by Mike Doogan
He looked across the desk at the big, silver-haired man in the tailored police uniform and shrugged.
“This is probably a snipe hunt, anyway,” he said. “By now the girl could be in Vancouver or Seattle or anywhere. Even here.”
“I’m having my people keep an eye out for her,” Jeffords said. “I’ve made inquiries of my friends in the state and the Lower 48. Even our Canadian cousins. Nothing so far.”
“What is this girl to you?” Kane asked.
Jeffords’s answer was a thin smile.
“She’s a missing teenage girl from a respectable family,” he said. “What else does she have to be?”
Classic Jeffords, Kane thought. An answer that doesn’t answer anything.
“What are your plans?” the chief asked.
“I came back to collect a few things,” Kane said. “I’ll load up and drive out there tomorrow sometime.”
“Good,” Jeffords said. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“You can give me my job back,” Kane said.
“You know perfectly well that can’t happen,” Jeffords said, holding up a hand to keep Kane from replying. “I know, I know. You’ve been cleared of the charges against you. But you still violated department policies. I’m taking a big political risk helping you out at all.” Then his voice softened. “You’re a good investigator, Nik, maybe the best I’ve ever worked with, but you’ll never work here again.”
“So the fact I was falsely convicted doesn’t make any difference?” Kane asked. “Is that fair?”
Jeffords shook his head.
“Don’t be childish, Nik,” he said. “As my father used to tell me, fair is a place where men in overalls throw cow chips for distance.”
“Your father was quite a card, wasn’t he?” Kane said. “What if I sue?”
“Jesus, Nik,” Jeffords said, his voice tired, “give it up. Start over. You made a mistake. You paid for it. Move on.”
Kane bit down on an obscenity and swallowed it. He didn’t really want to fight with Jeffords. Even if the chief had left him dangling in the breeze back then, he owed him a lot. Jeffords had quietly made sure he’d gotten a good defense lawyer. He’d quietly helped out Laurie, Kane’s wife—soon-to-be ex-wife now—while Kane was in prison. He was quietly trying to help him now.
He owed Jeffords for all that, even though he knew the chief had done it for his own reasons. For much of Kane’s time with the police department, Jeffords had been his boss. But he didn’t consider the chief a friend. Tom Jeffords was all about Tom Jeffords.
“What are you doing in your dress blues, anyway?” Kane asked to fill the silence.
The chief looked at Kane, then at the big gold mariner’s clock on his desk.
“You remember how this job is,” he said. “It’s always twenty-four/seven. My budget is up before the Assembly tonight, then I’ve got to make an appearance at a fund-raising dinner with Gwendolyn.”
“Political?” Kane asked.
“Not this time,” Jeffords said. “Charity.”
That was all the small talk Kane had in him, so he just sat there, waiting to hear what else was on Jeffords’s agenda.
“Have you put in your papers for your pension?” the chief asked.
“No,” Kane said.
“Why not?” Jeffords said. “You’ve got, what, twenty-five years in on the force?”
As if he hasn’t been looking at my file, Kane thought.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Twenty-five years,” Jeffords said, “and the expunging of your criminal record restored your pension rights. You’re fifty-five. You’re entitled to the money now. Why not claim it?”
Because if I draw my pension I can’t come back on the force, Kane thought. But he didn’t say it. Jeffords knew why he was stalling, and part of the reason he wanted Kane to make the application was to foreclose the question of re-hiring him once and for all.
“I just haven’t had the time,” Kane said.
The chief pushed a button on his desk. In a moment his longtime secretary, a canny, competent woman named Emily Lee, walked into the room. Her hair was gray now, and lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but she retained much of the beauty that had had cop after cop pawing the floor. When they were all younger, Kane had been sure that Jeffords had been fooling around with her. Then the chief had divorced his first wife to marry money, and their relationship now seemed strictly professional.
Emily Lee nodded to Kane.
“Hello, Emily,” Kane said. “Is he still working you too hard?”
Emily Lee offered Kane a smile, and his heart jumped.
“Yes, he is,” she said. “He’s such a stern taskmaster.”
She turned to the chief and briefed him on his schedule for the following day. When she was done, the chief said, “Nik here needs help with his pension paperwork, Emily. Why don’t you get his information from personnel and fill it out for him? Then all he’ll have to do is sign it.”
The woman smiled, nodded, and left the room. The chief rose and got into a long overcoat. Kane stuffed his feet into the cold-weather boots, picked up his parka, and followed Jeffords out.
“What do you know about the rough element out there in Devil’s Toe?” Kane asked as they walked down a long hallway.
“Every place has one,” Jeffords said.
I wonder if they still call those Jeffordisms, Kane thought, those answers that don’t answer anything.
Getting out of the building wasn’t easy. Jeffords was stopped in the hall by three people who needed to consult, so Kane got to listen to conversations about materials procurement, delays in the delivery of new patrol cars, and the lack of minority applicants. He knew two of the people who stopped the chief, but they both ignored him. A lot of the department didn’t know just what to think about Kane, and having him walking the halls was probably an embarrassment for them.
“Maybe you should keep me around as an object lesson,” he said to Jeffords when the last of the conversations ended. “You know, ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’ ”
“Nik . . .” Jeffords said.
“You know,” Kane said, interrupting the chief, “if you’d stood behind me when all that happened, I might not have been sent to prison.”
“I’ve explained that to you,” Jeffords said. “There were political considerations.”
“Yeah,” Kane said, “there are always political considerations.”
“And you were drunk,” Jeffords said.
Kane could hear the edge in the chief’s voice, so he didn’t respond. Besides, Jeffords was right. He’d been drunk.
“Do you need more money?” Jeffords said. Kane took the question to be an olive branch, and he was careful to reply calmly.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I still have plenty from what you loaned me.”
The two men continued in silence. Jeffords also stuck his nose into the watch commander’s office and the dispatchers’ bullpen. The watch commander was a guy named Rudy Jones, who got to his feet when he saw Kane and gave him a big hello and a handshake. Apparently there was a part of the force that saw him as a hero, Kane thought, or at least a guy who’d gotten more than was coming to him.
The watch commander didn’t have much for the chief; Kane knew from experience that what Jones really wanted was for Jeffords to go home and leave him in charge. Two of the dispatchers were frosted at being forced to come in on mandatory overtime and let the chief know it. He laughed about it on the way through the lobby.
“The department would stop running without those women,” he said, “and they’re the first to tell you so.”
The air outside was warmer and moister than it had been in Rejoice, but that wasn’t saying much.
“Feels like snow,” Kane said as he and Jeffords descended the steps of police headquarters. The building was well lit, the big towers of lights fighting the winter darkness to a standstill. The headquarters was new, built five years
earlier with bond money approved by voters grateful to live in such a safe, smooth-running city.
The new building had everything. It was built on rollers and reinforced to withstand even the biggest earthquake. A civilian couldn’t park a car within blast range or get past the armed, bulletproof glass-encased receptionist in the lobby with anything short of an RPG. One wing of the building housed an array of up-to-the-minute communications equipment. Temblor, terrorist attack, or Third World War, Jeffords was ready.
His driver had the chief’s bulletproof car waiting in front of the building. Kane nodded to him and followed Jeffords into the backseat of the black Lincoln Town Car. A red-faced man in the blue-on-blue uniform of the Alaska State Troopers was waiting for them, sitting in the jump seat.
“This is Major Denton,” Jeffords said to Kane as the car pulled away. “He’s here unofficially to tell you a few things about the area into which you are venturing. Stanley, this is Nik Kane.”
Kane didn’t recognize Denton, and if the trooper knew who Kane was, he did a good job of hiding it. Kane wasn’t really surprised to see him. The two departments cooperated pretty well, in part because Jeffords had gotten his start wearing a Smokey Bear hat.
“Whenever you’re ready, Major,” he said to the trooper.
“There are two communities in the area in question,” Denton said. “I’m told you have visited Rejoice. Just across the river, on the highway, is the town of Devil’s Toe.
“It’s not much more than a wide spot in the road. Devil’s Toe started out as a mining town, and when the mining played out, it shrank to little more than a roadhouse and grocery store catering to the Natives scattered around the area.
“It’s still that today, although there’s a component of the population composed primarily of riffraff who came up to get federal homesteads back in the sixties and seventies. Some of them proved up. Some didn’t. The ones who stayed are dominated by a fellow who calls himself John Wesley Harding.”
“John Wesley Hardin?” Kane said. “The Texas outlaw?”
“Harding, with a g,” the trooper said. “This guy isn’t from Texas, he’s from back east somewhere. Real name’s Francis Hogan.”
“Probably got the name off the Dylan album,” Jeffords said. “It’s spelled with a g there.”
Kane and the trooper looked at him.
“What?” Jeffords said. “I can’t like Bob Dylan?”
The two men shrugged, and the trooper continued.
“Nobody around there seems to know him as Francis Hogan,” Denton said. “Everybody calls him Big John. He has a son, Little John, who is in his thirties, and another son, a teenager, whose name is, believe it or not, John Starship. His mother was a teenage runaway who called herself Brenda Starship.”
“Big John was, what, in his fifties when the last boy was born?” Kane said. “He liked them young then?”
“Still does, as far as we know,” Denton said.
Kane could feel himself relaxing. A police briefing was a familiar situation, and getting one reminded him of better times.
“The mother still around?” he asked.
“Long gone,” Denton said. “She moved to Anchorage, did some hooking, then married a GI and left the state.”
Kane looked out the window. The car was traveling through a part of town so generic everyone just called it midtown. What had once been perfectly good muskeg had been scalped, filled, and leveled, much of it while Kane had been in prison. In place of the trees and willow bushes, malls and big-box stores had erupted. In the block they were passing Kane counted seven fast-food outlets. Of course, it was a long block. The roadsides were decorated with a thin film of snow colored brown by the sand put on the roads to improve traction. The short trees planted here and there in the name of landscaping were leafless sticks. Hell must be a place much like this, Kane thought.
“What else?” he asked.
“There are also some solid citizens in the area: business owners, teachers, other state employees, even a few legitimate homesteaders,” Denton said. “But Devil’s Toe has more than its share of less-than-solid citizens.”
“Got it,” Kane said. “Lots of bad guys. Probably bad girls, too. Go on, please.”
“For years, no one paid much attention to the area,” the trooper said. “The Native people kept to themselves. The residents of Rejoice were quiet and hardworking, and the citizens of Devil’s Toe were no better or worse than in a lot of road towns.”
“What changed that?” Kane asked.
“Two years ago, the Pitchfork mine opened,” Denton said. “And some of the entrepreneurs of Devil’s Toe began to offer, shall we call it, entertainment for the mine workers.”
“I don’t suppose we’re talking about movies?” Kane said. “Community theater?”
“Women,” the trooper said. “Gambling. Drugs.”
The car pulled up in front of Kane’s apartment house.
“Why haven’t you people closed the bad places down?” Kane asked.
Denton and Jeffords looked at one another.
“Don’t be soft, Nik,” Jeffords said. “You know that wherever you have a bunch of men working you’re going to have vice. Nobody wants these guys driving back and forth to Anchorage or Fairbanks for their booze and nooky. Too dangerous.”
“Too likely they won’t come back, you mean,” Kane said. “So letting the vice go on is just a service for the company. Keeping the workforce happy and productive.” The silence in the car was broken only by the rumbling of the engine and the whine of the heater fan.
“Just what are you doing about the bad people in Devil’s Toe?” Kane asked.
“Not much we can do unless we catch them red-handed,” Denton said. “The protections of the legal system extend to criminals even out in the tules.”
“But you have your best men on it?” Kane asked.
“We have one trooper for several hundred square miles,” Denton said. “Budget constraints. Our man out there is named Jeremy Slade. He’s just out of training.”
“That’s the best you could do?” Kane said. “A kid just out the of the academy?”
“These things are arranged by seniority,” the trooper said. “None of the senior officers wants to live in Devil’s Toe.”
“Or to try to enhance his career by looking the other way, I’ll bet,” Kane said.
“Nik,” Jeffords said, a warning tone in his voice.
Kane sighed.
“The people out in Rejoice say your man hasn’t been much help with Faith Wright’s disappearance,” he said.
“His report says he’s checked around without finding anything,” Denton said. “His opinion is that the girl, who is nearly eighteen anyway, just ran off.”
Well, Kane thought, if he’d done a better job, they wouldn’t need me.
“Okay, you’ve got a situation out there that could explode at any time,” he said. “So what do you want me to do about it?”
“What makes you think we want you to do anything about it?” Jeffords asked.
Kane looked at him.
“The mine is a centerpiece of the governor’s economic development policy,” Denton said. “He wouldn’t like to see anything embarrassing happen there.”
“Neither would the mine owners, who have their own concerns,” Jeffords said. “They have a substantial investment in equipment. They have a significant amount of gold being stored and shipped. Every two weeks, they have a large sum of money on hand for payroll.”
“Cash?” Kane asked.
“Checks would hardly have much value out there,” Jeffords said. “The company offers the workers the option of direct deposit, but surprisingly few of them use it.”
Kane’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile.
“Wouldn’t want the money where the IRS or child-support enforcement could find it,” he said.
No one said anything for a moment.
“So that’s it?” Kane said at last.
“That’s it,” the troop
er said. “What everyone would like is for peace to descend on Devil’s Toe, and particularly the Pitchfork mine. We don’t mind them feeding booze to the workers, or even running a cathouse, but we want to be certain nothing worse is in the works.”
He reached into his shirt pocket, produced a business card, and handed it to Kane.
“My private number is written on the back,” he said, “in case you run into anything you need help with.”
Kane put the card in his pocket and got out of the car.
“Oh, Nik,” Jeffords called after him, “when you get out there, be sure to see the head of mine security first thing. You know him. Charlie Simms.”
Kane closed the door and watched the car drive off.
Yeah, I know Charlie Simms, Kane thought. He’s the guy who helped put me in prison.
3
The Lord hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto
death.
PSALM 118:19
THE APARTMENT BUILDING KANE LIVED IN WAS ONE OF many thrown up quickly during the pipeline boom of the 1970s, then left to age ungracefully. It was three floors of plywood and two-by-fours, painted a nondescript gray on the outside and baby-shit brown on the inside. A large Yupik family with an ever-shifting cast of characters lived on one side of Kane; a good-looking young couple who had vigorous, noisy sex at every opportunity on the other. The people above him seemed to have a home business training elephants. Kane’s ears told him what his neighbors argued about and what they watched on television; his nose informed him of what they ate and what they smoked.
Not all that much different from prison, privacy wise, he thought as he checked his mailbox and found, as usual, nothing but junk sent to “current occupant.” He threw it away, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and let himself into his apartment. He locked the door behind him and felt the tension leave his shoulders and neck for the first time that day.
Kane had been out of prison for a little more than two months. The proportions of the outside world were still all wrong. Everything was too big and too open, too bright and too loud, and there were too many people wandering around loose, driving, talking, laughing, looking him right in the eye in a way that, inside, would have brought on at least an exchange of threats. The world simply contained too much for someone accustomed to a small cell, cramped vistas, and the constant vigilance that kept him out of trouble.
