hadn’t quite hit the legal drinking age. He drove Jubal there, and they went inside, sat in the dim light, drank beer, and listened to Waylon Jennings on the jukebox. Jubal talked about Winona, and for the first time in their history together, Cork saw his big friend cry.
They were both into their third bottles of beer when the door opened and Buzz Bigby walked in. He strode up to the bar and told the guy behind it-he called him Dwight in a tone that said they knew each other well-that he needed a bottle of Jim Beam to go, and he swung his eyes left and saw Jubal and Cork.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is a moment I been waiting for a long time.”
Dwight looked at Bigby, then at Cork and Jubal, and two and two came together. “Take it outside, boys,” he warned.
Bigby nodded toward the door. “Let’s talk.”
“I don’t think-” Cork began.
But Jubal cut him off. “Sure thing,” he said and slid from his barstool.
Cork put a hand on his friend’s arm. “Jubal.”
“Mr. Bigby wants to talk,” Jubal said, pulling away. “I’m going to talk.”
He took the lead, and Bigby followed. Cork said to the barkeep, “You might want to call the cops.”
The barkeep said, “You might want to go fuck yourself, kid.”
The bar was a ramshackle affair at the crossing of two back roads in the woods west of Aurora. Evening had settled. The sky was a soft blue, and the air was calm and quiet. There were half a dozen vehicles-dusty pickup trucks, mostly-parked in the dirt that served as a lot. In one of the trucks, Cork saw a kid staring out the window of the cab, and he recognized Lester, Donner Bigby’s little brother.
Jubal walked ahead, Buzz Bigby immediately at his back, and Cork, because he’d talked to the bartender, a few steps behind them both. No sooner was Jubal out the door than Bigby swung a fist hard as a wrecking ball into Jubal’s kidneys. Jubal arched and cried out and fell forward onto his knees. Bigby swung a steel-toed boot into Jubal’s ribs, and Jubal went down onto the dirt of the parking lot. Bigby delivered another kick, this one to Jubal’s head, and Jubal’s neck snapped sideways as if broken.
It all happened in the blink of an eye, executed by a man who’d probably been in more fights than Cork had toes or fingers to count.
Bigby wasn’t even breathing hard. He stared down at Jubal and said, “I want the fucking truth, boy.”
Jubal tried to speak but could barely raise his head from the dirt.
Buzz Bigby set himself to swing his steel-toed boot again.
And that’s when Cork went berserk. In the few seconds it had taken Bigby to bring Jubal down, Cork had stood paralyzed, stunned by both the swiftness of the attack and its brutality. But when he saw Bigby set to kick Jubal again, he snapped into action and launched himself blindly. Without thinking, he threw himself onto Bigby’s broad, muscled back. He wrapped his right arm around the man’s thick neck. With his left hand, he grasped his right wrist and put all his strength into keeping the bone of his forearm pressed against Bigby’s throat. Bigby stumbled back. He grunted but couldn’t speak. He grasped at Cork’s arms and tried to break the grip, but adrenaline poured into every cell of Cork’s body, and his arms were like the steel of a vise. Bigby swung his own body left, then right, trying to shake Cork loose. For Cork, it was like riding a raging buffalo, but he held on. Bigby stumbled across the bare dirt of the lot and slammed Cork into the door of his pickup. Cork held. He could feel the man’s strength ebbing, and he pressed harder against his throat. He wanted Bigby dead. He wanted to kill him with his bare hands.
Buzz Bigby leaned forward, away from the truck, preparing to go down like one of those great pines he’d made his living felling. He stumbled again and turned, legs all wobbly. And Cork suddenly found himself almost face-to-face with little Lester Bigby, who was staring through the glass of the driver’s-side window, wearing a look of horror.
Cork came back to his senses. He released his grip on Bigby’s neck and slid from the man’s back. Relieved of the weight, Bigby lurched, fell into the dirt, rolled to his back, blinked rapidly at the evening sky, and gasped for breath.
Jubal was at Cork’s side. Even though his face was smeared with his own blood and he grunted in pain when he moved, Jubal put his arm around Cork’s shoulders firmly and urged him away from where Bigby lay sprawled on the ground.
“That’s enough,” he said to Cork hoarsely. “Let’s go home.”
At the end of August, Jubal Little left on a Greyhound bus for Cedar Falls, Iowa. Cork, along with Jubal’s mother, saw him off at Pflugleman’s Rexall Drugstore, which doubled as the bus depot. He stood watching as the bus drove away in a smelly cloud of diesel vapor. They’d sworn to each other that they’d stay in touch. Even so, it felt to Cork as if the best friend he’d ever known was heading out of his life forever.
He would discover later, and not without regret, that nothing except death was forever.
CHAPTER 19
The night grew cold, and the fire died to embers, and Winona Crane had not returned. Cork finally went back to the cabin, where he found Willie drinking hot spiced tea from a white ceramic mug.
Willie asked, “Did you talk to her?” Diyoutatoher?
“She didn’t show.”
“She’s there. Watching. She’ll come back when you’re gone. You said you had a message from Jubal. I can give it to her.”
“In a minute. There are some things I want to ask first, Willie. I’d have asked Winona if she’d shown herself.”
“All right. Ask.”
“Did Jubal talk to you or Winona about threats on his life?”
“Winona said he got threats all the time.”
“Did he talk to her about any specific threat?”
“If he did, she didn’t say.”
“Did he take the threats seriously?”
“He wasn’t afraid for himself. He was more concerned about his wife.”
“What about Winona? Was he afraid for Winona?”
A sad smile warped Willie’s lips. “No one knew about him and Winona.”
“Not true,” Cork said. “I knew. And Camilla knew. And, I suspect, her brothers knew as well.”
“Her brothers?” Willie spoke as if the mention of them had brought something forgotten to his mind. “Jubal was concerned about something, but not a threat necessarily, or at least the kind of threat you’re thinking of. He was concerned about his brother-in-law.”
“Which one?”
“Nicholas. I guess he’s always been a little on the unpredictable side. There was some trouble that Jubal was afraid might reflect badly on the family and, as a result, on his own candidacy.”
“Did he tell Winona what the trouble was?”
“Yes, but she was vague about it when she talked to me. From the things she did say, I think it had to do with a hunt he and Jubal had done together in the Arctic wilderness in northern Canada last year. I had a sense that, whatever it was, it must have been pretty bad. Maybe even as bad as someone getting killed. One of the Native people, maybe. All covered up, of course. She did tell me Jubal thought that in the future it might prove to be a way to rein in the worst of Nicholas’s excesses. Sounded to me like blackmail.”
Cork gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Jubal told me once that in politics it’s not called blackmail. It’s called ‘leverage.’ Did Camilla and Alex Jaeger know about this… whatever it was?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, Winona was vague.”
Something came to Cork now, the sudden realization of a possible connection. “Willie, this incident in Canada, did Winona mention the name Rhiannon in connection with it?”
“Rhiannon?” Willie frowned and thought hard. “She never said that name to me. Are you going to tell me
