Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  “I know we took oaths to first do no harm, Jim,” Matt said with what Jim considered remarkable restraint, “but if you don’t get that asshole out of here, we’re going to tackle the sumbitch and load him up with enough morphine to send him into his next life.” Adding, a little unrealistically, Jim thought, “Where maybe the higher order of angels will have a better handle on controlling him.”

  By the time Jim got back into his uniform and down to the clinic, Sergei had run the .357 out of ammo and was waving around Luke’s .30-06, most fortunately empty. Demetri Totemoff and Auntie Edna, who lived next door and across Riverside Drive, respectively, were waiting for him. Auntie Edna in particular had plenty to say about stray bullets being fired within city limits, especially when one of them went through the wall over her bed.

  Demetri eyed the trooper with a considering gaze, but all he said was, “Think you might need a little help?”

  Jim didn’t think Demetri meant in tackling Sergei for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

  He also thought Demetri might be right.

  Never more so than when he had walked into the post that morning. The phone was ringing. With a long-suffering expression, Maggie answered it. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, watching her face.

  “What?” she said.

  A minute later, she said, “What?”

  This couldn’t be good, and it wasn’t, either. She hung up the phone and looked at him.

  Maybe he should have gone to Newenham with Kate. “What,” he said.

  “Someone just tried to drive off with Suulutaq’s Gulfstream.”

  “What?”

  Ten minutes later he wished he had gone to Newenham with Kate, because when he walked up the air stairs to the jet, he found Erland Bannister sitting on one of the plushy seats, holding a cup of coffee and chatting with Vern Truax on the latest price per ounce of gold.

  Vern Truax was the superintendent of Suulutaq Mine. Next to him sat Axenia Shugak Mathisen.

  “Hey, Jim,” Vern said.

  “Vern,” Jim said. He looked at Axenia. “Axenia.”

  A cool nod was her response.

  “This is Erland Bannister,” Vern said. “Erland, this is our local trooper, Sergeant Jim Chopin. But maybe you’ve already met.”

  “Not personally, no,” Jim said evenly. “But Mr. Bannister is well known to the Alaskan law enforcement community.”

  Truax looked uncomfortable, as though Jim had mentioned something in questionable taste in polite company.

  Erland Bannister was a contemporary of Old Sam Dementieff. Jim looked for the shrunken fragility common to most people in their early eighties, the beginning stoop, the grizzled jaw, the rheumatic hands, and found none of it. A tall man, lean and fit, Bannister still had all his hair. He had a strong nose, a stronger jaw, and a charming smile, if you ignored the calculating glint in his hard blue eyes. He was dressed casually, in slacks and a blazer over an open-necked shirt, but no one seeing him that morning would have doubted for one moment that every item on his body had been tailored to fit, including his gleaming leather shoes and his silk diamond-patterned socks.

  What Erland Bannister hadn’t inherited from his stampeder ancestors, he had earned, bought, and stolen himself. He was one of the biggest entrepreneurs in Alaska, into banking, transportation, and natural resources. He had also tried to kill Kate Shugak when she got a little too close for comfort to certain family secrets, and he had been put away at Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward for what everyone assumed would be the rest of his life.

  It is always a mistake, however, to underestimate the power of money. Erland had hired a firm of the very best criminal lawyers to work on throwing out his conviction. It had taken them two years and Jim could only imagine how many billable hours, but they’d gotten it done. Erland was out, on the loose, the verdict set aside on a technicality and key evidence disqualified. The state made noises like they were going to retry him, but Brendan McCord had told Jim and Kate privately that absent new evidence, it just wasn’t going to happen.

  So Bannister was once again on the loose. And in the Park. And the management of the Suulutaq Mine, at least, probably in exchange for Bannister’s vast wealth and admittedly extensive connections in the natural resource extraction world, seemed prepared to forget and forgive all his past transgressions.

  Chopper Jim Chopin was not.

  Bannister offered him a bland smile and did not extend his hand, a perspicacious decision on his part because Jim would certainly have refused to take it. “I hear good things about you from Vern, Sergeant Chopin. We’re lucky to have a strong law enforcement presence so close to the operation. As we know to our cost—” He gave Truax a conspiratorial glance. “—that is not always the case in rural Alaska.”

  “‘We’?” Jim said.

  “Erland is one of our newest partners,” Truax said.

  “Really,” Jim said. He looked at Axenia, who was watching her coffee cup like it might make a break for it.

  Erland leaned forward to give Axenia a pat on the knee. “Axenia’s here to hold a watching brief, aren’t you, Axenia? After all, the Niniltna Native Association is the governing body of the largest group of people affected by the Suulutaq Mine, and we want to be good neighbors.”

  Jim looked at Truax. “I got a call that someone tried to drive off with your jet?”

  The mine superintendent squirmed a little. “Yeah, it was one of my boys, had a little too much to drink, muscled his way on board and damn near got into the cockpit. Fortunately, one of Erland’s pilots spotted him from the hangar. I told George not to call it in.” He offered an apologetic smile. “I know how busy you are. I didn’t mean to call you out for nothing.”

  Jim looked back at Bannister, whose smile became if possible even more bland. “Talk to you for a minute, Axenia?” he said.

  Neither of the other two men made any objection, and Axenia followed him outside to stand on the frozen ground and squint at him against the sun. “You know who Erland Bannister is, right?” he said. “You know he tried to kill your cousin?”

  Her lips tightened. “I know he has been released, and not recharged, and from what I hear not likely to be,” she said. “And I know he is a wealthy and influential man, who is now a partner in a concern that is going to have a great deal to do with the Park and the NNA shareholders for the next twenty years, if not longer. As a member of the board of directors, due diligence requires that I develop a relationship with him and with the other owner-partners in GHRI.”

  He looked her over head to toe, a slow, deliberate glance that called to mind one of his first memories of Axenia Shugak, an unkempt, desperate little teenager, who at first sight of the new trooper in the Roadhouse had tried to seduce him into getting her away from a hated Niniltna and an even more despised Park.

  Her eyes darkened and he knew she had picked up on his thought, as he had meant her to, but she didn’t say anything. “You’ve come a ways,” he said. “Just not all the way back to the Park unless it’s on a private jet, evidently.”

  Again, she refused to be drawn.

  “So you’re just going to fuck her over from a distance, is that it?” he said.

  Axenia turned and marched back to the jet without another word.

  When she got to the air stairs, Erland was there to hand her into the plane. Over her shoulder he said to Jim, “You tell Kate I said hello, won’t you?” He smiled another bland smile. “Tell her if she needs some help, there are people in Newenham who would be happy to help out a friend of mine.”

  Inside his vehicle, Jim paused with his hand on the keys, staring at the sleek white jet sitting so incongruously on the forty-eight-hundred-foot strip carved out of a mountainside in the Alaskan wilderness. Along with a new coat of pavement, Suulutaq had financed a grader and fronted training and a salary for a grader operator. As Jim sat there, Eknaty Kvasnikof fired the grader up and moved out onto the strip to scrape off those last few fugitive streaks of ice
and snow that had escaped notice the day before. Jim was glad Eknaty had gotten the job—he had a family to feed and no money coming in until the salmon hit fresh water this summer—but Jim was sorry to see the gravel strip go. It seemed such a great leap forward, from Bush life to downtown.

  Maybe at eighteen hundred an ounce Erland Bannister just thought the Suulutaq mine was a good investment for Arctic Investments, the new venture capital firm he had started upon his release.

  Jim’s eyes narrowed, and the expression on his face made Eknaty, high up in the grader’s cab, wonder what he’d done to deserve that.

  No one had tried to drive off with the Suulutaq jet. Bannister wanted Jim to know that he was now a partner in the mine, and he had gotten Vern to make up a story to get Jim on that jet.

  Because Jim now knew Erland Bannister had a finger in the biggest pie in the region, the biggest pie in Kate Shugak’s backyard.

  And by letting Jim know, Kate knew.

  It didn’t help that last October Kate had learned that Erland Bannister was by way of being a shirttail relative.

  With this gloomy thought, he started the engine and drove around to the other side of the airstrip and parked in front of the post office. There was a line of people waiting for packages, half of them on their cells. Auntie Joy was texting somebody.

  Auntie Joy, texting. In a way, that felt even worse than the Suulutaq jet sitting on the Niniltna airstrip with Erland Bannister on board.

  He checked Kate’s box first, not that the woman ever got any mail. He checked his own box second, where he found a letter from his father’s attorney.

  He waited until he got back to the post, in his office with the door closed, before he opened it. It was a summary of his father’s estate, with a bottom-line number that made him a little dizzy. Even after dividing assets with his mother, there were just as many zeros in the amount that was coming his way as there had been when he went to California last year after his father died.

  Jim had never lived all that high on the hog, not even when he was averaging a new girlfriend every six to twelve months. In Tok, he’d lived in a rented house and driven a used pickup. He cooked at home more than he’d eaten out, largely because he firmly believed that the first step in any decent seduction was a good, home-cooked meal served with a good wine. That and a Dave Koz CD pretty much got the job done.

  Then he’d moved to the Park and the state had subsidized his room and board at Auntie Vi’s and the fuel for his state vehicle, until, he still didn’t know quite how it had happened, he had moved in with Kate Shugak and Johnny Morgan. Kate owned her house and land free and clear and they shared the food and fuel bills. His biggest personal expenses were buying books, good beer, and replacing new uniforms when the old ones wore out. Out of uniform he wore jeans.

  Through the years, he had earned a good salary, most of which went into savings and his retirement account. He just wasn’t a big-ticket-item kinda guy.

  He looked at the zeros on the account sheet again, and did some figures with a paper and pencil. He could quit his job tomorrow if he wanted to and never miss the paycheck. He could buy some land and build his own house. He could travel, and not last class, either. If he wanted to, he could leave policing the Park to the next trooper in line, could leave behind the Ulanie Anahonaks and their culture wars, the Harvey Meganacks and their get-rich-quick schemes, the Howie Katelnikofs and their everlasting search for that one illegal score that would set them up for life, no matter how many people they hurt along the way. If he wanted to, he could let someone else deal with the bootleggers and the drug dealers that sprang up wherever young men with money flourished, and the Erland Bannisters, the men with money who never had enough, who always wanted more.

  If he wanted to. He turned to prop his feet on the sill and look out his window at the dense growth of evergreens elbowing one another to peer in over his shoulder. Three moose were laying on the snow below his window, waiting out the cold before they got up again to forage. As he watched, an arctic fox trotted by, nose to the snow. She took no notice of the moose and they none of her. Through the trees he could make out a few Niniltnan roofs, and some flashes of white where the frozen surface of the Kanuyaq River announced its omnipresence. As he watched, he saw a snowmobile dash down the river, followed by a dog team, Chick Noyukpuk on a training run probably, and a pickup truck.

  Mrs. Doogan had assigned each of the Niniltna High seniors a poet, to be read and studied and reported on throughout their last year. Johnny’s was Robert Frost. Jim didn’t do poetry, ordinarily, but the Collected Works was sitting on the back of the toilet one morning and nothing else was in reach. The book opened naturally to a poem that read more like a story, about some guy splitting wood interrupted by a couple of other guys who were itinerant lumberjacks and who wanted to split the wood and get paid for it. The first guy loved splitting wood but they needed the work.

  Personally, Jim was glad that Kate like splitting wood herself, but this morning for some reason lines from the last verse teased at Jim’s mind, something about love and need being one. He liked being a trooper. The showman in him reveled at the might and majesty of the law his uniform inferred. He enjoyed the instantaneous hush that fell when he appeared at any scene, the law itself on blue-and-gold legs. His passion wasn’t necessarily for justice, per se, but he liked helping people in trouble, in leaving their lives a little better when he was done. Say then that the work satisfied the do-gooder in him, the civil and criminal wrongs, if not righted, at least alleviated. He was curious about what made people tick, as well as vastly amused by the incredible messes they got themselves into on either an amateur or professional basis. Law enforcement certainly gave him a front-row seat.

  Love, then. He dropped his feet and turned back to his desk to look at the attorney’s letter sitting there. If not need.

  The next time Jim talked to Kate, he’d better have his seat belt fastened. It was going to be a bumpy conversation.

  She preempted that decision by calling him way too early the following morning.

  Eleven

  JANUARY 19, VERY EARLY IN THE MORNING

  Newenham

  Mostly, Kate was pissed off.

  Stuffed in a bag, for chrissake, and dumped into a very small space, and then her dog dumped in on top of her. It was downright embarrassing, was what it was. What would Spenser say?

  “Mutt,” she said, because Mutt’s howling was starting to hurt her ears. The bag muffled her voice. “Mutt! Shut up!”

  The howl died to a low, menacing growl.

  “Knock it off,” Kate said.

  The growl stopped, possibly because Kate’s growl was meaner than Mutt’s.

  Possibly. Or possibly because Mutt was just biding her time until they got out of another fine mess Kate had gotten them into to speak her mind fully.

  Kate took stock. She was in a bag. A stuff bag? No, too big. A gear bag, used to stow lines and nets and fishing gear of every kind, more likely.

  The top of her head was jammed against a flat surface, and she could feel the opposite surface against the toes of her sneakers. Her knees were bent to fit. She had a little wriggle room from side to side but not much, especially not when Mutt was factored in.

  All 140 pounds of the half wolf–half husky were lying on top of her, and it was starting to get hot and stuffy inside the gear bag. Kate nudged Mutt. “Can you scootch over just a bit, girl? Come on, just a little bit.”

  She pushed and cajoled and bullied and finally got her fingers beneath the edge of the bag and managed to struggle free. Her face was pressed up against Mutt’s, to the point that she was breathing in Mutt’s exhale.

  The pencil flash was still in her pocket. She fished it out and turned it on.

  Quarters were too close for her to get her arm up but she could shine it around the inside of their cell with her hand held down at her hip. At first all she could see was gray hair, bared teeth, and one enormous yellow eye. Beyond that were flat white plastic surf
aces intersecting at right angles. They were inside a rectangular box of some kind.

  Mutt whined. It was an interrogatory whine, but it was also uncharacteristically tentative. Mutt was unhappy.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Kate said, although she wasn’t entirely sure that it was. She was also pretty sure that she shouldn’t waste oxygen talking.

  Because if she was right, they were inside the chest freezer in the apartment over the garage, and it wouldn’t be long before they ran out of air.

  She wriggled around some more, with some yelps of protest from Mutt when Kate’s knee hit a soft spot or Kate’s foot stepped on her toes, but eventually Kate got her legs together to kick at what gravity informed her was the lid of the freezer.

  It bounced open a crack and held, which was a great relief in some respects—they wouldn’t run out of air so long as her legs had the strength to hold the door open—but depressing in others—whoever had bagged them must have propped something against the lid to hold it down.

  Damn lucky there had been no lock on this freezer. Kate had one on hers at home because it sat out on the back porch, and anyone—read Willard Shugak—could saunter by and make off with a moose backstrap or a king salmon filet. Kate did not hold with that, especially when she had done the catching and cleaning and butchering and packing.