Red Knife

by William Kent Krueger

  Annie looked at her father and they both burst out laughing.

  “You know what I mean,” Jo said, but she laughed, too.

  “And with that profound advice ringing in my ears, Mother dear, I bid you adieu.” Annie picked up her backpack and danced out the door.

  “Stevie,” Jo called toward the living room. “Get a move on, guy. I’ll drop you off at school on my way to work.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sipped as she turned to Cork. “So what’s on your agenda today?”

  “Sam’s Place. A lot to do to get ready for next weekend. You know, I’m really looking forward to opening the place up.”

  “You always do, sweetheart.” She kissed him, tasting of coffee.

  Cork headed upstairs to shower, passing his son on the way. Trixie wasn’t far behind. She had one of Stevie’s sneakers in her mouth.

  “I’m teaching her to fetch my shoes,” Stevie explained.

  “When you get her to mow the lawn, let me know.” Cork ruffled his son’s hair and moved on.

  As he stepped out of the shower, he heard Jo pull out of the driveway in her Camry. He shaved and was almost dressed when he heard another vehicle pull up and park out front. He looked through his bedroom window and saw George LeDuc’s truck at the curb. LeDuc got out and Henry Meloux with him. Cork pulled his boots on and headed downstairs. He reached the door just as the bell rang.

  “Anin, Henry. Anin, George,” he said, using the more formal Ojibwe greeting. “Come on in.” He moved aside to let the men enter. He couldn’t read their faces. “Coffee?” he offered.

  “No,” Meloux replied. LeDuc shook his head.

  “What’s up?” Cork asked.

  LeDuc said, “Henry showed up on my doorstep this morning. He told me he had to see you.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  The old Mide spoke: “I told you, Corcoran O’Connor, that I had a vision of a dark, hungry thing.”

  “I remember, Henry.”

  “I have finally seen this thing clearly. It came to me before sunrise. It has the face of a youth. And I saw it standing in a meadow, surrounded by many bodies, also young. This dark thing was drinking their blood.”

  “Do you know what it means, Henry?”

  “I am not sure. But the meadow is a place I know from the stories I heard when I was a boy. It is called Miskwaa-mookomaan.”

  “Red Knife,” Cork said. He knew the name, too. It had come up a few years earlier when the school district was debating the site for the new high school. They’d elected finally to build it on the place where, long before, the Ojibwe had slaughtered a hunting party of Sioux.

  “One more thing, Corcoran O’Connor. I saw your daughter, Anne, among the bodies covered with blood.”

  “Where is Annie?” George LeDuc asked.

  “She left for school. She’s probably there by now.”

  Then Cork thought about what Will Kingbird had told him, about Ulysses taking the rifle from the gun shop. Will had been afraid his son had taken it to kill Buck Reinhardt, but maybe Uly, a boy misunderstood and much picked on, had a different purpose in mind all along.

  Cork grabbed the telephone in the hall and dialed Annie’s cell phone. The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. He tried not to panic. Annie always turned her phone off before she went into school. It was a rule.

  He hurried to the kitchen and grabbed the keys to his Bronco. He shouted to LeDuc and Meloux as he headed out the side door, “I’m going to the high school.” He didn’t wait for an answer.

  He backed out of the drive in his Bronco and shot down Gooseberry Lane. He thought briefly of calling the sheriff’s office, but he had no proof that anything was going to happen, today or any other, just the vision of an old man. Besides, it would take him only five minutes to get to the high school. And what could possibly happen in five minutes?

  FORTY-SIX

  Annie had just turned off her cell phone and was coming into the school parking lot with Cara when Uly Kingbird called to her. He was standing beside the red Saturn his mother usually drove.

  “Annie, can I talk to you?”

  “Go on,” Cara said. “I’ll see you inside.” She headed toward the school entrance where a late-arriving bus had parked and its student riders were spilling from the door.

  Annie put her cell phone in her purse and crossed the parking lot to Uly. He looked terrible, disheveled, red eyed, as if he hadn’t slept at all. “Uly, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Could we talk? Please? In private, in the car?”

  “Sure. We need to make it fast, though. We don’t want to be late our first day back after suspension.”

  Uly got in the driver’s side. Annie went around to the passenger door and slid in. Uly grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed, as if he were choking a snake. The tension in his body and the pain that twisted his face frightened Annie.

  “What is it, Uly?”

  “I don’t know what to do, Annie.”

  “About what?”

  “Last night I went over to Darrell’s house. I had to get one of my dad’s rifles.”

  “What was it doing over there?”

  “Long story. I’ve got it in the trunk. I’m taking it back to the shop after school.”

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Darrell was all pissed off when I got there. His granddad and him had been fighting, I don’t know what about. Darrell said he was going to add him to the target list.”

  “Target list?”

  “It’s this list we keep. Whenever somebody’s really been an asshole, we put him on the list. Then we shoot him.”

  “What?”

  “Darrell’s granddad keeps a lot of firearms around: pistols, rifles. We go out and set up bottles somewhere and shoot the hell out of them. Each bottle is somebody on the list. It’s just a way to, you know, deal with stuff. It’s not serious. At least I never thought it was. Last night, Darrell starts saying things that scared me. He said it was time to take care of the target list. He said he had a plan all worked out. He wanted us to do it together.”

  From the school came the ring of the final bell, calling students to homeroom.

  “He said what we’d do is lock the doors, chain them from the inside so nobody could get out. He has them, the chains. He showed them to me. And the locks. Then we’d sweep through, taking down anybody we wanted to.”

  “What doors, Uly?”

  He stared at the school and nodded in its direction.

  “Oh my God.”

  “I told him it was crazy, Annie. He’s like, ‘Dude, the whole fucking world is crazy. In the end, you’ve got only one choice. Do you go out with a bang or a whimper?’ It’s something he got off the Internet. He says it all the time.”

  “We’ve got to tell somebody.”

  “Who?”

  Annie thought a moment. “Let’s start with Ms. Sherburne.” The school psychologist, who was also Annie’s softball coach.

  Uly’s face went sour. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to her about stuff before. We don’t, you know, connect. And what if I’m wrong? Darrell already takes a lot of crap. If this got out, Jesus, he’d like have to move or something.”

  “What if you’re not wrong?”

  “I don’t know, Annie. I thought about it all night long and I just don’t know.”

  “Look, if he’s talking this way, he needs help even if he’s not really thinking of doing anything.”

  “Why? I mean sometimes I’ve thought how great it would be just to shoot all the assholes. That’s why we had the target list.”

  “But would you, Uly? Would you really shoot them?”

  He stared at the school building and finally shook his head. “No.”

  “Would Darrell?”

  Uly thought it over. “All right,” he said at last, though he didn’t sound totally convinced.

  They got out of the car. The parking lot was empty and quiet. Annie knew they were already late for class, but they needed to ta
lk to Ms. Sherburne and would be even later. They walked silently to the front entrance. Annie reached out and pulled the door handle. The door opened just a little then stopped. Annie yanked and heard the metallic rattle of a chain on the other side and in the last moment of her mind working clearly, she thought, Oh God. Darrell Gallagher.

  Once when she was much younger, she’d been trapped under a diving raft on Otter Lake, the back of her swimsuit strap snagged on something she couldn’t see, couldn’t reach back to release herself from. She’d struggled desperately. Seconds seemed too few and at the same time endless. Her mind took in everything, including the useless details of her situation—the soft green light of the water; the bubbles gathered along the bottom of the raft, like frog eggs; the velvet algae on the raft chain—but understood almost nothing in a useful way. The lake pressed around her, against her, isolated her, entombed her.

  That’s how she feels now, as if she’s underwater, struggling to fight her way out of an airless tomb, moving too slowly, unable to think clearly, to breathe, to release herself from the terror that has gripped her.

  She’s alone. Uly’s no longer beside her. Where he’s gone, she cannot say. Her cell phone is in her hand—how did it get there?—and her thumb is pressing the power button.

  She stumbles away from the chained front entrance, out of the shadow of the portico, and into sunlight. Without really thinking, she turns and sprints for the doors at the south end of the building. Her feet seem mired in mud, dragging like dead things. Through the windows of the classrooms, she sees students milling about, settling gradually into their desks for homeroom, oblivious. The south doors appear suddenly in front of her. She grasps the handles and yanks. These, too, are chained and locked.

  Gallagher, she understands, has trapped everyone inside.

  Think, Annie, she tells herself. Think.

  She remembers the entrance for the school kitchen, where deliveries are made, which is never used by the students or faculty. She spins and heads north.

  The cell phone plays a twinkling tune to let her know it’s powered on now and she punches in 911 as she races along.

  Tamarack County Emergency Services.

  Annie knows that voice, a woman’s voice, but a face doesn’t come to her.

  This is Annie O’Connor, she cries into the phone. I’m at the high school. Darrell Gallagher has a gun. He’s going to kill people.

  Have you seen the gun, Annie?

  No, but I know he has it. He’s locked the doors and trapped everybody inside.

  Officers are on their way, Annie. Are you in the school?

  No, I’m outside.

  Stay there and don’t go in.

  But she’s already at the kitchen service entry and she pushes inside, snapping her phone closed as she goes.

  The moment she enters she hears from somewhere in the distant interior four rapid cracks—bam bam bam bam—like a fist smacking against lockers in the hallways. She runs through the kitchen. Morning sunlight glances off stainless-steel countertops and sinks and commercial-size stoves. Two women in hairnets are frozen in the act of pulling big mixing bowls from the cabinets. They stand as if posed, heavy women with arms uplifted, glittering silver bowls cupped in their fleshy hands. It reminds her of a painting, some Renaissance thing about a pagan offering she should know because she studied it—didn’t she?—in her humanities class.

  Get out! Annie yells as she passes them. He has a gun! He’s shooting in the school!

  She doesn’t wait to see if they respond.

  Three more cracks in rapid succession echo down the empty hallway as Annie enters. She looks left, a clear view all the way to the main doors where light floods through the windows and down the polished tiles until it hits an obstruction, a dark oblong, lying cross-ways on the floor, that breaks the stream of light and begins a flow of its own, a dark and glistening stream. She thinks of a deer her father hit years ago when she was with him in the Bronco and she remembers how the animal lay across the road in just this way, bleeding, dying, then dead as she stood there with her father, watching helplessly as what neither of them could stop transpired.

  Screams ricochet off walls at the other end of the hall.

  Bam-bam. Bam-bam.

  Two doors down, Iris Surma, the librarian, sticks her head out.

  Darrell Gallagher has a gun! Annie cries in her mind. But does she speak it? She’s not sure.

  The librarian replies, her words like wood blocks that Annie gathers in her head and slowly puts together to construct their meaning: We can’t get out. The doors are locked.

  Annie points back the way she’s come. Through the kitchen. The service door is open.

  Iris Surma beckons behind her. Hurry! Eight students rush out and make a beeline for the cafeteria. Ms. Surma pauses and motions frantically for Annie to come with them. To Annie, it seems like a scene from an old movie where people stand on a pier waving to a boat that has already sailed.

  Annie turns away from the librarian, turns toward the body on the floor.

  It’s Lyle Argus, she discovers, one of the two security people in the school. He lies on his side, his arms outstretched toward the chain on the door. He stares beyond the reach of his empty hands, and Annie, who believes absolutely in heaven, wonders, as she kneels beside him, what those sightless eyes see now.

  Bam-bam. The shots sound as if they’re coming from the second floor. Bam-bam-bam-bam. The north stairwell disgorges students and several teachers, who stumble into the hallway. They rush toward the main entrance and Annie lifts her hands to stop them. It’s locked! Go through the cafeteria to the kitchen door!

  Some hear and swing in that direction, but many of them continue past Annie, leaping over the body of Lyle Argus in their hurry to reach the chained entry where they bunch like driven cattle. Annie’s cell phone bleats and she realizes it’s still in her hand. The call, she sees, is coming from Cara’s phone.

  Cara?

  Annie, I’m shot, she says, her voice barely audible.

  Where are you?

  South stairwell.

  I’m coming.

  Behind her as she rises, those grouped at the chained entrance kick uselessly at the doors.

  Her legs move as they do when she runs in the mornings with her father, without her thinking of them or even feeling them, really. She passes an open classroom where Mr. Henning, who teaches geography, sits on the floor with his back against the wall, cradling a student’s head in his lap. In the middle of Mr. Henning’s blue shirt is a huge red continent, like one of those he teaches about, but it’s a continent whose shape she doesn’t recognize. Mr. Henning looks at her as she passes, and he is crying.

  A long trail of blood on the hallway floor leads to the girls’ bathroom and disappears under the door. Annie leaps over the blood and races on.

  She approaches a corner and sees three black spiders crawling across the wall ahead. Nearer, she realizes they’re bullet holes that radiate cracks across the surrounding white plaster. She turns the corner and her legs carry her down another hallway, past closed gray lockers, past closed classrooms where the sound of desks scraping across floors tell her barricades are being erected. More gunshots—so many it sounds like corn being popped—and she reckons them to be coming from the direction of the main doors. She tries not to think of her classmates who’ve crowded there, desperately hoping to escape.

  She rounds another corner and is at the south stairwell.

  Cara lies at the bottom of the stairs, her face a bloodless white. She still clutches her cell phone in her hand. Her long legs, so graceful on the ball field and beautiful to watch, are sprawled under her, limp and twisted. She stares at Annie out of eyes that seemed to have turned into two dark tunnels. Annie glides to her and kneels.

  Can’t feel, Cara whispers.

  Annie lifts the bottom of Cara’s soggy sweater and sees the blood welling up. There is so much she can’t see the hole the bullet has made. The blood comes from somewhere deep inside
her friend and pours out so quickly that it is dark purple. It runs onto the polished floor and begins to snake away.

  Annie . . .

  Hush.

  She wipes at the mess and locates the wound, to the right of Cara’s navel. She presses her hand there, but bruise-colored blood continues to slip under her palm and feed the snake on the floor. Annie lifts her hand away, and in the next moment she has taken off the Reebok she wears on her right foot, has yanked off her white cotton sock and folded it into a compress that she lays over the wound as she presses again.

  She hears the cry of many sirens outside.

  Hang on, Cara. Hang on, girl. I’m right here with you. You’re going to be fine.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” comes the voice of Darrell Gallagher at her back.

  His voice was ice on her fevered thinking. She felt as if she was waking from a bad dream, only to discover a worse reality. She turned her head and looked over her shoulder, keeping her hands on the compress against Cara’s wound. Gallagher stood in the hallway in his long black coat. Visible beneath it was a vest full of ammunition clips. He held a handgun pointed loosely in her direction. He looked oddly calm. On the floor of the hallway where he’d just walked, his boots had left red prints. Streaks ran down his black coat, like dark red veins. Blood, Annie realized, though not his own. She thought for an instant of pleading with him, but she understood clearly that it would be useless. She understood, too, that her own death was upon her, and in that moment, she received a blessing she could never have guessed. Serenity descended and a wonderful, peaceful acceptance filled her. She looked into Gallagher’s eyes, where there was no hint of pity, and she said, “God forgive you, Darrell.”

  His reply was a lazy smile as he raised the gun and aimed at her head.

  “Darrell!”

  Uly’s shout came from down the hallway.

  Gallagher kept his gun trained on Annie while he looked behind him. The smile became a short laugh as he watched Uly Kingbird approach. “Son of a bitch. You decided to join in the fun after all.”

  Uly carried a rifle. The one he’d picked up at Gallagher’s the night before, Annie figured. He stopped a dozen yards from where Gallagher stood.