“Home tomorrow,” she said out loud, and felt good about it for the first time since the cabin burned down.
After Johnny had gone to bed and Kate was alone in the living room, Terminator playing on Jack’s VCR, she muted the television, picked up the phone, and dialed a number from memory, keeping mental fingers crossed. When a woman answered, she breathed a sigh of relief. “Fran, it’s Kate Shugak. Please don’t hang up, and please don’t let Gary know it’s me.”
There was a long silence, but no click and no dial tone. Background noise included voices and the inevitable television. Kate said, “If you can, get to a paper and pencil.” There was another long silence, followed by scrabbling sounds. “I know a counselor who works with kids who have been sexually abused. Her name’s Colleen Diemer.” She recited the number once, waited, and repeated it. “She’s very good. If you and Gary need to talk, she can refer you to someone who counsels adults. But whether you two do or not, get your daughter to her, or to someone like her.” She paused, and continued with difficulty. “There are things she just can’t say to you or to Gary. Things that need to be said. Colleen Diemer. Her office is in one of the medical buildings on Lake Otis, just north of Tudor. Her staff is really good about working out payment. There are all kinds of state and federal programs to subsidize the fees.”
Fran said nothing.
Kate took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “Colleen is very trustworthy, Fran. She’ll understand about Gary. She won’t call the house, she won’t send you a bill there.”
“Who’s that, honey?” Gary’s voice said in the background.
“No, thank you,” Fran said, “we’re happy with our long distance service as it is. Good-bye.”
There might have been a whisper of a “thank you” as Kate hung up the phone, but it might also have been her imagination. She went back to Terminator, which was a positive haven of peace and nonviolence compared to some of the homes she’d been into on the job.
She only hoped she had not visited one of them this afternoon.
14
Dandy was still torqued at what he saw as Jim Chopin’s patronizing dismissal of Dandy’s services. He was so torqued that he had slept alone the night before in spite of overtures on the parts of two different women.
His bed was located in the apartment he’d fitted up over the warehouse that sat on the five acres of land he’d received as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972 back when he was all of nine years old. The five acres sat on the river, and his father had built the warehouse as a place to park his fishing boat during the winter. Dandy’s apartment had started life as a net loft, but then the Native Association had begun paying dividends and Billy had started paying someone else to mend his gear, and Dandy had asked for the space. Billy shrugged. It was Dandy’s land, after all.
Dandy hadn’t done much beyond installing a bathroom and enough of a kitchen to allow his girlfriends to cook for him. The floor was hardwood with a couple of thick sheepskins scattered around for effect. A king-sized bed dominated one corner, with nightstands on either side with drawers big enough to accommodate condoms in bargain-size boxes and a weekend’s worth of clean clothes for sleepovers. In another corner there was a wide, long brown leather couch next to a Barcalounger, which sat in front of a 32-inch television. There was also a combination VHS/DVD player, and a set of shelves with an extensive selection of movies, most of them starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Dandy didn’t bother with satellite television, as he wasn’t into any sport you couldn’t play from a horizontal position and everything else was blood and gore. Women didn’t like blood and gore, as a rule. Dandy was willing to watch anything that got women into the mood, and he was continually expanding his movie library with that end in view. Audrey Hepburn was a recent discovery. The scene with Peter OToole under the museum stairs in How to Steal a Million had in recent testing proven itself to be fail-safe. He was hoping it would come out on DVD before his VHS copy was completely worn through.
Hands behind his head, he frowned at the ceiling. He was still annoyed with Jim for blowing off his efforts in the Len Dreyer case, but he was willing to forgive him because he knew what it was like to be led around by his cock, and he sympathized.
He was more annoyed with Kate, and he couldn’t decide if it was because she was the one leading Jim around, or if it was because she’d never tried to lead him, Dandy, around.
Easily sidetracked, he wondered about that. It wasn’t like Kate was a nun, she’d had her share. There was Ethan Int-Hout, and that doofus Anchorage investigator with more and blonder hair than Farrah Fawcett, and then there was Jack Morgan. The Kate-and-Jack thing went way back. Jeeze, Jack had been an okay guy, but sticking to one partner for, well, hell, he guessed it had been years. Years, for crissake. Dandy’s mind boggled. A real man wanted a little variety in his life. Sleeping with the same woman for years, years, that wasn’t variety, that was monotony, that was boredom. Dandy loved undressing a woman for the first time, loved the small discoveries that came with the act, the placement of a mole, the bony knees, the pillowy thighs. He loved finding out that a natural blonde wasn’t. Was she or wasn’t she? Only Dandy and her hairdresser knew for sure.
The trouble was, you could only undress a woman for the first time once. Fortunately, there were many, many women out there, and equally fortunately, many of them were happy to take a month’s romp at face value. Dandy Mike scorned to break hearts; he wanted whatever woman was in his life to have as good a time as he was, until it was time for both of them to move on. He prided himself that they almost always did. Oh, he’d had his failures, including one horrific experience when the girl of the month introduced herself to his mother and asked for help in planning the wedding, but on the whole he was fairly pleased with life in general. He attended the marriages of his classmates and friends with a smiling face, but privately he couldn’t imagine why any sane man would feel it necessary to settle on just one woman. It wasn’t natural, he thought, and just look at nature, while we’re on the subject. Why, he was reading an article just the other day, all about how new DNA studies were showing biologists that geese weren’t as monogamous as had been previously thought. The male of every species was designed to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. It strengthened the gene pool, insured the survival of the species. Dandy hadn’t finished college, but even he knew that.
Not that Dandy ever wanted to have children. He shuddered at the thought. He didn’t know how Bobby and Dinah were going to manage, always supposing for some unfathomable reason they still wanted to sleep together at all, in that big open house with a rug rat crawling all over it.
Nope, no question about it, old Jack must have been half a bubble off, as they said in the contracting business.
Where had he heard that saying? Oh, yeah. Len Dreyer. On the deck of the Freya last September.
Which reminded him of his grievance. Kate had old Chopper Jim on the hook, no doubt about that, she was just waiting until it was good and set before reeling it in. Thought she had the job landed at the same time, probably.
No two ways about it, Dandy was going to have to solve this Dreyer thing on his own just to get Jim’s attention. Once he had it, why, Jim would just naturally see what an asset Dandy would be to the local constabulary. And hopefully Dandy would never have to work this hard again.
The information he’d collected from his ex-girlfriends hadn’t made much of an impression. His face screwed up in thought. Well. He’d done a lot of jobs with Dreyer. Maybe he could put together the list of names he’d scrounged from his girlfriends, and maybe put in dates when he’d worked with Dreyer. Then maybe he could go talk to the people who had employed the two of them. They’d call that something on television – constructing a timeline, that was it. He’d construct a timeline for old Len Dreyer, was what he’d do, charting all old Len’s activities leading up until the day he died. Dandy didn’t know what day Len had died, but he dismissed that as a minor problem.