No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22) Read online

  NO FIXED LINE

  DANA

  STABENOW

  “Kate Shugak is the answer if you are looking for something unique in the crowded field of crime fiction.” Michael Connelly

  “For those who like series, mysteries, rich, idiosyncratic settings, engaging characters, strong women and hot sex on occasion, let me recommend Dana Stabenow.” Diana Gabaldon

  “A darkly compelling view of life in the Alaskan Bush, well laced with lots of gallows humor. Her characters are very believable, the story lines are always suspenseful, and every now and then she lets a truly vile villain be eaten by a grizzly. Who could ask for more?” Sharon Penman

  “One of the strongest voices in crime fiction.” Seattle Times

  “Cleverly conceived and crisply written thrillers that provide a provocative glimpse of life as it is lived, and justice as it is served, on America’s last frontier.” San Diego Union-Tribune

  “When I’m casting about for an antidote to sugary female sleuths… Kate Shugak, the Aleut private investigator in Dana Stabenow’s Alaskan mysteries, invariably comes to mind.” New York Times

  “Stabenow is blessed with a rich prose style and a fine eye for detail. An outstanding series.” Washington Post

  “Excellent… No one writes more vividly about the hardships and rewards of living in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness and the hardy but frequently flawed characters who choose to call it home. This is a richly rewarding regional series that continues to grow in power as it grows in length.” Publishers Weekly

  “A dynamite combination of atmosphere, action, and character.” Booklist

  “Full of historical mystery, stolen icons, burglaries, beatings, and general mayhem… The plot bursts with color and characters… If you have in mind a long trip anywhere, including Alaska, this is the book to put in your backpack.” Washington Times

  The Kate Shugak series

  A Cold Day for Murder

  A Fatal Thaw

  Dead in the Water

  A Cold Blooded Business

  Play with Fire

  Blood Will Tell

  Breakup

  Killing Grounds

  Hunter’s Moon

  Midnight Come Again

  The Singing of the Dead

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  A Grave Denied

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Night Too Dark

  Though Not Dead

  Restless in the Grave

  Bad Blood

  Less Than a Treason

  No Fixed Line

  The Liam Campbell series

  Fire and Ice

  So Sure of Death

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  Better to Rest

  Silk and Song

  Death of an Eye

  DANA

  STABENOW

  NO

  FIXED

  LINE

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus, Ltd.

  Copyright © Dana Stabenow, 2020

  The moral right of Dana Stabenow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN (HB): 9781788549110

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788549127

  ISBN (E): 9781788548977

  Design: Ghost

  Images: © Shutterstock.com

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For

  the Rasmuson Foundation

  who are such stuff as

  Alaskan dreams are made on.

  Thank you.

  …though there is no fixed line between wrong and right, there are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed.

  —Robert Frost

  Contents

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Prologue

  Anna was a warm, heavy weight against his side, her eyes closed, her breathing deep, her tears drying in faint silvery streaks on her cheeks. At least she was asleep now.

  A shadow fell over them and he curled a protective arm around her before he looked up.

  The Bad Man smiled at him and held out something. When David didn’t take it the Bad Man removed the foil wrapper and held it out again. It smelled like food. David didn’t want to take anything from the Bad Man but his stomach growled, and Anna would be hungry when she woke. He snatched the sticky bar out of the Bad Man’s hand. The Bad Man smiled again and patted his head. David held himself rigid and waited for the Bad Man to stop.

  The airplane shifted suddenly, up and down and side to side and back and forth. The Bad Man staggered a few steps, grabbing at the back of a seat to keep from falling. He looked toward the front of the airplane and shouted something. The piloto shouted something back. The plane jerked again and one of the duffel bags that they had loaded onto the plane fell from a seat into the aisle and broke open, spilling large square plastic bags everywhere. One of them burst in an explosion of tiny white tablets like aspirina. The Bad Man stooped to pick up the loose plastic bags from the aisle and beneath the other seats, cursing every time the plane yanked him off balance again. He cursed again when he couldn’t get the zipper on the duffel to work, and had to tuck the duffel beneath a seat so it wouldn’t flop around and spill the bags again. Afterward he went forward to fall into the chair next to the piloto.

  Something glinted from the floor and David looked down to see a teléfono. His heart leapt. It must have slipped out of the Bad Man’s pocket when he fell. He leaned over, straining at the belt, and managed to touch it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled it toward him until he could pick it up and slip it in his pocket. He looked up at the front of the plane. The Bad Man and the piloto still had their backs turned. The airplane shook again, a hard up and down bump, rocking him back in the seat.

  David hadn’t known there were bumps this bad in the air. He’d only ever been on an airplane once before, two if you counted when they had to change from one plane to another in the big aeropuerto, and the bumps on those planes had been little. There was a nice lady in a uniform with a cart, too, who brought them little bags of treats and a whole can
of Coca-Cola for each of them. There was no nice lady on this airplane. Only the Bad Man and the piloto.

  David broke the food bar in two and put half away in his pocket for when Anna woke up. He ate the other half. It was sticky and dry at the same time, with chewy little frutas in it that didn’t taste like anything. It reminded him of the bars that people had given them sometimes on the long walk north. People had given them water in bottles, too. He wished he had one of them now, but he would not ask the Bad Man. He would never ask the Bad Man for anything.

  The plane bumped again and Anna cried out “Mami!” but she didn’t wake up. They were sharing the last seat in the very back of the little plane. David made sure to sit on the outside so Anna wouldn’t fall out on one of the bumps. It was what Mami had told him to do the last time he had seen her. “Take care of your sister, David. Don’t be afraid, mijo. They will bring me back very soon.”

  But they had not brought Mami back very soon. They had not brought Mami back at all. David and Anna had been put in a big building inside one of many cages made of chain link with other niños from Mexico and Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador who had made the same long walk north for the same reasons. There they were held for so long David lost count of the days. It was too hot during the day and too cold at night. There were no beds and they had to sleep on the concrete floor. There was only a plastic bucket for a baño, there were no toothbrushes or bathrooms and no way to wash their clothes. Food came once a day in foil packets, dry and tasteless. Everyone got one bottle of water a day, and after two days some of the bigger niños began taking the water from the smaller niños. Nobody stopped them.

  Then one day big anglos in black jackets with big white letters on the back came into the cage and took away six of them: David and Anna and four other boys of David’s age. Outside the building the sun was bright and David couldn’t see very well at first. The four boys went away with two anglos and another two took charge of David and Anna. “Are you taking us to Mami?” David said, and one of them smiled and nodded and said, “Si, Mami.”

  First they were in a big blue van, which took them to an aeropuerto that had too many airplanes to count. They got on the big airplane with the pretty lady with the cart and flew to another, bigger aeropuerto where they got on another airplane. This time when they landed the sun was gone and it was cold and the ground was covered in snow. David knew what snow was from the picture book about the little boy in the red suit. He scooped up a handful and showed it to Anna and she had laughed and for a moment both of them forgot about Mami and where she was and why she wasn’t with them.

  But then the big men, who had changed from their jackets into regular clothes, put them in another big black car and drove them through city streets beneath a full moon to a house. The man who lived there gave the big men a black briefcase and they left David and Anna with him and drove away.

  It was a big house with windows all around. There was a big lighted star that glowed against the snow on the hillside that made David think about the tin stars Mami decorated the house with, back when they had a house, back before the bad men came and killed Papi and hurt Mami, and Mami took them to make the long walk to el norte.

  But there was no feliz about this navidad, because the big house was where the Bad Man lived. He locked David in a room and he hurt Anna. When the Bad Man let David out Anna was crying, her skirt sticking damply to her legs. Did he make you take a bath? David said.

  He hurt me, she said, sobbing, like los pandilleros did Mami, and then he washed me.

  The Bad Man came back in the room and gave Anna a bag of candy. David took it away from her and threw it in the Bad Man’s face as hard as he could. So then the Bad Man hurt David, too. For the first time David was glad Papi was dead so he would never have to tell him the things the Bad Man did to him and Anna. The one thing, the last thing Mami had asked him to do, protect his sister, he could not do. Sometimes he wished los pandilleros had killed him, too.

  They were nine days in that big house on the side of the mountain with the light from the star shining through the windows. He looked at the back of the Bad Man’s head where he sat in the seat next to the piloto and wished he had a gun like a pistolero in the narcocorridos. He would shoot the Bad Man dead, and then he would take Anna and find Mami and together they would find a safe place to live where there were no pandilleros and no Bad Men.

  This evening for the first time they had left the house on the side of the mountain and driven to a place where this small plane was parked. They went inside and the piloto started the small engines on the wings that sounded like the big engines on the big airplanes and they had taken off and flown for about an hour to a tiny place somewhere else. It was snowing and David didn’t see the airstrip through the window until just before they landed. They parked next to another airplane almost exactly like the one they were in and the Bad Man opened the door and the other airplane’s door opened and someone came down the steps carrying two big duffel bags and handed them to the Bad Man and then went back to his airplane. The Bad Man closed the door and the other plane took off and they took off afterward into the deepening dark and the wind-driven snow.

  The airplane jolted again, more violently this time. The piloto shouted something. The Bad Man shouted back. The roar of the engines seemed to change. David looked over Anna’s head and outside the window he thought he saw the sharp point of a rock, but it was quickly obscured again by the black of the night and the snow driving past.

  The piloto and the Bad Man were shouting at each other again and the airplane was still jumping up and down and lurching back and forth and side to side and it felt like they were falling and the engines got louder and Anna woke up and started to cry. It’s okay, David said, although he knew that it wasn’t. It’s okay, Anna.

  And then there was a screeching, grinding crash so loud it hurt his ears and the blackness outside the window seemed to flood inside and swallow them up.

  I’m so sorry, Mami.

  One

  MONDAY, NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Canyon Hot Springs

  “NEED A REFILL?”

  “Well, sure. But who’s going to go get it?”

  A good question. The wind was howling, the snow was swirling, and on New Year’s Eve it was already as dark as it got in Alaska to begin with. Which made cuddling with your honey in the pool closest to the cabin at Canyon Hot Springs all the more, well, delicious, Matt Grosdidier thought. There was something about being outside in a blizzard in midwinter and not being lost or cold. And not in the process of responding to a scene of medical mayhem in the middle of one. That work was left to his three brothers this evening, as he had won the coin toss. It didn’t hurt that he was the only one of them with a steady girlfriend, especially in the woman-poor Park, and was the subject of their manifest envy. He sighed with pure happiness.

  “What?” Laurel Meganack narrowed her eyes at him. She, too, was naked and submerged up to her neck in the steaming pool.

  He gave her a winning smile. She remained unimpressed, drained her wine and handed him her empty glass.

  He laughed and kissed her. She responded with enough enthusiasm that he gave some thought to going for a two-fer before rather than after, but she stiff-armed him. “Did you think you didn’t have to work for it? Go.”

  He sighed to let her know how he suffered, and on purpose splashed her good when he vaulted out of the pool and ran for the cabin door. The blowing snow stung his skin with a thousand tiny needles. There was significant shrinkage but you couldn’t blame a guy for that. The wind chill had to be thirty below. He could hear her laughing over the sound of the storm. He was moving pretty fast by the time he hit the door.

  The cabin had been built by hand the previous summer by Kate Shugak, whose property this was and who, when Matt asked if he and Laurel could spend New Year’s Eve there, had rolled her eyes and said, “Ah, to be young again.” Which Matt had, correctly, taken as tacit permission and had loaded up his sled forthwith
with various eatables and drinkables and an entire box of condoms. Safety first.

  The cabin was solidly built and snug, with a sleeping loft over the door reached by a ladder, a small but very efficient cast iron wood stove, and an outhouse just a few steps outside the back door that had an actual toilet seat. Alaska Bush luxury defined. He grabbed up the open bottle of red from the counter and before he could think twice about it trotted out the door and splashed Laurel again leaping back into the pool.

  She laughed again, fortunately. “My hero.”

  He refilled her glass. “Always,” he said, and was a little surprised to realize he meant it.

  The pool was one of seven of varying sizes that rose from a seep beneath the one they were marinating in and overflowed one into the other down the bottom half of the narrow canyon. Old Sam Dementieff had homesteaded the canyon and the surrounding one hundred and sixty acres back in the Stone Age—well, before World War II, anyway—and had left it to Kate. It was the place where she had spent the previous summer recovering from being shot in the chest at point-blank range. Building a cabin seemed an excessive way to go about the job of recovery, but then Kate Shugak was a law unto herself and Matt Grosdidier was not the man to second-guess her. He liked his balls right where they were. Suffice it to say that Canyon Hot Springs was Kate’s hideout, her bolthole, the place she went to to get away from it all. Her happy place.

  He looked at Laurel, who was regarding him over the rim of her glass with an expression that could only be described as smoldering. His happy place, too. Without breaking eye contact he took her glass and set it down in the snow edging the pool, and put his own next to it. She came easily into his arms, swinging a leg over his and settling down on top of him, everything lining up with what could only be described as perfection.

  She nuzzled at his neck in the spot just below his ear that seemed to connected directly to his cock. “You’re like the Coast Guard,” she said, her voice a low and excruciatingly sexy murmur.