Desolation Mountain

by Krueger, William Kent

  “I understand Senator McCarthy’s concerns about sullying the pristine North Country, but I’ve studied America Midwest Mining’s proposal, and I can assure you that there will be multiple safeguards in place, the most modern techniques available to prevent any spillage that might adversely affect the land or the water here. That’s my view, but I’m really here to listen, to let you know that your concerns are being heard.”

  Right, Stephen thought. In one ear and out the other.

  Mayor Legris opened up the meeting to comments and questions. And there was a landslide. One after another, the residents of Tamarack County gave voice to their fears.

  Finally, Dorothy Heinz left her seat near the back of the auditorium and stepped up to the microphone below the stage. She was an old woman, small, white-haired, a little bent, and Stephen knew her well. She’d been one of his Sunday school teachers at St. Agnes. Born in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, she’d come to the Iron Lake Reservation as a young child to live with her grandparents. During the Second World War, she’d been a member of the Women’s Army Corps, and when she came home to the rez, she’d married and become a strong presence in the community. She loved to bake and had taught classes in traditional cooking and in canning, and her berry pies were legendary. When Stephen camped in the Boundary Waters, he still made bannock bread and wild rice leek soup in the way he’d learned from her. She was a strong woman, who could still be found mowing her own lawn on a riding mower, wearing a Twins ball cap. And as she leaned to the microphone and spoke with grace and authority, Stephen thought there was no better voice for her people, the Anishinaabeg.

  “I have lived with the beauty of Mother Earth for more than ninety years,” she said. “When I was a girl, I went with my grandfather to catch fish in the lakes and the rivers. We plucked blueberries in the clearings where the bears ate them, too. Every fall, we gathered wild rice on Makwa Lake, watched ospreys dive from the trees, listened to the song of the loons coming from the morning mist. Now that I am nokomis, a grandmother, I take my eleven grandchildren and my ten great-grandchildren to the places my grandfather took me.

  “The earth isn’t just rock and dirt and trees and water. It’s one thing, one heart, one spirit. It offers us life and beauty and, if we listen, wisdom. And it asks nothing in return, not even gratitude, because giving is the whole reason for its creation.

  “And why are we created? To receive, to honor, and to protect. What you talk about here isn’t just the wounding of that beautiful, giving spirit. What you talk about here, in your ignorance, is the wounding of the spirit of us all. We are not separate. To kill the water, to kill the fish, to kill the trees, to kill the birds, is to kill ourselves. That is all I have to say.”

  To great applause, Dorothy Heinz retook her seat.

  Then a shout came from the audience: “When I was a boy my father had a job in the Apex Mine, a good-paying job. We drove a nice car and had a nice house. When the mine closed, all that changed. Hell, look around you. The towns on the Iron Range are sliding downhill, and it won’t be long before they hit rock bottom. Ghost towns. It was mining built the Range and it’s mining that’ll save it. We got plenty of ore still in the ground, plenty of minerals, and plenty of men looking for work. Seems to me a match made in heaven. If the governor says the mine’s going to be safe, then the mine’s going to be safe. I say let ’em start digging. The sooner they get to work, the sooner the rest of us do, too.”

  Although the wind so far had been against the mine, this spontaneous outburst was met with more than a little applause. From that point on, the comments flew from advocates on both sides of the issue, and Stephen could feel the mounting tension in the air, a taut spring ready to snap.

  Then a man leapt up on the far side of the auditorium, Boog Sorenson, someone Stephen had never liked. “We’d’ve had that mine up and running a long time ago if it wasn’t for people like McCarthy,” he hollered. “You ask me, that plane crash was the best thing could’ve happened up here.”

  Even in a room so contentiously divided, the comment stunned the crowd to silence.

  “Sit down and shut up,” someone yelled.

  “It’s a free country,” Sorenson asserted. “I’ve got a right to say what I think.”

  “And you’ve had your say.” Mayor Legris’s voice was stern. “Now sit down and let others speak.”

  “Let him talk,” another voiced shouted. And chaos threatened to descend.

  The outburst had drawn Stephen’s attention. When he swung his eyes back to where his father had been sitting, the seat was empty. Bo Thorson was gone, too.

  CHAPTER 34

  * * *

  When Boog Sorenson began his rant, Cork wanted to stuff his fist down the man’s throat. That was generally the response Sorenson elicited from Cork when he opened his mouth. Boog Sorenson had been a deputy under Cork in his first term as sheriff of Tamarack County and was the only officer Cork had ever fired. He took the action after a number of questionable arrests of people of Anishinaabe heritage, and one particularly nasty altercation on the rez, which Sorenson had handled badly and with clear prejudice. In the next election, Sorenson ran against Cork, and much of his platform had been an angry cry against what he characterized as “a blind eye” when it came to policing Indians, on and off the rez. Cork won the election by a landslide, but the bad blood still ran deep between them.

  He was tempted to join those shouting down Sorenson, but his cell phone vibrated and the instructions for the ransom drop came as a text: The gate of the gravel pit. Now. No funny stuff. It was from the same number as the call that afternoon.

  No funny stuff. Straight out of a bad movie. Cork and Bo rose and left while the rant in the auditorium went on. They headed out to Cork’s Expedition to pick up the backpack that held the money.

  “An access road a hundred yards that way leads right to the gate of the gravel pit,” Cork explained. “Unless I get another instruction, looks like the exchange will go down there.”

  Bo studied the sky. “Getting dark. Hard to see much of anything. I won’t be far behind.”

  “They said no funny stuff. Direct quote.”

  “Who are we dealing with, the Three Stooges?”

  “I’m about to find out.” Cork called the number the text had come from but got no answer. Then he texted, What about my friends?

  A moment later, he got the reply: Bring the money. You get them and the black box.

  “You’re not going to take any chances, right?” Bo said.

  “The flight recorder and my friends, that’s all I’m after.”

  “I won’t be more than fifty yards away. Anything goes haywire, I’m right there.”

  Cork shouldered the backpack and walked toward the access road, leaving behind the bright lights of the school parking lot. In the west, the sky along the horizon still held an ice-blue glow, against which the trees were nothing but silhouettes. He crossed the grass of the school grounds and came to the old asphalt of the gravel pit access road. He turned toward the gate, a black mesh of Cyclone fencing that, against the soft blue of the distant sky, reminded him of a spider’s web. He saw no one, but that didn’t surprise him. He reached the gate and stood alone, waiting for someone to show or to deliver further instructions.

  That’s when the shot came.

  The round slammed into his chest, dead center, knocking him back. He hit the ground and lay still, staring up at a sky sequined with sparkles, none of which were stars.

  * * *

  Stephen stumbled onto Bo Thorson first, the man in a crouch, a pistol in his hand.

  “Down. Get down.” Bo’s voice was taut.

  “Are you hit?” Stephen said.

  “No.”

  “My dad?”

  Bo got slowly to his feet. “Stay here.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Then stay behind me.”

  Bo loped toward the gate of the old gravel pit, Stephen close enough to be his shadow. In front of the gate, a dark figure slo
wly stood up.

  “Dad!” Stephen leapt past Bo and reached his father in time to help steady him. “Are you okay?”

  “Feels like a train ran me down.”

  Bo came up beside them. “You hit?”

  “The vest.” Stephen’s father put a hand near his heart.

  “The shot came from the south.” Bo used his pistol to indicate a small grove of birch trees a hundred yards away. In daylight, the leaves would have been golden and the trunks stark white. Now they were just a black clustering. “Shooter’s probably already bolted.”

  The three men stood together in a sudden explosion of light.

  “Police! Drop your weapons!”

  Bo said quietly, “The cavalry.”

  * * *

  Sheriff Marsha Dross held up the armor and studied the place where the bullet had hit. “You could have been killed.”

  Cork said, “Thanks to Bo, the only hole is in the mackinaw I wore over that vest.”

  Her glare swung to Bo. “You certainly came prepared. What did you bring to my county besides body armor?”

  “A license that makes it all legal.”

  She set the vest on her desk and slid from it one of the ceramic plates. “You were expecting heavy caliber?”

  “Best to be prepared,” Bo replied.

  She turned her attention to the backpack. “Twenty thousand. That’s it?”

  “I know,” Bo said. “Chump change. Pretty sure it was a setup, just to get Cork in the open.”

  “A setup by who?”

  “Wish I could tell you, Sheriff.”

  “Bo Thorson.” She rolled the name around in her thinking. “Bo Thorson.” Then a light came on. “Not the Bo Thorson who saved the First Lady?”

  “Yeah, that Bo Thorson.”

  “No longer Secret Service?”

  “Left a while back. Private now.”

  “Working for whom?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  She looked toward Cork. “Do you know the answer to that one?”

  “Jerome Hill, Senator McCarthy’s father.” Cork gave Bo a shrug. “Sorry. Not my client.”

  “He doesn’t believe the crash was due to pilot error?” The sheriff’s eyes swung back and forth between the two men.

  “He has significant doubts,” Bo answered.

  “And his hope is that the flight recorder will resolve the issue?”

  “At least clarify some things.”

  The sheriff leaned her butt against her desk, crossed her arms, scowled at Cork. “You never mentioned Thorson. I thought we had an agreement.” She reached out and tapped the vest. “Don’t you think it would have been appropriate to inform me of this at least?”

  “Things moved quickly,” Cork said, though that wasn’t the whole truth.

  Dross looked at Stephen, who’d been mostly silent since they were all brought in. “What happened to your face?”

  Stephen had been staring at the floor. He lifted his eyes briefly, then looked down again. Cork wasn’t sure what to make of this. Nervousness? Shame? Fear?

  “Just clumsy.”

  “And you just happened to be at the town meeting?”

  Stephen’s voice was quiet but steady. “I wasn’t supposed to be. Dad didn’t want me there. I went anyway.”

  “So you knew about this exchange that was supposed to go down?”

  “I knew.”

  Dross breathed deeply, once, twice, thinking things over. “Okay, Cork. If, as Thorson says, the intent was to take you out, it seems to me it had to be someone who knows you’re investigating the senator’s crash. Who would that be?”

  “My family and some of the folks on the rez.”

  “What about Gerard?” Stephen said. “He seems to know a lot.”

  “Gerard?” Dross thought for a moment. “The one who questioned you yesterday, right? Who is he?”

  Cork said, “He feels military, but there’s more to him than that, I’m sure.”

  Dross left the desk, began pacing. “I had a visit from Alex Quaker, the number two man in the FBI’s National Security Branch. He advised me to keep my nose out of this business. Was this an act of terrorism, Thorson?”

  “I can’t say at the moment. Maybe that’s what the flight recorder would have told us.”

  “You believe someone has it?”

  She addressed her question to Cork, and he brought her up to date on what they knew.

  “Do you think it was Blessing who shot at you tonight?”

  Before he could answer, the phone on the sheriff’s desk buzzed. She picked it up, listened. “Send him in.” She hung up. “Quaker’s here. This should be interesting.”

  Two men entered. The one in front had red hair and a prognathic jaw that gave him a relentlessly determined look. The man two steps behind was younger, serious-looking in a religiously zealous way. The chill they brought with them reminded Cork of a storm front ushering in a blizzard.

  “Sheriff.” A one-word greeting from the man in front. He didn’t bother introducing his companion. “Which one is Cork O’Connor?”

  Cork said, “That would be me.”

  “And Thorson?”

  Bo lifted a hand.

  “And you’re the son?” the man said to Stephen.

  “Yes.”

  The man’s eyes went across the three of them, and Cork thought of a machine gunner taking aim.

  “I’ll need an interview room, Sheriff.”

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  Gerard leaned against the deck railing of Bo’s cabin, smoking a Cuban cigar and gazing out at the black water of the lake inlet. Lights like solitary stars glittered along the far shoreline. A saffron glow over the treetops pinpointed the place where the moon was about to rise. Bo watched the cigar ember brighten, then dim each time Gerard inhaled. He hated the odor of cigar smoke, especially in this place where the scent of evergreen felt calming and healing to the soul.

  “So when Quaker asked about your connection with all this, what did you tell him?”

  “The truth. That I’m working for the senator’s family.”

  This was clearly no surprise to Gerard. Bo wondered how long he’d known.

  “Did you say anything about me?”

  “Silence is one of the things you pay me for.”

  Gerard fixed him with a cold eye. “I guess it was too much to hope that loyalty might be one, too.”

  “It’s a complicated game we’re playing.”

  “What do you tell the senator’s family?”

  “Everything I tell you.”

  “Do you tell them things you don’t tell me?”

  “I tell you everything.”

  Gerard considered this, probably weighing its truth. “Quaker will be putting two and two together pretty soon, the stiff-jawed bastard. I’ll take care of him eventually, but we need to keep him in the dark awhile longer.” The cigar ember bloomed red, and smoke exploded gray above the deck railing. “I wonder if they really have it.”

  “They?”

  “Whoever tried to take O’Connor out.”

  “If they had the recorder, they wouldn’t care about O’Connor. As far as I can tell, we’ve gotten nowhere. Quaker thinks it’s domestic terrorism, thinks the Lexington Brigade might be behind it.”

  “The Lexington Brigade?” Gerard gave a grunt that passed for a laugh. “Bunch of wackos out of South Dakota.”

  “The name Cole Wannamaker mean anything to you?”

  “He heads up the brigade. He’s got himself a compound in the Black Hills.”

  “Quaker says Wannamaker dropped off the radar a couple of weeks ago. Quaker thinks he might be around here somewhere.”

  Gerard faced Bo, the cigar ember like a gaping red hole in the center of his pursed lips. “Why?”

  “A guy stood up at the meeting tonight and basically hailed the senator’s demise. Got some applause among the folks in that auditorium. The guy was Boog Sorenson, commander of the local chapter of the Lexington B
rigade. He’s got a few followers in the North Country.”

  “Wacko enough to assassinate a U.S. senator?”

  “Think Oklahoma City.”

  “Why now?”

  “Maybe the brigade up here has taken strong exception to the senator’s opposition to this mine proposal. Another possibility might be the bill banning assault rifles she was about to introduce. That bill’s got a lot of press, and it’s looking like it might actually have some good bipartisan support. It certainly has the NRA worried. Or maybe the Manila Accord. The alt right likes it because they hope it’ll contain China without America having to confront the Red Dragon directly. The senator made it clear she was going to do her best to defeat the accord.”

  “How does he think the plane was brought down?”

  “Didn’t say, but if he’s thinking domestic terrorism, it had to be something like a ground-to-air missile.”

  “The brigade?” Gerard ashed his cigar beyond the railing. “I don’t buy it. What about this Blessing?”

  “I’ll check him out some more, but he doesn’t feel right for any of this.”

  “Did you fill Quaker in about Blessing and the other missing Indians?”

  “Yeah. He told me and O’Connor to back off, he’d take things from here.”

  “You keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll take care of Quaker.” Gerard studied his cigar, which he’d smoked almost to its end. “You’re sure there’s nothing you haven’t told me?”

  Bo thought about Stephen’s vision and the boy bringing down the eagle, but said, “You know what I know.”

  When Gerard had gone, Bo made a call. “It was a setup.”

  “We heard. And we heard that you’re okay. The news is reporting it as a flare-up because of the contentious town hall meeting up there. One shot fired, but not at the governor. No one hurt. Nothing else official at the moment.”