Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  “Now what?”

  “Hold it there. Harry…” The cop had never called him by his first name and it conveyed a peculiar vibration of alarm. “You didn’t answer the phone.” Jerry wasn’t good at looking contrite. His eyes swept back and forth at knee level. “Just wanted to check on you.”

  It hurt when Harry tried to grin.

  Jerry chewed his lip. “Yeah, well, we got a problem. Larry’s loose.”

  The words had the laconic brevity of correctly gauging the approach of a typhoon. Harry nodded. Their eyes agreed. They’d just as soon be somewhere else.

  “We sent a deputy out to Cox’s trailer. Put another out on the road in front of here. Just a precaution.”

  Harry grimaced. “You should put a sign at the edge of town.

  Caution: Sheriff Dangerous When Drunk.”

  “Think it could be a little more serious than that.” Jerry toed the porch boards with a polished boot.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 313

  “What happened?” Harry asked and realized he’d been standing there with a cocked pistol hanging in his right hand and Jerry hadn’t mentioned it. His eyes scanned the black treeline.

  Jerry inhaled, held the breath. “Took him home, cleaned him up.

  Looked like he was coming out of it. Then he went to the bathroom.

  He was butt-naked in a towel…and…” Jerry clicked his expensive bridgework. “Bathroom had two doors. Breezeway goes to the garage. Musta had a pack with hunting gear stowed out there. From the garage was boot prints. So, ah, he’s on foot. Near as I can tell he’s up Nanabozho—”

  “Armed?”

  “Be my guess.”

  “Great.”

  “Harry. Me and Uncle Mike need you to look at something.”

  “What? Now?”

  “I need your help, man. Get your coat on,” said Jerry firmly, hooking his thumbs in the thick leather belt that supported his 9-mm Glock, cuffs, spare ammo, and can of Mace. “Just been crazier’n hell with the funeral and Jesse and Maston getting divorced like they are…now this.”

  Harry queried Jerry’s intelligent, uncomplicated, powder-blue eyes, and saw duty there, durable as a coat of paint on a wooden soldier. Neat silver badge. Thin blue line. All that good shit.

  The wooden soldier dropped his eyes.

  “What is it, Jerry?”

  “You know how to use that piece?”

  Harry nodded. Jerry cleared his throat. “Well, better bring it along.

  He shows up—if he’s like he was last night—and for some reason he gets past us…don’t take any chances.”

  “Jesus? Where we going?”

  “Back to his house. Shake it up.”

  314 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Now the snow comes down as quiet as a separate peace and inside the speeding Blazer the dash lights leak gloomy lime bubbles across Jerry’s face.

  “Mitch was in a fight. What about?” asked Harry.

  “Ah, that was high school stuff. Kid made an off-color remark about Becky. Mitch lunched him.” Jerry drove in silence for a few minutes, then he said, “Uncle Mike ain’t exactly been candid.”

  “No shit.”

  “He’s been covering for Larry. Not calling the grand jury wasn’t for Maston. That was to go light on Larry for babying Chris.” Jerry ground his teeth. “Weird thing is Larry wanted the grand jury.

  Wanted to grill Jay Cox and Karson. And you. That threw us.”

  “Mitch told me about the scene in October. Chris threatening Bud.”

  “You gotta know the history, Harry. He loved those kids and suddenly everybody’s taking them away from him. Now this is just between you and me, but around Labor Day it looked like Jesse had given up on Maston and was putting out feelers to go back to Larry.

  He got antsy about Cox, said something wrong was going on out at that lodge and he had to get Jesse and the kids out of it.”

  Jerry grimaced, the Blazer skidded through a turn too fast. “Then she does a one-eighty and decides to marry Maston. That’s what the big fight was about. The kids thought they were going back with their dad. After the wedding, Chris started acting up and took a gun to school. Larry stepped in and made Uncle Mike back off. Had this idea he could work with Chris, go hunting together, get close to him again after everything that’d happened. But then Chris turned it around, after Larry taught him to handle a rifle, he decided to go out with Maston.”

  “Or Emery talked him into it, for obvious reasons.”

  “Hell, we knew it stank to high heaven and then you came back to remind us and Don Karson was running around playing Johnny One Note about the Duluth stuff. And word getting HUNTER’S MOON / 315

  around about Jesse’s big divorce settlement. But goddamnit, there was nothing solid.”

  “Where was he that morning?”

  “Exactly. He was in the police station, getting ready to go out hunting, standing next to the dispatcher when the call came in about Maston.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t talk Chris into it.”

  “Yesterday I’d a given you an argument.” Jerry shook his head.

  “Figured it was too sloppy and obvious for Larry, putting Chris, fucked up like he was, in the middle. Hell, he’d of found a way to have Maston eaten by a bear or break his neck climbing a tree. Now, I don’t know. Could be Don Karson is right.” Jerry exhaled. “Normally Larry doesn’t spend all day in the woods and all night in a bottle.”

  “He’s in the woods after Becky. She knows what happened. If he’d use his son to commit murder, he might make his daughter disappear. It’s about Jesse and the money. And if Bud Maston dies before the divorce is final, we’re talking a lot of money.”

  “I don’t want to believe he’d do that to his kids,” said Jerry.

  They pulled into Emery’s driveway. Two more Blazers and a red Bronco were parked in front of the garage. A deputy waved them in. “Mike’s in the basement,” he said.

  The first thing Harry saw in the hallway was a picture of Becky and Chris, younger, smiling. The place where Jesse should be was cut out. Night of the funeral, after the Battle of the Snowmobiles, digging in the basement—that picture…

  “This way,” said Jerry. Months of dust cloaked the living room furniture and gave off a musty lived-in smell that turned piquant as they entered the kitchen.

  “Phew.” Harry wrinkled his nose. Bags of garbage heaped against the stove. Spores of mold festered on fruit rinds. Opened cans. Pots gluey with leftovers on crusted burners. Jerry grinned tightly. “My dad always said you have the heart-to-hearts sitting at the kitchen table.”

  A family album had been ripped apart, cellophane page 316 / CHUCK LOGAN

  minders scattered and torn. Scraps of cardboard. Photos littered the grubby table and the woman’s face had been cut from all of them.

  “I count four empty whiskey bottles,” said Jerry. He jerked his head ominously to the basement stairs. “It’s down here. When he split on me, I thought maybe he got into the basement, so I went down to take a look.”

  The basement was divided into two areas. An unfinished utility area with the furnace, laundry sinks, washer and dryer, storage closets. The other half was a paneled den.

  Mike Hakala hadn’t taken the time to get all the way dressed. He stood barefoot next to his kicked-off Sorels, in pajamas under his parka. Staring.

  A couch and chair faced a fireplace and a small bar was built into the wall. Next to it, a broad workbench held a mounted apparatus Harry vaguely recognized as a reloading press. There were shelves with tools and firearm paraphernalia and two rifles lay on the bench.

  A large abstract painting, six feet by three and a half, four feet, was propped on the top shelf over the bench.

  A third rifle was secured by rubber bungees to a snow tire on a table at one end of the room. Sandbags wedged the table legs.

  “Don’t touch anything,” said Mike.

  Harry nodded and followed the direction of the rifle muzzle. At the other end of the room, a plywood
frame held a backstop of thick phone books. Bud’s face, thinner, a poster from his stillborn political campaign, was taped to the phone books. A grid had been drawn with precision over his features with a red felt-tip pen. It exactly matched the grid on a sheet of paper taped next to it. Harry had seen the sheet of paper before. A target grid from an army instruction manual they used on the rifle range to zero M14s. Something about the trajectory being the same at 20 feet as at 200 yards.

  “What the fuck?” Harry poked a finger at a tight group of six bullet holes a foot off the poster two o’clock high on the right.

  “Don’t touch, just look,” said Jerry.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 317

  They went back to the bench. A plastic baggy containing a lump of smashed lead lay next to a bottle of Old Grand-Dad. Three unfired cartridges, all tagged. The tags labeled: CHRIS, MASTON, GRIFFIN.

  Harry pointed to the old Remington on the counter. “That’s my rifle. I thought—”

  “Yeah, so did I. All three guns went down to the BCA in Saint Paul for analysis. Larry got ’em back. What the fuck was he up to?”

  Mike winced and looked away.

  Harry gave his full attention to what leaned against the wall over the bench and his battered sinuses cleared and the hallucinatory after scent of whiskey and cordite that lingered in the basement became a witch’s brew of obsession.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed.

  “Right,” said Jerry tersely. “You’re an artist. Give me an artistic opinion about that.”

  Harry’s skin rippled as he sensed the brooding presence of Larry Emery all around him. A man who watched everything and missed nothing.

  “It’s a photo montage,” said Harry quietly as his eyes roved and his knees got weak. He dropped to a stool and groped for a cigarette.

  Jerry backhanded him on the arm, held out his hand.

  “Huh?”

  “Gimme one.”

  They lit up and viewed the intricate wall hanging. Bud. Hundreds of pictures of Bud Maston. Meticulously cut out and fitted together with headlines and blocks of type. A public record of his shining life. Bud in his baby shoes. Bud walking with his father on the Stanley waterfront. At the funeral after his family died in the sailing accident. On the football team at St. Thomas Academy in St. Paul.

  The debate team at Harvard. Grainy photos from the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes. Sleek black-tie snapshots from society pages.

  Banquets. Dedications. Dates. The most recent pictures were from his political campaign. Gleaned painstakingly from dozens of publications over more than forty years.

  318 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Richard Nixon hanging the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck at the White House.

  Mike Hakala’s voice was quiet, glum. “How hard is it to make something like this?”

  “Not the technique, Mike. It’s the time…assembling all the pieces.”

  “Whaddya suppose that means?” Jerry pointed at a color picture of a muscled torso, male genitals. A portion torn from a larger picture. No face.

  Harry strained air through clenched teeth. A sprig of cherries, drawn on, like a tattoo on the muscle of the left hip.

  “These cherries all around?” Jerry pondered, indicating several large groups of cherries cut from glossy ads sprinkled over the montage along with Marine Corps insignias plastered next to a bold headline. LOCAL MAN WINS HIGHEST HONOR.

  Harry shook his head. The thing dripped with cold patient pathological hatred. “I don’t know, man…”

  Their eyes met. Jerry gritted his teeth and whistled. “So Larry coulda kept like a scrapbook all these years and then…after Jesse left him…been down here drinking and putting this together.” He clicked his teeth. “And Chris…somehow in on it?”

  Mike Hakala’s voice rasped. “Not common knowledge but I saw it on the coroner’s report. Chris had cherries tattooed on his hip.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Jerry.

  Harry turned to Mike Hakala. “So, Prosecutor, what do you think?”

  Mike Hakala shook his head. “Fuck me dead! This goddamn thing won’t go away, will it?” He exhaled. “This…gun setup, that could be tampering with a state agency.”

  Jerry hitched up his gunbelt. “Uncle Mike, I think we better have us a manhunt. Fast.”

  Harry watched Mike Hakala pace while Jerry stood with his arms crossed; the more Mike speculated the more determined the expression on his nephew’s face became.

  “You say he threatened Cox and Griffin last night?”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 319

  “We had to cuff him, Mike. Took all three of us.”

  “And you let him go?”

  “Jesus, I thought it was just a drunken piss-off, that he’d sleep it off.”

  Mike pointed to the montage. “That ain’t no drunken piss-off.

  That’s psycho shit. That’s…weird. And those pictures in the kitchen.

  Jesse’s face cut out?”

  “We gotta pick him up,” said Jerry flatly.

  “Well, sure. What’s the charge?” Mike wrung his hands.

  “How about he’s an armed, dangerous sonofabitch who’s out to kill every man who ever screwed Jesse Deucette? And I think Bud Maston is way up on top of the list,” said Jerry.

  “How do I put that in a warrant?” Hakala laughed nervously. “I don’t know what this crazy shit means. Is there intent here? Does it prove anything?”

  Jerry pointed down the room at the red grid traced over Bud’s smiling face. “Do I have to draw you a fucking picture? Don Karson’s out there just dying to give his theory of things to a reporter.

  Hell, he spoon-fed it to Harry. And what if he’s right? History could be repeating itself here. Like Kidwell in Duluth. Or have you forgotten about that?”

  “Christ, Larry and I are…friends. We were on the goddamn hockey team, went down to the state tournament together. We dated the same girls…you know how he keeps everything inside. I thought he’d get through it. I thought he was working on something—”

  “Make a decision, Uncle Mike. It’s what we pay you the big bucks for.” Jerry put his hands on his pistol belt. “I sure as fuck ain’t going up against Larry Emery with nothing but good intentions backing me up!”

  “He did that to your nose?” Mike asked Harry.

  Harry nodded. “Cox saw it.”

  “Unprovoked attack?” Mike asked Jerry.

  “Well, he did mumble something about losing it when he looked in through Cox’s windows and saw Jesse coping Griffin’s joint.”

  “Christ,” Mike Hakala put his face in his hands. Then he 320 / CHUCK LOGAN

  looked up at Harry. “Maston’s been trying to get ahold of you. He left a message at my office. He’s in Duluth. Said you weren’t answer-ing the phone. He’s coming up here tomorrow—” Hakala glanced at his watch “—today, to go to court on a separation agreement with Jesse.”

  “Could be a setup. We better get Jesse in to talk to.” Jerry shook his head. “You should have gone to a grand jury on Chris, Uncle Mike.”

  “I know, I know.” Hakala took a breath. “This time if we err, it’ll be on the side of caution. First we get Larry.”

  “The number. Where Bud’s staying?” asked Harry.

  “Uh, left it at the office. Look. Jerry, you secure this place. Who’s dispatcher tonight?

  “Billy Munger.”

  “I’ll get Billy to wake everybody up. Get another guy out here to take pictures. Nobody disturbs this—”

  “Two more guys here, and two out at Cox’s and four at the lodge.

  Be straight with them. Tell them Larry’s wrong on this. And warn Maston off till we lock him down,” said Jerry.

  “Okay. Griffin, we’re going to town. I’ll find that fucking message.

  What else?”

  “Becky Deucette,” said Harry.

  “She’s all right, she’s with my crazy kid. They got some damn hideout up on the ridge.”

  “Better find her, Uncl
e Mike, before Larry does,” said Jerry.

  “Okay. Okay. Collect Becky. Arrest Larry.” Mike Hakala made dizzy swimming motions with his hands. “Jesus, we need more guys.”

  “You gotta put it over the radio in plain goddamn view,” said Jerry. “Highway Patrol. Lake and Cook Counties. Hell, if we have to take him on in the woods—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” muttered Mike Hakala, “I might have to call Rudy and ask for the National Guard.”

  They went out the door and Jerry grabbed a radio handset and put out an all points on Larry Emery. One of the other HUNTER’S MOON / 321

  deputies walked off a few steps and aimed a kick at a snow tire.

  “Yeah, our Larry Emery,” Jerry yelled back at a query from the static.

  Mike Hakala pointed to the Colt stuck in Harry’s waistband. “That thing loaded?” he asked. Harry nodded. “Keep it handy,” he said, stomping into the snowy night, pajama top flapping.

  51

  Hakala bobsledded his Ford Bronco down Highway 7.

  “Live situation. Important to keep it simple. No time to figure it all out. First, warn Bud off till we find Larry. Second—Christ,” he giggled nervously. “Every shadow in the goddamned headlights…”

  Harry eased the Colt from his belt and held it in his lap.

  “Keep your eyes peeled, I saw that sonofabitch drop a deer at 400

  yards with open sights once,” said Hakala.

  Streetlights sieved the steady snow falling on Stanley’s barren streets and nothing moved except a cloud of exhaust that surrounded a Blazer running in front of the police station. Hakala opened the door to the police car and turned off the engine. Then he stormed through the door, yelling.

  “Everybody out. We got trouble. Larry Emery’s off his fucking nut!”

  Deputy Morris stood in the hall, parka open, sandwich to his mouth. Another tired-looking deputy behind the radio desk gave Hakala a deadpan once-over. “We heard. Jesse,” he said, shaking his head.

  Hakala threw a set of keys at Morris. “Don’t leave your unit running with the door open, Morris.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding at three A.M. in my fucking pajamas!