Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 10 - Midnight Come Again

by Midnight Come Again(lit)

  "He's still not here?" She stepped through the doorway into the hangar.

  Baird followed her. "No, he ain't here, and he's late. Goddamn Job Service." His hand dipped beneath his bib and he scratched, adding in an absent-minded tone, "Fucking state."

  It just wasn't her problem. Kate went out the door.

  Halfway around the hangar she turned, went back to the office and picked up the phone.

  "Who've you calling?"

  "The cops."

  Baird blinked. "Why, you think he got picked up or something?" "Hi," she said into the phone. "I'm calling for Baird Air out at the airport.

  We've got an employee missing, name of Jim Churchill.

  Caucasian, late thirties, six-two, a hundred seventy-five pounds, dark blond hair, blue eyes, no obvious identifying moles or scars. Ring any bells?"

  Baird's eyes narrowed. "You sound like some kind of cop yourself, Sovalik. What the hell's going on here?"

  "You watch too much television," she told him. "They've got me on hold."

  He was about to say something else when she held up a hand. "What?" Her brow creased. "What? When? Where?" She listened. "Where is he now? Okay, thanks. We'll get right over there."

  "Right over where?" Baird said, mystified.

  "The hospital." Kate's lips were set in an unsmiling line. "Somebody shot our new employee last night."

  The hospital was a prefabricated structure, built in sections in Seattle and shipped north on a freighter to be assembled on the shore of the Kuskokwim River like a gigantic Lego toy. Jim was lying flat on his back in one of the rooms, skin very pale against the white pillow. The nurse, a young Yupik woman with a glint in her eye that said she didn't get patients often and liked to keep the ones she did, whispered, "He's asleep, but he was awake for a few minutes an hour ago. That's a good sign."

  "What happened?"

  The nurse, identified as Sadie Guy on the nametag pinned to her uniform, was striving to maintain a professional detachment but she couldn't quite hide her excitement. "He was shot," she said impressively.

  "They told me that much on the phone," Kate said. "Where, and how bad is it?"

  "Oh, well, it's not that bad." Nurse Guy tried not to sound too regretful. "It only creased his scalp, just over his left temple. He's got a new part in his hair." She compressed her lips and shook her head, looking stern. "A fraction of an inch lower, and--well. He'll have a terrible headache for a while, but it doesn't look like there will be permanent damage."

  Kate realized that she wouldn't have known who to call if there had been.

  Nurse Guy looked at Kate, obviously trying to place her. "Are you a relative?" Her eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat and her eyes widened.

  "No." Kate didn't elaborate.

  The single word, spoken in her low, rough voice, triggered Jim into consciousness. His eyes opened and focused on Kate's face. "Hey." "Hey yourself," she said.

  Jim's bed tilted dangerously floorward when Mutt placed her forepaws on the side to peer down at him anxiously.

  "I really don't think--" the nurse began.

  "Hey, gorgeous." Jim's voice was low and caressing, and Nurse Guy shut up. "Mutt. Down," Kate said, and Mutt dropped back to all fours. Kate scowled at Jim. "You can't wander around goddamn Bering, Alaska, for godsakes, without getting yourself shot? Lucky your head is so hard."

  He gave her a drowsy smile. "I like the hair. Did I say? Makes you look sorta like Demi Moore. Dasvidanya." His eyes closed again.

  "Jim?"

  A rustle and a whisper from behind the door made her turn. Three people stood there besides the nurse. One of them wore the uniform of the Alaska State Troopers.

  "Who are you?" Kate said.

  "Who are you?" the trooper said.

  They stared at each other in silence, as reflexes Kate didn't know she still possessed kicked in. "I'm Kathy So valik," she replied, lying without compunction before a sworn officer of the court. "I work with him," with a backward jerk of her head. "We're both ground crew with Baird Air. He didn't show up for work at noon, so we called the cops.

  They said he was here." She paused expectantly. When no reciprocal information was forthcoming, she said, with emphasis, "And you would be ... ?"

  The trooper, a short, wiry woman in her forties, said woodenly, "I'm Trooper Mary Zarr. These people found him dumped in the backyard of a house on the river. The ambulance brought him to the hospital. The hospital called me." Her gaze lingered at the scar on Kate's throat.

  Unlike the nurse, she wasn't shocked; rather, she seemed to be intent on solving the puzzle Kate's scar had posed for her.

  Kate looked, first at the tall, fair woman, then at the short, dark man, both dressed for work on the slime line in yellow bib rainpants, heavy shirts and black rubber boots. "When did you find him?"

  The two exchanged a glance, and the shifting of gears was so smooth she almost missed it. The man stepped forward, a broad, admiring smile on his face, his hand outstretched. "Kathy--Sovalik, did you say? Al Gonzalez." His hand enveloped hers in a warm, firm, rather insistent grasp. "Me and my partner here, Maxine Casey, we work the beach gang down at the dock. We knocked off around eight this morning, didn't we, Max?"

  "Around eight," she agreed, eyes never leaving Kate's face.

  "Yeah, and we were heading back up to the bunkhouse when we stumbled across your friend here."

  "Where exactly did you stumble across him?" Kate demanded. Mutt's ears went up, and then back. She stepped to Kate's side without crowding either one of them, ready for action.

  Gonzalez looked at Mutt, looked at Kate, and rolled his shoulders as if to work out the kinks, maybe get ready for a little action himself. His Hispanic accent became more pronounced. It would have worked better if it didn't sound as if it had been used before, and to more effect.

  "Gosh, I don't know, Kathy, we only got in a week ago and we been working nonstop ever since, you know? We don't really know our way around. It was one of those houses between the dock and the bunkhouse, s'all I know."

  Kate looked from him to Casey. Casey's blue eyes were cool and steady.

  "Between the dock and the bunkhouse," she confirmed. "Around a corner and up a street. We were passing a yard, heard a groan, and looked in and saw him lying there. He was just covered in blood." She affected a shudder which did not go well with the appraising expression in her eyes.

  "Scalp wounds bleed like faucets," Nurse Guy agreed sympathetically.

  "Lucky for him you found him when you did," Kate observed. Jim roused.

  "Damn straight, lucky for me. Spasibo" he said strongly. He smiled at Kate. "You can ride to my rescue next time," he said, and slid back into sleep.

  Nurse Guy bustled forward. "Now, wasn't that nice? We'd better let him sleep it off. Come back tomorrow morning, and we'll see how he's going on."

  Kate and Mutt found themselves hustled out of the room. The trooper and the two beach gangers did not immediately follow.

  If they were beach gangers. Oh, they had the requisite amount of fish scales per square inch, the proper smell of brine. But Gonzales was clean-shaven, Casey's nails were manicured, and both had haircuts that looked fresh out of a salon. That kind of tidy usually came government issue.

  Mutt nudged her knee. Kate heard voices on the other side of the door and moved down the hall. The door to a rest room came up on her right and she shooed Mutt inside just as she heard the door to Jim's room open.

  She shot the bolt on the door and leaned against it, listening for the footsteps to pass down the hall on the other side. Mutt looked at her quizzically.

  "Who the hell was that woman?" Casey's voice said.

  "I don't know," Gonzalez replied.

  "You buy her story that they're working together at Baird?"

  "Easy enough to check out." "That scar--" Zarr's voice said thoughtfully.

  "Goddamn it, Al, I want a wire on that damn boat."

  "They don't have a phone, Max."

  "We've see
n at least four of them talking on cells. How about a directional receiver?"

  An invisible shrug. "The hull's made of plate steel. I doubt anything's going to come through that. And what are we going to do with it, mount it on top of a forklift and park it next to their gangway?"

  "I'm going to call Gamble anyway--"

  The footsteps and the voices faded. Kate relaxed.

  Gamble. That would be Fred Gamble, special agent assigned to the Anchorage office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kate had burgled the office of a prominent Anchorage attorney in company with Fred Gamble two years before. He wasn't a very good burglar. If Jim was working with Fred Gamble, it was no wonder he was flat on his back in a hospital bed.

  She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror on the wall. She was not yet comfortable with her shorn head. She missed the weight of the braid on her back.

  But she could also remember rough hands using it to pull her around the yard of the hunting lodge, like a dog on a leash.

  She braced her hands on the sink and stared at herself.

  Who was Demi Moore?

  She stood like that for a long time. keep an open countenance stand lance-straight --To a Young Warrior Woman Baird's reaction was similar to hers and completely predictable: "Jesus gawd, he's not even in Bering twentyfour goddamn hours and he gets himself shot in the head? How the hell did that happen?" "Probably the husband got home early," Kate said.

  "I say we ship his butt back to Anchorage and let goddamn Job Service inflict this pain in the ass on some other poor, defenseless business!"

  "Works for me," Kate said. "I never wanted you to hire a second roustabout anyway."

  Baird eyed her with suspicion. "You sound awful goddamn chipper, Sovalik."

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "For someone who's going back to a twenty-four hour on, none off shift," he explained, still suspicious.

  She gave him a sweet smile that put Mutt's ears straight up. "You must be talking about someone else. I'm not on until midnight." She held a hand up against the resultant sputtering. "Hey, this was all your idea, taking on more help. I just pulled a full shift, and I haven't had any sleep. You cover things for a while. It's not like you haven't done it before. I'm going to go catch some Z's."

  Instead, she went into town. * * * She walked down the gravel road, dodging taxis--there were almost as many taxis in Bering as there were in Dutch Harbor--and trucks and trying not to choke on the dust they raised. She passed a housing subdivision so painfully new the houses on their lots of naked dirt hurt her eyes to look at them. A little further down the road and on the opposite side was a supermarket, a trailer court and what looked like some kind of state housing, half a dozen small buildings of a similar size with the same brown paint and white trim and, like all buildings in Bering, up on stilts to keep them out of flood's way.

  Then there was the hospital, with Jim tucked safely inside, and the state jail, followed in rapid succession by the Delta Branch of the University of Alaska, the local radio and television station and a building housing the local police, the state police and the library.

  Kate didn't quite understand the juxtaposition of tenants, but then construction materials for projects in Bering had to be freighted in by barge or plane; the first method was expensive enough; the second, as she now knew from firsthand experience, prohibitively so.

  Roads began to appear, mostly from the left, as the river was on her right, with private homes interspersed with public businesses. There was a bowling alley next to a cabin that looked as if it had been built by the first Moravian missionary, all decaying logs and mud-and moss chinking. Fireweed grew from the roof and was beginning to bloom. As Kate passed, a woman came to the door and poured a pan of slops to one side of the front steps, where another clump of fireweed was thriving.

  An outhouse, in better repair than the main house, stood in back. Tall grass obscured the foundation, and bid fair to cover the first-floor windows as well.

  The pattern continued as Kate moved into the heart of downtown, small houses mixed in with large buildings sheltering half a dozen businesses each. One large, two- story building housed the post office, two restaurants and the AC supermarket, a second the armory, the elementary school, Swensen's Variety Store and the Catholic church, a third the Moravian Church, Moravian Bookstore, Moravian Seminary and Moravian Museum, and a fourth the Klondike Cafe, the local newspaper, a branch of Alaska First Bank of Bering and the Mormon church.

  A surprising number of the homes were two-story. None of them had yards.

  All the buildings were on pilings with steps up to the front doors or porches.

  There were outhouses everywhere. There was no community sewer in Bering, although there had been some talk of an above-ground flowline system connected to a sewage treatment plant. The sooner the better, as the current nonsystem had the city of Bering acting as a leach field for the city of Bering. Enough to turn the entire state Department of Health a pale, algaeic green, the same color as some of the many shallow lakes that interrupted the city lots and streets in every direction.

  It was so typical of the state government's reactive style of administration. Take a bunch of people who had been migratory hunter-gatherers for thousands of years and tell them they had to settle down in villages. They comply, and then the government won't give them schools so their kids have to be sent away from home to receive a high-school diploma. Molly Hootch and eleven hundred other village kids had sued to correct that situation. So now the villages had schools but no sewers, and the legislature wouldn't fund them, either, and probably never would until forced to by a lawsuit.

  In the meantime, a cloverleaf was being built at the corner of Minnesota and International in Anchorage, a city of less than three hundred thousand people, at a cost of eighteen-point-two million dollars.

  Ninety-five percent of that was in federal funds, true, but those funds could have been allocated to something more beneficial to the Alaskan population than another road in Anchorage.

  It soothed Kate to focus on the folly of the Alaska state government in their dealings with Bush communities, rather than dwell on the fact that this was the first time she'd been into Bering since she had managed to strongarm Baird into buying her tampons so she didn't have to go in herself. It was the first and only time she'd seen him blush. She was, well, not comfortable, exactly, at the airport, doing her job at Baird Air. Content wasn't the right word, either. Safe didn't work because she didn't feel safe anywhere anymore. Call it uninvolved, for lack of a better word.

  Uninvolved was good. Uninvolved, nonpartisan, uncommitted. The world rolled on but she wasn't part of it. She was one layer removed, insulated from the joys and sorrows and laughter of daily life by her very indifference to it. She wasn't hurting anyone, she kept herself to herself, she was the cat waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Nobody's seen you for four months! You couldn't have called? You couldn't have dropped somebody a postcard?

  The words had been reverberating in her head since Jim shouted them at her the night before, and for the first time in nearly a year she felt something.

  Guilt.

  There was almost as much activity in town as there was at the airport; people loading trucks with boxes and bags and case lots of groceries, two marine chandlers doing a roaring business in propellers and engine oil and mending twine, the post office preparing pallets of wet lock boxes filled with Kuskokwim River reds. Villagers from up and down river, identified by the strong smell of hard smoked king salmon, jostled for space with fish buyers from Seattle decked out in cargo pants and olive green T-shirts from Banana Republic. Fishers in hip boots covered with fish scales formed groups to discuss and embellish their most recent catch. Japanese workers fresh off the processor staggered out of Eagle and AC with bags and bags of beef cut into rib eyes, New York strips, T- bones, filet mignons, tenderloin, pot roasts, rolled roasts, rib roasts. From another door came Koreans loaded with boxes of Camel cigarettes, unfilter
ed.

  The restaurants were full, with lines to get in. The post office was jammed with locals and transients sending red salmon packed in dry ice to friends and family Outside. The fish were up the creeks and people were making money fast and spreading it faster. Busy, bustling, it would have been brawling if there had been any bars; the ka-ching of the cash register played a joyous harmony to the melody of commerce in this Kuskokwim River hub.