a Night Too Dark (2010) (7 page)

“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 relatives 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 shortlived 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.
And he had given her Johnny. She looked at his son, boding to be as tall, and if not quite as ugly then as memorable in feature and as
independent in personality. “I’m not a mommy,” she’d told Jack a long time ago, and he’d saddled her with a twelve-year-old son in response.
Well, she still wasn’t a mommy. They were friends, her and the kid. She was older and tougher so she could make what she said stick, for now. Just because she had resorted to blackmail to keep his mother from taking him away didn’t mean anything. Except that she loved him, first for his father’s sake and now for his own.
Johnny’s a gift
, she’d told Old Sam, and it was the simple truth. He was a smart, funny kid who had grown into a young man of such promise it almost hurt her eyes to look at him. After a lifetime spent in a determined search for independence, she now had a hostage to fortune.
Jack had to be laughing his ass off somewhere. Of course he’d had The Talk with Johnny at age ten. He would probably have had it with him at age six if he hadn’t recoiled from the need to use pictures to make himself understood.
Today, Van and Johnny slid into the cab of the four-wheel-drive Ford Ranger XL long-bed Super Cab Kate had received as a fee for babysitting Mandy Baker’s Beacon Hill parents during their one and only visit to the Park. Mutt already took up a large portion of the bench seat but they managed to pull the door shut on the mashup.
Four years ago, the truck had been bright red and brand-new, but there had been a series of unfortunate encounters with a Super Cub, a grizzly, and a Park rat with a .30-06, so the bloom was rather off the pickup rose. The previous owner of the truck was crossing the parking lot outside the school, and Kate rolled down her window. “Hey, Mandy.”
“Hey, Kate. Hey, Mutt.” This as Mutt peered around Kate, ears pricked forward. “Hey, kids.” Mandy gave the pickup the once-over, followed by a mournful shake of her head and the rote comment. “My poor baby.”
Kate gave the rote response. “Takes a licking, keeps on ticking. How’s your folks?”
“Good. They might come up again this year.” Mandy smiled. “Seems they know some of the members of the board of GHRI.”
Mandy Baker, known to the dog mushing world as the Brahmin Bullet, the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third to win the Yukon Quest, was now working as the dedicated Alaskan spokesperson for the Suulutaq Mine, at a hefty salary and with generous stock options that earned an even more generous amount of shares in Global Harvest Resources Inc.
“Be good to see them again,” Kate said, and it wasn’t a polite lie. Mandy’s Boston Brahmin parents had turned out to be something of a surprise to everyone concerned, including themselves. She nodded at the school. “You signing up to get your GED?”
“Very funny,” Mandy said.
“I met your staff geologist today.”
“Holly Haynes?”
“Yeah, first she bought Auntie Vi’s B and B for the mine.”
Mandy looked unsurprised. “They’ve been talking about the need for a place. I told them Auntie Vi’s B and B was the only suitable house in Niniltna for what they needed.”
“And then she helped me break up a knife fight in the Riverside Café between a couple of your other employees.”
Mandy swore under her breath.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Kate said.
Mandy heard the bite in Kate’s voice and gave her a sharp look.
On a gruesome day the previous winter, Global Harvest’s former representative to the Park had met an end that was still discussed over the bar at Bernie’s with fascination, revulsion, and not a little awe. Up until that day, Mandy Baker had been a musher and a damn good one, but Iditarod and Yukon Quest purses went only so far, and besides she wasn’t placing in the money as regularly as she once had.
Previously a trust fund had made up the difference, but in the current depression, with a hundred dogs to feed and vet bills and a live-in boyfriend who needed the occasional bail money, it didn’t go as far as it once had, either. She could have asked her parents for a loan on her inheritance, which would be considerable, but Mandy was a proud soul who didn’t like to ask anybody for anything. The only solution to the bills piling up on her kitchen table was to get a job.
She was probably Kate’s oldest friend in the Park, after Bobby Clark. And she was Global Harvest’s new representative to the Park.
“So, what were you doing at the school?” Kate said.
Mandy nodded at Johnny and Van. “I’ll let them tell you about it. See you later.”
She slopped through the mud to a Ford Explorer with the now familiar sunrise-over-the-Quilaks logo on the side and drove off.
Kate put the Ranger in gear. “What’s she talking about?”
Van was tucked beneath Johnny’s arm. They exchanged glances. “Mandy made a speech at the potluck. The mine’s offering summer jobs to kids sixteen and older.”
“Really,” Kate said. “What kind of jobs?”
“Roustabout.”
Kate thought back to Jim’s definition of roustabout. “What would you be doing, exactly?”
“Picking up trash,” Johnny said.
“Washing dishes or making beds,” Van said.
“Scrubbing pots.”
“Janitor work.”
“Typing and filing.”
“Oh.” They bumped over a section of washboard without anyone being ejected out of the pickup, a minor triumph in the days between breakup and summer. “So the job’s just for the summer?”
“Yeah.”
“Hourly?”
“Yeah.”
“Minimum wage?”
“Yeah, but anything over eight hours is time and a half, and holidays are double time.”
Federal minimum wage was currently $6.55 an hour. Time and a half would be $9.83. They were both sixteen. Kate didn’t know if state law required them to be eighteen to work overtime. She wasn’t sure if the state was geared up yet to send a labor inspector out to the Suulutaq, though, and it wasn’t like Johnny and Van didn’t know what a long day was like. “What’s the shift?”
“Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, two weeks on, two weeks off. But Mandy says depending on how good we are and what needs to be done, there’s the possibility we could work back-to-back shifts straight through the summer.”
Kate ran a rapid mental calculation. Twelve hours times seven days equaled eighty-four. Forty hours times $6.55 was only $262, but forty-four hours times $9.83 was $432.52. “Almost seven hundred dollars a week total,” she said out loud. Twenty-eight hundred a month. Even if you figured a third for taxes, it was still a fortune to a teenager. Especially one who lived in the Park, and with the economy in the toilet it looked like a king’s ransom. Kate had been squirreling away a quarter of every paycheck into Johnny’s college fund but this would at the very least pay for textbooks.
“What about crewing on the
Freya
?” she said.
Johnny looked uncomfortable. “Do you think Old Sam will mind much?”
“He hates breaking in new help,” she said. It was true. It was also true that Old Sam had hired Johnny in the first place so he could keep Kate on as a deckhand. At least at first. However, Johnny had proved himself, both as a quick learner and as remarkably reliable for one of whom Old Sam referred to as the hormonally challenged.
“It’s a lot of money, Kate.”
Given the dismal predictions for this year’s salmon run, it was probably more than he’d make on the
Freya
.
But money wasn’t his only consideration, and maybe not even his first consideration. Kate watched Johnny and Van exchange another glance, and the un spoken thought was mutual and obvious. If they both got jobs at the mine, they could be together over the summer. Kate wondered how good an idea that was.
Well, at some point, you had to trust that you’d raised them right, and if she had little confidence in her own embryonic parenting skills she had a great deal of faith in Annie Mike’s. Nevertheless, she saw no harm in letting them sell her on the idea. Kate also had great faith in the child-rearing instincts of Lazarus Long, who had famously said, “Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
“They’re going to hire the Grosdidier brothers to teach an EMT class so we can respond to emergencies,” Van said.
“And the culinary union is going to send in chefs from Anchorage to teach institutional cooking,” Johnny said.
“And we get paid to take the classes,” Van said. “It’d be part of our job.”
GHRI going after the next generation with a vengeance. Still, Kate couldn’t detect a flaw in the offer of free education. She pulled into Annie Mike’s driveway and they trooped inside. Annie had coffee and lemon sugar cookies waiting.
Annie already knew about Auntie Vi selling the B and B, so Kate favored her with a description of her heroic disruption of the knife fight in the Riverside Café, and Annie retaliated with an eyewitness account of Bonnie Jeppsen and Suzy Moonin bitch-slapping each other around the post office, as near as anyone could make out just for the fun of it.
“Well, at least that won’t be Suulutaq related,” Kate said. “Annie, you hear about these summer jobs the mine’s offering the kids?”
Annie nodded, her face placid and calm as ever. A short, plump woman with straight brown hair that fell in ordered strands from a side part to a pudgy chin and brown eyes that remained bland in expression no matter what the provocation, Annie dressed in Jelly Belly–colored polyester pantsuits that Dinah Clark freely speculated she had bought a gross of straight off the rack at JCPenney in 1963. No one disagreed, and besides, Annie’s rainbow figure was a welcome sight in the middle of a dark Alaskan winter. Her style, however retro, most decidedly did not make her a figure of fun.
Kate thought of Annie Mike as an auntie-in-waiting, although given recent history she wasn’t altogether sure Annie would be flattered at the comparison. Annie Mike was half Athabascan and half Aleut, with some Swedish thrown in from a Cordova connection and a rumor of African-American on her mother’s side. This was attributed to Hell Roaring Mike Healy, who had scattered enough seed up and down the Alaskan coast in his time to have been the progenitor of all the residents of Ahtna, with maybe Fairbanks thrown in for good measure. It was indisputable that Annie was the granddaughter of one tribal chief and the widow of another, and she had served as secretary-treasurer of the Niniltna Native Association since its creation. Kate, less than nine months in office after succeeding Billy Mike as the chairman of the board of directors, had come to regard Annie as her lodestone. She relied on her for Annie’s institutional knowledge, which was second to the knowledge of no other shareholder. That bland expression and that blinding rainbow attire were misdirection, camouflage to distract attention from the sharp intelligence, the acute perception, and the unshakeable integrity that was the woman beneath. If Annie said something was okay, Kate had learned that it indisputably was.
Kate licked sugar from her fingers and waited for judgment to be rendered. Johnny and Van, well aware of the esteem in which Annie Mike was held by her tribe, in the Park and not least by Kate Shugak, waited, too, with some anxiety.
Annie frowned and the kids looked at first dismayed and then ready to argue, but Kate knew from experience that the frown was more an expression of deep thought than of disapproval. “I wish they’d proposed it to the board before they’d announced it to the kids,” she said.
“That was my first thought as well,” Kate said. She meditated on her coffee. “However, I see their point in taking it directly to the kids themselves. For one thing, not everyone enrolled in Niniltna High School is a Niniltna Native Association shareholder.”
Annie nodded. “They want to make the offer to everyone, not just Natives.”