Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

by Mike Doogan

  Even his apartment, small by most standards, seemed too big to Kane. It really wasn’t much: living room with kitchen attached, bedroom in the back with a bathroom off that. It had come furnished, and none of the pieces—the moldy couch, the rickety table with mismatched chairs, the double bed without headboard or foot board, the paper-thin wooden chest of drawers—was without its scratches, mars, or sags.

  But every surface was spotless: the hairy brown carpets freshly shampooed and vacuumed, the kitchen linoleum swept and mopped, the bed made with a tautness that would have made even Kane’s old drill instructor smile. The Wal-Mart dishes were clean and stowed away, the pot and pan shined. The little TV-VCR combo that sat on a metal stand gleamed. The apartment was as neat and barren as a monk’s cell.

  One exception, propped up on top of the chest of drawers, was a framed photo of Kane, Laurie, and the kids in camp during a raft trip on the Talchulitna River years before. He remembered everything about that picture: the sun on his back as he positioned the camera and set the timer, the fresh salmon they’d eaten for dinner after it was taken, how he and Laurie had made love so quietly in their tent that night, arriving together at the place very good sex takes you if you are lucky.

  Another was an old picture his mother had given him that hung above the bed, a garish, bloody rendering of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that had scared the hell out of him as a kid.

  How could anybody live with their heart outside them like that? he’d asked.

  It’s a miracle, his mother had said. Don’t question God’s miracles.

  If you’d asked Kane why he’d hung that picture, he couldn’t have answered. Even though his relationship with God, if there was a God, was much more complicated than his mother’s, the picture looked like it belonged there.

  Kane pulled off his outdoor gear and stowed it in the closet by the door, walked to the bedroom, navigated around the books piled there, and dressed for the gym. He put a change of clothes into his gym bag, put on a coat, and left the apartment, his nose noting that the Yupik family, the Sundowns, would be having fish for dinner. He started his pickup, got out to scrape the ice off its windows, disconnected the head-bolt heater from an electrical plug mounted on a short four-by-four cemented into the ground, got back in, and drove to the gym. As usual, the pickup’s cab was just starting to warm up when he got to where he was going.

  He pumped some iron, did an hour on the treadmill, then had a steam and a shower. After he toweled off, Kane looked at himself in a full-length mirror. A shade over six feet, 190, the same weight he’d played football at in high school. At the time of the shooting, he’d weighed thirty pounds more, but worry and exercise had pared that away. Self-discipline and prison cooking had kept it off.

  Kane leaned closer to the mirror to examine his face. Except for the scar, unremarkable, he thought: black hair flecked with gray, still cut close, prison-style; brown eyes; an ordinary nose, ridged in a couple of places it had been broken, over somewhat thin lips; a jaw that was neither square nor pointed. The beginnings of jowls hung from the sides of that jaw, and when he bared his teeth the thin ropes of muscle in his neck jumped out.

  Not getting any younger, he thought.

  Back in the apartment, Kane stood in the kitchen assembling the ingredients for veal scaloppine. He’d never been a cook. Laurie had done all of that during their more than twenty years of marriage. Before that, institutions and restaurants had. Before that, his mother. But as he’d told the Rejoice Council of Elders, he’d had plenty of time to read in prison, and one of the things he’d found himself reading was cookbooks. He had one open now, an old copy of The Joy of Cooking he’d bought at a secondhand bookstore. Like most of the recipes, this one served three or four, and he was still trying to figure out how to cut them down to serve one.

  As he sliced mushrooms and diced tomatoes, browned and baked, he thought about Jeffords’s question. Was he a religious man? It was the same question the elder, Pinchon, had asked. Kane couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked him such a question, let alone two people on the same day. The cons and guards didn’t discuss theology much, and neither had the cops he’d worked with.

  Was he a religious man? He didn’t think of himself as one. He had read the Bible in prison, true, but he’d read anything he could get his hands on to keep himself from thinking about where he was, how he’d gotten there, and how much longer he had. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to Mass. The Catholic Church seemed like a big bureaucracy to him, the Army with bishops instead of colonels. And all that stuff about God, the devil, and evil? He’d seen enough in his time to believe in evil, but it seemed to him that everyone created his or her own. Jesus, the things people did to each other.

  Kane put the scaloppine and steamed vegetables on separate plates; there was still far too much meat for one person. As he sat down, he heard the bed in the apartment next door begin its rhythmic squeaking. Here we go, he thought. He sat eating and reading other veal recipes as the pace of the squeaking increased, followed by the woman moaning, then the man joining in, the headboard banging against the wall, the noise level increasing until it sounded like the couple was going to come right through the wall, bed and all. Then, suddenly, silence.

  That must be one stout bed, Kane thought, turning the page.

  After he’d put the extra scaloppine in the refrigerator and cleaned up the dinner dishes, Kane took a cell phone from his pocket and punched in a number. When a man answered, he ran his finger down his scar and said, “I’d like to speak with Laurie, please. This is Nik Kane.”

  The man’s hemming and hawing was quickly replaced by her voice.

  “What do you want, Nik?” she asked in the tone of a mother dealing with a misbehaving child.

  “I need to pick up a few things at the house,” he said.

  “Does it have to be tonight?” she said.

  “It does,” he said. “I’m heading out in the morning.”

  “Why did you leave this until now?” she demanded.

  “I didn’t leave it until anytime,” he said. “I didn’t think that coming by the house I still own to pick up some of my possessions would be a problem.”

  “Well, it is,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t care,” he said. “I’m coming over anyway. If that means you and your boyfriend have to put your clothes back on, tough.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Nik,” she said, and slammed the receiver down.

  That went well, he thought, stowing his cell phone away.

  He put on a coat, went out, got into his pickup, and drove to his soon-to-be ex-house.

  Kane told himself he’d have understood if Laurie had given up on him while he was in prison. But she hadn’t. She wrote to him regularly and visited him once a week, tracking him as trouble drove him from one prison to another. The drive to where he’d ended up, at the prison in Kenai, was more than three hundred miles round trip, but she made it anyway, week in and week out, and never a word of complaint. He watched her hair grow longer and her body thinner, listened to her talk about the kids and her return to nursing, and wondered if he could make it without her. The cons’ conventional wisdom was that having ties to the outside made you weak, but Kane figured that was just their way of making it okay not to have anyone outside. He had been—still was—immensely grateful to Laurie, and as he pulled into the driveway he was stricken with remorse for fighting with her.

  Laurie was waiting for him, alone, her arms folded across her chest.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she said.

  He followed her into their kitchen—her kitchen now—and sat at the table. Kane folded his hands in front of him and waited.

  “Nik,” she said, “we’re getting divorced. I told you that before. You have to accept it. We can be friends or we can be enemies, depending on how we handle this. But we’re not going to be husband and wife anymore. I’ve seen a lawyer. You’ll be getting the papers soon.”

  Kane looked down at his hands. T
he knuckles were white. He forced himself to relax his grip, took a deep breath, and said, “I want to start by apologizing for how I just treated you. I had no right to do that. But I just can’t get used to this. I thought about you for seven years, about coming back and being a couple again, and now that’s all over? Why?”

  Laurie sat up a little straighter, as if she were trying to put more space, even just a couple of inches more, between them.

  “We talked about that, Nik,” she said. “You’re not the same man you were before you went in. I’m not the same woman. We don’t have the kids to raise anymore. We’ve just grown apart. People do, even under normal circumstances.”

  Kane felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He was having trouble breathing. He sat up straighter, took a couple of deep breaths, and said, “That’s it? We’ve grown apart, so that’s the end of more than twenty years of marriage? Couldn’t we give it some time, maybe grow back together again?”

  Laurie shook her head.

  “That’s not the way it feels to me,” she said. “It feels like this is over. Putting in more time would just make breaking up horrible and bitter.”

  Kane thought about that. Hiding somewhere in her explanation was something else, a real reason or reasons. He’d had this feeling before, questioning suspects, and he’d always been right. Was it that she felt like she didn’t have that much more time, more time to find somebody else? Laurie was forty-three, and while she was still a good-looking woman, she had some gray hair and lines around her eyes and mouth. For a moment, Kane could see her as he first saw her at nineteen, a twinkle in her eye, her body turning her candy striper outfit into an incitement to riot. Laurie was right, the woman she was now was different. But did that have to mean the end of everything?

  “Are you sure that’s all there is to it?” he asked. He couldn’t quite keep a tone of accusation out of his voice and he saw her stiffen.

  “Another man, you mean,” she said, her voice harsh. Laurie got to her feet and walked over to lean against the kitchen counter. “I told you before, there is no other man. I waited for you. I’m not saying I was a nun for seven years, but I passed up plenty of chances to hook up, as the kids say. I practically moved right out of my parents’ house to yours. Why would I want to get involved again right away? I needed the time to figure out who I am.”

  Kane didn’t understand that at all. Who I am? Who ever knows who they are? There’s the person you want to be, the person other people want you to be, the person you have to be, and probably a lot of others. You do the best you can with all those people every day, and that’s who you are.

  “A man answered the phone,” he reminded her.

  “Antonio is just a friend,” she said, exasperation in her voice. “I mean, he might be something more, but he hasn’t been. He’s just been there for me during a lot of hard times while you were away, and he’s here for me now. But we’re not sleeping together.”

  She blew air out of her mouth and paced, her movements jerky with anger.

  “Listen to me,” she said, “explaining myself to you. I don’t owe you any explanations. You’re the one who fucked up and brought us here.”

  “I know,” Kane said. “I want to make it up to you.”

  “Make it up to me?” Laurie said, stopping in her tracks. She sounded really angry now. “How are you going to make it up to me? You going to give me the seven years back? You going to be here to help me finish raising the kids and see them off? You going to fix it so I don’t spend the past seven years on my feet for ten hours a day, working my butt off, then coming home and working here, having to be cheerful every minute?” Kane watched as she regained control, saw the soft smile and the shake of her head. “You can’t make it up, Nik. What’s done is done. It’s time to move on.”

  That’s what Jeffords said, too, Kane thought. Time to move on. That’s fine for people who have a place to move on to. But where am I going? I have a hard time just leaving my apartment.

  “I wish there was something I could say that would change your mind,” he said, a plea in his voice. He took a deep breath, then said more firmly, “Can you at least tell me what it is that convinced you we aren’t right for each other anymore?”

  He really was baffled about that. After seven years away, they’d spent three weeks together and she’d sent him away. He’d thought things were going okay, considering. He had been getting a slow start back into the world, it was true, and she’d seemed a little tense around him, prickly really. And there was the sex, which she didn’t seem to really be participating in the way she once had. He was probably hard to get along with as well. You don’t go from years of having walls and bars everywhere you looked to living in twenty-first-century America without needing some time to adjust. But he loved her, and he thought she loved him, and that would be enough to carry them over this rough spot.

  “What good would it do you to know?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that you stuck with me for all that time and then, all of a sudden, it’s over. I’m confused, I guess.”

  Laurie walked over and sat at the table again. She reached out and put a hand over Kane’s folded ones.

  “It wasn’t anything big,” she said. “It was a lot of little things. But the thing that did it was the way you dress.”

  “The way I dress?” Kane said.

  “You wear the same clothes all the time,” she said. “Blue shirt and jeans. You even had me buy another blue shirt, so you’d have one to wear while the other was being washed. Look at you. That’s what you’re wearing now. It’s like you’re still in prison and this is your uniform.” She took her hand off his and laid it on the side of his face. He could feel its warmth, and calluses, too. “You’re not the man I married, Nik, or the one I expected to get back from prison. Since you left, my world has gotten bigger, but yours has gotten so much smaller. You’ve got a lot of issues, Nik, a lot of things to resolve. And I just can’t wait around until you work it all out, if you ever do.”

  Kane opened his mouth and closed it again. There wasn’t anything to say to that. He’d been proud of the way he’d gotten through his sentence. Not proud of some of the things he’d done inside, but proud of not being broken by the experience. He’d thought it hadn’t even marked him much, but Laurie saw it differently. He didn’t understand the decision it had led to, but he had to accept it, like so many things that had come his way since that night.

  I guess I’ll have to do better living in the world, he thought, and for the first time he felt committed to going to Rejoice and finding the girl. At least it would force him to get out of the apartment.

  He looked at Laurie’s face. This is probably as close to her as I’ll ever be again, he thought.

  “Okay,” he said, “if that’s what you want. I’m not happy about it, I may never be, but you’ve got a right to your life.”

  He reached up and gently took her hand and laid it on the table. Then he got to his feet.

  “I really do need to pick up a few things,” he said. “I’m going out of town for a while. It’s work. I’ll get the rest of my stuff later, if that’s all right. I’ll be sure to call ahead. And I’ll sign the papers when I get back. Any way you want to settle things is fine.”

  He went into the garage and got a sleeping bag and some camping gear and his big thermos. He loaded all that into the pickup. He stood looking at his locked gun case for a long time but made no move to open it. A judge had said he was no longer a felon, so he could use firearms, but he didn’t know if he’d ever handle one again.

  He was taking out the last load, tire chains and his tool box, when he heard Laurie call, “Nikky.”

  He went back into the house. She was standing at the top of the stairs. God, she’s beautiful, he thought.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to see you one more time.”

  They stood looking at each other for several momen
ts.

  “Good-bye,” Kane said. He wouldn’t see her again if it could be avoided. He needed a clean break. He turned and walked away without another word.

  Back at his apartment, he packed some clothes and shaving gear in a duffel bag and got ready for bed. He found he couldn’t sleep. Somewhere somebody was watching a reality show on television, and it sounded like a domestic dispute was heating up down the hall. He lay in his bed thinking about Laurie and his life with her, saddened and amazed that it was over. Thinking about it made him want to take a drink. More than one. Instead, he turned on his bedside lamp and picked up Donald Frame’s translation of Montaigne’s essays.

  “Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light,” he read, “for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.”

  4

  And they journeyed from Oboth, and pitched at Ijeabarim, in the

  wilderness which is before Moab, toward the sunrising.

  NUMBERS 21:11

  KANE WAS AWAKENED EARLY THE NEXT MORNING BY THE sound of squeaking springs next door. He got out of bed and padded to the living room window. He couldn’t see two feet through the falling snow. He showered, dressed, and drank a couple of cups of coffee.

  As he waited for the caffeine to wake him up, he thought about how strange it still was not to be on somebody else’s schedule. He missed that in a way, missed the predictability of it and not having to make decisions. That must have been one of the changes Laurie saw, he thought. Before I went in I was decisive, at home and especially at work. Sometimes too decisive for her, I suppose. Now I miss having someone tell me what to do with every minute. What am I? A child? One of those cons who can’t make it outside? No wonder she wants to be rid of me.