Restless in the Grave (31 page)

Hands grabbed her shoulders and her feet. She swung back and then forward and the hands let go at the end of the forward arc and she sailed through the air and gravity kicked in and she landed in the Dumpster with a disgusting, squashy-sounding splat.

The lid slammed down on top of her. Footsteps, running very fast. The distant sound of an engine starting and moving away in first gear with the gas pedal all the way down.

Kate wasn’t in any shape to pay attention. She landed hard, which jolted her diaphragm out of its stasis. She inhaled, an enormous gulp of air, feeding her starved alveoli.

That was good.

But along with the air came the smell of three days’-worth of garbage, the remnants of burgers and fries and shakes and uneaten maraschino cherries, everything out of the bar, kitchen and bathroom garbage cans, paper towels and used Kleenex, not mention used condoms from assignations consummated in the parking lot, all of it sitting there beneath her, fermenting.

She sucked it all in, for the moment just grateful to be breathing again.

Twenty-two

JANUARY 21

Newenham

The lid flew back. “Climbing out of there any time soon?” an irascible voice said. “Or were you thinking of spending the night?”

For a split second she thought she was hearing the voice of Old Sam.

“Gimmee.”

She focused and saw a hand stretched out to her in the darkness. Mustering up the initiative from somewhere she grasped it. It pulled her over on her front and began a steady tug, sliding her through and over wine boxes, squashed beer cans, slimy lettuce leaves, and rotting tomato tops until she could reach the side of the Dumpster with her other hand. Between the two of them they got her out and on the ground.

“You’re lucky they didn’t toss you into the bottle bin,” Moses said beside her.

There was another ominous thud and even more ominous crunching sound from the back door of the bar, accompanied by a continuous growling, slavering, threatening howl that Kate realized hadn’t stopped since she’d gone in the Dumpster.

“Tell that dog of yours to cease and desist before the Newenham magistrate has her up on charges,” Moses said.

Kate took another, cleaner breath of air and call up the requisite energy. “Mutt! It’s okay! I’m all right!”

The howling stopped but there was another thud against the door, and even in the darkness Kate thought she saw it sag slightly in defeat. She grabbed the railing and hauled herself up the steps. It wasn’t fully functional after Mutt’s battering, but she pulled and swore at it and finally got it open. “I’m okay, girl, stand down.”

Mutt, crouched to go airborne, poised in mid-launch. Her lips pulled back from her teeth, she went up on tiptoe and in reverse in the same movement, and the sound she made then would have been indistinguishable from “Eeeeee
yeeeeeew
!” in any other language.

“Nice,” Kate said, “thanks, I appreciate your sympathy and support.” She turned around to see Moses still on the bottom step. “What?”

“You planning on standing out here all night?” he said.

“I’m locking up, going home, and taking a shower,” she said shortly. “Do you know who those two guys were?”

“Too dark to get a good look at them,” he said.

“Not what I asked,” she said.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” he said.

She stopped the futile attempt at brushing herself off and glared. “I hear tell you’re supposed to be some kind of soothsayer. You couldn’t have gotten here five minutes earlier? Maybe your crystal ball broke down?”

“For people in real danger, maybe,” he said. “For you, no.”

She watched him vanish around the corner of the building, and thanked whatever powers there were that he hadn’t decided it was a good time to do form.

Whatever the hell that was.

Mutt politely declined the invitation to hop on back of the ATV, instead loping beside Kate all the way back to the apartment over the garage. The mood Kate was in, it was a good thing it was empty.

*   *   *

The next morning her cell phone rang way too early. She groped for it with her eyes closed. “Make it good,” she said.

“Don’t start with me,” Jim said, “I’m not even of this world yet.”

She woke up. “Hey.”

“Hey, your own damn self. Seen the inside of any chest freezers lately?”

From fast asleep on the braided rug Mutt woke and came all upstanding at the sound of her love god’s voice. She padded over and nosed the cell phone. Kate shoved her aside. “Get your own guy.” To Jim she said, “Dumpsters okay with you?”

A brief silence. “I don’t even want to know, do I.”

“You really don’t. But I had a shower. I’m all, you know, cleaned and pressed. Wanna have phone sex?”

“Sure,” he said automatically, because he was a man and any question with the word
sex
in it automatically elicited an answer in the affirmative. “Wait,” he said, “what?”

She laughed, a husky, intimate sound. “You awake now?”

He cleared his throat. She imagined him shifting to ease the fit of his pants, and smiled to herself. “So, what were you doing in the Dumpster?”

“Coward,” she said softly.

“The kid’s right here,” he said, or maybe he hissed.

She laughed again.

“Dumpster,” he said. “I’m assuming you didn’t climb in of your own free will.” He paused. “Unless you did.”

“I didn’t,” she said, laughter failing, and ran a hand through her hair to make sure no bits of eggshell lingered there. Wouldn’t hurt to shower again this morning, just to be sure. “Much as it humiliates me to admit it, I got thrown in.”

“Where was Mutt?”

“On the other side of the door.”

“That’s never stopped her before.”

“Wouldn’t have stopped her this time if they hadn’t run off and I got out in time to calm her down. As it is, I think I have to pay for a new one.”

“Who did it? Or maybe that question should be, why?” There was the sound of another voice, and she heard Jim say, “Somebody threw your esteemed guardian into a Dumpster.”

“Really?” she heard Johnny say. “Did anybody get pictures?”

“So?” Jim said into the phone. “Whodunnit?”

I saw her put it in her jeans at the library.

“I’ve got it down to around ten or so,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, at least you’re narrowing the field. What the hell’s going on down there, anyway?”

“If anything,” she said, stretching, “Campbell grossly underestimated the amount of enemies his vic had. And get this.”

“What?”

She shoved the covers aside and sat up. Mutt leaned against her bare legs and yearned toward the phone. “Erland Bannister is connected to Finn Grant somehow.”

There was a long and, Kate sensed, somehow fraught silence. “How?” Jim said eventually.

“I don’t know, exactly,” Kate said. “He, ah, made an introduction to someone I met down here.”

“Someone involved with the case?”

“Sort of, although not really.”

“Thanks for clearing that up.” Another odd silence.

“What?” Kate said.

“It’ll keep till you get back,” he said. “What next?”

She looked out the window. Dawn was drawing a thin light on the horizon. “I think I’m going to hitch a ride,” she said. Before he could ask what she meant, she said, “What’s going on at home?”

A momentary silence, to let her know he noticed she had changed the subject. “A lot of the usual, a couple of the not so usual.”

“Such as?”

“Don’t clutch, everyone’s alive,” he said, “but Frank Echuck got his hands on his dad’s three-fifty-seven, and he shot his brother David with it.” Hearing the intake of Kate’s breath, he said more loudly this time, “Remember, everyone’s alive. David got off with a grazed forearm. Pretty big graze, and his ears are still ringing, but a lot better than it could have been.”

“Don’t tell me Nick just left that cannon sitting around loaded!”

“Okay, I won’t,” Jim said, “but he did. He told the kids never to touch any of his firearms unless he, Nick, was present. That might work when the kids are younger, but once they hit their teens, it’s all about pushing the limits. Like I said, David was mostly scared, and the boys at the clinic patched him up. In the meantime, I’m not sure Frank’s ever going to be able to sit down again. I might have stepped in, were I a better person, but let the punishment fit the crime and all that.”

Kate waited for her heart to slow down. “Nick needs a gun safe,” she said.

Jim snorted. “Oh hell, Kate, you know better than that. Nobody outside of Anchorage owns a gun safe. A gun rack over the door is the best we can hope for, maybe, and I told Nick so. By the time I left, he’d stopped whaling on the kid and was getting out his tools.” A pause. “I told him he could start locking up his liquor, too.”

“They’d got into his booze?”

She could almost hear his shrug. “They’re fourteen, their mother split, when they’re not at school they’re home alone.”

“This is happening too damn often,” Kate said.

“Over the entire state,” Jim said. “I’m just glad this time I didn’t need a body bag. Listen, Kate…”

“I’m listening.”

“You know Frank and David are Annie Mike’s nephews.”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“She’s pretty shook by this, as you might imagine. And…”

“And?”

“And, just looking at it from the outside in, you understand, not being a shareholder and all…” It didn’t take telepathy to hear him thinking,
And thank god for that.

“Yes?” Kate said, although again telepathy wasn’t required to guess what was coming next.

“Yeah, well, I think the board’s giving her first days as chair a rough ride. Things I hear indirectly, you know, and she looked pretty frazzled even before I told her about the twins. She could probably use a phone call about now.”

“No,” Kate said.

“Ah, come on, Kate—”

“No,” Kate said, even more firmly. “I took this job for this exact reason, so she couldn’t lean on me and so the shareholders couldn’t end-run around her to me and undercut her authority. I know it’s tough, but she has to learn, and she can only learn by doing. And everybody else has to learn to go to her, not come to me.”

“Yeah, well, there’s been some of that, too,” he said grimly. “Johnny and I should have left town with you.”

Someone hammered on the door. She knew instantly who it was. “Shit,” she said, with feeling.

“What?” he said. “What now?”

“Just a little gnat I have to swat,” she said. “Call you later.”

She hung up, pulled on her sweats, and went to the door.

“Get your ass in gear,” Moses said, “I ain’t got all goddamn day.”

Mutt didn’t exactly whimper, but she did retreat again to the far side of the room. “Look at that, you even scare the dogs.” Kate started to close the door in Moses’ face.

“Fry bread,” he said.

The door halted in midswing.

“With nagoonberry jelly.”

The door opened again. “I really do hate your living guts,” she said.

*   *   *

At least he hadn’t been lying about breakfast. Only ninety minutes of torture later and Kate had a heaping plate set before her. “How come Bill doesn’t have to do whatever the hell it is?”

“Tai chi,” Chouinard said.

“Yang style,” Campbell said.

“I could really give a shit,” Kate said.

Both of them snickered. Moses ignored all three of them, head down in his own plate. His table manners were neat but efficient and he was done before the rest of them were halfway through. He grabbed the bag holding his ninja outfit and gave Kate a hard stare. “Some people can fly no hands, you know,” he said, and marched out.

Kate meditated on the door. “I don’t understand why he feels the need to speak at me in tongues,” she said.

Campbell and Chouinard exchanged a glance and kept their mouths full.

“I got tossed into a Dumpster last night,” she said.

Campbell choked on his fry bread and only narrowly missed spitting nagoonberry jelly down the front of his pristine uniform. “Really,” he said, coughing, his eyes watering.

“Really,” she said, and told him about it.

When she was done he said thoughtfully, “Describe the guy at the library.”

“Mid-forties, medium, medium, brown, brown,” she said. “I’d say there was a little Native going on there, maybe Yupik as his torso seemed a little longer than his legs.” She thought. “Oh yeah, and he was missing a finger on his left hand. Or part of one, the top half of his middle finger.”

“Artie Diedrickson,” Campbell and Chouinard said at the same time. “And the other guy was probably his boon companion, best friend, and co-conspirator, Leon Coopchiak,” Campbell said.

“The guy in the video,” Kate said.

“Okay,” Campbell said, brightening in much the same way Jim Chopin did whenever he had a clear line on a perp. “Let’s go find Artie.”

Kate shook her head. “I’ve got other plans.”

He knew her MO well enough now to be immediately suspicious. “Other plans? What kind of other plans?”

She shrugged, noncommittal. “Might be another lead. Might not be. Want to check it out.”

“Another lead?” Campbell looked at Chouinard. “Ten—eleven if we’re being strictly fair—blackmail victims not enough motive for murder for you?”

She spread her hands. “I got an itch. I want to scratch it. It’s likely nothing. If it’s something, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, you’ll run down the perps off that list?”

“Which, absent a confession, cannot be admitted in court,” he pointed out. “Since I can take no official cognizance of how it came into my possession.”

“Then get a confession,” Kate said, and smiled at him.

He looked at her, and she looked back, the picture of innocence, if a cobra with its hood extended could be called innocent. He shook his head. “Jim didn’t tell me the half of it, did he.”

“Where would be the fun in that?” she said sweetly.

He looked wary, as well he might, but he didn’t ask and she didn’t tell. He left and Kate and Chouinard cleaned up the kitchen. On the wall Kate saw a photograph of Chouinard and Campbell and a teenage boy. “Who’s the kid?”