Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  Guy put up a small fight about it, but eventually gave in and climbed up into the plane to get our supplies. Vinnie thanked Maskwa a couple of times for everything he had done.

  “We will find your brother,” Maskwa said just before he left. “I promise you.”

  We stood there and watched the plane take off. As it cleared the trees, it banked and circled us once and then headed south. We could still hear the sound of the plane, long after it disappeared.

  Vinnie started walking around the clearing, collecting sticks. The trees were close on all sides, with the edge of the water just a few yards away. It was so small, this cabin site, a tiny speck in a huge wilderness.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Making a fire.”

  I helped him build a teepee-shaped pile of wood. He put some birch bark in the middle and lit it with a match. The bark burst into flame.

  “Best fire starter there is,” he said. “It’ll even burn when it’s wet.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  An hour later, the sun was going down and painting the sky in deep shades of red and orange. Vinnie and I sat by the fire, eating more salami sandwiches and finishing off the Coke and beer.

  “It’s a nice sky,” Vinnie said. “Tom probably sat right here and watched it.”

  “What you said about feeling him here, do you really mean that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’m not saying I don’t.”

  “Tom and I used to fight a lot when we were kids. My grandmother told us we shouldn’t fight because we had the same blood in our veins. We were part of each other. I didn’t really listen to her back then. I wish I could talk to her now. She’d know what to do.”

  “You’re doing everything you can.”

  He put some more wood on the fire. A dry pine log crackled and sent sparks into the air. The sky got darker.

  “It’s getting cold,” I said. “We should get some sleep.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll put out the fire.”

  I went in and got one of the pots off the stove, cleaned it out as well as I could and then went down to the lake to fill it with water. I heated the water on the propane stove and washed my face. Then I unrolled a sleeping bag on one of the bottom bunks and climbed in, with my coat balled up as a pillow. I lay there awhile, listening to the night, wondering when Vinnie would come inside.

  I must have dozed off. I woke up some time later in total darkness. I grabbed the flashlight off the floor and shined it around the room. Vinnie wasn’t there. There was a scraping sound somewhere close to me. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It sounded like—

  The wall right next to my bed. Something was scratching the wall, but it wasn’t big. It was the slightest sound, like a whisper. Here, then here, then here—all over the wall.

  No. It was inside the wall. I put my ear against it and listened. I heard the scraping noise like it was being done a thousand different ways, and then I heard a thousand little squeaks.

  I got up out of the sleeping bag. The wooden floor was cold beneath my feet.

  “Vinnie?”

  There was no answer.

  I went through the main room, out the front door. Vinnie was sitting there on the porch, facing the lake.

  “I’m right here,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m listening.”

  There was a quarter moon in the night sky. Silver clouds raced in front of it. And then a darker cloud, rising from behind the cabin, that broke up into a thousand dark pieces.

  “Oh shit, those are bats,” I said. “My God. They must live inside the back wall. You should hear them in there.”

  He put his finger to his lips and shushed me. I listened to the wings fluttering and the high squeaks.

  “I’m sure they were hibernating,” he said. “We must have disturbed them.”

  “Doing what? We haven’t made any noise.”

  “Something woke them up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m gonna hibernate a little bit myself,” I said. “You should, too.”

  “I’ll be in,” he said. “Go to bed.”

  I went back in and climbed into the sleeping bag. The bats kept moving around inside the wall. I tried not to picture them, crawling all over each other and flying out into the night. A thin layer of plywood was the only thing separating them from me.

  I heard Vinnie come in and take the bunk next to me.

  “You didn’t have to stay here,” he said.

  “I’m in this far, Vinnie. I’m gonna help you see it through.”

  “I don’t understand you,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I made a promise to your mother.”

  “You know that’s not the only reason.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just get some sleep.”

  “I know you don’t like to talk about it,” he said, “but there’s something inside you that makes you do things like this.”

  “Yeah, it’s something.”

  “I’m serious, Alex. You can be a real pain in the ass, but underneath it all you’re the most loyal person I’ve ever known.”

  “Vinnie, I don’t have that many friends, okay? It makes me want to hold on to the ones I’ve got.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That sounds good to me.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I’m glad I’m one of them.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Now shut up and go to sleep.”

  He settled in and said good night. I listened to the bats in the wall for a while, and I thought about what he had said.

  He’s right, I thought. Vinnie can see right through me.

  I finally slept for an hour, maybe two. Then suddenly I was awake again. There was another noise in the room, this one a lot louder than the bats.

  “Vinnie, what is that?”

  I heard him sit up. His flashlight came on, blinding me.

  “It’s in the other room,” he said.

  We both got up at the same time. When he shined the light at the front wall, we saw an enormous face looking at us through the window.

  “Go on! Get out of here!” Vinnie yelled. He went into the front room and banged two of the pots together.

  “That was one big bear,” he said. “Did you see him?”

  “Yeah, Vinnie, I saw him.”

  Vinnie pushed the front door open and went out onto the porch. I followed him. We could hear the bear crashing through the brush.

  “Alex,” Vinnie said, his head back. “Look.”

  I looked up at the sky. The quarter moon had gone down behind the trees. The clouds had disappeared. It was so dark up here, so far away from any other kind of light. It was just the stars, every star in the heavens, the great expanse of the Milky Way spread out above us.

  I stood there with my friend, watching the sky.

  Until the sound came. A lonely, inhuman sound, far off in the distance. It was joined by another. And then another. The sound rose and fell, stopped and started again.

  “What the hell is that, Vinnie?”

  “I think those are more bears, Alex. Black bears.”

  “Black bears? From what planet?”

  “Shh, listen,” he said.

  We stood there under the stars and listened to the wailing of the bears. If I lived a million years, that sound was something I’d never forget.

  Chapter Twelve

  There’s nothing like waking up in a cold, filthy cabin, a hundred miles from anywhere, with no running water and nothing to eat but salami and bread.

  When I looked over, Vinnie’s sleeping bag was empty. I pushed myself up to a sitting position, feeling the stiffness in my neck, and my shoulder, and my back. After that, I stopped counting.

  I stood up and put my shoes on. There was a pot of water on the propane stove. It was just starting to boil. One of the front windows was on the floor. The big bear had pushed it right in.r />
  When I went outside, I saw Vinnie on the dock. He was on his knees, washing his face with lake water. He had his shirt off, which wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t about thirty degrees. “Morning,” I said. “Mind if I use the sink?”

  “It’s a bit cold,” he said.

  “I think maybe I’ll keep my clothes on. That should help.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Your water’s boiling in there,” I said. I knelt down and just about pitched myself into the lake.

  “I’ll let it boil for a while,” he said. “It’s lake water. I found some instant coffee.”

  “That actually sounds pretty good right now.” I splashed the water on my face. In ten seconds, my hands went from painful to numb.

  We sat on the front porch, having our breakfast of salami sandwiches and hot instant coffee. We watched the morning fog drifting across the lake.

  “I saw Tom last night,” Vinnie said. “In my dream. He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”

  “Did it seem like he was in trouble?”

  “No, not at all. He was happier than I’ve seen him in a long time. He was laughing.”

  “When do you suppose Guy and Maskwa will get here?”

  “I imagine they’ve already left,” he said. “How long did it take us to fly here yesterday? About an hour?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “So they should be here soon.”

  “They’re really going out of their way to help us,” I said.

  “It’s not so surprising,” he said. “It comes naturally to them.”

  “Being Indians and all.”

  He looked at me. “No, just being good people.”

  “Okay,” I said. “No argument there.”

  We waited around for another hour. The sun came up and burned off the rest of the fog on the lake, but it didn’t do much else. “I can’t just sit here,” I said. “I’m gonna be so stiff, I won’t be able to move.”

  “I hear you,” he said. “They might be having some trouble getting that old plane started. I’d hate to sit here and waste half the day. Why don’t we go up this trail a little bit, start looking around.”

  “We could leave them a note.”

  “Yeah, and we’ll hear the plane coming.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “Anything to get moving.”

  I found an old notepad in the cabin and a two-inch stub of a pencil, wrote them out a quick note, and put it on the front porch. I put a rock on it so it wouldn’t blow away. “Okay, show me this trail,” I said.

  We set off north, picking up a wide trail that led deep into the woods. If I’d forgotten just how far away from civilization we were, it took about ten minutes of walking through the trees to remember. There were no signs of human life whatsoever—none of the little things you find on just about any trail in America if you look close enough, like cigarette butts or gum wrappers. There were no wooden signposts, no little trail marker tags nailed to the trees. The trail belonged only to the animals. For all we knew, it hadn’t changed in a thousand years.

  Vinnie was walking slowly, looking at the ground in front of him. His footsteps didn’t make a sound. “There are so many bear tracks here,” he said.

  “Can I ask a dumb question?” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “How many moose tracks have you seen?”

  “Not one,” he said.

  “So how good could the moose hunting be on this lake?”

  “Sort of explains why they didn’t bring one back,” he said.

  “Those other guys we saw,” I said, “the first day we got here. They got a moose, but they were out on a different lake, remember?”

  “I remember. So you’re wondering why Albright and his guys came to this lake instead.”

  “There being no actual moose here, yeah.”

  “It’s a good question.”

  Something moved ahead of us. We couldn’t see what it was, but we heard the brush moving. Then we heard the sound, the same sound we had heard the night before as we stood on the porch of the cabin. It was like a low growl, but with an eerie, glottal pulsing to it. It was almost what a giant dog would sound like if it could purr like a cat.

  “Vinnie, you’re telling me a bear’s making that noise?”

  “Yes, Alex.”

  “How come I’ve never heard that before?”

  “People don’t realize how vocal bears can be,” he said, “or how strange they can sound. Did you know when they do bear scenes in movies, they usually dub in some other animal’s growl? Like a wolf?”

  “That so?”

  “And this time of year, hell, some of these bears are still desperate for food. They’ve got to put their fat on before the winter comes.”

  “That bear we saw last night, it was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like it had brown fur.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t a true brown bear. Even black bears can have brown fur.”

  “How do you tell the difference?”

  “The face and shoulders,” he said. “And the size. Browns are bigger.”

  “Whatever you say, Vinnie. All I know is, I’ve never heard a sound like that.”

  We were maybe three miles up the trail when we came to a stand of white birch trees. The leaves were long gone. The cold sunlight lit the ground through the bare branches.

  “This is where we stopped yesterday,” Vinnie said. “Can you see all the marks on the ground?”

  I bent down and looked. “All I see are bear tracks,” I said.

  “Yeah, but besides that. Over here toward the sides.” He pointed a few feet off the trail, by the base of the biggest birch tree. “Careful where you walk.”

  “You make it sound like a crime scene,” I said. Then it occurred to me. A crime scene might be exactly what this was.

  “You see the boot prints?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “There are several together, right here.” He stepped carefully and leaned against the tree. “I think there’s at least three different boots here.”

  “So they were all walking in a line.”

  “But why so close to the tree? The trail’s wide-open. There’s no reason to walk all the way over here. And this is what we were talking about yesterday—you see here how this boot print is deep on the inside edge? And this one here, too. You wouldn’t see that if somebody was just walking normally.”

  “So what do you think happened here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We need to keep looking.”

  “How far up this trail do you wanna go?”

  Vinnie didn’t answer me. He stood there looking up into the sky. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  It took a few seconds to pick up the sound. It was a faint buzzing, in the far distance. “The plane,” I said.

  “They’re coming. It’s about time.”

  “So let’s go back.”

  He looked back down at the ground. “You think you can find your way back to the cabin?”

  “I suppose so, why?”

  “We’re just gonna go meet up with them, and then come right back up here. I’d rather just stay here and look around some more.”

  “Well, don’t go wandering off too far. We don’t want to lose you, too.”

  He looked at me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Are you sure you can find your way back?”

  “Vinnie, I’m not that hopeless. I can follow the trail back to the cabin.”

  “Bring me some food when you come back,” he said. “And some water.”

  “Will do,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  I turned around and took two steps, then stopped. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said.

  “Alex, I’m just gonna look around. Go get the guys.”

  “All right,” I said. I shook off the little chill that had run up my spine and st
arted down the trail. You’re starting to imagine things, I thought. Damned bears and those noises.

  I retraced our steps, leaving the white birches behind and heading into the deep shade of the pine trees. The pine needles were a soft blanket beneath my feet. The only sound was the steady buzz of the plane, getting louder and louder with each passing minute.

  I came back to the small stream we had crossed, jumping over the water and landing hard on the rocks. Then it was back into the pine trees, more darkness, more pine needles. I saw bear tracks all over the place.

  And no boot prints.

  Shit, I thought. Leave it to me to get lost walking back three miles to the goddamned cabin.

  “All right, stay calm,” I said out loud. I didn’t sound very reassuring. I wasn’t fooling anybody. “Just retrace your steps a bit.” When I turned around there was nothing to see but trees. A million trees and no recognizable trail.

  The plane got louder. It seemed to be circling overhead now, but I couldn’t see it through the branches. Maskwa must have flown right over the lake. He was probably scouting out the terrain up here along the north trail.

  I took a few steps back the way I had come, following my boot prints, all the way back to the stream. The plane was north of me now, assuming I had any idea where north was anymore. I tried to locate the sun. “Okay, if the sun’s there,” I said. “It’s late in the morning, which means that south would be—”

  Thataway, you stupid useless white man. I found our boot prints, right down the original trail. How I’d missed them coming over the stream, I had no idea. I kept walking, making a promise to myself that I wouldn’t tell anyone about my little detour. The plane was passing overhead once more. Again, I couldn’t see it through the trees, although this time I did see the plane’s shadow darken the sky for just a moment. The sound receded for a few minutes, and then stopped. They’re at the lake, I thought. They’re getting out, wondering where the hell we are.

  I kept walking. They’re reading the note, maybe shaking their heads at our impatience. They’re settling down to wait for us. Or more likely they’re coming up this trail to find us. With lots of cold water, I hoped. All this walking through the woods, not to mention getting lost, was making me pretty damned thirsty.

  I was about a mile away from the cabin at that point. As I came around each bend in the trail, I kept expecting to see them. But I didn’t. They must be unloading stuff from the plane, I thought. Or maybe they saw something else and went down a different trail. Which would mean I’d get there and find the place deserted, and wonder what the hell to do next.