Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

by Mike Doogan

  He heated and ate the previous night’s scaloppine, washed the dishes and coffeepot, and loaded snacks and bottled water into a day pack, along with as many books as he could fit. He took one last look around the apartment, put on a coat, picked up the duffel and day pack, and left, locking the door behind him. He walked down a flight and knocked on the building manager’s door. The guy, a recent arrival from someplace in Asia, looked like he hadn’t been out of bed long. It took a while, but Kane finally got the idea across that he wanted the manager to hold his mail if he got any. The manager seemed happy that it wasn’t a complaint of some sort, and closed the door nodding and smiling.

  Downtown, Kane was lucky to find a parking spot in front of the Catholic cathedral. He let himself in a side door. The long wooden pews were empty, the only life in the big room coming from the flames of candles that danced in front of the statues of Jesus and his mother.

  Kane had made his first communion in this church, wearing a hand-me-down white shirt and black dress shoes with holes in the soles. There were eight kids in his family—he was second-to-last—and never enough money for all the necessities, let alone luxuries. They’d been so poor that when his father drifted off in a cloud of failure and alcohol fumes the family’s standard of living didn’t drop much. He continued to attend the church through his youth and into his teenage years for reasons that were more practical than spiritual; without the parish’s charity, the Kane family’s situation would have been even more dire. His brothers and sisters approached the matter much the same way, but their mother had enough religious fervor for all of them.

  When he went off to the military, Kane quit attending any church, and stayed away even after returning to Anchorage and joining the police force. But he’d been coming to the church again since he’d gotten out. He didn’t know why, but the visits made him feel better somehow. He knelt in front of a rack of prayer candles, slipped a dollar bill into the slot beneath them, and lit a candle. His mind groped for a prayer to say for his parents and came up with the response from the rosary:

  “Holy Mary, mother of God,” he whispered, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  He said the same for each of the people he had killed. They ran through his mind like pictures fanned by a finger: small brown men during the war, then a pair of hopped-up killers coming out of a convenience store, where they’d murdered the clerk and a pair of customers. The next picture, the one that had put him in prison, was blurred, a dark shape holding what looked like a gun. He skipped over it quickly. Then the man he’d killed in prison. A lot of bodies, when you added them all up, he thought.

  Kane wasn’t sure that the prayers would do any good for his soul, since he didn’t really feel sorry for most of the killings. But maybe praying would help the souls of the dead somehow.

  Kane got up from the bank of candles, walked back a few pews, and knelt. The church was dim and cool and quiet, soothing. He waited, as he had since he was a boy, for God to say something to him.

  He would settle for any word from above, but he really wanted God to answer a list of questions for him. The list had grown long over the years; it was so long that Kane had forgotten many of the questions. He remembered the first one: Why had God allowed Shamrock, his dog, to be run over by a truck? He remembered the most recent: Why was Laurie leaving him? Now he had a new one: Where is Faith Wright?

  He’d never heard so much as a whisper from God in answer. He didn’t really expect one. He wasn’t sure there was a God. Even if there was, he couldn’t believe that God, whoever or whatever he, she, or it was, was directly involved in individual human lives. But somehow the awed boy in him continued to kneel in hope.

  He tried to empty his mind but, as usual, failed. The blurry memories of the shooting kept creeping in. His pulse ran faster and faster and he clasped his hands harder and harder. But it was no use. He relaxed and let it all come back.

  He was driving home from an after-work party. They’d been at the Blue Fox, celebrating his promotion to lieutenant. He was feeling no pain, humming to himself, but he had his home car completely under control. He was thinking about how to avoid an argument with Laurie about coming home late and, as she would put it, “stinko,” when the “Officer needs assistance” call came over the radio. No cop could ignore that.

  He was right on top of it, just two blocks away, so he was first on the scene. The neighborhood wasn’t a good one. The scene was poorly lit by a single streetlight and lights from the surrounding houses. The unit was slewed in the road, the driver’s door open, a shape sprawled half in, half out. Two figures were standing above it. One of them, the one closest, seemed to be doing some sort of dance.

  His tires slipped when he braked, then grabbed as the studs dug in. He came out of the unit and drew his gun, keeping the door between himself and the two figures.

  “Police officer!” he shouted. “Step away from the vehicle and put your hands on top of your head.”

  The second figure tried to say something, but Kane ignored him.

  “I said step away, now!” he shouted.

  The closest figure turned toward him and started to raise its arm. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion now.

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t do that!” the second figure called.

  But the arm kept coming up, and Kane could see something in the hand, something that looked like a gun.

  “Drop that!” he called. “Drop it now or I’ll shoot!”

  The arm kept coming up. Kane centered his weapon on the figure’s chest and fired three times. The bullets threw the figure back against the door. Then Enfield Jessup, described later in the newspapers as “a twelve-year-old mentally challenged African-American youth who was big for his age,” fell on his face, dead.

  “Oh, Christ, you shot Enfield!” the other figure screamed. “Why’d you wanta do that?”

  “Get your hands up!” Kane shouted. The figure raised its hands. Kane moved out from behind the door, slipped on the ice, and went down, hitting his head. He must have been knocked out for a moment, he decided later, because the next thing he knew he was getting to his feet. He put a hand to the back of his head and it came away sticky with blood.

  He could hear the sirens of other police vehicles approaching, but otherwise the only sound was his own labored breathing. A few faces peeked from behind curtains to see what had caused the gunshots. Even in the bad light, Kane could see both bodies lying as before. But of the other figure, there wasn’t a trace.

  Kane walked to the bodies. The officer was still breathing, but Enfield Jessup was not. There was no gun in his hand or anywhere else in sight. As a police car came sliding to a halt behind him, he sank to his knees thinking, What have I done? Where’s the gun? What have I done?

  Kane shook himself all over, got to his feet, and left the church. The snow was still coming down. The city was trying to go about its business, but the roads were littered with vehicles stuck in the snow. Beater cars, mostly, but he also saw an abandoned UPS van and a city bus that had gotten high-centered.

  I hope this isn’t God’s way of telling me to stay put, he thought.

  Traveling through an Alaska winter could be an adventure, and Kane was prepared. He wore long underwear, jeans, a blue work shirt, a pile vest, and old hiking boots over two pairs of polypropylene socks, one thick and one thin. He had a set of tire chains in the back of the pickup along with a shovel and a tow rope. An old parachute bag held camping gear, and his duffel of clothes sat on a foam pad and sleeping bag, his Kevlar vest lying beside it.

  The cab contained cold-weather gear, hot coffee, snacks, and CDs. A set of United States Geological Survey maps of the area around Rejoice lay on the passenger’s seat, along with Montaigne’s essays and a copy of the Bible. He popped a Dylan CD into the player, and Bob started grating out “Love Sick.”

  About 350 road miles separate Anchorage from Rejoice. The highway follows the Matanuska Valley, climbs through a pass between the Ta
lkeetna and Chugach mountain ranges, parallels the Copper River, then swings north and east along the Jordan to join the Alaska Highway.

  Even in the snowstorm, there was a fair amount of traffic on the road between Anchorage and the Valley. The town of Palmer, about forty miles northeast of Anchorage, had started as the center of a social and economic experiment during the Great Depression, when families from the Midwest were relocated to establish agriculture in Alaska. But the coming of the container ship, the jet airplane, and the chain store made milk and vegetables from the West Coast cheaper than milk and vegetables from the Valley. Most of the people who lived in and around Palmer worked in Anchorage now, commuting because they liked the rural lifestyle and cheaper housing.

  From Palmer on, only an occasional laboring semi marred the open road. On the long climb through the mountains, Kane watched the trees grow smaller and sparser, the houses fewer and farther between. He thought about why people came to Alaska and why they stayed. The Alaska they came to now was more like the rest of America than the one he’d been born in: more developed, more strident, and more polarized. But it retained its allure for people, at least certain kinds of people. Still the land of new beginnings and last chances, he thought.

  On a good day, the drive from Anchorage to Rejoice takes five or six hours. It wasn’t a good day. The snow slowed Kane to a crawl, and he had to stop well below the top of the pass to put on the tire chains, a wet, unpleasant job, then stop on the other side to take them off. There was, as usual, much less snow on the interior side of the mountains, but the air was much colder.

  Kane looked at the trees he passed and the streams he drove over, wondering what it would be like to throw a pack on his back again and head off into the wild. He’d always loved the outdoors. When he was a boy, his father had taken him fishing and hunting. Then his father abandoned the family. But Nik was soon old enough to fish and hike in the summers with his friends and, later, hunt as well. He strapped on snowshoes as soon as he could, and skis not long after. The outdoors had been an escape from the troubles at home, and during the summers anyway, the source of fish, meat, and berries, much welcomed by his mother.

  He’d done everything he could to show his own children the joys of the outdoors, with mixed success. Only his oldest daughter seemed to have caught his enthusiasm. His other daughter was an indoor girl all the way. And his youngest, his son? Kane had missed too much of his growing up to know.

  His own attitude toward the outdoors seemed to have changed in prison. After so much time in confined spaces, the land that passed by the windows of his pickup looked too big and empty. I hope I get over this, he thought. I’d hate to lose the outdoors, too.

  Kane was stiff, tired, and hungry when he pulled into the parking lot of the Devil’s Toe Lodge a little after six p.m.

  The lodge was a long, low log structure. Most of the logs were dark with age, but some were lighter, showing that someone had added on to the place. A door opened into a bar and café.

  Inside the bar, a big, bearded drunk dressed in work clothes was yelling at a small, white-haired Native man wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, a ski jacket, and one of the nicest pairs of knee-high beaded moose-hide moccasins Kane had seen in years. A half dozen men in work clothes sat at a couple of tables, watching.

  “We don’t want none of you goddamn salmon-crunchers in here,” the drunk was yelling. “Now get the hell out.”

  The old man stood with his head bowed, leaning slightly toward the man like his words were a stiff wind. The drunk towered over him. Kane’s first instinct was to ignore the situation. It wasn’t his problem. But that was prison talking. I’ve got to get out of prison sometime, he thought. He walked over and stepped between them, facing the drunk.

  “Calm down,” he said quietly, “or you’ll break something.”

  The bartender looked at the two of them and scurried from the room.

  Up close, the drunk looked to be Kane’s age or a little older. He had small, bloodshot eyes and a beak of a nose etched with the red lines of a heavy drinker. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and he had an ornate tattoo on his left forearm of a demon doing unspeakable things to a woman. The finger he shook at Kane had dirt embedded under its nail.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the drunk screamed. “You keep out of this or you’ll wish you had.”

  His breath smelled like the inside of a bourbon barrel.

  He was taller than Kane and, with his ample gut, probably fifty pounds heavier. Kane wasn’t worried. Every Anchorage cop had plenty of experience with big drunks.

  “I’m just a guy came in here to have a quiet meal,” Kane said reasonably, “which I can’t do if you’re carrying on like this.”

  “Fuck you,” the drunk said, and wound up to throw a big right hand. Kane shifted his feet and kicked the drunk’s brace leg out from under him. The drunk toppled over, banging his head on a table as he went down.

  “Jumpin’ jimminy,” the old man said, “we’re having fun now.”

  Kane looked around the room. All the men were standing. He turned to face them, arms at his sides and what felt like a big grin on his face. One of the men raised his hands and clapped them together. Slowly, the others joined him, until the café was filled with applause.

  “Hit the rotten cocksucker again,” one of them called. “We don’t like him anyway.”

  The drunk put his hand to his head. It came away bloody.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, and tried to get to his feet. Kane let him get to a knee before reaching over and shoving him onto his back.

  “Stay there,” he barked. “You get up again and you’re just going to get hurt.”

  The drunk mumbled something but stayed put.

  The bartender returned. He had a dark-haired young guy with him. The guy looked worn out to Kane, but he was carrying a metal baseball bat.

  “What happened here?” he demanded.

  “Relax, Little John,” a voice called from one of the tables. “Henry just fell down.”

  “Yeah, twice,” another voice called. General laughter followed.

  “That what happened?” the guy with the bat asked Kane.

  “More or less,” he said, “leaving out the fact I helped him fall. You really should stop serving guys like him before their true personalities come out.”

  The guy gave Kane a tired grin and lowered the bat.

  “Henry is a bastard,” the man said, “but his money spends just as good as the next man’s. As long as these boys don’t break the place up, they’re welcome.”

  He turned to the Native man.

  “But you’re another story, aren’t you, Abraham?” he said. “You know what Dora will say when she finds out you were here again, don’t you.”

  The Native man smiled and lowered his head.

  “Maybe you should head on home,” the man said, “before you get yourself—and me—in trouble.”

  “I can’t leave,” the old man said. “I’m going to meet my son here.”

  Kane looked toward the thin, wood-panel partition that separated the bar from the café.

  “Let’s go get a bowl of soup, uncle,” Kane said. “If your son shows up, he can find us there.”

  The old man stopped and looked at the men at the tables. He looked at the man with the bat. He looked at Kane.

  “Okie dokie,” he said. “I like soup.”

  Kane took the old man’s arm and led him toward the café.

  A couple of the men helped the drunk to his feet. When he was upright, he shook them off and rushed toward Kane and the old man.

  “Look out,” one of them called. Kane pivoted, saw the drunk coming and stepped aside, nudging the old man out of the way. When the drunk reached him, Kane planted his feet, grabbed one of his arms, and heaved. The drunk went flailing past, and crashed into a table, tumbling over it. He lay there for a moment and got to his feet again.

  “You know,” Kane said conversationally, “being big isn’t all there is to it.”


  The man rushed him again. Kane admired his gumption, but was getting tired of playing matador to his bull. He stepped aside again and as the big man floundered past Kane screwed his feet into the floor and put everything he had into a kidney punch. The man dropped like he’d been shot and lay there moaning, clutching his side.

  A couple of the other men came over to help the big man into a chair.

  “That was some punch,” one of them said to Kane. “Henry here will be pissing blood for a week. Can’t say he didn’t deserve it, though.” He laid a hand on the old man’s arm. “We don’t all share his views on race relations.”

  “This ain’t over,” the big drunk said through gritted teeth.

  The other men in the bar laughed.

  “Shit, Henry,” one of them said, “you start up with that guy again and we’ll be chipping in to buy flowers for your funeral.”

  Kane led the old man to a table in the café. A dark-haired young woman in tight jeans, a low-cut blouse, and sneakers brought them menus.

  “What would you like to eat, uncle?” he asked.

  “Just soup,” the old man said.

  He ordered chicken soup for the old man and a cheeseburger for himself. The café was about half full, single men or men in small groups mostly, but one family with a couple of kids. They gave off a buzz of conversation. Above it, Kane could hear noise from the bar next door: voices, laughter. A jukebox, or maybe a television set, started up.

  Kane let the silence stretch out between him and the old man. He knew he’d have to do something with him, but for the moment he just sat and let the road miles and the tension from his encounter with the big drunk slip away.

  While he sat, he examined his surroundings. The walls of the café were covered with photographs of Devil’s Toe and its citizens, dating back quite a ways; the picture nearest their table showed a half dozen men trying to push a 1930s Ford pickup out of the mud.

  The waitress brought their food, bending low so that Kane could get a good look at her lacy bra and what it held.