into boarding schools and taught to speak, read and write English so as to forget their Aleut. Once home, as a matter of everyday conversation they spoke Aleut to each other and a sort of pidgin English to everyone else, mostly, Kate thought, in rebellion against the attempt to strip them of language and culture by gussuks. When so moved, however, they could all sound like they graduated from Vassar.

  It startled the fake agents, though, for just a moment as they were going for their weapons, just long enough for Jim to lean forward, plant a hand on Vanessa’s chest and shove her over backward in her chair. It hit the floor and she slid off the chair and across the kitchen floor right under the swinging doors into the pantry, disappearing from sight and thankfully out of range. O’Hanlon’s gun had cleared its holster and he was bringing it up when Auntie Vi’s shotgun boomed. It sounded a lot louder in an enclosed space than it did when duck hunting from a skiff on a lake. It was one hell of a starting pistol and many things happened at once.

  Auntie Vi had fired wide and mostly missed but blood bloomed on O’Hanlon’s left shoulder and he cursed and fired at the same time the recoil of the shotgun slammed Auntie Vi back up against the sink. She slid to the floor and out of Kate’s view.

  “Mutt!” Kate yelled. “Take!” She shoved off with her feet and somersaulted backwards out of her chair to land on two hands, one foot, and one knee just like a superhero.

  There was a terrifying growl and the sound of fabric tearing and flesh ripping. Gaunt screamed. “Al! Get it off me! Shoot it! Shoot it!”

  Jim slid beneath the table and came up again with it on, top of him. He shoved it up on one end and pushed the surface towards the two men. Kate scuttled forward to help, cringing when she heard more shots. One of the bullets hit spang in the middle of a Royal Tara tea set, the Irish Treasure pattern that was Auntie Vi’s pride and joy and that she never took down from on top of the cupboard except to wash. The bullet broke three cups, two saucers, the creamer and the serving plate and Kate heard a choked cry of protest from Auntie Vi but then there was another terrible sound of rending flesh and Gaunt screamed again. “Al! Shoot it, Al, shoot it, get it offa me!” More shots were fired and holes appeared in the ceiling and one clanged into the chimney of the big black oil stove, knocking it apart and spilling a cloud of soot into the room.

  Kate put her shoulder next to Jim’s, Vanessa was suddenly on his other side, and together the three of them shoved the heavy wooden table forward. It banged into Jim’s chair and shoved it into O’Hanlon, who fired again. The bullet hit the surface of the table and didn’t quite go through although Kate had an u
ncomfortably close look at the outline of the round. They shoved hard again, catching one of the men between the door frame and the table. Mutt growled and Gaunt screamed again, more faintly this time.

  Kate looked at Jim and pointed to herself and to the right. He pointed to himself and to the left. “Van, get Auntie Vi’s shotgun. Go, now!”

  Kate went low and came around the other side to see O’Hanlon shoving at the table. He saw her and raised his weapon, and then Jim hit him from the other side, grabbed his gun hand, put his other hand flat against O’Hanlon’s elbow, and pulled back. A bone cracked and O’Hanlon screamed.

  Another gun fired from in back of O’Hanlon.

  “Mutt!” Kate yelled. “Off! Off! Off!”

  There was another growl, more tearing of fabric and flesh, another scream, another gunshot. Kate shoved between the table and the frame of the door and dove over O’Hanlon into the hallway beyond. David and Anna were peering around the corner, Anna frightened, David, bless him, angry, Mutt, on her toes, her hackles full on up, and looking all wolf, stood next to them, was growling at full volume. Gaunt was on his knees, bleeding from arm, thigh, and shoulder with his left arm dangling uselessly, but with his right he was bringing his weapon to bear. She stepped up behind him and kicked him in the lower back as hard as she could. He went down and she stepped on the wrist of his gun hand and put her full weight on it. His grip loosened and she picked up his weapon and put on the safety. “Mutt! On guard!” Mutt took a single leap forward to thrust her blood-stained muzzle into Gaunt’s face and ratcheted up the growl. Gaunt quailed.

  “Stay there!” Kate said to the kids, and felt for her phone to call for reinforcements.