No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  One result was that, unlike the Kanuyaq Mine, the Kichatna Mine infrastructure was more modern and in much better condition. The village chief was a dynamic woman in her thirties with a lot of ideas. One of them was adapting the mine buildings into a voc ed school. Kate was—barely—allowed to say her piece and receive final confirmation of her suspicions before Jim elbowed her to one side and took over. Chief Nadya took them on a forced march through the entirety of the has-been mining operation and expounded at length on her plans, which included a course curriculum aspirational of universal accreditation in engineering. Jim listened, rapt, until Kate shoved her phone under his face with the clock app up. He surfaced as one does from a dream and bade Chief Nadya farewell with genuine sorrow. The new besties vowed to keep in touch.

  The sky was a bubble of gray that seemed to surround the aircraft and move with them as they flew into the southeast. The Alaska Range sank behind as the Quilaks rose up before. Kate thought of the various landscapes they’d seen over the past two days. Seldovia’s 84-fathom fjord that looked like something out of a Norwegian travel brochure. The sandy river delta of King Salmon that might have looked familiar to Mark Twain from his days as a pilot on the Mississippi River. Kichatna, Triassic gold on a Mesozoic lily. Ahtna, the head of an immense river valley that depended into the Gulf of Alaska and the vast north Pacific Ocean, a stretch of water that rolled south with only intermittent island interruptions all the way to Antarctica.

  Viewing Alaska from the air was a sobering exercise in perspective, capable of making one small insignificant human being feel that much smaller and even less significant. “What was all that about back there?” Kate said.

  He leveled out and watched the gauges for a few moments. “I was twenty-two years in the troopers, Kate.” He sounded somber over the headset and she leaned back in her seat so she could watch his profile as he spoke. It was a good profile, broad forehead, strong nose, a well-cut mouth bracketed by laugh lines, all of it held up by a firm chin. Kate had never trusted good looks as the outer man so seldom matched the inner man but in Jim’s case it did. Authority without arrogance, commitment without fanaticism, firm but not inflexible, and always approachable. It was a rare combination and one of the reasons she loved him.

  Wait, what?

  “All those years I always got there after. After the wreck, after the overdose, after the abuse, after the murder.” He was silent for a moment. “After the suicides. The teen ones were always the hardest to take.” He glanced at her and smiled to see her watching him. Well, wow. That thick blond hair, those intense blue eyes, that white shark’s grin. Sometimes he did take her breath away, and sometimes she let it happen.

  “Money’s weird, Kate. You have enough of it, it just goes off into a dark corner and breeds.”

  She blinked at the change of subject.

  “I told you my father left me a lot of money,” he said, misreading her expression.

  “No, not really.” She laughed a little. “But the strip and the hangar and the Cessna were kind of a clue. What, did you spend it all already?”

  “Far from it.” He hesitated and gave her the side eye.

  “What?”

  “You should know.”

  “Why? It’s none of my business.”

  “It kind of is.” He hesitated again.

  “Just spit it out.”

  He blew out a breath and started laughing.

  “Okay, you’re starting to scare me.”

  Still laughing, he said, “You’re my trustee.”

  “I’m your what!”

  “You’re the trustee of my will. The boss lady. The gal who writes the checks when I pass on to that Big Waypoint in the Sky.”

  For a moment she forgot how to say words. He was still laughing beside her, to the point that Mutt sat up and pushed her head in between the two of them, wanting in on the joke. To occupy herself Kate fished out a strip of salmon jerky, a parting gift from the kind folks in Seldovia, and passed it over. She wiped the grease from her fingers and said finally, feeling aggrieved, “What, were you and Erland Bannister communing telepathically or something?”

  “We must have been,” Jim said, chuckling. “Don’t worry, there are step-by-step instructions.” A pause. “Although I think I’m about to change all that.”

  “Why?”

  “What I said before, about always getting there after?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like a shot at getting there before.”

  “Okay…?”

  He needlessly adjusted the prop pitch and gave her the side eye again. “I think I want to start a school.”

  She stared at him, realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it again with a snap. “A school.”

  “A voc ed school like the one Chief Nadya is talking about in Kichatna. But in Niniltna.”

  “In Niniltna.”

  “Yes. You heard about the Topkoks.”

  “Of course,” Kate said, faint but pursuing.

  “I talked to Auntie Vi.” He looked at her but she was speechless. Seemed to be a lot of that going around lately. “She said none of the Topkok kids were interested in moving back to the Park and that she figured they would slap a for sale sign on the shop first thing. I took a look at it, and it’s in good shape. Their house is right next door, and it looks good, too.” He was gathering steam as he went, the accumulation of ideas over days having built by now to critical mass. “The shop can be the classrooms and the house can be the dormitory.”

  “Dormitory?”

  “We’ll need one if we want students from all over the Park. Luckily, Herbie and June had a lot of kids so it’s a big house. I’ll need help with the curriculum. A lot’s going to depend on Herbie’s inventory, at least to begin with.”

  “Curriculum?”

  He drummed his fingers on the yoke. “I’d like to focus on teaching students to provide services the Park most needs. R&M for sleds and ATVs, marine engineering, A&P, like that.”

  “What about faculty?”

  He made a face. “Well, my number one pick for superintendent would have been Herbie. There was nothing with moving parts that guy couldn’t fix.”

  “I don’t think Herbie Topkoks are that thick on the ground.”

  He tsked impatiently. “No, but we’ve got two thousand plus people scattered over twenty million acres, who because of their isolated living conditions have to make and mend themselves. There have to be a couple of go-to guys who are at least budding Herbies who might like full-time jobs that would keep them in the Park year round. Those aren’t very thick on the ground, either.”

  “True enough.” In spite of herself, Kate was getting into this. “And you never know, there might be some misguided soul with the exact CV you need who actually wants to move to the Bush.”

  There was a smile in his voice when he said, “I can see that happening.” He became serious again. “Whoever we hire, Kurt does the full background check.”

  “We can trade. Hours for background checks for hours in the air. Pletnikof Investigations could use an on-call pilot.” They flew on in silence for a few moments. “What do you see as your role in this new educational facility?”

  “I’m not going to run it, that’s for sure. I went to school. Doesn’t mean I know a thing about running them. I thought I’d talk to Valerie Doogan about it. See if she could help with the, you know, structure.”

  “Good idea. You might want to talk to Annie Mike. Seems like anything that had a shot at keeping the kids home would be something the NNA would be interested in.”

  He looked at her, hands in his lap. There was very little turbulence and in January very little traffic. “So what do you think?”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

  “There is bound to be a shit ton of government rules and regulations to wade through.”

  “I’ll hire a lawyer.”

  “State and federal.”

  “I’ll hire two
.”

  “You really do have a lot of money, don’t you?”

  He laughed. “So, you with me?”

  She thought about what he’d said, about law enforcement always arriving after, and about wanting to get there before. “Yeah. I’m with you. However I can help, I will.”

  He put his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a kiss, the mikes on their headsets clashing but not letting that stop him. He sat back, grinning all over his face. He looked happy, she thought. Been a while since he looked happy. It suited him.

  They overflew Ahtna. “Home or town?” he said.

  “Town. I want to ask Mrs. Doogan about her Bannister Foundation application.”

  “Promise you won’t scare her.”

  She made with the wounded eyes. He snorted.

  They landed in Niniltna an hour before twilight, tied down in front of George’s, said hi, and hotfooted it over to the school, where they found Doogan in her office. “It was the simplest grant application process I’ve ever gone through,” she said. “Basically all they wanted to know was how much I wanted and when.” She reflected. “Now that I think about it, I had to kind of force her to listen to what I wanted to do with their money.”

  “Force her?”

  “The Bannister Foundation representative. The one who flew here to help me fill out the application. Jane Wardwell.” Doogan’s eyes sharpened. “Why do you want to know? Is there something wrong with the Bannister Foundation?”

  Valerie Doogan always had been better than average bright. “I’ve got a little project of my own going on that I want to talk to you about,” Jim said. “Buy you a cup of coffee down at the Riverside sometime?”

  “Sure,” Mrs. Doogan said, still suspicious, but after a quarter century in the teaching trenches recognizing a stonewall when she saw one.

  Outside, the sun was a dim memory behind the cloud cover and a faint breeze chilled the skin exposed between hat brim and scarf down to icicle levels. Jim said, “Where to?”

  “I can’t face Auntie Vi’s,” Kate said. “Let’s go to Bobby’s.”

  The sled had not frozen quite solid, a good thing, and they drove to the A-frame two miles downriver and off the road. The windows shone with a warm glow that invited everyone in, and they accepted, kicking the snow from their feet, opening the door and stepping inside. Dinah looked up from the kitchen counter and greeted them with a broad smile. “Perfect timing,” she said, “the pot roast is about to come out of the oven.”

  Katya exploded out of her bedroom. “Mutt!” Mutt met her halfway and the two of them went down in a rolling tumble of fur and pigtails, Katya’s deep, chuckling laugh competing with Mutt’s fake growls as they wrestled for dominance. It was hard for both of them not to compare Katya to David and Anna. Katya, secure in a safe home with loving parents. David and Anna with neither.

  Bobby had a fistful of scribbled notes and was talking into a microphone. “Save the date, January thirtieth, the next meeting of the Tet Offensive Book Club, at which we’ll be discussing William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness. Yes, Sergei, you do have to read the book, and no, it doesn’t have any pictures in it. This is your very own home-grown pirate radio station, Park Air, live with the latest episode of Park Palaver. So far we have five people looking for someone to fix their sleds, one to change out an impeller on a bow picker, and three, count ’em, three different love letters for Demetri Totemoff. Here’s a good one to go out on.” He sorted through the slips. “‘To Demetri at the Lodge. Your side of the bed is awfully cold. Please come home soon and help me warm it up. Love, Hot to Trot.’ Demetri, buddy. Call George for a ride into town now. Or, you know. A friend could step up. It’s what friends do.” He ducked just in time and the ladle shaped like a purple brontosaurus smacked into the mike instead of the side of his head. It was almost like he’d known it was coming. “Incoming! I believe that was the signal for soup’s on. Okay, folks, we’ll be back to talk with your very own congresscritter, the Honorable Pete Heiman, visiting from that place where they deal from the bottom of the deck better than anywhere else in the world, the one and thank god the only Washington, DC!”

  He punched a button and turned a knob and Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus galloped out of the speakers. Speaking of unlikely combinations, Pete Heiman was sitting at the kitchen table and laughing. He stopped, momentarily, when he saw Kate and Jim walk in. Jim nodded at Pete and went to get a beer out of the refrigerator. Kate walked into the kitchen and said to Dinah in a low voice, “Who’s got the kids?”

  “They’re back with Laurel and the bros,” Dinah said. “Van told them it was okay and they seem to have settled in for the duration. At any rate they haven’t run away again.”

  “Van?”

  “With Johnny at your place. She’s still a little shook.”

  “Have you seen the aunties?”

  “Joy’s at the hospital in Ahtna with Vi. Balasha is leading the charge at Vi’s house. She rounded up any Park rat Auntie Vi ever made fry bread for.”

  “So, all of them.”

  Dinah smiled. “She sent Bobby on a supply run to Ahtna for materials this morning. The idea is to have it cleaned up, repaired, patched, and painted before Vi gets home.”

  “A good thought.” Although Auntie Vi, being Auntie Vi, might have liked to have been able to point to the scars of bullet holes during what was sure to become the oft-told tale of The Battle of the B&B.

  Dinah opened the oven and pulled out a massive casserole dish heaped with moose roast and crisp squares of beef fat and mushrooms and onions and celery and potatoes and carrots. It smelled like garlic and heaven. Kate pulled more plates from the cupboard and more silverware from the drawer and filled out the place settings on the table. Dinah filled a pitcher with a rich brown gravy. “Come and get it!”

  They settled in and other than a few moans of ecstasy conversation ceased for the near future. Katya sat across from Kate and Kate could see the two points of Mutt’s ears sticking up over the edge of the table next to her. Katya had always been a messy eater. And then she forgot about them and just ate.

  Dinah said, “Don’t forget about dessert. It’s rhubarb tart with whipped cream.” Pete groaned and Jim swore and Bobby said, “Did I marry up or what?” and Dinah smiled a very self-satisfied smile. Afterward they sat around in a collective state of food coma, from which Pete managed to rouse himself enough to say, “I heard about Viola. I hope she’s doing well?”

  “As well as can be expected after being shot in her own home.”

  Kate continued to look at Pete with what she hoped was a thoughtful, considering gaze. Bobby, who had known her longer than anyone else around the table except for Pete, looked from her to Jim and seemed to telepathically divine some message from Jim’s poker face. He sat back and folded his arms and prepared to enjoyed the show. Dinah looked as if she wished she had her video camera in hand.

  “You may have missed some other news in all the, ah, kerfuffle, Pete.” Good lord, she was even starting to sound like a Special Agent.

  “What other news? Why are you looking at me like that?” Pete said. “It makes me nervous.”

  Kate smiled at him. “It should.”

  Pete laughed but it wasn’t his best effort. Practicing politicians were generally comfortable as the focus of attention but something in the atmosphere had changed and his eyes darted around the table as if seeking a way out, from this conversation, from this house, from the Park itself.

  “There are lines even politicians don’t cross, Pete,” Kate said, her voice mild, “and operating a money laundry for a drug cartel is one of them.”

  He gaped at her.

  “I don’t know what lure Erland Bannister cast your way but I thought you were smarter than to swallow it. I’m guessing it was a campaign contribution, and probably more than one. Am I right?”

  Kate had read about people going white but she had never seen anyone actually do it before. Pete couldn’t produce an articulate word for a full minute
, which had to be a record for him or any other politician. When he did speak, he was trying hard to be offended but all Kate could see on his face was fear and all she could hear was sputtering. You knew, you son of a bitch, she thought. You at least suspected.

  Pete swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate, but I resent the implication that I would ever have anything to do with something so heinous as profiting from a scourge that has been decimating Alaska communities for decades. How dare you say such a thing? I could sue you for slander.”

  “Sure you could,” Kate said. “If it weren’t true.”

  Pete surged to his feet. “It isn’t!”

  She held his gaze with her own and said nothing.

  The lengthening silence was broken when Bobby smacked his hands together. “Okay! Let’s hit the air!”

  But Pete found that he had an urgent appointment somewhere else for which he was disgracefully late. Apologies, but… “Thanks so much for the terrific dinner, Dinah.” He was trying to shove his arm into the sleeve of his parka. Dinah got up and untangled it for him. “Thanks, again!” He summoned a simulacrum of his standard Jolly Old St. Nick grin, waved as if he were saying his farewell to a much larger crowd, and disappeared. Dinah closed the door behind him.

  Bobby looked at Kate. “If I’d known you were gonna fuck with my programming I wouldn’t have fed you dinner.”

  “Play some funky music, black boy,” Kate said.

  “Just for that you get Toby Keith back to back.”

  “Maybe Patsy Cline?”

  He reconsidered.

  Later, when Jim and Kate were bedded down on the couch, the fire crackling and popping in the fireplace, Jim said, “Why here and now?”