Winter of the Wolf Moon

by Steve Hamilton

  He showed no reaction. He kept dealing. The third player stood on seventeen.

  “Your turn,” he said to me. “Would you like a card?”

  I just looked at him. The other three players looked at me.

  “A card for you, sir?”

  I slipped my hands under the table and gave it a little experimental nudge. “This thing isn’t too heavy,” I said. “I wonder what would happen if I flipped it right over.”

  “You would be removed from the premises, sir,” he said.

  “It would make a hell of a show, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Would you like a card, sir?”

  “What I would like,” I said, “is for you to come outside with me.”

  “Alex, I just got on this table,” he said. “I can’t leave.”

  I gave the table another nudge. This time all the little piles of chips fell over. The three other players looked around like they were expecting somebody to help them.

  Vinnie closed his eyes. “Finish the hand,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”

  “Give me a card,” I said.

  He put a six on my fourteen. Then he threw over his hole card and showed nineteen. “You win,” he said. He cleaned up the table, then signaled for the pit boss. “I have an emergency,” he said to the man.

  The boss looked at me and then gave a little wave. Another dealer was there in three seconds to take Vinnie’s place.

  I waited until we were in the parking lot. Then I started thinking about where I should hit him first. The problem was, I wasn’t sure that I had the strength to lift my arm high enough to swing at him. And I didn’t feel mad enough to start kicking him. Not yet, anyway.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “What happened to that big lecture you were giving me about Indians not interfering in each other’s lives? That whole story about how your mother didn’t even make you go to the dentist. You make your own way, you choose your own path, all that bullshit.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “What about kidnapping Dorothy from my cabin?” I said. “Isn’t that interfering with her life? Just a little bit?”

  He looked out at the road. A cold wind picked up. I barely felt it.

  “So when are you going to explain this to me?” I said. “Before or after I beat the living crap out of you?”

  “Alex, don’t.”

  “Why do you say that? Because you don’t want to hurt me? You don’t want to have to use some secret Indian chokehold on me?”

  He looked at me. “Stop it,” he said.

  “How many of you guys did it take?” I said. “She must have put up quite a fight.”

  “In case you’re forgetting,” he said, “I was in jail the night she was taken.”

  “Yes, you were. But you’ve only got, what, seven hundred cousins? How many came out that night?”

  “How did you find out?” he said. “Who told you?”

  “Guess what, Vinnie. Nobody had to tell me. Some of us white people can figure things out ourselves. I knew it wasn’t Bruckman and it wasn’t Molinov. Neither of them even knew she was with me until the next day. Even if they did know, they wouldn’t have known to go to that second cabin. It had to be somebody who actually saw me take her there. Somebody who was in the woods, watching us.”

  He looked away again.

  “It also explains why she opened the door that night. They must have tricked her. What did they do, call her by her Indian name?”

  “I didn’t know about any of this,” he said. “I swear. I didn’t know. I told you Jimmy and Buck were with me when I went after Bruckman. When I got arrested, I guess they kept following them. Bruckman and Dorothy, both. When Dorothy ran out on him that night, they split up. Buck followed Dorothy to the bar, then to the Glasgow, then to your place.”

  “Of course he’s good at following people,” I said. “He’s an Ojibwa.”

  “Will you knock it off?” he said. “He’s a college student. He’s gonna be a lawyer one day. He and my other cousins, I don’t know how to make you understand this, Alex. They’ve seen too much. This guy Bruckman, he had taken one of our people from us. Then he brought her back, like he was rubbing our noses in it. And he was trying to sell drugs to our people, Alex. To some of us, the ones who don’t know better. He was another white man trying to destroy us. They decided it was time to start doing something about it.”

  “I came to that jail the next day and bailed you out,” I said. “You’re telling me you had no idea any of this was happening?”

  “No,” he said. “I swear to you.”

  “So when did you know, Vinnie?”

  He hesitated.

  “When did you know?”

  “The night you were arrested,” he said. “I saw her.”

  “Wait a minute, the night I was arrested? On the bridge? The next morning you came over and helped me clean up that last cabin, and you were asking me why I was still trying to find her.”

  “I wanted you to stop,” he said. “You’d been through enough.”

  “My God, Vinnie. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I didn’t think I had to,” he said. “It sounded like you were done with it.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “And all this time, up until that night, you didn’t have the slightest idea that your own cousins took her?”

  “I don’t live on the reservation,” he said.

  “That’s not a very convincing answer.”

  He looked at me. He didn’t say anything.

  “When we went to talk to her parents,” I said. “When I thought they were acting strange and you gave me your big speech about the way of the Ojibwa, was that all a sham? Did they already know?”

  “I think her parents knew she was safe,” he said. “That’s all. They didn’t know anything else.”

  “And everybody just let me run around trying to find her?” I said. “Do you have any idea what I went through?”

  “You were looking for Bruckman,” he said. “My cousins probably didn’t want to stop you from finding him.”

  “You mean if I found him …,” I said.

  “They would have taken care of him,” he said.

  “Listen to you,” I said. “You sound like the Mafia or something.”

  “No,” he said. “Just a new generation, Alex. We’ve been through too much. We’ll do whatever it takes to save our people.”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “I’m moved.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “So where is she now?” I said. “Where did you see her?”

  “In Canada,” he said. “She wanted to call you.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  “They didn’t want her to,” he said. “They didn’t want … I mean, they wanted to wait.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The people who are taking care of her.”

  “The people who kidnapped her,” I said.

  “No.”

  “They came into the cabin,” I said. “And then they dragged her out of there.”

  “It didn’t happen that way,” he said. “That’s not what they told me.”

  “There were people in that cabin,” I said. “And they did a nice job of busting up the furniture.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re helping her. They’re getting her cleaned up …”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And she asked me to tell you something, too. She said to say that she’s sorry she got you involved in this, and something else about your pipes.”

  “My pipes?”

  “Something about your pipes freezing.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over that. It’s been my biggest problem this week.”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You delivered the message.”

  “Alex, I don’t know what else to say. I swear, I really didn’t know anything until …�
��

  “Save it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more. You didn’t know about this because you didn’t want to know. If you knew, you would have had to tell me. And you didn’t want to do that. And we both know why.”

  I looked in his eyes. For the first time since I had known him, I felt the distance between us as he looked back at me. I knew that, even if we ever found a way to get over this, the distance would always be there.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “Whatever happened to that bag? I hear there’s quite a load of, what did they call it, wild cat in there?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “As far as I know, she didn’t have it when they took her.”

  “Of course she did,” I said. “Your cousins are sitting on enough drugs to stay high for the rest of their lives. Or whoever those people are in Canada. And they’re not even sharing it with you?”

  He just looked at me, his shoulders back like he was ready to jump on me. “I was feeling pretty bad about what happened to you,” he said. “You’re making it a lot easier on me.”

  “Why don’t you go ask them?” I said. “Ask them where that bag is. If they say they don’t even know what you’re talking about, then you know you’ve got a problem. That stuff is poison, Vinnie. For anybody. Indians, white, black, anybody. If the drug doesn’t hook you, what about the fact that you could sell that stuff for, God I don’t even know, a couple hundred thousand dollars, at least? You think that every single one of your cousins can resist that temptation? Talk about the white people destroying you. It looks like you guys are gonna do a pretty good job of it without anybody’s help.”

  “It’s time for you to walk away,” he said. “Walk away before I do something I’ll regret.”

  “We wouldn’t want that,” I said. “God knows you’ve done enough already.”

  When I left, he was still standing there in the parking lot, staring off into the distance.

  I spent the heart of the day in my cabin, sitting by the woodstove. I didn’t feel like going to the Glasgow, even when the sun was starting to go down and I’d normally feel the urge for a little company. I sat by the woodstove, putting in log after log, trying to get even heat going to dispel the chill in my body. I felt cold all the way through.

  I tried not to think about Molinov, or about what he said as he left me. The cold takes away a part of you. It didn’t make any sense at the time. Now I was beginning to feel the truth of his words.

  I was tired, but I dreaded the thought of going to sleep. I knew as soon as I closed my eyes, I would be back in that shack. It took me fourteen years to get over that day in Detroit, I thought. Fourteen years until I didn’t see that apartment every night, my partner lying on the floor next to me. Now I’ve got some new dead bodies to dream about. Maybe this time it’ll only take me thirteen years.

  I got up and walked around the place, looked out the window as the day gave way to darkness. I could see my own reflection in the glass.

  “Do something,” I said. “Anything. Don’t just sit here going crazy.”

  I put my coat on and went out to the truck. I fired it up and drove the quarter-mile to the second cabin. It felt strange to open the door and walk in, now that I knew what had really happened there. I picked up the leg that had broken off the table. It was solid oak. My father had made this table down in his basement in Dearborn, turned the legs by hand on his lathe and put the whole thing together without using one nail. Somewhere I still have a couple of his old pipe-clamps, I thought. If I can find them, I’ll try to glue this thing back together.

  I felt the weight of the table leg in my hands, holding it like a bat without even thinking of it. I tried to swing it. It hurt like hell. You’re a real specimen, Alex. You used to be able to drive the ball when you got hold of it. Now it hurts just to swing a fucking table leg.

  Wait a minute.

  I stared at the table leg in my hands. In my mind I was back in this very same cabin the morning this had all started, the morning I came to find Dorothy and found nothing.

  Nothing but chairs scattered around the room. A table overturned. A leg broken off. And the faint marks of snow melting on the floor.

  They came to her that night. They knocked on the door. She was afraid. She thought it was Bruckman. Or Molinov’s men. Or Molinov himself.

  She panicked. She looked for something to defend herself. She opened the drawers. There was nothing but plastic silverware. She knocked a chair over.

  And then she turned the table over and tore the leg off. She was strong enough to do it if she used a little leverage. There was nothing holding the table together but glue that had become brittle after years of cold air.

  She held the leg and waited for the door to be kicked in. I could see her standing right here, breathing hard, ready to make her stand.

  And then they called to her. Voices from her past, calling her by her Ojibwa name.

  She dropped the table leg and opened the door. Come with us, they said. We’ll take you away from here.

  She must have wanted to tell me she was going. I had to believe that.

  No, they said. There’s no time. We must go.

  Maybe they told her they would call me later. Maybe they tried to convince her that they couldn’t tell me, that I couldn’t be trusted.

  Or maybe they just grabbed her at that point, and took her away.

  No matter how it happened, she didn’t have the bag with her when she left.

  The melted snow on the floor. That was her. After I left her, she went outside, then came back in.

  Which explains her message. The frozen pipes.

  I put the table leg down, went back outside to the truck, grabbed the flashlight from the cab and the shovel from the back.

  I went to the back of the cabin and started digging through the snow. I had done the same thing the night I brought Dorothy here. I had gone under the cabin to turn the water on, and told her to keep the tap dripping so the pipes wouldn’t freeze.

  When the deputies searched this place, I thought, they didn’t really have their hearts in it. They didn’t think about what was under the cabin.

  I dug all the way down to the little access door. By the time the deputies got here, there had been enough new snow to cover it

  I crawled under the cabin and turned the flashlight on. There it was in the corner. I backed my way out, pulling the bag with me. When I was out, I stayed on my knees and unzipped the bag.

  White powder, in small clear bags, the powder glittering as I passed the light over it.

  “So this is wild cat,” I said. “Brought here all the way from Russia.”

  I zipped up the bag and took it back to my truck. I needed to get back inside, next to that woodstove. A good stiff drink wouldn’t hurt, either.

  Then I needed to figure out what the hell to do next.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Two weeks passed. It snowed. I plowed the road. New renters came to stay in the cabins. They drove their snowmobiles on the trails, filling the cold air with noise.

  I didn’t spend much time at the Glasgow Inn those two weeks. I chopped some wood. I cleaned up after the snowmobilers. I even got the passenger side window in my truck fixed. Mostly I stayed in my cabin by the woodstove, trying to get warm.

  I saw Vinnie’s car by his cabin. But I didn’t see the man himself. Not once.

  Until he came knocking on my door. When I opened the door, he was standing there on the walkway I had just shoveled.

  “Get your coat on,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “The hell I am,” I said.

  “There’s a ceremony at Garden River,” he said. “She wants you to be there.”

  “Who does?”

  “Dorothy,” he said. “Who do you think?”

  “I thought she was locked away somewhere.”

  “She was never locked anywhere,” he said. “She was just getting herself together. Now she’s ready to move on.”

  “Where�
��s she moving on to?” I said. “Last I heard, those DEA agents still wanted to talk to her.”

  “They’re not going to,” he said. “She’s not coming back to the United States.”

  “She’s in Canada?”

  “No, Alex, she’s in Ecuador. Are you coming or not?”

  “Take it easy,” I said. I went to get my coat.

  “Why’s it so hot in here?” he said.

  “I’ve been cold lately,” I said. “Ever since I almost died of hypothermia.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I hear you.”

  “Ecuador, did you say? Where did you come up with that one?”

  “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  I followed him to his car. When we got in, I turned the heat up.

  “The car’s warm enough,” he said. “You’re gonna suffocate me.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  He let out a long breath and backed out onto the access road. “She asked me to bring you,” he said. “So I’m bringing you.”

  “So drive,” I said.

  “I am,” he said.

  He drove through Paradise, between piles of snow that were a good seven feet high. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I didn’t say anything back.

  When we were on M-28 heading east, he finally cleared his throat. “I know what you did,” he said.

  “Do tell.”

  “With those drugs,” he said. “The day I go to trial on the assault charge, there’s Maven on the front page of the paper, bunch of bags on a table, those two agents on either side of him. What did you do, give the stuff to Maven directly?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Soon as I get to the courthouse, the public defender tells me the charge has been dropped down to a misdemeanor. I get a fine and a lecture from the judge. That’s it.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  “Just stop it, Alex. I know what you did.”

  “Look,” I said. “I still feel like shit, okay? But when I get my strength back, I’m coming over and knocking you on your ass. How am I gonna do that if you’re sitting in jail?”