A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  When his body slid to a halt, his head flopped forward. The tip of his short, blunt nose was just touching Kate’s boot.

  Three

  Most of the time I just love being a ranger,” Dan said. “But I admit there are days that do test that love.”

  Jim saved the document and hit the Print button.

  Kate had given her statement first. Then, because she was still seeing the world through a transparent veil dotted with large dull black spots that kept fading in and out, she walked down the hill on shaky legs to the Niniltna Native Association headquarters. Annie Mike kept a cache of Stouffer’s frozen mac and cheese in the break room freezer. Kate felt like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

  She was a little closer to human again when she and Mutt walked back into Jim’s office, just in time to hear Dan say, “Do you believe that George Perry? Saying you’d have to wait to ship the body to the crime lab in Anchorage until a later flight?”

  “He got it on the plane,” Kate said.

  “Sure, after you leaned on him,” Dan said, looking around at her.

  “He’s a busy man these days.”

  “He sure as hell is,” Dan said. “Suulutaq has him on contract, did you hear? Freight flights and crew changes every day of the week. And did you hear about the grader?”

  “No, what?”

  “They’ve brought in a grader dedicated to keeping the airstrip out there level. A John Deere motor grader, six-wheel drive. And they bought it new. Brand-new. Just like that, walked in, plunked down a check, and drove it off the lot.”

  Kate looked at Jim. “Grader envy,” she said.

  “Ever been on that moose trail to the Step?” Jim said.

  Kate had just that morning. She desisted.

  “Demetri was telling me that he wanted to go to Anchorage on Monday and George told him he didn’t have a seat open until Thursday,” Dan said. “And Bobby said George told him he was in the market for a couple more airplanes and to spread the word. Plus, he wanted to hire Bobby to fly for him.”

  Jim pulled Dan’s statement from the printer. “Sign here.”

  Dan signed.

  “What was going on up at the Kanuyaq Mine?” Kate said.

  Jim rolled his eyes. “Some of the guys from the Suulutaq camping out in the mess hall.”

  “Doesn’t sound so awful.”

  “Wouldna been, if they hadn’t brought a dozen cases of Oly with them, along with four of the local girls.”

  “Which girls?” Dan said.

  Kate gave him a halfhearted glare. “I thought everything up there was boarded up.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how that goes. Anyway, I ran them off.”

  “No arrest for trespassing?” Kate said.

  Jim snorted. “What’s the point? There isn’t anyone from here to Anchorage who hasn’t been up there, sifting the ruins for souvenirs.”

  “How many people are working out at Suulutaq now?” Dan said.

  “A hundred as of May first.”

  “A hundred and ten, if you count the admin crew that got here in March,” Kate said.

  “Bernie’s thinking of hiring a bouncer,” Jim said.

  “Not a bad idea. You can barely wedge yourself into the Roadhouse these days. It has increased the fight-or-flight reflex.” Dan reflected. “Not to mention the competition for women.”

  “How many women out at the mine?” Kate said.

  “Eleven,” Dan said.

  Kate looked at him, an eyebrow raised.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m paying attention, so sue me. I’m single and of age.” He leered.

  “Sounds like Prudhoe Bay,” Kate said. She had worked under-cover in the Alaskan oil fields some years back. She remembered only too well what being the only woman in a room full of a hundred men felt like.

  “I’m getting run ragged by Park rats who aren’t used to having this many people around, and who want me to lock up every second person they meet just on general principle,” Jim said. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen when the road to Ahtna opens this year. Going to be one hell of a summer.”

  “What kind of trouble are the new mine guys getting up to? Other than trashing the old mine, that is.”

  “Nothing big, at least not yet. Chickenshit stuff, drunk in public, reckless driving, trespassing, coming on too strong to the local girls, who aren’t used to it. And whose parents definitely aren’t used to it.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Some, but picayune so far, retail, not wholesale.” He grinned at Kate. “We got the only aspiring wholesaler last year.” The grin faded. “That’ll change, though. Young men and money. Recipe for recreational drug use.”

  “Kate, when are we getting cell phone service in the Park?” Dan said.

  Kate was taken aback by this abrupt change of subject. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Since you’re the Lady High Everything around these parts these days, is how. I hear thirty-six villages in the Y-K Delta have cell phone service now and they’re expecting to add another fifty-nine villages between Dillingham and Barrow before the end of next year. What the hell’s the holdup with the Park?”

  “Do you really want to be that much in touch with the rest of the world, Dan?”

  “It’s either that or the rest of the world passes us right on by, Kate.”

  “Let them pass,” Kate said.

  Dan looked at Jim and spread his hands. “What’re ya gonna do?”

  Jim, who had already had this conversation with Kate, more than once, kept his mouth shut.

  “Did you hear Global gave the school a grant for a satellite link and a computer for every kid?”

  “I heard,” Kate said.

  “Starting this fall, every kid in Niniltna Public School is going to be online.” They could hear the envy in Dan’s voice. He would have a lot easier time holding on to employees if he could offer them Internet access on the Step.

  “I heard,” Kate said.

  Dan grumbled. “You heard, you heard. Probably get cell phones in the Park just about the time the rest of the world is upgrading to communicators with a universal translator.”

  “Geek,” Kate said.

  “Luddite,” Dan said.

  “Children,” Jim said, keeping it mild. “Play nice.”

  Dan looked at Kate’s mulish expression and decided he’d pushed things far enough for one day. The seed had been planted. Now time for some fertilizer. “How about a cup of coffee and a doughnut on the Parks Service?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, although she recognized it for the peace offering it was. She’d been charged by bears before and suffered the same adrenaline rush followed by the subsequent enervation and the same onset of ravenous hunger. The only remedy was massive caloric intake. “Laurel’s packing them in these days. You think we can get a seat?”

  They opted to walk down the hill, and had to jump out of the way of a four-wheeler being driven too fast by a young man clearly inexperienced in its operation, with three whooping friends hanging precariously off the back.

  “I didn’t see that,” Jim said, “and neither did you.”

  A booth emptied out in the Riverside Café as they walked in. They scooted into it just ahead of a couple of young men Kate had never seen before. Mutt’s unblinking yellow gaze might have had something to do with the perceptible pause in their rivals’ step. She waited for her humans to take their seats, and then trotted past them. Kate turned to see Auntie Balasha, who was sitting alone at a corner table with bright fabric draped over the other three chairs. She was making change out of a gray metal cash box for a young man holding a recycled grocery bag. Through the thin plastic of the bag Kate could see more bright fabric.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and got up to follow Mutt. Auntie Balasha’s color heightened at their approach, but she smiled at the young man as she put his change in his hand. “There, authentic Native dress perfect present for girlfriend. You come back for present for your mother and your auntie sometime,
too, okay?”

  The young man mumbled his thanks and took himself off.

  “Ha, Mutt,” Auntie Balasha said, and looked up to meet Kate’s eyes. “Katya.”

  “Hi, Auntie,” Kate said. On closer examination the drapes of fabric resolved themselves into kuspuks, essentially a Yupik hoodie in various lengths worn by both sexes and more often of late by Alaska Natives of all tribes. To the educated eye they bore distinct signs of having been mass-produced. There were only three different fabric patterns and the rickrack had evidently been a bulk purchase because it was the same on every sleeve edge and hem. Each one conformed to the same minimalist design with no skirts and no pouch pockets. “You’re making and selling kuspuks?”

  Auntie Balasha, her color still high, gave a defiant nod, and Kate realized with something of a shock that she was embarrassed to have been caught out in mid-enterprise. “Young mens want Alaska presents for their womens,” Auntie Balasha said. “So I make kuspuks.”

  “How much you charging?” Kate said.

  “Hundred dollars each.”

  Kate was impressed. “All right, Auntie,” she said, in a tone she tried to make admiring rather than condemnatory. First Auntie Vi, now Auntie Balasha.

  “Handmade,” Auntie Balasha said.

  “So I see.”

  “Authentic Alaska Native souvenir.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Made in Alaska by Alaska Native.”

  “No question about that.”

  Auntie Balasha, relieved, relaxed into a confidential mood. “I give Laurel ten dollar each sale for table rent.” She leaned forward and said in a lowered voice, “I talk to Thor. Maybe we open gift shop in town.” She beamed past Kate. “Ha, young man, you like?”

  Kate allowed herself to be elbowed aside and returned to the booth, sliding in next to Jim. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Bloody Mary over there is taking the sailors for all they’ve got.”

  Dan craned his neck to look. “What’s she selling, quilts? Oh, I see, kuspuks.” He sat back. “I should pick up a couple of those for my mom and my sister.”

  “You absolutely should,” Kate said. He was looking over her shoulder, and she looked around and saw Holly Haynes sitting at the counter in front of a half-eaten patty melt and a mug of coffee, the mug featuring the current NNA logo, which at this distance looked like a kindergartner’s finger painting. Kate tried not to wince at the sight, instead exchanging a nod with Haynes, who nodded back. There was a man she didn’t know sitting next to Haynes in conversation with Demetri Totemoff sitting next to him, but the rest of the café’s clientele were young men in their twenties, scruffy and none too clean, loud of voice and rough of manner. They had money and they were determined to spend it, even if the only places in Niniltna to spend it were the Riverside Café, which didn’t serve alcohol, Bing-ley’s one-room store, which did not sell alcohol, and the gift shop located mostly on a corner shelf in the post office, which didn’t ship alcohol. There was no road from the mine to Niniltna and Suulutaq picked up an employee’s airfare only when they were changing shifts, every two weeks. Since the snow had melted and the ground dried out, four-wheelers had been sprouting like weeds from Niniltna to the Roadhouse. Kate had dark suspicions as to where the vehicles had sprouted from, most of them involving Howie Katelnikof.

  All of the miners and Park rats present were there for the only espresso drinks served between Niniltna and Ahtna. They also lusted after the lovely and nubile Laurel Meganack, too, almost as much as they lusted after her green chile cheeseburgers.

  Today Laurel wasn’t working alone. “You’ve got new talent,” Dan said, craning to see around Laurel when she brought them menus.

  “Hands off,” Laurel said. “Heather’s working out, and I’d like to keep her a little longer than the last three girls I hired. Hey, Mutt.”

  They nodded at each other, woman to woman.

  “Kate,” Laurel said.

  “Laurel,” Kate said. Laurel was still a trifle peeved with Kate for the verbal roughhousing Kate had given her father last year during a murder investigation, but since then they had conspired together with Auntie Vi and Matt Grosdidier for the greater good, and as it happened for Laurel’s greater good in particular. Both Jim and Dan were aware, in their dim male way, that constraint had existed, and that it was now gone. Good, they got to eat.

  Laurel took their orders and swiveled off, a pocket Venus with thick dark hair sleeked back into a severe ponytail, a thin white T-shirt that displayed to advantage every detail of the low-cut, lacy bra beneath, and jeans that looked as if they’d been sewn to her body. Laurel was a good fry cook and a world-class barista but she knew what brought them in the door.

  “Truth in advertising,” Dan said, mesmerized.

  “No misleading of the consumer there,” Jim said, rapt.

  Both men recalled themselves at the same moment and gave Kate identical guilty looks.

  She laughed at them.

  It was an incongruous and yet somehow outrageously sexy rasping rumble of amusement. Laurel and Heather weren’t the only women in the room worth a second look, and Kate was worth a third.

  She wasn’t a classic beauty, five feet, 120 pounds, and, compared to Laurel, modest curves. Her black hair was cut very short and gleamed beneath the fluorescent lights with an almost iridescent sheen. Her olive skin was clear and looked velvety to the touch. Her Aleut cheekbones were flat and high and her eyes were a changeable hazel she had inherited from multiple multiethnic forebears, beneath the eyelids she had inherited from the Asian ancestors who had crossed the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska twenty-five thousand years before.

  Her mouth was wide and full and when she bothered it was capable of curling into a sensual smile that revealed a set of white, even teeth that had everything to do with heredity and nothing at all to do with the dentist. On closer inspection, beneath a rounded but very firm chin, there was a white, roped scar that bisected her throat halfway between chin and clavicle, almost from ear to ear. The more alert might have figured out it was the cause of the husky voice and the rasping laugh. She didn’t dress to attract, clad in jeans that fit comfortably and a cream-colored mock turtleneck beneath a navy blue sweatshirt with UAF NANOOKS on the front. Her feet were shod in worn boots with steel toes.

  An ordinary getup on an ordinary Alaskan woman. Still, that laugh sent out a siren call that appealed viscerally to the testosterone in every male within earshot. Once heard, it was never forgotten, and men wanted to hear it again, preferably from a horizontal position. Heads turned, eyes narrowed, butts shifted in chairs, and Jim closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Conversation at the round table in the center of the room was rising in volume and the laughter was becoming raucous. Kate watched as a pint bottle was produced from the pocket of a pair of grimy overalls and passed around the table in a stealthy manner. She nudged Jim with her elbow.

  “I’m begging you,” he said. He was seated on an inside seat with his back to the revelers, both deliberate and determined choices. Laurel arrived at tableside, bearing their orders, appearing to him as an angel from upon high. All he wanted to do was eat and drink his meal in peace, if not quiet.

  The green chile cheeseburgers were thick and juicy and loaded, and Laurel had remembered to bring them malt vinegar for the homemade fries. Kate, whose post-ursine enhanced metabolism had forgotten the frozen mac and cheese faster than a six-course Chinese dinner, was seduced into devoting all of her attention to the plate in front of her. When she emerged from gustatory heaven, the noise at the round table had risen another decibel level.

  And then, as if someone had turned a switch, the noise shut off. Kate looked around to see what was going on.

  Jim did not.

  Phyllis Lestinkof was standing at the round table, a hand on the shoulder of one of the young mine workers. He was red-haired, blue eyes bright in a freckled face, with an awkward ranginess of build that made him look tall even sitting down
.

  He shook off Phyllis’s hand and said something to his friends that made Phyllis redden. “It is, too!” she said, and reached for his shoulder again. This time she laid hold and shook it.

  This time he slapped her hand away.

  The scene at the clinic that morning replayed itself in Kate’s mind, and many things were clearer now than they had been then. She pushed her plate back.

  “I’m begging you,” Jim said, without much hope.

  “You’re repeating yourself,” Dan said, watching events unfold with the judicious eye of a drama critic. Did those idiots not see an Alaska State Trooper in full regalia sitting ten feet away?

  “Oh, hey, man,” one of the redhead’s friends said. “No call for that.”

  “Fuck off,” the redhead said, or spat, more like. He looked embarrassed, and angry.

  Several of the more prudent young men around the table pushed back their chairs and gathered their legs beneath them, ready to leap out of the line of fire when the shooting commenced.

  “No call for that, either,” the friend said, his own face reddening. He looked at Phyllis. “You okay, honey?”

  Phyllis burst into tears. “It’s his, it really is, and now what am I going to do? My mother—”

  “This is such bullshit!” the redhead said, leaping to his feet and in the process knocking Phyllis off hers. She fell backward with a cry that Kate judged to be more startled than angry.

  Her champion leaped to his feet to go to her aid. Mistaking this for aggression, the redhead pulled a knife.

  Kate was on her feet and in between the two combatants before he was able to use it.

  “Always been quick as a snake,” Dan said.

  “Is there blood yet?” Jim said.

  Kate blocked the knife wielder’s right hand with her left one, reached up under his right arm with her right hand, grabbed his right wrist, stepped in closer to him, turning left and stepping to the side as she did so, and brought the hand holding the knife down smartly. The redhead let out a startled squawk and dropped the knife before he stabbed himself in the thigh.