Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate drove around the block and came into the parking lot from Northern Lights. The SUV was parked in front of the main entrance, in a handicapped spot, and so far as she could see through the tinted windows, it was now empty.

  She pulled into a space in the row behind it and pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “Hello, Agrifina, it’s Kate Shugak. Is Kurt in?”

  “One moment please, Ms. Shugak.”

  Click, another click, and Kurt’s voice came on. “Kate! You’re back in town already?”

  “Yeah. Kurt, can you have a vehicle towed for me? As in right now?”

  A startled silence. “Uh—”

  “I’ll explain it all later, but it has to do with Old Sam.” Translated: family.

  “Let me make a call.”

  “I don’t want this to look like enemy action,” she said, “so I’m going to call the parking authority and tell them it’s parked in a handicapped space so when the owner checks there will be an official complaint. They’ll think the city towed it and it’s lost in the system when the city can’t find it for them.”

  “Is it parked in a handicapped space?”

  “Two of them,” Kate said, “and no sticker.”

  “I hate it when people do that.”

  “Have you got a place you can squirrel it away? I want to search it.”

  “Sure,” Kurt said. “Give me fifteen minutes and then make your call.”

  “I just love having my own personal private dick,” Kate told Mutt. She waited fifteen minutes. The SUV stayed where it was. She consulted the Anchorage phone book in the door pocket and dialed another number. “Hello, my name is Rita,” she said, infusing her voice with just the right mixture of righteous indignation and citizen activism. “I’m at the bank and there is an SUV without a disability plate parked in the handicapped zone. It’s taking up two spaces. Two spaces! Ordinarily I wouldn’t waste your time, I know this happens too often, people are so inconsiderate”—her voice actually trembled—“but an elderly gentleman just dropped off his wife, who is making her way up the stairs with a walker because the SUV has blocked the ramp. I mean really. If ever anyone deserved to be towed, they are it.”

  She gave the address and the make, model, and tag number, avoided giving the rest of her name (Lovely Meter Maid), and hung up.

  Five minutes after that, a tow truck showed up. It was driven by a couple of grizzled old farts in plaid shirts out at the elbows and bibbed Carharrts with serious miles on them. They hitched up the tow and were gone in five minutes. The cops never did show.

  Kate had to wait another half an hour before the owner of the SUV came out.

  He had a distinct limp.

  He was three steps from the parking space before he realized his car was gone. He did what everyone does when they find their car gone. He looked around to see if he’d forgotten where he actually parked it. No. It was really gone. He swore, if the outraged expressions on the faces of the two older women who had followed him out were any indication, and got out his cell phone.

  “Does he look like he might taste familiar?” Kate said to Mutt.

  Mutt licked her chops.

  It was the man in the balaclava, she was sure of it, not only because of the limp but because there was something instantly familiar about the way he moved. Hand-to-hand combat is an introduction that stays with you.

  But there was something else familiar about him. Obligingly, he stood on the top step long enough for her to remember why.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “It’s Bruce Abbott.”

  Bruce Abbott, generally up for sale to orchestrate political wet works for whoever could afford him. Last job known to her, gofer for the then governor. Abbott had offered her a bribe two years before to walk away from a case.

  And now he was following her, first on a snow machine in the Park, and now in an SUV in Anchorage. But not for himself, because not for one moment did she believe he was acting on his own. Oily little weasels like Bruce Abbott were only rent boys for the rich and powerful.

  And that would be why she’d gotten the drop on him in the cabin. Oily little weasels like Bruce Abbott always made sure they were one step removed from the dirty jobs. That way lay federal subpoenas, federal prosecutors, and time served in Club Fed.

  Not to mention serious loss of income. Which begged the question. Why was Bruce Abbott, the original backdoor bag man slash rat fucker slash hatchet man being so hands-on this time?

  He went back inside the bank, still talking on his phone.

  Her phone rang. It was Kurt. “They got it.”

  “Yeah, I know, I watched them. Artists at work. Kurt, what do you hear about Bruce Abbott?”

  “Abbott? The ex-governor’s gofer?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Not much lately,” he said at last. “Shall I inquire?”

  “Please, but not so’s anyone would notice.”

  He was hurt. “Does anyone ever?”

  She hung up and started the Subaru. As she pulled out on Benson, a second tow truck pulled in.

  She drove to an auto shop on the Old Seward Highway, a single cavernous building on a fenced lot barely big enough to hold it and a cramped eight-space parking lot. Alders sprung up wherever there was a grain of soil and dripped browning leaves over hoods, windshields, and pavement.

  She squeezed the Subaru into the narrow lane between shop and fence and emerged into the backyard feeling like a cork being pulled from a bottle. The SUV had been unhitched and pushed to one side, and the two seedy-looking characters with the tow truck were standing around looking shifty, which was their second best thing. She parked next to it and got out. “Tom, Ray, how you doing.”

  “Hey, Kate,” Tom said, and Ray mumbled something inarticulate.

  “Any problems?”

  “Nah,” Tom said, and Ray looked like he didn’t know what the words meant. Without further politesse they ambled into the shop, followed by Mutt. She’d been here before and she was well-acquainted with the assortment of snacks next to the coffeepot in the office.

  Mutt was a world-class forager in town or Park.

  What you couldn’t learn about someone from their personal automobile wasn’t worth knowing. Kate went to work.

  Half an hour later she stood back and dusted her hands.

  The SUV was three years old, with seventy thousand miles on it. Abbott had bought it from the dealer in Anchorage, according to the handbook in the glove compartment, and the registration form tucked into the back of the sun visor indicated no liens, which could mean he’d either paid it off early or bought it for cash.

  However, it was fifty-two hundred miles past its next scheduled service per the sticker in the upper left hand corner of the windshield, and all four tires were bald. There was a crack on the windshield that started right in front of the steering wheel—windshield cracks invariably start right at driver’s eye level—and crept all the way across the glass to dead-end in the molding on the passenger side.

  The interior hadn’t been detailed lately, either. A layer of dust covered the dash, there were coffee stains on the seats, and the floor was littered with wrappers from McDonald’s and Taco Bell.

  Abbott had been flush when he’d bought the car. He hadn’t replaced it, and a new car every year was de rigueur for someone who wanted to be taken seriously by movers and shakers.

  Resolved: he wasn’t flush now.

  Equally interesting was the file folder in the passenger seat marked “Shugak, Ekaterina Ivana” on the tab.

  Most interesting of all was the scribbled note found in the driver’s-side door pocket.

  Kate skimmed her file. They’d misspelled her grandmother’s name, they’d shortened her sojourn in Anchorage by a year, they didn’t have Johnny listed as a dependent, and they’d missed half of the cases she’d worked after she went into private practice. The one case they knew chapter and verse was the Muravieff case two years back.

  Kurt Pletnikoff woul
d have sneered at this background check. She closed the file and replaced it on the front seat. The note she stuffed into a pocket.

  She went to the shop and stuck her head in the door. Ray was under a venerable dark green International pickup, only his feet showing. Tom was under the hood of a silver Mercedes-Benz 450 SL, only his butt showing, a little too much of it. “Guys?”

  Ray slid out from beneath the truck, Tom popped up from beneath the Mercedes’ hood, and Mutt appeared in the doorway of the office.

  Kate jerked her head back at the SUV. “Can you get that into the city’s impound lot without anyone knowing? So it’ll look like the municipality had it towed and they just lost the paperwork?”

  Tom and Ray communed in silence for a moment or two. Ray nodded. Tom nodded back. “I reckon we could,” Tom said.

  “Excellent,” Kate said. Money changed hands and adieus were said with good feeling all around.

  Back on the road, Mutt smelling strongly of beef jerky in the passenger seat, Kate wondered when Abbott would find his missing vehicle, and what he’d think when he did. He had been illegally parked, after all, taking up not just one but two handicapped parking spots, a guaranteed producer of angry phone calls to the parking authorities. There was no reason for him to think she was onto him. It helped that he was white, male, and a boomer from Outside who would never make it past cheechako status no matter how long he stayed in Alaska, and that she was only five feet tall, a woman, and a Native to boot. Not to mention which, she’d turned down a state job that came with benefits a U.S. Senator would envy. There was no way Abbott would take Kate Shugak seriously as a threat.

  He’d gone from gubernatorial gofer, yes-man, lobbyist, and flack to getting his hands dirty. It would explain why he wasn’t very good at it. Shiners aside, the coldcock with the firewood hadn’t been productive of anything more than common theft, and if the continued pursuit was any indication, the journal he’d stolen hadn’t helped him. She wondered where he’d scored his gear, which had looked like the real deal. Borrowed, had to be, because it couldn’t possibly be his. Perhaps from the second shooter?

  Jane’s death at his hands rang more true. He’d broken into her house, she had come home and interrupted him, and he had shoved her aside in a panicked flight. His bad luck Jane had hit her head and died.

  And Jane’s.

  He must have gone to Jane’s house alone. A confederate would have kept watch and they would have been out the back door when Jane pulled into the driveway.

  He’d known the exact place to wait to run Kate off the road, though. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen Abbott in the Park. With Pete Heiman, maybe, on a campaign swing? Had he been one of Anne Gordaoff’s hangers on?

  He had never convinced her he was going to actually shoot her in the cabin, and he’d been all too easy to take down. But by then he’d picked up a partner, someone with enough backwoods smarts, enough gear, and enough familiarity with the Park to be able to pick up Kate’s trail and follow it. Or to know where she was going in the first place. Maybe he’d had the partner with him when he’d run her off the road, too.

  “You know what?” she said to Mutt. “There is too damn much going on here.”

  Mutt cocked a sympathetic ear.

  “Somebody got spooked when Old Sam died. Spooked and/or greedy. I’ve been attacked three times. Jane Silver is dead. What do we have in common? Old Sam.”

  The Subaru’s tires squealed when she slammed on the brakes before she ran the red light at International and C. “Shit,” she said, fear knifing through her. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  She waited in a fever of impatience for the light to change, and when it did she stamped on the gas and crossed two lanes of traffic to get to the shoulder, where the Subaru squealed to a halt. There was honking, accompanied by digital commentary. She ignored it all, fumbling out her cell phone. She had to call the operator to figure out how to call the satellite phone at the Niniltna trooper post, and was warned that it was an international call that would be very expensive. She was not polite to the operator, who became very formal and much less helpful.

  She waited, hand sweaty on her cell. Finally, Maggie answered. “Maggie, thank god, this is Kate Shugak.”

  “Kate? Where are you? What are you doing calling on the sat phone?”

  “I’m in Anchorage. Listen to me, this is important, urgent. I need you to go down to Auntie Joy’s and make sure she’s all right. Tell her it’s not safe for her to stay alone in her house. She needs to go stay with Auntie Vi or Auntie Edna for a while, and to take the story with her.”

  “What?” Maggie sounded mystified, as well she might.

  Kate repeated her instructions. “If you’ve got time, please wait and make sure she does it. Tell her it’s very important.”

  “Is she in danger?” Maggie’s voice was incredulous.

  “She could be and I don’t want to take any chances. It has to do with Old Sam.”

  “Okay.” Maggie sounded bewildered but acquiescent. “I’ll go right down to her house.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said, making it heartfelt. “And could you do one other thing for me? Could you tell Johnny not to go out to our house alone? To stay at Annie Mike’s until I get back?”

  “What the hell is going on here, Kate?”

  “I’m in Anchorage trying to figure that out. Will you tell Johnny?”

  “I’ll tell him. What was it Auntie Joy supposed to take with her?”

  “The story. She’ll know what I mean.”

  Kate hung up and sat there, the Subaru shuddering whenever a vehicle hurtled past, trying not to shake, cursing herself for not making sure Auntie Joy was safe before Kate left the Park.

  If Old Sam was the contributory factor to all these assaults, then it followed that an ex-fiancée, were she known to exist, would be highly at risk. Wheeler, Gunn, and Abbott might all be amateurs, but as Bobby had rightly said, Even Dortmunder gets lucky once in a while.

  When she stopped trembling, she started to get mad. She looked at Mutt. “If anyone lays a hand, if anyone lays so much as a finger, if they so much as look cross-eyed at my auntie, I will feed them to you. One. Piece. At. A. Time.”

  * * *

  Kate pulled into the Last Frontier Bank parking lot and this time there was nothing surreptitious about her actions. She left Mutt in the Subaru with the windows rolled down and went inside.

  The Last Frontier Bank had been founded back in the days of the gold rush by a missionary stampeder who had come north to do good and had stayed to do right well indeed. With Hermann Pilz and Isaiah Bannister, Lucius Bell had formed part of a commercial triumvirate that had been either primarily or peripherally involved in the construction of the state of Alaska from the Klondike on. Banking, transportation, consumer goods (a roaring business), natural resource extraction (gold, copper, coal, oil)—there was no Alaskan pie in which they didn’t have a finger, if not their whole hand up to the wrist.

  Bell had founded the first Alaskan bank in Circle, and when the gold played out moved operations to Fairbanks. In the 1950s his son, Marcellus, had upon the insistence of his wife moved the head office to Anchorage, where it was warmer and there was more light for longer and where there were more people and more things to do. It was also that much closer to a trip Outside, of which she took a great many.

  Last Frontier Bank had built their new headquarters in downtown Anchorage, only to see the building destroyed during the 1964 earthquake. Marcellus and his son, Vitus, had been among the first to rebuild, making manifest their belief in the future of Alaska.

  It was a handsome building, the first floor two stories high with pillars and marble flooring and original wood counters. Plush runners kept the noise from footsteps to a minimum. There were Art Deco wall sconces that gave the large room a retro feel. No Muzak profaned the air, and the security guard maintained an unobtrusive scrutiny from an alcove to one side of the door. Gray-haired, with a face that showed its age, he still looked more fit and
much more alert than most bank security guards. Kate approached him. “Hi,” she said. “Where’s the museum?”

  He showed her to the descending staircase and returned to his post.

  Downstairs the ceiling was lower and the lights were fluorescent, but the shelving was solid and the display cases were made of plate glass. A receptionist sat at a desk that formed part of a railing. One did not just barge inside. All the better, Kate thought. “Hi,” she said.

  The receptionist, on the evidence about the same age as the security guard, was also conspicuous by her alert eyes and vigilant attitude. She gave Kate a quick once-over, was either smart enough or had enough time served in Alaska to discount the jacket, jeans, and tennis shoes as an indication of true worth, and said, “May I help you?” Her manner gave one to understand that only serious researchers were welcomed into the inner sanctum, and anyone on a mission to waste her time would not be tolerated.

  Kate’s instincts about people were generally good, and she decided to go with the truth, or at least some of it. “My name is Kate Shugak,” she said. She pulled the crumpled piece of paper from the SUV and handed it over. “I lost my uncle recently, and I’m the executor of his estate. He left me a small mystery, and I’m hoping you can help me solve it.”

  The woman, whose name tag read Ms. S. Sherwood, smoothed out the piece of paper, which proved to be a call slip, with Bell’s Legacy of Alaska Museum imprinted at the top. “That’s my handwriting,” Ms. Sherwood said.

  “I thought it might be,” Kate said. “Do you remember who asked for those materials, and when?”

  Ms. Sherwood frowned. “A gentleman, I believe, on the Monday before last.” She consulted her desk calendar. “The fourteenth.”

  The Monday after Old Sam died. “Might I look at those same materials?”

  Ms. Sherwood considered. “Lucius Bell collected many things of great value during his life in Alaska,” she said. “Generally, we require references before we admit scholars to the collection. Are you a scholar?”