Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Dinah.” He mustered up a smile.

  “Come on in. I just put on a fresh pot.” This earned her a hard look from Bobby. She raised an eyebrow. That was all, but Bobby scowled and fell back a step. Jim walked into the house and sat down at the counter. Nobody said anything while Dinah poured out three mugs and set out the fixings and a plate of peanut butter cookies. They drank and ate and the silence gathered like a dark cloud. Dinah looked back and forth between the two men and slapped the counter. “Oh for heaven’s sake. Will you two knock it off?”

  Eyes on his coffee Jim said, “He has a right to be angry at me, Dinah.” He gave a half laugh that could have sounded like a sob to an impartial observer. “Pretty much everyone does.”

  Dinah leaned across the counter and this time she smacked the side of his head. Then she smacked Bobby.

  Both men reared back.

  “The hell?”

  “Dinah!”

  She glared at them both with equal disfavor. “So, okay, that happened. Get over it, both of you.” Bobby snorted and Dinah leveled a finger at him. “Especially you. She’s alive. She’s healthy. You’ve seen her, you’ve talked to her, you know this to be true.”

  “Nice somebody has.” It wasn’t quite a mumble.

  And you,” Dinah said to Jim, “you’re as bad as he is and have less to get over.”

  “Less! I nearly got her killed!”

  “No, you moron, Ken Halvorsen nearly got her killed and you took him down afterward, and I repeat, she’s FINE. She’s ALL GOOD. Get OVER yourselves and move ON. She has.”

  “All the way to Anchorage.” Try as he would, it did come out sounding as if Jim were pouting.

  Dinah rolled her eyes. “Like she’ll be there a nanosecond longer than she has to be. She’s on a case, Jim. It’s how she earns her living.” She gave him a pointed look. “Not everyone we know can afford to just up and quit their job.”

  Jim set his teeth. He wasn’t going into that with anyone. Except maybe Kate. And she wasn’t here. “Have you seen Martin around lately?”

  “Martin?” Bobby said. “Martin Shugak?” Jim nodded. “No, and why would I want to?”

  Jim debated with himself over how much to say. “Howie stopped by the homestead. He seems to think Martin is in trouble.“

  “Howie!” Bobby hooted. “Howie’s asking you for help in getting Martin out of trouble? Seriously?” He threw back his head and laughed. “Man, I thought I’d heard everything.” He stopped suddenly in mid-laugh.

  “What?” Jim said.

  Bobby looked at Dinah. “Remember Ace and Deuce?”

  “I do.”

  Bobby said, “I was out at the Roadhouse the other night. Saw a couple of guys there, strangers. Big bruisers, covered in tats, both right out of the cast of Oz. Kept to themselves, but Bernie said they were asking around about Martin.”

  · · ·

  But by the time they got to the Roadhouse, Ace and Deuce were nowhere to be found, and Martin Shugak was still MIA.

  Like other people he could name. “Damn.”

  Bernie stroked his chin. “Well…”

  Jim and Bobby looked at him, alerted by something in his voice. “What?”

  “After my conversation with Bobby that evening, I made sure I bussed Ace and Deuce’s table when they left.”

  Jim felt a smile begin to creep across his face. “You didn’t. You did not.”

  “I did.” Bernie’s hand dropped below the counter and reappeared holding a Ziploc bag. It contained a dirty pint glass. “Ace’s. The guy with the mullet. The bald guy was drinking bottled water and took the bottle with him when they left.”

  “That’s why you were carrying it that weird-ass way,” Bobby said, remembering. He looked at Bernie with an expression that was almost respect.

  Jim accepted the bag and held it up to admire. “I could kiss you, man.”

  “Don’t get all mushy on me, Chopin.” Bernie ran a hand down his pony tail and fussed with the front of his T-shirt. “Although anyone could see the attraction.”

  “Bobby said they’re renting a cabin?” Bernie nodded. “Can we go see?”

  But there was nothing in the cabin other than a couple of unmade beds. Ace and Deuce were traveling light. “How did they get here? Drive? Fly?”

  “I think they had a pickup, old beater, green. Had to have been Alaska plates or I would have noticed.” Before Jim could ask he shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t get the number.”

  Ten

  Friday, November 4th

  Anchorage

  Brendan was grinning at something on his phone when Kate slid into the chair opposite him at Orso’s. He’d scored a table in a corner, out of the eyesight of most of the other diners and out of the traffic pattern of the staff, which wasn’t surprising, since the state of the front of his tie testified to how at home he felt here. He looked up and his face lit. “Kate!”

  The megahertz of the bellow confounded all his efforts at privacy as every head in the place turned to look at them. “Hey, Brendan.”

  He got up and she endured the now expected bone-crushing hug, staggering a little when he let her go. He was beaming all over his broad, good-natured face. “Kate,” he said. “Kate.”

  “That is my name.” It was impossible in the face of that welcome not to smile back.

  “God damn, it’s good to see you, Kate.” He looked at her in silence for a moment and then said in a surprised voice, “You look good. Better than good. You look like Anne Nzinga. You know. If you were black.”

  “And if I was a warrior queen.”

  “And lived in Africa,” he said. “But still.”

  “Thank you.”

  He smiled and released her hand finally. “Sit, sit.”

  She sat opposite him and nodded at his phone. “What was so funny?”

  “What? Oh,” he said, and chuckled. “God told a couple of guys in Georgia to blow up HAARP.”

  HAARP was an aurora research facility in interior Alaska run by the University of Alaska. “Really. What did HAARP ever do to them?”

  “Evidently it was threatening to control their minds.”

  “Presupposing the existence of such.”

  He nodded. “All evidence to the contrary.” He swiped the screen and handed her the phone. “Check out the trophy shot.”

  “Geeze,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, enough ammo there to invade Lithuania. Well. Lichtenstein, anyway. Plus a bunch of meth and dope. I know, I’m astonished, too.”

  She handed the phone back. “How close did they get?”

  He grinned. “They never got out of Georgia.” She laughed, and he said, “I admit, I prefer my evil villains to be on the low side of the I.Q. spectrum.”

  “Let’s just hope they didn’t procreate.”

  “Amen to that.” He sat back and looked at her with satisfaction. “I’m not going to ask how you’ve been, or what you’ve been up to. You look good enough to eat and that’s enough for me. I was pretty scared there for a while.”

  “Me, too.”

  He gave the empty space next to her chair an involuntary look. “And—”

  “Did you find anything out about Barney Aronsen?” she said.

  His mouth twisted but he let it go. “Went out on a scheduled run, with company, four years ago and never came back. Day job, master mechanic at Continental Motors, working on Subarus. Married, no children. A half million dollar life insurance policy, even though rumor had it he and his wife didn’t like each other much. She remarried, sold their house and bought a condo.”

  “Really? He’s only been missing for four years. Don’t you have to wait seven years before someone can be declared legally dead?”

  He shook his head. “There’s a statute for petition and inquiry. Basically if you can convince a district judge or magistrate that there are reasonable grounds to presume death, they can summon a six-member jury to examine the evidence and have him or her declared dead.”

  “Huh. Anything else
?”

  “Nope. I looked up this group he belonged to. They go running around the backwoods with nothing but a compass and a bottle of water. On purpose. It amazes me he’s the only one they’ve lost so far.” Their salads came. “You’re seeing hinky everywhere,” he said, “and no surprise when practically the first person you meet when you come out of the mountains winds up dead.”

  “Murdered.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure.” She told him the details.

  “Huh.” He ate some salad. “You’re feeling like its cause and effect.”

  “She hires me and ends up dead twelve hours later? Kinda hard not to feel like the Angel of Death.”

  It wasn’t like he could deny it with any conviction so he didn’t bother trying. “You’ll figure it out.”

  “It’s what I do.” And she didn’t smile when she said it.

  Their meals came. Auntie Vi’s cookies the night before, oatmeal this morning, the mussels at lunch, this seafood mac and cheese, everything she put in her mouth tasted like heaven one bite at a time. Mortality added its own spice, evidently.

  They shared a piece of chocolate cake that transported her back to the original cacao plant in Brazil and lingered over coffee heavily laced with cream as the restaurant emptied out around them. Brendan was the longest serving DA in Anchorage, the go-to guy when you need to cut a deal or prosecute a case to the point that no one on the defense team had a square inch of skin left to them, beginning with the accused. He shared all the gossip current in the office and Kate listened and nodded and smiled when it seemed called for, all the while thinking of Sylvia’s body crumpled by the side of the Step road, and of the pile of bones that had laid on Old Sam’s homestead in the mountains, unregarded, for years. It was such a lonely way to die.

  Brendan shifted in his chair. “We’ve pretty much closed the joint down.”

  But something in the way he said it caught her attention. “Brendan?”

  He looked shifty as only an experienced ADA could. “We should probably go so they can go home.”

  “Brendan.”

  “I don’t know if you’re ready to hear this, Kate.”

  “Pretend I am.”

  He sighed. “On your own head be it.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “Erland Bannister just put out a press release announcing that the Bannister Foundation would be fully funding the construction of the Samuel Dementieff Memorial Museum in Niniltna.”

  Kate sat very still, absorbing the words.

  The silence stretched out until Brendan couldn’t stand it anymore. “Kate?”

  It seemed like a long time before she spoke and when she did it was in a calm, measured tone that betrayed nothing of the feeling boiling beneath. “Here’s a guy I never met until three years ago, and now he’s all up in my business, in my family, in my home.” She took a deep breath and let it out, and summoned up a smile. “I find it…irritating.”

  “I can only imagine,” he said, and hesitated.

  She noticed. “Out with it.”

  “You heard about Jane Morgan?”

  She nodded. “I actually saw them at lunch.” She told him about it.

  He was silent for a moment or two. “Well,” he said finally, “there is one upside.”

  “Enlighten me, do.”

  “You’re bound to outlive him.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Assuming you can stay out of the hospital yourself from now on. As a favor to your friends. I’ll cop to some bias here.”

  She thought back to lunch earlier that day, and how unexpectedly elderly Erland had appeared. “Is he ill?”

  He shrugged. “There are rumors, but at his age there are bound to be. I do know he’s tried to reach out to his nephew and his sister.”

  “And?”

  “And neither will have anything to do with him. Of course, Oliver’s hoping for early release on good behavior, so he’s bound not to. Victoria…”

  “How is she?”

  He shrugged. “Still in remission. Still running the family business.”

  “Max Maxwell still working for her?”

  He grinned. “He and I had dinner at Club Paris last month.”

  She smiled. “Did you wind up under the table?”

  “No, because only a moron tries to match martinis with that guy. He may be older than god but he can still hold his liquor.”

  “I’ll have to give him a call.” Actually, not a bad idea, she thought, and tucked it away for later.

  He sat back, eyes never leaving her. “You’re taking this pretty calmly. I figured poking a grizzly in the eye with a sharp stick would be nothing to it.”

  “One thing at a time,” she said.

  That sounded ominous, and like time for a change of subject. “Did you get the books?”

  She nodded. “George sent them in with a load of two-by-fours, and thanks for that. Why three Cleopatra biographies, by the way?”

  He grinned. “She was an interesting woman. You’re an interesting woman. I figured you could relate.”

  “I don’t have a pearl or I’d whistle up a glass of vinegar.”

  He leered. “Be worth it for a trip up the Nile with you, babe.”

  · · ·

  Saturday, November 5th

  Anchorage

  A hand slid deliciously down her spine. She arched her back, legs parting eagerly to wrap around—

  A car door slammed and someone shouted something and Kate was yanked rudely from sleep into the darkness of an Arctic winter morning, aroused and annoyed about it.

  For the last four months her body had been fully concentrated on healing itself and nothing else. Convincing her inner organs to settle down from the trauma of having been so rudely disarranged by bullet and scalpel, keeping her food down, moving without pain, sleeping without nightmares, and regaining her physical strength, she had bent all her formidable powers of concentration on becoming the Kate Shugak she had been before Ken Halvorsen had shot her. She would settle for nothing less, and allow no time for anything else, not other people, not other concerns and certainly not sex.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy sex, and it sure wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy it with Jim Chopin, but it had been four months and she felt a little, what, gun shy? She had tested her body repeatedly over the healing process, in tearing down Old Sam’s cabin, in building another, and in continual hikes into the surrounding terrain, much of it vertical and all of it at an altitude that forced her body to work that much harder.

  So now that she had regained her health it appeared that her subconscious had decided that it was time to include something else. Great. She should have expected it, and she probably would have had she given it any thought. Her college roommate had once told her, “The body must be cleaned and fucked regularly.” Kate had been shocked at such frank speech, until she met a man who knew what the hell he was doing, after which she thought her roommate might know what she was talking about after all.

  She shifted restlessly and threw off the covers to cool down. The clock on the nightstand read 7:30 a.m, late for her, but then Brendan had kept her out past her bedtime. She got up and went to the bathroom. The overhead light was bright and unforgiving, illuminating every blemish on the face and body of the woman staring back at her, beginning with the scar the size and shape of a quarter between and below her breasts. Dead center, was what they called that. She raised her chin, her hand going to her throat. The scar bisecting it predated the new scar by nearly a decade and over time it had faded from red to silver to a pale olive and had reduced in size from a rope of abused tissue to a thread. The effect was still felt, though, whenever she spoke, a rough husk of sound somewhere between Tom Waits and the crunch of gravel beneath monster truck tires, although that, too, had moderated over time. Jim had told her once she was starting to sound like Scarlett Johanssen, with a soupçon of Darth Vader.

  It was only normal that as she regained her health that her sex drive would wake back up, too. Hence the drea
m. Human. Natural. Nothing more to it.

  Dropping her hand, she looked the rest of herself over with a critical eye. Five feet tall, a hundred and twenty pounds, a thick cap of short black hair that this time Dinah had cut to fall in wisps around her face so that she was almost stylin’. Almond-shaped eyes with a hint of Asia around the fold that tilted up slightly at the outer corners, high, flat cheekbones, a short nose and a wide, full-lipped mouth that revealed a perfect set of white, straight teeth when she smiled, courtesy of both her parents and, she was pretty sure, a Filipino ancestor not too far back there somewhere.

  There was no mirror at the cabin and her body’s reflection surprised her. It wasn’t that she looked like Thor or anything but the heavy lifting required in the demolition of the old cabin and the building of the new one had added muscle to her arms and legs. Her shoulders seemed squarer, somehow, her breasts higher—not bad for thirty-nine year old breasts—and her waist oddly smaller, which made her—she turned sideways to check—yes, she had something of an hourglass figure going on these days and if her eyes did not deceive her there were dimples on her ass where ne’er had dimples been seen before. She didn’t think. She’d have to ask Jim.

  Or not.

  She put that thought firmly back into the cage from which it had slyly escaped and dressed in jeans that felt snugger around the thigh and a T-shirt that was manifestly tighter around the bust. She went down to the kitchen to make oatmeal with all the fixings. She poured another cup of coffee and opened the drapes in the living room to watch the light come slowly back into the sky. Six more weeks until the winter solstice, when they would start gaining daylight again. Kate’s favorite day of the year was January 1, the day on which Alaskans were rewarded for surviving the holidays by a gain of half an hour of daylight a week by the end of the month. It was almost like the first day of spring.

  The sky looked more gray than blue this morning and she brought up the weather app on her phone. Snow, maybe two to four inches was in the forecast, but then it had said that the day before and the day before that it had forecast rain. She left her mug in the kitchen and suited up in a shirt, a sweater, leggings and a jacket, a knit cap and tennis shoes and mittens and went out for a walk, following the Coastal Trail around the lagoon and under the railroad tracks and out onto Knik Arm. Light on the southern horizon outlined Susitna and illuminated the broad current of ice moving steadily down Cook Inlet on the outgoing tide.