Restless in the Grave (15 page)

She preempted that decision by calling him way too early the following morning.

Eleven

JANUARY 19, VERY EARLY IN THE MORNING

Newenham

Mostly, Kate was pissed off.

Stuffed in a bag, for chrissake, and dumped into a very small space, and then her dog dumped in on top of her. It was downright embarrassing, was what it was. What would Spenser say?

“Mutt,” she said, because Mutt’s howling was starting to hurt her ears. The bag muffled her voice. “Mutt! Shut up!”

The howl died to a low, menacing growl.

“Knock it off,” Kate said.

The growl stopped, possibly because Kate’s growl was meaner than Mutt’s.

Possibly. Or possibly because Mutt was just biding her time until they got out of another fine mess Kate had gotten them into to speak her mind fully.

Kate took stock. She was in a bag. A stuff bag? No, too big. A gear bag, used to stow lines and nets and fishing gear of every kind, more likely.

The top of her head was jammed against a flat surface, and she could feel the opposite surface against the toes of her sneakers. Her knees were bent to fit. She had a little wriggle room from side to side but not much, especially not when Mutt was factored in.

All 140 pounds of the half wolf–half husky were lying on top of her, and it was starting to get hot and stuffy inside the gear bag. Kate nudged Mutt. “Can you scootch over just a bit, girl? Come on, just a little bit.”

She pushed and cajoled and bullied and finally got her fingers beneath the edge of the bag and managed to struggle free. Her face was pressed up against Mutt’s, to the point that she was breathing in Mutt’s exhale.

The pencil flash was still in her pocket. She fished it out and turned it on.

Quarters were too close for her to get her arm up but she could shine it around the inside of their cell with her hand held down at her hip. At first all she could see was gray hair, bared teeth, and one enormous yellow eye. Beyond that were flat white plastic surfaces intersecting at right angles. They were inside a rectangular box of some kind.

Mutt whined. It was an interrogatory whine, but it was also uncharacteristically tentative. Mutt was unhappy.

“It’s okay, girl,” Kate said, although she wasn’t entirely sure that it was. She was also pretty sure that she shouldn’t waste oxygen talking.

Because if she was right, they were inside the chest freezer in the apartment over the garage, and it wouldn’t be long before they ran out of air.

She wriggled around some more, with some yelps of protest from Mutt when Kate’s knee hit a soft spot or Kate’s foot stepped on her toes, but eventually Kate got her legs together to kick at what gravity informed her was the lid of the freezer.

It bounced open a crack and held, which was a great relief in some respects—they wouldn’t run out of air so long as her legs had the strength to hold the door open—but depressing in others—whoever had bagged them must have propped something against the lid to hold it down.

Damn lucky there had been no lock on this freezer. Kate had one on hers at home because it sat out on the back porch, and anyone—read Willard Shugak—could saunter by and make off with a moose backstrap or a king salmon filet. Kate did not hold with that, especially when she had done the catching and cleaning and butchering and packing.

She pulled herself up with a jerk. No time to let her mind wander. What was keeping the lid shut? She thought about what else was in the apartment. Bed, chairs, end table. They could have piled some furniture on the lid, weighing it down. But they would have slid when she popped the lid, and she hadn’t heard the sound of anything sliding.

Wait a minute. In the space between the end of the freezer and the wall there had been some lengths of two-by-fours. Left over from the remodel, Tina had said. Of course. Easy enough for someone to slam down the lid and jam one of the two-by-fours between the wall and the lid of the freezer.

She kicked the lid again. Again a brief, blessed bit of fresh air, again the lid snapped right back down.

Had they had time to nail the ends down? Things had gotten a little confused there for a bit. Kate had no real recollection of the sounds of a hammer. Maybe there had been nails already in the two-by-four. Convenient.

Kate was pretty strong, but she might not be strong enough to kick loose a two-by-four.

What was she strong enough for?

Her cell phone was in the pocket of her jeans. With more wriggling, yelping, and cursing, she managed to get it out, the whole time mortally afraid she would drop it. It was so hot in the small enclosed space that she was sweating freely, and both she and Mutt were breathing too fast. She braced her butt against the bottom of the freezer and jammed both feet against the freezer lid, cracking it open that fraction of an inch. It was awkward and her muscles strained at the effort because she didn’t have enough room to straighten her legs and lock her knees. The resulting tiny bit of air was more than worth it, though.

She wedged her arm up to where she could see the face of her phone, and pressed the
ON
button.

One bar. Figured. Could have been
NO SERVICE
, though. She pressed
1
.

By a miracle the phone at the other end rang, and rang again.

The third ring was interrupted by an angry male in full cry. “Maggie, whoever went in the ditch at this hour can fucking well wait until I’ve had some more sleep!”

“It’s me,” Kate said.

“Oh.” A brief pause. “Sorry.”

“Lots of 911 calls?”

“You could say that.” She heard him roll over and yawn. “What’s up?”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” Kate said. “I’m locked inside a chest freezer.”

A brief silence. “I beg your pardon?”

Kate repeated herself, and waited.

When next he spoke, Jim sounded resigned. “You’re not kidding, are you.”

“Alas,” Kate said, “no, I am not.” It was getting hot inside the freezer. Next to her, Mutt, hearing the voice of her personal god, whined loudly enough to be heard in Niniltna without benefit of phone.

“Anybody in there with you?”

“Just Mutt,” she said.

“You really aren’t kidding,” he said. “How long have you been in there?”

“Hard to tell,” Kate said, “things got somewhat confused. Maybe five minutes.”

“Really,” Jim said. “How is it you are still breathing?”

“I’ve managed to crack the lid,” Kate said. “As long as my gluteus maximus holds up we’re okay.”

“Several responses fairly leap to mind.”

“You may compliment me on my very fine ass when I get home.”

“Deal. Shall I call Newenham 911? Believe me, I’d enjoy that.”

“No, I got a plan.”

“What kind of a plan?”

“An effective one, I hope. But if I don’t call back in five minutes, send in the marines.”

She turned off the phone and wriggled around until she could get it back into her pocket. She put her arms around Mutt and pulled her as close as possible. Mutt gave something approaching a squeal. “Hang on, girl,” she said, and started rocking the two of them back and forth. After a couple of rocks she got some momentum going and they started hitting the sides of the freezer hard.

At first the freezer barely moved, and Kate despaired. Freezers weren’t that heavy, an airtight plastic container and some refrigeration coils, this shouldn’t be that hard.

She kept it up. The rocking motion gathered its own momentum. Pretty soon, the chest freezer began to rock, too.

Mutt didn’t fight her but she wasn’t happy, either, and she said so by yipping in Kate’s ear, conveniently located right next to Mutt’s muzzle and making Kate’s head ring most unpleasantly. She held on and kept rocking, working up her very own personal free surface effect, until the two of them were slamming into the sides of the freezer,
THUD
-thud,
THUD
-thud,
THUD
-thud.

After what seemed like an hour but was probably only sixty seconds, the freezer lifted up just a tiny bit, only to fall back when its back feet hit the wall. But Kate had felt it and she redoubled their efforts, slamming against the side of the freezer harder and harder and harder, walking the freezer across the floor of the apartment, away from the wall a micrometer at a time, until the freezer was far enough away from the wall that the back feet cleared it when their combined weights slammed into the side and it toppled over on its side with a resounding crash.

Kate and Mutt spilled out between where the open lid of the freezer was propped open against the floor and the freezer itself, and lay prone for some moments, taking in air in great, thankful gulps.

When she felt like she could make it all the way there, Kate crawled to the pole lamp next to the recliner and turned it on. She took her first close look at the chest freezer. Their rocking had walked it away from the wall a good twelve inches before the bottom back of the freezer had cleared the wall. The Sheetrock on the wall showed multiple horizontal impressions where the freezer had struck.

“Good thing Tina didn’t make me pay a security deposit,” Kate said, a little light-headed.

Mutt got to her feet and shook herself all over, rearranging every hair back into its proper place. She looked outraged and indignant, and she looked at Kate as if to say,
Well?

“Thank god there was linoleum on the floor,” Kate told her. “We’d never have done it on wall-to-wall carpeting.”

Mutt did not feel that this was an adequate response.

Kate called Jim. “We’re out, we’re okay, stand down.”

She hung up and surveyed the mess, her right shoulder and hip and knee warning of spectacular bruises on their way.

She investigated and sure enough found a length of two-by-four on the floor between the wall and the freezer. No nails, but there was a corresponding dimple on the lid of the freezer, and another on the wall in back of the freezer, enough to keep the two-by-four from skidding. Or maybe she just hadn’t kicked hard enough.

“We haven’t even been here twenty-four hours,” she said. “That’s a record for inciting someone into assault and battery.”

The once spare, neat apartment now looked like a disaster area. The bed had been ripped apart, the mattress lying catawampus, half on the box springs, half on the floor. All the cabinets in the little kitchen stood open, everything in them scattered across the counter, the table, and the floor. Kate’s bag had been opened and dumped, and her belongings were everywhere.

“Even for us,” Kate said a little plaintively.

For a toss of this magnitude, taking a knife to the mattress and the recliner would have been at minimum the logical next step, but perhaps her walking in the door had interrupted them.

She looked at her phone. It was a little after 4
A.M
. At a rough estimate, she and Mutt had been in the freezer for ten, fifteen minutes at most.

She looked around the apartment. This had taken longer than fifteen minutes. Which meant she and Mutt had walked in in mid-rampage, and that said rampagers had fled immediately after said rampagers’ attempt to turn Kate and Mutt into next winter’s entrées.

She heard a whine and looked around. Mutt was standing at the door, her nose pressed up against the crack. “They’re long gone, girl,” she said, but she opened the door. Mutt was out of it like an arrow, shooting down the stairs and quartering the area around the garage. If there was any scent to be picked up, at least Mutt would recognize it again. Kate propped the door open a crack against Mutt’s return and started cleaning up.

It was well past five when she was done, and in the process she had had some interesting thoughts, although it was early days for any conclusions.

She hadn’t been in town for twenty-four hours. It seemed unlikely that she’d been made in that short a time. Not impossible, but unlikely. She—and Mutt—were fairly well known in other parts of Alaska.

There were three people in town who did know who she was. Liam Campbell. Jo Dunaway. Bill Billington.

Campbell and Billington she discounted immediately. Dunaway took a little longer, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine Dunaway hiring a couple of toughs even to satisfy her reporter’s curiosity as to what Kate was doing in town.

If all three of them were out, then either someone else had made her, or …

She paused in the act of sweeping creamer into the dustpan.

Or this toss had nothing to do with her.

If it wasn’t about her, who was it about?

She boiled water and made some chamomile tea sweetened with honey, both found in the cupboard. The tea tasted just about as bad as one might expect of herbs steeped in hot water. She wondered if Newenham had a coffee roaster, or an espresso stand, or at the very least imported Kaladi Brothers from Anchorage. It was probably too much to hope for Captain’s Coffee from Homer. She added more honey on the theory that it couldn’t make it any worse and sat down in the recliner. She put up the footrest. She thought she deserved it.

This apartment, according to Tina Grant, had been built for the oldest daughter of the house, Irene, the woman in the photograph on the hall table. The soldier killed in action in Afghanistan. What was it Tina had said?
We had it finished off so my daughter would have a little privacy when she came home on leave.

Had Irene ever stayed in this apartment? Kate thought not. It had seemed such a sterile place when she first walked in—no plants, no photos, no personal possessions of any kind. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find the toilet seat sealed with a paper band.

But the garage itself had been around for a while, longer than that model of the antebellum South next door, certainly. Someone else could have hidden something here, and perhaps have failed to recover it before the space was remodeled into the apartment.

Kate put down her tea and spent the next half hour going over every surface in the room, checking for hidden squares in the linoleum floor, hollow spaces in the walls, movable tiles in the ceiling that might lift up and reveal something squirreled away. She looked inside all the cupboards, knocking against the bottoms and sides, and checked the bottoms of all the drawers. She checked to see if the medicine cabinet in the bathroom came out of the wall, a dodge she’d seen on the job in Anchorage with the DA’s office many years ago.