"You do groceries well," Jim said to Kate.
"Yes, I do," she said, and looked at Johnny. "Things okay at school today?"
He hunched a shoulder. "Yeah, fine."
They both looked at him, Jim pausing in the act of loading up dishes for a trip to the sink. "What?" Kate said.
"It's all anyone is talking about," Johnny said. "I'm a hero for getting beat up coming up the river. Poor old Mac gets shot and hardly gets a mention."
Jim started stacking dishes again. "It's a matter of setting priorities, Johnny. Folks are on the river every day, going hunting, buying fuel and supplies, visiting relatives, going to basketball games. Safe passage on the river is essential to the life of the 'Burbs."
"And what's one miner more or less?" Kate said.
"Oh man, Kate," Johnny said in dismay. "That's kind of harsh."
"Pretty harsh, yeah," she said. "Also true. And, you know, it's life. Or at least it is around here." She looked at Jim. "Have you tracked Howie down yet?"
Jim let out a long, heartfelt sigh. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Howie. No. No, I haven't. He isn't at home, and Willard claims he hasn't seen him. Of course we all know that Willard can't remember today what happened yesterday, unless yesterday was Darth Vader's birthday. Howie hasn't been to the Roadhouse for the last five days, according to Bernie, which fits because he was supposed to start his shift at the trailer on Monday. You'll remember that storm we had just before Thanksgiving?"
"No tracks?" Kate said.
Jim gave a gloomy nod. "No tracks."
"Who's out there now?"
"At the trailer? FNG name of Gallagher."
"What?" Johnny said, looking up from his trig homework.
Jim looked at him. "Talia Macleod hired Howie and a new guy, a Dick Gallagher, to babysit her trailer a week on, a week off. This was supposed to be Howie's week."
Johnny opened his mouth and Kate said, "Is he armed?"
"I didn't ask. He's a fool if he isn't. And Macleod would probably insist." He hesitated.
"What?" she said. "You want me to find Howie for you?"
He gave an irritated wave of his hand. "No, I'll find Howie. I always find Howie whether I want to or not."
"Uh…," Johnny said.
"No," Jim said, "I want you to go talk to the villagers for me."
"But you already have."
"Come on, Kate. They'll say things to you that they won't say to me."
"Oh. You think the highwaymen have to be the Johansens because that's who Art Riley said they were. Even if he couldn't identify them."
He winced. "Please don't call them that. People'll start romanticizing them, think they wear cocked hats and carry swords and fall in love with the landlord's daughter, and the next thing you know there'll be stories about them robbing from the rich to give to the poor."
"Okay," she said obligingly, "you think Art's right about who the assholes on the snow machines are."
He nodded. "If not know, then suspect. Hell, don't you? Maybe the Kaltaks or Ike saw something. Find me an eyewitness and I'll lock up those sonsabitches and throw away the key."
"Usual rates?"
He grumbled. "Yeah, fine. You're getting to be my single biggest budget item, Shugak."
She batted her eyelashes. "But you know I'm worth it."
Johnny opened his mouth for the third time and Jim said, "You got a mouth on you, Shugak, I'll give you that. A disease for which there is only one known cure." He leaned forward and kissed her.
Johnny made the obligatory gagging noises and departed for less saccharine climes, otherwise known as his room.
It was furnished in a style Kate called Late American Adolescent, which is to say that the original of no horizontal or vertical surface showed through the clutter of clothes, shoes, boots, books, toys, posters, gadgets, CDs, DVDs, truck parts, snow machine parts, four-wheeler parts, notebooks, X-Men comic books, but only the ones written by Joss Whedon, used bowls containing leftovers in a communicable state of congealment, and many different varieties of shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream, pimple unguent, and cologne, all of which had been used once before being tossed aside in favor of the next new thing.
Not on view was the pile of Penthouse and Playboy magazines that both he and Kate pretended she didn't know were under the head of his bed. Not that she ever came in here anyway. "Your room, your mess," she had said cheerfully when they moved in. "My prime request, which I do last pronounce, is that anything that breeds in there? Stays in there."
He cleared his bed by the simple expedient of lifting one corner of the tangled spread and shaking it. Everything on it fell, slid, or crashed to the floor, and he flopped down on his back to stare at the ceiling.
So Doyle-Dick-had scored a job with Talia Macleod. That was good. "It is good," he said to the ceiling.
He tried to remember some of the stuff they'd talked about over the night and day they'd spent in the cab of that semi, more than two years ago now. He'd been homesick and filled with longing for the clean, cold air, the lack of crowds, the empty roads, the silence. Yes, he'd raved about Alaska, he remembered that much, and evidently Doyle-Dick!-had believed every word. Well, why not? Johnny hadn't lied.
He was worried, though. Alaska wasn't easy. It was beautiful enough to break your heart, but there was a price. It didn't tolerate fools gladly. "Suicide by Alaska," Kate called it whenever a cheechako did something particularly stupid that got them killed, like planting a tent on a known bear trail, or moving into the backcountry with no experience in a subsistence lifestyle, or climbing Denali without a radio, or taking off in an overgrossed chartered floatplane for a fishing trip that ended with the people inside as bait.
Dick was tough, though. You didn't spend years driving an eighteen-wheeler across country without learning how to take care of yourself.
Johnny still hadn't told Kate about Dick being in the Park, much less about him changing his name. That was partly because she went into orbit every time he mentioned his hitchhiking home that August. But he'd had to do it, there was no other way to get home, and he'd had to get home.
If he'd still been living in Anchorage he could have tolerated living with his mother, too, but Jane had dumped him with his grandparents. He'd met them twice in his life before that, and they lived on a golf course, for crying out loud! Who lived on a golf course? Nobody under seventy-five, that was for sure. It might not have been so bad if he'd been old enough to drive, the country looked interesting farther out, but there he was, stuck between the golf course and school. He had nothing in common with the kids in his classes, he wasn't into sports or shopping. In the summer you couldn't even go outside or the heat would come down on you like a sledgehammer. You couldn't even breathe in heat like that.
It wasn't like he hadn't asked his mom, repeatedly, if he could come home. His appeals had gone unanswered, and his grandparents hardly spoke to him. The three of them never sat down to a meal together except when they went out to Denny's for the senior special. There had been a bunch of Stouffer's frozen dinners in the freezer, cereal and Top Ramen in the cupboard, milk in the refrigerator, and bananas in a bowl on the counter, and that was it. He'd felt like he was starving to death.
That August night he had left the house well after midnight, a daypack over his shoulder filled with clean underwear and every penny he had. It wasn't much, and, he was ashamed to remember, the sum had included two twenty-dollar bills he'd stolen out of his grandmother's purse. The first thing he'd done after Kate gained legal title to him and it was okay to tell them where he was was to borrow forty bucks from her and enclose it with a card, apologizing for the theft.
They hadn't answered. That was okay with him, because it indicated a reassuring lack of interest in having him back.