A deeper sleep (7 page)

Jim tuned out the rest of her apologia, finished his tea with honey, accepted a dozen freshly baked oatmeal raisin cookies, the ones she had gotten up at five a.m. to bake because she knew he was coming out that morning and because she knew they were his favorites, and left.

On the way back into town, Jim drove past the little grocery store that the Bingleys had just opened. Several men were loitering with what to Jim looked like intent near the door, including Martin Shugak, Howie Katelnikof, and, yes, there was Willard.

For the hell of it, he pulled to the side of the road and got out. "Hey, guys."

Howie and Martin eyed him warily, but Willard broke into a big smile. "Hey, Jim."

Jim stamped his feet and blew into his gloves. "Damn, it's cold. I sure could go for a hot toddy about now."

"Me, too," Willard said with feeling.

"Know anywhere I could buy a bottle?" He made a show of getting out his wallet. "I've got cash."

Martin and Howie both made convulsive moves for Willard, but they were too late. "Why, sure, Jim," Willard said happily. "I can get you a bottle," and he ducked in back of a snow berm to come up beaming with a plastic pint of Windsor Canadian. He handed it over in exchange for a wad of money.

Martin sighed heavily. Howie said with resignation, "Willard, you dumb fuck."

"What?" Willard was bewildered. "What'd I do?"

"What you did was sell me liquor without a license, in a damp town," Jim said. Damp today, anyway. Tomorrow, depending on the mood of the voting citizenry and the fishing season, it could be wet or even dry. "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. . . ."

Willard went without question, by now well versed in the form. As Jim held the cell door open for him, Willard was patting Darth Vader's head, whose shiny black helmet as usual peeped from the top of Willard's shirt pocket. "It's okay, Anakin. The evil Sith Lord has us trapped again, but you know we always escape."

In fact, Jim felt a little ashamed of himself, but at least Willard got to spend the night in a nice warm jail, with three hot meals hand-delivered by Laurel Meganack. He spent it there alone, though, because he refused to implicate either Howie or Marty in the bootlegging. Jim hadn't expected much else, and he let Willard off the next morning with a warning, which he estimated Willard retained for possibly as long as thirty seconds. Jim had confiscated and poured out the rest of the booze, which had been his target all along, and an added bonus was that Auntie Balasha gave him a little less hell than he was expecting when she heard of the incident.

Martin vanished into the woodwork, probably fearing what would happen when Kate heard. Howie remained distressingly visible. Howie Katelnikof, Louis Deem's boon companion, Willard Shugak's in loco parentis, and Jim Chopin's ever-present thorn in his side.

Louis Deem was bad because he was good at it and because he enjoyed it. Willard was bad because he was FAS and incapable of making even one good decision unless it was by accident. Howie was bad because he was lazy, because it paid better than straight work, and because somebody had once told him that girls went for bad boys. He was similar enough to Louis that the girls were initially interested, but that interest always wore off fast. One of life's losers, that was Howie Katelnikof, and the sad thing about Howie was that he knew it. It was one of the reasons he'd hooked up with Louis Deem, his cousin, his idol, his mentor, and his meal ticket, from whom he'd absorbed just enough gray matter wherewithal to make beer money screwing over everyone who didn't get out of the way first. The bootlegging operation was a classic example of Howie's entrepreneurial skills. He had just enough brains to acquire product and hire staff, but then he parked the operation on a road providing direct access to a trooper post, and the staff he hired had shoe sizes bigger than their IQs. Jim suspected that Louis Deem's delusions of invulnerability were starting to rub off on his henchman.

Not that Deem was looking all that deluded lately.

In February, two snow machiners were stranded on one of the Quilaks' minor peaks in the middle of a raging storm. They had no survival gear and no radio and it was only a miracle that another snow machiner in the area had seen them and reported their location to Dan. Dan called Jim, and together they called out the Llama high-altitude rescue helicopter, which swooped in to pluck up the morons during a momentary lull.

Their chief concern, they explained earnestly to Jim, was the recovery of their snow machines. "Jesus Christ," Dan said when Jim reported this, "they were highmarking in a place we told them not to go, right when a ballbuster of a storm was coming in off Prince William Sound, which we also told them. You'd think they'd be happy just to be alive."

When the storm blew itself out, Jim had to fly to Chistona on one of a wearying number of domestic assault cases that winter, all of them involving alcohol, and he did a flyby of the area in question. "Not much point in it," Dan said when Jim told him what he was going to do, and Dan was right. Even in the aftermath of the storm, the vultures had managed to strip both machines of anything of value. The tracks were gone, the cowling with the instrument panels gone, the engines, the seats, the shocks, the skis, the treads, all gone. One of them looked like someone had tried to tow it behind another snow machine. It was lying in a narrow canyon in a heap of broken metal. The other sat where it had been abandoned, minus even its gas tank.

"What's left isn't worth fifty bucks," Jim told Dan when he got back to the Park. Dan relayed the news to the owners, who weren't happy, but as they were home in Anchorage by that time Dan didn't really care, and truth to tell neither did Jim. Dan was right. The snow machiners were lucky to be alive. Still, Jim harbored no doubt that they'd both be back in the Park the following winter pursuing their death-defying hobby of extreme snow machining. With any luck, they'd get themselves killed before they had a chance to procreate. The gene pool needed all the help it could get.

As for where the parts had wound up, Jim had a mild hunch that a search of the Deem homestead would provide a few leads. If only a hunch was sufficient cause for Judge Singh to issue him a search warrant.

In March, Kate—in the employ of the state Department of Revenue—concluded a ten-week investigation which broke up a ring of grifters who had been filing applications for the state's annual permanent fund dividend in the names of forty-three children, all of whom had died five years or more earlier. The last five dividends totaled $6,264.20, which times forty-three brought the amount embezzled to well over a quarter of a million dollars, which qualified for grand theft, while if not quite on a scale of Raven stealing the sun, moon, and stars, certainly bumped up the charging documents to a felony.

Jim and Kenny were called in to make the arrests, warrants in hand that Judge Singh had been delighted to issue. "You have the right to remain silent," Kenny said, and was interrupted when Margaret Kvasnikof spat at Kate.

"Nice to see you again, too, Mags," she said as Kenny cuffed her third cousin once removed and led her out.

"Hey, a fan," Jim said. "You okay?"

"It's a living," Kate said, and suffered no qualms of conscience three weeks later when her fee arrived in the mail with three lovely zeroes on the end of it. She didn't enjoy being spit at, but Mags was no longer the girl who had played kick-the-can with the gang on the riverbanks when they were all kids together. Of course, she thought, it helped that Mags's branch of Kvasnikofs came from Ouzinkie instead of Nanwalek, and as such was an extremely distant relative. If she'd been yet another of Auntie Balasha's three hundred nieces, Kate would have cashed the check anyway but would have braced herself for an onslaught of reproachful glances and baked goods.

"Wow," Johnny said, reading the zeroes over her shoulder, "let's go to Disneyland."

"Hell with that," Jim said, "let's go to Vegas."

Instead, she sent 30 percent to the IRS, put 20 percent into Johnny's college fund, dropped $1,200 at Costco on essentials like bread flour, kept a thousand in a roll of fives, tens, and twenties for walking-around money, and banked the rest.

"My snowgo's falling apart," Johnny said.

"Snow's almost gone," Kate said.

"Yeah, but my four-wheeler is in even worse shape."

"Cannibalize mine for parts."

"Couldn't we at least get satellite television?"

"Over my dead body."

Johnny, who obviously still had a lot of work ahead of him before he could start violating all the known laws of physics, gave up and trudged mournfully to his bedroom. Not neglecting to take the copy of the latest Harry Dresden novel with him, even though Kate's bookmark was prominently clasped at the halfway mark.

During these months Louis Deem remained snugged down on his homestead, drinking beer and watching WWE
SmackDown.
He did have satellite television. Naturally.

In fact, Jim's usual winter workload was down considerably, which didn't hurt his feelings any but which left him a lot more time to brood over Kate Shugak. He haunted the Riverside Cafe, flirting desperately with Laurel Meganack, a very easy on the eyes twenty-something who had indicated her interest on more than one occasion but who had now totally backed off. He feared that she knew he and Kate were an item, which of course they weren't, but he couldn't seem to muster up the strength of character to out and out say so.

And more and more often at the end of the day his vehicle seemed to head up the road to Kate's house, where more and more often he seemed somehow to spend the night. True, six months into this, he still didn't know what to call it, this whatever it was he had going on with Kate, the frantic, almost ferocious sexual need that marked the beginning of all his best affairs had settled into a slumberous ardor. But that ardor had the damnedest way of flaring up and leaving nothing but scorched earth behind it, all the more enjoyable—and unsettling—because he wasn't expecting it. Usually by this point in Jim's relationships boredom had set in and he was looking for a way out with the least amount of damage to everyone involved, especially him.

And then he would look down at Kate, her face flushed and glowing, a smile curling the corners of her lips, her legs still tight around his waist, and feel complete, whole, all his empty spaces filled up.

Like he was home.

When he realized this, he waited for the panic to set in. Hell, he would have welcomed it.

It just wasn't there.

One evening he was helping Johnny with his algebra. "Man, I hate this stuff," Johnny said, grumbling. "It was a lot easier when X was just a letter in the alphabet." He looked up from where he was torturing a page of his textbook. "You're really good at it, though. How come?"

"I don't know. Probably because I had a really good teacher." They were seated at the dining room table. Kate was curled up on the sofa, her nose in a book. Typical. It would be easier to get over her if she were a little more labor intensive. Jim shifted in his chair, ostensibly to stretch but really to get a look at the title.
Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen. Bleah.

He looked back at Johnny. "I never went as far with it as I wanted to. Someday I'm going to go back to school and take bone-head math right on up to trig and calc."

"Why the he—?" Johnny looked over his shoulder at Kate, who he knew from personal experience was never so oblivious to her surroundings as one might like. "Why would you want to do that?"

"I always wanted to take astronomy. You need calc to take astronomy."

"Oh. You gonna buy a telescope?"

"That's my plan."

Johnny considered, and then jerked his head toward the front windows. "We got a deck."

"Yeah," Jim said, "I noticed."

"All I'm saying is it'd be a good place to put a telescope."

"Yeah," Jim said. "About that X—"

He felt reasonably confident that the implication of that conversation was going to jerk him out of a sound sleep at three a.m., sweating bullets. Instead he was woken at three a.m. in the middle of being taken thorough advantage of by Kate.