No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

“What’s all this got to do with not having kids?”

  “You asked,” he said, pointing at her. “I’m getting there.” He was smiling but there was a quality of introspection, of gravitas, even, behind the smile that she didn’t remember seeing before. “So I graduate at the top of my class and swear my oath and get my badge, and I do my probationary period in the Valley.”

  “And then?” she said when he paused.

  “And then I shipped out to the Bush. Kateel, then four hundred people, which had an on again/off again police force, and was surrounded by villages averaging fifty to a hundred people you could only get to by air, unless you wanted to hike. Hiking would have drastically cut down on my response time so I learned to fly.”

  He fell silent again. She waited.

  He looked up. His smile was faint this time, a faded memory from long ago. “It took a while to sink in.”

  “What? What took a while?”

  “That I was a triple threat.” He thought. “A quadruple threat, really. White, male, rich—comparatively, at least—and an officer of the law. Sometimes the only law they ever saw. The only representative of government they ever saw. Other than their postmaster.”

  She had a sudden memory of Max Maxwell, that quintessential Alaska old fart on a par with Abel and Old Sam, who had been a Territorial Policeman back in the day before Alaska was even a state. He had said much the same thing and sixty years ago it would have been even more true then than it was when Jim took his badge into the Bush.

  “The poverty in some of those places—Jesus, Kate. And they’re so far apart, and so far away from the larger towns and cities where all the services are, health, welfare, law. A village loses that one capable elder and right away the substance abuse, the child and spouse abuse start ramping up, assault, rape, murder. Teen suicides are always the worst. They can be infectious, spread to other villages. It can destroy a village, Kate.” He was silent for a moment.

  “And they are so very, very Native,” Kate said softly.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you so, so weren’t.”

  “Nope. Other than the fun factor of somebody new flying into the village, they mostly tried to ignore me. It took me a while—too long—to realize that I was always going to be other.” He sat back and brought his legs up on the couch. She mimicked him and rested her legs on top of his. “I don’t think there were five thousand people all told in my entire post. I don’t know what it is now. A lot of the villages are losing population.”

  “Like Kushtaka.”

  He thought about the village that murder had decimated, not only in death but in diaspora. “Yeah.” He sighed. “I did the best I could, tried to be fair, but it was slow going trying to get any cred with those folks. Some of my villages those fucking northwest Jesuits had relocated their asshole abuser priests to. They had no reason to trust another gussuk Outsider.”

  “What if you had been a Native yourself?”

  “I don’t know that’d be any better. If he or she had been Inupiaq themselves, chances were they’d have been related to everybody which meant they couldn’t arrest anyone. If they were Aleut or Tlingit or Athabascan—” He shook his head.

  “Did it ever change?”

  “About seven months into my tour, they had a gathering to hash out some political stuff. Representatives from the regional Native corporation and AFN and the legislature flew in. So someone decided to stage a demonstration, which would have been okay if someone else hadn’t started throwing rocks.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yeah. So I stepped in, and it all came down to this one kid. Hell, Kate, he was barely old enough to vote and he didn’t really know what he was protesting other than life as he knew it, which was pretty damn bleak.” Jim shrugged. “So I asked the elders of his village to step in, and they tore him a new one, you know, in that calm, measured way Native elders have of ripping your liver out without ever raising their voices.”

  She laughed. “I know.”

  “They made him promise to pay restitution, which was mostly a couple of broken windows in the school where the meeting was taking place.”

  “Kid have a job?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how—”

  Jim scratched behind his ear. “Well, I didn’t have anyone to clean the post and it was getting pretty ratty, so—”

  “So you gave him a job so he could pay his fine.” Jim shrugged. Kate bet she knew who had paid the kid and it wasn’t the Alaska Department of Public Safety. “And then?”

  “Well, it wasn’t like I was adopted or anything. But every now and then someone would drop off a fillet of char or a piece of caribou backstrap at the post. When I landed in the villages they’d come out to say hi instead of holing up waiting for me to knock on the door. One time—” he smiled “—one time they’d lost power and the lights were out on the strip so the whole village lined up their sleds on both sides of the strip and turned on their headlights to illuminate the runway so I could land.”

  “Pretty cool.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  “And from there to Tok?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t ask for it, they just moved me. They said I was such a hell of a fellow that they wanted me to straighten out another trouble spot.” He paused. “It’s beautiful out there, Kate, in its own way. Miles and miles and miles of flat tundra, stretching out into the horizon. There’s a national monument up there, a desert made up of yellow sand dunes, about twenty-five square miles. You look out your window from a thousand feet and that shows up on the horizon and you think you’ve been teleported to another planet. And then more tundra, no trees except maybe some stunted spruce and alder, but mostly it’s just thick brush and berry bushes and wildflowers and salmon rivers as far as the eye can see. A few rolling foothills here, the tag end of the Brooks Range over there, and this unending sky overhead. And during the winter the aurora just all over that sky, every color, and they talk, Kate, I don’t care what the scientists say.”

  “Little buzzing sounds when they dance. I’ve heard them, too.” She’d never heard him talk like this before. “You really did like it up there.”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t my idea to leave.” He looked at her. “I think your grandmother might have had something to do with that.”

  “Emaa?”

  He nodded. “She was at that meeting where the kid broke the windows. And then, a couple of days into the job in Tok, she came to the post, introduced herself, and said that if there were any problems in the Park she should be my first call.”

  “Wow.”

  “I think she might have had something to do with me being posted to Niniltna, too,” he said.

  “Emaa was dead three years before you opened the post here.”

  “I think she had it in mind from the time she got me moved to Tok.”

  Kate thought it over. “She did take the long view.” She rubbed the sole of her foot against his leg. “I’m glad to know all this, but you’ve kind of wandered from the point.”

  “In the Park I did all over again what I’d done in Kateel, only more people, many of them as always behaving in the worst possible ways.” He shrugged. “And you respond, and you take corrective action.”

  This time she laughed. “Sounds like parenting, all right.”

  “On a massive scale. And there you have your answer. I think I’m kinda done with that.” He caught her foot in both hands and started massaging it. She groaned. “Yes, yes, yes, just like that.”

  “Ew,” Vanessa said from the door. They looked up simultaneously to see her grinning.

  “You’re interrupting a private moment here, brat,” Jim said.

  “Then you should have locked the door,” Vanessa said. “Johnny and I are staying in town for a couple of days.”

  “What about—”

  Van rolled her eyes, a leftover from her annoying teen years. “It’s almost a month until classes start.”

  “A month? Geeze. When I was in s
chool classes started up again the second week of January.”

  “It’s not all bad.” Jim waggled his eyebrows at Kate. “Just think. You and me and no kids in the house. Whatever shall we do to fill in all that empty, lonely time.”

  “Ew,” Vanessa said again, and retreated.

  Across the room, still pissed that they’d evicted her from the couch, Mutt was lying with her back to them, her head on an enormous bone Auntie Vi had produced from the freezer. Kate watched as her chest rose and fell. “What’s on your schedule tomorrow?”

  He was looking at his phone, and turned it so that she could see that he’d pulled up the NOAA app, which, miraculously, sported a sun for the following day. “The forecast is clear for a day, maybe even a day and half. George and I are going to run up to the canyon on sleds and see what we can find of the wreck, if anything. You want to come with?”

  She suppressed a shudder. “Sure. Three sets of eyes will be better than two. And let’s not forget Mutt’s nose.”

  “I would never forget Mutt’s nose,” he said. “Hey, I forgot, I picked up the mail. Let me go grab it.”

  He returned with the bag and they sat next to each other on the couch to divvy it up.

  “Oh great, some law firm wrote me a letter. This’ll end well.” Kate picked up a white legal size envelope and ripped it open. She unfolded the single sheet of paper inside.

  Jim was reading the most recent statement from his account at the brokerage that handled his inheritance. Money was very odd. If you had a lot of it, it seemed almost to breed in the very best Christian tradition, going forth and multiplying in the most amazing fashion. There didn’t seem to be a single bank or brokerage big enough to hold the estate his father had left him, and his assets and their holding companies made for a thick stack of paperwork. He wondered if Beverly’s jointure was doing as well, and hoped so. He had no wish ever to hear from his father’s widow again, and he was certain to if she ran out of money. It all depended on who she chose as her second husband. It might already be that gigolo who’d been chasing after her when Jim left California, in which case hearing from her in the future was a Nostradamus-level prediction.

  He had a card from his half sister, a pediatrician with Doctors Without Borders currently serving in Côte d’Ivoire, which made for an interesting stamp, and another from his half brother, a cop with the San Diego Police Department. They had yet to meet in person but he called his birth mother, Shirley, once a month. Those conversations were building a relationship that he hoped would one day lead her and her husband and their two children to visit the Park. He wondered if Kate would let him build a guest cabin.

  Families, he thought. He’d take the one he’d created in the Park over the one he was born into any day. Especially if that meant he could share his bed for the rest of his life with the woman sitting next to him.

  Who, he realized, had become preternaturally still. “Kate?”

  She looked up, a dazed expression in her eyes. “Read this,” she said, handing him a letter.

  He read it. “What the hell?” And then he read it again. “Erland Bannister made you the trustee of his estate?”

  Voices woke David up. He held very still, listening. He couldn’t hear the Bad Man. That was one good thing, but who did those other voices belong to? Some men, and one woman. They were talking in English, like on the television at the Bad Man’s house. Was he back in the Bad Man’s house? And where was Anna?

  He fought to open his eyes. The first thing he saw was Anna on a bed next to his. There were people standing over her. A woman, the one he must have heard talking, was pulling a nightgown over Anna’s head. Anna’s eyelids fluttered and she muttered something but she didn’t wake up. The woman, she looked a little familiar, had silent tears slipping down her cheeks. The man next to her, he looked familiar, too, like David knew them both from somewhere. Was he one of the Bad Man’s friends? The woman pulled the sheet up and tucked it beneath Anna’s chin. Anna rolled over on her side, still sleeping. The man put his arms around the woman’s shoulders and she turned her face into his chest. Her shoulders were shaking.

  Three other men, younger than the first man but who looked a lot like him, stood in the doorway speaking English in low voices. He could tell they were angry about something. He held very still and watched them carefully through his lashes.

  He was in another bed in the room, covered by another sheet. The beds stood high on metal frames and the room was painted white and there were instrumentos medicos on the walls like at la clínica at home. Did the Bad Man bring them to el doctor? Why?

  He tried to remember. There was the big house, and the star on the mountain, and the men who took Mami from them and sold them to the Bad Man. They were with the Bad Man and then—el aeroplano! He remembered now. They were on the plane and it was dark outside and the plane was bumping around and then… then what? He had a confused memory of a cabin and a stove that burned wood and—he looked across at the man holding the crying woman. They had been there.

  They turned to look at him and he shut his eyes. He heard footsteps and gentle hands tucked the covers under his chin like Anna’s. The woman whispered something and the man whispered something back, and David opened his eyes a crack to see them tiptoeing out the door. It closed behind them with a soft click. He didn’t hear a bolt thrown or a lock turned. He knew what those sounded like well enough by now.

  David sat up and when the sheet fell back he saw that he had a nightgown on, too. That was bad. They would need clothes if they wanted to get away and get back to Mami. He looked around and saw their clothes folded on a chair against the wall.

  And the phone. Where was the Bad Man’s phone that he had stolen on el aeroplano? He cast a wary look at the door. It was still closed. He slipped from the bed and padded to the chair. His jacket was on the bottom. He felt in his pocket and was relieved when it slid into his hand. They hadn’t found it. He pulled it out and thumbed it on. There was no password. He smiled.

  Mami had made them learn her number over and over and over every night before they went to sleep, all the way from Tegucigalpa to el norte, every single night, over and over again. She had bought them both phones before they left and put her number in David and Anna’s but she said if they lost their phones they would need to know her number.

  David and Anna hadn’t lost their phones. The big men in the blue jackets with the big letters on the backs had taken them. They might have taken Mami’s, too.

  But they might not have.

  He took a deep breath and pressed the green phone button and tapped in the numbers. He held the phone to his ear. It was ringing. It rang. And rang. And rang and rang and rang and rang. He let it ring twenty, twenty-five times.

  Slowly, he lowered the phone and ended the call. Maybe Mami had turned her phone off. He would try again later.

  He felt very tired, and his stomach ached. He pulled his nightgown up and looked down to find a wide, ugly bruise across his waist just below his belly button. There were more bruises on his arms and legs, too, and his neck hurt. He was glad he didn’t know how he’d come by the bruises but he didn’t want any more of them.

  He looked around the room, at the closed door, at their clothes folded on the chair. They were clothes the Bad Man had bought them, beautiful clothes, and new, the first new clothes they’d had in a long time. He hated them. But at least they were clothes. They had something to wear when they had to run.

  He tried one more time to call Mami, letting it ring even longer this time. Still no answer, even though he was straining for it with every sore muscle in his body.

  The spurt of energy was strong but brief, and suddenly his neck couldn’t hold his head up for one moment longer. He took the phone and climbed into bed next to Anna. She sighed and curled into him, clean, and warm, and safe, for at least this one moment. The last thing he saw before he fell back to sleep was her thick black lashes fanned out against her cheeks, and the last thing he heard was the steady sound of her b
reathing in his ears.

  Take care of your sister, miho.

  I will, Mami. I promise.

  Four

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2

  Anchorage

  “KATE SHUGAK,” KATE SAID. “WE SPOKE on the phone earlier this morning.”

  “Ah yes, Ms. Shugak. Eugene Hutchinson.” He cast a quick look around Kurt’s office and without changing expression in the slightest seemed to lift his lip in a slight sneer. Kate bristled inwardly and Kurt outwardly but they maintained a similar stony silence. Mutt, sitting next to Kate, fixed her unblinking yellow eyes on the attorney she could tell Kate already disliked and gave her usual impression of preparing to repel boarders in the event it was necessary. What Mutt deemed necessary was fluid, as was who she cared to designate as a boarder.

  Eugene Hutchinson, the author of the letter Kate had read the night before, was in his late fifties or early sixties and attired in a gray three-piece suit carefully tailored to disguise his paunch. His hair was a thin white tonsure, his eyes were a sharp if watery blue, his nose long and inquisitive, and at rest his lips formed a single line that no matter how hard he stretched them into a smile still looked like a noose someone had yet to put around the condemned’s neck.

  After a moment, he extended his hand. After a moment, Kate took it. His skin felt like it belonged to someone who had a regular spa day on his calendar and the muscles beneath it felt like they never did anything more strenuous than pull the knots tight on his shoelaces. She let go as soon as she could and sat down. “All right, Mr. Hutchinson, what is all this about?”

  He settled himself in the second visitor’s chair, crossed his legs and fussed a bit with the crease of his elegant trousers. He smiled at her, and then generously extended his smile to Kurt. Kurt stared back, unsmiling.

  “This is Kurt Pletnikof. He is a trusted associate,” Kate said. “I’ve asked him to sit in on this conversation.” She smiled thinly at Hutchinson’s moue of displeasure. “If you wanted me to welcome you with open arms, Mr. Hutchinson, you shouldn’t have used Erland Bannister’s name to get my attention.” She glanced at the clock on Kurt’s wall and wasn’t the least bit covert about it. “Now what is this all about?”