A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “Aren’t you going to do something?” Dan said.

  “Not feeling the need to,” Jim said, sloshing more vinegar on his remaining fries.

  Just for the hell of it, just because she could, Kate grabbed the redhead’s wrist and kept going, bending her knees and using his own momentum to roll him forward. She was so much shorter than he was that he was forced to bend forward, over her back, to remain attached to his arm, which he had discovered was now in an iron grip. In the split second between the moment when he lost his balance and the moment when he fell on her she straightened her legs with a jerk, shoving her back into his torso. He performed a half gainer with a midair twist, to land flat on his back on the table in front of Dan and Jim.

  The table held but the impact jarred the entire room. Dan was pretty sure he saw some dust shake out of the join where the wall met the ceiling.

  Jim, who had moved his glass and plate out of the way in the very nick of time, said in a stern voice, “Son, you brought that on yourself.”

  Dan assisted the redhead back to his feet with a vigorous shove, but he fell forward on both knees with a double crack that made everyone in earshot wince. Meantime, Kate heard a rustle of feet and turned to see that Phyllis’s champion had switched sides, and in addition was making a gross error in judgment by charging in her direction with vengeance written all over his face. This was a mistake often made by non–Park rats. When you didn’t know her, Kate Shugak seemed on first sight like such a tiny little thing, and she was a woman at that. It was easy to underestimate her, and that, as his redheaded friend had already discovered, was one of her biggest assets.

  However, in this instance it was another woman who confounded his intent. From the counter, Haynes stuck out her foot. He tripped and went sprawling on the floor, pancaking on his face and skidding almost to the door across Laurel’s well-waxed linoleum. In three quick steps Kate was on him, one hand on his collar, the other on the seat of his pants.

  “Allow me,” Haynes said, and opened the door. Phyllis’s erstwhile champion was hurled through it to the street outside, where he was narrowly avoided by Galen Heideman on his four-wheeler. Galen’s sharp and succinct comments on this surprise impediment to lawful traffic were clearly audible through the open door.

  “You were saying?” Jim said.

  Dan was laughing too hard to speak.

  “By the way, Ned,” Haynes said to the young man sprawled in the dirt, “you’re fired. And so are you, Jason,” she said as Kate assisted the redhead out the door, too. Haynes turned to run a considering eye over Ned and Jason’s remaining friends, who divested themselves of their chairs and the café in short order.

  Kate looked at Phyllis, who was now sobbing. Kate took a step toward her.

  “Leave me alone!” Phyllis said, and fled, the door slamming behind her.

  “Well, then,” Laurel, who had come charging out of the kitchen with a sauté pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, said. “And who picks up their checks?”

  “I do,” Haynes said.

  “Appreciate the help,” Kate said.

  Haynes shrugged. “You didn’t need much. We don’t tolerate any bad behavior by our employees anywhere in the Park. Not if we can help it.” She smiled again, with more mischief in it this time. “Besides, it was fun. Felt like I was Dean Martin backing up John Wayne.”

  Kate couldn’t help it, she had to return the smile. “Buy you a refill?”

  “Sure.”

  Haynes paused to hand her mug to Laurel. She collected the two plastic bags full of groceries reposing at the foot of her stool and followed Kate to the booth.

  Kate looked at the bags. “I heard they fed you pretty well out at the mine.”

  Haynes smiled and shrugged. “No matter how good it is, camp food gets old after a while. Sometimes you just don’t want to go to the mess hall. Everybody has food in their rooms.”

  Kate made introductions, and Haynes sat across from Kate, next to Dan. He was clearly thrilled.

  “And you’ll have the kitchen at Auntie Vi’s when you come to town.” At Jim and Dan’s puzzled looks, Kate said, “The Suulutaq Mine just bought Auntie Vi’s B and B for a flophouse when their employees have to overnight in town.”

  Haynes grimaced. “ ‘Flophouse.’ Ouch.” She waited a fraction of a second too long for Kate to retract the term, and looked at Jim to help her out of the awkwardness. “Sergeant Chopin? We’ve met.”

  He nodded, mopping up salt with the last fry. “Your boss introduced us last time I was over to the mine.”

  Haynes looked at Dan. “And you are?”

  “Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian, National Parks Service,” Dan said, “and after that little rodeo, yours to command.”

  Haynes laughed. “I appreciate that. Holly Haynes. I work for Vern Truax over at the Suulutaq. Listen, all joking aside,” Haynes said to Kate, “I’m sorry about that. We tell our employees at orientation that it’s one strike you’re out when it comes to roughhousing the neighbors.” She smiled her thanks when Laurel brought over Haynes’s mug, which she announced as a skinny latte double tall with a shot of hazelnut syrup. She waved away Kate’s money with a “Thanks for the bouncer work.”

  Haynes looked back at Kate. “Most of them listen. Some of them don’t.”

  “Young men and large amounts of money,” Kate said, quoting Jim without attribution. “It’s a combustible combination. What I’d like to know is where they’re getting the four-wheelers to come into town.”

  “So would we,” Haynes said with feeling. She hesitated. “We could restrict all employees to the mine.”

  Dan snorted, Jim smiled, and Kate sighed. “Yeah, you could, but since everyone in town with anything to sell”—she hooked a thumb over her shoulder in Auntie Balasha’s direction—“would kill us both if we did, probably a bad idea. Besides. They’d come in anyway. They’d find a way.”

  Haynes nodded. “They’re a long way from anywhere.”

  “You could go to week and week,” Kate said. “If they were only going to be on shift for seven days, they might not be so antsy to go anywhere in their off time.”

  Haynes shook her head. “Not gonna happen. In fact, when we go into operation we’ll be going to month and month.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment, and next to her she felt Jim let out a long sigh. She opened her eyes again to see Haynes regarding her with sympathy. “Comes down to money,” she said. “Flying people in and out every week gets expensive. Changing shifts once a month makes more fiscal sense. Could have been worse.”

  “How much worse?” Kate said.

  “Head office was making noises about eight-week shifts. Vern managed to talk them down from that.” She shuddered.

  “Speaking of flying,” Dan said, “you’ve pretty much taken over George Air.”

  Haynes looked confused. “Chugach Air Taxi Service,” Kate said.

  Haynes’s brow cleared. “Oh. Well. You won’t let us build a road.” She shrugged. “Anyway. Our guys get desperate enough for a drink or new faces, they’ll hike in if they have to.”

  Dan groaned. “No, please, I don’t need any more of that in my Park.” He told her, naturally with advantage, the story of the hiker on his way to Bright Lake.

  “You just let him go?” Haynes said.

  “He’s a grown man. It’s public land. If he shoots something he shouldn’t, or fishes something he shouldn’t, or builds a cabin where he shouldn’t, then I can do something. But just walking out on it? No law against that. Unfortunately.”

  Jim finished his Coke and shifted into trooper mode. “Ms. Haynes—”

  Haynes smiled at Jim. “Holly, please.”

  “Okay, Holly, we’ve got another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A resident found a pickup abandoned on the road in to his house. Subsequent investigation revealed that the truck was registered to someone we have reason to believe may have been employed at the Suulutaq Mine.”

  Hay
nes stiffened. “Name?”

  “Dewayne Gammons.”

  She frowned, thinking. “The name is familiar.”

  “Someone will be out to the mine tomorrow to ask around. That okay with you?”

  Haynes inclined her head. “Of course.”

  “I appreciate your help.”

  Haynes took Jim’s nod quite correctly, a clear dismissal, and stood up to make her farewells. Both men watched her all the way out the door, Dan with speculation, Jim with a pucker between his eyebrows.

  When the door closed behind her Dan said, “Auntie Vi sold out to the mine?”

  “She didn’t sell out,” Kate said, annoyed, and forgetting for the moment that she’d thought the same thing in so many words that morning.

  “They made her an offer she couldn’t refuse?”

  Kate sighed. “Pretty much.”

  “She headed for a condo in Maui now?”

  “No, she says she’s going to run it for them.”

  Dan snorted. “Yeah, that’ll happen, Vi Moonin taking anybody’s orders.”

  “Ms. Haynes’s bad memory notwithstanding,” Jim said, “Mr. Gammons is, or was, in fact, an employee of the Suulutaq Mine.” He had called the mine on their sat phone from his office sat phone when Kate was down the hill gorging on mac and cheese. “He was hired last year, according to mine superintendent Vernon Truax. He and, Truax says, about four thousand other people responded to an ad that Global Harvest ran in newspapers in Alaska and on the West Coast. Gammons was one of forty-eight hired. That is, of those employees who weren’t hired from the Park.”

  Global Harvest Resources Inc. was losing no opportunity to curry local favor. They’d hired fifty-two Park rats from Ahtna to Cordova to Niniltna last January, keeping most of them on at reduced pay over the remainder of the winter so as to retain their services for when the snow melted in the spring and operation commenced. Not to mention giving them a taste of regular paychecks, something quite out of the ordinary in the Park.

  As Kate kept reminding them and everyone else, they could afford it. She was going to see about Global Harvest affording week-on, week-off shifts, too. Wasn’t much point in being chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association if she couldn’t throw a little weight around for the common good. “What did Gammons do at the mine?”

  “According to Superintendent Truax, he was a roustabout on Gold Shift.”

  “What’s a roustabout?” Dan said. “I got visions of Elvis here.”

  “Again, according to the good superintendent, a roustabout is someone with a strong back who is capable of doing what he’s told.” Jim shrugged. “A little bit of everything, it sounds like, loading and unloading freight, getting it from the airstrip to the correct delivery point, warehouse, administration building, mess hall, dormitories, drilling rigs. They police the site—Superintendent Truax made sure I understood that they’re very big on a clean worksite.”

  “Good for them,” Dan said, “or I’ll be all over their ass.”

  This was blowing smoke with a vengeance. Dan didn’t really have any say about it, since the Suulutaq discovery was located on a series of state leases on property the state of Alaska had retained when the Iqaluk Wildlife Refuge was created around them. As chief ranger of the Park Dan O’Brian was very much a federal employee. Neither Jim nor Kate commented on this logical disconnect, however. Logic wouldn’t stop Ranger Dan if he perceived Global Harvest to be shitting anywhere near his nest.

  “His fellow workers say he was suicidal?”

  “According to Truax, none of them noticed. I don’t think most of them knew he was missing, to tell the truth.” Jim turned to look at Kate. “Tell me something. How many employees do they really need out there right now? To do the job they’re doing at present?”

  “Can’t say for sure, never having started a gold mine up from scratch myself. But, yeah, be my guess there is a lot of make-work going on. They want to keep the Park rats happy.”

  “And the Niniltna Native Association, and their shareholders,” Dan said, “of which, allow me to point out one more time, you happen to be chair of the board of directors.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kate said. Eight months into the job that had been wished on her by four determined aunties, she wasn’t even going to be comfortable with the title.

  “You haven’t come out for or against the mine yet,” Dan said, prodding her. “When’s that gonna happen?”

  “Never, if I have my way,” Kate said under her breath. To Jim she said, “From what I saw there isn’t enough left of Gammons for his best friend to identify.”

  “It is his truck.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “There’s a personnel file, according to Truax, and everyone hired had to take a physical. There’s a blood type. There’s at least enough left of the body to make a match. It doesn’t take much these days.” He leaned back. “Want to take it on for me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Come on, Kate, don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming. All I need is a positive ID on the body and case closed. Easy money for you.”

  “Yeah, but I’d have to go out to the mine.”

  He gave her a look. “You know you’re dying to see what’s happened out there since they started up work again this spring.”

  “You gonna make me notify the next of kin?”

  He winced. “No. That’s the trooper’s job. I’ll make the call. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. “When I was in Ahtna last week, testifying at that rape case? During those same two days Maggie fielded calls for a child sexual assault in Chistona, a domestic violence incident in Red Run, a gang rape in Slana, three break-ins of homesteads along the river, and a murder-suicide on a homestead somewhere between here and Ahtna that I never heard of before and neither one of us can find on a map.” He shook his head. “On top of all that I got fifty wannabe Park rats running around after their shifts thinking up new ways to get into trouble. Where the hell they get all that energy after twelve hours of hard labor is beyond me. I’m up to my ears just trying to keep the peace in the Park. This Gammons is pretty rote, a by-the-book suicide by Alaska, and I’d sure appreciate it, Kate, if you’d dot the i’s and cross the t’s on this one.”

  “Jesus, man,” Dan said, only half kidding, “don’t grovel.”

  “I’m not groveling,” Jim said, patiently for him. “I’m just tired.”

  There was a wealth of weary in his voice. Kate’s heart melted. “Sure. I’ll do it.”

  Jim pulled the folder out of a capacious inner pocket and handed it over. “Thanks. I owe you.”

  “You’ll pay me,” Kate said.

  She was rewarded by what she felt was only a pale simulacrum of his trademark shark’s grin. “In legal tender, or you want to take it out in trade?”

  She shook back feathered wisps of hair from her forehead and gave him a speculative glance from eyes that were momentarily more seductive green than innocent hazel.

  What the hell, a tired shark still had teeth that could later be put to creative use. “How about both?”

  Dan labored to produce an appropriately gagging sound, but what came out was only a long, drawn-out sigh of pure envy.

  They stepped out the door and again had to leap out of the way of another four-wheeler, driven this time by a completely different young man, also a stranger to them, and this one with six friends hanging off the back.

  Dan stared after them. “Either of you guys ever see a movie called Local Hero?”

  Four

  Kate picked up Johnny at the school potluck, and was persuaded without difficulty to give Van a lift as well. As girlfriends went, in respect to the now sixteen-year-old male Kate had taken in tow three years before, Vanessa Cox ranked right up there. A slender, self-possessed brunette, she seemed far older than her years, which might have had something to do with her early orphaning and her later adoption by Park rat re
latives who had turned out to be less than satisfactory guardians.

  Absent any other living relatives, Kate and Jim had pulled all available state strings and custody of Vanessa had been granted to Billy and Annie Mike, who had raised six of their own and recently adopted a half Korean, half African-American baby from Seoul. There was always room for one more at the Mikes’ house. Vanessa, once she was sure she was wanted, had blossomed in Annie’s care from a tomboy in bib overalls and a ponytail to a very attractive young woman dressed in a Realitee cardigan over !iT jeans tucked into a pair of Ugg boots that laced up the front. She was even wearing makeup, although Annie’s fine hand could be detected in how much, amounting to a touch of mascara to emphasize already ridiculously long eyelashes and a gloss of lipstick on a firm mouth notable for its placement over a decidedly square if delicate chin.

  Johnny had noticed. That they were now a couple was taken for granted. Kate had had The Talk with Johnny, and again with him and Vanessa together, both times to his excruciating embarrassment. She’d repeated it a third time when he bought his pickup, this time to his exasperation. “Jeez, Kate, you think I didn’t hear you the first hundred times?”

  “I’ll never be a candidate for World’s Greatest Mom,” Kate said without apology. “How bad a grandmother do you think I’d be?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Dad had The Talk with me when I was ten.”

  “He did?” Kate thought of Jack Morgan, dead almost four years now. First her boss at the Anchorage DA’s office as she became a legend as a sex crimes investigator with a conviction rate record that stood to this day, and then, inevitably, her lover. Jimmy Buffett had cemented the deal, she remembered with a faint smile. They’d first made love after they’d fought over Jimmy moving from acoustic to electric. She was still right, “African Friend” was still Jimmy’s best song to date.

  She waited for the pain to strike at the memory of the tall, ugly man who had known her better than anyone else in the world. Instead, she felt only the sweet sorrow of his absence, and gratitude that she had had him in her life for so many years. He had forgiven her everything, not so much as a look of recrimination over her short-lived affair with Ken Dahl when she returned home to the Park after burning out on the job in Anchorage. That their affair had helped get Ken killed was something for which she still felt a lingering guilt, but Jack had never said a word. Later he had given his life to save her own, a sacrifice he had made willingly, and he had died in her arms with a laugh on his lips.