by Неизвестный
“You shouldn’t have shot him,” Her fury began to implode, her legs started trembling. She didn’t want to admit to her fear. She didn’t want him saving her. She didn’t want to owe him anything.
“He was going to kill you,” Justin said, his voice unsteady.
“We could have worked out a deal.”
Justin had shrunk into himself on the sofa; he was still staring at the floor.
“He was the only thing we had to go on.” The anger had drained out of her voice. She took a deep breath trying to keep herself steady, trying to stop the trembling in her legs.
“If we’d brought the police in like I wanted to, this wouldn’t have happened,” Justin said, his voice small.
“They would have screwed it up.”
“Screwed it up?” Justin lifted his head, his voice louder, hardening. “I’m shot, you’ve got a cock stuck in your mouth, and he’s dead. How could they’ve screwed it up worse than this?” He glared up at her. “You blew it. I’m going for the cops,” he said, standing.
“No.”
Justin picked up the gun again and headed for the door.
“No.” Kris ran in front of him, blocking his way. “Dammit, Justin. He’s dead; it won’t make any difference. Let’s search the place before they come. They’ll never know.”
“They’ll arrest us for tampering with evidence.”
“How’re they going to know?”
“Fingerprints, dust marks, there’s a million ways.”
“Get your gloves then.”
“No way. I’m out of here.”
“Get your damn gloves.”
Justin looked at her. “Where’s that blood coming from?”
Kris looked down. The open parka hid her breasts, but the skin between them was visible and smeared with blood. Suddenly, she felt the pain. It surged through the tip of her breast every time her heart beat. “Asshole sliced off one of my nipples.”
“Jesus Christ.” Justin reached toward her.
“Leave me alone.” Kris twisted her shoulder, blocking his hand. “Get this tape off me.”
He ignored her and opened her parka and shirt. Blood was starting to cake on her breast and belly. “Let’s find it. We can pack it in snow and they can sew it back on.”
“I don’t need it. It’s only the tip.”
“You don’t need it?” He stared at her. “Jesus, Kris, you are motherfucking crazy.”
“Yeah, probably,” Suddenly, the last of the adrenaline drained out of her and she felt giddy. She held her breath to keep from giggling; she let it out slowly.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yeah, it hurts. So let’s move.” Kris turned her back and pushed out her taped hands.
She rubbed her wrists after he’d unwound the tape, then pressed her T-shirt against her nipple to soak up the slow dribble of blood. She’d been cut worse.
Justin watched her. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. She tucked in her shirt.
They were silent for a minute, then Justin asked, “Look.” When she looked up at him, he pulled his jacket tight and stuck his finger through the bullet hole. “Right over my heart. Glad he was a good shot even drunk.”
She stared at the hole, then looked up at him.
Justin stepped over the kindling box and began shuffling his feet in the dark corner where he’d been thrown by the slug. Kris heard a clunk and something heavy grate on the floor. He picked it up. It was the piece of pipeline steel. There was a lead-colored scar in it that she’d hadn’t seen before. He tucked it into his jacket and crossed his arms over his chest to hold it over his heart. He tapped it through the material with his forefinger.
“Look, this is where the bullet hit,” he said taking it out and pointing to the scar. He pulled at his jacket again and found a second hole off to the side. “I’m lucky it didn’t ricochet through my arm.” He laughed nervously. “I wonder why he didn’t hear the ricochet.”
“He had other things to think about. I jumped him.”
He rubbed his chest. “It’s starting to hurt now. It knocked me out, I didn’t feel a thing when it hit.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “It was pretty close, wasn’t it?”
Kris remembered Justin’s foot sticking out of the shadows, twitching. She looked at the piece of dull steel with the gash in it and then she looked away. “You did OK.” It wasn’t something she often said to anybody, especially a man, and the words made her feel awkward and uncomfortable.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Get your gloves,” she said, covering the faint flush of warmth she suddenly felt toward him. She pulled Ben’s mittens from her pocket and put them on.
“OK.” Justin went out the door. Kris went over to look at Vern. He’d crumpled onto his side; blood still seeped out of his chest. It glistened in the dim light as it flowed slowly across the room and puddled in a low point in the floor. His pants were open and his penis lay shriveled on his thigh like a tumor, like something alien, like something that belonged on ET. Kris wondered at the frenzied, uncontrollable power it had over its owners. It wasn’t something she wanted.
She turned away from the body and surveyed the shack. There wasn’t a bed and she wondered where he and Evie’d slept. Looking up, she saw a ladder nailed to the wall in the far corner by the kitchen. It led up to a hole in the ceiling. She climbed up, but it was too dark to see anything and she dropped back down to look for a light. Next to the cook stove, she found matches and a kerosene lantern. She took off a mitten and carefully, so she wouldn’t leave any prints, struck a match and lighted the wick.
The loft had two thin foam mattresses pushed together against the far wall. On one side was a box of men’s crumpled clothes. On the other, Kris found a neater box of women’s things. She took them out one at a time, wondering at the changes that must have come to Evie. Was it Vern that changed her? Clothes had never been folded when Kris had lived with her.
Down below she heard Justin come back in.
“Kris?”
“Up here. You look down there.”
“All right.”
Most of the clothes were new. Wal-Mart stuff, nothing fancy, but still new. At the bottom of the box were some worn, dirt-stained shirts and Kris wondered if Evie had held on to them because she hadn’t trusted her luck. What had Vern offered Evie? How had he sobered her up? More than anything when she was a kid, she’d wanted her mother to stop drinking. She cried, she screamed, she bullied; nothing she did made a damn bit of difference. What had Vern done that she couldn’t?
Kris lifted the last carefully folded old blouse and there, at the bottom, was a small brown paper bag. Holding it next to the frail glow of the lantern, Kris opened it. Inside was a simple caribou hide pouch with leather drawstrings laced around the open edge. It was her mother’s; she had carried it with her all the years, all the drunks, all the nights in jail that Kris had known her. In the last nine years, Kris had not once thought of it.
“Hey, Kris. I found something. Come down and take a look.”
“Hold on.” She dropped the pouch into the paper bag and stuffed it into one of the parka’s inside pockets. Less carefully, she repacked Evie’s clothes and with the lantern in one hand, climbed back down the ladder. The movement rubbed the T-shirt over her nipple, and she felt it start bleeding again. The pain was still sharp and she hardened her face so Justin couldn’t see it. He was sitting with his feet dangling through a hole in the floor under the sink. The slop bucket had been moved out of the way and half a plywood section lifted out of the floor. In his lap was a red cookie tin.
“Two thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars, all in twenties,” he said putting the wad of cash back in the tin. “And a card and an envelope.” He turned the envelope over. “Oh, it’s from you.”
He handed it to her. It was the letter she’d sent Evie letting her know when she was arriving. The envelope had been ripped open across the top and the letter was still inside.
“Why was
n’t this with Evie’s stuff? Why were they hiding it under the floor?”
Justin looked up, the card in his fingers. “Maybe Vern was hiding it from her. She probably didn’t know about the money, either.”
Probably not. Kris shook off a mitten and pulled her letter out of the envelope. “How’d he get this? I sent it to the AWARE shelter.”
Justin didn’t answer.
Suddenly, she realized with a pang that surprised her that Evie had never known she was coming. She’d died thinking that Kris hadn’t answered her letter; that she’d run from her again.
“Take a look at this,” Justin said, handing her the card. It was a 3 x 5 card and on the side without lines was a number written in a precise script: 95544.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Phone number.”
“It’s not long enough.”
“789-5544. There are only a few exchanges in Juneau, so all you need to do is write the last digit of the exchange. This is a valley number, so it’s probably someone’s house, though it could be a store too. It’s not Evie’s writing, is it?”
“God, no.”
“It had to be written by someone who knows Juneau’s phone system.”
“Two and a half thousand.” She picked up the cash and riffled it. “Where did they get this?”
“Bet you’d find out if you called that number.”
“There’s no phone here.”
“No.”
“So are we done?” Justin asked. “Let’s put this back and get out of here. They’ll be able to tell how long we hung around by changes to the body.”
“I’m taking these.” Kris reached for the tin and put the money, letter, and card in it.
“Are you going to give them to the police?”
“No.”
“It’s material evidence. You take that and you go to jail.”
“How are they going to find out, Justin.” It was a warning, not a question.
Justin looked uncomfortable. “I think we should tell them. It probably has something to do with the murder.”
“It can’t have anything to do with her murder; she didn’t know anybody with this kind of money.”
“They had to get it from someone.”
“I’m taking it.”
“It’s your ass.” Justin crawled out from under the sink and replaced the plywood and the bucket.
“See that?” Justin pointed at the slop water frozen to the plywood. “That’s how I knew there was something under there—the insulation had been ripped out so the floor here is colder than in the rest of the shack.” Justin walked over to Vern’s body, pushed one of Vern’s booted feet into the light with his toe. “Not crepe,” he said. “Ben’s the only one, so far, to have crepe soles.”
“Did you find anything upstairs?” he asked.
“A caribou-hide pouch that belonged to my mother.”
“Did you take it?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s in it?”
“Used to be some of my hair. Evie cut it when I was born. She said I looked like a bush when I came out. Then I lost it all before it grew back in later.”
“Is it still there?” Justin followed her out the door, closing it behind him. It was dusk now, the sun already behind the mountains.
“I haven’t opened it yet.”
“Let’s look.”
“Not enough light. Let’s get in the car.”
They walked down the driveway, weaving around the junk, and climbed into the car. Justin started the engine and clicked on the overhead light. The car was cold and their breath frosted the windshield. Kris pulled the purse out of her pocket. The leather was soft, almost like tissue. Justin leaned across the seat as she worked loose the leather cord. When she had it open, she angled it to catch the light and looked in. She frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
Kris reached in and gently pulled out a snip of black hair that was twined with a short length of white beads around the quill of a feather. The feather’s barbs were twisted and kinked and separated from the years in the pouch. It was from a Stellar Jay; a big bird that Kris had liked when she was a kid because its call was loud and unafraid.
“It’s still there,” Justin said.
“There’s two.” Kris stuck her thumb and forefinger back into the bag and pulled out a second snip of hair twined around the quill of a black feather. The hair was reddish-brown and much finer than hers. Kris laid it on her palm next to the other.
“Strange. Whose is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think, somewhere, I’ve got a brother or a sister.”
__________
Kris leaned against the Red Dog Saloon’s phony log wall watching Justin lope up the steep slope at the end of Franklin Street toward Chicken Ridge. She’d refused his offer of dinner; she had enough money now to feed herself and she didn’t want anything to do with him until he’d quit being a hero. When he started up the staircase at the end of Franklin, disappearing into the darkness beyond the reach of the streetlights, she straightened and walked down to the Lucky Lady. The nub of nipple that she had left and the outer half of her breast were still numb, as if frostbitten. The doctor had given her a shot to cut the pain, but other than a bandage, there wasn’t much he could do and, he warned, scar tissue would form that might make it hard to nurse—not a problem Kris was going to worry much about.
The Sunday evening drinkers had already started collecting in the Lady. The crowd was as noisy as in any bar on a weekday, although, instead of wailing or throbbing, the jukebox was playing something smooth that she didn’t recognize. Maybe it had a Sunday line-up. Kris headed to the back hallway past the end of the bar and found the holes in the wall where a pay phone used to be. She scanned the room, spotted a sullen looking man staring into an empty glass.
“Buy you another beer, if I can borrow your cell,” Kris said.
The man fished his phone out of his pocket without looking up and handed it to her. She signaled the waitress and sat down across from him. She pulled the card with the phone number, which she’d folded into a tiny square, out of her pocket and flattened it on the table.
She was lucky that Justin had kept his mouth shut and didn’t tell Barrett about the money or phone number that they’d found under the floor. Barrett had pressed them hard after they’d gotten out of the hospital; worrying at every damn detail. He wanted them back in the station Monday for follow-up questions and to sign their statements. Kris couldn’t tell if Barrett suspected they were holding out on him and she was worried that Justin would lose his nerve overnight and crack if Barrett bore down on them again in the morning.
She picked up the phone. How the hell was she going to get the person who answered to identify themselves? Justin had told her to say that the electric company had had a computer glitch that had scrambled some customer accounts and that she was calling to confirm name and address information. But she’d have to wait until tomorrow to do that; no one would buy the story on a Sunday evening.
Kris didn’t want to wait. She tapped in the number. It rang four times and then a woman’s digitized voice announced: “You have reached 789-5544. Please leave a message and your call will be returned promptly.” There was a pause and then the tone. Kris broke the connection. Slowly, she stuffed the card back into her pocket, left a five on the table, and walked out of the bar.
It hadn’t rained in two days and the streets were dry and dusty. A tattered sheet of newsprint swirled in the slipstream of a passing car.
Yes.
Kris accelerated up the street, ignoring the bright lights in the Liquor Cache’s window and the few people on the sidewalk. It made sense now. She crossed Front Street. Vern must have been blackmailing him. That’s where the money under the floor had come from. Franklin Street slanted up and she leaned into the slope. Blackmail. What did the shit do? Kris pulled out a cigarette. Evie. Did he screw Evie? Christ. Worse than that? The sanctimonious shit. She lit the cigarett
e and drew in the smoke, pitching the match into the street. She’d seen it a million times. Some angel of righteousness preaching holy hellfire to the whores and crack heads on the street and then, when no one was looking, paying some kid, who hadn’t had a serious meal in a week, a couple of bucks to jerk him off.
“Promptly.” Who talks like that? Kris stopped suddenly outside the Baranof’s glass doors and stared into the hotel’s lobby. A couple of gray-haired women laughed soundlessly in the warmth and light, and intent men in suits strode purposively past them. Alvilde. Most likely she can’t juice up and that’s why he had to go looking. Couldn’t imagine her on her back anyway. Or maybe she was part of it. Probably her way of keeping him off her. It happened all the time—a woman pushing her man into the street for his pussy so she didn’t have to deal with it.
She turned away from the bright doors, hating the people behind them, hating the clean and the wealthy who played with people like Evie, who took what they wanted, and then tossed them back into the pits of their lives. Or killed them. Lambale had killed Evie. It fit. He knew her, he gave her money, he could talk her into his car and down to Thane, he wore expensive suits—the fibers in the bushes were his—only Lambale would murder somebody in a fancy suit. He’d taken what he wanted from her and when she turned on him, or when Vern turned her on him, he murdered her. Kris drew hard on her cigarette, coughed, spewing smoke into the air in front of her.
She turned on Third and suddenly her anger leapt to Justin. That shit. He hadn’t believed her. Lambale’s just being friendly; he feels sorry for you, he’d said. What did he know? Like having a mother who tucks you in at night teaches you anything about life.
Kris stopped halfway up the steep street, breathing hard, and searched Ben’s window high on the hillside. It was lit, but too dimly for Kris to see if Ben was behind it sitting in his chair looking down at her. She flicked her cigarette up the hill in front of her. It arced through the darkness. Its orange tip glowing like an angry eye, it bounced on the gravel road, and rolled down the slope until it was stopped by a sharp-edged stone.
