No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Real good, Katya,” Jim said.

  “Did you catch any bad guys today?” she said.

  “Hundreds,” he said solemnly.

  Katya chuckled her rich, infectious chuckle and waved her fork. “Yay! One for the good guys!”

  Bobby snorted. Dinah cleared her throat in meaningful fashion and Bobby winked at her and reapplied himself to his plate.

  Bobby was black and bulky with muscle, a vet who’d lied about his age to go to war and who had come home a double amputee. He looked like Denzel in The Mighty Quinn and he had more attitude than Kanye West and Alec Baldwin combined and it was always turned up to nine. He’d come to the Park before Kate had come home, built the A-frame and the 212-foot tower out back that mounted a dozen dishes aimed at everything between the Park and Mars. He was the NOAA reporter for the Park which provided cover for the fact that he had no other visible means of support.

  Dinah had come into the Park two years after Kate had returned, one of those cheechakos whose personal history stopped at the Beaver Creek border crossing. Twenty years younger and much whiter than Bobby, they had nonetheless taken one look at each other and never looked back. On one never to be forgotten day Kate had had the privilege of officiating at their wedding, acting as Bobby’s best man, and delivering their now six-year-old child. Jim had vivid memories of the event, if only because he’d had to watch Jack toss Kate over his shoulder and disappear with her into the woods, not to be seen again until morning. It had hurt like a son of a bitch and he’d only been in lust with her then.

  Dessert followed.

  “What is this cake, Dinah?”

  “You like it?”

  “It might be the best cake I ever ate.”

  “Olive oil lemon cake,” Dinah said, preening. “I tweaked a recipe I found online. Probably be better with fresh lemons, but it’s not bad. I’ll pack some up for you to take home tomorrow.”

  He smiled at her, giving her the full wattage. “I think I’m in love.”

  She blushed and knocked over her mug, and Bobby snorted again. “What’s with you and this fix-it craze you’ve got going on?”

  “You heard about the Topkoks?”

  “Terminated by extreme volcanic prejudice. Who hasn’t? So?”

  “So he ran the only shop between Ahtna and Cordova. Where are the Park rats going to go to get anything fixed now?”

  “I dunno. Fix it themselves maybe?” Bobby went over to the circular console that took up the center of the A-frame’s main room. He sat down and flicked some switches, turned some knobs, donned a pair of headphones, and pulled the mike down in front of his face. “Park Air coming to you live and uncensored, hoping to offend as many listeners as possible in as short a time as possible. Your host Bobby the Bandit on your six here. You know what I saw down at Bingley’s today? Cheese and onion flavored potato chips! What the fuck, people? Orange in chocolate was bad enough but now they’re making pumpkin-flavored Cheerios and dill pickle-flavored mints!” His basso profundo voice dropped to a register that might vibrate the A-frame off its foundations. “They’re putting fruit and vegetables and sriracha in beer now. In BEER. Heresy! Sacrilege! AbomiNAtion! This. Must. END. Are you with me, Park rats? Of course you are. That’s why we’re all going out to the Roadhouse this Saturday to sample the beer Bernie’s been brewing up in the back room. That’s right, we got our very own brew pub in the Park now. Draft beer on tap! That’s me in line in front of you.” Bobby pushed a button and turned a knob and Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber rose up out of speakers to blight the room. Jim, once he recovered from the shock, was fully prepared to deliver ridicule in epic proportions, and was only forestalled when Katya bounced out center stage and started dancing with an abandon Queen Bey herself could only have envied. “Come on, Daddy! Dance with me!”

  Daddy did. There were shoulder shrugs and hip pops and there might even have been a little robot going on there.

  Later that evening, after Katya was in bed and Dinah was editing video footage for a Chevy Tahoe commercial, headphones on and lost in communion with the pixels, Jim and Bobby moved to the couch in front of the fireplace, sipping respectfully at a very fine single malt that Bobby said he’d bought at Costco in Ahtna. Jim was pretty sure he was lying but it had never been his policy to inquire too deeply into the source of all the excellent liquor he’d been served in Bobby’s house over the years. “So,” he said. “Sheeran and Bieber. Who’s next, the Jonas Brothers?”

  Unembarrassed and unrepentant, Bobby said, “Any song that gets my baby girl up and moving and grooving is okay by me.”

  “And this from the man who once refused to have any music in the house that predated CCR.”

  “I wasn’t a father then.”

  “Fair enough. I’m telling Kate, though.”

  “You, sir,” Bobby said without heat, “are a traitor to the man cave. Imma have to revoke your card.” They drank in companionable silence for a few moments. “Those two kids.”

  “What about them?”

  “You heard Van got them to talk a little?”

  Vanessa, whose high school Spanish proved marginally better than Matt’s, had spent some time with the two children that day, trying to tease out their story. It hadn’t been easy, as the boy was angry at everyone and Anna left the talking to her brother. Van at least managed to find out their names, their mother’s name, and the barest of outlines of the events that had led to their presence in the Park. After that the boy had closed his mouth except to eat. When Laurel had tried to take the girl to give her a bath, the boy had attacked her. After a fraught negotiation that had brought Vanessa back from Auntie Vi’s, the boy had allowed Laurel to fill the bathtub and sit on the floor of the bathroom with her back to the tub while he bathed his sister and then himself. Laurel had found jeans and sweaters of more or less the right size but shoes were proving a more difficult task and for now the kids were wearing the sandals they’d arrived in.

  “What’s going to be done with them?” Bobby said.

  “First we find their mom.”

  “You gonna let them send them back after that?”

  Jim leaned his head back against the couch and contemplated the firelight flickering on the walls. “No,” he said eventually. “No, I don’t believe we are. Not if they don’t want to go, and not if Kate has anything to say about it.”

  They both sipped again. It was like warm honey slipping down their throats, with just a touch of cloves to spice things up.

  Bobby looked involuntarily over his shoulder. “Anyone ever touch Katya, I’d—”

  “I know. And at that you’d be standing in line.”

  They had been two days in the room and the four men and the one woman had been very kind to them. They had been brought meals on a tray, and when Anna woke up and screamed when she saw the strangers they left the room to let David calm her down so she could eat something. They brought in a phone that spoke Spanish and tried to talk to them but David pretended not to understand until they gave up and let them watch cartoon videos on it.

  Yes, they were nice, but he didn’t trust them. Well. He didn’t trust anyone, really, except for himself, and Anna, who was too young and who had to trust him, and Mami, who was not here.

  He wasn’t so sure how much he could trust Mami anymore, if it came to that. It had been Mami’s idea to go north because things would be better in el norte than in Tegucigalpa, and the bad men at the border who had taken Mami away and the Bad Man they had given David and Anna to had proved that was not the case. There was no better here. David was not a fool. He and Anna had been sold to the Bad Man, like empanadas on the street.

  No, el norte was not a good place. For all David knew, there were men doing to Mami now what los pandilleros did before they left. And for all he knew, the people they were with now meant to do the same to David and Anna.

  They had to leave. He didn’t know where, but he had to find a place where they could hide until Mami answered her phone and could come get them. He kne
w from the television that there were ways of finding people with their phones. He didn’t know how to do that but he would find out, and he and Anna would go to meet her wherever she was. And then the three of them would figure out what came next. If they had to go back to Tegucigalpa, so be it. They would find a better place to live and Mami would get a job and David would, too, and they would be together, and he would grow up to be a carpenter or an astronaut, and Anna could grow up to be a teacher like Mami. If they stayed in el norte, they would do the same. So long as they were all three together. It was all he asked for now.

  He would need to learn English, though. Mami had tried to teach them on the way but they had been so tired and hungry and thirsty at the end of every day that they had learned little and most of that he had already forgotten. One of the men of this house had brought a book, a diccionario, with words in Spanish and English in columns next to each other. He recognized some of the words in Spanish but his attendance at school had suffered due to the bad things happening in the town and his reading skills were more suited to picture books. They brought those, too, one with a little girl in a blue dress walking to school across Africa, and another with frogs flying on leaves, and The Cat in the Hat, only in English, but he could sound out the words, some of them. He would take the books with them when they left.

  He took out the Bad Man’s phone and looked at it, wondering if he should try to call Mami again now or wait until they found somewhere else. He decided to save the battery and put it away without turning it on, and went to wake Anna.

  After three days of warmth and food and three nights of uninterrupted sleep where no one touched them and a real bathroom with a toilet that flushed, Anna was fretful when he told her they had to go. She cried, a little, but she let him dress her. They had no coats so he pulled the blankets from both beds and folded them into a kind of serape. Anna looked like a tamale. She almost giggled when he told her so.

  They waited until the house was still. He shouldered the garbage bag with the books and the leftovers from that night’s dinner and slipped out the door no one had bothered to lock.

  Eight

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 4

  Niniltna

  JIM ROSE EARLY AND LEFT THE A-FRAME AS quietly as possible, arriving at the Riverside Café as Laurel Meganack was making her first latte of the day. She saw him and started on a large Americano without asking. The smell of baked goods perfumed the air. “What time did you get into work, Laurel?”

  She gave him a tired smile. “Baker’s hours are the worst. But the good news is that I’ve got biscuits, scones, cinnamon rolls, and plain cake donuts for you this morning.”

  “I’ll take a cinnamon roll for here and one of each in a bag.”

  “Done.” She handed him his drink and he sat in a booth at the back and looked out on Niniltna’s main street as the caffeine kickstarted his day.

  “Here you go.” A plate with a cinnamon roll the circumference of the full moon landed in front of him, along with his Americano in a soup bowl with two handles on it. Laurel plopped down across from him and blew over the top of her own soup bowl. “Heard anything about those kids yet?”

  He shook his head. “No. Kate’s in Anchorage. She’s going to sniff around, see what can be done in the way of finding the mom. This administration, though—” Even an Americano as good as Laurel’s had a hard time washing away that taste from his mouth.

  “Feds going to be involved?”

  “It’s a plane crash, so, yeah, I’m guessing the NTSB will be parachuting in shortly. Or whenever they decide they have the best chance of not being weathered in.”

  She was a homegrown beauty, was Laurel Meganack, with a come-hither sparkle in her eyes and a penchant for scoop-necked T-shirts that was probably responsible for the sale of gallons of coffee and thousands of cookies. At the moment, though, the sparkle was in abeyance. “And DFYS?”

  He sighed. “Probably. I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “Those kids have been through a lot, Jim. They shouldn’t be manhandled into the system, it’ll just wreck them more than they already are.”

  “No argument here.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?” There were tears in her eyes.

  “They have family, Laurel,” he said gently. “A mom, at least.”

  “Where?” she said fiercely. “Where is she? How did she let this happen to her own children? If she can’t take any better care of them than this, she don’t deserve them!”

  “We don’t know the circumstances, Laurel,” Jim said, still gently. “Let’s not be too quick to judge before we do.”

  The doorbell tinkled and they looked around to see Matt Grosdidier step inside. He looked around, saw them, and his eyes narrowed. He marched across to the booth and slid in next to Laurel. “Hey, babe.” He took a closer look. “Are you okay?” He kissed her and turned to give Jim a hard stare.

  With true heroism Jim did not rise to the bait. “She’s worried about the kids.”

  “We’re all worried about the kids,” Matt said, putting his arm around Laurel and pulling her in close. “It’ll be okay, honey. We’ll make it be okay.” She leaned against him for a moment, her eyes closed, and then she sat up and nudged him with her hip. “Move. I’ll bring you some coffee and a pastry.”

  Jim raised what was left of the cinnamon roll. “I can vouch for superbity of these.”

  “Superbity? Is that even a word?”

  “If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.”

  Matt laughed in spite of himself, and Laurel returned with another soup bowl and a roll. She nudged Matt down the bench and sat down again. “Jim,” she said, “what do you think of Martin Shugak?”

  The roll caught in his throat and he coughed to clear it. “Little whiplash going on here, but okay, I’ll play. Martin Shugak? I had a lot to do with him professionally back in the day. Pretty penny-ante stuff, mostly B&E looking for money to buy a binge. He never got sentenced to much more than time served. He shot game out of season on the reg but I never caught him at it, and—” he shrugged “—he was hunting to eat, so I never got too excited about it.”

  She frowned. “He do drugs?”

  “Maybe a little grass, but mostly it’s all about the booze for Martin. He was never into distribution, he was strictly a consumer. So far as he showed up on my radar.”

  “Did he ever hurt anybody? Like, you know, physically?”

  “What, you want me to grade him? As lowlife as Howie Katelnikoff? Not so low as, I don’t know, I can’t even think of a relevant comparison. Unless it was Martin himself.”

  “He says he wants to be a baker.”

  Jim paused with his soup bowl halfway to his mouth. “Martin Shugak wants to be a baker,” he said slowly, testing the words on the air. “Didn’t he just inherit a whole bunch of property? Like damn near the entire Kanuyaq Mine?”

  “It’s in court, and it’s going to be in court for years to come. In the meantime, he says the last time he was away—” Laurel waggled her eyebrows “—he was assigned to the kitchen and there was an honest-to-God baker who was inside at the same time and he took Martin on as his apprentice. Martin said he really enjoyed it and he doesn’t mind going to work at three a.m. And since —” She looked at Matt. She might have blushed a little.

  Matt straightened and a proud grin split his face nearly in two. “And since we’re getting married and we want to have kids, Laurel thinks bringing on another employee would be a good idea.”

  “You guys are getting married?” Laurel was definitely blushing now, and Jim stood up to lean over the table and give her a hearty smack on the cheek. He shook Matt’s hand and sat back down again. “I hear the sound of hearts breaking all over the Park, but congratulations, both of you. When did this happen?”

  Matt had his arm tight around Laurel’s shoulders, as if he was afraid she might get away. “New Year’s Day.”

  Right after they’d rescued the two kids out of the wreck in the middle of a blizzar
d. It wasn’t a situation that in Jim’s opinion inspired romance but then he was coming up on forty-four this year. And then he had an extremely unwelcome thought.

  He wasn’t entirely sure what Kate Shugak would call a romantic situation. But how would he know? Had he ever even brought her flowers? Had they ever gone out on Valentine’s Day? On a date on any day? They’d never even gone to the dump to watch the bears. Although there was that time he and Mutt had dug her out of a dump she’d been tossed into, that had to count for something. He tried to remember if he’d ever given her a gift. There was that Christmas when he’d given her a copy of Robert’s “Rules of Order”. There had been a pretty big reward for that that lived on in Technicolor in his memories to this day. Last Christmas—Jesus, that was just last month, how could he not… And her birthday, when was that? He knew a moment of panic and then with a tremendous sense of relief remembered that it was in October, October sixteenth. No, eighteenth. Fourteenth?

  He looked across the table at the happy couple beaming at him. He had some remedial boyfriending to do in future or he was going to be so totally fucked.

  “Why?” Matt said, bewildered, and Jim realized he’d said that last sentence out loud. “Nothing,” he said. “So, you’re going to hire on Martin Shugak at the Riverside, Laurel?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said cautiously. “I know he might not be the best risk, but I think he’s trying, Jim. And I want to help him if I can.”

  “Martin Shugak, baker,” Matt said. “Funny he learned that in jail. Do you think they teach home ec up at the high school anymore?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said with a sigh. “Any more budget cuts and we might not even have a school to teach it in.”

  The bell jangled and Dulcey Kineen, her three brothers and two sisters, and all three Balluta brothers, Albert, Nathan, and Boris, trooped in. Laurel got up and helped them shove two tables together and got out pad and pencil to take their orders.