Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  And Harry could see Bud’s face—Brillo beard stuck in dirty Ivory soap—between the backs and shoulders of the medics.

  His deputy escort was young and competent, very correct in his bearing with tragic excitement animating his athletic Scandinavian face. Maybe they didn’t get this kind of call much up here. He had asked questions and methodically taken notes in his spiral notepad and had photographed the scene with a Polaroid as the medics went in to get to Bud. He had directed their initial approach with care so as not to disturb evidence. Procedure had set in, setting boundaries for shock.

  Harry gagged and tried to spit the taste from his mouth.

  “How you doing?” asked the deputy.

  “I’m good,” said Harry, wiping spittle from his lips. Probably the wrong thing to say. He gingerly dabbed his face with a bloody wad of gauze and loose meat wobbled like thawing steak. Four deep lacerations started on his left cheek

  HUNTER’S MOON / 75

  under the eye, raked across the bridge of his nose, and clawed down his right cheek.

  “Where’s your coat?” asked the deputy.

  Harry nodded down the slope. “Used it to cover him.”

  The deputy yelled down the incline. “Somebody bring Mr. Griffin his coat.”

  Harry grimaced. The hemorrhaging adrenaline that had carried him this far had flamed out and now his guts were charred hollow and dirty as a chimney fire. The deputy watched him closely for signs of shock.

  “We got this under control here, Mr. Griffin. We can get you back to town. Get you somebody to talk to.”

  “Talk to?” Harry shook his head. “A lawyer?”

  “No, uh, they got people trained in crisis counseling—”

  “Christ,” muttered Harry. Minnesota cops. They probably all had counseling degrees. “You got a cigarette?” he asked the deputy.

  “Don’t smoke.”

  Harry hugged himself. “Cold,” he said.

  “Hurry up with that coat,” the deputy yelled. Down below someone held up the coat. They were putting Bud on a gurney.

  “I’d like to ride with him to the hospital,” Harry said.

  “You just wait here, sir,” said the deputy. “Here comes your coat.”

  Another county deputy jogged up the slope, staying outside the yellow tape perimeter. He carried Harry’s jacket, a blanket, and a Thermos. Harry put on his parka, pulled the hood over the cake of sweat frozen in his hair, and grabbed for a high-energy bar in his pocket. He tore at the plastic wrapper and his numb, blood-stained fingers spasmed. He dropped it. The deputy picked it up and opened it. Harry gobbled it down. The other deputy draped the blanket over his shoulders and held out the Thermos.

  “Sheriff thought you might need this,” he said, screwing off the cup and pouring it full and steaming.

  Harry took it and drank greedily and the warmth flooded 76 / CHUCK LOGAN

  his veins and enlarged his throat and suddenly there was all this new room inside him. An involuntary parched “Ah,” came from his lips and he forced the cup away with both hands. He spat out the residue in his mouth as a smoky wind, one part coffee, nine parts whiskey, raced through him. He spat again on the snow and handed back the cup. “Booze in it,” he said, unable to stop the grin spreading across his torn face. “Not the day I want to lose ten years of sobriety.”

  The cops exchanged glances and the one who brought the Thermos spoke apologetically. “It’s Sheriff Emery’s. He ain’t on duty today. Was going hunting.”

  Harry nodded, found his cigarettes in his pocket, and lit up.

  Tendrils of fire spun hot and lacy inside his fingertips and the whiskey washed the decomposed taste from his mouth. Huddled in the coat and blanket he felt stronger. He nodded down the slope.

  “How is he?”

  “Shock. Lost some blood, but you patched him up pretty good,”

  said the second deputy. “That’s what the Smokeys say, anyway.

  What happened to his face, Jerry?” he asked.

  “Jesse and Becky went apeshit when Mr. Griffin told them what happened. Becky took a swipe at his face.”

  The second deputy spit thoughtfully. Dark brown stain on the snow. Chewing tobacco. “Maston says he saved his life. That Chris was trying to kill him, which don’t exactly surprise me. I’d a never let that kid go near a gun myself.”

  Harry started to ask a question, but something about the way the deputies were talking warned him to shut up.

  “Larry shoulda done something about that Chris…the shit’s going to hit the fan now—”

  “Sweet on Jesse and the kids,” said the one named Jerry. “Be sweet on her after Maston’s gone.”

  Bud’s hasty marriage didn’t appear to be engraved in stone in Maston County.

  “Yeah, but will he still be sheriff after this?” said the tobacco chewer.

  Jerry toed the snow with his boot, the other cop spit his tobacco.

  Any minute now one of them would start whittling, HUNTER’S MOON / 77

  thought Harry. The hayseed schmooze routine didn’t fit with their otherwise highly trained style. Consequences, he thought, on guard.

  If Jesse made good on her rape threat, how would his story look to these canny backwoods cops?

  The second deputy inspected Harry’s face. “You should get back to town, have a doc look at that kisser. Need a tetanus shot for sure.

  Lots of dirty stuff under a person’s fingernails.”

  “It can wait,” said Harry. He had given his driver’s license to another cop who’d stayed back at the lodge. By now they’d made a radio call and he wondered what kind of picture the criminal justice system kept on Detroit Harry in its national computer.

  The second deputy said, “I’ll be getting back down there, help them bring the stretcher up.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Harry.

  “You best wait up here, sir,” said the second deputy. “Anybody in this county’s going to get first-class treatment, it’s Maston. He had the new hospital built. You just sit tight. Sheriff’ll want to talk to you.” He took off down the hill.

  “Am I under arrest?” Harry asked.

  “No sir, you’re under no legal constraints other’n we’d like you to stick around to help clear up some questions the county medical examiner might have. You weren’t planning on leaving, were you?”

  Harry shook his head. It was interrogation. Keep the parties involved separate for questioning. Routine. Sensible. Different though, if you were in the middle.

  “And if the medical examiner has…questions?” asked Harry.

  “Well, then the county prosecutor gets involved and there’ll be an investigation. Gets to where two and two don’t add up…well, then we’re required to advise you that you might want to talk to an attorney…”

  Harry started to ask another question. The deputy cut in polite but firm. “Just rest up, Mr. Griffin. Save it for the sheriff.”

  78 / CHUCK LOGAN

  They were bringing Bud up the slope. Six cops manhauling the gurney with a medic jogging alongside steadying an IV rig. More medics with bags and gear followed. Bud grimaced with every jerk of the stretcher and Harry pushed through to him and squeezed his arm through the blankets. “Hang in there,” he said.

  Bud grinned wanly and fell back exhausted and the coppowered dogsled huffed and puffed down the trail and disappeared in the pines. A voice bellowed commands down by the swamp:

  “Awright, we got the hurt guy outta here, so square away this clusterfuck, and be careful, people! Nobody go near that body till the medical examiner gets here. And the BCA are coming from Duluth. You know how finicky those guys are. Film it, but don’t be mucking up them tracks. An’ don’t fuck with them rifles. Or the packs. Leave ’em lay. BCA’s bringing their lab, so we gotta keep this place clean. I don’t want no dumb-ass hunters walking through.”

  Out-of-place voice in the North Woods, with a lilt of Southern cadence.

  Sheriff Emery plodded up the slope and Harry had an
impression of butternut and leather and thought: he’d own a horse. The kind of man Jesse might have married before she met Bud.

  No badge. No gun. His person was his authority. He moved with shambling grace; a powerful man with a deceptive softness to his loosely chiseled features; hatless, his long dark hair ruffled almost to his shoulders, softly curly, in the breeze.

  Emery drew close and his watchful tobacco eyes were mournful and bloodshot and teared with the cold. He stopped a few feet away and seemed to loose his balance.

  Deputy Jerry immediately went to him. Profound sympathy softened the vigorous lines of the young cop’s face as he took the sheriff by the arm and steadied him. “How you doing with this, Larry?” he asked.

  The sheriff took a deep, shuddering breath and released it.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 79

  “I’m okay,” he said but the scary way his eyes flashed told Harry to get ready to meet the most pissed-off and most dangerous man in Maston County.

  Emery let Harry have another second of the glare, then he folded it back into his eyes like a jackknife blade and said, “Jerry, you go down an’ help Morris with the video camera so’s we got more than just treetops on that tape. And don’t have him spitting tobacco juice on any evidence. Do it right. And don’t piss off the God almighty State fucking Patrol.”

  “Morris knows what to do,” said Jerry and didn’t move. They had a quick conference, heads close. Emery perused Jerry’s notebook, then returned to Harry. Jerry hovered a few feet away.

  “I’m Larry Emery. Sheriff here.” He said, icy with control.

  “How is he?” Harry asked.

  Emery squinted at him. “You want a lawyer? Go back into town, get a lawyer. Or talk to somebody ’bout being upset? We got this preacher works for us you can talk to now when your heart starts going pitter-pat.”

  “Is he all right?” Harry repeated.

  “Seems to be. Looks like you’ve bandaged a gunshot wound before.”

  “Nothing went into his guts or anything?”

  “Flesh wound. Through and though.” Emery slowly scanned Harry’s face. “He’s more worried about you.”

  Harry nodded and winced as the ooze from the claw marks cracked in the cold.

  “Girl really did a job on you,” said Emery. “Need that looked at.”

  “Your deputy said you had some questions?”

  “Bud says you saved his life. What d’you say?” Emery asked. He took a small wooden cylinder from his pocket, twisted off the top, and withdrew a toothpick that he held between his fingers and put it to his lips like a smoker. His fingers shook.

  “It was real fast,” said Harry.

  “Um-hum,” nodded Emery. He was looking down the slope.

  80 / CHUCK LOGAN

  At the kid’s body, hugging the bush. “So you was up here, in this dead pine,” he walked the yellow tape to the platform 20 feet away.

  The angle of the land and the brush below just blocked the line-of-sight view from the stand to where Chris had stood. Emery’s eyes took this in. “And you hear this shot—”

  “Yelling. They were yelling at each other.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “An argument. Bud called Chris an ‘ungrateful little shit,’ I heard that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Two shots and Bud screamed. I jumped out of the tree and ran to the edge of the ridge where I could see. Bud was down, the kid—”

  “Name was Chris,” said Emery. “Christopher Warren Deucette.”

  “Chris was reloading, tearing at the bolt like it was jammed, then he aimed it at Bud—”

  “How long you know him—Chris, I mean?”

  “Met him last night. We just drove up from the Cities. Bud married his mother…

  “Lives with her. Keeps her.” said Emery with distaste. He threw the toothpick away. “You got another cigarette?”

  Harry handed him his pack. Emery tore off the filter and took a light from Harry’s Zippo. He dragged for a moment and exhaled.

  “You talk much to Chris?”

  “A little, about hunting—”

  “Anything between Chris and Maston come up? Anything explain why he’d put a deer gun on Maston?”

  “Right after it happened Bud said something about stolen goods.

  Not real clear on that part.”

  “You get that in your notes?” Emery queried Jerry, who nodded.

  Then Emery studied Harry carefully. After an interval, he went on.

  “An’ you see Chris shoot at Bud. Was they standing close?”

  Harry shook his head. “Bud was down, crawling away, bleeding.

  The ki…Chris, he was working the bolt—”

  “So you didn’t see him shoot?”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 81

  “Not the first two. Third one hit a tree next to Bud’s head. Same time I fired.”

  Emery peered down the slope, at angles and distances. “So his shot went wild when he was hit? Or he missed?”

  “Too close to tell.” Harry remembered Bud’s agonized statement—that he was trying to talk to Chris. Did he react too fast? His memory was starting to function again and it served up the image of the gray movement he’d seen in the trees right after the shooting and matched it with the image of Becky in her ski suit racing down the trail, coming off the porch at him. “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer,” he said.

  “I don’t think we’re to that yet, Mr. Griffin. Don’t think this is headed that way. But that’s your right. Take you back and you make your phone call. You get your legal advice, then we’ll get your statement. Like the law says.”

  There was something heavy and remorseful in Sheriff Emery’s manner when he pronounced the phrase, “the law.”

  Harry and Emery walked in silence back along the ridge and down to the trail with Deputy Jerry just behind them. The herd of cops and medics had made a wallow of the snow, obliterating any snowshoe tracks. As they approached the grove of pines, Harry stiffened as he watched Emery’s alert tracker’s eyes inspect the two sets of footprints that left the trail and went into the trees.

  Harry stopped flat-footed. The tracks ended abruptly in recently feathered snow. Sprinkled pine needles and curls of rusty bark traced the path of someone who had swept the entire area with a pine-bough broom.

  Harry held his breath and heard the leather creak on Jerry’s gunbelt as the deputy shifted his weight. Trying to look calm, he followed Emery into the grove. All swept over. No trace of the stamped snow where he’d been with Jesse less than two hours ago.

  Without comment, Emery walked a circle through the grove. Harry and Jerry followed. Harry’s fingers were exploring the nubbin of thick thread on his trousers where a button was missing when he saw what Emery had paused to study.

  82 / CHUCK LOGAN

  The sweep-job led to ski tracks, distinct as two rails that fanned a turn around on a slight rise at the edge of the thicker timber above the grove. The tracks did not lead off toward the snowmobile trail.

  Instead they cut overland through the cover of the trees parallel to the ridge. Hard going for anyone unless they had something very deliberate in mind.

  Becky. Had to be. Snooping. And cleaning up after her mother?

  Harry was no expert on police work but he could follow fresh tracks in clean snow close to the site of a shooting and pose the obvious question. Were there any other witnesses or an accomplice?

  Harry’s face closed tight to hide a flush of shame and anger. Bud could be the one lying dead out there if…

  And Emery, who looked like he could follow a butterfly through a tornado, just knelt over the tracks and slowly rotated his eyes with his weather-cured face showing no expression.

  No one was connecting the dots strewn all around the countryside and things were getting tricky in Maston County. Harry resolved to keep his mouth shut until he got a big-city lawyer like Dorothy Houston’s dad to back him up.

  Emery motioned Harry and Jerry back to the trail an
d they continued on to the lodge without speaking.

  14

  Laconic after-the-fact police traffic droned on car radios.

  County Blazers and Highway Patrol cruisers jammed the horseshoe drive in front of the lodge. They’d taken Jesse and Becky away.

  Cops. Watching him out of the corner of their eyes. A van showed up with CRIME LAB stenciled on the side. The guys in the van had the scene explained to them, then they watched Harry from the corners of their eyes as they talked to Emery. Jerry, ever-present and competent, helped load travel cases of forensic gear on a gurney rigged behind a snowmobile.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 83

  When somebody looked at him, Harry looked back with a hard glance that said, Fuck you, I didn’t do anything wrong. He had a metal whir in his chest and his eyes were a camera.

  Deeper down, Sheriff Emery’s whiskey crept in him, silently, opening doors, and the walls of his memory started to move.

  A snowbridge of the shock crumpled beneath his feet, his knees misfired and his hands went out for balance. Emery caught it from the corner of his eye.

  His thoughts spiraled: Chris spun and fell. The smooth muscles at the base of Jesse’s spine trembled.

  He could feel the electric charge of Chris’s life go from his body.

  Weigh the corpse. He knew it would be lighter. Put the whole fucking world on a scale. Lighter. Minus one.

  The snapshots of desire and death had a specific slippery, corrosive taste. Gotta brush my teeth. Now.

  “I want to make a phone call,” he told Emery. The sheriff was talking to the state guys; he nodded and pointed to the lodge. A deputy lounged in the kitchen near the coffee pot. Harry asked to use the phone.

  The deputy checked with Emery, who dismissed him with a wave of his hand and turned back to the BCA.

  Two cops were going through the room where he’d slept and the contents of Harry’s duffel were neatly spread out on the bed, exactly where he’d left them. He asked if he could have his shaving kit. They handed it to him. In the bathroom, he scrubbed at his teeth, swigged mouthfuls of Listerine, gargled, and swallowed some in his haste.

  It only managed to coat the taste. He grimaced in the mirror at the gummy stripes that were riven into his face.