by Mike Doogan
Kane looked at the old man.
“You tell him what she was up to?”
Big John’s smile disappeared, replaced by a poker face.
“Now, why would I want to do that?”
They sat looking at one another for a few moments.
“You know, you and Moses Wright look a lot alike,” Kane said. “You related?”
“Nope,” the old man said. “People are always asking me about that. Must be that we’re both so godly.”
He laughed at that.
“You got any more questions?”
“Yeah, I do,” Kane said. “Who are you so afraid of?”
“What makes you think I’m afraid?”
“You’re hunkered down here with your cabin buttoned up tight and a gun in your hand. Seems like fear to me.”
The old man shook his head.
“Just being cautious. You never know what you’ll run into out here in rural Alaska. Now, I think it’s time you was going.”
“I’m not done,” the detective said. “You think one of your sons had anything to do with Faith’s disappearance?”
Big John laughed at that.
“Not likely. My oldest boy don’t have the backbone, and his brother was in love with the little whore. She probably took off somewhere like they do. Or one of her clients wouldn’t take no for an answer. Or maybe them Angels found out what she was up to and is punishing her some way. Ain’t nobody more ruthless than a righteous man with a Bible in his hand.”
“You mean, like Moses Wright? Why would he hurt her? She’s his granddaughter.”
“I ain’t saying it was the old fraud,” Big John said, “or any other one of ’em. I’m just saying all the sin in these parts ain’t sitting here in this room. Now, if you’re finished . . .”
Kane nodded and started to get up.
“Wait a second,” the old man said. “Ain’t you going to ask me about the robbery?”
“What robbery?” Kane said.
Big John just smiled.
“You mean the mine payroll?” Kane asked. “I’m not investigating that.”
“That’s not what I heard,” the old man said. “I heard you was one of the first on the scene and was kind of running things.”
Kane nodded.
“That’s right as far as it goes,” he said. “But if you know all that, you should know that a couple of trooper investigators showed up and took over. Told me to butt out.”
Big John shook his head.
“Nope, I never heard that part. But if you’re saying it, it must be true. You cop types never lie, right?”
“You’re a fine one to talk. I’ve been lied to more times than I can count, and by better liars than you. I figure you haven’t said two true words since I came in here.”
The old man gave him a sarcastic smile.
“Then I don’t see any more reason we should be talking,” he said. “Do you?”
“Guess not,” Kane said.
He put his palms on the chair’s arms and levered himself to his feet. The gun barrel wavered as Big John started to do the same. Kane dove at him. The .45 went off, the bullet going God knew where. Kane got his hands on the old man’s wrists and rolled off the chair, bringing the old man with him. When they stopped rolling, Kane was sitting on Big John’s chest, pinning his arms to the floor. The old man threw his head to the right and tried to bite the hand that held the gun down. Kane let go of Big John’s empty hand and clipped him on the jaw.
“Knock it off,” he growled, “or the next punch puts you out. Let go of the gun.”
The look the old man gave Kane was feral and full of hate. But he gradually relaxed his grip on the .45. Kane took the gun, rose, stuck it in his belt, and offered Big John a hand. As the old man reached his feet, he lunged at Kane and tried to knee him. Kane turned his leg and took the knee on his thigh, then pivoted back, using his momentum to put some zip into the slap he landed on the side of Big John’s head.
The old man staggered back a couple of steps and fell back into the chair. Kane was right on top of him when he pulled a small-caliber automatic from under the chair cushion. The detective swiped the gun away and landed a short, sharp punch to the old man’s jaw. Big John’s body went slack, but Kane wasn’t taking any chances. He dragged the old man to the middle of the floor, away from any convenient hidey-holes.
A shotgun blast blew the front door open and Slade came through like he was storming Omaha Beach. Kane stuck his hands straight up in the air.
“Just be calm,” he said. “It’s all over.”
The light went out of Slade’s eyes, and he lowered the shotgun’s barrel.
“I heard the shot,” he said after he’d collected himself. “I was all the way around at the back of the house. I thought maybe something had happened.”
Then he smiled.
“Heard gunfire,” he said. “Probable cause.”
“You’re learning,” Kane said. “Now why don’t you keep an eye on this fellow while I conduct an unofficial, unrecorded search of this place? And be careful. The old boy is dangerous as a wolverine.”
Kane started at the top, in the A-frame’s loft, where he found nothing but an impressive number of firearms, boxes of ammo, and some thoroughly illegal explosive devices.
“Looks like Big John here is prepared to fight World War Three,” he said to Slade as he came down the steep stairway. He walked to the back of the cabin. As he walked past the old man, he stepped carefully on one of his fingers. The old man jerked his hand away and cursed.
“Ah, awake, are we?” Kane said. “How nice. Perhaps you could direct me to your videotape collection. And, of course, the money from the payroll robbery.”
The old man cursed Kane, steadily and inventively.
“You can’t search my place,” he said when he’d finished. “You got no warrant.”
“Guess again, old-timer,” Kane said. “I’m not a cop. I don’t need a warrant. And by shooting at me, you gave Trooper Slade here probable cause to enter your house. And once he’s in, well, there’s no telling what he might see right out in plain sight. Now, if you’d prefer to answer a few questions, we wouldn’t have to go through this song and dance.”
Big John told Kane to do something both obscene and improbable.
Kane went through the ground floor of the house quickly. He found a pile of dirty magazines in the old man’s bedroom, and in a drawer some notes in block letters. “Justice is coming,” one said. “Prepare to die,” said the other. The other two bedrooms, which Kane assumed belonged to Big John’s sons, yielded nothing of interest.
When he was finished, Kane got a broom from the kitchen and started tapping the floor and interior walls. When he’d finished every place else, he went back to the living room, where Big John sat on the floor with his arms on his knees and Slade leaned against a wall with his issue sidearm trained on the old man.
“That’s quite a collection of reading material in your bedroom,” Kane said. “And you such an old man. Shame.”
Big John responded with a snarl.
Kane turned to Slade.
“At least I found out why the old guy is holed up here,” he said, handing him the notes.
Turning to Big John, he said, “Who’s been threatening you?”
The old man glowered at him and said nothing.
“Must have been somebody pretty scary to make you hide out like this,” Kane said.
“Ain’t nobody scares me,” Big John said.
Kane gave the old man a considering look.
“I guess that’s why you decided to go for the mine payroll now,” he said. “You wanted one last score before you cleared out, and you couldn’t wait because you were afraid whoever was after you might get you. Who is it?”
The old man sat there mute.
“Okay,” Kane said to Slade, “I’m going to finish checking this room, then we’ll take him in for assault and sweat him.”
The broom made a hollow sound where a couple of the walls
came together. Kane set the broom down and walked back to look at the kitchen, then came into the living room with a smile on his face.
“You know,” he said to the old man, “that’s pretty good. I suppose that if someone noticed that the kitchen stopped a couple of feet short of square, they’d just think it was the pipe wall. But I’m thinking something different.”
He began pressing on the paneling of the hollow-sounding wall. After several attempts, a section of the paneling popped loose and swung open. Kane groped around until he found the pull chain for an overhead light.
He walked in and looked around. The room was the size of a good-sized closet and was lined with wooden shelves. The shelves held all sorts of things, including videotapes and a couple of plastic freezer bags containing money. On the floor of the room sat a half dozen bank bags.
“I expect that’s the mine payroll,” he said.
He turned to find Slade looking in at him.
“Aw, hell,” Kane said. Pulling Big John’s .45 from his belt, he stepped to the door and looked out. Big John was sitting on the floor next to an end table with a big revolver in his hand.
“Drop it, old man,” he said.
Big John fired, the big handgun sounding like a cannon. The bullet bit splinters out of the doorframe next to Kane’s head. Kane pointed the .45 and fired at the old man’s shoulder. The gun roared and a red spot appeared on Big John’s upper arm. He grunted and flinched. His second bullet crashed into the wall about halfway between Kane and the trooper. As Kane aimed again, Slade began firing, the shots coming as fast as he could pull the trigger. His bullets drove the old man across the room and flat onto his back. His weapon clicked and clicked again as he pulled the trigger after his magazine was empty.
“Get a grip!” Kane barked. He walked over to the old man, looked, and turned away without even taking his pulse. Slade’s bullets had made a pulp of the old man’s chest.
“That’s great,” Kane said. “Just fucking great. You couldn’t keep an eye on one old man and then you had to shoot him to pieces. Christ almighty. I still had plenty of questions to ask him.”
“It was a firefight,” Slade said. “They teach you in a firefight to keep shooting until the other guy can’t.”
“It was only a firefight because you took your eyes off your prisoner,” Kane said.
He wanted to hit somebody, but there was really nobody to hit. The old man was a corpse, and the trooper had just made a young man’s mistake.
He took several deep breaths.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “You take my truck and go to the mine and get the investigators. I’ll deal with the videotapes and see if there’s anything here that will help tell me where Faith Wright has gone. Stick to the truth. We came out here to question Big John about Faith. I went in while you waited. You heard a shot and busted in. We were questioning Big John when I found this room. He got his hands on a gun and we shot it out. Tell them we found the mine payroll, and that we are as surprised as they are. That way we don’t have to explain looking for any tapes.”
Slade started to say something, but Kane waved it away.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “Just go. You killed my best lead to Faith Wright because you underestimated an old man and took your eye off the ball. So I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
The trooper nodded and left the room. A minute later, Kane heard his truck start, back around, and drive off. He set the .45 down and walked to one of the windows, opening the shutters to look out at the monochromatic landscape. He took deep breaths and felt his pulse slow.
I really like this stuff, he thought with something like surprise. Even getting shot at. Maybe especially getting shot at. I like the matching wits and following clues and figuring things out. Maybe being a private eye wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Then, after taking one more look at Big John’s mortal remains, he put his gun away and got to work.
24
For they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not me, saith the Lord.
JEREMIAH 9:3
ON THE DRIVE TO FAIRBANKS, KANE TRIED TO FORGET the events of the previous two days.
There was a lot to forget. He’d had time before the troopers showed up to fast-forward through Big John’s tape collection, finding the original tapes of Simms and Slade and selecting another that featured Richardson, the mine manager. He’d watched Slade’s all the way through at regular speed, then one part of it several times. Then he’d sat, staring into nothing for several minutes.
“God damn it,” he’d said at last. “God damn it, God damn it, God damn it.”
He’d stowed the tapes he was keeping in the inside pockets of his parka and returned the rest to the shelves. He couldn’t do anything about the tapes that were left. There were too many to hide. Besides, when the troopers questioned Little John, he’d tell them about the tapes. It would look pretty suspicious if they’d all just vanished.
So lots of tapes remained of Faith at work. Kane knew someone would copy a tape or two, and they’d make the rounds at cop stag parties and poker games for years to come. The cop world would know Faith as an eager whore, and nothing more.
He knew, too, that word of what Faith had been doing would leak out, which meant he was obligated to tell her father before he heard it on the small-town telegraph. That had been an encounter Kane never wanted to repeat. The blood had drained out of Thomas Wright’s face, leaving him pale as the sheets of paper on his desk, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth, saying, “I don’t believe it,” over and over again. Kane had finally gone in search of help, and when he’d brought the two middle-aged ladies who had been at his table at dinner back to Wright’s office, one of them had shot him a baffled look and spat, “What have you done?” He’d made a run for it, and that was the last he’d seen of Wright.
Word of Thomas Wright’s pain got out, of course. Many Rejoice residents refused to speak to him after that. When he tried to ask Moses Wright some questions, the old man held up a cross and yelled at him to leave, like he was driving out a demon. Kane’s appeal for information at that evening’s gathering was greeted by mutters or stony silence. The few who did talk had no idea what might have caused Faith to think she’d been ruined.
Everything else was a collection of negatives. The troopers’ search of Big John’s cabin had found no clue to Faith’s whereabouts. They’d held on to Little John for a while, under the theory that his father couldn’t have pulled the robbery solo. But without any evidence tying him to the crime, all he had to do was keep quiet, and he did, about Faith as well as the robbery. So they’d let him go. They might charge him with running a house of prostitution, not much of a charge all things considered. The trooper investigators were pissed off about the outcome.
“If you assholes had brought us in on this when you should have, the old man would still be alive, and we’d have been able to make a case,” Sam had shouted at Kane and Slade.
“Wanted that reward too bad, huh, Kane?” Harry had sneered, and Kane was too depressed to snarl at him.
Even Slade was mad at Kane. The trooper wanted the original videotape of himself and the two women, but Kane wouldn’t give it up. When Slade demanded to know why, Kane lied and said that he still wasn’t sure what Slade’s role had been in all this, and he wasn’t about to hand over his leverage until he was. After he’d said that, he’d thought he was going to have to fight the big trooper.
After two days of nothing but hostility, Kane was anxious to get some space between himself and the residents of Rejoice and Devil’s Toe, so anxious that he pulled out at four a.m., even though the errand that took him north and west was a long shot. He hoped, too, that the drive would help erase the images from the videotape that kept running through his mind like they were on a loop.
He played nothing but the blues on the four-hour drive through the darkness, the music matching his mood and the cold, pitiless land he drove through. The highway to
ok him past Eielson Air Force Base, through North Pole, then into downtown Fairbanks, a small cluster of buildings on both banks of the Chena River.
Kane stopped there, at the post office, where he put all of the videotapes but one in a box and mailed them to himself in Anchorage. Then he walked a few blocks to a mean-looking bar on Second Avenue. Good thing the bars open early here, he thought, and ordered a shot and a beer.
He sat looking at them for a while, debating the wisdom of drinking them. There was no wisdom in doing that, he knew, but it wasn’t wisdom he was after. So he downed the shot and chased it with beer.
His impulse was to stay and drink until he couldn’t remember Faith or Laurie, until he couldn’t remember Charlie Simms or Lester Logan or Big John lying dead, until he couldn’t remember his time in prison and the lack of grace in the world, until he couldn’t remember anything, especially Ruth Hunt. All that made several more drinks irresistible, but later, he decided. He had work to do. Work was all he had now, so it had better be enough. He forced himself back out into his truck and drove up toward the university with the alcohol rolling around in his empty stomach like liquid fire.
The university sat on a hill above the Chena, west of town. Following the directions he’d gotten off Slade’s computer, Kane took the road that ran across the base of the hill, then past a golf course. About two miles past the campus, he took a left onto a road through the trees, then another left. He rolled up a short hill to a big house that sat in a clearing overlooking a creek valley. His knock was answered by a young man with a cereal bowl in his hand. He wore a pair of blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts and nothing else.
“Yeah?” the young man said.
“I’m looking for Feather Boyette,” Kane said.
“Got no Feather Boyette,” the young man said. “Got a Feather Collins. She owns the place.”
“I’d like to talk to her, then,” Kane said.
“Step in, mister,” the young man said, “it’s goddamn cold with the door open.”
Kane stepped in. He found himself in a big, open room with a kitchen along the back and a set of stairs leading up to a railing-lined walkway that gave access to several doors.