Free Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel by Mike Doogan Page A

feet.”
    “What about the cop who was shot?” Kane asked.
    “O’Leary?” Simms said. “Says he doesn’t know anything. Says he went to answer a domestic dispute call and didn’t even get all the way out of the unit before he was shot. Never saw anything. The bullets were from a nine-millimeter. Half the men in Anchorage own a nine. And a quarter of the women. All in all, nothing.”
    “So now what?” Kane asked.
    Simms shook his head.
    “We keep looking,” Simms said. “Most of the force is trying to find out who ambushed O’Leary. You know how it is when a cop is shot. But some of us are working your case.”
    The word “case” got through to Kane. If the shooting was a case, somebody could be charged.
    “What happens if you don’t find anything?” he asked.
    “That’s up to the DA,” Simms said.
    “The DA?” Kane said. “To do what?”
    “To decide whether to charge you,” Simms said.
    “Charge me?” Kane said. “Charge me for what? The kid had a gun.”
    Kane saw in Simms’s eyes the look that cops gave suspects.
    “You sure about that, Nik?” Simms said, his voice full of doubt. “You blew a 1.6. You were pretty drunk.”
    Kane’s thoughts took him right past a side road that seemed wide enough to accommodate heavy equipment. He stopped and backed down the highway, turned, and drove up the road. He followed it for a few more miles, twisting and turning and climbing steadily, until he reached a gate in a tall Cyclone fence topped with barbed wire.
    “Pitchfork Gold Mine,” a sign on the gate read, with “Alcan Mining Consortium” written below it. Then, in the biggest letters of all, “No Trespassing.”
    The place was lit up like a Hollywood premiere. From where he sat, Kane could see a big building that must have been the mill house, but not much else. There was a small guardhouse next to the gate, but its window was tinted and he couldn’t tell if anyone was in there. He leaned on his horn.
    The window flew open and a shotgun was thrust out. Behind it, Kane could make out a pale face dominated by a droopy mustache. He rolled down his window.
    “You got business here?” a man’s voice asked. Kane heard sleep in the voice and, beneath it, hundreds of hard whiskey nights.
    “Shouldn’t be sleeping on the job, Lester,” Kane said. “Somebody might sneak up and steal your shack.”
    A smile appeared beneath the mustache. It was several teeth short of a full set.
    “Anybody who tried would get a bellyful of double-ought,” the man said. “Howdy, Nik. I heard you was out.”
    “Two months, eight days,” Kane said. “I’m here to see Charlie Simms.”
    The man in the guardhouse gave Kane a look, then started shaking his head.
    “I don’t know about that, Nik,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, but it weren’t Charlie’s fault.”
    Lester’s seriousness made Kane smile. Much of life is a mystery to Lester, Kane thought, but not so baffling that he can’t jump to the wrong conclusion.
    “I’m not here to get even,” Kane said. “Jeffords sent me.”
    “I’ll check,” the man said, and slid the window shut again. After a few minutes, he came out, wearing a big beige parka and bulbous-toed white bunny boots. He threw a bolt and swung the gates wide.
    “Just past the mill house on the left,” he told Kane.
    Simms’s office was in a one-story prefab, next to the office belonging to the mine manager. A secretary dressed in a sweater and ski pants showed him in, asked him if he wanted coffee, and left him alone. Even though there were fifty yards between the trailer and the mill house, Kane could feel the steady shaking of the mills breaking rock.
    Pictures of old mining operations dotted the walls: men in dark, bulky clothes standing next to long sluice boxes, men aiming water from high-pressure nozzles at seams of gravel, men jockeying bulldozers through creeks.
    “The chief told me you’d be stopping by, Nik,” a voice said. “You’re