by Chuck Logan
Bud’s voice deepened, absolutely steady. “She has a copy in her briefcase of the Detroit Free Press from the morning you left Detroit.”
Linda pulled her briefcase up on the table. The latches clicked under her thumbs.
Harry put out his hand. “I believe you.”
“That was your Fifth Step. Admitting to God and one other person the exact nature of your wrongs—”
“So you must be God, huh? ’Cause she’s the other person now.”
Harry said in a steady voice.
“Nobody’s saying you did this,” Linda said quickly, tapping the briefcase. We just don’t want it to…happen again.”
“Give me the gun,” said Bud, extending his hand. “Go back to Saint Paul with Linda. I’ll bring your stuff.”
Harry shook his head. “I’m staying till Emery’s in a cage.”
“You can’t use a mess in my life as an excuse to go out of control again, I won’t have it.”
“You just going to roll over for those fuckers? Try and buy your way out? You don’t owe them shit. They set you up, man. Jesse unzipped my fly to keep me from going into the woods that morning!”
Bud recoiled and sparks ignited in his eyes.
“Yeah, you married the town pump, buddy. Wake up.”
Bud’s eyes crackled and his voice shook. “I always tried to help you…and this is how—”
“I saved your ass,” retorted Harry. “I blew that kid all over the fucking county.”
“And you enjoyed it. You should have seen your face.”
“Guys,” said Linda in a tense voice, aware of all the forks suspended in midair around them.
“No,” snarled Bud. “I have to tell him this. I been there, too. I went over there and it was twisted, but it was service. You, you sonofabitch, you went back, to Laos, and you went back as 332 / CHUCK LOGAN
a mercenary. You did it for money and for kicks. Christ, those CIA creeps even sprung you out of jail in Detroit—”
“Jail?” said Linda.
Harry shook his head. “Not jail. The workhouse.”
“Because he beat up his wife.”
“You’re outta line, Bud. You can’t handle this stuff anymore,” said Harry.
“I can,” said Bud. “I’ll show you, you big-dick sono-fabitch!” Bud lurched across the table and tried to grab the gun in Harry’s belt.
Harry blocked him, shoved Bud back. Breakfast stopped. A fork clattered to a plate.
A Maston County deputy came over. “Is everything all right, Mr.
Maston?” he asked.
“Fine. It’s a personal matter that we should not have aired in public,” said Bud, busying his hands with his lapels. The deputy moved away. Bud stood up, folded the Duluth paper, and put it in his suit pocket, then he picked up Chris’s story and mashed it into a ball in his fist. Before Harry could stop him, he went to the Fisher stove, opened the door, and chucked the ball of paper into the fire.
Harry started out of his chair to follow. Linda held him back with a cautioning hand. “Let him be alone for a while.”
Harry shook his head. “He’s going to fuck up.”
“You really cut him,” said Linda.
“Aw, shit,” Harry stood up. He caught a flash of Bud’s determined eyeballs through the windshield of the Trooper as he pulled away from the diner with two police cars in tow.
Linda plucked his sleeve. “Did you really beat up your wife?” she asked in a serious voice.
“Huh?” Harry put his hand in front of his eyes. Where was she from? Venus? Didn’t she know what was going on?
“Well, did you?”
“Christ no, Linda…it was…” He reached for a handle in the thin air to steady himself. Nothing. Bud hadn’t left any ground under him. And the look on Linda’s face. “You wouldn’t understand…Why the hell did you have to come?” he asked.
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“We thought we could talk to you…”
He stared at her hard.
She drew herself up. “Because I love you, you dumb sono-fabitch.
So does he. He’s reaching out to you and you slapped him down.
He’s not well, he’s depressed…that was crude, what you said about that grasping bitch he married. You screwed her, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what I did.”
Linda tucked her briefcase under her arm. “Well I have to get a new court date so I can smile at her and arrange to hand over a check like I get paid for. Then I’m outta here. Last chance for a ride home.”
“Linda, you don’t get it. See all these cops? There’s a guy out there who’s this one-man army and all he wants to do is kill your client. There’s a manhunt.”
She looked at him, perplexed.
“I mean a person hunt. Fuck it.”
She gave him a frosty look and gripped her briefcase. “Where’s the court house?”
“One block down across the street, in the back room of the liquor store,” said Harry. “Jesus, wait. I’ll walk you.”
54
Harry watched Linda drive out of town and the dreary damn overcast promised more snow and hung thistles of fatigue in the iron light and Nanabozho Point brooded down from the top of the ridge and he shouldn’t have said that to Bud about Jesse. That hurt him.
Cops came and went down Main Street. Harry sat in the Jeep and smoked a cigarette. Morris came over and knocked on the window.
The deputy grinned. “All the people with college educations are to meet at the lodge. You, Maston, and Karson. Just got a call from Maston’s escort. Follow me up.”
Halfway up Highway 7 Morris’s flasher erupted into a blue 334 / CHUCK LOGAN
meteor and two cop cars topped the rise ahead of them. Hogging both lanes, the cops bore down and forced them off the road. Morris’s tires showered Harry with snow and gravel as he whipped a 180 and joined the pack.
Great. There went his guards.
He found the front door of the lodge wide open. Okay. Light-headed and fatalistic with exhaustion, he swung the Colt and step-by-step cautiously checked out the rooms, then the basement. He entered the addition, climbed the ladder, and searched the unfinished rooms and the balcony. Back in the den, he saw that the computer port was open and the disk was gone.
So was the picture of Chris and the Italian postcard.
The visitor had left an unsubtle calling card. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s sat amid the clutter on the dining room table.
My brand. Nice touch. Emery’s idea of a joke? He hurled the bottle across the main room into the fireplace. Another shattered whiskey flower bloomed from the soot and creosote and smelled like Larry Emery’s breath.
Emery could be here. Right outside. No, the cops were piling on to something. They must have spotted him. Not thinking too clearly right now.
The phone rang and he grabbed it.
“Now what?”
“Najoong, motherfucker,” said an energetic voice from the crypt.
Harry sagged to a chair. Hallucination wasn’t out of the question.
“Hollywood?” Harry’s lips slowly formed the question.
“Long time, buddy.”
Harry visualized a mountain airstrip in the Laotian highlands, gray helicopters in the creeping mist, and the thick compost scent of jungle…
The voice went on. “Me and Randall’s sitting here killing a bottle of tequila talking about you, so we decided to call you up.”
Harry rubbed his eyes. “What?”
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“Me and Randall…hey, you all right?”
“Yeah sure. Great.” Harry’s head swam. Hollywood. Another Randall prodigy who’d stayed on and on. Turned out the lights in the embassy in Phnom Penh and then Saigon. Fuckin’ Hollywood.
“Hear you had some bad luck hunting—”
“Uh-huh,” said Harry tonelessly.
“Still a hero, still flawed, eh? So apart from still being able to shoot, how’d you turn out? You ever get to be an artist?�
��
“Hack artist at a newspaper.” Unbelievable.
“I can dig it. Turned into a hack Republican lawyer myself.”
“I figured you’d be dead. Or swabbing cankers from the foreskin of some fascist chimpanzee in El Salvador.”
“Same old Harry. Say listen, Randall’s here and wants to talk to you.”
Randall came on the line. “How’s it going?” He slurred his S’s.
Wonderful. They were loaded.
“Weird. Dorothy tell you—?”
“Yeah, you’re living in a game of Clue. Old newspapers pinned to your door. Wild girl in the woods. Listen, forget that, me and trusty ole Hollywood were hunting in the computers just for the hell of it and we’ve turned up something on this Cox guy. We’re on our way to check it out. Just so happens it fits in with Hollywood’s current line of work so we’re traveling on Uncle.”
Traveling? “Where the hell are you?” asked Harry.
“Arizona. You should come on down. Catch some rays—”
“Forget it,” said Harry, rubbing his eyes. “The other guy, the sheriff, went bonkers. Looks like he was in it with his kid to kill Bud.
All these cops are chasing him all over the back forty. He’s got these cutouts of Bud…Aw, fuck it. Tell you later. And Bud’s up here with Linda Margoles getting set to hand over a million bucks to get free of a three-week marriage. Can you believe that? Soon’s they catch the sheriff I’m going home, man. I been too long at the fair.”
“Question: Why’s Bud have Linda handling his divorce?
336 / CHUCK LOGAN
Linda’s one smart lady, but the Maston family has used Deal and Noble in Saint Paul as legal council for over a hundred years.”
Harry shook his head. “This isn’t a game of three-dimensional chess like you used to play with the Vietnamese. Just a bunch of backwoods thugs pulling off a get-rich-quick scheme. And it’s my fault. Bud’s stuck paying blood money because I killed that kid.”
“You sound pretty rough.”
“Randall. I been in a fight with a deer.”
“A deer?”
“I’ll explain later…”
Cars in the driveway. Harry bolted upright. “Have fun in Arizona.
Tell a few war stories for me.” He slammed down the phone. Agitated voices, hurried footfalls up the porch. Harry rolled out of the chair, snatched up the Colt, and had his arm extended when the door opened.
Don Karson took one look at Harry’s menacing face squinting over the sights of the pistol and gasped.
Bud pushed the minister through the door and planted his hands on his hips. “For Chrissake, Harry. Put that thing down!”
55
“Look out,” Harry admonished. “There are pieces of glass on the floor.”
“What happened?” asked Bud.
“Somebody was here. They left a bottle of booze for me.
Thoughtful, huh?”
Bud’s eyes swung, watchfully. “You think it’s another setup?”
Harry shrugged. “The cops that were here split.”
“Ours too, took off with the ones hauling ass down the hill. Could be they found him already…” Bud’s voiced trailed off and he licked at an open sore where stitches had
HUNTER’S MOON / 337
been on his lower lip. “Or maybe he’s right outside.” He picked up the 12 -gauge off the table and wracked it open. A shell popped out.
He put it back in, slammed the slide back, chambered it, thumbed the safe.
The shotgun’s steel clash brought Karson to attention. His eyes darted out the windows. “Emery?”
“Who knows,” Bud said absently. Circulation had returned to the haggard face and his pupils wrenched down tight to pinholes.
“You didn’t have to say that in front of Linda,” Harry said.
Bud looked him straight in the eye. “I had to get your attention.
Didn’t I?”
Harry nodded tightly. “While you were getting my attention, they ripped the place off. Chris’s floppy was in the computer when I left.”
Karson seemed visibly shaken, but Bud waved his hand in disinterest. “Do you really think a boy’s fantasies are proof of anything?”
he said. He raked a polished wing tip through the books that littered the den carpet, then snapped the plastic latch on the disk drive of the IBM and clicked it open.
“They took other stuff,” Harry went on. “This picture of Chris posing naked. Did you know he had cherries tattooed on his left hip?”
“Cherries?”
“Yeah. And the collage in Emery’s basement…”
Bud nodded. “Hakala told me.”
“It had a picture like that, some stud with a cherry tattoo. Left hip.
They took those flicks for a reason,” said Harry.
“They?” said Bud, scrutinizing Harry. He went out on the porch and stared at the wreckage in the drive. “Same ‘they’ who tried to burn me out?”
His eyes met Harry’s. It was cold on the porch but both men sweated profusely and reeked of nerves. “This is a fucked-up place.
Why did I ever come here?” said Bud softly. His eyes wandered up.
“Good, it’s starting to snow.” They went back in.
“Karson,” Bud called out. “It’s time for show and tell.” He 338 / CHUCK LOGAN
grinned and his lips curled back too far, revealing receding gums and slivers of root above his shiny dental work. “What if Emery is out there?” he asked Harry. “Jesse made half a million cool ones when Emery put a bullet in Tip Kidwell in Duluth.”
“Should have paid more attention to that,” said Harry.
“As you pointed out, I wasn’t tracking at the time. Christ. I think I’m the one who needs a drink.” They laughed. Bad dream kind of laugh.
Karson joined them in the den and winced when Bud swept the clutter off the dining room table with a brisk arm. Scraps of ammunition boxes and bullets scattered among the books on the floor.
“Sit down, Reverend.” Bud balanced the shotgun stock on his hip.
Karson sat. Bud stood behind him. Harry slid a hip on the table so he was above Karson. Bud leaned forward and spread the newspaper page out in front of the minister. Harry put the pistol on it.
“So?” said Karson.
“Real simple, Don,” said Bud. “Why didn’t you go directly to Hakala? Why feed it roundabout to Harry?”
Karson squared his shoulders. “I went to Mike. He dismissed it as a cheap shot because of the animosity between Emery and me.
And people thought you sent Harry up here to investigate what really happened.”
“But you think Larry Emery and Jesse are implicated in what Chris…did?”
“Larry, yes. Jesse…I don’t know.”
“This computer disk and the photo of Chris that Harry says is missing—you know anything about that?”
Karson shook his head.
“Chris ever show you a story he wrote about…” Bud raised his eyes to Harry. “What was it about, anyway?”
“A homosexual fantasy.”
“No. Never,” said Karson.
Harry took over. “Jesse and Chris told you certain things in HUNTER’S MOON / 339
confidence as their minister. And Emery accused you of making sexual overtures to Chris and turning Jesse against him under the guise of counseling.”
“Any of that true, Don?” asked Bud.
“It’s not that crude and simple. Yes, I talked to Jesse and Chris when they moved out on Emery and in with you, Bud.” Karson took a deep breath and let it out. “Chris told me in the fiercest way that he’d do anything to get his family back together. He wanted Jesse to marry his dad.”
“God,” said Bud. “No wonder the boy flipped out the night we told him we were getting married.”
Karson sighed. “But Jesse said she’d do anything to escape Larry Emery’s control. That makes it hard to place all three of them in a conspiracy.”
“So?” Bud glowered.
“So, after the marriage, I think Emery planted the idea that Chris could redeem himself and force his mother and father back together by killing you.”
“What about you, Don?” said Harry. “What did you plant in your private little discussions with Chris about his sexual…preference?”
“Jesus, Harry,” Bud said, grimacing. He eased Harry aside and pulled a chair up next to Karson. “Look, Don, we know each other, right?”
Karson nodded.
“You never told me that Chris was obsessed with getting his parents back together.”
Karson pursed his lips. “When people talk to me in confidence, I’m supposed to keep it that way.” He sighed. “Now I’ve violated that trust.”
“Okay, okay. What about the other stuff—the sex thing. Could Emery have used it to manipulate Chris?”
Karson sat straighter in the chair and smoothed his thumb and index finger across his mustache. “Possibly. Chris escaped his home life in fantasies and later in drugs. And he had…anxieties about his sexual identity. Emery was a very violent man and his mother was—”
340 / CHUCK LOGAN
“A tramp,” said Bud.
“He was old enough to remember that.” Karson tapped the newspaper page. “Emery killed his stepfather. Then took his place.
And Jesse kept fooling around. I think both those kids lived in fear that Emery was going to do it again. He was trying to escape the man. But in the end, he tried to please him.”
“You really think so?” Pallid wrinkles creased Bud’s forehead. “I thought he was just…rebelling.”
“No. He was contemptuous.” Karson erupted with sincerity. “Remember when we had Clark up here and he talked about the import-ance of fathers? How fathers and sons have to row together, cross over together. I think Chris desperately wanted a father figure he could trust. He wanted to love Emery but he couldn’t tell him he was…gay. Maybe he thought Emery would respect him if…”
Bud gingerly touched his side, glanced at Harry, and winced. “So he shot me to get his father’s approval? Jesus.”
“They did it for the money. This is bullshit,” Harry grunted.
Karson smiled. “That’s the same thing Larry said when he found out that I was talking to Chris. It didn’t fit into his sick macho worldview.”
“Worldview,” said Harry, shaking his head. “Now he’s giving us the big picture.” Harry walked to windows, stared out.
