The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  A tree fifteen yards away. A man slumps at the base of it.

  Her father comes up beside her, his breathing harried, and together they approach the body. “Looks like he was going too fast in the ATV, hit that log, shot out of his seat.”

  “Looks like it.”

  His neck is bent at an unnatural angle, presumably broken from impact after he was launched through the air. His skin is gray-black and puffy with rot, but she can clearly see that he is short and heavyset. The crows have pecked away much of his face, but pieces of beard cling to his jaw.

  “Is it him?”

  “No.” She crouches and waves a hand and the flies alight with an angry buzz. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “Well, let’s see who he is, then.” Her father bends down with a crack of his knees and sweeps away some brush on the ground and picks up a metal storage clipboard. He swipes the dirt off it and pops it open, revealing a mess of paper.

  He hands it to Stacie and she fingers through the forms inside. There are surveys and analysis reports with the Frontier Metals emblem at their top left corner. She finds a map folded at the bottom of the pile, and her father unfolds it.

  “But that’s impossible,” he says. That word—impossible—could apply to so much right now. But he remains focused on the rules and boundaries that guide his particular understanding of the world. “This land. It’s protected wilderness. They can’t mine it ​—”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are laws.”

  “Don’t laws change? Could they have gotten a special provision?”

  “Not yet, they haven’t.” He studies her with tired eyes. “I know I’m partial. But I’m not exaggerating when I say this might be the best canoeing in the world. Certainly it’s one of most beloved patches of wilderness in the country. If anyone so much as proposed mining it, there would be lawsuits, editorials, thousands of activists here overnight making all sorts of noise and trouble.”

  “So what’s going on? What’s Frontier Metals doing here?”

  “Nothing good. You know I’ve always thought that company—and the Frontiers themselves—are the worst thing to ever happen to Northfall.”

  She remains still another moment, riffling through the papers, lost in her thoughts, and then stands and paces in a circle. “Until I figure out what’s going on here, let’s keep this between us.”

  Her father looks back and forth between her and the corpse. “This man might have a family. You’re not going to report ​—”

  “I’ll report the body. But anonymously. I don’t want anyone to know we were here. Because I don’t want anyone to know I have this. Not until I understand better what’s going on.” She snaps shut the clipboard. “Now, I know you and Sheriff Barnes go way back. I know you’ve told him to look out for me. But I’m going to say this only once: You don’t say a word to him. About any of this. Not one word.”

  There is a long beat of silence before her father says, “I’ve never known you not to be a rule follower, Stacie. But it sounds like you’re going your own way on this?”

  “I don’t like it,” she says, “and I doubt you’ll like it. But I’ve come to a conclusion: I can’t win by playing by the rules when everybody else is breaking them.”

  * * *

  Night is coming when Stacie and her father hoist the canoe from the water and carry it to the Explorer. They arrange themselves on either side of the vehicle and say, “One, two, three,” then heave it up onto the rack. Their shoulders are sore but they manage. They haven’t spoken since they walked away from the corpse, and they don’t speak now. Not until they’ve tied down the canoe and tossed their gear in the back seat and closed themselves into the cab.

  “All right,” her father says. “Spit it out.”

  “What?”

  “I was under the impression that we were looking for a missing police officer.”

  “We were. We are.”

  “You’re clearly not telling your old man everything.” Her father turns the key and the engine coughs to life. “So tell me.”

  “I’m looking for evidence.”

  “Of?”

  “There’s something going on with the Frontiers.”

  “They’re crooks and despots. Sure, there’s something going on with them. I could have told you as much.” He tugs the gearshift into drive. “Am I to understand you think they might have something to do with this Dan Swanson going missing?”

  “Dan Swanson might be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You probably read in the papers about the father? Ragnar?”

  “He’s in a coma. There was a house fire and ​—”

  “And I suspect foul play.”

  “Who?”

  “I thought I knew. Now I’m not sure sure. All I know is, Frontier Metals and Black Dog seem to be going after each other. And there might be some sort of cover-up going on with the police.”

  “Is that all?” he says, and then, “I’m kidding.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “No. I’m sorry. It sounds . . . dangerous.”

  “It’s really fucking dangerous.” Here she slaps a hand over her mouth. She is not one to swear, and never in front of her father. Quieter now, she says, “It’s really dangerous.”

  She expects her father to scold her, to encourage her to quit her job, to walk away from all of this, but instead he says, “I’m proud of you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I am. Real proud.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “Somebody’s got to protect this place.” His eyes might be a little damp when he looks at her and gives a quick nod. “You’re doing it. You let me know how I can help.”

  “You’re doing it right now.” She curls a hand through his arm and leans her head against his shoulder. “You are helping.”

  He pulls the Explorer out of the weeds and onto the rutted road and they bump down it slowly. The light is dying and the shadows close in around them. “You’ve heard me talk about the wolves.”

  She has, but she has heard most of his stories, and that never stops her from listening. “Go on.”

  He talks about the nationwide incentive to hunt down wolves and decimate the population. It began in the nineteenth century—ranchers and then government agencies offered rewards for carcasses—and carried into the twentieth. An eradication campaign. Wolves were shot, trapped, and poisoned. And the only place in America they managed to survive was northern Minnesota. “Because the Boundary Waters are so wild.”

  “What’s your point, Daddy?”

  “I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it.” Some branches claw at the windows and at the canoe. “I’m saying, maybe you’re struggling with breaking the rules. Maybe you’re scared of what you’re up against. But look at the bigger picture. Look at what’s happening to this place. How do you fight it? Protest marches and letters to the editor can only accomplish so much. Frontier and Black Dog, they’re the hunters in this scenario. They’re not going to stop now that they’ve got the scent. Now that they’ve got the Boundary Waters in their cross hairs. We need to push back. We need a place for the wolves to hide.”

  “Are we the wolves?”

  “You betcha we are.”

  28

  * * *

  Two new hangars and three runways have been built at the Arrowhead Regional Airport to accommodate all the extra air traffic. Several commuter airline shuttles dash back and forth from Minneapolis each day, but the private planes and jets are what keep the control tower busy. The Gulfstream that lands now—a direct flight from Houston—has a Black Dog Energy emblem on its tail.

  It pulls into a hangar and powers down with a wheeze. A handler rattles a stair ramp over. When the door unlatches, the pilot smiles and gestures with his arm, and a big man exits the plane. Walter Eaton pauses at the top of the ramp and fits his Stetson into place on top of his head. It’s a cold enough day that his breath fogs the air. His
belt buckle is the size of a salad plate, and his cowboy boots cheat his six-foot-two frame another three inches. Everything about him’s big, he likes to say, Texas big.

  The first thing he notes is the Cessna parked directly beside him. Frontier Metals is painted across its side with a northern lights effect, a magical swirl of purple and green around the lettering. He huffs, and when he gets to the bottom of the ramp, he tells the handler to arrange a separate space for his Gulfstream. “I don’t want to be within spitting distance of that so-and-so, understand?”

  He doesn’t travel with luggage, because he has a fully stocked cabin waiting for him here, and he doesn’t travel with an attendant, because he hates relying on people. Case in point: what happened with the hit.

  For more than a month now, Mickey Golden had groomed contacts within the PD. He offered cash for simple information: Which truck in the fleet carried the load of omnimetal from Northfall to the St. Paul mill? That’s all he wanted to know. Anything that happened, the cops were assured, would happen outside their jurisdiction. Mickey promised no one would get hurt. And he also promised both companies would profit from the situation. Let’s say the Frontiers get ripped off. The insurance claim covers them, and then Black Dog offers to sell half the ore back at market price. It’s just good business. Everybody wins. Mickey implied the Frontiers might even be in on it.

  Everything seemed fine until the first contact vanished. A cop named Dan Swanson. No warning something might be off. And no body to indicate foul play. He was simply gone. Who knows what happened, Mickey said. Maybe the guy got sick of his old lady and skipped town.

  Maybe. Walter told Mickey to get to work on whatever cop took over the escort. However careful he’d been last time, do better. Step up the secrecy. Only meet up in remote locations. Use a Blackphone. Pretend the Frontiers were always watching. Turns out, they were. Now another cop has gone missing and men on the Black Dog payroll are dead.

  If something needs to be done, Walter would do it himself. He had started off at the bottom—a high-school dropout living in his truck. His work as a handyman led to him buying foreclosures and condemned buildings and fixing them up and flipping them decades before this became a trend so popular that there were stupid TV shows about it. Then, in the early eighties, he happened upon a hundred-acre ranch in the scrublands of northern Texas that was home to a dried-up well and the site of a triple homicide. Nobody wanted it. He walked the property and found at its southeastern corner a blackened stretch of sand that stuck to his boots. He brought a drill out and tapped a vein of crude that came gurgling up so fast, he and his truck were soaked in it. He bought the place for pocket change. He saw value where others didn’t. He muscled his way onto the Forbes list not because anyone offered to help or because he asked permission; he simply took whatever could be taken—whether land or oil or metal.

  He keeps an Escalade parked at the airport and climbs into it now. He cranks the engine. The windshield is silvered with a latticework of frost and he punches up the heater and waits for the vehicle to warm.

  Walter once filled a syringe with oil and inserted it directly into the jugular of someone who crossed him. He’d bribed farmers hesitant to sell their land for a pipeline project, and, with a hammer, he had broken the legs of those who’d refused. He’d sent in a team of divers to set C-4 charges and sabotage a competitor’s platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Midway through a freighter shipment, oil prices dropped steeply, so he ordered the ship sunk to collect the insurance rather than letting it dock and sell the barrels at rock-bottom prices.

  Walter is not about to be undone by a bunch of flannel-wearing, loon-loving Lutherans from northern Minnesota. They don’t know how the game is played. He does. There is no law. And there is no God. Legal and moral restrictions are set in place for what Walter calls sheeple. Those too weak and too stupid to think for themselves. You only have eighty or so years on this planet, and that’s not a lot of time to take it all in. He is a self-professed man of large appetites. He believes in excess. In gluttonously enjoying every meal, every woman, every cash grab; every drop of oil and every gram of omnimetal. He worships at an altar built from wagyu beef, single-malt whiskey, and hundred-dollar bills. Why have one wife when you could have a mistress in every state? Why be a millionaire if you could be a billionaire?

  The frost has mostly melted from the windshield. But he pauses his hand at the gearshift. Something smells off. Like old ham. He checks around him for the source. A forgotten sandwich, maybe. Then he leans into the vents and takes a deep sniff and cringes. A mouse. Maybe a whole nest of them. The little buggers must have crawled into the engine block and readied a winter home. He notices a few faint lines of smoke rising from the edges of the hood.

  He curses about how his goddamn luck couldn’t get any goddamn worse and climbs out of the cab and huffs toward the front of the Escalade and discovers the hood already popped. He lifts it cautiously, and more smoke comes drifting out. He waves it away and discovers the source. A head—roughly severed at the neck—shoved in next to the exhaust manifold. The edges of the face are scorched and the hair aflame, but otherwise the skin has been preserved by the cold. A fifty-something-year-old man with a mustache. Walter knows he was a police officer because of the badge propping open his mouth.

  * * *

  When the gate rose on the semitrailer and revealed Talia Frontier hoisting an RPG launcher to her shoulder, Mickey slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel hard. He was going seventy at the time. His truck skidded and then rose into a flip. If it hadn’t, the warhead would have shot through the windshield, but instead, it glanced off his rear bumper before detonating and cratering the asphalt.

  He isn’t sure how many times the truck rolled. His brain went black for a minute. He woke up to find himself hanging upside down and the airbags deployed and his mouth tacky with powder. The man in the passenger seat had been ejected from the cab and left behind a blood-edged hollow in the windshield. Mickey ripped off his alien mask and cut himself out of his seat belt with a pocketknife and staggered onto the highway just in time to wave down one of his other trucks. Two men in alien masks dragged him into the rear bed, slammed shut the tailgate, and tore off across the median.

  That was a week ago, and ever since then, Mickey has been in hiding. A concussion has left his memory a mess and any light makes his head hurt, so he’s wearing sunglasses even when inside. His left arm is broken above the wrist, but he thinks he’s set it properly on his own, duct-taping a wooden spoon to his forearm. He’s still digging glass out of his scalp. He should have gone to the hospital but couldn’t.

  The Frontiers were ready. They knew he was coming. That means the cop Mickey had been working with, Hank Lippert, might have flipped on him. Lippert wasn’t responding to texts or calls. Best guess—he’d taken the cash from Mickey and then double-dipped as a rat for the Frontiers. If that’s the case, Mickey will make him pay with a pound of flesh. Right after he heals up.

  For now he’s content to medicate with space dust and whiskey. He has a five-thousand-square-foot neo-Tudor in one of the new developments, but he doesn’t feel safe there, so for now he’s holed up in a singlewide trailer at the Black Dog man camp. Lying down makes him dizzy, so he’s stationed himself permanently on the couch. He wears nothing but his jewelry and his silk boxer shorts, a bottle of Old Grand-Dad tucked into his groin. He isn’t sure how much he’s sleeping, but maybe eighteen, nineteen hours a day. Right now, the lights are off. The television plays Judge Judy on mute. On the cushion beside him lies a pistol, three cell phones, and a business card for Happy Endings massage service. And on the far side of the couch sits the woman they sent. Asian. Barely legal. In a red wig and purple negligee. He called out of boredom. She tried to make something happen for him earlier, but after ten minutes, he said, “It’s okay. I’m not really in the mood anyway. Just sit by me, how about?”

  “Do you want to talk?” she says now.

  “No. Talking makes my head hurt. Let’s jus
t sit and watch ourselves some TV.”

  “Do you want me to put on the volume?”

  “No. I like it like this. Quiet.”

  After a few minutes, she says, “This is kind of weird,” and he says, “You’re getting paid to watch TV. I’d say that’s a pretty sweat deal.”

  “Sweat?”

  “Sorry. I got hit in the head. My words are all mixed up. Sweet. It’s pretty sweet. It’s a sweet deal. That’s what I meant.”

  “Oh, okay,” she says. “Do you mind if I take my wig off? It’s itchy.”

  “Go for it.”

  “My name’s Tina, by the way. Is that space dust?” She slips off the candy-colored wig and sets it on the coffee table next to the Ziploc bag full of blue powder. She shakes out her shoulder-length hair and then picks up the scorch-bottomed bowl and sniffs it and curls her nose at the smell. “What happened to you anyway?” she says. “You look like ​—”

  “Like I got hit by a skunk?”

  “A skunk?”

  “Like I got hit by a truck, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  Right then the door shakes in its frame. Three hard knocks. Whoever is on the other side doesn’t wait for a response, just twists the knob, letting in a shaft of sunlight.

  “Who’s ​—” Mickey fumbles for his pistol and knocks it onto the floor. A gut-twisting sense of vertigo sets in, and the trailer seems to lurch and spin. He slumps over on the couch, unable to understand any direction but gravity.

  Tina takes her cue from him; she picks up the pistol and aims it at whoever’s coming through the door. “Stop,” she says, “or I’ll shoot.” Then she whispers to Mickey, “Should I shoot?”

  “Tell the pretty lady to put the pistol down.”

  At the sound of his voice—that familiar, meaty bark—Mickey hoists his head and tries to focus. The wobbling image of Walter Eaton solidifies. The big man wears his standard uniform—Stetson hat, bolo tie, denim, boots—but in his hand, he’s holding something. A black garbage bag.