by Неизвестный
Ben didn’t come to the door when she knocked. She knocked harder and heard a muffled yell. She pushed the door open; the house stank of sweat and piss. His chair was empty and the kitchen behind it, dark. Kris stepped into the front room and caught sight of him on a mattress off to the right against the back wall of the house.
“What’s wrong, Ben?” She knelt by him. He was lying flat on the mattress in the same clothes he’d worn the day before with a pillow under his knees. His skin was the color of dishwater and had sunk in at the cheeks and temples.
“Not much,” he said, forcing a smile.
“You look like shit.”
“I’m OK.”
“Bullshit. What’s wrong?” He smelled. Kris plucked uncomfortably at the edge of the mattress.
“Back hurts.”
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“No.” Then, trying to make a joke: “Not since the service.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll get better.” He took a breath. Kris looked at him; he looked away.
“What’s this?” She reached for a bottle with apple juice or something in it.
“Urine,” Ben said, not looking at it. It was full and warm. She put it down and wiped her hands on her pants.
“I’ll call a doctor,” she said, getting up.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t need a doctor.” He looked directly at her, his eyes hard. “Understand?”
Kris looked at his bottle of piss; she should empty it. She should get him something to eat, too; if he couldn’t make it to the bathroom, he couldn’t make it to the kitchen. Maybe he had to take a dump. Kris picked again at the edge of the mattress, confused. On the street, weakness was something you hid; even from yourself if you could, and Ben’s pain was so exposed it embarrassed her.
“Let me go down to the store and buy some pain killers,” she said. “They probably have some special back medicine there or something.”
Ben’s face softened; he looked relieved, as if he wanted her out of there as badly as she wanted out. Kris picked her parka off the floor where she’d dumped it and walked to the door. Ben’s head was hidden behind a small wooden chest pushed against the side wall. Kris made a racket, dropping a tin can with change in it off the little table on the far side of the door and, at the same time, she opened the wall cabinet and lifted out Ben’s pistol. She dropped it into her pocket as she bent to pick up the coins and drop them back in the can. Then she walked back over to Ben, pulling on her mittens.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. Ben nodded, his eyes fastened into space beyond the ceiling.
Kris dumped a collection of back pain medicines on the counter.
“Is this for your bald friend who doesn’t get cold?” Martha asked.
“Yeah. He hurt his back.”
“Has he seen a doctor?”
“He’s not that kind of guy.”
“I used to be a nurse.”
“What are you doing this for then?” Kris pointed at the scanner.
“No doctors. No stress. No bedpans. Standard beef.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Kris said. Don’t sound too helpless.
“I’ll stop by if you like. He seemed like a nice man.”
“He’s the nicest man I ever met,” Kris said. “I think he’s lonely too, but he won’t say so.”
Martha smiled. “Men usually don’t. Where does he live?”
Kris told her.
“I’m off at ten. But Sunday evenings are slow. Maybe I can get out of here early.”
Kris handed her the bag of medicine.
“Do you mind if I put some of this stuff back?” she said, picking through it. “It’s all the same and all pretty useless.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll find some other things that might work better and see what I can do.”
Monday, November 16
This one was wild. Barrett had pissed-off women in his office before, but none had wrapped her fist around the muzzle of his M1 Abrams and pitched it against the wall. He watched her now, his face professional, his eyes piercing. She was sitting in the gray steel chair next to Justin, sullen and defiant; refusing to concede she’d made a complete hash of things out at Montana Creek. She needed something in her hand with more meat to it than a toy cannon.
He forced his mind back to Vern Jones. Why did Jones try to kill Kris? How did he know when she would arrive in Juneau? Where did he get the money for Evie’s new clothes and the rent on the shack? If he worked, he did it off the books. The Department of Labor had no record of anyone paying UI taxes on him. Nor was there any cash found in the shack, although his forensics team was still taking it apart. Jones’s rap sheet, which described a two-bit thug knocking randomly through life, held no clues: Four DUI convictions since he’d come into the state, two dismissed charges for assaults and a nolle prossed grand theft auto. Since there was only one road out of state, and it was a long one, people stole cars because they wanted a ride or because they needed them for another crime, like moving drugs or bodies. But if Jones was involved in anything bigger, it wasn’t on his sheet.
Then there was Stewart and his strange coincidences: showing up in Juneau a few weeks after Vern and Evie had arrived, finding her body and the curious fact that they hadn’t found any footprints belonging to the killer at the scene. Who else but an old trapper could hide his tracks so well?
Two suspects; one dead, neither likely to own an expensive wool suit, neither with an apparent motive and neither could be placed at the creek on the day Evie was murdered. A charge of adrenaline shot through his bloodstream—murders don’t happen often in Juneau.
And this one had an unbroken Native wildcat.
Barrett was in the police business for the chase. When you caught what you were hunting, the fun was over. You could nail the rack over the fireplace, but life grayed if all you had left were stories about the kill. His best days had been in Iraq as tank sergeant of an M1A1 Abrams chasing the Republican Guard in their Soviet T72s towards Baghdad taking hits in the Battle of Basra and running the Karbala Gap just south of the capital. His unit was one of the first in the city, volunteering to road test a bridge over the Euphrates that hadn’t collapsed after the Guard had mined it.
Half way through his second tour, a Sunni kid tossed a grenade through the open hatch when they were moving through a secured village south of Fallujah. Barrett, sitting on the lip of the hatch, his feet dangling inside, never saw the grenade coming and only looked into the tank when he heard it bounce onto the floor, watched it for an endless half-second, as it lay there rocking easily to the motion of the tank before it exploded, killing his loader and gunner and shredding his feet and calves. He was medivaced to Landstuhl Regional in Kaiserslautern, Germany and that had been the end of his war.
Juneau, where a simple assault was a big deal, was not an exciting place. He was here because it was home to a woman he’d pursued half way around the world; chasing her from the Baja and up the coast to San Francisco then across the Pacific to Vanuatu and the Marshalls—a woman whose glamour began to wilt the day he slipped a ring on her finger.
Barrett refocused on Kris and Justin. They’d finished signing the statements he’d taken from them yesterday and were waiting for him to speak. It was odd that Justin had gone down to the creek to gawk at the murder site. Sometimes amateurs return to the scene of their crime, but Barrett dismissed him; there was a tinniness to Justin, as if he couldn’t dig his paddle into the current and just sort of twirled along on top of it. Though now, after killing Jones, he was a hero. Barrett was not impressed. He figured they’d been saved by dumb luck. And if it made Justin cocky, he’d be killed next time: dumb luck tended not to be reliable.
Kris stood. Barrett had been silent too long; he put out his hand and shooed her back into her chair, careful not to look at her breasts, which were high and unstayed.
“I can’t keep you from trying to find the murderer,�
� he said, “but let’s make a deal. Let me give you this.” Barrett opened a desk drawer and pulled out a cell phone. “Just carry it with you and any time you need help or information, call me. OK?” He looked at Kris.
“You never know when you might need it,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
He put it back in the drawer. He picked up Evie’s leather purse, which had been lying on his desk, and coiled the drawstring. “So, is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
Kris held his eyes and shook her head. In the periphery of his vision he saw Justin glance at her and then drop his eyes to the floor.
“Justin?” he asked with an edge in his voice. “You’ve got something to add?”
“Nope, we’ve said it all.”
Barrett kept his eyes on him a second longer than necessary; he needed to get him away from Kris. “All right,” he said. “Let me know if you learn anything new.” He handed the purse back to Kris. “Check in later today. Vital Statistics will have gotten back to me by then.”
A clerk waited for Kris and Justin to pass through the door before entering the office. He dropped a fax in Barrett’s in-basket and left. Barrett glanced at it and then hit the intercom button to the front desk. “Send Miss Gabriel back in here, please.”
When she reappeared, he stood and handed her the fax. Her eyes flashed over the sheet and when she glanced up at him again they were darkening.
“Easy,” he said. “We don’t know the whole story.”
She dropped the paper onto the desk and walked out.
Barrett watched her go—he’d give her five, maybe ten minutes—then sank back into his chair, pleased.
Now he had motive.
__________
Kris raced out of the police station and into the morning darkness. Justin yelled something about working late. It was raining again; her feet slapped in water puddled on the sidewalks. She rounded the Red Dog onto Franklin and jogged up the street, which was busy with the morning rush of people and cars.
Her eyes had stumbled over the fax, unable to find anything to latch on to. From nowhere, something squeezed her chest. Finally, across the top, she saw and understood: State of Alaska, Certificate of Birth. But none of the names looked familiar, until she deciphered Evangeline Gabriel. And then she knew. Birth of: Corvus Stewart. Father: Benjamin Stewart. Her heart had started beating again.
Kris jogged up Franklin Street. People dodged out of her way. Under her parka, sweat broke through her skin. Why hadn’t he told her? Up Franklin, right on Third, slowing as she climbed the hill to his staircase. It was her mother. Her brother, for fuck’s sake. He was playing with her. She reached the steps and labored up them, ringing the metal grates, losing speed as she climbed, her lungs pulling for air.
The house was dark. She pushed through the door without knocking. The air inside was still and heavy with the smell of piss. Ben lay on his mattress, in the same clothes and with the same pillow under his knees. She stood over him, panting, mouth opening and then she saw his eyes.
“Don’t do that again.” His voice, cold and vicious, sliced into her. “Do not mother me. Do not send strangers to mother me. Leave me alone. Is that clear?”
It was quiet. A second. Two. Kris started breathing again. Fury, red as blood, blinded her.
“Then lie there in your own stinking piss,” she yelled. “What the fuck do I care?” She stormed out the door and crashed down the stairs. She skidded down the gravel street; the pebbles, lubricated by the rainwater washing down the hill, slipped and turned under her feet. At the bottom, she gulped air and thrust her uncovered head into the rain and stormed the sidewalks. Rage—at Lambale, at Ben, at the whole fucking situation—ignited in her head and hammered the inside of her skull and she was lost to the cold, the people, hunched in their rain gear, who ducked out of her way, and the rain that fell on her, wicking down her hair and into the clothes beneath her parka.
Hours later, wet and shivering, her head throbbing, she pushed through the door into the Lucky Lady. The Miller-Lite clock glowed white on the wall behind the pool table: it wasn’t even noon yet.
Five hours to kill.
__________
Kris peered through the slit between the door and its frame. The black Mercedes sat alone under the harsh lights. It was quiet. No car had drifted down the ramp in the last five minutes. Kris widened the slit with her fingers and checked the row of parking places against the other wall. Only two cars left. She released the door, letting it close on the mitten stuffed between it and the frame.
She straightened and looked away from the door into the night. The rain had turned to snow. Sloppy flakes fell out of the sky, floating into view just above her head, dimming the lights in Douglas across the channel and muffling the slick of tires on the city’s streets. The emergency stairs she stood on, at the back of the garage, were rimmed with snow, finger-deep, and it was falling fast.
She put her eye back to the slit.
Ben’s pistol weighted her parka.
Her hands shook, a tremor she couldn’t still. She felt as if her body were strung together by barbed wire. Too much coffee and beer. And cigarettes; she needed one now. Her mouth was dry and stale. She scooped up a handful of snow and let it melt on her tongue, swishing the trickle of water through her teeth before spitting it over the railing onto the wharf below. It didn’t help.
She gathered another handful of snow and rubbed it, cold and rough, against her face.
She didn’t know what she was going to do.
Distantly, through the concrete walls, she heard the electronic bleat of the elevator signaling floors as it climbed. She waited. The doors slid open and Lambale walked out. His hat and overcoat were flecked with snow and he was alone.
He transferred his briefcase to his left hand and rummaged in his pocket for his keys with his right. Lambale thumbed the key bob and she heard the locks click open. He opened the door, setting his hat in the back seat, and sat heavily in the car. Kris picked up her mitten, squeezed through the door, and ran across the concrete floor; her legs rubbery and distant and the aftertaste of beer thick in her mouth. The Mercedes’ lights came on, the engine muttered, the exhaust echoing hollowly in the empty garage, and the car began backing out of the parking space. Kris ran around the back end of the car and pulled open the passenger door. Lambale rammed the brakes and swung his head toward her, startled.
“Hi Loren,” Kris said, ducking into the seat.
“Kris! This is a surprise. What are you up to?” He shifted into park and turned more fully in his seat, resting an arm on the steering wheel, to face her.
“I need to talk to you.” She smiled at him.
“Sure.” He looked pleased. The fat on his neck rolled over his collar. “Do you want to come out to the house again for dinner? It’d be a little less formal. TV dinners or canned beans. Alvilde is at an Arts and Humanities meeting until eight.”
“No cook?” She fought to keep her voice light. Could he smell the beer on her breath?
“No. When the kids are gone, she’s only in a few nights a week.” He shifted into reverse and finished backing the car out.
“I want to go down to Thane, Loren.”
In the dimness, Lambale’s eyebrows rose in surprise and then his face became somber. “If you wish,” he said. He turned right out of the garage and they sped past the darkened tourist shops, boarded up for the winter, toward Thane. The snow in the street had been churned into transparent slush.
“I read the article in the Empire today about Montana Creek. Sounds terrifying.”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
“Pretty amazing thing your friend did.”
“Justin? Yeah.” Kris couldn’t keep the talk going; she felt closed in and her head rang and her heart was beating too fast.
Lambale glanced at her and drove on in silence. The heater began pumping in hot air, the plastic smell thickened; she needed air, but couldn’t figure out the buttons on the arm rest to l
ower the window.
She wanted a confession. She wanted him broken and pleading.
“Kris,” he said. “Your mother and I. Ah...” He faltered.
Kris turned toward him, hardening. Don’t toy with me, she warned silently. The car sped over a short bridge and began climbing a hill. Snowflakes swirled in the headlights and blew into the windshield. The lights from the dash colored his face sickly green.
“Do you ever wonder who your father is?” he asked not looking at her. His grip tightened on the wheel.
She gasped like a fish sucking air and the anger that flooded into her took seconds to gather. Leave me alone. Once, a man had slept with her mother. That’s all she knew. When Kris was young, Evie’d told her that he’d been handsome, had brought her a flower and held her hands and Kris, in her prayers, had begged him to come and take her away—away from the cold, the fighting, the booze, from Evie. Later, she realized that Evie was lying; that she’d made him up. When Kris pushed for more, Evie became frenzied and upset; not looking her in the face and crying, “I don’t remember, I don’t remember.” And Kris knew then that her father was just another nameless man who had gotten what he wanted from Evie and, even if he’d known he’d fathered a child, would’ve tossed it aside as carelessly as a drunk pitching an empty into the street. As carelessly as he’d discarded Evie.
“No, never,” she answered him. She stifled her anger, hiding it from him, but it clotted in her mind and she clung to the armrest, unable to think.
“Kris.” He glanced at her, his face unreadable in the shadows. She stared back, her face hard, giving him nothing. He released his breath. “Sorry.”
The silence in the car grew as thick as the falling snow and when they pulled up to the guardrail at the end of the road, Lambale tried to break it.
“Twenty years in Juneau and I’ve never once hiked this trail,” he said as if the tension between them weren’t there. “Wrong end of town, I guess. Are we going to get out?”
Kris nodded and opened her door. The overhead light came on.