Blood Is the Sky

by Steve Hamilton

  Another quarter mile and I got to the third cabin. It was dark. Another quarter mile and then the fourth and fifth cabins together. They were dark, too.

  One more quarter mile. The last cabin my father had built. His masterpiece. Until somebody burned it down. The walls were about half rebuilt now, a great blue tarp covering the whole thing, propped up in the middle to keep the snow off. Rising above it all was the chimney my father had built stone by stone.

  I stopped and got out of the truck, made sure that the tarp was sealed tight. The wind died down and the pine trees stopped swaying. I took a long breath of the cold air and then got back in the truck. I plowed my way back to my cabin.

  I went in and listened to the weather report on the radio. More snow was coming. A lot more. They didn’t even try to guess the number of inches. That’s always a bad sign.

  God damn it all, I thought. I’m going to Canada tomorrow. I don’t care if we get three feet. I’ll plow again in the morning, and then I’m going.

  I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I ran a hand through my hair, then picked up the package and read the directions one more time.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said out loud.

  I looked in the mirror again. Then I put on the plastic gloves and went to work.

  The phone rang. I took the gloves off and wiped my hands on the towel. I picked it up on the third ring, looking at the clock. It was almost one o’clock in the morning.

  “Alex,” she said. With that voice. It still hit me in the gut, every time. She was Canadian, so she had that little rise at the end of each sentence. That singsong quality, almost melodic, but at the same time it was a voice that meant business. It had some darkness in it, a smoker’s voice without the smoke.

  “Hey, it’s late,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but I was just listening to the weather.”

  “A little snow. No problem.”

  “A little snow, eh? They’re talking like twenty-four inches. What are they saying down there?”

  “They’re not saying. You never know with the lake. It could be less than that. Or more.”

  “I don’t think you’re coming out here tomorrow.”

  I thought about what to say. There was a distant humming on the line. “I think I can still make it.”

  “Don’t be a dope,” she said. “You’ll kill yourself.”

  Out of a hundred different feelings I can have in one minute when I’m talking to her, one feeling in particular came into focus now. It was not the first time I’d felt it, this little nagging doubt, that maybe I wanted something out of all of this. Something real. And that maybe she had woken up that morning not wanting anything at all.

  And then the thing that always came right after that. The certain realization that I was being a complete ass.

  “Besides,” she said. “Don’t you have people staying in your cabins? If it’s snowing all day, don’t you have to stick around to plow them out?”

  “I’ve got one family,” I said. “The rest of the cabins are empty.”

  “Okay, but even so. That one family will need you around, won’t they?”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “If there’s a lot of snow falling, yeah. I can’t be away for too long.”

  “So maybe it’s time to try out your idea.”

  I opened my eyes. “What’s that?”

  “You know, about me coming to your place.”

  “Here?” I looked around the cabin. This was my idea? To have her come here?

  “Yeah, why not? I’ve got four-wheel drive. And I’ve never even been there yet. You always come out here. I’m starting to feel guilty.”

  One single bed. The old couch, sagging in the middle. Two rough wooden tables. This sad wreck of a place, after fifteen years of living all by myself. This is what she’d see. My God.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This cabin—”

  “You don’t want me to see your bachelor pad?”

  “I’m not sure I’d call it that.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think anyone says that anymore. Bachelor pad, that was from the seventies, right?”

  The seventies, I thought. Back when I was playing ball, and being a cop. And you were … God, were you in grade school then?

  “Alex, are you still there?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m just thinking. I don’t want you driving all this way tomorrow if the weather’s gonna be bad.”

  “It was just an idea. Okay?”

  Think, Alex. Think.

  “Hey, I know,” I said. “Why don’t we do something special?”

  “Special like what?”

  “Like I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  “I thought you had to stay there.”

  “We could meet in the Soo,” I said. “That’ll keep me close enough to home.”

  “Soo Michigan?”

  “There’s a great hotel right on the river.”

  “A hotel?”

  “It’s called the Ojibway,” I said. “You ever been there?”

  “No,” she said. “Never.”

  “They’ve got great food. And it’s just … I mean, it’s been there forever. It’s the only fancy place in town.”

  “You want us to stay there?”

  “I’m just saying …” You’re blowing it, Alex. It’s all gonna fall apart, right here.

  “This is a nice place? In Soo Michigan?”

  A little jab there, I thought. Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, is so much smaller than its sister city across the river. Soo Canada has more of everything.

  “It’s a classy hotel,” I said. “I’d really like to see you, okay? It’s been a few days, and I wouldn’t mind spending some time with you.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment. There was the faint hum on the line and nothing else.

  “Yeah, why not?” she said. “It sounds nice.”

  That’s how it happened. That hesitation, that long silence while she thought about it, I figured that was just natural. Just part of the dance, the getting to know someone new.

  Of course it wasn’t that at all. It was something else entirely. But I didn’t know her well enough yet. I didn’t know the way she was, the way she has been for most of her life. The way she had to be. Above all, I didn’t know the one most important thing about her—that she never, ever hesitated that long about anything. Not unless it was something big.

  Really big.

  Damn it all to hell. If I had only known.

  Natalie Reynaud. That was her name. Apparently, some of her friends called her Natty, but I never did. Not once. Natty didn’t work for me. Natty didn’t sound miraculous enough. To me she was always Natalie.

  She was a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police, stationed in a little town called Hearst, way the hell up there on the last road in the world, the Trans-Canada Highway. The first time I saw her, she was jumping out of a floatplane, having flown back from a remote outpost to look for five missing men. She had dark brown hair pinned up under her OPP hat. She had green eyes.

  She didn’t find those missing men that day. Or the next. Vinnie and I found them, in a way I was still having nightmares about. Then a senior constable named Claude DeMers came looking for us. He was Natalie’s partner, but he came without her. DeMers ended up dead and Natalie ended up looking like a bad partner. It was something I knew a little bit about myself.

  There was something else I knew, too. Natalie’s partner didn’t leave her behind just to protect her from a little danger. He left her behind because he had a secret of his own out there, buried in the ground with the dead men. So he came out alone to try to keep that secret in the dirt, and he ended up with a bullet in the back.

  Natalie took an administrative leave of absence from the OPP. I went back home to Paradise, but I kept thinking about her. I found out she was living in Blind River, just a couple of hours away from the International Bridge. So I went to see her. It was New Year�
��s Eve, with only a trace of snow on the ground. I drove across the bridge and followed the Queen’s Highway due east, along the shore of theNorth Channel. I arrived at her doorstep with a bottle of champagne and something else—what I thought would be a final answer to all the questions I knew she was living with. I had lived with the same questions, after all, with my own partner gunned down right in front of my eyes, on a hot summer night back in Detroit, in that one-room apartment just off Woodward Avenue with the tinfoil all over the walls.

  I remembered the hell I had lived in for all those years afterward. I knew Natalie was in that same hell now. I thought I could give her a way out, the way out I never had.

  Claude DeMers was buried a hero. He was the man who flew out to that lake to try to save the two Americans. When I told her the real story, I knew it would have to stay between us. When your partner’s dead, you can’t be the one to stand up and defame him. You can’t point to his grave and say there lies a dirty cop. I knew that, but I figured what the hell. As long as she knew. Maybe she’d be able to sleep at night.

  I had another reason to find her. I admit that. I sat in the dining room of that old farmhouse, watching what the antique light did to her green eyes, and how it picked up a faint hint of red in her hair. We talked and then we drank the champagne and made an awkward toast to the new year at midnight. She finally told me she wouldn’t mind if I stayed the night, just so she wouldn’t have to be alone.

  “I don’t trust many people,” she said to me that night.

  “But you trust me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can tell,” I said. Although, of course, I couldn’t. I had no idea what she was thinking. In another five minutes, I could have been back in my truck, heading home.

  “That would be a miracle,” she said. “I mean a real miracle.”

  “I think it already is,” I said. “Look how we met. And now here we are.”

  “I guess I should thank you for coming out here, Alex. It was a completely insane thing to do. But I’m glad you did.”

  I didn’t say anything then. I drank some more champagne and so did she. She had a way of looking up from her glass, eyeing me carefully, not like she was shy but maybe just the opposite. Like she was sizing me up. She asked me what sports I played, because it was obvious I was an old athlete. I shook off the “old” business and told her about my baseball career, such as it was. She told me she was a hockey player, back when a woman who played in college had nowhere to go with it. No women’s hockey in the Olympics, just back to the frozen pond in the backyard. It surprised me a little. I would soon find out that the game of hockey fit her perfectly.

  And then, for whatever reasons had brought me to this house, on this one cold night, after the grandfather clock at the top of her stairs chimed twelve times and the new year began, we stood up at the same time and met in the middle of the room. Because of the things that had happened to her, and to me. All these things we had in common. Hell, and maybe a little champagne on an empty stomach. It all came together in that minute after midnight. We kissed first, then she took me by the hand and led me upstairs.

  We stopped in front of one room. Inside there was a canopy bed with white lace and stuffed animals all over it. “No,” she said and pulled me past yet another room, with a double bed made up neatly, with more white lace. I saw two portraits, one on each end table, but I couldn’t make out the faces in the dim light. “This one,” she said as she pulled me into the third room. She was strong and the way she was pulling me, it felt like she was angry at me, and maybe she was. Maybe that was part of it.

  The room she pushed me into was different from the others. The light was on, the bed was unmade, and there were two suitcases opened up on the floor with clothes spilling out of them. She turned the light off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she struck a match and lit three candles. Then with her back to me she unpinned her hair and let it fall down onto her shoulders. She took her white shirt off and then reached behind and unhooked her bra. She kept her jeans on for the moment, turning around to face me in the candlelight. It’s always been shoulders for me, more than any other part of a woman, and hers were perfect. She had small breasts and her nipples stood out erect in the chilled air of this bedroom in the corner of this old, silent house. I took my shirt off as she watched me, and then she came close and kissed me again. I felt her skin against mine. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke and something sweet like cinnamon.

  She pulled away and left the room. I stood there, not quite sure what to do. When she came back, her white panties glowed in the candlelight. She put something in my hand, a foil wrapper, and in the half-second it took to register, she knocked me backward onto the bed.

  “That’s two minutes for cross-checking,” I said.

  “Shut up and take your pants off.” She climbed on top of me.

  “I can’t. That’s another two minutes for interference.”

  “Just shut up,” she said, and then she slapped me lightly across the mouth. It may have been a love tap, on her scale anyway, but it got my attention. “Okay, no more jokes,” I said. I rolled her over and kissed her hard. She bit my lip and dug her fingernails into my back. Then it got serious.

  BLOOD IS THE SKY

  Copyright © 2003 by Steve Hamilton.

  Excerpt from Ice Run copyright © 2004 by Steve Hamilton.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  eISBN 9781429905121

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002037199

  St Martin’s Press hardcover edition / June 2003

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition June 2004