They didn’t run, but they looked ready to.
“Who’re they?” Jim said as she leapt the steps to the minuscule front porch.
“Friends,” Kate said, “hungry friends.” She turned. “ Come in or park it on the lawn, your choice.”
In the end, the four of them sat down to breakfast together- eggs scrambled with cheese, onions, garlic, and green chilies, served on tortillas with salsa and sour cream. The boys had cocoa and she and Jim had coffee.
I’m going to have to buy more eggs, she thought as she watched the boys, their heads bent over their plates. Hungry as they were, they ate neatly. Someone had been teaching them manners. That wasn’t always a good thing, in her experience.
She looked at Jim. She saw him look at the boys. He opened his mouth, and she caught his eyes and shook her head once from side to side.
He closed his mouth again.
She wondered why he was still here. She wondered if he was ready to cave. Probably not, she thought. Probably just pissed off to wake up alone for a second time. Probably thought waking up alone the morning after was the sole province of women.
She got up to get the coffeepot, and paused next to Jim to refill his mug. She took her time over it, leaning in, ensuring as much body contact as possible.
He wrapped his hand around one of her thighs, and for a split second she didn’t know if that hand was going to slide up or shove away. It shoved, and she went with it, moving around the table to refill her own mug and replace the coffeepot. Neither of the boys, faces still in their plates, noticed anything. She slid into her seat, her eyes mocking. Jim looked very tense around the jaw-line. She smiled at him. His hand tightened around his mug. She hoped he wouldn’t throw it at her, as she didn’t know what the boys were running from and she didn’t want them to run from her house, too.
They cleaned their plates and then cleared the table. “I guess we better go,” Jordan said.
Kevin looked forlorn, but he nodded obediently.
Jim looked at Kate.
She pushed back from the table and draped a knee over one arm of the chair. “Where you going to go?” she said to the older boy.
“Home,” he said.
Kevin raised his head to give his brother a quick, alarmed glance.
Kate nodded. “Think things will have calmed down since you left?”
“They always do,” he said, his eyes bleak.
Drinkers, she thought. They’ll have sobered up by now. And it’s chronic enough for the boys to know the routine. “You live off the trail?”
The boys exchanged a glance. “Sort of.”
Not even close to it, she thought. “I’d like to give you a ride home.”
“No,” Jordan said immediately.
Jim opened his mouth. Kate closed it with another look. “Guys, you did good. When things got bad, you left, you found a place to sleep, and you found a nonweirdo to feed you breakfast. You did good, but you were lucky, too. I’d just as soon you don’t have to be lucky again.”
“We do okay,” Jordan said.
Kevin said nothing, pale of face, standing very close to his brother.
“I bet you do,” Kate said. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
Kevin plucked at his brother’s sleeve. “Jordan-”
Jordan looked down at the pleading face of his little brother and all the fight went out of him.
Their home was a trailer in Spenard, a good three miles from the coastal trail. Their mother came to the door after Kate pounded on it for a while. The smell of spilled booze and stale cigarettes was strong enough to rock Kate back a step.
The woman, short-waisted and thick through the middle, looked to be at least part Aleut, something Kate had suspected from the first time she had seen the boys.
She blinked at her sons. “Kevin? Jordan? What are you doing up already?” She saw Kate. “And who is this woman?”
When Kate got back to the town house, Jim was still there. “You’re still here,” she said, brushing by him in the doorway.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said, following her into the kitchen.
“Really?” She poured the last of the coffee. “I wouldn’t wish the home those boys are living in on a dog.”
Mutt looked reproachful, or as reproachful as she could pressed up next to Jim, tail wagging with delight.
“Call DFYS.”
Kate pressed her lips together. “They aren’t starving, and nobody’s hit them. Yet. I had a conversation with their mother. Might have scared her some. I’ll keep tabs.”
Diverted momentarily from his mission, Jim said, “You can’t save everyone, Kate.”
“What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” she said.
“You know damn well what about,” he said. He kept himself well to the other side of the room, out of her reach.
She cleared her face of all traces of a grin before turning. “I must be a little slow this morning,” she said, leaning against the counter, hands cradling her mug. She smiled at him through the steam rising up off the surface of the coffee. “Explain it to me.”
He stared at her in fulminating silence for a charged moment, then finally blurted, “Those damn boys, for one thing! Are you out of your mind, bringing them home like that? You should have called DFYS the instant you walked in the door!”
“No, I shouldn’t,” she said equably. “Is that all?”
It was like throwing gas on an open fire, she noticed and waited hopefully, thinking she might be tossed over his shoulder and hauled back upstairs. To her disappointment, Jim managed to reign in his temper. That couldn’t be good for his blood pressure. She drained the mug and put it in the sink. “Well, I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you do, too, back in the Park. I won’t keep you.”
He found himself being ushered from the house. One moment he was in the kitchen, full of legitimate fury, and the next he was on the sidewalk, looking up at her framed in the doorway, with no clear idea of how he got there.
“Kate,” he said.
“Yes, Jim?” she said.
He opened his mouth and closed it, several times.
He looked so bewildered that she relented, if only a little. “Isn’t this how you wanted it?” she said.
“What?” he said.
“Isn’t this how you wanted it?” she repeated. “Straight sex with no complications-when its over we go our separate ways, no harm, no foul?”
“Sounds good to me,” the man next door said, retrieving the newspaper from his front step.
“You mind your own goddamn business,” Jim told him.
The man, grinning, vanished back inside.
When Jim turned back, Kate had closed the door in his face.
9
Kate was still chuckling at the memory of Jim’s baffled expression, when the phone rang. “Is that lucky bastard gone, or is he standing there ready to come up here and rain all over my sorry-ass parade once he knows it’s me?” Brendan McCord said.
“He’s gone,” Kate said.
“Good,” Brendan said. “Henry Cowell no longer practices law in the state of Alaska.”
“Did he retire?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he move?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Brendan-”
“Kate, this guy seems to have just vanished off the map.”
“When?” Kate said.
There was a brief silence. “According to the records, he represented no clients, or at least no Alaskan clients, after he rested his case for Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff.”
“Victoria’s case was his last case?”
“You’re a little slow on the uptake this morning, Shugak,” Brendan said. “That’s what happens when you’ve been up all night, I guess.”
“Brendan,” Kate said, unheeding, “don’t you think it’s interesting that Victoria’s attorney vanishes right after her trial is over?”