Auntie Vi shook her head, refusing to be drawn, and waved at the courthouse they were standing in. “That boy kill that girl,” she said, “and get away with it.”
“Getting myself elected to the board wouldn’t have changed that, Auntie.”
Auntie Vi opened the door. “A hundred and seventy-three shareholders, Katya. When something bad like this happen, they want answer. Who here to give them one?”
Jim took one look at Kate when she got back to the judge’s chambers and rose swiftly to his feet. “Lunch, anyone?”
They adjourned to the Ahtna Lodge where, Jim hoped, exchanging gossip with Tony and eating one of his partner Stanislav’s famous steak sandwiches would soothe Kate’s savage breast.
How bad an idea that was was immediately obvious when they walked into the restaurant and saw that instead of heading for the Seven Come Eleven as was his usual MO following an acquittal, Louis Deem had for reasons best known to himself decided to park an elbow on the Ahtna Lodge bar, long known to be the hangout of Kate Shugak when she was in town. He was surrounded by the usual suspects and appeared to be having a high old time of it.
“Let’s go,” Jim said.
“Oh, let’s not,” Hazen said, and thwarted Tony’s attempts to seat them as far away from the bar as he could get without actually putting them at a table in the river.
Jim looked at the judge, who shrugged and sat down in the chair Hazen had pulled out for her.
Such provocation did not go unnoticed. “Oh man,” someone said in a not very low voice, “that’s just a nine-one-one call waiting to happen.”
“No point,” someone else said. “Everyone who would answer it is right here.”
There was a nervous titter, quickly squelched. Kate and company gave a jittery Tony their orders, and he fled their table as if pursued by demons. Everyone was watching out of the corner of their eyes, and those eyes got sharper when after a fraught ten minutes Louis Deem strolled over to their table. “Nice to see a man pull a chair out for a woman anymore, Kenny,” he said, and looked down at Robbie Singh. “Gotta love the manners on that good ol’ boy, dontcha, Judge.” He gave her a slow once-over. “Gotta say also that you’re looking mighty good. Glad to see getting the tit cut off didn’t slow you down.”
Hazen was up and out of his chair and Jim was right behind him, only he was grabbing hold of Hazen and hanging on. Jim Chopin was not a small man, but next to Kenny Hazen in a rage Paul Bunyan would have looked frail. “Kenny. Don’t. You know it’s what he wants.”
The judge said coolly, “Thank you, Mr. Deem. I appreciate your good wishes, given the antagonistic state of our professional relationship.” She even smiled at him. “Which I do assure you is far from over.”
Louis was wise enough to let this pass. He took a long pull at the draft beer he was holding and looked at Kenny, who shrugged off Jim’s hands and restrained himself to a killing glare. “Man, that’s good. The one thing I’ve missed most inside.” He grinned. “Well. Maybe not the thing I’ve missed most.”
Kate thought of Eve Waterbury weeping into Nick Waterbury’s shoulder in the courtroom. Next to her Mutt showed her teeth, a growl rumbling out of her throat.
Louis looked at Mutt. “Hey, Mutt,” he said softly.
The growl, if anything, increased in volume.
“Fuck off, Louis,” Kate said, just as softly.
His gaze shifted to her for the first time, and while no one saw the “target acquired” sign flashing over his head, no one who was watching in the Ahtna Lodge Bar that day could mistake the hostility that sizzled between the two of them. “Hey, Kate,” he said in what could be described as an almost caressing tone. “I hear somebody burned down your cabin.”
“Pity you were in jail at the time,” Kate said. “Arson, attempted murder. Right up your alley.”
His smile widened. He even turned his head a little so the dead tooth faced her straight on. “I also hear you got a brand-new house. And a brand-new son.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Kate,” Jim said on a warning note. He felt like he needed a striped shirt and a whistle. And body armor.
Slowly and with a certain ceremony, Kate rose to her feet.
The room was absolutely silent.
Kate leaned forward with her hands flat on the table and met Louis’s eyes. “Buzz off now, Louis,” she said softly, “like the little gnat you are, before someone slaps you down.” She smiled, a wide, warm smile that terrified everyone who saw it, and dropped her gaze to his teeth. “Again.”
The hair standing up all over his head, Jim said, long after he should have, “You have no business here, Deem. Go on back to the bar.”
Deem ignored him, raising his glass to Kate. “Be seeing you.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Kate said. “Little boy.”
Tony, frozen two tables away in the act of taking someone else’s order, greeted Stan’s call of “Order up!” with the demeanor of someone reprieved from the gas chamber thirty seconds before the balls dropped, and bustled over with their steak sandwiches, full of false good cheer.
“You okay?” Jim said to Kate in a low voice as they sat down again.
“I’m fine,” she said. She even ate all of her sandwich, although he noticed she didn’t appear to taste any of it. He noticed also that Mutt eschewed the plate of chopped meat Tony set before her in the manner of one setting an offering before a god, instead positioning herself between Kate and the bar, her considering yellow gaze fixed on Louis Deem’s back.
“Stay away from Deem,” Jim said after they were in the air.
“Tell him to stay away from me,” Kate said.
To his surprise, she didn’t sound angry, or even threatening. On the contrary, she sounded calm, almost matter-of-fact. As if, Jim thought with a sudden chill, as if the gauntlet had been thrown down, and the challenge accepted. He concentrated on getting them to cruising altitude before speaking again, more cautiously this time. “You and Deem appear to have something of a history.”
Kate stared through the windshield with a face devoid of all expression.
He tried again. “It wasn’t—”
“Personal?” She looked at him, her mouth a straight uncompromising line. “Is that what you’re trying to find out, Jim? If Louis and I got it on?”
He was honestly appalled. “No! Jesus! No way, Kate. No way would you ever have anything to do with that lowlife.” He examined the dials on the control panel and then the horizon, hoping for a loss of oil pressure or the onset of clear air turbulence as a way out of this conversation. No such luck. “Let’s just drop it, okay? Sorry I said anything.”
They flew on for a few minutes. To Jim it felt more like a few hours.
“I saw the results of him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing,” Kate said. “Which is pretty much the story of Louis’s life.”
Jim maintained a hopeful silence.
“I.. .” Kate hesitated. “I instructed him as to the error of his ways.”
Jim thought about it for another twenty-five miles. “The cap,” he said. “You knocked his tooth out.”
Kate said nothing.
“But he keeps smiling at you with it.”
Silence.
Jim sighed. “So he didn’t stay instructed.”
A great snowy owl was startled awake by their passing over his roost and exploded into flight, a vast sail of pure white feathers and matchless grace. Kate turned her head to watch it out of sight.
“He beat the rap,” Jim said. “Again. Still.”
The back of Kate’s head was unresponsive. Mutt stuck her head in between them and touched her nose to Kate’s neck. Kate didn’t even jump.
“Shit,” Jim said.
They were silent the rest of the way home.
It took Jim a while to figure out why the encounter between Kate and Deem bothered him so much.
Louis Deem might be the only Park rat Jim Chopin had ever met who wasn’t afraid of Kat
e Shugak.
THREE
The Park
But January passed into February, and Louis Deem made no noticeable ripples in the peaceful winter surface of the Park. It stayed cold enough long enough for the school to build and maintain an ice-skating rink on the baseball field behind the gymnasium. Everyone pulled their skates out of the crawl space, dusted off the dead spiders, and met on the ice, where someone set up a bonfire every night, next to which Auntie Vi sold hot chocolate topped with whipped cream that froze into mustaches on everyone’s upper lips. Word was at least two children were fathered just beyond the glow of the fire that winter, but word also was that many more had been attempted, so the fallout wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
As expected and in spite of strenuous arguments by Jim, Auntie Balasha refused to file charges against Willard for stealing her fuel oil. She told Jim she was sure the poor boy was driven by hunger, as nothing would convince her that her grandson harbored a larcenous bone in his body. He’d fallen into bad company, although she did think that perhaps Howie wasn’t quite so black as Park rumor had him painted. He was misunderstood, that was all, and she was sure—
Jim tuned out the rest of her apologia, finished his tea with honey, accepted a dozen freshly baked oatmeal raisin cookies, the ones she had gotten up at five A.M. to bake because she knew he was coming out that morning and because she knew they were his favorites, and left.
On the way back into town, Jim drove past the little grocery store that the Bingleys had just opened. Several men were loitering with what to Jim looked like intent near the door, including Martin Shugak, Howie Katelnikof, and, yes, there was Willard.
For the hell of it, he pulled to the side of the road and got out. “Hey, guys.”
Howie and Martin eyed him warily, but Willard broke into a big smile. “Hey, Jim.”
Jim stamped his feet and blew into his gloves. “Damn, it’s cold. I sure could go for a hot toddy about now.”
“Me, too,” Willard said with feeling.
“Know anywhere I could buy a bottle?” He made a show of getting out his wallet. “I’ve got cash.”
Martin and Howie both made convulsive moves for Willard, but they were too late. “Why, sure, Jim,” Willard said happily. “I can get you a bottle,” and he ducked in back of a snow berm to come up beaming with a plastic pint of Windsor Canadian. He handed it over in exchange for a wad of money.
Martin sighed heavily. Howie said with resignation, “Willard, you dumb fuck.”
“What?” Willard was bewildered. “What’d I do?”
“What you did was sell me liquor without a license, in a damp town,” Jim said. Damp today, anyway. Tomorrow, depending on the mood of the voting citizenry and the fishing season, it could be wet or even dry. “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent....”
Willard went without question, by now well versed in the form. As Jim held the cell door open for him, Willard was patting Darth Vader’s head, whose shiny black helmet as usual peeped from the top of Willard’s shirt pocket. “It’s okay, Anakin. The evil Sith Lord has us trapped again, but you know we always escape.”
In fact, Jim felt a little ashamed of himself, but at least Willard got to spend the night in a nice warm jail, with three hot meals hand-delivered by Laurel Meganack. He spent it there alone, though, because he refused to implicate either Howie or Marty in the bootlegging. Jim hadn’t expected much else, and he let Willard off the next morning with a warning, which he estimated Willard retained for possibly as long as thirty seconds. Jim had confiscated and poured out the rest of the booze, which had been his target all along, and an added bonus was that Auntie Balasha gave him a little less hell than he was expecting when she heard of the incident.
Martin vanished into the woodwork, probably fearing what would happen when Kate heard. Howie remained distressingly visible. Howie Katelnikof, Louis Deem’s boon companion, Willard Shugak’s in loco parentis, and Jim Chopin’s ever-present thorn in his side.
Louis Deem was bad because he was good at it and because he enjoyed it. Willard was bad because he was FAS and incapable of making even one good decision unless it was by accident. Howie was bad because he was lazy, because it paid better than straight work, and because somebody had once told him that girls went for bad boys. He was similar enough to Louis that the girls were initially interested, but that interest always wore off fast. One of life’s losers, that was Howie Katelnikof, and the sad thing about Howie was that he knew it. It was one of the reasons he’d hooked up with Louis Deem, his cousin, his idol, his mentor, and his meal ticket, from whom he’d absorbed just enough gray matter wherewithal to make beer money screwing over everyone who didn’t get out of the way first. The bootlegging operation was a classic example of Howie’s entrepreneurial skills. He had just enough brains to acquire product and hire staff, but then he parked the operation on a road providing direct access to a trooper post, and the staff he hired had shoe sizes bigger than their IQs. Jim suspected that Louis Deem’s delusions of invulnerability were starting to rub off on his henchman.
Not that Deem was looking all that deluded lately.
In February, two snow machiners were stranded on one of the Quilaks’ minor peaks in the middle of a raging storm. They had no survival gear and no radio and it was only a miracle that another snow machiner in the area had seen them and reported their location to Dan. Dan called Jim, and together they called out the Llama high-altitude rescue helicopter, which swooped in to pluck up the morons during a momentary lull.
Their chief concern, they explained earnestly to Jim, was the recovery of their snow machines. “Jesus Christ,” Dan said when Jim reported this, “they were highmarking in a place we told them not to go, right when a ballbuster of a storm was coming in off Prince William Sound, which we also told them. You’d think they’d be happy just to be alive.”
When the storm blew itself out, Jim had to fly to Chistona on one of a wearying number of domestic assault cases that winter, all of them involving alcohol, and he did a flyby of the area in question. “Not much point in it,” Dan said when Jim told him what he was going to do, and Dan was right. Even in the aftermath of the storm, the vultures had managed to strip both machines of anything of value. The tracks were gone, the cowling with the instrument panels gone, the engines, the seats, the shocks, the skis, the treads, all gone. One of them looked like someone had tried to tow it behind another snow machine. It was lying in a narrow canyon in a heap of broken metal. The other sat where it had been abandoned, minus even its gas tank.
“What’s left isn’t worth fifty bucks,” Jim told Dan when he got back to the Park. Dan relayed the news to the owners, who weren’t happy, but as they were home in Anchorage by that time Dan didn’t really care, and truth to tell neither did Jim. Dan was right. The snow machiners were lucky to be alive. Still, Jim harbored no doubt that they’d both be back in the Park the following winter pursuing their death-defying hobby of extreme snow machining. With any luck, they’d get themselves killed before they had a chance to procreate. The gene pool needed all the help it could get.
As for where the parts had wound up, Jim had a mild hunch that a search of the Deem homestead would provide a few leads. If only a hunch was sufficient cause for Judge Singh to issue him a search warrant.
In March, Kate—in the employ of the state Department of Revenue—concluded a ten-week investigation which broke up a ring of grifters who had been filing applications for the state’s annual permanent fund dividend in the names of forty-three children, all of whom had died five years or more earlier. The last five dividends totaled $6,264.20, which times forty-three brought the amount embezzled to well over a quarter of a million dollars, which qualified for grand theft, while if not quite on a scale of Raven stealing the sun, moon, and stars, certainly bumped up the charging documents to a felony.
Jim and Kenny were called in to make the arrests, warrants in hand that Judge Singh had been delighted to issue. “You have the right to re
main silent,” Kenny said, and was interrupted when Margaret Kvasnikof spat at Kate.
“Nice to see you again, too, Mags,” she said as Kenny cuffed her third cousin once removed and led her out.
“Hey, a fan,” Jim said. “You okay?”
“It’s a living,” Kate said, and suffered no qualms of conscience three weeks later when her fee arrived in the mail with three lovely zeroes on the end of it. She didn’t enjoy being spit at, but Mags was no longer the girl who had played kick-the-can with the gang on the riverbanks when they were all kids together. Of course, she thought, it helped that Mags’s branch of Kvasnikofs came from Ouzinkie instead of Nanwalek, and as such was an extremely distant relative. If she’d been yet another of Auntie Balasha’s three hundred nieces, Kate would have cashed the check anyway but would have braced herself for an onslaught of reproachful glances and baked goods.
“Wow,” Johnny said, reading the zeroes over her shoulder, “let’s go to Disneyland.”
“Hell with that,” Jim said, “let’s go to Vegas.”
Instead, she sent 30 percent to the IRS, put 20 percent into Johnny’s college fund, dropped $1,200 at Costco on essentials like bread flour, kept a thousand in a roll of fives, tens, and twenties for walking-around money, and banked the rest.
“My snowgo’s falling apart,” Johnny said.
“Snow’s almost gone,” Kate said.
“Yeah, but my four-wheeler is in even worse shape.”
“Cannibalize mine for parts.”
“Couldn’t we at least get satellite television?”
“Over my dead body.”
Johnny, who obviously still had a lot of work ahead of him before he could start violating all the known laws of physics, gave up and trudged mournfully to his bedroom. Not neglecting to take the copy of the latest Harry Dresden novel with him, even though Kate’s bookmark was prominently clasped at the halfway mark.
During these months Louis Deem remained snugged down on his homestead, drinking beer and watching WWE SmackDown. He did have satellite television. Naturally.
A Deeper Sleep Page 5
