Hunter's Moon
Page 43
Far below, he could see the flicker of a fire on the lake and hear the happy drum.
Emery came out. Jerry held up the medical bag and raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the cave. “We need this?”
“Not fucking likely,” mused Morris.
Emery shook his head and Becky sobbed and Emery put his arm around her and held her for a second. Don Karson stepped from the darkness. Emery reached out and squeezed the minister’s elbow.
“Stay with her. She might need to talk,” he said. Karson nodded to Mitch and Miss Loretta and they walked Becky back down the trail.
Emery held out his hand. The big .44 magnum lay in his palm with tiny wisps of steam or smoke still leaking from the barrel and the chamber. Mike Hakala put his hand on the pistol, then Jerry.
Harry covered the other men’s hands with his own.
Emery holstered the pistol, unbuckled his gunbelt, fingered his badge off his chest, and handed it all over to Mike Hakala. Mike declined and handed them back. “There’ll be a board.
HUNTER’S MOON / 397
Turn it in when we get back to town. He resisted arrest, Larry. You were just doing your job.”
Larry Emery nodded and cinched the gunbelt around his waist.
His voice rang in the darkness. “Awright, people. Do it right. Process it. Don’t touch nothing, take pictures. Get the medical examiner up here. And when it’s all done, make sure you get all the pieces of him outta there. Be another four hundred years of bad luck if the spiders eat his fat ass.”
62
Harry made the drive in Linda’s car but was unable to bring himself to set foot back in that graveyard, so he watched the ceremony from a distance as they buried Jesse next to Chris in the cemetery beyond the old company housing on a quiet, chilly November day.
And the wind whispered down through the pines and scattered a lacy veil of snowflakes across the brooding ridge and the name we hear whispered at a graveside is always our own.
After the service, he drove directly back to St. Paul and attended his first AA meeting in years. Later he learned that, when no one claimed Cox’s body, Sheriff Emery purchased a plot for him, next to the ring of granite stones.
It was too early to tell whether he would carry permanent nerve damage in his left hand from Bud’s knife thrust. The lasting wound was more subtle and had to do with who he was now. Increasingly he caught himself facing north with the intuition that the healing was to be found in conversation with Miss Loretta’s voices in the deep woods up on Nanabozho Ridge.
The casket containing Bud Maston’s remains made the trip from the county morgue in Stanley, Minnesota, to the Fort Snelling Veterans’ Cemetery in the open bed of Jay Cox’s truck. Mitch Hakala received $200 for making the drive from
398 / CHUCK LOGAN
the prestigious St. Paul law firm of Noble and Deal, which was none too happy about disposing of the Maston estate. Their client had been page-one news for two weeks, ever since he’d died resisting arrest for two counts of premeditated murder.
And ever since the detailed diary of Jason Cox—a document that read like the obsessed odyssey of a modern Ahab—had mysteriously showed up in Franky Murphy’s mailbox. Palming off the diary was a modest touch of black propaganda in which Harry detected the hand of Tim Randall, and now Franky had a hell of a story going and Harry, inevitably, would be part of it.
Lots was going on. Harry had no trouble getting an indefinite leave of absence from his work. A strident national ad hoc gay and lesbian coalition demanded that Bud’s Medal of Honor be reissued posthumously to its rightful owner.
He didn’t relish testifying at the grand jury coming up in Maston County.
There was a sticky question concerning the disposition of the Maston fortune where Becky’s rights as the surviving daughter of the deceased spouse were concerned. A flock of lawyers hovered over Maston County to puzzle that one out.
Becky had, as Dale Talme predicted, landed on her feet. She sent Harry a simple thank-you card. The enclosed photograph portrayed a seriously beautiful high school senior. Eyes uplifted, chin raised slightly to the future. After her name, she had written simply: “Vale-dictorian.”
A preliminary reading of Bud Maston’s will revealed that he had left Harry an amount of money that, after taxes, would exceed a half a million dollars—ostensibly a gratuity for saving his life, more likely the iron prison parachute he had mentioned. Dorothy’s father advised Harry to stay clear of the will until after the grand jury.
Bud had included a thoughtful line in the will, something about hoping that Harry would openly enjoy the money, since he and Harry had been unable to openly enjoy the love they bore for each other.
HUNTER’S MOON / 399
Harry shifted from foot to foot in his icy dress shoes next to another open grave and heard a demented cackle that could have been Bud laughing in Hell. But it was just a raven with a broken wing that had been left behind, hopping among the gravestones in the tired snow on this endless white day.
Mitch wheeled up to the hole in the ground. He’d slapped a hell of a wax job on Cox’s truck and the marine dress blue crackled smartly among the tidy white markers. Mitch nodded at Harry. He did not get out of the warm cab. A disgruntled federal employee, who was not real happy about working on the third Thursday in November, engaged him in conversation.
Harry watched an argument commence between Mitch and the groundskeeper about how they were going to move the casket from the truck onto the drop apparatus set up over the grave. There was no funeral party. No pallbearers. No flag. Just three TV vans and reporters and photogs from the two local papers and Sherry Rawlins from Duluth. She walked over and flipped open her notebook.
The expression on his face stayed her questions and she drifted back to the pack as the clouds stacked up like black cannonballs in the cold pewter sky at 1 P.M. on this gloomy Thanksgiving day.
Harry lit a cigarette and watched. He wore his new suit. He was not wearing an overcoat. He had not shined his shoes. He was freezing his ass. He wasn’t carrying no coffin.
Necessity and the cold weather dictated that the only available able-bodied souls—the press—would carry the coffin the last few dozen feet.
Being carted to the worms by TV and print reporters was probably the loneliest fate that could befall a body and Harry thought it a just epitaph for Bud, who had so loved the lime-light. After they lowered the box, they scrambled out of the way and the shooters snapped their shot of Harry standing there without a coat looking like a bandleader in a black
400 / CHUCK LOGAN
suit—or maybe the Angel of Death—against the rows of white dragon teeth.
No thoughts came as he dragged on his cigarette. There were beginnings, middles, and ends. This ending would stay with him forever. His mouth and tongue felt like he’d spent his life licking the bottom of an ashtray.
He glanced at the green Prelude parked on the service road. Maybe it was time to quit. Make Linda happy. Harry walked past the grave, paused, and threw his cigarettes into the hole ahead of the backhoe poised to fill it in. “Day is done, motherfucker,” he said under his breath.
Linda drove back to his apartment and they went up and he tossed off his suit on his new king-sized bed and put on his old corduroy sports jacket, a pair of jeans, and some comfortable shoes. Randall and Dorothy were expecting them.
He eyed the phone. He’d made a vow on the plane trip back from Arizona, along the lines of: if I get out of this alive and not in jail—I swear I’ll do this thing…
He got out his phone directory and called the number in Michigan.
A man answered.
“Is Kate there?” Harry asked.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Her husband,” said Harry.
“I believe I’m her husband,” said the man.
Polite fucker. Harry sighed and felt his belly tighten. “Her ex-husband.”
Seconds passed. Very long seconds. “Harry?” And her voice
was the wild bullet of his youth going right through his heart.
“Kate,” he said.
“Harry?” she said.
He cleared his throat. “Ah, lookit. I came into some money and I thought—well, I should talk to the boy, you know, about…school.
He must be close to graduation—”
“Next year,” she said quickly. Then more slowly, “Uh, I don’t know, Harry. That’s…real thoughtful but, uh, maybe you should give me some time…to prepare…”
HUNTER’S MOON / 401
“Let me talk to him, okay? Please?”
Long sigh on the other end. “Uh, okay. Just a minute.”
Harry waited. He began to sweat.
“Look, I don’t want to talk to you,” said a hard young voice. “I sure as hell don’t want to talk to you on Thanksgiving.”
Harry put both hands to the receiver, as if the voice were Braille and he could touch it.
“I…thought it’s time we should talk,” he said.
“Why? We never have before. Far as I’m concerned you’re just noise in a piece of plastic—”
“Wait,” said Harry. “Goddamnit, I’m your father!”
But the line was dead. A little shaky, Harry managed a hollow laugh as Linda gently placed her hands on his shoulders.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Randy. Sounds like a good kid. Tough, doesn’t take any shit.”
“It’s a start,” she said, then she took him by the hand. “C’mon, we’ll be late for dinner.”
“Right. Thanksgiving’s the only uncorrupted feast day we have left.” He smiled.
“What?” she asked.
He answered with his eyes. He was glad that he had some-place to go for dinner and that he had someone like her to accompany him.
Out on the street he reached for a cigarette. Then he remembered.
He’d thrown them away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deborah Howell
Bill Tilton
John Camp
Dr. Kenneth S. Merriman
Jean Pieri
About the Author
CHUCK LOGAN is the author of After the Rain and four other novels featuring former Minnesota undercover copy Phil Broker. He lives in Stillwater, Minnesota with his wife and daughter.
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RAVES FOR HUNTER’S MOON
“A powerful, convincing yarn about murder, sexual deviance and alcoholism…Logan…writes with verve and enthusiasm.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Human evil stains the snowy backwoods of Minnesota blood-red in Logan’s gripper of a first novel…Logan knows how to grab the souls of his characters and hold them up, squirming, to the light; in turn, readers should grab on to his strong debut and hold tight for a memorable ride through the heart of darkness.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“Suspenseful, scary, incredibly sexy.”
James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor
“Logan’s language is tough-guy perfect.”
Kirkus Reviews
Books by Chuck Logan
HUNTER’S MOON
THE PRICE OF BLOOD
THE BIG LAW
ABSOLUTE ZERO
VAPOR TRAIL
AFTER THE RAIN
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HUNTER’S MOON. Copyright © 1997 by Chuck Logan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
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