Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel (20 page)

Simms’s eyes fluttered open.

“Who’s there?” he whispered.

“It’s me,” Kane said, “Nik Kane. How you doing, Charlie?”

“Head hurts like hell,” Simms whispered.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Kane asked.

Simms closed his eyes. The silence stretched out so long that Kane thought he’d gone to sleep. Then Simms cleared his throat.

“Can I have a drink of water?” he asked.

The medic picked up a plastic cup with a straw in it and held it to Simms’s lips. Simms lifted his head a little, groaned, and drank. His head fell back on the pillow.

“I can’t remember,” Simms said, his voice a little stronger. “I remember meeting the airplane at the Devil’s Toe airstrip, getting the money, driving back. But after turning onto the mine road . . . nothing. God, my head hurts.”

“Might be better if you let him rest for a while,” the medic said.

“Okay,” Kane said. “There’s a doctor coming over from Rejoice. I’ll send him by here to check Charlie out. There’s a trooper helicopter headed this way, too, so if he needs to go to town to get checked out, we can send him on that.”

“Don’t want to go to town,” Simms said. “Want to catch whoever did this to me.”

“I’m sure you do, Charlie,” Kane said. “I’m sure you do.” To the medic, he said, “You take a gun off him?”

The medic pulled open a drawer and handed Kane an automatic. It was a Glock 17. Not Kane’s favorite weapon, but dependable and relatively cheap. Kane popped out the clip, then worked the slide. A round arced out onto the floor. The clip was full, and the gun didn’t smell of gunpowder.

“Hasn’t been fired,” Kane said, reloading it and replacing it in the drawer. “Lester’s shotgun hadn’t been, either. So none of our bad guys is leaking blood.”

He looked around the room, saw Simms’s clothes hanging on a chair, and scooped them up.

“I’ll bring you some more clothes, Charlie,” he said, “but these are going to the crime lab.”

Simms didn’t reply. Kane walked out of the clinic, followed by the mine manager.

“Why are you taking his clothes?” Richardson asked. “You don’t think he’s involved, do you?”

“Standard procedure,” Kane said. “The lab might be able to lift something that tells us about the perps.”

The trooper pulled up as they reached the mine manager’s office. Kane stuffed Simms’s clothes into a big evidence bag. His coat was too big to fit, so the mine manager went off to find a garbage bag.

“You can try Simms if you want to,” Kane said to Slade, “but he’s pretty loopy and says he doesn’t remember anything about the crime.”

“I suppose he’ll keep,” the trooper said. “I wonder if they’ve got any coffee in there.”

“I’m sure they do,” Kane said, and led the way into the office trailer.

From there they went to search Charlie Simms’s quarters, in a nest of prefabs as far from the mill house as they could be and still be inside the fence. Even at that distance, Kane could feel a light shaking in the floor. The quarters were about the size of a decent hotel suite: bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen.

The search didn’t take long. There were a few clothes in the closet and dresser, shampoo, shaving gear, cholesterol medicine, and Viagra in the bathroom.

“Viagra?” Slade said. “What’s he want with Viagra out here?”

“Good question,” Kane said, “although just because he has it with him doesn’t mean he’s using it.”

There was beer in the refrigerator, canned food in the cupboards and dirty dishes in the sink, a paperback western on a table next to one of the armchairs, a row of videotapes beneath the big TV. About what Kane expected to find in a construction camp room.

By five p.m., they were back in the trooper’s office. They’d examined the Explorer thoroughly, searched Logan’s locker and Simms’s office, and come up with zip. They sent Lester Logan’s body and Simms’s clothes back to Anchorage on the helicopter. The pilot said that a couple of trooper investigators were on their way out from Anchorage by car.

The doctor from Rejoice had said he couldn’t tell how serious Charlie Simms’s injuries were, and he’d be happier if Simms went to town for evaluation and observation. So Kane had packed him a bag, and they’d loaded Simms on the chopper, too, along with the medic.

“Just make sure he gets to the hospital okay,” the mine manager told the medic. “We’ll charter you back here in the morning.”

The medic had grinned at the prospect of a night in town.

After the now fully loaded helicopter left, Kane and Slade made one more eyeball scan of the area before the light left completely, found nothing new, and reopened the road. In between all that, they’d done a lot of waiting, eaten a lunch the mine’s kitchen had knocked together for them, and drunk a lot of the mine’s coffee.

“Any ideas about this?” Slade asked. He had his hat off, his collar open, and his stocking feet up on his desk. His hair was a mess, and he looked about twelve.

“Lots,” Kane said, “but nothing that bears sharing right now. I guess what we do for the time being is wait and hope Simms’s memory comes back. And you can keep an eye out for anybody spending more money than he ought to have. Or taking any spur-of-the-moment vacations.”

The trooper nodded.

“You think we’ll catch whoever did it?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Kane said.

Slade dropped his feet onto the floor and leaned forward.

“What do you know that I don’t?” he asked, so earnestly that it made Kane laugh.

“There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to answer that question,” Kane said. “But as far as this holdup goes, just keep your shirt on. Part of being a good detective is knowing when to press and when to wait.”

The trooper settled back in his chair.

“I’m sorry I was so snotty this morning,” he said. “It’s just that life here is a lot more complicated than it might look, and I’m not sure I’m cut out to handle it, even without robberies and murders.”

“That’s not what we were having difficulties about,” Kane said. “Remember? We were arguing about Faith Wright.”

The trooper tensed at the mention of her name. Kane stood up.

“I’m leaving now,” he said. “Monday, if you’re still not too busy with the robbery, I’m going to want you to accompany me to the high school so I can search the girl’s locker.”

Slade started to say something, but Kane held up his hand.

“Between now and then,” he said, “I want you to think about how you’re going to handle this. If you’re wrapped around the axle in some way that involves doing your job right, decide how you’re going to deal with that. Just don’t think that one of your options is to stonewall me or lean on me or somehow get me to go away. Because that’s not going to happen.”

The trooper looked at Kane steadily for more than a minute.

“What makes you think I’ve got a problem doing my job?” he asked in a voice that sounded as young as he looked.

Kane laughed.

“I’ve made a few mistakes, too,” he said.

He put on his coat.

“Some of them,” he said, turning to go, “the not-so-serious ones, happened early in my career, and older and wiser heads helped me out. I’m offering you the same kind of help I got. You’d be smart to take it.”

14

 
JUDGES 14:7

 
 
 
 
KANE WAS EARLY FOR HIS DINNER WITH RUTH HUNT, SO he decided to stop in the bar to hear what Devil’s Toe was talking about. From the looks of the place, everyone within a hundred-mile radius had made the same decision. Small-town Friday night, Kane thought. The only thing thicker than the crowd was the cloud of cigarette smoke that filled the room. The only thing thicker than that were the rumors flying around.

Kane felt something like panic crawling up his throat. Too many people, too much noise. He took a deep breath and got a lungful of smoke. Coughing, he forced his way toward the bar.

I’ve got to get past this, he thought, or I’m not going to be worth a damn at anything but sitting in my apartment staring at the walls.

As he shouldered through the crowd, Kane overheard snippets of conversation. Everybody was talking about one thing.

“I heard there was a half dozen mine guards killed,” one man said.

“The payroll was more than a million,” said another a little farther along.

“They’re sending in some kinda strike force,” a woman with a snake tattooed on her left shoulder told a long-haired guy with a ring in his nose. The woman had clearly been spending a lot of time pumping iron, and the long-haired guy was muscles from head to toe.

“I heard,” the guy said. “Maybe a SWAT team, too. That kid trooper ain’t up to this.”

By the time Kane reached the corner of the bar, his nerves were twitching like live wires. I really need a drink, he thought as he caught the bartender’s attention.

He wanted to order a beer, just one, but he knew there couldn’t be just one for him. He forced himself to say, “Club soda with a twist.”

The bartender, a thin, greasy-haired, shifty-looking character who had a scar of his own on his right cheek, gave him a pitying look.

“Sure you don’t want a glass of milk?” he asked with a sneer in his voice. “That what the fast crowd in Anchorage is drinking now?”

Kane reached across and laid a hand on the bartender’s shoulder, pulling him close.

“Believe me, pal,” he said in a low voice, “the last thing you want is for me to start drinking.”

The bartender drew back, rubbing his shoulder.

“No need to be acting so tough,” he said, moving away.

Actually there’s every need, Kane thought. Act soft in a place like this, and they’d pull you down like a pack of wolves. The only difference between this place and prison is that there weren’t any guards in gun towers to make them think twice.

The bartender returned and set a glass in front of Kane.

“That’ll be three dollars,” he said.

“For club soda?” Kane asked.

“It’s the freight,” the bartender said.

Kane smiled at the punch line to the old Alaska joke, handed him a five-dollar bill, and said, “How do you know I’m from Anchorage?”

The bartender gave him another pitying look.

“This here is Devil’s Toe,” he said, laying a couple of wrinkled one-dollar bills on the bar in front of Kane. “A half hour after you take a dump everybody knows what color it was.”

Kane stood there drinking his club soda and taking in the scene, wishing that his fellow drinkers smoked less and bathed more. He wondered which of them, if any, had been involved in the robbery or knew something about it. Or knew something about Faith Wright’s whereabouts. Anyone who did would be unlikely to simply walk up and tell an outsider.

The crowd ignored him until the woman with the snake tattoo forced her way over and stood next to him. Up close, she had a flat face that was cracked and seamed like the face of a glacier, a big nose that had been broken and badly reset, and eyebrows that had grown into one. There was a cluster of rings on one side of that brow.

“You’re some kinda cop, ain’t ya?” she asked, her voice loud to be heard over the noise of the crowd.

“Some kinda cop,” he replied. “That’s about right.”

“What you know about the robbery?” she asked.

Kane set his empty glass down on the bar.

“Robbery?” he said. “There’s been a robbery?”

The woman examined his face.

“You just being funny?” she asked.

“I’m here looking for Faith Wright,” he said. “You know anything about that?”

“You mean that little Angel that disappeared?” the woman said. “No, I wouldn’t be knowing any of the Angels. I’m sort of on the other team.”

“You work here?” Kane asked.

“Me?” the woman said. “Nope, you won’t find me making beds or slinging hash.”

“How about at night?” Kane said.

The woman gave a hoot of laughter and examined his face again.

“You’re kidding, right? Who’d pay money to fuck me?” she said.

She giggled and punched Kane on the shoulder. The blow sent a bolt of pain shooting down his arm.

“You got a pair on you, asking me a question like that,” she said, turning to leave. “I told Herman what you said, he’d pinch your head off. See you later, Mr. Some Kinda Cop.”

Kane waved the bartender over and handed him a twenty.

“Get those two whatever they’re drinking on me,” he said, nodding to the tattooed woman and her companion, “and keep the change.”

He wriggled his way through the crowd and through the partition into the café.

The café was full. Ruth Hunt was sitting at a corner table, chatting with the waitress named Tracy. The two of them were laughing. Ruth put her hand on Tracy’s arm. The waitress responded by reaching down and stroking aside some hair that had fallen over Ruth’s face. She looked up and saw Kane watching them.

“Oh, Mr. Kane, right on time,” she said. “Meet Tracy, our waitress.”

Kane nodded at the waitress as he slid into a chair opposite Ruth.

“Tracy and I have met,” he said. “In fact, I was an overnight guest in this establishment.”

“I’d better get back to work,” Tracy said. “That was a G-and-T for you, Ruth. And what are you having, Mr. Kane?”

“Nik,” Kane said. “I’m drinking water.”

The waitress went off and Kane looked over at Ruth Hunt. She was wearing a long-sleeved black mock turtleneck sweater, just a touch of makeup, and no jewelry. Her long, black hair had been brushed until it shone. The overall effect was neither provocative nor frumpy.

“How do you do that?” Kane asked.

“Do what?”

“Manage to be so much yourself wherever you are?”

“Is that good or bad?” she said, arching an eyebrow.