Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

by Mike Doogan

  “If you see anything you’re interested in,” she said, “just ask.”

  The old man picked up his spoon and began slurping.

  “I like soup,” he said. “These store teeth I got make it tough to chew.”

  Kane had known a lot of Natives. He’d grown up with them, gone to school with them, played sports with them and against them. On the force he’d dealt with Natives of all types: corporate leaders and street drunks, wife beaters and crime victims, and fellow cops and neighbors. He’d known a lot of Natives in prison—Native men ended up in prison all out of proportion to their numbers—including the ones who had helped him finally find peace of a sort. He’d done some reading on their culture and found much to admire. It gave them enough to keep going when disease and discrimination and booze would have broken most other people.

  For a moment, Kane was assailed by an urge to ask the old man what it had been like to have his culture overrun and nearly swept away. But he recognized the self-indulgence and futility in that urge and kept quiet.

  The two of them ate, the old man taking his time the way old people do. Kane’s cheeseburger was only a cut above hunger. Just as he was finishing, a young woman stormed in through the opening from the bar. She walked directly to where the two men were sitting.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she said to the old man. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  She turned to Kane.

  “Who the hell are you? And what are you doing with my grandfather?”

  She looked to be in her mid-twenties, with long, straight black hair, high cheekbones, and copper-colored skin.

  “Buying him soup,” Kane said, “and looking after him. Like somebody else should be.”

  The girl’s shoulders slumped.

  “He does this sometimes, he just takes off,” she said. “When I get home from work, he’s gone.”

  The old man stopped slurping soup.

  “I’m here to meet my son,” the old man said. “I promised.”

  He went back to eating.

  Kane reached over and pulled out a chair.

  “You could sit until he’s finished eating,” he said. “Would you like anything?”

  The girl shook her head and sat.

  “I’m Dora Jordan,” the girl said. “This is my grandfather, Abraham.”

  “Nik Kane,” he told her. “I’m here to do a job for the people over in Rejoice.”

  “The Angels?” the girl said. “What could you do for the Angels? They do everything for themselves.”

  The old man lifted the bowl and drank the rest of the soup. He set the bowl back down and smacked his lips.

  “I seen an angel once,” he said. “Back up behind where they’re mining now. I used to have a trap line back up there. Too old now, and there’s no animals on account of the noise.”

  The old man was quiet for several seconds.

  “But I was up there checking my traps, me and my son, when I seen the angel. It was snowing pretty good, and out of the snow came this angel all dressed in white and carrying this beautiful woman. She had long yellow hair with red streaks in it. He didn’t make a sound goin’ past me.”

  The old man was quiet again. Just when Kane thought he’d finished, he said, “When I was done checking traps I went back to where I seen the angel. But there was no tracks. I guess because he was an angel. Or maybe the snow covered them up. I’ll ask my son when I see him.”

  Kane cocked his head at the girl.

  “His son, my uncle, went off to the Vietnam War,” she said. “He never came back. I show grandfather the letter saying he’s missing in action, but he doesn’t understand.”

  Kane smiled.

  “Or maybe, uncle, you just prefer living in a world where your son is coming back,” he said. “A world with angels in it.”

  The old man smiled but said nothing. The girl helped him get up. She offered Kane some money, but he waved it away.

  “My treat,” he said.

  The pair started out of the room.

  “Oh, Dora,” Kane called, “if those moccasins he’s wearing are your work, they’re beautiful.”

  The girl stopped and turned to face Kane.

  “We’re very good with our hands,” she said sharply. She turned, put her hand on the old man’s arm, and led him, shuffling, out of the dining room.

  “Touchy, ain’t they,” the waitress said, bending low again to hand Kane the check.

  “Yeah, but I expect you’d be touchy, too, if you were going through what she was going through,” Kane said.

  “Like my life’s a day at the beach,” the waitress said, turning to leave.

  “Hey, wait,” Kane said, “who do I talk to to get a room?”

  “In the office,” the waitress said, gesturing vaguely toward the bar.

  Some of the men, the big drunk among them, had left. The ones who remained didn’t say anything to Kane as he passed through. The bartender didn’t even look up from his cell phone conversation.

  A door on the far side of the bar led to a narrow hallway. The first door was open, and light poured from it. Kane went in. It was a small room divided by a counter. Behind the counter stood the young fellow from the bar. The baseball bat was nowhere in sight.

  “Help you?” he asked, looking up. “Oh, it’s you. Fighting with those men from the mine might not be too healthy.”

  “I’ll try not to make a habit of it,” Kane said. “Right now, I need a room for the night, someplace far from the bar and the noise. And a plug-in for the truck.”

  “We got warm storage around back,” the man said. “Cost you twenty. Fifty for the room, eighty if you want your own bathroom.”

  “I’ll take the bathroom,” Kane said. He dug money out of his wallet and laid it in front of the man.

  “Want a receipt?” he asked. Kane nodded and the man wrote one up.

  “How about some company?” he asked.

  “Company?” Kane asked.

  “You know,” the man said. “Female companionship. Tracy there, the waitress, would join you after her shift for a hundred. Or I got some numbers I could call.”

  His heart wasn’t in his sales pitch. The idea of a warm body in bed with him sounded good to Kane, but he didn’t want to have to deal with the hooker attitude he knew he’d get, and having to sleep with one eye open to keep his wallet from disappearing. Besides, if the Angels heard about it, there was no telling what would happen.

  “Not tonight, thanks,” he said.

  “Suit yourself,” the man said, handing Kane a key.

  Kane drove his truck into the long, low garage at the back. He dug out his duffel, locked everything up, and, following the man’s directions, carried the duffel to his room. When he got there, he closed and locked the door. Then he took a pair of wedges out of his duffel and shoved them under the door.

  The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell. He used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and stripped off his clothes. He set his travel alarm for eight a.m., turned out the lights, and closed his eyes. He didn’t even have time to think about how much he wanted a drink before falling asleep. He dreamed he saw an angel gliding over the snow, dressed all in black.

  5

  And the gold of that land is good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

  GENESIS 2:12

  THE ALARM CLOCK’S BEEPING PULLED KANE OUT OF HIS dream. He lay for a moment getting his courage up, then threw off the blankets, rolled out of bed, and hopped around for a minute on the frigid floor. He scraped a clear patch in the frost covering the room’s small window and looked out. Too dark to see anything. He took a fast shower—you could never tell how long the hot water would last in a place like this—and dried himself on a towel as big and soft as a sheet of sandpaper. He repacked his duffel and walked along silent hallways to the café.

  Tracy the waitress was standing behind the counter of the restaurant. She was wearing the same clothes. Kane wondered if she’d found some other customer re
ady to part with $100.

  “This is some shift they’ve got you on,” Kane said.

  “Work’s work,” she replied. “Menu?”

  “Just coffee,” Kane said. “What’s the weather like?”

  “Cold,” Tracy said, pouring coffee into a thick, chipped mug. “Thirty or thirty-five.”

  She didn’t bother to say “below zero.” She didn’t have to.

  Tracy put the coffee down in front of him, bending low from force of habit. Up close, she had lines of weariness beside her mouth and a bright red hickey on her left breast. Guess she found her man, Kane thought.

  The coffee was hot and surprisingly good. As he drank it, Kane thought about his day. The mine first, then Rejoice, he decided.

  He got another cup of coffee to go, put his coat on, picked up his duffel, and walked out to the warm storage shed. His breath escaped in white puffs. The cold deadened the skin of his face and froze the hairs in his nose. The only noises were the hum of the electrical line and the squeaking of his boots on the snow. Not a bird flew or a creature stirred.

  Kane pulled the door open and went into the shed. He threw his duffel into the back of the pickup, backed out of the shed, got out, and closed the door, then drove off toward the bright lights that marked the Pitchfork mine.

  He cruised along the highway for a few miles, the only thing moving. The community of Devil’s Toe, not much more than a dozen buildings spread out along both sides of the road, was shut tight.

  As he drove, he tried to ready himself for seeing Charlie Simms again. Simms had led the investigation of the shooting, and the last time Kane had talked to him was in an interrogation room at the station.

  It was almost a week after the shooting. Kane was still feeling slow and fuzzy headed, disoriented from something, maybe hitting his head, maybe being the guy doing the listening rather than the talking.

  “We can’t find a gun, Nik,” Simms said that day. “I’m telling you this because you’re family. The other kid at the scene came into the station the next day. Lionel Simmons. Aka ‘Train.’ Seventeen. A pretty long juvie rap sheet. He said him and the retard, Jessup, were watching TV when they heard the shots. Jessup ran out to see what was what. Lionel followed, he says, to keep Jessup out of trouble. They were looking at the scene when you pulled up and started barking orders. He said he figured Jessup got confused, but it looked to him like the retard was starting to raise his hands when you shot him. Then you fell and hit your head on the ice. He went over to check on Jessup. No pulse. You groaned and he ran away.”

  “Why’d he run?” Kane asked.

  “Said he was afraid you’d shoot him, too,” Simms said.

  “That’s it? His word against mine?” Kane asked.

  Simms was silent for a moment.

  “We went over it with him hard, again and again, but he stuck to his story,” Simms said. “We tested the clothes he was wearing. No gunshot residue. We got a warrant and searched his house and didn’t find anything. None of the neighbors said anything about seeing a gun, including one old bag who said she watched the whole thing and saw you shoot the kid for no reason, even though she can’t see three feet.”

  “What about the cop who was shot?” Kane asked.

  “O’Leary?” Simms said. “Says he doesn’t know anything. Says he went to answer a domestic dispute call and didn’t even get all the way out of the unit before he was shot. Never saw anything. The bullets were from a nine-millimeter. Half the men in Anchorage own a nine. And a quarter of the women. All in all, nothing.”

  “So now what?” Kane asked.

  Simms shook his head.

  “We keep looking,” Simms said. “Most of the force is trying to find out who ambushed O’Leary. You know how it is when a cop is shot. But some of us are working your case.”

  The word “case” got through to Kane. If the shooting was a case, somebody could be charged.

  “What happens if you don’t find anything?” he asked.

  “That’s up to the DA,” Simms said.

  “The DA?” Kane said. “To do what?”

  “To decide whether to charge you,” Simms said.

  “Charge me?” Kane said. “Charge me for what? The kid had a gun.”

  Kane saw in Simms’s eyes the look that cops gave suspects.

  “You sure about that, Nik?” Simms said, his voice full of doubt. “You blew a 1.6. You were pretty drunk.”

  Kane’s thoughts took him right past a side road that seemed wide enough to accommodate heavy equipment. He stopped and backed down the highway, turned, and drove up the road. He followed it for a few more miles, twisting and turning and climbing steadily, until he reached a gate in a tall Cyclone fence topped with barbed wire.

  “Pitchfork Gold Mine,” a sign on the gate read, with “Alcan Mining Consortium” written below it. Then, in the biggest letters of all, “No Trespassing.”

  The place was lit up like a Hollywood premiere. From where he sat, Kane could see a big building that must have been the mill house, but not much else. There was a small guardhouse next to the gate, but its window was tinted and he couldn’t tell if anyone was in there. He leaned on his horn.

  The window flew open and a shotgun was thrust out. Behind it, Kane could make out a pale face dominated by a droopy mustache. He rolled down his window.

  “You got business here?” a man’s voice asked. Kane heard sleep in the voice and, beneath it, hundreds of hard whiskey nights.

  “Shouldn’t be sleeping on the job, Lester,” Kane said. “Somebody might sneak up and steal your shack.”

  A smile appeared beneath the mustache. It was several teeth short of a full set.

  “Anybody who tried would get a bellyful of double-ought,” the man said. “Howdy, Nik. I heard you was out.”

  “Two months, eight days,” Kane said. “I’m here to see Charlie Simms.”

  The man in the guardhouse gave Kane a look, then started shaking his head.

  “I don’t know about that, Nik,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, but it weren’t Charlie’s fault.”

  Lester’s seriousness made Kane smile. Much of life is a mystery to Lester, Kane thought, but not so baffling that he can’t jump to the wrong conclusion.

  “I’m not here to get even,” Kane said. “Jeffords sent me.”

  “I’ll check,” the man said, and slid the window shut again. After a few minutes, he came out, wearing a big beige parka and bulbous-toed white bunny boots. He threw a bolt and swung the gates wide.

  “Just past the mill house on the left,” he told Kane.

  Simms’s office was in a one-story prefab, next to the office belonging to the mine manager. A secretary dressed in a sweater and ski pants showed him in, asked him if he wanted coffee, and left him alone. Even though there were fifty yards between the trailer and the mill house, Kane could feel the steady shaking of the mills breaking rock.

  Pictures of old mining operations dotted the walls: men in dark, bulky clothes standing next to long sluice boxes, men aiming water from high-pressure nozzles at seams of gravel, men jockeying bulldozers through creeks.

  “The chief told me you’d be stopping by, Nik,” a voice said. “You’re looking pretty good.”

  Kane turned to face Charlie Simms. He was a big, balding fellow with a weightlifter’s body and a drinker’s complexion. Like Kane, he’d followed Jeffords through the ranks of the Anchorage Police Department. After Kane had gone to prison, Simms had finally made lieutenant and stalled behind a desk. He’d retired and gone to work for a private security outfit that, according to rumor, belonged to Jeffords.

  Kane had worked with Simms from time to time, and had come to the conclusion he was dedicated but plodding. He was also a big-time skirt chaser, but then a lot of cops were. They’d socialized some, too, often sitting across from each other at poker games Jeffords put together. He’d called it team building, but Kane knew the chief had organized the games as a way of assessing his subordinates.


  Simms had been at the Blue Fox that night, celebrating even though he’d been a sergeant in the running for the promotion, too. When Kane was on his way out, Simms had weaved over to shake his hand, then navigated his way back to a booth and put the hand up the skirt of a cop groupie.

  “You okay, Nik?” Simms asked, drawing him back to the present. “You look a little peaked.”

  Kane gave Simms a twisted smile.

  “Sorry, Charlie,” he said. “Memories.”

  “Yeah, I had some, too, when the chief told me you were coming,” Simms said. “Sorry about what happened.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” Kane said. “You just did your job.”

  Simms closed the door, waved him to a chair, and went through the motions of hospitality. When those were out of the way, he said, “I’m surprised to see you, Nik.”

  “Why’s that, Charlie?” Kane said. “I thought you said Jeffords told you I was coming.”

  Simms sat quietly for what seemed like a long time. I suppose he’s thinking, Kane thought.

  “I guess it’s because the chief is involved,” Simms said. “I know you never thought he did right by you.”

  “How do you know that?” Kane said.

  Simms gave him a grin.

  “Your wife told my wife, Nik,” he said. “You know how that is.”

  Kane thought about telling Simms that he and Laurie were split up, but decided against it. Marriage trouble wasn’t something men talked about. And he didn’t really want to explain his attitude about Jeffords, either. On balance, he figured, the chief had helped him more than he’d not helped him. On a more practical level, Jeffords could still do him a lot of good or a lot of harm. And he found an odd kind of comfort in taking a case Jeffords gave him. It was an echo of his life before the fall.

  Besides, he thought, how much reason do I need when my only alternative is sitting in a ratty apartment thinking about all the ways I’ve fucked up?

  What he told Simms was, “That’s all water under the bridge, Charlie. I’m trying to make a new start.”

  That seemed to satisfy Simms.

  “I’m glad to see you, Nik,” he said. “I’m glad you’re doing okay. I’m glad that little bastard finally told the truth and that you’re out with a clean record. And I can use the help. There’s something bad coming. I can feel it.”