A Deeper Sleep

by Dana Stabenow

  After three attempts to read the same page, she gave up. Barnes was worth a better effort than that, so she put the book down and went over to check on Mutt’s breathing again. The warm gray pelt was still moving up and down in a reassuringly regular fashion. Kate knelt down and put her cheek against Mutt’s side. One of Mutt’s ears flickered, but otherwise Mutt slept on. Her heartbeat was a steady thump against Kate’s ear. Kate lay down next to her, pillowing her head on one arm, the other draped across Mutt, careful to avoid the bandage on her shoulder.

  The next thing she knew, she heard a soft woof, the scramble of nails on wood floor, tongue lapping up water. She opened her eyes to see Mutt standing by the door. The door handles were lever style, deliberately chosen so that Mutt could open them. She wasn’t opening them today. Kate went over and opened it for her. Mutt gave her the evil eye, as if this tedious disability were all Kate’s fault, and went across the deck and down the stairs with a cautious tread. Kate went around to the front of the house to watch her progress through the windows. Mutt watered a few plants, sniffed at a few more, and disappeared beneath the deck. Kate went out to check, and found Mutt lying beneath the deck. She gave Kate an annoyed look.

  Kate went back inside and checked the bread, which had almost doubled in size. She turned on the oven and the burner beneath the water kettle. When the water boiled, she poured it into a pan and set it on the bottom of the oven. She brushed the loaves with more water, slashed their tops with a razor blade, put them in the oven, and set the timer. She might even have said a prayer.

  She’d tried bread, bills, book. Nothing seemed to be able to hold her attention for long. And then, hallelujah, Johnny walked in.

  She took one look at his face and thought, Or maybe not hallelujah. “What’s wrong?”

  “Where’s Mutt?”

  “Outside under the deck, last time I looked.” She took his chin in one hand and said, “What’s wrong, Johnny?”

  He pulled free and let his daypack hit the floor with a thud.

  “They’re going to let Louis Deem go.”

  She stared at him. She could not possibly have heard right. “What?” she said.

  “They’re going to let Louis Deem go,” Johnny said again.

  For one inglorious moment all Kate could think of was, So that was why he didn’t pick us up at the airport. Instantly ashamed, she shook the thought out of her head. “Jim Chopin turned Louis Deem loose?”

  “Not yet, but he’s going to have to,” Johnny said, tired of playing the game. “Some lawyer or judge or something like that wouldn’t charge him, and they can’t keep him.”

  “Did Jim tell you this?”

  “No. But everybody knows.”

  The school had been buzzing with nothing else, and there had been a lot of speculative looks cast Johnny’s way. Did they think he’d been too afraid to testify to what he saw that awful night? Vanessa knew he wasn’t. That was something, but a bunch of other people were looking like they thought that Johnny had weaseled out. Wouldn’t be long before they’d be saying it, and then they’d say it to his face.

  Maybe he hadn’t always liked Jim Chopin. Maybe he had thought Jim wasn’t necessarily the best choice Kate could have made after Johnny’s dad died. Maybe he’d even been a little jealous, even if he did jump back from that thought like he was jerking his hand back from a hot fire.

  But the more he’d got to know Jim, the better he had liked him, even if Johnny was a little worried about Jim’s reputation with women. Anybody hurt Kate Shugak, they’d have Johnny Morgan to answer to. Maybe he was only fourteen, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make someone’s life a living hell if he put his mind to it. Just ask his mother. But so far Jim had behaved himself, earning Johnny’s qualified approval.

  And now this. Louis Deem was a bad guy. It was a cop’s job to lock up bad guys. Instead, Jim was going to turn one loose. And not just any bad guy, but the one who killed Fitz, and Fitz’s mom. The guy who would have killed Johnny if he’d known Johnny had been there.

  Johnny wanted to be absolutely fair. He wanted to give Jim a chance to explain. He was sure Jim would have a reason for what he did. Cops were the good guys. Johnny’s father had been a cop, or close enough. “Why would they let Louis go, Kate? Is my testimony not enough?”

  “Not by itself,” Jim said, “no.”

  They looked around to see him standing in the doorway. Mutt had followed him up the stairs, and she nosed his hand. It was the first time Kate had ever seen Mutt ask for his attention. Usually she simply demanded it.

  Jim pulled off his cap, unbuckled his gun belt, and hung both from the rack next to the door. He walked to the table and slumped down into a chair as if all the bone had gone out of his spine. “I was hoping I’d get to tell you myself. I’m sorry, guys.”

  “What happened?”

  Jim looked at Johnny. “I put all the evidence I had, which was your statement, in front of the district attorney. He won’t even put it in front of the grand jury.”

  “But I saw him!”

  “I know you did, kid.”

  Johnny looked at Kate. “What if I went to Ahtna and talked to them myself?”

  Kate looked at Jim. Jim shook his head. “They don’t want to go before thirty Park rats who are already pissed off that they have to look at pictures of dead people for three months instead of gearing up for salmon season with only the eyewitness testimony of a fourteen-year-old boy.” He looked at Kate. “With whose guardian the arresting officer has a relationship.”

  Johnny flushed a dull red right up to the roots of his hair. “That doesn’t have anything to do with what I saw!”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

  “It will at trial, though,” Kate said. “Damn, damn, damn. I should have thought of this.”

  “I thought of it before I arrested the bastard, but that was also before we knew there was no forensic evidence to back up Johnny’s testimony. Between that and Abigail Smith ready to get up on the stand and swear that Louis was with her all night that night, we don’t have a case.”

  “I thought you said she was lying!”

  “She is, Johnny, but I can’t prove it. And if I can’t prove it, Louis Deem will skate again. It’s better to turn him loose now than he gets acquitted later. If Abigail’s story ever changes, we can charge him. The statute of limitations never runs out on murder.”

  He rubbed his scalp with his fingers, leaving the thick blond mane in an unaccustomed disarray. “Hell.” He looked at Kate. “I’ll keep pushing Abigail for details. Amateur liars get caught because they forget what they said before and start contradicting themselves. I’m thinking Abigail Smith doesn’t have a lot of experience lying. I’m also thinking her parents will be working on her, too.”

  “Or they’ll marry her off to Louis that much faster,” Kate said.

  Jim rubbed both his hands over his face. “Jesus, I hope not. Wouldn’t that just put the icing on Louis Deem’s cake.”

  “He was standing as close to me as Mutt is right now.” Mutt, back in front of the fireplace, looked and gave her tail a perfunctory wag. The corners of Johnny’s mouth drooped. “He killed Fitz. He killed Fitz’s mom. I wanted to say so. I wanted to say so in a court of law, looking right at him when I did.”

  Kate put a hand on his shoulder. “You may get the chance to yet, Johnny.” But over Johnny’s head, her eyes met Jim’s, and she saw her own relief reflected there, relief that fate had delayed and probably denied Johnny’s chance to testify against Louis Deem.

  “I’ll hang on to him as long as I can,” Jim said. “Maybe another day, maybe two. Go out and talk to Abigail again. Go out and talk to Howie and Willard, see if I can shake something loose there.”

  “Why? What did they have to do with anything?”

  “It was Howie that shot Mutt, Johnny,” Jim said. “He was probably aiming at Kate. Or you.”

  Johnny went white at hearing said out loud what he had long suspected at heart to be true. “You
don’t know that,” he said in an almost inaudible voice.

  “Howie is Louis’s go-to boy, Johnny,” Jim said, his voice firm, maybe even a little harsh. “By now you’ve heard all the stories. I don’t have a shred of evidence to back it up, but I know Howie Katelnikof. He took that shot at you, and he put you into the ditch, and if he’d tried a little harder, I’d be saying this over your grave.”

  “You’re scaring him, Jim,” Kate said.

  “I want him scared,” Jim said. “I want you scared. It’s never a good thing to get into Louis Deem’s sights, and you know it. He’s got a notoriously twitchy trigger finger.”

  “Did you talk to Howie after?”

  “Sure, I went out to Deem’s place, right after I got back from Ahtna and dropped Johnny at Bobby’s.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said what he always says, Kate, that he was watching television at the house at the time of the incident. By then of course he had the TV Guide memorized for the whole evening, and he was more than happy to recite it for me, chapter and verse and which episodes were reruns.”

  “And Willard backed him up,” Kate said.

  “Of course Willard backed him up.”

  “Well,” Johnny said, “then maybe Howie didn’t do it.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Jim said. “Willard’s got the attention span of a first-grader. His one major skill in life is repeating the last thing he heard. Howie shot at you all right, Johnny.”

  “Enough,” Kate said firmly. The boy was mute with misery. “Enough for tonight, anyway. Hungry?”

  They nodded.

  “I’ve got bread in the oven. I’ll make spaghetti.” She gave Johnny’s shoulder a friendly tug. “Come on, chop me some garlic.”

  The baguettes came out of the oven, looking like four golden-brown torpedoes and smelling like heaven, and she set them aside to cool. For the rest, she was unaccustomedly clumsy that evening, dropping the frying pan, letting the bacon overcook, cutting herself on the bread knife, until finally Johnny threw her out of the kitchen and finished the meal himself. It wasn’t as good as Kate’s spaghetti, but Jim looked from Johnny’s mild triumph at this small accomplishment to Kate’s meaningful stare and filled his mouth with food before he could say so.

  The bread was great.

  Mutt spent the meal asleep on the hearth. “You sure she was ready to come home?”

  “I’m sure,” Kate said. “Hospitals are best for patching things up. Home is best for healing. You spending the night?”

  She still asked, even though it had been weeks since he’d said no, or said no and made it stick. “That was my plan,” he said cheerfully. It was in fact his plan to stick to her like glue, and Johnny, and Mutt for that matter. Once Louis was out, Howie’s motive would vanish, but Louis wasn’t out yet.

  On that grim thought he took a shower, changed into a T-shirt and jeans, and pulled his boots on over bare feet and went to get the case file to see if he could find something he’d missed. It was part of an untidy heap in the passenger seat. He gathered the bits and pieces and forms and statements into the folder and was momentarily arrested by the golden glow streaming out of Kate’s front windows. Johnny was helping Kate clean up in the kitchen. Mutt had resurfaced and was reaching up a paw to pull down the door handle. Before she could, Kate nudged Johnny and pointed, and he trotted over to open the door for her.

  This time it was Mutt. Last time it had been Kate, laid out by the business end of a number 2 shovel. He had been terrified because for a few horrible moments he’d thought she was dead, and then he’d been angry because he’d been terrified. He had walked away from her afterward. Hell, he’d run.

  They’d spent a winter at war, a war of attrition, during which by perseverance and not a little femme fatalism she’d worn down his resistance and pretty much vacated his autonomy. He was done trying to figure out how she’d done it, how he’d let her do it. Now he was just trying to deal with what was. In spite of a blameless life lived determinedly for himself and himself alone, he now had hostages to fortune. Three of them.

  Previously, his family had consisted of his parents, who lived in southern California in a state of civil indifference that hadn’t changed since his childhood. He’d let them define what a relationship was, calm, polite, bloodless. His relationship with Kate, by contrast, was turbulent, bawdy, challenging, exasperating, amusing, and passionate enough to melt his eyebrows, and infrequently not a little violent. He rubbed the scar on his forehead, a reminder of the file cabinet she’d heaved at him when she’d found out he’d slept with Ruth Bauman. That it had happened years before he’d become involved with Kate hadn’t put her aim off any.

  Not that it mattered, he told himself. He’d never told a woman he loved her. He was always scrupulously honest about the love thing. If it came to that, he was honest about everything. He raised no false hopes, he encouraged no long-term plans, he made it clear from the beginning that he was in it for the fun of it and when it was over no hard feelings, good-bye, and everybody’s still friends. That was his plan and it had worked well for him.

  Until now.

  For the first time it occurred to him that if he spent as much time working on a relationship as he did in planning for its ending, it might last longer, and it might mean more.

  If he had to boot Howie Katelnikof out of the Park, if he had to buy him a one-way ticket out of the state out of his own pocket, he was going to see to it that Louis Deem wasn’t going to get any more free shots at Kate Shugak or Johnny Morgan. Or Mutt. The U.S. Constitution was a wonderful thing, no doubt about it, and he personally loved each and every one of the amendments, in particular the first ten. He’d meant every word of his oath when he took it. More, he believed absolutely in the law enforcement doctrine of “to protect and to serve.”

  But if the U.S. Constitution said he couldn’t arrest Louis Deem for killing Kate Shugak unless and until Louis Deem actually did kill her, then fuck the goddamn U.S. Constitution and all who sailed in her.

  In this patriotic mood, he carried the case file back into the house and sat down at the table to go through it piece by piece.

  Sec. 11.41.110. Murder in the Second Degree

  (a) A person commits the crime of murder in the second degree if

  (1) with intent to cause serious physical injury to another person or knowing that the conduct is substantially certain to cause death or serious physical injury to another person, the person causes the death of any person ...

  —ALASKA STATUTES

  He liked to have his hands around her throat during sex. She didn’t like it, but he didn’t give her much choice in the matter, and she had learned through experience that it was over quicker if she didn’t fight him.

  That damn Kate Shugak. She’d dropped in again today, oh so casually, looking at her with those eyes that saw everything whether you wanted them to or not. He was always angry after one of Kate’s visits. She tried to tell him that it wasn’t her fault, that she and Kate hadn’t been that close in school, that they were hardly related at all, that Kate was just snooping around in what wasn’t any of her business, but he wouldn’t listen. He would be angry, and he would take it out on her.

  Lately he’d been taking it out on her in public places, too, which she really didn’t like, all the more reason for making no protest so it would be done and they could go home.

  She shut her mind to the sound of other truck engines coming and going and let him bend her over the bench seat of the truck. Her head struck the steering wheel, and she made an involuntary sound and tried to jerk free.

  “Louder,” he said, and grabbed a fistful of her hair to push her down again.

  Her head caught awkwardly between the wheel and the edge of the seat. The last thing she heard was a loud crack, and she had just enough time to wonder what it was before the broken edge of her axis vertebrae severed her spinal cord.

  NINE

  In that same patriotic mood, the next morning Jim drove t
o the post and strode back to the cells like Will Kane heading out to face down Sam Fuller.

  Unlike Sam Fuller, however, Louis Deem was not holding a six-gun; he was reading a book. He looked up. “Hey there, Jim.”

  “Louis.” It bothered Jim that Louis could read. It bothered him more that Louis was reading one of Jim’s favorite authors, John D. MacDonald.

  Louis smiled. “You seem upset about something, Jim. How can I help?”

  Jim rallied. “I know why you wanted Bernie’s gold, Louis.”

  “And I can see you’re dying to tell me,” Louis said. “Go ahead, serve it up.”

  “It wasn’t the gold at all. Or not Bernie’s. I couldn’t understand why you left all those nuggets lying around. I figured at first you dropped them, but it’s just not like you to get in a hurry when it comes to ripping somebody off.

  “And then I remembered something Bernie told me once, and this morning I called the Alaska Miners Association and talked to a guy there. He told me an experienced miner can tell what mine a piece of gold comes from in a certain area. Emphasis on experienced, Louis. You aren’t, of course. In a million years, you’d never dirty your hands on something as hardscrabble as mining gold. But you don’t mind a controlling interest while somebody else pulls it out of the ground for you.”

  “So far I’m not seeing what this has to do with me,” Louis said with determined boredom, “but it’s a whale of a tale, and everybody likes gold rush stories, so by all means continue.”

  “That’s why you shined up to Abigail, got her to say she’d marry you, and you’d have gone through with it, too, because hey, she’s the eldest daughter, the one who’s bound to have the most say over whatever her folks leave behind. Which brings me back to the gold.” Jim produced a slip of paper from his breast pocket and waved it at Deem. “Bernie isn’t an experienced miner, either, but he’s a half-assed amateur historian and he likes to know about stuff. So whenever a miner brought in gold to settle up his tab, Bernie’d ask him to write down what creek it came out of, and anything else the miner could remember, any details that would spice up the tale.”