No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Thank you, Jared,” an older male voice said. A click as Jared exited the conversation. “Ms. Shugak?”

  “Speaking,” Kate said again. Something in the timbre of Smith’s voice made her sit up. Across the room Mutt raised her head. “Your name isn’t really Smith, is it?”

  “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to deal with intelligent people. It saves so much time.”

  “Why did you kill Hutchinson?”

  A sigh. “Given his friendship with Erland, it was felt better safe than sorry.” A pause. “He did call you just before he died, after all. Three times. It argued a certain… sincerity of purpose, shall we say.”

  And how had he come by that piece of information? She tried to picture Detective Branson as inside snitch for anyone and failed utterly. “Your sources of information are frighteningly good.”

  “Thank you. We try to keep abreast of the news. Do you have any idea what he was so determined to communicate?”

  “If I did you would be the last person to know.”

  “Pity.”

  She knew a burning desire to shake him out of his complacency. “Did you know that Erland Bannister had set a plan in motion to reveal your entire operation and hang it on me six months following his death?”

  A brief silence. “No,” Mr. Smith said slowly. “No, I did not.” He sighed. “It is always a mistake to allow one’s personal feelings to enter into business dealings.”

  “Speaking as someone who could have ended her days in federal prison had his plan succeeded, I am forced to agree with you.”

  He chuckled. “I may owe you a debt of gratitude, Ms. Shugak, for extricating, however unwittingly, our organization from a matter that had the potential to inflict a great deal of damage to it.”

  “No gratitude is necessary, Mr. Smith, I assure you.”

  “Oh well done, Ms. Shugak. Just the right touch of sarcasm without abandoning good manners.”

  “Thank you.” She remembered the angry bee sound of the round passing too close to her ear in the parking lot outside the bank. “Is your gratitude enough to get the bullseye off my back?”

  “My dear Ms. Shugak.” He actually contrived to sound wounded. “For all intents and purposes, our operation in Alaska is blown. The pursuit of petty vengeance after the fact is a waste of both energy and resource. I am not Erland Bannister.”

  She caught herself, barely, before she apologized.

  “But to the point of my call.” The tenor of his voice remained exactly the same; polite, informative, not a hint of menace, even a trace of apology, mixed with sorrow. Lord, what fools these mere mortals be. “You have twice now interfered in our affairs. I’m afraid we would be quite displeased if that happened a third time.”

  She found herself on her feet without knowing how she got there. Across the room Mutt was up as well, her ears back, teeth showing, and a growl on low boil. “Stay the hell out of my state and it won’t.”

  “I appreciate your directness. Allow me to be equally frank. Our business is global and universal. It takes us everywhere. Simple opportunity may bring us your way again.”

  “Your business is killing people, Smith.”

  She could almost hear his shrug. “We offer a consumer good for sale, at a reasonable price made possible by bulk manufacture and distribution. If people want to stick a needle in their arm or shove powder up their nose—or pop a pill, or ten—it really is none of our business. Let them go to hell their own way.”

  “So long as you make a profit on it.”

  He tsked. “So judgmental, Ms. Shugak. I thought better of you. This call is merely to advise you that it would be best for your health, and the health of your loved ones, if you, shall we say, averted your eyes going forward? That is a very handsome dog you have, by the way. Half wolf, am I correct? She looks very comfortable there in front of the fire.”

  He ended the call.

  Kate clicked the phone app on her phone and then Recents. She tapped Unknown Number and it wouldn’t even ring. A second later, the call vanished from the list.

  She sat back down on the couch, and looked up at the window. The hole was still there, still patched with a cross of silver duct tape.

  She got up and pulled the drapes, keeping as far out of view through the window as she physically could.

  Twenty-one

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 19

  Niniltna

  JIM, KATE, JOHNNY AND VAN WERE BACK AT Bobby’s, who was sprawled on the couch with Dinah curled up next to him. Katya sat between Mutt’s paws, where she was narrating the action of The Snowy Day out loud with great animation. Mutt was following along with apparently deeply felt interest.

  “So, you going to help Vanessa with video footage for her little online Park Inquirer or not?”

  “Sure.” Dinah’s smile broadened. “So long as she spells my name correctly in the credits.”

  “Might maybe figure out a way to work Park Air into the mix, too,” Bobby said thoughtfully, and Van brightened.

  “Did you really get Pete Heiman to sponsor the Treviosos for fast-track citizenship?” Bobby said.

  “I did,” Kate said.

  “High five right there, woman.” They smacked hands. “How the hell?”

  Kate smiled.

  He shrugged. “Keep your secrets. I’m all about the happy ending.” He looked across at Katya and Mutt playing Story Time. “Sometimes I think—”

  “What?”

  The oven timer dinged and Dinah got up to get the coffee cake out of the oven.

  “What, Bobby?”

  He sighed and sat up, elbows on his knees, looking tired. Not physically tired, Kate thought, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually tired. Tired right down to his soul. “Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever get it right in this country. If we’ll ever stop seeing people who don’t look like us as other. As disposable. If those kids had been white, how different might their story have been at that border crossing in Texas?” He was watching Katya. “You know why I always wear cutoffs in Anchorage? Because if I’m pulled over driving while black, the cop sees my prostheses and assumes I’m a vet. Half of them are vets, too, and all is well. That getting shot while breathing because you’re black shit is not something I want to be dealing with every goddamn day. I may be the Park’s token black, Howie Katelnikof might call me ‘that nigger’ when he has too much to drink, some of the old farts may tell me to go back to where I came from—”

  “Tennessee?”

  He smiled, at least a little. “All that may be true, but people know me here and they leave me alone to live my life.”

  He looked at her. “Sorry, Kate. I know I don’t have to explain this to you.”

  “No.”

  “I’m praying that things get better before Katya has to go out there among them English. Otherwise I might as well lock her in the barn and keep her there for the rest of her life.”

  She looked at Katya, too, who had inherited more of her father’s black as ebony than her mother’s white-as-you-can-get-without-bleach. She hadn’t learned yet that white can be the enemy.

  “Let’s eat!” Dinah said. Jim picked Katya up and tossed her in the air. Kate noticed that he winced a little as he did so, the healing wounds inflicted by Auntie Vi’s enthusiastically fired shotgun still making themselves felt. The little girl with the Hershey’s chocolate skin and the flyaway dreads shrieked with laughter.

  Over the lump in her throat Kate said, “You don’t have a barn.”

  “I’ll build one.”

  They ate, and then they went to the gym and mourned for the Topkoks and for Auntie Edna, too. Jim noticed that Maria Jose Trevioso came with her children. They were all wearing new, much warmer clothing, and Ms. Trevioso cleaned up pretty good. He also saw Park rats taking notice of the fresh meat in their midst—already proven fertile, too—and made a mental note to spread the word that this woman and her children were under his protection. He doubted it would even slow down the hornier among them but he had to
try. And he could always sick Kate on them.

  In February Johnny went back to school. Van went with him, committing to one more semester, and that only because it was paid for, and then she’d see. In the meantime Jim got busy buying Herbie Topkok’s shop. The Topkok kids okayed the sale of the house, too, and Jim hired the same carpenter who’d built his hangar to come out from Anchorage and remodel both into something approaching a school and a dormitory. He thought about buying Auntie Vi’s B&B, too, but Auntie Vi wouldn’t hear of it. She was back home, and Ms. Trevioso, David and Anna were living with her now to take care of her. Old bones take the longest to heal, and she would need help from now on if she wanted to keep on living at home.

  Annie Mike put together an advisory board for his school, consisting of herself as president, Valerie Doogan as treasurer, and three more women from around the state: Bobbi Quintavell, Tara Sweeney, and Jeanine St. Jean. Bobbi was the president of a Native association in Nome, Tara was helping to run the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Jeanine ran a shipping company responsible for bringing in half the consumer goods sold in the state. Annie had summoned Jim and Valerie to NNA headquarters for a Skype introduction and it became immediately evident that the three were none of them shy people. They’d flirted with him for five minutes just to loosen him up and then asked a whole lot of questions that in the end left him questioning his own motives in starting the school, after which they were gracious enough to allow as how it might be a good thing, maybe, possibly, even, at a stretch, probably. They decided the school should be incorporated and should apply for nonprofit status so other people besides Jim could donate to it, even if he did have more money than any one human being should have and he didn’t even have to work for it, either. They picked the school’s accountant and attorney. They decided that despite his protests he should be on the board and put him there as a member without portfolio, like he even knew what that meant. They chose one additional board member for a quorum of seven, and they picked her, too, because evidently he had nothing to say about it. Deciding on a date for their first board meeting in person would have been easier with access to the Cray computer at UAF but they managed it, eventually.

  “What are you going to call it?” Bobbi said.

  “Gotta have a name,” Tara said.

  “Something local,” Jeanine said. “A name that means something to the people who live there, that the students will be proud to say they graduated from.”

  All he’d wanted was someone to annual his airplane and now he was starting a school and making himself answerable to a board of directors that had dominatrix written all over it.

  “Speak up,” Bobbi said, “we don’t bite.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Tara said.

  “We promise not to break the skin,” Jeanine said.

  Annie and Valerie mostly sat back and looked amused, damn them. Jim gathered up his courage. “Herbie Topkok could fix anything you brought him, from a toaster to a Super Cub. It’s his shop that will be the school and his house that will be the dormitory. I’m hoping it’s going to graduate students who can fix anything, too. So I’d like to call it after him.”

  “The Herbert Topkok Vocational School,” Bobbi said.

  “The Herbert Topkok Academy,” Tara said.

  “The Herbert Topkok Polytechnic,” Jeanine said.

  “Ooooooh, fancy,” the other two said, and then the screen was filled with the sounds of tapping as they all googled the word polytechnic on their phones to make sure it meant what they thought it meant.

  Jim squirmed a little. “Could we call it Herbie, not Herbert? It’s how everyone here knew him.”

  “Why not?” Bobbi said, and then asked him if he knew how to make a fireball. In spite of a feeble protest that he was already taken, somehow he found he had a date with the three of them at the Roadhouse when they flew in for his first board meeting. He quaked to think of what Kate would say.

  She laughed, was what she did, loud and long, when he staggered home that afternoon and blurted out the whole horrible story. “I’ve heard of all of them,” she said. “Not only are you going to get your school, it will be extremely well-run, never over budget, and will meet its student quota, with a waiting list, every single semester you are in business. Well done, Annie!”

  He was glad to see her laugh, even if it was at his expense. There hadn’t been a lot of laughter around the house during the last month. She’d told him about the phone call from Mr. Smith but she’d been threatened before and he didn’t think that was it, either. Kate didn’t scare easily. There had been many times when he wished she did and, he had no doubt, would be again.

  The phone rang. It was Kurt. “They found the shooter, and his driver.”

  “Really? Who were they?”

  “Local talent, and Branson says not all that bright local talent. They were hired over the phone and paid through a wire transfer into their bank.”

  “Let me guess. Untraceable?”

  “Branson says so, but Tyler says he’ll take a crack at it.”

  “He still winding up things in Fairbanks?”

  “He showed up this afternoon in a robin’s egg blue 1961 Ford Econoline van crammed with laptops and hard drives and battery packs and enough cable to reach high earth orbit. And one plastic Safeway bag filled with clothes.” She heard him shudder. “We had to stop by Walmart to buy him some clean underwear. And a giant-sized tube of Clearasil.”

  “Just how old is Tyler, Kurt?”

  “Almost nineteen.”

  “How old was he when you recruited him?”

  “He bought a house off the Old Seward near Rabbit Creek. Five acres, teeny-tiny house. He likes his privacy, does Tyler. I left him instructing a locksmith on how many and what size locks he wanted installed on the doors and the windows. I imagine he’ll be online and at work shortly.”

  Jim made her dinner, caribou steak with loaded baked potatoes and canned green beans fried with bacon and onions. Afterward they sat on the couch and she read a book by John Sandford that she claimed had Amur tigers and a pickle factory in it. A likely story. He contented himself with a biography of Winston Churchill so heavy it put his legs to sleep if he let it rest on them for too long. The fire crackled in the hearth and Mutt snoozed on her quilt and he kept thinking it ought to be snowing again but it still wasn’t. He wondered about the wreck up in the mountains. He wondered how many Ziploc gallon bags full of homemade fentanyl were scattered around. He wondered if the wildlife would get into them. Not a pretty thought. About as pretty as some yahoo Park rat stumbling across one and making it his own personal stash. He was going to have to make regular trips to Canyon Hot Springs between now and breakup to check on the scene. He hoped his sled didn’t break down before he graduated someone from Herbie Topkok Polytechnic who could fix it. “Hey,” he said.

  She peered at him over the top of her book. “What?”

  “I didn’t think to ask the last time we talked about it. You ever want kids?”

  “I already have about two thousand of them.”

  It surprised a laugh out of him and she set her book on the floor and crawled down to his end of the couch. Kate didn’t snuggle often, so he set his own book down and made room. She tucked her head into his shoulder and he put his arms around her and wanted for nothing else in this world, and was faintly surprised at himself for thinking it.

  “Martin is sober,” she said.

  “I saw,” he said.

  “He’s renting a house.”

  “I saw that, too.”

  “He’s got a dog.”

  “Yep.”

  “And Laurel’s going to give him a job?”

  “I hope so. Otherwise how’s he going to pay his rent and buy dog food?” She didn’t laugh and he angled his head to see her expression. “Are you okay? You’ve seemed a little off, lately, and I don’t think it’s only about Martin Shugak.”

  “I have been a little off lately,” she said, “and it isn’t about Martin Shugak. Di
dn’t realize you’d noticed. Sorry if I’ve been sulky.”

  “No need. But tell me.”

  Her breasts pushed against his chest on a long sigh. Sue him for noticing but there they were. “We live in this, this enclave,” she said. “Everybody knows everybody else. It’s like Bobby said. Nobody’s going to shoot him in the Park for driving while black. Nobody’s going to go up the hill and beat the crap out of Oscar and Keith because they’re gay. Nobody’s going to get mad at Willard Shugak because they saw him steal a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from Binkley’s because everybody knows he’s FAE and they understand, so they pay for the damn candy bar themselves and forget about it.”

  “I like that about us, too,” he said cautiously. “I was raised in the middle of way too much civilization and I didn’t love it. Why I came looking for something else. How I ended up here.”

  She moved against him restlessly. “So much that is good in the Park was Emaa and the aunties. We’ve had drugs in the Park but not like other places in Alaska. Bernie keeps the booze out the road. People just, I don’t know, get along. We know each other so we tolerate each other. Emaa and the aunties drew the line and then they held it, and led by example, and the rest of us fell in behind.” She sighed, thinking. “Maybe it’s insular. Parochial, even. Certainly Park rats spend enough time picking lint out of our own navels. But most of the time, at minimum we manage to co-exist without too much friction.

  “Now Emaa and Auntie Edna are gone, and Auntie Vi and Joy and Balasha probably aren’t far behind them.” She touched his lower lip lightly, tracing it with her forefinger. “And the wider world has come crashing in, and it doesn’t feel like much can stop it. The Suulutaq Mine. Demetri and his anti-mine PAC. Now this plane crash and suddenly we have two illegal immigrant children, the same kids in cages we’re reading about in the news every day, made the victims of sex trafficking, something else we’re reading about in the news every day. And we find out some asshole has been transshipping drugs through our airstrip for distribution in Alaska, Russia, Japan, South Korea, who the hell knows where else. Niniltna! Our town! Our Park! It’s something you read about in the media. It’s not something that happens here.”