Though Not Dead (3 page)

He knew she was still working out the trust issues. Jack Morgan, a government-certified Grade A one-woman man, was a hard act to follow in that respect. It didn’t help that despite a visible lack of offspring, Chopper Jim Chopin’s
nom d’amour
had once been Father of the Park. Come to think of it, Old Sam had been the one to hang that on him. Right after Misty Lambert had burned the clothes he’d left behind, during the monthly meeting of her book club with all eight members in attendance and more invited over to celebrate the event. At least half of whom he’d slept with at one time or another.

They’d all got a big laugh out of it at the time, both the ritual immolation and Old Sam’s nicknaming, but the truth was, Jim Chopin was probably quicker with a condom than he was with his sidearm. Living with Johnny Morgan was as close as he ever wanted to come to being a father. As the only Alaska state trooper in twenty million acres of national Park, he already had eight thousand children requiring primary care.

He pulled up in front of the post, making a mental note to stop in at the high school to suggest to Johnny, man-to-man, that he spend the night in town. Johnny was old enough to recognize the justice of the appeal, and besides, given the way things appeared to be heating up between Johnny and Van, the kid would expect some reciprocity in the not too distant future. Jim had a vivid memory of what sixteen was like. If he couldn’t keep his hands off Kate now, at sixteen he would have kept her horizontal for days at a time.

He laughed at himself and got out of the truck. His dispatcher met him at the door, a pink message slip in hand and an expression on her face that wiped his mind free of blithe spirit. “What?” he said, mind racing, sorting through the usual suspects. Howie Katelnikof, Martin Shugak, Wade Roche and what might or might not be going on out at his place, Dulcey Kineen’s latest escapade, which he hoped this time did not involve the road grader. “Cindy threatening to shoot Willard again?”

“No, Jim,” she said, and right away he knew from the gentleness of her reply that it was going to be bad. “I just got off the satellite phone with Nick.”

Nick Luther was head of the Alaska state trooper detachment in Tok, which had been Jim’s old post until two years before, when volume of business caused Juneau to open a new trooper post in the Park. He wondered now why he had never wondered before if someone in the state capital had known about the discovery of the world’s second largest gold mine in Suulutaq before making that decision.

His mind tended to head off on tangents whenever he wanted to avoid what was coming at him like a steamroller. He took a deep breath. “Go ahead,” he said. “Serve it up.” When she still hesitated, he said, “Whatever it is, letting it sit won’t make it smell any better.”

“There’s no easy way to say this, Jim,” she said. “Your mother called.”

His spine stiffened. “Yeah?”

“I’m so sorry. Your father died.”

*   *   *

Kate sat on the bed and watched him pack, putting clothes she had never seen him wear into an actual suitcase she’d never seen him use. Out of uniform he wore T-shirts and jeans. Traveling within Alaska he used a pack. The charcoal gray suit looked like something the new and improved Kurt Pletnikof would wear to meet his better-heeled clients in Anchorage. The silver, hard-sided suitcase looked like it had been bought out of the SkyMall catalogue, with which Kate was familiar only because it was in every seat pocket on every Alaska Airlines 737, offering everything from basketballs autographed by Magic Johnson to $900 wine fridges, none of which was much use to anyone about to make a connecting flight to Igiugig. “Gee,” she said, “looks just like downtown.”

He shot her a quick look, and she wondered if that had come out more intimidated that she had meant it to. “California, here I come,” he said.

Try as she might she could not detect any joy in his tone.

They were in his room at Auntie Vi’s B and B, or what had been Auntie Vi’s B and B before she sold it to the owners of the Suulutaq Mine to be a bunkhouse for mine employees in transit. Auntie Vi was now running it for them. A condition of sale had been that Jim got to keep his room there, which he had had since first moving to the Park to open the post. Mine manager Vern Truax had been more than happy to accommodate a law enforcement presence fifty miles from his mine.

“Right back where you started from,” Kate said.

This time he stood up and looked her straight in the eye. “I won’t be staying long.”

“You don’t have any brothers or sisters,” she said.

“No.”

“And your mother is how old?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“Ten years younger than Old Sam.”

“Yes.”

She thought of how healthy Old Sam had been, right up until he sat down on his dock and died. “Your mom in good shape?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘in good shape.’ I’d bet a whole paycheck she looks pretty damn good. She’d sure as hell spend it getting that way.” He zipped the suit into a garment bag, something else Kate recognized only from catalogues, and snapped it into the lid of the aluminum suitcase.

“You’re, what, forty-two now?”

“Yeah.”

“She was thirty-seven when you were born.”

He added a couple of white, button-down shirts, neatly folded, to the suitcase. T-shirts, shorts, and socks followed. “I showed up late, when they’d pretty much given up on having kids. Dad was forty-five.”

“You never talk about them.”

He shrugged. “Not much to say. They were hard of hearing before I was in high school. It was like growing up with grandparents.”

Wow, she thought. Didn’t that sound affectionate.

When she thought about it later, she wondered if that lack of affection might have been part of what had driven Jim north in the first place.

He pulled a shoebox from beneath the bed and added it to the suitcase. The ditty bag full of toiletries went into a daypack with Craig Johnson’s latest Walt Longmire novel and Naomi Novik’s
Victory of Eagles
. The books had been waiting for him in the post office when he had cleaned out his mailbox that morning. He hoped two books were enough to get him from Anchorage to San Jose, because the rest of his to-read pile was back at Kate’s house. He was six four, and there was nothing worse than being shoehorned into last class with nothing to take his mind off the discomfort of having his knees jammed up against the seat in front of him. He’d once been stuck on a flight from Phoenix to Seattle with a Steve Martini book whose perp he’d guessed before they reached cruising altitude. Never again. “Where the hell’s my— Oh, here it is,” he said, producing a clip-on reading light and tossing it into the daypack with the books. “They’ve got the seats so close together on the new jets that I can never get the overhead light to shine on anything but the top of the head of the guy sitting in front of me. Especially when he leans his chair back into my lap.”

“Jim?”

“What?”

“Why did you come to Alaska?”

He zipped up the daypack. “I read
Coming into the Country
when I was too young to resist.”

Always with the smart remark. Fine. “Is anyone coming in to the country to cover for you while you’re gone?”

He snapped the suitcase closed and set it on the floor. “Nick will check in with Maggie every morning. Otherwise, I’m relying on you, babe. Oh.” He paused to look at her. “Kenny says there’s been a rash of break-ins and burglaries in Ahtna over the last month. He says he thinks it’s partly due to the economy, people looking for anything they can sell to raise cash. Just FYI, in case it spreads down the river.”

“Got it,” she said. He felt distant from her somehow, as if he were already in Los Angeles. Land of surf and sand and sun. When he looked at her again she realized she’d said the words out loud.

“I’m not staying there, Kate,” he said again. “I work in Alaska. I live in Alaska.”

You’re in Alaska,
he could have said, but didn’t.

Instead, he put the daypack on the floor next to the suitcase and took her down to the bed with a soft tackle. Caught off guard, she looked up at him with a startled expression. “Let me just mark my spot,” he said, and reached for the buttons on her jeans.

*   *   *

He made George’s last flight into Anchorage with sixty seconds to spare. She stood flushed and rumpled at the end of the forty-eight-hundred-foot dirt airstrip, watching the de Havilland single Otter turbo rise into the air, bank right, and head west, its signature whine receding over the horizon.

Mutt gave a soft, plaintive whimper. Kate looked down and said in a stern voice, “We are strong and beautiful women. We can do anything.”

And Mutt proved it on the walk back to the red Chevy super cab by catching the hem of Kate’s jeans in her teeth and dumping Kate on her ass.

Two

Johnny was already home from school and halfway into his specialty, moose stew. This involved every vegetable in the refrigerator boiled to mush in beef bouillon, which mixture was then strained and thickened with flour sautéed in butter and finished with a dollop of red wine, a deplorable habit he had picked up from Jim. Although Kate, a notorious teetotaler, had been heard to admit out loud that wine added a certain flavor to the broth that was not altogether unpleasant. Into this liquid Johnny dropped chunks of moose fried hot and fast so that they were crusty on the outside and bloody on the inside, a couple of smashed garlic cloves, a generous pinch of dried thyme, onions, and potatoes.

Kate’s stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. Johnny served up steaming bowls with hunks of the rustic loaf Kate had made the day before, perfect for sopping up what was left in the bottom of the bowl. She ate heartily and felt better for it. Raising her head, she saw Johnny looking at her. “You okay?” he said, his voice tentative.

Her heart turned over at his anxious expression. “Sad. I’ll miss him.” She’d told Johnny about Jim’s father, but she knew without asking that they were talking about Old Sam.

“Me, too,” Johnny said with feeling.

Her mouth kicked up a half smile. No time like the present, and moose season was still open in some parts of the Park. “He left you something to remember him by.” She nodded at the rifle case standing next to the door.

Johnny’s mouth dropped open and stayed that way. “Not … not the Winchester?” On the last syllable his voice went up into a high squeak that hadn’t been heard since he was twelve.

“Yep.” She reached for the file box sitting on the next chair and extracted the list of belongings that had accompanied the will. “He said, ‘To Johnny Morgan I leave my Model 70 Winchester, as I find him a boy of more sense than most of my acquaintance and will trust him to save his ammunition for a moose and not his goddamn big toe. Don’t try for a head shot—the brain’s too small and the skull’s too hard. Go for a lung shot every time and you’ll be fine. Remember, the best place to shoot a moose is fifty feet from the pickup, and next to a good rifle your best friend is a sharp knife.’ ”

She had to blink away tears when she was done reading. She’d heard it all before, on fall hunts stretching back decades, Abel and Old Sam instructing her and Ethan and Ethan’s brothers.
Those sumbitches will do their damndest to die on you in the most inconvenient place possible, and most of the time the fuckers’ll succeed
.
Heart’s dry and tough as boot leather but you can eat it right away, along with the liver and the tongue
.
Get yourself a load of beef suet, grind it up with the scraps for burgers
.
Small packages are better; if you’ve got a crowd for dinner you can always thaw out more but you can’t thaw out less
.

Johnny already had the rifle out of the worn leather case. He looked like someone had just handed him the Hope Diamond. “It’s got a serial number below six hundred thousand, doesn’t it?”

“Look for yourself,” she said, and while he was communing with his new muse she cleared the table and washed the dishes, after which he was still cradling the Winchester like it was his firstborn son. A horrible thought. “Enough,” she said. “Put it in the rack and get started on your homework.”

“Can’t I sight it in?”

She glanced out the windows that formed most of the front wall of the house. “It’s too dark. Tomorrow.”

“Morning?”

“After school,” she said, and added craftily, “You’ll want to show it to Van.”

On a lesser sixteen-year-old what would have been a pout brightened. Van was the girlfriend. Of course he wanted to show the Winchester off to her. He set it in the gun rack next to the front door with reverent hands, stood back to admire it for a moment, heaved a lovelorn sigh, and fetched his homework from his bedroom.

He sat on one side of the table, working math problems, and she sat on the other, working her way through Old Sam’s will as the first, fabulous notes of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” beat out of the speakers.

Old Sam had kept it simple, leaving everything he owned to Kate outright and attaching a letter disposing of those possessions he wanted to go to specific beneficiaries. It was dated the day after the will, which had been written by one Peter P. Wheeler, an attorney in Ahtna. Kate didn’t know him. Two weeks ago had been the end of fishing season and the beginning of hunting season, and she wondered that either of them had had the time.

The letter accompanying the will was in Old Sam’s copperplate handwriting. You could always tell an elder by their writing—if they’d gone to school at all they’d had penmanship to rival Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beaten into them by a series of teachers intent on beating the Native right out of them, starting with their language. The letter was five pages long, written on what looked like printer paper in black ink by what appeared to be a Bic pen with a medium nib.

The cabin in Niniltna he wanted to go to Phyllis Lestinkof, which came as something of a surprise. Kate sat back. Or did it really? “Girl ain’t got a pot to piss in,” Old Sam wrote, “let alone a place to lay her head, and those worthless parents of hers ain’t going to be no help to her. She needs somewhere to raise that baby. You keep the title, tell her it’s hers for as long as she lives in it, year-to-year lease for one dollar a year.”